The editors' team of the “Nuremberg: Casus Pacis” project – together with the Eksmo publishing house – is publishing excerpts from Philipp Gut’s book about Benjamin Ferencz, the man who organised the trial against the SS punitive special units, introduced the word “genocide,” and stood at the origin of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

My grandfather Mikhail Fedorovich Loshchits (1917-2015) went through the war from the first to the last day. He served as a military journalist on the Leningrad front. He was an instructor in the political department of a division, a secretary, and then an editor of the divisional newspaper “In the line of duty”. The story “On the Last Day of the War” tells a little-known episode – the surrender of a group of German troops ambushed in the so-called Courland Pocket in western Latvia. It was only on 8 May that fierce fighting stopped there, however, some units resisted until the end of the month.

Pravda’s special Nuremberg correspondent, the celebrated writer Boris Polevoi (who would soon shoot to fame in the Soviet Union for his book “The Story of a Real Man”) knew much more about Auschwitz than many other eyewitnesses at the Nuremberg trials. He visited the camp two days after it had been liberated by the Red Army in January 1945 and interviewed prisoners and witnesses, afterwards writing a memo about it to the Political Department at the Front. On 15 April 1946, he published his impressions of the examination of Rudolf Höss, the former commander of Auschwitz Extermination Camp, by the Nuremberg tribunal on the same day in an article for the Soviet Information Bureau. The authors of “Nuremberg: Casus Pacis” found the article in the archives of Sovinformburo. The full version of Polevoi’s article about Auschwitz is published for the first time.

The rise and fall of Karl Dönitz, the man who ordered that drowning men should not be rescued