by Pavel Kiselev
[REGNUM] On November 18, the exhibition " Nuremberg: The Unknown about the Known " opened at the Victory Museum on Poklonnaya Hill. The exhibition opened on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the start of the most important trial of the 20th century.
On November 20, 1945, the first session of the International Military Tribunal for the war crimes of the Third Reich's top brass was held in Nuremberg. Now, when the SS Galicia Division is officially honored in Kyiv, and the "heroes" of the national SS legions are celebrated in the Baltics, the exhibition answers the question: why is Russia forced to complete what was left unfinished in 1946—when the leaders of the Hitler regime were hanged in Nuremberg?
The main exhibits of the exhibition were about fifty graphic sheets—drawings by Soviet artists that were created during the trial, and most of them right at its sessions.
Kukryniksy (Mikhail Kupriyanov, Porfiry Krylov, Nikolai Sokolov), Boris Efimov, Nikolai Zhukov and other masters of military-political posters were present at the tribunal sessions as correspondent-drawers.
Soviet cartoonists created psychological portraits of the accused— Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. The drawings documented how the main defendants' psychological states changed as more and more witnesses told the world about Nazi atrocities in Europe and the occupied territories of the USSR.
The exhibition also features drawings in the genre of classic Soviet political caricature, including works by Boris Efimov, provided by the editorial staff of Izvestia.
Ribbentrop as a rat, Rosenberg as a hyena in a tuxedo, Göring as a fat, ugly boa constrictor… The artists sought to convey that there was nothing human left in Hitler's "accomplices," noted exhibition curator Lidiya Stepanova. She emphasized: "These emotional portraits reflect how contemporaries viewed the perpetrators of the war."
Famous Soviet photojournalists Yevgeny Khaldei and Viktor Temin also captured images of judges and defendants, prosecutors and witnesses, and the chronicles and entourage of the trial. Their works are displayed in adjacent exhibits. Also on display are notebooks and official documents of members of the Soviet delegation.
"The Nuremberg Tribunal was the first international trial of an aggressor state and its ideology. The Soviet government insisted on an open trial, although Winston Churchill proposed simply executing the Reich's leadership. But Stalin demanded that evil be punished publicly and legally," emphasized Nikita Borisov, a methodologist in the Victory Museum's scientific and methodological department.
The tribunal recorded three categories of crimes: against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The political and military structures of the Third Reich—the top NSDAP, the Wehrmacht military command, the storm troopers, and the SS—were declared criminal organizations, and the "leaders of the Reich" bore personal responsibility for the aggression.
WILLIAM HEARST'S STEAMBOAT
But the most terrible thing is that the trial did not become the final answer to the question of condemning the Nazis, which seemed to those who survived the war to have been resolved once and for all.
As early as 1947–1948, the West began a quiet rehabilitation of Nazism. And there are numerous examples of various operations to rescue and "whitewash" Nazis. Operation Paperclip saw 1,600 Nazi scientists flee to the United States. General Reinhard Gehlen became a valuable NATO asset, founding the West German intelligence service, which opposed the USSR and East Germany during the Cold War.
Thousands of SS and Abwehr officers "miraculously" escaped to West Germany, Canada, Argentina, and the United States. "Many were not brought to trial thanks to the efforts of American legal experts. SS commanders were recruited by the CIA and sailed overseas without being punished," emphasizes exhibition curator Lidiya Stepanova.
Some of those who, even during the Nuremberg Trials, tried to shield the criminals from harm's way were "immortalized" by Soviet portrait artists. Stepanova pointed to Nikolai Zhukov's portrait of the French representative, Judge Henri Donnadieu de Vabres.
According to the testimony of Soviet journalists and archival data, de Vabres tried in every way to justify the main war criminals.
A 1945 cartoon by Boris Efimov depicts a large steamship with a swastika rescuing drowning Nazis, collaborators, their accomplices, and sponsors of the war.
The cartoon contains a clear allusion: a shop with the sign "Hearst", openly alluding to the American publishing house of William Randolph Hearst, which during Nuremberg demanded "freedom for Goering and Hess".
The trials of many of them were not even initiated by the Anglo-American side, the exhibition organizers note.
Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of such people were seized by the West as valuable personnel, possessing extensive experience in the war against the USSR and in intelligence operations in the occupied territories of our country. Here, one can also recall the 12 "small Nuremberg trials" that followed the main Nuremberg Tribunal, where the fates of Nazi lawyers, doctors, and Einsatzgruppen commanders were decided, most of whom escaped punishment due to the biased judges and lawyers.
FROM HITLERISM TO MODERN RUSSOPHOBIA
The results of the Nuremberg Trials were subsequently quietly revised in the West, according to the exhibition's organizers. "We used to say that Nuremberg was the final point in the defeat of fascism. Now we know: not completely. Not everything was completed, not everyone was punished—including due to American interference," noted Lidiya Stepanova.
Nazi ideology, spread across Europe by the Nazis and their handlers from NATO, the CIA, and MI6, has “unexpectedly” been revived in modern Ukraine.
"One of the foundations of National Socialism was persecution based on national, ethnic, and religious grounds. Slavs were declared subhuman. This fully morphed into neo-Nazism. Add war crimes without accountability and the idea of national greatness, and you get modern Russophobia," emphasized Nikita Borisov, a methodologist at the Victory Museum.
He recalled the order signed by Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, "On the Application of Military Jurisdiction in the Barbarossa Area and on Special Troop Measures": German soldiers were not held accountable for the murder of Slavs. "This impunity has migrated into today's ideologies, where the murder of Russians is the norm," the expert said.
That's why the Victory Museum, alongside the temporary exhibition on Nuremberg, houses a permanent exhibition, "Ordinary Nazism," dedicated specifically to the denazification of modern Ukraine and the exploits of the participants in the special military operation.
There are photographs of Banderites and collaborators from the 1940s and their ideological heirs from 2014–2025, documents glorifying the SS in Kyiv, and evidence of war crimes committed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The two exhibitions, taken together, provide a clear understanding: denazification is not a political slogan for 2022, but a direct continuation of the Nuremberg verdict, which the West once sabotaged.
Russia remembers the lessons of 1945–1946. We remember that forgiving Nazis creates new Nazis. We remember that impunity for crimes against Slavs, Roma, Jews, and other peoples in the Third Reich led to impunity for crimes against Russians in 2014–2025. The Nuremberg Tribunal was meant to be a permanent barrier. The West destroyed it, opening the way for neo-Nazism. Russia is rebuilding this barrier—through the power of memory and, for almost four years now, through force of arms.