Number of the day
Nazi criminals were convicted worldwide following the Nuremberg Trials
Source:
Alexander Zvyagintsev, “The Nuremberg Epilogue” / The newspaper “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” from 1 November 2016.
That German Was Our Friend
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.
‘I Recalled the Smoke of Auschwitz’
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.
Hitler's Successor
The rise and fall of Karl Dönitz, the man who ordered that drowning men should not be rescued
Document: ‘The Expression 'Russia' Were to Be Avoided’
Before the invasion of the USSR, the High Command of the German Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) issued a directive for handling propaganda in the territories included in Operation Barbarossa. The general hoped to convince the Soviet population of his best intentions.
Plan is Not to Take Moscow, but To Surround it and Starve it to Death
“Nuremberg. Casus Pacis”, the Eurasian People’s Assembly cooperated with the president of the Digital History Foundation, the historian and researcher Egor Yakovlev, to create the documentary cycle “Genocide. Reich’s plan”. The Third Reich documents are being published in Russian for the first time and prove irrefutably that the Nazis’ crimes cannot be excused simply as excesses which occasionally occur in wartime or the private acts of a handful of unspeakably cruel people. The blockade of Leningrad, along with the mass executions in occupied territories and the extermination of prisoners of war, as well as the medical experiments in castration and sterilisation in concentration camps, were all a well-planned and concerted attempt to destroy Soviet ethnicity. Today we publish the first package of documents which shed light on Germany's true intentions towards the civilian population of the European part of the USSR: to kill up to 30 million people through artificially created starvation and unbearable living conditions.
Document: 300 Thousand Words for Soviet Radio Listeners
Mikhail Gus was a Soviet international radio journalist, publicist and art critic, who witnessed many of the events of the Second World War. He also worked at the Nuremberg Trials. Residents of the USSR listened to his reports from Nuremberg through special radio devices – so-called black "plates", which were in every apartment and at work places in those years. On 3 May 1946, he sent a telegram to the All-Union radio (the State Committee on Radio Broadcasting) with a report on five months of the work at the trials. And in 1971 he published a book of essays "Madness of the Swastika", in which he described many vivid episodes which he witnessed during the trial.
‘No, That Is Not My Signature’
Unseen Excerpts from Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s Interrogation – Part One
'We Had One Wish Only: The Wish That Some of us Would Escape Alive'
The “Nodding Donkey” and Its Strategist
Adolf Hitler had a complicated relationship with the military. The career officers, brought up in the tradition of the Kaiser's Germany, could hardly trust the Austrian corporal; many openly despised the Führer. Hitler faced military opposition many times – ranging from quiet sabotage to an attempted assassination. But some generals became the mainstay of the Nazi regime and at the same time - war criminals on an international scale. Two of them, Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, signed Germany's surrender in World War II and appeared before the Nuremberg trials.
The Stranger
What should one watch if they want to know about Nuremberg? Which films best capture the essence of the tribunal? We continue with our series of recommendations from famed film aficionado Lydia Maslova, who has collected a unique list to accompany the "Nuremberg: Casus Pacis" project.
That German Was Our Friend
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.
