Former Scholar Francine Hirsch Publishes New Book About USSR Involvement in the Nuremberg Trials

Dr. Francine Hirsch, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and alum of the Kennan Institute, has recently published a new book entitled Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II.

Hirsch, who was a TVIII short-term scholar with the Kennan Institute, is a distinguished and experienced scholar who has largely focused her research on Russian and Soviet History, broader European history, Human Rights, and Russian-American relations. During her time with The Wilson Center, she worked on a project called “The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order”: a project similar to the work in her new book.

Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A Cold War Story covers the complex and often convoluted process by which the Soviet Union and its legal minds contributed to the Nuremberg Trials, also known as the International Military Tribunal (IMT), as well as how they helped to establish conceptions of international law and human rights in the wake of World War II. The book mainly focuses on the conflicted Soviet involvement in the trials given their previous alliance with Nazi Germany and their own controversial actions both during and before the war, offering a fuller and more nuanced look at the trials and how they brought to light many issues not only for Nazi Germany, but also for the Soviet Union.

By giving the readers an inside look at the meetings that took place between the prosecutors in the trials, Hirsch also shows how the relationship between the four allied countries—the United States, Great Britain, France, and the USSR—affected and was affected by the trials, and what that meant in the context of the broader Cold War.

Hirsch has also written a book called Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union about how Soviet leadership utilized ethnography, the study of customs and cultures of different peoples, in order to shape many different aspects of the Soviet Union.