Organized in the wake of World War Two by the victorious Allies, the Nuremberg Trials were intended to hold the Nazis to account for their crimes and to restore a sense of justice to a world devastated by violence. As Francine Hirsch reveals in her groundbreaking new book, a major piece of the Nuremberg story has routinely been left out: the critical role of the Soviet Union. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers a startlingly new view of the International Military Tribunal and a fresh perspective on the movement for international human rights that it helped launch.

Panelists:

Francine Hirsch, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Christian Ostermann, Woodrow Wilson Center

Francine Hirsch is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches courses on Soviet and Modern European history and on the history of human rights. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in 1998. Her first book, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (2005) received several awards, including the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. She has just launched a new project on the history of Russian-American entanglement.

Christian F. Ostermann is director of the History and Public Policy Program (HAPP) which seeks to bring historical context to public policy issues. Dr. Ostermann also oversees the Center’s renown Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) and co-directs the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP) and its Nuclear History Boot Camp. He created and leads the North Korea International Documentation Project (NKIDP) which documents North Korean politics and foreign policy. Ostermann envisioned and established the program’s award-winning Digital Archive—International History Declassified, winner of the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize. Under his leadership since 1998, the program has become a globally-active and widely-acclaimed resource for new and policy-relevant historical findings and insights. Together with W. Roger Louis (National History Center) Ostermann launched and co-chairs the weekly Washington History Seminar.