Authors: Ira Katznelson
74
István Deák,
Essays on Hitler’s Europe
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), p. xvii. Deák thoughtfully took note of the contradictory impact of the trial and subsequent proceedings: “A few dozen Nazi leaders were actually executed, but most others, including thousands of mass murderers, were soon released or were never even charged. They were all allowed to continue and to thrive as if nothing had happened” (pp. 17–18). A useful summary of subsequent trials of accused Nazis is provided in Adalbert Rückerl,
The Investigation of Nazi Crimes, 1945–1978
. (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1980).
75
The appointment of Nikitchenko raised issues of judicial propriety, as he had been the Soviet negotiator in setting the terms of the tribunal.
76
Bradley F. Smith,
Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg
(New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 4; Patrick Dean, cited in Tusa and Tusa,
The Nuremberg Trial
, p. 207.
77
Joseph E. Persico,
Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial
(London: Penguin, 1994), p. 133.
78
Robert H. Jackson,
The Case against the Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America by Robert H. Jackson, and Other Documents
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).
79
Robert Gellately, ed.,
The Nuremberg Interviews
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. xv.
80
A summary of RAF bombing attacks on German cities appears in A. C. Grayling,
Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
(New York: Walker, 2006), pp. 283–328. The basic work regarding this subject for Berlin is Reinhard Rurup,
Berlin 1945: Eine Dokumentation
(Berlin: W. Arenhövel, 1995).
81
Richard G. Davis,
Bombing the European Axis Powers: A Historical Digest of the Combined Bomber Offensive, 1939–1945
(Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2006), pp. 511–12; see also Ian Buruma, “The Destruction of Germany,”
The New York Review of Books,
October 21, 2004, pp. 8–12.
82
Joseph E. Persico,
Nuremberg,
p. 128. Incredibly, the city’s best hotel, the Grand, also was sufficiently unscathed to house the members of the tribunal and the press.
83
In all, Allied bombing raids killed some 300,000 and injured some 800,000 Germans, and destroyed one in five German homes. Mak,
In Europe,
pp. 561, 563.
84
Peter De Mendelssohn, “The Two Nuernbergs,”
Nation,
December 1, 1945, p. 569.
85
Nikitchenko originally had led the Soviet team of prosecutors. Called back to Moscow in September, he returned to the trial as the Soviet judge, taking his oath with the others on October 18. See Robert E. Conot,
Justice at Nuremberg
(New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 65. For his role in suggesting Nuremberg as the site, see Arieh H. Kochavi,
Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 240. Some iconic places met a different fate. The Soviet occupation force, for example, kept Buchenwald open to house suspect social democrats. See Clive James,
Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 721.
86
Marion A. Kaplan,
Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 17–49. The new regulations originated in a process that began in July 1933 when a Ministry of Interior Advisory Committee for Population and Race Policy was asked to draw up proposals concerning Jewish citizenship rights in the new Reich. See Saul Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews
, vol. 1,
The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939
(New York: HarperCollins), p. 146.
87
Cited in Avraham Barkai, “Exclusion and Persecution: 1933–1938,” in
German-Jewish History in Modern Times
, vol. 4,
Renewal and Destruction, 1918–1945
, ed. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 211.
88
Robert H. Jackson,
The Nürnberg Case as Presented by Robert H. Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States Together with Other Documents
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 31.
89
Elizabeth Borgwardt,
A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 203.
90
Grayling,
Among the Dead Cities,
pp. 12–13.
91
Frederick Taylor,
Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February 1945
(London: Bloomsbury, 2004), pp. 373, 375. For a powerfully realized account of Allied bombing during World War II, see Randall Hansen,
Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942–1945
(Toronto: Doubleday, 2009).
92
For useful discussions of the ethical issues, see the essays in Paul Addison and Jeremy Craig, eds.,
Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945
(London: Pimlico, 2006); Grayling,
Among the Dead Cities.
93
Cited in Arieh J. Kochavi,
Prelude to Nuremberg,
p. 57.
94
An excellent discussion of “The London Conference and the Nuremberg Indictment,” including the give-and-take among the four powers, can be found in Smith,
Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg,
pp. 46–73.
95
Cited in Telford Taylor, “The Nuremberg Trials,”
Columbia Law Review
55 (1955): 500.
96
Cited in Jackson,
The Nürnberg Case,
p. xv. For a discussion, see Jonathan A. Bush, “Nuremberg: The Modern Law of War and Its Limitations,”
Columbia Law Review
93 (1993): 2022–86.
97
Jackson,
The Nürnberg Case,
p. 33.
98
For an uncommonly thoughtful discussion, see Borgwardt,
A New Deal for the World
, pp. 196–248. Genocide was recognized as an international crime in the December 1946 Resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, and codified by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as the targeting for elimination of a group on the basis of its racial, religious, ethnic, or national characteristics.
99
Borgwardt,
A New Deal for the World,
p. 247.
100
Cited in Taylor, “The Nuremberg Trials,” p. 499.
101
Smith,
Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg,
p. 103.
102
Cited in Tusa and Tusa,
The Nuremberg Trial,
p. 449; James Owen,
Nuremberg: Evil on Trial
(London: Headline Review, 2006), p. 317; Norbert Ehrenfreund,
The Nuremberg Legacy
(New York: Palgrave, 2007), p. 87. Ehrenfreund covered the trial for
Stars and Stripes,
the army newspaper.
103
Cited in Taylor, “
The
Nuremberg Trials,” p. 499.
104
Persico,
Nuremberg,
p. 94. Writing when the tribunal was in session, Max Radin, a retired law professor from the University of California at Berkeley, noted how “the utmost care has been taken to enable all the defendants to present the fullest defense for themselves.” They had access to all charges and counsel of their choosing, were offered simultaneous translation of all testimony irrespective of its language, could cross-examine prosecution witnesses and call witnesses of their own, and were to be allowed final statements. See Max Radin, “Justice at Nuremberg,”
Foreign Affairs
24 (1946): 383.
105
International Military Tribunal,
Trial of the Major War Crimes before the International Military Tribunal
, vol. 1 (Nuremberg, Germany: International Military Tribunal, 1947), p. 26; some members of the American delegation came to believe that “Nikitchenko was a decent chap and a covert liberal, but a man imprisoned behind the ideological bars of the regime he served.” See Persico,
Nuremberg,
p. 182.
106
William Taubman,
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 99. Addressing the Twentieth Party Congress in the 1956 secret speech, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for originating “the concept ‘enemy of the people.’ This term automatically rendered it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in controversy be proven; this term made possible the most cruel repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of evil intent.” Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev,
Khrushchev Remembers
(New York: Little, Brown, 1971), p. 510.
107
Cited in Robert Gellately,
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe
(New York: Vintage, 2008), p. 273.
108
Richard Overy,
The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 128, 182.
109
See Nicolas Werth, “Strategies of Violence in the Stalinist USSR,” in
Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared,
ed. Henry Russo (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp. 73–95.
110
For a powerful discussion of the fear-inducing effects of nighttime raids and nighttime interrogations, see Stephen Kotkin,
Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 344–48.
111
Niall Ferguson,
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
(New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 210. During the Great Terror, some 800,000 Soviet citizens were put to death. For discussions of death estimates during this period, see Robert Conquest,
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Alec Nove, “Victims of Stalinism: How Many?,” in
Stalin’s Terror: New Perspectives,
ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Mannings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a discussion of the process of setting, securing, and increasing quotas, see Nicholas Werth, “The Red Terror,” in Stéphane Courtois et al.,
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 71–80. A concise discussion of debates among historians about the sources and meaning of the Great Terror can be found in Kotkin,
Magnetic Mountain,
pp. 280–86. “Moscow’s Communist boss, Nikita Khrushchev, had already been presented with a quota of 35,000 ‘enemies’ to arrest, 5,000 of whom were to be shot.” See Mak,
In Europe,
p. 452.
112
J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov,
The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 588; Anne Applebaum,
Gulag: A History
(New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 93. During Stalin’s reign from 1929 to 1953, some 29 million Soviet citizens were imprisoned in the Gulag. See Mak,
In Europe,
p. 453.
113
Kotkin,
Magnetic Mountain,
p. 300.
114
Cynthia A. Ruder,
Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). Clive James has sardonically observed that the ballet company, “when on tour outside Russia, is still called the Kirov, presumably on the assumption that the ballet audience abroad remains clueless enough to believe that Kirov had once had some sort of background in the fine arts. . . . Kirov’s background was one of unrestricted power and the extermination of blameless human beings. A measure of our slowness to face up to the real history of the Soviet Union is that the expression ‘Kirov Ballet’ does not strike us as obscene.” See James,
Cultural Amnesia,
p. 548.
115
“Of the 394 members of the Comintern’s executive committee in January 1936, only 171 were still alive in April 1938.” During the Great Terror, leading generals were killed and some 100,000 officers were put on trial; in all, “more Russian officers with a rank superior to colonel died at Stalin’s hand than at Hitler’s.” See Mak
, In Europe,
pp. 454, 455.
116
For an account of this trial, see Donald Rayfield,
Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him
(New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 254–57. When the presiding judge, Vasili Ulrikh, sought to refer the case for further inquiry, Stalin responded, “No further investigation, finish the trial . . . they must all have the same sentence—shooting” (pp. 255–56). Kamenev’s brother, Nikolai Rosenfeld, a painter married to a doctor inside the Kremlin, testified against him at the trial.
117
Like Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were among the most prominent Jews in the leadership of the Communist Party. For a discussion that touches on the role of anti-Semitism in the purges, see Alfred A. Greenbaum, “Soviet Jewry during the Lenin-Stalin Period,”
Soviet Studies
16 (1965): 84–92.
118
Report of Court Proceedings.
The Case of the Trotskyite-Zionvievite Terrorist Centre
(Moscow: People’s Commisariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R., 1936), p. 18. An overview of “The Russian Trials,” with more than a tinge of sympathy and tendentiousness, can be found in Gunther,
Inside Europe
, pp. 489–99. Gunther sought to remind his readers that “an important point to keep in mind is the peculiarity of the Russian legal procedure . . . where the real ‘trial’ is the preliminary investigation; the final court session does not so much determine guilt as decide what penalty should be attached to the guilty. . . . Within the circumspections of Russian procedure the trials were perfectly fair. . . . The attitude of the court was severe but not coercive,” he wrote, noting that “the confessions were genuine, of which there can be little sincere doubt” (pp. 490, 496).