Soviet Chief Prosecutor Rudenko Delivers Opening Statement to Tribunal

“It is impossible to enumerate in an opening statement the crimes committed by the defendants against humanity. The Soviet prosecution has at its disposal considerable documentary material which will be presented to the Tribunal.

If Your Honours please, I here appear as the representative of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, which bore the main brunt of the blows of the fascist invaders and which vastly contributed to the smashing of Nazi Germany and its satellites. On behalf of the Soviet Union, I charge the defendants on all the counts enumerated in Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal.

Together with the Chief Prosecutors of the United States of America, Great Britain, and France, I charge the defendants with having prepared and carried out a perfidious attack on the peoples of my country and on all freedom-loving nations.

I accuse them of the fact that, having initiated a world war, they, in violation of the fundamental rules of international law and of the treaties to which they were signatories, turned war into an instrument of extermination of peaceful citizens - an instrument of plunder, violence, and pillage.

I accuse the defendants of the fact that, having proclaimed themselves to be the representatives of the ‘master race’, a thing which they invented, they set up, wherever their domination spread, an arbitrary regime of tyranny; a regime founded on the disregard for the elementary principles of humanity.

Now, when as a result of the heroic struggle of the Red Army and of the Allied forces, Nazi Germany is broken and overwhelmed, we have no right to forget the victims who have suffered. We have no right to leave unpunished those who organised and were guilty of monstrous crimes.

In sacred memory of millions of innocent victims of the fascist terror, for the sake of the consolidation of peace throughout the world, for the sake of the future security of nations, we are presenting the defendants with a just and complete account which must be settled. This is an account on behalf of all mankind, an account backed by the will and the conscience of all freedom-loving nations

May justice be done!”

Sources:

Sergei Miroshnichenko, “Transcript of the Nuremberg Trials”, Volume VI

http://victims.rusarchives.ru/vstupitelnaya-rech-glavnogo-obvinitelya-mezhdunarodnogo-voennogo-tribunala-ot-sssr-general

Chief Prosecutor for the USSR at the International Military Tribunal, General-lieutenant R.A. Rudenko's Opening Statement, 8 February 1946. Pictures by Yevgeny Khaldei. The BPAWG, arch. Nos. В-3029, В-3030, В-3035.