Nuremberg and You – A Reply to Ivor Montague¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, published in Socialist Appeal in 1946, launches a devastating polemic against Ivor Montague and the British Communist Party, using the Nuremberg Trials as a weapon to expose the Moscow Trials as a Stalinist frame-up. The core argument is that the exhaustive, four-power investigation at Nuremberg—which examined millions of documents, diaries, secret memoranda, and cross-examined leading Nazis including Hess, Rosenberg, and Ribbentrop—produced not a single piece of evidence to support the central allegation of the Moscow Trials: that Trotsky, the Old Bolsheviks, and Red Army generals like Tukhachevsky were agents of Hitler and part of a vast conspiracy with the Nazi General Staff. The chapter seizes on Montague’s own words in the Labour Monthly, where he celebrates Nuremberg as a revelation of “the naked truth” that provides “confirmation of much that he had analysed and predicted.” The reply turns this against him with savage irony: if Nuremberg is the definitive establishment of all facts, why has the Stalinist prosecution not asked a single question about the alleged Trotsky-Nazi connection? Why has the Daily Worker, which for years screamed about secret alliances and preparations for war, fallen completely silent?
The chapter draws on the historical context of the Moscow Trials (1936-1938), where the Stalinist regime executed the “cream of the Old Bolsheviks” after secret or semi-public trials that alleged they were in league with German fascism. It contrasts this with the open, documented proceedings at Nuremberg, where the prosecution had access to the entire Nazi state apparatus and diplomatic correspondence. The evidence produced there—blueprints for invasions of Russia, Britain, France, and others—showed in meticulous detail the real Nazi conspiracy, but contained nothing about Trotsky or the Old Guard. The polemic is directed squarely at the Stalinist leadership, whom it accuses of knowing the Moscow Trials were frame-ups from the start but using them as a “clever method of discrediting revolutionary opponents.” The rank and file of the Communist Party, the chapter argues, have been genuinely disturbed by the silence, while the cynical bureaucrats remain unmoved. The reply concludes by inverting Montague’s own moralising peroration: Nuremberg will indeed be a “mine of gold,” but for exposing the Moscow Trials as a conspiracy against communism and the working class, not for confirming Stalinist lies.