Letter From the RCP to the British Prosecutor at Nuremberg¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) addresses the British prosecutor at Nuremberg, Sir Hartley Shawcross, not to endorse the proceedings but to expose a fundamental hypocrisy at their core. The chapter’s central argument is that the Nuremberg Trial, in purporting to establish Nazi war guilt, provides the perfect juridical and historical opportunity to finally debunk the Moscow Trials of 1936-38. The RCP insists that the two sets of trials are inextricably linked: the Stalinist prosecution, led by Vyshinsky (who also sits at Nuremberg), convicted Leon Trotsky and the Old Bolsheviks on the explicit charge of conspiring with Nazi Germany and other foreign powers to dismember the USSR. The key claim is that if the Allied prosecutors now possess the full Nazi archives, they must contain—or conspicuously lack—the evidence of this alleged conspiracy. The RCP demands that the prosecution be compelled to produce it.
The chapter draws directly on the 1938 Moscow Trial indictment, quoting its charge that Trotsky had been connected to German intelligence since 1921 and British intelligence since 1926, and that the ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ acted as agents of foreign aggressors. This is the historical context: the Stalinist regime used the frame-up of Trotskyism as a political weapon to liquidate internal opposition. The RCP’s polemic is directed squarely at the Stalinist prosecution and the Allied powers’ willingness to treat the Moscow Trials as settled history. They argue that the “world forum” of Nuremberg must now answer the question the Dewey Commission could not fully resolve due to Soviet non-cooperation: whether any documentary proof of a Nazi-Trotskyist link exists. The RCP’s request for formal representation to cross-examine witnesses and examine evidence is a tactical demand to force the truth into the open. The letter’s narrative thrust is that the workers’ movement has a vital interest in ending the slander campaign against Trotskyism, and that Nuremberg, for all its flaws, offers an unprecedented chance to vindicate the Fourth International by exposing the Moscow Trials as the fraudulent frame-ups they were.