In the airbrushed consecration of the 1990s of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the part played by the Soviet Union was regarded as inconvenient or inessential, when it was mentioned at all. In this masterful history, Francine Hirsch reconstructs the story of its contribution to the framing of the proceedings, especially the priority that prosecutors — inspired by a Soviet jurist — accorded to the charge that the National Socialists had
aggressively breached the peace. Her book is a landmark work on the search for justice after World War II even as the Cold War dawned.
Francine Hirsch is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches Soviet and Modern European history. Her first book, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (2005), received several prizes, including the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. She and her family live in Madison.