Memory and Postwar Memorials

Confronting the Violence of the Past

M. Silberman, F. Vatan, M. Silberman, F. Vatan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137343512
• eBook ISBN: 9781137343529
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Social Sciences

The twentieth century witnessed genocides, ethnic cleansing, forced population expulsions, shifting borders, and other disruptions on an unprecedented scale. This book examines the work of memory and the ethics of healing in post authoritarian societies that have experienced state-perpetrated violence.

PART I

COMPETING MEMORIES

CHAPTER ONE

THE NUREMBERG TRIALS AS COLD WAR COMPETITION: THE POLITICS OF THE HISTORICAL RECORD AND THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE

Francine Hirsch

We are all familiar with the standard Western account of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945 to 1946. It is a victors’ narrative, celebrating the triumph of truth, justice, and essential liberal values, such as the rule of law, over evil. In the most famous versions US Chief Justice Robert Jackson with his forceful personality and no-nonsense manner shines as the hero of the moment, insisting on a fair trial for even the most monstrous Nazi leaders as “the American way” and countering the demands of the Soviet Union, as well as his own colleague Henry Morgenthau, for a program of reparations that would include the use of German forced labor for postwar reconstruction in the Allied countries. This is a good story, but one that largely leaves out the contribution and perspective of one of the major Allied victors—the Soviet Union.¹ In the West the critical role of the Soviet Union as a shaper of and participant in the International Military Tribunal (IMT), first informally and then as one of the four countries of the prosecution, had until recently been almost willfully forgotten. To be sure, there were practical reasons for this omission. For decades critical Soviet documents about the Nuremberg Trials were buried in the former Soviet archives, and even Russian researchers had limited access.² But there were deep political reasons as well. First, the Soviet Union was regarded by its wartime allies not just as a victor, but also as a rival. As the Cold War developed, it was not in the interest of the Western powers to highlight the Soviet contribution to postwar justice. Second, in spite of later claims to the contrary, Western leaders at the time knew full well that the Soviet prosecution had presented the court with falsified evidence about the Katyn Affair.³ Focusing too much on the Soviet role in the trials threatened to undermine the overall credibility of the IMT and possibly even the collective memory of the war. In other words, for the Western powers, and for the United States in particular, downplaying the Soviet Union’s contribution to the Nuremberg Trials served important postwar goals.

This chapter explores the politics of memory, restoring the Soviet Union to its rightful place in the history of the Nuremberg Trials and also looking at how postwar politics shaped the narrative that emerged in the courtroom about the causes and course of the Second World War. It shifts the focus away from the Nazi defendants and concentrates instead on the deliberations among the four countries of the prosecution, highlighting how the Soviet Union and the Western powers attempted to use the IMT to shape the record of the past and to influence the postwar future. Drawing on newly available archival materials, it gives particular attention to Soviet goals, concerns, and motives, and shows how Soviet leaders and the members of the Soviet prosecution attempted—with mixed results—to keep information that could embarrass or damage their country out of the courtroom and to introduce their own official interpretations of events. Such a perspective illuminates how the IMT, later celebrated as a milestone of “human rights” (and rightly so), was grounded in the particular politics of the postwar moment—and must be understood both as an artifact of the wartime alliance and as a front of the early Cold War.

The Soviet Contribution

So what kind of contribution did the Soviet Union make to the Nuremberg Trials? The short answer is: a major one. From early on in the war Joseph Stalin and his Commissar of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov publicly denounced the systematic nature of Nazi crimes and actively called for the punishment of German war criminals by means of a “special international tribunal.”⁴ The Soviets were far ahead of the rest of the Allies in this and in their sophisticated arguments about the criminal responsibility of Nazi leaders. Soviet legal experts working as consultants for the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs made the case that not just “war crimes,” but also “the waging of an aggressive war,” was a punishable criminal act. While the idea of treating war itself as a criminal act had been raised before in international conferences, it was the Soviet law professor Aron Trainin who coined the term “crimes against peace” during the war and gave it its definitive formulation in a series of articles and in his major work On the Criminal Responsibility of the Hitlerites. This latter work was translated into several languages and circulated in high political circles in the West. According to Trainin, “crimes against peace” included “acts of aggression,” “propaganda of aggression,” “the conclusion of agreements with aggressive aims,” “the violation of treaties which serve the cause of peace,” “provocation designed to disrupt peaceful relations between countries,” “terrorism,” and “support of armed bands (fifth columns).”⁵

Soviet legal experts also made a major contribution to an ongoing discussion among the Allied powers about using the legal concept of “complicity” to try the Nazis. Trainin contended that Hitler and his ministers, the leaders of the Nazi party, the German high command, and other “higher-ups” should all be tried as the “central group of international criminals” and charged with “creating a system of organized governmental banditry” and executing “a criminal conspiracy” against other nations.⁶ The Western powers and the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC, of which the USSR or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not a member) were at first uncomfortable with Soviet ideas about postwar justice, which they criticized as ex post facto law.⁷ But the Soviet view prevailed. Indeed, it is fair to suggest that the Nuremberg Trials would not have happened without the Soviets and their legal theories about aggressive war, criminal responsibility, complicity, and collective guilt. For Western leaders it would become an awkward fact that the same Soviet regime that had murdered millions of its own citizens during the Stalinist Great Terror and other campaigns was one of the main forces behind the invention of new, internationally applicable legal norms.

The Soviets were out in the lead in pushing for a special international tribunal at least in part because they, much more than the Western powers, had great faith in the efficacy of the political trial. Beginning in the 1920s, Stalin had used the courtroom to publicly take down countless “enemies of the people.” Moreover, in the Moscow Trials of the late 1930s, the notorious and brilliant Andrei Vyshinsky—Stalin’s right-hand man and perhaps one of the most accomplished legal pragmatists of all time—had helped to prosecute Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and other “old Bolsheviks” on false charges as supposed Nazi collaborators who had organized with “the direct connivance of the Hitler regime and were plotting to establish a fascist dictatorship in Russia.”⁸ For the Soviets a political trial of actual Nazi leaders was a logical next step. In addition to establishing a legal claim for reparations, Soviet leaders hoped to shine a light on the unprecedented nature of Nazi atrocities and shape the historical narrative about the Second World War.

In their planning for the IMT the Soviets tried to draw on their vast experience with domestic show trials. Shortly after the Allies agreed to hold an international tribunal, Stalin appointed Vyshinsky, who was now Deputy Foreign Minister, to head a secret, Moscow-based Commission for Directing the Work of the Soviet Representatives in the International Tribunal (the Nuremberg Commission for short). This commission, comprised of high-ranking leaders from the Soviet government and state security apparatus, would make an exceptional effort to oversee and manage the Soviet delegation from afar and to influence the course of the trials themselves.⁹ When selecting a Soviet chief prosecutor and chief judge, Stalin and Molotov similarly looked to people who had earned their political stripes in the major Soviet show trials. The Soviet chief judge Iona Nikitchenko had made his career as a judge in the Moscow Trials of 1936–1938. The Soviet chief prosecutor Roman Rudenko had served as the prosecutor for show trials in Ukraine during the same era. Stalin and Molotov chose assistant judges, assistant prosecutors, and other personnel with similar credentials.¹⁰ Many of them owed their careers to Vyshinsky and Stalin.

But Nuremberg was not Moscow—and neither was London (where pretrial negotiations were held). Soviet leaders, at least at first, seem to have believed that the verdicts were to be a fait accompli and that the scripting of the trials would be straightforward. They soon realized their mistake. Even before the Tribunal convened, Soviet leaders back in Moscow began to express apprehension about the whole affair. Indeed, the decisions first to hold the trials in American-occupied Nuremberg as opposed to Soviet-occupied Berlin, and then to permit Nazi leaders to take the stand as witnesses in their own defense, made all too clear to Soviet leaders the extent to which the IMT would be outside of their direct control. Soviet leaders had agreed to Nuremberg, the first choice of the Western powers, somewhat reluctantly after calculating the expense of holding the tribunal in Berlin. In Nuremberg the Americans would shoulder more of the costs. But the idea that the Nazi leaders would be allowed to take the stand to do anything other than read a prepared (and preferably scripted) confession seems to have taken Moscow by surprise—as did the realization that Nikitchenko and Rudenko, who had represented the USSR in pretrial deliberations, had not understood that their Western colleagues actually intended to allow the accused to launch a genuine defense.

The Soviets were clearly out of their element on the international stage. While Soviet prosecutors and judges were skilled at staging and executing domestic trials, they lacked critical expertise and experience abroad. From September 1945 when the four chief prosecutors and their teams met in London to work out the basics of the IMT, Soviet informants had been reporting back to Moscow that Rudenko and his assistants were ignorant about foreign affairs and at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their Western colleagues because of their “lack of experience in the work of international organizations.”¹¹ Making matters worse, the informants explained, was the Soviet team’s lack of qualified interpreters and translators. According to one informant, the translator that Rudenko had “at his disposal” in London had poor English and German and struggled to translate the evidence and other critical materials for the Tribunal. As a result, Rudenko and his assistants had been unable to become acquainted with “an enormous amount of evidence that the Americans, French, and English” had “submitted for the prosecution.”¹² Most of these materials were in German. Later at Nuremberg these shortcomings did indeed compromise the work of the Soviet prosecution. When Joachim von Ribbentrop and other defendants took the stand in the spring of 1946, it became all too apparent that Rudenko and his assistants were also unacquainted with critical evidence that had been logged in for the defense.¹³

There were real reasons for the Soviet delegation’s lack of know-how. Rudenko’s ignorance about foreign affairs was a direct consequence of the Soviet policy of keeping even senior Soviet officials isolated from the rest of the world. After the USSR had formed alliances with the Western powers in the 1930s, Stalin still remained suspicious of the West. Soviet officials with foreign-language expertise or experience abroad had come under attack in the Stalinist Terror: numerous international experts had been arrested or shot, and the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs had been decimated.¹⁴ Most Soviet representatives to the IMT were part of a new, informal foreign relations apparatus: academics, officials, and cultural figures with little or no prior international experience. Even after Soviet leaders acknowledged the need for more qualified personnel, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD or secret police) frequently refused to clear, or expedite the clearance of, translators and other experts for travel abroad. ¹⁵ Complicating matters further, the Soviet regime’s centralized command structure discouraged the true delegation of responsibilities. Soviet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction  After the Violence: Memory
• Part I   Competing Memories
• Part II   Staging Memory
• Part III   Re-membering Memory
• Works Cited
• Index