'Judgement at Nuremberg.'

Francine Hirsch, Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg: A History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II. 

“The myth of the Nuremberg Moment,” according to historian Francine Hirsch in “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II” (Oxford University Press), is that the trial of the surviving Nazi leadership for war crimes “celebrated the power of American leadership and Western liberal ideals.” But, she insists, “[t]he real story of Nuremberg is messy.”

“[A] popular mythology took hold in the United States that celebrated Nuremberg as the birthplace of postwar human rights,” Hirsch writes. Stalin, however, “envisioned the Nuremberg Trials as [he] had the Moscow Trials of 1936 to 1938,” that is, “as a grand political spectacle whose outcome was certain.” And yet Hirsch also credits the Soviet attorneys who participated in the trials for “mak[ing] their mark on international law in a way that changed it forever.” Even though Hitler and Stalin had secretly agreed to invade and divide up Poland in 1939, it was a Soviet attorney who introduced the idea that “the planning and waging of an unprovoked war of conquest [was] a punishable criminal act,” she argues. “The Nuremberg Trials might not have happened at all had the Soviet view not prevailed.”