First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946

7. “The Dead Never Lie: ”SOVIET FILM, THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL, AND THE HOLOCAUST

186 From the moment they first began filming Nazi atrocities, in autumn 1941, the Soviets had invoked a legal rationale for doing so. As Roman Karmen said, “every meter of film, every frame, would be a terrifying document denouncing the Fascist hangmen.”1 The footage was to be shown at a future trial of the Nazis, demonstrating their crimes, especially those against the Soviets, to the whole world. This aspiration to legal redress was widespread in the Soviet Union, which, having suffered more losses than any other state involved in the war, became an important force calling for retributive justice against the Nazis. This call began with Molotov’s four “notes” on war crimes, the first issued in November 1941; all four refer to notions of law contravened by Nazi atrocities. Other documents, too, invoked juridical notions, including the Supreme Soviet’s 19 April 1943 decree declaring that Axis personnel and their accomplices found guilty of committing crimes against the Soviet Union would be publicly executed or sentenced to lengthy prison terms,2 and the November 1943 Moscow Declaration. All these pronouncements proved crucial in paving the way to an international trial.3 Nonetheless, though Soviet newsreel makers and other journalists sincerely strove to record evidence of Nazi crimes as just that—crimes—it may seem strange that the idea of judging Nazis in a court originated in the pronouncements of Soviet leaders, since the Soviet Union itself was 7  “The Dead Never Lie” SOVIET FILM, THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL, AND THE HOLOCAUST “THE DEAD NEVER LIE”  187 notorious for its extrajudicial detentions, deportations, and murders, as well as torture, forced confessions, show trials, and a general contempt for the rule of law.4 As I have shown, however, the legalistic imperative had throughout the war coexisted uneasily with the desire to show images of Nazi atrocities so as to spur Soviet citizens to greater efforts toward victory . Ultimately, the calls for some sort of legal process were part of a wartime propaganda strategy aimed partly at bolstering the Soviets’ image with their British and U.S. allies but above all at reestablishing the Soviet government’s moral superiority among its own citizens, whom the war had shown to be so alienated that they were often attracted to the Nazis. Soviet officials, then, understood the proposed judicial procedure primarily in terms of propaganda, along the lines of the 1930s Moscow show trials, but other factions warmed to the notion of an international tribunal during the course of the war, and as the proposed process took shape, it gained backing, particularly in the United States. While the proposed format included the didactic, not to say theatrical, elements of a show trial, the proceedings were given a legally robust basis guaranteeing their judicial integrity, despite Soviet involvement.5 The consequence was the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal of Major Nazi War Criminals , a groundbreaking attempt to demonstrate the benefit of due process for international conflict. The tribunal was equally important for creating a framework that shaped the early understanding of the Holocaust, in particular by establishing the figure of six million Jewish dead “with the authority of a non-Jewish international agency.”6 The trial incorporated novel means to achieve its aims, one of them being film admitted as evidence of the Nazis’ crimes. Historians have paid significant attention to the two films that the U.S. team compiled and showed at the proceedings, Nazi Concentration Camps and The Nazi Plan, both directed by George Stevens, but they have tended to ignore the Soviet films, the most significant of which was Film Documents of Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders (Kinodukumenty o zverstvakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov; hereinafter referred to as Film Documents of Atrocities).7 Given the suspicion that all information of Soviet provenance received, this disparity probably arose, at least in part, from an unease regarding the film’s trustworthiness. Indeed, Film Documents of Atrocities was essentially a reedited compilation of footage that had been used for motivational or propagandistic ends in wartime Soviet newsreels and documentaries. The voiceover was more descriptive, but the polemi- 188  “THE DEAD NEVER LIE” cal purpose behind the original material contradicted the title’s claim that this was simply a document. Whatever its polemical origins, the Soviet film was submitted as evidence relevant to the tribunal’s most groundbreaking legal dimension: the indictment for “crimes against humanity,” which has been described...