Letter From Goldman to Stein¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter dated 11 February 1946, Albert Goldman writes to Morris Stein to outline a strategic intervention in the Nuremberg Trials, driven by the prior involvement of the English comrades. Goldman’s core argument is that the Trotskyist movement must not rely on the official prosecutors or judges of the Allied powers to expose the truth about the Moscow Trials. Instead, he proposes that the Dewey Commission—the independent body that had previously investigated the Moscow Trials—should formally request the right to examine Rudolf Hess, who had been named in the Soviet indictments as having allegedly conspired with Trotsky. Goldman treats this as a propagandistic and political manoeuvre, not a legal one, since he expects the request to be refused.
Goldman makes several key claims. First, he asserts that the Moscow Trials have already been proven to be frame-ups, and that any further requests for evidence should proceed from that assumption, not from a posture of open-ended inquiry. Second, he criticises the English comrades for poor formulations: they should not ask for documents “to prove or disprove” a conspiracy, because if no conspiracy existed, no documents could exist. The correct formulation, Goldman insists, is that if a conspiracy had occurred, documents would necessarily have been produced; their absence proves the frame-up. Third, he argues that even if the Dewey Commission refuses to act, the movement should assemble a coalition of organisations and prominent individuals to send a letter to Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor, demanding access to Hess and any relevant documents.
The letter draws on the immediate historical context of the Nuremberg Trials, where the Allied powers were prosecuting Nazi leaders, and on the longer controversy over the Moscow Trials of 1936–1938, in which Stalin’s regime had convicted and executed Old Bolsheviks on fabricated charges of conspiring with Trotsky and the Gestapo. Goldman’s polemic is directed against both the Stalinists, who had orchestrated the frame-ups, and the credulous or passive officials of the Allied powers, whom he refuses to trust for an impartial verdict. He also implicitly rebukes the English comrades for their tactical naivety. The letter concludes with a fallback proposal: if the Commission refuses, Goldman, as the representative of Natalia Sedova (Trotsky’s widow), could personally petition to intervene, exploiting his status to generate publicity even if his legal credentials are no longer current.