Please join us for a Casual Conversation with Professor Francine Hirsch on Monday, October 20 at 6 pm Eastern. We will be speaking with her about her beautifully written and vitally informative book: Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II (Oxford University Press 2020).
Professor Hirsch is Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Her faculty listing, which links to her cv, is here: https://history.wisc.edu/people/hirsch-francine/ .
So, you attended the Casual Conversation with Professor John Q. Barrett, biographer of Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson, the U.S. chief prosecutor in the first trial of Nazi war criminals. (Professor Barrett is thanked by Professor Hirsch in the Acknowledgments section for helping her with Justice Jackson.) And, perhaps, you attended the two Casual Conversations with Mary Fulbrook (and maybe read her two books being discussed) where one of her subjects was justicevel non (mostly non) meted out to Nazis. And you even watched Spencer Tracy in Judgment at Nuremberg.
If you did all these things, congratulations. You are only halfway there in understanding the IMT and Nuremberg. What you don’t know could fill a book, and Professor Hirsch has written it.
In The Army Lawyer (Issue 6 2020), Fred L. Borch III wrote:
Author Francine Hirsch, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, deserves high praise as the first scholar to publish a comprehensive study of the role played by the Soviets in the prosecution of Nazi leaders at the IMT. Prior to the publication of Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg, the history of the IMT was viewed almost exclusively through Western eyes, with Brigadier General Telford Taylor’s personal memoir—Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials—serving as the foundation for understanding the event. By looking at Soviet participation in the war crimes prosecution, Hirsch now gives a new and valuable perspective on what happened at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946. Or, as she puts it, her book “presents a new history…by restoring a central and missing piece: the role of the Soviet Union.”
. . .
The IMT remains the “starting point” for discussions about “transitional justice, international law, genocide, and human rights.” Given its importance in legal history, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg provides “a new way of understanding the origins and development of the post-war movement for human rights.” Professor Hirsch spent fifteen years researching and writing her fine book, which included examining thousands of documents from the former Soviet archives. Her superlative history of the Soviet Union’s role at the IMT deserves to reach the widest possible audience.
Reading Professor Hirsch’s book is eye-opening. She takes her time to describe the legal cultures of the four Nuremberg Allies: Britain, France, the U.S., and the Soviet Union. The Soviets ran show trials, where the trial itself was just a display of the guilt that had already been determined. The Soviet officials at Nuremberg, including the judge and chief prosecutor, had no experience with fair trials. Professor Hirsch focuses on, as well, the Soviet system of control where all decisions were made at or near the top, the top being Stalin himself. The problems associated with central decision-making were legion. Further, the Russians were required to supply translators and interpreters to take German documents and turn them into Russian, as well as translate German testimony into Russian. The problem: a lot of German speakers in Russia were shot on suspicion of being spies, and everyone sent to Nuremberg (from the small group of German speakers left alive) had to be vetted by the security agencies to make sure that they were reliable and that they wouldn’t jump ship when they arrived in a zone run by a free country.
One of the most interesting topics discussed in the book is the battle in the courtroom over the responsibility for the mass killing of Polish military officers in the Katyn Forest. The USSR committed the horrific crime but planted evidence and used every device available to try to pin Katyn Forest on Germany, even including it in the indictment for the trial. A bad idea because it became a charge that the defense had the legal right to seek to disprove, but then the USSR had plenty of bad ideas. Another topic is how Russia tried to finesse its invasion of Poland and the Baltic States as authorized by Germany under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
As stated in the review above, a number of the proposals for crimes to be charged in the indictment and tried at Nuremberg were developed by individuals in the Soviet Union. A book written by the most prominent Soviet legal theorist was read by Justice Jackson.
A fascinating story, and I urge you to read about it in Professor Hirsch’s book. But read it or not, please join us on Monday, October 20 at 6 pm Eastern to find out more about what was previously untold: the Soviet role in the International Military Commission.
Usual rules apply. Email me at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com by the close of business on the Friday before the Casual Conversation, to wit, Friday, October 17.
Arthur Fergenson