Iona Nikitchenko
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Major-General Iona Timofeevich Nikitchenko (Russian: Иона Тимофеевич Никитченко) (1895 - April 22, 1967) was a judge of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union.
Nikitchenko presided over some of the most notorious of Stalin's show trials during the Great Purges of 1936 to 1938, where he among other things sentenced Kamenev and Zinoviev.
Nikitchenko was one of the three main drafters of London Charter. He was also the Soviet Union's judge at the Nuremberg trials, and was President for the session at Berlin. Nikitchenko's prejudices were evident from the outset. Before the Tribunal convened, Nikitchenko explained the Soviet perspective of the trials:
- "We are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose conviction has been already announced by both the Moscow and Crimea [Yalta] declarations by the heads of the [Allied] governments ... The whole idea is to secure quick and just punishment for the crime." on June 29, 1945 (8. Report of Robert Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, London, 1945 (Washington, DC: US State Dept., 1949), pp. 104-106, 303.; Whitney R. Harris, Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg (Dallas: S.M.U. Press, 1954), pp. 16-17.)
His statements in this respect call to mind the statements of US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote "Chief US prosecutor Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg, I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas." Nikitchenko was thus far from alone in viewing the Nuremberg trials as a farcical cloaking in law of the process of putting to death a large number of notorious villains.
In this way, it may be said that Nikitchenko echoed numerous latter day critics of the Nuremberg tribunal who have pointed out that the
Nikitchenko dissented against the three acquittals and argued for a death sentence for Rudolf Hess. Nikitchenko also famously said, in the lead-up to the trials, "If ... the judge is supposed to be impartial, it would only lead to unnecessary delays." and "What is meant in the English by 'cross examine'?" also on June 29, 1945 Hess, formerly Hitler's deputy fuhrer, a founder of the SS, the man charged by Hitler with implementing Nazi Germany's Nuremberg laws, and the man who wrote the decree establishing the notorious German occupation government of Poland, was sentenced to life in prison by the tribunal. In this respect, he was by far the most senior surviving Nazi official to escape a death sentence.
During the trials, the French judges suggested that a firing squad should be used for the military condemned. Nikitchenko fiercely resisted this, arguing that the accused were common criminals who had disgraced their military ethos and tradition.
| Judges of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg | |||
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Geoffrey Lawrence (president) | Norman Birkett (alternate) | |
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Francis Biddle (judge) | John Parker (alternate) | |
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Henri de Vabres (judge) | Robert Falco (alternate) | |
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Iona Nikitchenko (judge) | Alexander Volchkov (alternate) | |
