At Nuremberg, American judges had to teach the Soviet judges about concepts such as “innocent until proven guilty.” The Soviets saw the trials as simply being about whether the accused went to the gulags or were taken out back with a pistol.
Most people aren’t prepared to learn just how different their cultures are from others, let alone realize the implications.
Oct 28, 2026 · 4:33 PM UTC
Do you have any like short articles about this? I’m researching a White general shot by the Soviets and I’d love to know more about how they viewed guilt
While not short, here’s a primary source on how the Soviet judge perceived the trials. In this context, declaring the accused to be criminals was enough, and that actually having a trial was navel-gazing.
avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/jack…
So American judges worked hard to protect Nazis, and Soviet judges worked hard to execute them, and I'm supposed to side with the American judges on this one?
That’s an oversimplification. There were a handful of Nazis who opposed the regime and worked to undermine it. Should they have been executed in a show trial?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjalma…
Soviet judges knew about the concept; they had simply grown accustomed to political trials that were mostly theater. The accused would confess (usually after being tortured and threatened with harm to their families), publicly break down in court, get sentenced to death, and then everyone would applaud and go home happy.
No one on the Soviet side expected the Allies to take the Nuremberg trials seriously, with proper interrogations, investigations, and a genuine defense.
Nikolai Zorya, an assistant Soviet prosecutor, had failed to pin the blame for the mass execution of Polish officers on the Germans, as Western prosecutors and the tribunal were beginning to realize that the Soviet NKVD was responsible. He was also distressed by the courtroom disclosure of the secret protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
Shortly afterward, he was found dead in his Nuremberg hotel room, with a gunshot wound to the head and a Walther pistol beside him. The Soviet delegation claimed that he had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his service weapon.
The fundamental difference is ends v means. Classical liberalism values means/process in itself, which is contrary to pretty much every other system government where the ends justify the means. In the West, we forget how unintuitive and unique concepts like due process are globally and historically.
Including the Soviets at Nuremberg made the whole thing into a genuine farce imo. The moment you throw ex-post-facto out the courtroom window, you really need to take a step back.
The Soviets wanted to execute the anti-rearmament, anti-Holocaust Reichsbank president who was basically ousted in 1939.
