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This volume aims to offer a fresh perspective towards the evaluation of Soviet war crimes trials of Holocaust perpetrators, their representation through various means of media, and their reception in the context of the Cold War. By examining the 1964 Klaipėda war crimes trial in Soviet Lithuania through a microhistorical perspective, the book explores the history of the “second wave” of Soviet justice in the 1960s. It attempts to offer insight not only into how this Soviet war crimes trial was initiated and investigated, but also into how it was presented in the courtroom and channeled through the media for publicity. The book argues that the war crimes trials conducted by the Soviet Lithuanian judiciary can be on one hand perceived as an intrinsic element of Soviet ideological propaganda and, on the other, viewed as an alternative space for disclosing memories of the mass murder of Jews, offering an opposing perspective to the official Soviet politics of memory. Intended for both an academic audience and the general public, this volume unveils an intertwined compilation of Soviet legal history, politics of retribution, memory, and media during the Thaw period.
This book is a study of the legal reckoning with the crimes of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police and its political dimensions in the Soviet Union, West and East Germany, and the United States in the context of the Cold War. Decades of work by prosecutors have established the facts of Latvian collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. No group made a deeper mark in the annals of atrocity than the men of the so-called 'Arajs Kommando' and their leader, Viktors Arājs, who killed tens of thousands of Jews on Latvian soil and participated in every aspect of the 'Holocaust by Bullets.' This study also has significance for coming to terms with Latvia’s encounter with Nazism – a process that was stunted and distorted by Latvia’s domination by the USSR until 1991. Examining the country’s most notorious killers, their fates on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and contemporary Latvians’ responses in different political contexts, this volume is a record of the earliest phases of this process, which must now continue and to which this book contributes.
The Nuremberg Trials (IMT), most notable for their aim to bring perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice in the wake of World War II, paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this new history of the trials, a central part of the story has been ignored or forgotten: the critical role the Soviet Union played in making them happen in the first place. While there were practical reasons for this omission--until recently, critical Soviet documents about Nuremberg were buried in the former Soviet archives, and even Russian researchers had limited access--Hirsch shows that there were political reasons as well. The Soviet Union was regarded by its wartime Allies not just as a fellow victor but a rival, and it was not in the interests of the Western powers to highlight the Soviet contribution to postwar justice. Stalin's Show Trials of the 1930s had both provided a model for Nuremberg and made a mockery of it, undermining any pretense of fairness and justice. Further complicating matters was the fact that the Soviets had allied with the Nazis before being invaded by them. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 hung over the courtroom, as did the fact that the everyone knew that the Soviet prosecution had presented the court with falsified evidence about the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, attempting to pin one of their own major war crimes on the Nazis. For lead American prosecutor Robert Jackson and his colleagues, focusing too much on the Soviet role in the trials threatened the overall credibility of the IMT and possibly even the collective memory of the war. Soviet Justice at Nuremberg illuminates the ironies of Stalin's henchmen presiding in moral judgment over the Nazis. In effect, the Nazis had learned mass-suppression and mass-murder techniques from the Soviets, their former allies, and now the latter were judging them for crimes they had themselves committed. Yet the Soviets had borne the brunt of the fighting--and the losses--in World War II, and this gave them undeniable authority. Moreover, Soviet jurists were the first to conceive of a legal framework for viewing war as a crime, and without that framework the IMT would have had no basis. In short, there would be no denying their place at the tribunal, nor their determination to make the most of it. Illuminating the shifting relationships between the four countries involved (the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R.) Hirsch's book shows how each was not just facing off against the Nazi defendants, but against each other and offers a new history of Nuremberg.
When the Allies decided to try German war criminals at the end of World War II they were attempting not only to punish the guilty but also to create a record of what had happened in Europe. This ground-breaking new study shows how Britain and the United States went about inscribing the history of Nazi Germany and the effect their trial and occupation policies had on both long and short term 'memory' in Germany and Britain. Donald Bloxham here examines the actions and trials of German soldiers and policemen, the use of legal evidence, the refractory functions of the courtroom, and Allied political and cultural preconceptions of both 'Germanism' and of German criminality. His evidence shows conclusively that the trials were a failure: the greatest of all 'crimes against humanity' - the 'final solution of the Jewish question' - was largely written out of history in the post-war era and the trials failed to transmit the breadth of German criminality. Finally, with reference to the historiography of the Holocaust, Genocide on Trial illuminates the function of the trials in perpetuating misleading generalizations about the course of the Holocaust and the nature of Nazism.
Kerstin von Lingen shows how Nazi SS-General Karl Wolff avoided war crimes prosecution because of his role in "Operation Sunrise," negotiations conducted by high-ranking American, Swiss, and British officials - in violation of the Casablanca agreements with the Soviet Union - for the surrender of German forces in Italy. Von Lingen suggests that the Cold War started already with "Operation Sunrise," and helps us understand rollback operations thereafter: one was the failure of justice and selective prosecution for high ranking Nazi criminals. The Western Allies not only failed to ensure cooperation between their respective national war crimes prosecution organizations, but in certain cases even obstructed justice by withholding evidence from the prosecution.
In the spring of 1940, the Soviet Union carried out the mass executions of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war - army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians - taken by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. This work details the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up of the crime, and the subsequent revelations.
This official government publication investigates the impact of the Holocaust on the Western powers' intelligence-gathering community. It explains the archival organization of wartime records accumulated by the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service and Britain's Government Code and Cypher School. It also summarizes Holocaust-related information intercepted during the war years.
Since the end of World War II, the ongoing efforts aimed at criminal prosecution, restitution, and other forms of justice in the wake of the Holocaust have constituted one of the most significant episodes in the history of human rights and international law. As such, they have attracted sustained attention from historians and legal scholars. This edited collection substantially enlarges the topical and disciplinary scope of this burgeoning field, exploring such varied subjects as literary analysis of Hannah Arendt’s work, the restitution case for Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, and the ritualistic aspects of criminal trials.
Über die NS-Prozesse in Osteuropa in den 1960er Jahren und den Stellenwert des Holocaust darin. Etwa 15 Jahre nach Kriegsende kam es in vielen Staaten des Ostblocks zu einer zweiten Welle von Gerichtsverfahren gegen NS-Verbrecher, die anderen Logiken folgte als die Prozesse unmittelbar nach Kriegsende. Auf dem Höhepunkt des Kalten Krieges in den 1960er Jahren verpflichteten die Prozesse einerseits zu einer Zusammenarbeit zwischen Ost und West, andererseits waren sie bestimmt durch die Abwehrhaltung gegenüber dem jeweiligen Gegner im Systemkonflikt. Innerhalb des Ostblocks sollte durch ein abgestimmtes Vorgehen auf der internationalen Bühne Einigkeit demonstriert werden, gleichzeitig führten nationale Interessen zu je eigenen Wegen in der Strafverfolgung. Die in diesem Band zusammengetragenen Aufsätze widmen sich der Geschichte der Strafprozesse zu nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen in Ungarn, der DDR, Polen, der Tschechoslowakei und der Sowjetunion nach der "Tauwetterphase" und fragen nach den Voraussetzungen und Eigenheiten dieser Verfahren. Welche Regeln galten für die Prozesse? Welche Ziele verfolgten sie? Und nicht zuletzt: Welchen Stellenwert hatte der Holocaust bei der Aufklärung der Verbrechen? Der Band erscheint vollständig in englischer Sprache. __________ On the Nazi trials in Eastern Europe in the 1960s and the place of the Holocaust in them. About 15 years after the end of the war, a second wave of trials against Nazi criminals occurred in many Eastern Bloc states, which followed a different logic than the ones immediately after the war. At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, the trials on the one hand obliged cooperation between East and West, on the other hand they were determined by the defensive attitude towards the respective opponent in the system conflict. Within the Eastern bloc, unity was to be demonstrated through a coordinated approach on the international stage, while at the same time national interests led to their own paths in criminal prosecution. The essays collected in this volume are devoted to the history of criminal trials on National Socialist crimes in Hungary, the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union after the "thaw" and ask about the preconditions and peculiarities of these proceedings. What rules applied to the trials? What goals did they pursue? And last but not least: What significance did the Holocaust have in the clarification of the crimes?
This report is based on findings from newly-declassified decades-old Army and CIA records released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. These records were processed and reviewed by the National Archives-led Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. The report highlights materials opened under the Act, in addition to records that were previously opened but had not been mined by historians and researchers, including records from the Office of Strategic Services (a CIA predecessor), dossiers of the Army Staff's Intelligence Records of the Investigative Records Repository, State Dept. records, and files of the Navy Judge Advocate General. This is a print on demand report.