Nuremberg . . . Again
It is interesting that they are always making new movies about the Nuremberg trails – at which the military and civilian leadership of the defeated German Reich were tried – but there has yet to be a movie (certainly not recently) about the Soviet Show Trials, presided over by the same judge (Andrei Vyshinsky) who was one of the judges at Nuremberg. He sentenced men to death – at Stalin’s trails – whose “crime” was being a bur in Stalin’s saddle.
Stalin was himself by any objective metric – such as bodies piled up – a far worse criminal than any of the National Socialist leaders who were convicted at Nuremberg. He starved and deported – not necessarily in that order – millions of Russians. He ordered/approved the murder of more millions than the Fuhrer of the German Reich was even accused of having murdered, taking those accusations as numerically accurate. Stalin’s minions executed more than 20,000 actually counted Polish soldiers, officers and members of the Polish “intelligentsia” – the Katyn Forest massacre – yet probably not one out of 100 American children who passed through the government education gulag in America has ever heard of this.
Likewise, they will generally look baffled when you tell them that it wasn’t just Germany that attacked Poland – the much-told reason schoolchildren are told started World War II; i.e., that the Germans were the bad guys. Well, the fact is that so were the Russians – more finely, the Communists who ran Russia at the time – if the criteria for that is attacking Poland, which Stalin and his armies did shortly after the Germans and by agreement with the Germans.
Joachim Von Ribbentrop – the foreign minister of National Socialist Germany – who was later convicted at Nuremberg and hanged – clinked glasses in Moscow with Stalin and Vachyslav Molotov, the foreign minister of the Soviet Union. Molotov’s signature is on the secret agreement between National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia to carve up Poland between them, like a Thanksgiving turkey. Yet Molotov lived to ripe, un-indicted old age and died peacefully in his bed.
American school children know nothing of this.
How about Lavrenti Beria? How many American school children can say who he was? Probably not one out of 100. There are no movies depicting the man who Stalin jocularly referred to as “our Himmler” during the Yalta conference with American leaders where the postwar future of shattered Germany was being discussed. Most every American adult knows who Heinrich Himmler – the Reichsfuhrer SS – was because it is almost impossible to grow up in America and not have heard who he was. Yet Himmler was a far less evil person than Beria, who delighted in the torture and murder of his many victims. Himmler had some humanity in him. Beria – like Stalin himself – was a kind of human arachnid-predator thing in the form of a man, with dead eyes and a dead soul.
This brings us back to Nuremberg and the newest movie about it – again. There have been at least two major motion picture made in the last 25 years about it, the most recent one before the new one starring Alec Baldwin as the American prosecutor and the excellent actor Brian Cox (of Braveheat fame) as the Reichsmarschall. The latter was, of course, the chief of the German air force and – prior to that – a highly decorated combat pilot in the first world war.
Herman Goring was found guilty of – among other things – signing the Nuremberg race laws and, later, of supposedly authorizing the “final solution,” though almost no Americans have the slightest clue that term was in currency long before the National Socialists came to power and was used by early Zionists when discussing what they themselves referred to as the “Jewish Question.” Not many Americans are aware, either, that Adolf Eichmann – of the famed Jerusalem trials – worked closely with Zionists to export Jews to what was then still Palestine.
These are heresies to speak of, of course.
But that is why it is so important to speak of them. And to ask the question that is begged by this article: Why aren’t there any major motion picture about Vyshinsky or Molotov or Beria – and so few about Stalin? (One great exception to this being the film starring Robert Duvall as the Red Tsar – as Stalin referred to himself, by the way).
Instead – once again – the Reichsmarschall will be depicted as the apotheosis of evil for purposes of prompting (once again) the becoming pro-forma expressions of sympathy for the victims of National Socialism. Which would be less suspect if the victims, far more numerous, of Communism were accorded similar publicity.
Why aren’t they?
That is a question Americans of all ages ought to be thinking about answering.