Modern European history. Her first book, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (2005), received several prizes, including the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association.
Hirsch applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II, and reported the following:
Page 99 finds us in Berlin, in October 1945, about six weeks before the start of the Nuremberg Trials. Representatives from all four countries of the prosecution (the U.S., Britain, France, and the USSR) are in the midst of deliberations that will fundamentally affect the course of the trials.Learn more about Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg at the Oxford University Press website.
Tensions are high among the four chief prosecutors about the Indictment—a jointly authored document that lays out the charges against the former Nazi leaders and their organizations. The American, British, and French chief prosecutors have signed off on the Indictment. Soviet chief prosecutor Roman Rudenko is stalling for time; he is under strict orders “not to sign off on the final document—under any circumstances” until he gets approval from Moscow.
Meanwhile the four main Nuremberg judges work through other issues. Some are matters of pomp and circumstance. The French judge, Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, insists that the judges wear “black robes as befitting the Tribunal’s dignity.” But Soviet chief judge Iona Nikitchenko dismisses such attire as “medieval.” A compromise is reached: each judge could wear whatever he considered appropriate—leaving the Soviet judges free to wear their military uniforms.
Other more significant issues remain matters of contention. On October 11, the three Western judges decide, over Nikitchenko’s objections, that the presidency of the Tribunal would not rotate during the trials at Nuremberg. A couple of days later, the judges select the British judge, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, as the Tribunal’s president. While the American judge Francis Biddle had coveted this post, the U.S. chief prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, had convinced him to support Lawrence “lest the Americans, who were playing host and supplying the majority of the defendants, be seen as completely running the show.” Jackson sends President Truman a letter expressing his concern that if Biddle were to preside and anything went wrong, “all of the animosities and blame would be centered upon the United States.” Nikitchenko goes along with the choice of Lawrence, mainly because he, in turn, is selected to preside over the Tribunal during its public sessions in Berlin.
Back in Moscow, the Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Vyshinsky—who had been appointed by Stalin to head a secret commission to oversee the Soviet delegation for the Nuremberg Trials—is focusing his attention on the Indictment. Nikitchenko has surreptitiously sent him a copy for review and approval. Vyshinsky is well aware that the October 15 deadline for lodging the document with the Tribunal is approaching quickly. He sends copies (hastily translated into Russian) to the other members of the secret commission asking them “to send their comments that afternoon.” Matters are complicated for Vyshinsky and others in Moscow because Stalin is incommunicado. Stalin had left Moscow on October 9 for his villa in Sochi, near the Black Sea in the Caucasus, for his first vacation in nine years. Rumors abound that he had suffered two heart attacks during the Potsdam Conference in August and is gravely ill.
The page 99 test works beautifully for my book. Although the prosecutors and judges have not yet arrived in Nuremberg—and the start of the trials is still over a month away—page 99 illustrates a number of key dynamics that are at the heart of the story.
First of all, it shows that Nuremberg was a four-power affair—and it captures the difficult relationships among the wartime allies who were cooperating to bring the Nazis to justice. The Americans, the British, the French, and the Soviets came to Germany with different ideas about the meaning of justice and with competing visions of what Nuremberg should look like. They all made compromises to make Nuremberg happen and to keep the trials moving forward. Some of those compromises (over matters of wardrobe, for example) were small ones; others, involving questions of procedure and evidence, would threaten the very legitimacy of the trials.
Page 99 also shows how the particularities of Stalinism undermined the Soviets in Nuremberg—another key theme of the book. It reveals the tensions between the Soviet delegation in Germany and Soviet leaders in Moscow who were determined to shape the trials from afar. Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Vyshinsky and his secret Nuremberg commission play a key role throughout the trials. Vyshinsky (who had gained infamy in the 1930s as the prosecutor of the Moscow show trials) answered directly to Stalin. Moscow’s insistence on reviewing and signing off on each and every decision greatly impeded the Soviet delegation—which was continually scrambling to meet tight deadlines. Stalin’s influence over the Soviet delegation is heavily felt at all times, even when he is away from Moscow and incommunicado.
Finally, on page 99 we start to get a sense of Nuremberg as an incipient Cold War battleground—another theme that is developed more fully in the book. We see Soviet judge Iona Nikitchenko being outvoted by the other three judges on a key procedural issue; this will happen again and again. We also get a peek at U.S. chief prosecutor (and Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson’s desire to have the Americans run the show at Nuremberg without it being evident that they are doing so. (His letter to Truman is especially telling.) The Soviet-American relationship is critical to the course of the trials and also to the postwar creation of international law regarding human rights—which is a theme I explore in more depth in the final chapter of the book.
--Marshal Zeringue
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