in order to hide Soviet post-war weakness, and his own gross profligacy with human life, especially after making such monstrous errors in the early stages of the struggle.93 In 1946 he gave a figure of only seven million dead. As part of his deStalinization programme, Nikita Khrushchev admitted in the 1960s to a number ‘in excess of twenty million’. A General Staff commission in 1988–9 reported that the ‘irrecoverable losses’ of the Red Army alone – that is, those who died in action or from wounds, illness or accidents or were killed as POWs or shot for cowardice – had numbered 8,668,400, with a further eighteen million medical casualties from wounds, illness, frostbite and so on. Yet even this figure has been called into question by the leading scholar of the Russian war, John Erickson, over ‘methodology, the genuineness and objectivity of data, the manner of its interpretation and much else’.94 Figures compiled by General G. F. Krivosheev in 1997 seem to be much more reliable. These indicate that the Soviet Union mobilized 34.476 million people in the years 1941–5, including those already under arms in June 1941. Of that vast figure, 11.444 million died.95 In the chaos of June 1941 many were slaughtered but few records were kept. The evacuation and displacement of such immense populations meant that the local military commissariats could not keep their card-indexes up to date, and with unregistered partisan activity, multiple counting for complex administrative reasons and many people dying of their wounds soon after the end of hostilities it is next to impossible, even free of political pressure, to arrive at an accurate final figure so long after the event. The ones chosen by Richard Overy, of eleven million military losses, eighteen million other casualties and civilian losses of around sixteen million killed, are probably as good as any and better than most. The aggregate figure of around twenty-seven million Russians killed is therefore probably best, which in a conflict that claimed the lives of fifty million people means that the USSR lost more than the whole of the rest of the world put together.
How would such genocide be punished? At 3.30 p.m. on 12 April 1945 the British War Cabinet discussed how to deal with German war criminals. The (hitherto unpublished) notes taken of this meeting by the Additional Cabinet Secretary, Norman Brook, became available in 2008 and show that the Minister of Aircraft Production, Labour’s Sir Stafford Cripps, disagreed with the policy that the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, set out for a large-scale trial, saying that it ‘mixes politics and judicial decision with disadvantage to both’. Preferring the summary execution without trial of the senior Nazis, Cripps argued that either the Allies would be criticized for not according Hitler a real trial, or they would ‘give him a chance to harangue’ with the result being ‘neither proper trial nor political act’ but the ‘worst of both worlds’. The Secretary for War, P. J. Grigg, pointed to the ‘very large numbers, hundreds of thousands’ of suspected war criminals who had fallen into British hands, whereupon Churchill suggested a ‘Trial of [the] Gestapo as a body first. Then proceedings against selected members,’ adding that it was ‘Not proposed to arraign them all.’ The Lord Chancellor, Lord Simon, then said that Roosevelt’s Special Counsel, Samuel Rosenman, had made it clear that the US ‘won’t agree to penalties without trial’, prompting Churchill to say, ‘And Stalin insists on trial.’ The historian in Churchill was unconvinced, however, and advanced the idea of a ‘Bill of Attainder not an impeachment’, such as that used to execute Charles I’s adviser the Earl of Strafford in 1640 without the need for a trial.
The Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, believed that ‘This mock trial is objectionable. It really is a political act: better to declare that we shall put them to death.’ Churchill agreed, insisting that ‘The trial will be a farce.’ Turning to the wording of the indictments, and the the defendants’ right to be given access to defence