Dan Snow's History Hit - The Soviets at Nuremberg

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Francine Hirsch joined me on the pod to discuss the full story of the Nuremberg Trials, one in which the Soviet Union was a defining player.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's the anniversary of the Nuremberg trials this year, 75th anniversary. They were held in autumn in fall 1945. A remarkable departure from past practice. Leaders, military and political, of the Nazi regime were brought together and tried for war crimes by the victors. Standard accounts of these trials tend to gloss over the fact that the Soviets were fully involved alongside the British, the French and the Americans. And Francine Hirsch is written a brilliant new book, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg, showing how the Soviets were both responsible for the trials existing in the form they did, but also how they shaped the course and judgments in those cases. judgments in those cases. It's a really fascinating story which shows how the fissures of the Cold War are opening up before the gun barrels of the armies in Europe are even cold. If you want to watch all the documentaries we've produced for the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War,

please go to History Hit TV. We've got hundreds of documentaries there, hundreds and hundreds of podcasts. It's a one-stop shop for all your history needs please go over there and use the code pod1 at checkout pod1 and you will get one month for free and then you'll get your second month for just one pound euro or dollar please go and check it out in the meantime everyone here is the excellent francine hirsch Fran, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Dan. It's a real thrill to be here. Very embarrassing. I did not realize the Soviets had anything to do with Nuremberg. But I thought it was the Western allies prosecuting the German, the Nazi operatives that they particularly had a beef with. So tell me,

what was the Soviets' involvement? That's really kind of funny. I mean, sometimes when I say that, that people don't realize that or don't know that, I'm like, am I overstating that? But the more people I talk to, the more people say that they really didn't know that part of the story. And the Soviets had a fundamental role. They were one of the four countries of the prosecution, along with the United States, Britain and France. Being part of the prosecution meant that they were part of the tribunal that were judging the Nazis as well, because the four countries did both. did they have a fundamental role in the trials. But as I argue in the book, I don't think the Nuremberg trials would have happened without the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was out in front during the darkest days of the war, really pushing for a special international tribunal to try the Nazi leaders. And at that point, early on, the Western powers, well, at that point, France is defeated, but Britain and the United States, well, at that point, France is defeated, but Britain and the United States are very resistant to this idea, in part because the war is still going on and

they're concerned about retaliation, but in part because there's this idea that can you really try the leaders of a state for committing crimes and for what the Soviets were actually starting to argue was that they should be tried not just for war crimes, but for what they were talking about then is the crime of waging an aggressive war. And one of the Soviet jurists, a guy by the name of Aron Chayinin, was really out in front there as well, arguing that the crime of a crime against peace, waging an aggressive war, should be criminally prosecuted as well. And so that became a really fundamental part of the legal framework of the Nuremberg trials, too. And I think it's really interesting that in a lot of the books in the U.S. that I've read about this early on,

and this is starting to change, but especially when I first started working on this project, people talked about the U.S. as coming up with this idea of crimes against peace, with Marie Bernays in the War Department. And in fact, lots of people were talking about aggressive war, about crimes against peace. I was able to trace the paper trail of seeing how Trajan's ideas made it to London, to the meetings of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and then made it across the Atlantic to the War Department and to the White House as well. It's so interesting that it was a Soviet idea. Is that because there was a period of the war

when the Soviets thought, you know what? The Allies might reach Berlin first and they might just let all these guys off the hook. So I wonder if the Soviets go, I guess when it turned out actually they were the ones who captured Berlin and made the first serious inroads into the Reich, they must have been tempted to kind of dispense with the Western allies and just hold these trials themselves.

I mean, did the Soviet relationship with the trials change depending on the course of the war? Yeah, they always wanted a four-power tribunal or a three-power tribunal early on, and France is brought in. And when they're calling early on in October 1942 for a special international tribunal, the war is still going on. Victory, it's a dream, right? No one knows what's going to happen with the war at that point. But part of what prompts them to talk about this is the Soviet Union has

already been so devastated by the war, right, in ways that is hard for Americans, I think, to really understand. Just the lives lost, the amount of devastation that's been done. And so they're thinking already about reparations. And they're thinking about ways to make a claim for reparations. And they understand that in order to make that claim, it would be helpful to have this tribunal. The Soviets, of course, also have different ideas about what a war crimes trial might look like. And when they're talking about a special international tribunal, they're imagining something that's going to be pretty quick, open and shut. So what happens later as the war is kind of coming towards an end, there's still talk and there's still resistance from the British in particular, actually, who are calling for more of an executive degree to deal with kind of the

most heinous leaders and the most heinous crimes, right? And because they say that, how can you try, like Hitler, how can you try, Goering? And the Soviets are really at that point still pushing for that. And another reason that the Soviets want this to be an allied venture is at the end of the war, afterwards, when once everyone gets to Berlin and all of that, is because some of the major war criminals, the most major ones, have been captured by the Americans and British. And so they want to be right in on that, too. They want to be part of this four power alliance later at the table, at the table of victors in order to. And again, they think it's going to be quick, open and shut. Everything that happens, like once they get to Nuremberg, even a lot of what happens once they get to London in June and then have the London Agreement in August, a lot of that comes as a surprise to them as well.

So there's an irony here in this story that the great, you know, the illiberal authoritarian USSR helps to kind of establish this precedent of this kind of post-war international settlement, this precedent of transnational legal bodies, which echoes down to the present day. Absolutely. I mean, that to me is the heart of the story. That to me is the heart of the story, that we have this Nuremberg myth still, that the Nuremberg trials were all about liberal Western leadership. It was all about the rule of law. We get this beautiful, glorious story of the leadership of Robert H. Jackson about the rule of law. We get this beautiful, glorious story of the leadership of Robert H. Jackson and the leadership of the Americans and the British and all of this. And the fact that the Soviets, again, Stalin's Soviet Union, had a fundamental role in putting together the legal framework of the trials, in carrying out the trials, and then later on in

deliberations about international law as well, I think that's a really crucial part of the story. And I think it's critical for a number of reasons. You know, we, in idealizing Nuremberg, I don't think we're doing ourselves a favor. You know, still in some conferences that I've been going to and kind of attending virtually recently, when people talk about the Nuremberg trials, there's a tendency on the one hand to either hold it up as this triumph of the rule of law or to denounce it as victor's justice, right? And both of those are oversimplifications that you kind of avoid the messiness, right? The politics that are all in the middle of it. And I think we need to understand that messiness. We need to understand what happened. We need to understand the compromises that were made

by all of the countries at the table. And I actually find it kind of reassuring in this time that we're living in now to know that the messiness and the politics and the Cold War politics come in all of it, that in the middle of that great big mess, you could still come out with these ideals, right? These ideals that carry forth. And even, no matter what you think about international law and how useful it is, this or that, that's a whole nother debate. I think that what happens afterwards in the Soviet Union and in other states, these ideals provide something for even for dissidents to grab onto and to argue for rights. And I think it's important. I think it's just important to know that it's not this beautiful myth that we can wrap up, but that the complexity is what I like about the story.

Well, let's talk a little bit more about that complexity and how it played out in the trial itself. I mean, how did Soviet involvement, not that I'm claiming the Anglo-Saxon nations, the British and Americans and French were all paradigms of judicial propriety, but how did the Soviet involvement make itself felt as these trials were underway? Well, in a bunch of different kinds of ways. I mean, first of all, I want to say that the Soviets contributed positively to the trials as well, through their witness testimony, through the collection of the evidence, through the footage that Soviet filmmakers had shot during the war. So in the way that they were able to chronicle the war and the atrocities and contribute to the historical record in that way, that's very positive. At the same time, the Soviets go in really thinking that it's going to be an open and

shut case. They go in, they have this history of show trials, the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. All of the members of the Soviet delegation that are sent to Nuremberg, the Soviet chief judge, Yonan Nikolchenko, the Soviet chief prosecutor, Roman Rudenko, the assistant prosecutors, they all had played major roles in the show trials. And so that's a piece of this, too. And because the Soviets think that it's going to be open and shut, they try to do some things that kind of challenge the legitimacy of the trials at various points along the way. kind of challenged the legitimacy of the trials at various points along the way.

I mean, one of those things is that the Katyn massacre, which was a major wartime atrocity, right, that the Soviets had in fact committed, the murder of tens of thousands of Polish officers who are prisoners of war, that had become this political hot potato with the Soviets and the Germans accusing each other of committing the crime. And the Soviets, they think it's like this brilliant idea. They're going to include it in the indictment as a Nazi war crime. And they do this in part because, well, there's so much evidence of other Nazi crimes, right? So they think, who's going to question this? Who's going to challenge this? They do this in part because they don't really understand what the defense case is going to look like, that there's going to be a full-on defense. They do this in part because the prosecutors have agreed, even before the trials have started, that they're going to keep the tribunal focused on Axis crimes.

They actually circulate lists of things that they want to keep out of the courtroom, these taboo lists, and the Soviets put together this list, and other countries do too, right? And so, but what they don't really understand is that the prosecutors might feel this way, but the judges aren't on board with this, right? And the other thing is that once they get Katyn into the indictment as a Nazi crime, they don't think that the defense is going to be able to challenge it. But the defense does challenge it. And the judges allow for the defendants to call witnesses, and they allow the Soviets to call more witnesses on this as well. But that becomes a whole big thing in the Nuremberg courtroom. And there's a lot of anxiety among the British and among

the Americans, too, who sort of thought all along that this was a really bad idea to include it in the indictment, but went along with it because Rudenko, the Soviet chief prosecutor, was threatening to have to go back to Moscow and talk to Stalin and delay the whole trial. So they make the compromise and they go along with it. But this hangs over the trial. It hangs over the trial. The other thing, of course, the other big thing that hangs over the trial, again, and everyone, no one is totally clean hands in all of this, but the Soviets, again, have the most to hide, especially when it came to the secret protocols of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact of August 1939. that the Non-Aggression Pact and then the secret protocol sort of led the way for the dual invasion of Poland and the division of Eastern Europe, right? And so that's a crime against peace. So here you have the Soviet jurist who has introduced this idea of a crime against peace, right? And then the Soviets, of course, have a major crime against peace that they're trying to hide. And it just comes out, right, through the

course of the trials. And again, because the judges, the Western judges, right, there are four main judges, one from each country of the prosecution. And Nikushenko, the Soviet judge, he's outvoted again and again and again, so that Ribbentrop and others are able to introduce evidence of this. And this hangs over the trials as well. So the Soviets have contributed in a positive way in terms of the legal framework, in a positive way in terms of some of the evidence that they provide, right?

But at the same time, there are these things where everyone is now very anxious about what's going to be exposed and the legitimacy. And you see a fracturing of the countries of the prosecution as time goes on, in part because of the strain of these secrets and in part because of the Cold War coming into the courtroom as well. So so that's that's part of it as well. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week. You went to the Soviet archives for this. Yes. You see, I talk to historians who are much older than you who remember those halcyon days. You go to the Soviet archives in the 90s

and look up all sorts of stuff about Stalin's purges. So how did you get access and what kind of documents and manuscripts did you see in them? Yeah, so I did archival research in 2005 and 2006 for the book. And I worked in five Moscow archives and archives in other places, too. But the Moscow archives were amazing because here there were I was really able to reconstruct the story of the child, in part by looking at the secret

documents in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in part by looking at secret documents in the Party archive, and in the State archive, in part by looking at the archive in the Ministry of, I'm sorry, in the Academy of Sciences that had the legal questions and all the legal back and forth, and in part in the Archive of Literature and Art. And really, this was a moment still in 2005 and 2006. So this is, again, like 15 years ago that I was really doing this research when the archival access was still pretty good. And although I had to be persistent about getting access to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was worth it. And again, it's the documents, the archival documents that not only enable me to tell the

story of the Soviet involvement in the trial, but that I think put the whole story of the trial in a different light. Because once you have the Soviet story, then lots of other questions that one might have about what's really going on behind the scenes and questions that the Americans have, like why are the Soviets stalling? Does Rudenko, the Soviet chief prosecutor, really have malaria, as they claim, because when they try to delay the trial, there are all kinds of things that you see what's going on behind the scenes. You're like, oh, OK, so that was what was happening on the Soviet ends of things. going on behind the scenes, you're like, oh, okay, so that was what was happening on the Soviet ends of things. Stalin had two secret commissions in Moscow that was operating from afar. Again, they thought this was going to be open and shut, that they were going to be able to control things. And these secret commissions, I was able to read the transcripts of their meetings, and you see them just wrestling with all of the issues that are coming up in the course of the trials and the Katyn question and the secret protocols and all of this.

And looking at correspondence that's sent back by informants, that's the other thing. The Soviets have so many informants. So there's so much information that gets sent back in these just really juicy telegrams and these amazing reports. And you see from, for example, from a telegram that gets sent back from a Soviet diplomat who's acting as an informant in London at the time of the London Conference. That's how I learned that the Soviet chief prosecutor, Roman Rudenko, he didn't know about the secret protocols. He didn't know about what they called in that telegram, the secret history of Soviet-German relations. And so the Soviets, you know, they sent him that telegram, the secret history of Soviet-German relations. And so the Soviets, you know, they sent him blind, basically, and then they have to make a decision at a certain point about how much to tell him and when, right? So those kinds of documents are just

amazing. The other kinds of documents that I really love are just these letters, these reports that these journalists are sending back. And again, they're journalists, but they're also informants. And so they're writing these really lengthy letters. And, you know, some of the things they're talking about are Nuremberg's nightlife, right? They're talking about people drinking too much. They're talking about members of the Soviet delegation, right? They're kind of tattling on each other in some ways. But they're also talking about just how painful it is to sit in the courtroom and to have to listen to the testimony day after day after day. The Soviet writer Vysheva Lodishnevsky, who is a playwright and a journalist, and he's part of the Soviet delegation of journalists there, he says that one of the other writers, Boris Pavlovoy, is about to have a nervous breakdown, right?

And so you get this sense of this. And Vishnevsky also is complaining about, you know, the Americans who he thinks are just not taking this seriously enough. And the thing that really gets him is the American guards who are chewing gum in the courtroom, right? That he's just furious about this. Like, how could this be, like, while they're discussing these horrible atrocities in court. So, again, I think these kinds of documents, they they let you get behind the scenes and tell the story of what's going on in the courtroom.

But they also enabled me to to really tell a more vivid story of the trial and what's happening in the bars and at the private parties and all of that as well. What did, what effect of any did the two approaches, or perhaps more than two, because I'm sure the US, French and British approaches were different as well. What effect did that have on each other, on the various delegations, on the various judges? Was there movement to a kind of a new hybridized form of justice or did it end up actually repelling? Did this help to deepen the divisions at the end of the war, at the start of the Cold War? Yeah, no, that's such a great question.

And we see that really from the start at the London conference when the four representatives of the four powers are coming together to work out the details of the charter and then when they're going to work out four representatives of the four powers are coming together to work out the details of the charter, and then when they're going to work out the details of the indictment. You know, on a very simple level, you have these different judicial systems, right, where the U.S. and Britain have the common law system, the French and the Soviets have the civil law system, but the Soviets, of course, have their whole other thing going on with their show trial history, too, right? So there's that.

But what some of these differences mean is that the indictment, everyone has different ideas about what the indictment should look like, right? For the Soviets and the French, the indictment should include, like, all of the information, right? And for the Americans and the British, they want to introduce new documents and show things in the course of the trials. And so there's compromises that are made as a result of that. But I think the Soviets didn't really understand what those compromises were going to mean in practice. And so I think that's one of the reasons that they find themselves continually surprised by the new evidence that gets introduced during the course of the trial. They have different ideas, again, about the role that the defense should play. Again, here the Soviets are the odd ones out because the French go along with the Americans and the British on this.

But the Soviets, they are just appalled, first of all, that the defense should be able to have former members of the Nazi party as attorneys, right? How could that be, right? They're also appalled that the defendants can call witnesses. They think that the prosecution should have veto power over witnesses and they're not given that veto power, right? They think that, how could the defendants be allowed to take the stand in their own defense, right? That's propaganda, the Soviets say, right? And that's shot down as well. So there are lots of these differences in terms of what the trial should look like

that get worked out at the beginning. And the Soviets lose a lot of those battles, which then kind of shapes what they're up against and part of why they're unprepared, right? The other thing, and there's so many interesting things here in terms of what each country wants to get out of the trials, right? All of the countries of the prosecution, all of the wartime allies, right, they all want to use the trials in part to tell the story about the war, and they want to shape that story about the war, and they want to shape it in different ways. And, you know, the charter and the indictment, there are different charges,

right? The three main class of charges are, so it's, you know, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. Crimes against peace being the charge of waging an aggressive war. For the Soviets, crimes against peace, that is the most important charge, right? For the British, it's really important too, but the British are also very interested in prosecuting certain kinds of war crimes, especially crimes at sea. And that's one of the things that they really hold on to. For the French, it's crimes against humanity. What's originally called crimes against civilians and is later defined as crimes against humanity. And all of that factors in as well during the course of the trial in terms of, again, how the indictment is written up and what's presented in court and the kinds of narratives

that are told. But I would say that the biggest division of all is really between the Soviet Union and the United States. And that has to do with a lot of things. It has to do in part with Robert H. Jackson, who right from the start, once he comes on board as the U.S. chief prosecutor and travels around Europe, he gets word of Soviet war crimes. He gets word of what the Soviets are still up to in Eastern Europe. And he is just appalled at having to cooperate with the Soviets at all, right? And he does.

And all of these compromises are made about Katyn and about all of other things as well. But that just, it really just influences things all the way along. And then once the defense case happens in March, which is like coincidentally right also after Churchill gives his Iron Curtain speech in the United States, right? That's at that point, the Soviets, things really take a turn for them in ways that they are not expecting, where lots of evidence about their own war crimes gets introduced into the courtroom.

And then the judges consistently allow it. What is the lasting effect? Just to zoom out a little bit on Nuremberg, you mentioned this kind of historiographical debate, you know, was it this amazing, enlightened moment in humanity when we started, invented international law and everything? Or was it just a sordid victor's justice? Where are we on that at the moment, especially given now what we know about the Soviet Union? What is a legacy? What should we think of on this anniversary of Nuremberg? Oh, that's a hard, yeah, no, it's a really big, hard question, right? Because I want to be an optimist about it. And in some ways, I really am. But at the same time, as we see what's happening

in the world and we see what's happening with international law and with the ICC, and we're in a moment now where I feel like we go in waves of states being up for that kind of involvement and more concerned or less concerned about state sovereignty and feeling like perhaps they have more to hide or less to hide in terms of things. And I think we're in a moment now where we need to hold on. We need to hold on to the legacy of Nuremberg. I think we need to hold on to, and part of that legacy was the Nuremberg principles that came out of the trials. Part of that legacy was the genocide convention. part of that legacy was the Nuremberg Principles that came out of the trials. Part of that legacy was the Genocide Convention. Part of that legacy was the Declaration on Human Rights, right?

I think those kinds of documents continue to give us hope in trying times because they lay out a way. They lay out a path. They provide a beacon, a kind of a moral compass that I think that as long as people continue to look towards that and to believe in that, that there's still hope. Which is why, I mean, I think, you know, one of the dangers, quote unquote, in bringing in the Soviet story about the Nuremberg Trials, someone asked me when I began working on this project, are you sure you really want to do this? Do you really want to bring in the role of the Soviets and Katyn and the Soviets doctored evidence about Katyn? So do you really want to talk about that? Aren't you playing into the hands of those who just want to dismiss Nuremberg and international law. And again, I think we need

the full story. I think we need to know the messiness. We need to know the contradictions. We need to know that this wasn't this beautiful time that's been lost, but that things are always complicated. Things are always really messy, right? There are always politics involved. And I think the more that we kind of understand that these are human beings who came to the table, human beings in some ways they agreed with their governments, in other ways they didn't. Some of them on the Soviet side, you know, who knows? I mean, I used to speculate a lot about Aaron Trainin who introduced these ideas, right? Did he hope in some way that this would change things in his country, right? I don't know. There's no evidence, but, you know, kind of like when you work on something, you try to get into the heads of the people that you're studying. And I think, again,

I think we have to hold on to international law. We have to hold on to these ideals, even as we recognize it's a mess right now. Well, I couldn't agree more. Thank you for giving us some hope, and let's hope we do hold onto now. Well, I couldn't agree more. Thank you for giving us some hope and let's hope we do hold onto them. Fran, your book is called? Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg, a new history of the international tribunal after the Second World War.

And it's the anniversary of this year and your book is out. So thank you very much indeed for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. This was a lot of fun. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this,

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