Each week, the Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is "Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II" by Francine Hirsch. A groundbreaking, deeply researched reassessment of the Soviet Union’s role in the International Military Tribunal (IMT), Hirsch's book fills a void in the standard Nuremberg narratives, according to which the Anglo-Americans ran the show from start to finish, with the Soviets only showing up occasionally to quibble about such embarrassing issues as the Katyn massacre.

Hirsch, to the contrary, argues that Soviet jurists were indispensable to establishing the IMT. The Soviet Union pushed for a legal reckoning for the Nazis via a formal international court. Among Allied leaders, some, such as Churchill, preferred to dispense with the possibly embarrassing process of holding trials, opting instead for summary executions for Nazi leaders.

The Soviet Union, by contrast, from early on urged the establishment of a formal legal process. Soviet legal legal thinkers such as Aron Trainin had developed the concept “crimes against peace” in the 1930s. While the Western powers contributed concepts such as "crimes against humanity," it was the Soviets who were instrumental in elevating "aggression" to a crime, which formed Count 1 of the indictment at Nuremberg.

According to Hirsch, Soviet prosecutors brought to Nuremberg a very different legal culture, shaped by, first, civil law traditions, and, second, Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology. From the start, Soviet prosecutors sought to prove that the Nazi regime had been a criminal conspiracy from the start, that the Soviet Union had been the main victim of Nazi aggression, and that the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated on Soviet soil were uniquely horrific.

None of the Allied Powers believed that the IMT was administering impartial justice. The war crimes trials were seen as an extension of the war itself, a mechanism to adjudicate the vanquished as uniquely evil, and the victors as uniquely virtuous. The Soviet prosecutors were a little less hypocritical than their Western counterparts in that they made no pretense of believing that the trials would be solely concerned with determining individual responsibility for crimes. The Soviet prosecutors at the outset sought to put the Nazi regime as a whole on trial. Curiously enough, decades later, the Western public still believes that at Nuremberg defendants were tried as individuals, and not as representatives of a reviled regime. This soothing notion exists even though the IMT declared the following organizations “criminal”: the Nazi Party leadership corps, the SS, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) and the Gestapo.

Of course, mention of any of the war crimes perpetrated by any of the Allied powers was strictly prohibited. No Katyn, no carpet bombing of cities, no Hiroshima, no fire-bombing of Tokyo, no executions of POWs (at least by the Allied powers).

Francine Hirsch's "Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg" provides a useful corrective to the stories presented by Telford Taylor and John Tusa that presented the Western powers all moral and high-minded, and the Soviets as curmudgeonly bit-players.