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From The Militant, Vol. X No. 30, 27 July 1946, p. 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Nuremberg trial started eight months ago, on November 20, 1945. Yet to this day the Stalinist prosecution has kept a tongue-tied silence on the principal charge levelled by Prosecutor Vyshinsky and the GPU frame-up machine in the Moscow Trials. The Stalinists maintained, it will be recalled, that Trotsky made a treasonous deal with the Nazis as part of their plot to invade the Soviet Union. Rudolph Hess, now in the prisoners’ dock at Nuremberg, was named as the contact man between Trotsky and Hitler.
Last January the Revolutionary Communist Party, British Section of the Fourth International, challenged the Nuremberg Court on these slanderous charges which had been levelled in the Moscow Trials. The Nuremburg court remained silent.
Shortly thereafter a large group of well-known political and literary figures in Britain headed by H.G. Wells and a number of members of Parliament requested that a representative of Natalia Trotsky, the widow of Leon Trotsky, be permitted to examine Hess, and that any documents relating to the alleged conspiracy between Trotsky and the Nazi leaders -if such documents exist—be produced at Nuremberg. The court remained silent.
Then in the United States a petition signed by more than a hundred American political figures, trade unionists, clergymen, professors and writers, headed by Norman Thomas, James T. Farrell, and Matthew Woll, requested investigation of the alleged complicity of Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders with the Nazis in the preparation of a war against the Soviet Union. The court remained silent.
The demand to investigate the charges of the Moscow frameups at Nuremberg was taken up in a number of other countries.
Finally last May, Albert Goldman, speaking as the attorney, of Natalia Trotsky, demanded the right to “cross-examine any witness who testifies on this question and to examine any documents that might be produced by the Russians in support of their frame-up.” Natalia Trotsky held that the findings of the Dewey Commission were conclusive but for the benefit of those still doubtful was “perfectly willing to have the Nazi defendants, especially Hess, examined and to ask the governments now in control of Germany to search the Nazi archives for any documents dealing with the alleged conspiracy.” The court has not yet broken its silence.
This silence, however, is only added confirmation of the findings of the Commission of Inquiry headed by John Dewey. This Commission proved in 1937 that Leon Trotsky and son Sedov were NOT GUILTY of the Stalinist charge of having plotted with the Nazis against the Soviet Union.
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