Reply From Stein to Goldman¶
Core Argument¶
In this letter of 18 February 1946, M. Stein, writing on behalf of the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), responds to Albert Goldman’s proposal regarding the political line to be taken on the Nuremberg trials. The core argument is that any intervention by the Trotskyist movement into the Nuremberg proceedings must be grounded in the established fact that the Moscow Trials were frame-ups. Stein insists this premise is non-negotiable: only die-hard Stalinists still defend the Moscow Trials, and many of them do so unscrupulously to smear the movement.
The letter sets out a sharp polemic against the approach of the British comrades, who are accused of attempting to vindicate Trotsky by appealing to the Nuremberg officials to prove the truth about the Moscow Trials. Stein denounces this as fundamentally false, arguing that it constitutes an appeal to the very people guilty of the original frame-up. Whether the American or British prosecutors and judges would behave differently from Stalin’s appointees, he writes, depends entirely on the shifting relationship between the Big Three; they could easily bargain away the truth about the Moscow Trials for concessions from the Kremlin. This is a direct attack on any strategy that places faith in the bourgeois legal apparatus of the victorious powers.
Stein also rejects the idea of reviving the Dewey Commission to demand the right to cross-examine Rudolf Hess. He notes that Carlo Tresca, the most reliable member, is dead; John Dewey is too old; and the remaining members—Suzanne LaFollette, Benjamin Stolberg, and John Chamberlain—have become out-and-out reactionaries during the war. To submit any question to their decision, he argues, would be foolish.
The only proposal Stein considers viable is Goldman’s suggestion that he intervene personally as Natalia Sedova’s representative, demanding the right to cross-examine Hess. Even this, the Political Committee regards with doubt, but they agree to it on tactical grounds: it might counteract the British comrades’ false approach and shift emphasis toward a more positive attack. The letter thus represents an internal factional dispute over strategy, weighing the risks of legitimising imperialist justice against the need to expose Stalinist frame-ups. The evidence cited is entirely political and historical—the record of the Moscow Trials, the Dewey Commission’s findings, and the political degeneration of former liberal allies.