Judgment Before Nuremberg

When people think of the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz and Dachau. Not of Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not a town called Kharkov. But in reality, the first war crime trial against the Nazis was in this tiny Ukrainian town, which is fitting, because it is where the Holocaust actually began. Judgment Before Nuremberg is also the story of Dawson’s personal journey to this place, to the scene of the crime, and the discovery of the trial which began the tortuous process of avenging the murder of his grandparents, great-grandparents and tens of thousands of fellow Ukrainians consumed at the dawn of the Shoah, a moment and crime now largely cloaked in darkness.

Organized in the immediate aftermath of World War II to try the former Nazi leaders for war crimes, the Nuremberg trials, known as the International Military Tribunal (IMT), paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this immersive new history of the trials, a central piece of the story has been routinely omitted from standard accounts: the critical role that the Soviet Union played in making Nuremberg happen in the first place. Hirsch's book reveals how the Soviets shaped the trials--only to be written out of their story as Western allies became bitter Cold War rivals. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers the first full picture of the war trials, illuminating the many ironies brought to bear as the Soviets did their part to bring the Nazis to justice. Everyone knew that Stalin had originally allied with Hitler before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 hung heavy over the courtroom, as did the suspicion among the Western prosecutors and judges that the Soviets had falsified evidence in an attempt to pin one of their own war crimes, the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, on the Nazis. It did not help that key members of the Soviet delegation, including the Soviet judge and chief prosecutor, had played critical roles in Stalin's infamous show trials of the 1930s. For the lead American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson and his colleagues, Soviet participation in the Nuremberg Trials undermined their overall credibility and possibly even the moral righteousness of the Allied victory. Yet Soviet jurists had been the first to conceive of a legal framework that treated war as an international crime. Without it, the IMT would have had no basis for judgment. The Soviets had borne the brunt of the fighting against Germany--enduring the horrors of the Nazi occupation and experiencing almost unimaginable human losses and devastation. There would be no denying their place on the tribunal, nor their determination to make the most of it. Once the trials were set in motion, however, little went as the Soviets had planned. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg shows how Stalin's efforts to direct the Soviet delegation and to steer the trials from afar backfired, and how Soviet war crimes became exposed in open court. Hirsch's book offers readers both a front-row seat in the courtroom and a behind-the-scenes look at the meetings in which the prosecutors shared secrets and forged alliances. It reveals the shifting relationships among the four countries of the prosecution (the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the USSR), uncovering how and why the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg became a Cold War battleground. In the process Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers a new understanding of the trials and a fresh perspective on the post-war movement for human rights.

The Nuremberg trials brought to public attention the worst of the Nazi atrocities. Judgment at Nuremberg brings those trials to life. Abby Mann's riveting drama Judgment at Nuremberg not only brought some of the worst Nazi atrocities to public attention, but has become, along with Elie Wiesel's Night and Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, one of the twentieth century's most important records of the Holocaust. Originally written as a 1957 television play, later made into an Academy Award winning 1961 film, and available now for the first time in print (using the text of Mann's recent Broadway adaptation), Judgment at Nuremberg is as potent and relevant as ever. To this day the Nuremberg trials stand as a model for international criminal tribunals, due in large measure to the spotlight thrown on them by Mann's dramatic interpretation of the historic events. Mann's overwhelming compassion strikes at the heart of human suffering--his achievement has been to reaffirm humanity and justice in the wake of unspeakable evil.

Using documents from German sources...Final Judgment: The Story of Nuremberg is a revealing X-ray of the whole political, economic, and moral system that the Nazis built up. It uses the Nuremberg trials as its starting point. But it peels away, one after another, the layers of meaning behind Nuremberg. Anyone who followed the reports of the trials in the American press must have been dismayed by their fragmentary and superficial character. All we got were bits and pieces of the Nazi story. Millions of words were, of course, cabled from Nuremberg by correspondents to the twelve corners of the world—especially in the first few days. But mainly they were color stuff, portraying the trial as a spectacle. There were pictures of the defendants and detailed accounts of their behavior in jail. There were excerpts from United States Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson’s opening indictment, and some scattered debate on the international law at the basis of the trial. And at the end there was a sensational flare-up of think-pieces about how Goering managed to cheat the gallows by concealing his lethal poison. It is some kind of commentary on our press and our ways of thought that the most important trial of our era should have ended on the cheap note of a mystery thriller entitled The Case of the Hidden Poison. Nuremberg is still the Trial Nobody Knows. In contrast with this surface stuff, Victor Bernstein has written an attack-in-depth on what the Nazis did, and the techniques they used, and what Nazism did to them. The book is a scalpel-dissection of the whole Nazi disease of which the Nuremberg criminals were only the more ulcerous outcroppings.-Print ed.

WWII is over, there is a climate of jubilation and optimism as the Allies look to rebuilding Europe for the future but the perpetrators of Nazi War Crimes have yet to be reckoned with, and the full extent of their atrocities is as yet widely unknown. Today, we have lived with the full knowledge of the extent of Nazi atrocities for over half a century and yet they still retain their power to shock. Imagine what it was like as they were being revealed in the full extent of their horror for the first time. In this book the Judges at the Nuremberg Trials take it in turn to describe the indictments handed down to the defendants and their crimes. The entire history, purpose and method of the Nazi party since its foundation in 1918 is revealed and described in chilling detail.

This is an examination of the law's response to the crimes of the Holocaust. It studies exemplary proceedings including the Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals and the Israeli trials of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk.

In this prodigiously researched study, the author concentrates on the reaction to the trials by various segments of the American public largely in terms of the legality of the tribunal, the composition of the court, the justice of the verdicts, and the implications for the future. Originally published 1970. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.