Done justly: what did Izvestia publish about the Nuremberg trials?
Ink and paper that have become weapons. Pencil sketches that turned into diplomatic notes. The most frivolous genre of painting, reflecting the most serious trial of the 20th century. All this is about the works of the legendary Izvestia artist Boris Yefimov, who was seconded by the newspaper at the end of 1945 to Nuremberg. His caricatures of the leaders of Nazism infuriated them even before Germany's surrender: Hitler personally demanded to catch and hang the "sniper of Soviet newspaper satire." But Yefimov outlived the Fuhrer, the Third Reich, and even the Soviet Union itself. To mark the 125th anniversary of the master's birth and the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials, Izvestia and the Russian Academy of Arts opened the exhibition "Cartoons. Comics. The humor of the Fuhrer's personal enemy." Details of the exposition and little—known details of Nuremberg can be found in the Izvestia article.
As they wrote about the Nuremberg trials
Almost every day from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946, articles about the Nuremberg trials appeared on the pages of the Izvestia newspaper. They were often accompanied by cartoons and illustrations by the legendary artist Boris Yefimov, the "sniper of Soviet newspaper satire", Hitler's personal enemy, whom the Fuhrer demanded to find and hang. Boris Yefimov was present at the Nuremberg trials and continued to denounce the enemy even after the Victory.
Boris Yefimov, Soviet graphic artist and master of political caricature
A month before the trial began, on October 20, 1945, an article by Soviet prosecutor Konstantin Gorshenin appeared in the newspaper — he participated in the preparations for the Nuremberg trials and was one of his accusers.
"In carrying out their predatory plans to enslave peoples, establishing the so—called "new order," the fascist invaders acted using methods that pale before the horrors of the Middle Ages," he writes in an article entitled "The main war Criminals before the Court of Nations." "Only the fascist bandits, who had lost their human form, were capable of such atrocities as freezing people in tubs of water, ripping open their bellies, and mass shootings to the musical accompaniment of an orchestra composed of prisoners who expected the same fate."
Konstantin Gorshenin recalled that especially monstrous atrocities were committed by fascist fanatics in the territories of the regions of the Soviet Union temporarily occupied by them.
"In the Lviv region, in the city of Lviv, for example, about 700,000 Soviet people were exterminated by the Germans. From September 7, 1941 to July 6, 1943, 133,000 people were tortured and shot in the Jewish ghetto. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were exterminated in the Yanovsky camp," he writes.
The former Stalag 328 concentration camp in Lviv
The author called the indictment, which was simultaneously distributed in all the allied countries, an amazing document.
"It shows in a concentrated form the monstrous crimes of the Hitlerite clique, the leaders of which will soon occupy the dock," the author notes in the article. At the end of it, a poem "The Court" by Maxim Rylsky, a Soviet poet, translator, publicist, linguist and literary critic, was published. It ends with these words:
"Not in any secret lair
There is no escape for mad dogs!..
The trial is fair and strict:
You brought death, so die yourself!"
The newspaper regularly publishes TASS news agency materials describing the tribunal's meetings. They described in detail what happened at the morning and evening meetings.: who was questioned, who spoke, and what documents were submitted. And on November 21, the first material on the trial was released, titled "The trial of the main German war criminals has begun!"
Nuremberg trial, courtroom
"Before the opening of the meeting, the hall is full," writes a TASS correspondent. — There are 20 main German war criminals on trial. Four defendants are missing. There is no Martin Bormann, Hitler's deputy for the leadership of the Hitler Party. He cowardly escaped after frantically calling on the German army and the German people to fight to the last drop of blood. The defendant Robert Ley committed suicide in prison without waiting for the trial. The defendant Gustav Krupp von Bohlen is lying in Salzburg, stricken with paralysis, and, according to the expert examination, cannot stand trial. The defendant Kaltenbrunner, a famous executioner and one of the leaders of the Gestapo, suddenly fell ill. But the court announced its decision to try his case in his absence."
Three days later, Izvestia published an article by Lev Sheinin, a Soviet lawyer and assistant to the chief prosecutor from the USSR, entitled "The trial is underway."
"The International Tribunal is sitting in the Palace of Justice, on one of the main streets of the city of Furterstrasse, in the building of the regional court (Oberlandsgericht). It is a long brownish-pink house with an invariable tiled roof and boring outlines. American tanks are on duty at his entrance, the sentries of all the allied nations are frozen at their posts at the entrances of the court. There is a rostrum meeting on the third floor in a small hall and everything is flooded with artificial light," he described the atmosphere of the city where the main trial of the 20th century was taking place.
At the meeting, the staff of the chief prosecutor from the United States, Robert Jackson, continued to report to the tribunal numerous documents confirming the charges.
The judges of the Nuremberg trials look through documents at a table in the conference room at the Palace of Justice
"And now it has come, this trial, and now it has come, this day, so long-awaited and long-suffering. And the whole world is watching the trial, and the attention of the whole world is focused in this small hall on Furterstrasse, where the valor and will of the peoples put the terrible chieftains of the Nazi gangs in the dock," writes Lev Sheinin.
This issue also contains a report by Roman Karmen, a front-line cinematographer of the Great Patriotic War, "Letters from Nuremberg."
"It's quiet in the courtroom. Occasionally, one of the journalists raises his hand with a piece of paper covered with writing, and a courier silently rushes to him and takes him to the telegraph office. Hundreds of thousands of words come from Nuremberg every day by wire and on the radio," the article says.
In another article in Izvestia, "The Dock," Lev Sheinin described how page after page document No. 25 is being read out — the protocol record of a top-secret meeting with Hitler on November 5, 1937, exposing criminals in deliberate preparation of aggressive war from the very first years of their coming to power.
Judges of the International Military Tribunal at work in the Palace of Justice. On the left is Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence (Great Britain), President of the International Military Tribunal.
"The defendants, pale and silent, listen to the words that inexorably expose their monstrous intentions before the court of nations," the author writes.
And in December 1945, the newspaper published the material of the Soviet scientist, jurist Aron Trainin, "Seekers of legal gaps." In it, the professor tells how the defendants' defenders are looking for loopholes to justify war criminals.
"Lawyers by education and lawyers by profession, they naturally look for legal gaps and loopholes. Goering's defense attorney, Stammer, on behalf of all the defenders, appealed to the tribunal with a written statement in which he tries to prove that there is no law on the basis of which the tribunal could try the main war criminals," he writes, noting that the defense's arguments look pathetic and untenable.
The lawyers of the criminals were given the opportunity to get acquainted with the documents of the Nazi archive
In early December, Boris Yefimov's cartoons began to appear in the newspaper under the headline "The Fascist Menagerie." So, in four separate paintings, the artist depicts the accused: Hermann Goering and Hans Frank as snakes, Wilhelm Keitel as a monkey sitting on its hind legs, and Julius Streicher as a toad.
And in the New Year's edition of the newspaper, on January 1, 1946, a cartoon was published depicting all the accused sitting in the dock. Their heads are turned back. They look at the wall, on which there is a clock showing 12 o'clock, and next to it there are numbers — 1946. "No matter how much rope you twist, there will be an end," read the inscription on it. The title was also placed under the image: "The Twelfth Hour of Hitler's criminals."
The newspaper not only published articles about the trial, but also published the opening and closing speeches of the chief prosecutor from the USSR, Roman Rudenko.
The speech of the chief prosecutor from the USSR, Roman Andreevich Rudenko
"For the first time in the history of mankind, justice is confronted with crimes of this magnitude, which have caused such severe consequences. For the first time, criminals who had taken over an entire State and made the State itself the instrument of their monstrous crimes appeared before the court. For the first time, finally, in the person of the defendants, we are trying not only themselves, but also the criminal institutions and organizations they created, the misanthropic "theories" and "ideas" they spread in order to carry out long—planned crimes against peace and humanity," the prosecutor's words are quoted in the newspaper dated February 9, 1946.
In March 1946, in Izvestia, you can see another cartoon by Boris Yefimov, in which a judge first stands in front of the building, followed by a whole queue: a man in a hat and with a suitcase with the inscription "Hess's brother", a woman with glasses and with a suitcase with the inscription "Keitel's mother-in-law" and a man with a suitcase marked "Rosenberg's uncle." The caption to the picture is "Reliable protection personnel".
In the same March, an article by Sergei Krushinsky, editor-in-chief of the Pravda newspaper, "Goering's Last Crime." In it, the author writes that one of the accused, Goering, who created the Gestapo (the secret state police of the Third Reich, which served as the main instrument of Nazi terror) and opened the first concentration camps, is blatantly lying.
"A prudent careerist and a greedy money—grubber - this has always been this 'Fuhrer number two,'" the author wrote.
One of the main war criminals Hermann Göring testifies
At the end of March 1946, the Izvestia newspaper published an article by correspondent, writer, poet and translator Ilya Ehrenburg entitled "Counterattack of the Night." In it, he wrote that in the fifth month of the Nuremberg trials, Western interest in him had decreased. He urged not to forget about the special importance of the tribunal.
"The significance of the Nuremberg trials: it should bite into the memory of the forgetful, warn against a repeat of the past, the prosecutors are not archivists, they are people who protect the future," he wrote.
In June of the same year, Izvestia published another article on the same topic, "The Slow-motion Process" by Aron Trainin.
"It would be a mistake to believe that the Nuremberg trials can develop easily and smoothly in the image and likeness of the processes of individual countries. The International Tribunal in Nuremberg is going and must go its own special way, meeting the special tasks of the trial of the main war criminals," he argued.
At the end of July, an article "May justice be done!" appeared on the front page of the newspaper. It quoted Roman Rudenko, the chief prosecutor from the Soviet Union, as calling for all the defendants to be punished with death.
The dock
"Death to the fascist murderers! — he declared in it. "It was a deliberate and carefully carried out attack on the world, with the aim of enslaving and exterminating peoples and establishing domination over the whole world by a gang of rabid German imperialists."
And finally, on October 2, 1946, the article "The Verdict on Hitlerism" appeared on the front page of Izvestia: "The sessions of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg have come to an end. The verdict has been passed. International justice has punished the leaders of the criminal Hitler gang." The author of the article did not subscribe, but described in detail the day of retribution.
"The verdict was read out in the Nuremberg courtroom. Twelve leaders of German fascism from among those who, together with Hitler, conceived and committed bloody crimes against humanity, learned yesterday that they would face a shameful death. Prison doors will open for other criminals," the article says. "The verdict will serve as a terrible warning to all those who are surreptitiously, under the guise of imaginary peacefulness, undermining the foundations of peace and seeking to ignite a new war."
What was Boris Yefimov's exhibition on the anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials?
Boris Yefimov had been slamming the Nazis with his biting, witty satire since the 1930s, and during the Great Patriotic War his drawings in Izvestia became an important component of anti-fascist agitation and had an international resonance. It was he who was entrusted with capturing from nature the Nazi criminals who appeared before the tribunal.
Sketches by Boris Yefimov
In his memoirs, Boris Yefimov expressively describes a visit to Nuremberg, an ancient German city that was heavily destroyed by bombing. He describes in detail his journey from the airport in the Berlin suburbs to the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. And he ironically complains about the selectivity of the allied armies: in his words, it is felt that the Second World War had barely ended, and the Cold War air was already blowing.
"American bomber sights have, it turns out, a strange imperfection: having very accurately rained down a hail of heavy bombs on the unique monuments of medieval architecture in the museum city, they could not get into the huge industrial enterprises of Furth, where, as they say, a lot of overseas dollars were invested," he wrote in his memoirs.
Sitting in the courtroom, Yefimov makes pencil sketches in his notebook — and then creates more detailed ink images: in them we see the defendants on the bench. These are not caricatures yet, but they are caricatures. Finally, the final stage is the transformation of human figures into a series of hideous animals.
Boris Yefimov's cartoon "Nuremberg Dock"
The result of the work is the very cycle "The Fascist Menagerie", which was published in Izvestia until January 1, 1946.
You can view the originals of Boris Yefimov's Nuremberg works, see his notebook, writing materials, photographs and archival newspapers of this period in person at the exhibition "Cartoons. Comics. Humor of the Fuhrer's Personal Enemy", created by Izvestia in collaboration with the Russian Academy of Arts. The project, which opened at the Zurab Tsereteli Art Gallery, is timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials and clearly shows how the newspaper artist was able to fight the formidable enemy - fascism — and win.
The enemy of absolute evil
The opening of the exhibition is directly related to the events of those years and the responses of the past to the current international situation, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Izvestia.
"It is a great happiness that we have this chronicle: in dry documents, in the chronicle of documentary films and photographs, and through the prism of the perception of an artist who knew how to emphasize the acuteness of the moment," she noted. — Today's exhibition has a special relevance. Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote: "A poet in Russia is more than a poet." The gallery now is not just walls on which you can hang anything, but a manifesto and a civic position.
The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, at the opening of the exhibition of the Izvestia International Exhibition Center and the Russian Academy of Arts dedicated to the 125th anniversary of Boris Yefimov's birth and the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials
According to Maria Zakharova, cartoonist Boris Yefimov has become a visionary and a prophet, as many of his works sound like a direct answer to modern questions.
— Some of them literally fall into today's reality. For example, a cartoon about the plans of the German colonization of Ukraine, which depicts the book "Wealth of Ukraine" — instructions for gauleiters and a list of German joint-stock companies in Ukraine. It's amazing how all this resonates with modernity. It just so happens that someone gets to know the current situation through books, someone through journalism, and someone through Boris Yefimov's cartoons, which allow for a deeper understanding of what our leaders are talking about and the root causes of what is happening," the diplomat believes.
Sometimes Boris Yefimov's cartoons performed an unusual function of diplomatic notes — they were passed on to allies in the anti-Hitler coalition, in particular Churchill, Maria Zakharova recalled.
— Boris Yefimov was included in the list of personal enemies of Hitler. Imagine: a man who did not hold a weapon in his hands, worked with a pen, paints, pencil. Hitler is the epitome of absolute evil. Being a personal enemy of absolute evil is perhaps the most honorable title a person can earn," said the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, at the opening of the exhibition of the Izvestia International Exhibition Center and the Russian Academy of Arts dedicated to the 125th anniversary of Boris Yefimov's birth and the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials
During the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet authorities, the people and the soldiers of the Red Army were well aware that the International Military Tribunal for Nazi Criminals was just around the corner, said Alexander Bezborodov, Doctor of Historical Sciences.
According to him, the first ideas for the creation of the tribunal appeared back in 1942. And then the whole course of world history, the military events of the Great Patriotic War and the Second World War, went to ensure that this tribunal took place. It has become a reality, a great event in world history, and it is becoming more relevant every year.
— Even then, although the Cold War was still ahead, its first flashes were noticeable. A discussion immediately began about the venue of the trial — in Berlin or in another city. The Soviets insisted on Berlin, which was understandable, but the Allies settled on Nuremberg, the city where the Nazi Party forums were held. It was symbolic," the historian noted.
He recalled that 24 major Nazi criminals were sentenced to death or various terms of imprisonment following the Nuremberg trials. In a relatively short time, more than 400 public meetings were held, and about 300,000 written materials were reviewed, which became the most important basis for sentencing. The results of denazification are also well known: those who managed to avoid responsibility or were acquitted at the trial were subsequently punished, Alexander Bezborodov noted.
View of the Nuremberg prison corridor, where round-the-clock surveillance was conducted and the main Nazi criminals were kept
— Of course, such a global event could not pass by real artists, masters of the international level, and Boris Yefimov is one of them. The years of the Great Patriotic War became his finest time, and his work at the Nuremberg Trials was a special milestone. This is perfectly reflected here at the exhibition," the expert said.
According to the historian, it is especially valuable how ordinary Red Army soldiers treated the work of the cartoonist — truly, fantastically popular, difficult to compare with anything. All this puts Boris Efimov in the highest place both in the artistic world and in the world of political caricature, he believes.
—And the very fact that we are gathered here and that the newspaper Izvestia, on whose editorial assignment Boris Yefimov worked at the Nuremberg Trials, does not forget about this, shows how deeply his work continues to find reflection in human souls," the historian concluded.
For the first time in history, the Nuremberg trials called to account the Nazi criminals and state leaders who unleashed the Second World War, said military commentator, screenwriter and writer Viktor Litovkin.
Lev Nikolaevich Smirnov, Assistant to the Chief Prosecutor from the USSR (right), presents to the court evidence of monstrous atrocities against the civilian population — a container with a toxic substance used by the Nazis to exterminate prisoners of the "death camps"
— Thanks to the process, the anatomy of the preparation for World War II, the mockery of people, genocide — the destruction of entire states, entire peoples - was revealed. The Nuremberg Trials issued a ruling that denounces fascism, Nazism in all its manifestations and is still in force. But, unfortunately, today many countries have forgotten about the lessons of Nuremberg," the expert noted.
According to Viktor Litovkin, the Nuremberg trials serve as a warning to these states and a reminder that Nazi criminals are always punished as they deserve.
While working on the legacy of their legendary colleague, Izvestia thought about reviving political caricature on the pages of the newspaper and today they are actively looking for a cartoonist who could take over the baton of the great Boris Yefimov. If you feel that your work should be seen by readers, send them via the feedback form. The Izvestia editorial board and experts from the Russian Academy of Arts will select the best works from the received works, which can then be published on the Izvestia News Center resources. And the brightest authors will get a chance for permanent cooperation.
Natalia Belova, Sofia Prokhorchuk, Seregy Uvarov, Ivetta Nevinnaya, Irina Ionina, Valeria Mishina, Yana Sturma participated in the creation of the material.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
