War Crime Evidence and Cold War Games: The 1978 Miami Trial of a Soviet Treblinka Guard

Abstract

Nazi crimes prosecutions for most crimes committed in Eastern Europe – including the extermination centres on occupied Polish territory – depended heavily upon evidence that could only be gathered in the countries of the Soviet bloc. Recent scholarship has addressed the extent to which the Cold War dynamics impeded, or, on the contrary, fostered East-West cooperation in the punishment of Nazi war criminals, particularly after the death of Stalin and the opening of a new stage in the history of Nazi crimes accountability (the Ulm trial of 1958 and the Jerusalem trial of 1961). This article uses the case of a former Ukrainian SS guard and Trawniki man, Fedorenko, to reflect on the Soviet strategy of discrediting the Western countries that unwillingly or unknowingly offered shelter to perpetrators in the immediate postwar years.