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I'm reading a history of 1918, and there is a comparison made between what one soldier advocated for Germany's leaders post-Great War, and what happened post-WWII. It occurred to me that, while I've read of Allied arguments for the acquittal of Axis defendants, I've not read of any similar from Soviet prosecutors/witnesses. Did the Soviets speak up for any defendants, if only for form's sake?
Not a big reading area for me. What little I have read suggests that the Soviets used many of the same personnel that had prosecuted on behalf of the party and state during Stalin's show trials in 1936-1938. They went in viewing the Nuremburg process as a form of show trial, but the Western Allies successfully -- in part by providing an orthodox defense of the Nazis on trial -- kept the process more or less in line with Western jurisprudence and did not allow their Soviet colleagues to use it for show and/or as a way to undercut the centrality of property rights in Western Law. I would assume that Soviet efforts to "defend" would have been only in service of legal process and their larger international struggle to advance Marxism. They would NOT have taken as a starting point the idea that each individual was entitled to the best practicable defense that could be made. That was not the purpose of the Soviet justice system.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pannonian