In this extremely valuable book, Gabriel Finder and the late Alexander Prusin explore an unjustly neglected topic: the criminal trials in Poland of Nazi perpetrators responsible for mass atrocities during World War II. “Nazi trials” in the general sense—from the Nuremberg trials to the Eichmann trial and beyond—have been the topic of a veritable cottage industry of scholarship in the past twenty years. It is all the more striking, therefore, that the Polish trials have until now received only cursory study. Finder and Prusin's major study fills in this gap quite nicely.

Meticulously researched in Polish, German, Austrian, American, and Israeli archives, the book provides a wealth of new information. We learn about both the politics and the jurisprudence of the Polish trials, from the conflict over war-crimes investigations during the war between the Polish exile government in London and the Soviet-backed Polish Communist Party, to the final trials during the 1950s, at the height of Polish Stalinism. Finder and Prusin cover policy questions—what authority would be used to prosecute Nazi criminals? In which courts? With what personnel? The authors also cover the stories of many specific trials, especially those of prominent Nazi criminals, including the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss or Jürgen Stroop, who commanded the German destruction of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Along the way, they make many insightful observations on topics ranging from perpetrator motivation in the Holocaust to the nature of Stalinist rule in 1950s Poland.

Finder and Prusin make two fundamental arguments. First, they insist that the Nazi trials in Poland need to be understood as real trials, not Stalinist purges. Because the Nazi trials focused on German and Austrian defendants, they were not pressed into the service of Stalinizing Polish society. The authors argue that “in trials for Nazi crimes the regime was more or less content to leave the conduct of the trials in the hands of lawyers and judges whose basic instincts had been shaped by a prewar rule-of-law legal culture” (249). Indeed, according to Finder and Prusin, the communist regime used Nazi trials to satisfy genuine popular desire for retribution against the Germans who had inflicted such terrible suffering in Poland. Thus, they “could afford” to allow these trials to proceed within the rule of law. This stands in marked contrast to the trials of Polish collaborators, which were quickly and thoroughly subordinated to the political dictates of the Communist Party.

Finder and Prusin contend that, in large part because Nazi trials in Poland proceeded with reasonable due process and professionalism, these trials could not help but create a space for Jewish voices and agency, which revealed something of the distinctiveness of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. In other words, although both Polish society and the new communist regime were both deeply antisemitic in the early postwar years, Nazi trials were one space—perhaps the only one—where Jewish agency was possible. The professionals in charge of these trials sought to build the strongest cases they could against the Nazi defendants. That meant charging them with crimes against the Jews and doing so in ways that made clear that Polish Jews had been particularly targeted by the Nazis. It meant cooperating with Jewish institutions to secure evidence and allowing Jewish survivors to testify. In short, the specificity of the Holocaust as an attempt to exterminate European Jewry emerged clearly in these trials.

At the same time, Jewish officials and witnesses had to walk a careful line not to offend communist sensibilities. That meant not stressing Polish—as opposed to German—antisemitism. It also meant giving in to Polish desires for a more universal narrative of Nazi atrocities that emphasized the commonality between Jewish and Polish suffering, and asserted that the Nazis harbored genocidal intentions toward non-Jewish Poles, who allegedly would have been exterminated like their Jewish compatriots had the Germans won the war. But, according to Finder and Prusin, Jews “found it worthwhile to try to meet the Poles halfway, even if it meant having to stomach occasional exaggerations, half-truths, and even distortions for the sake of legal recognition of the Jewish tragedy and the pursuit of retributive justice through Poland's courts” (212).

Historians studying modern Europe rarely are in a position to write about a genuinely new topic, one with little existing literature. Finder and Prusin have done just that. This means that their study will be foundational for all future scholarship, not just on Polish trials, but on the history of Nazi trials in Europe more broadly. There has been a tendency in the literature to treat the history of Nazi trials in East Europe as not only separate from the history of West European trials, but as a story fundamentally linked to the Cold War and the consolidation of communist dictatorships rather than one about the genuine pursuit of justice for Nazi atrocities. Justice behind the Iron Curtain offers a useful corrective to this tendency. Although it is itself a largely national, Polish story, it will also help future historians integrate the history of East European and West European trial programs to see them as part of a broad, continental project of seeking justice for Nazi crimes. In their epilogue, Finder and Prusin offer a helpful comparison between the Polish trials and their Dutch counterparts. This suggests that, for all their differences, East and West Europeans shared a common goal of legal retribution after the war. Finder and Prusin's excellent study helps make this common project visible in important ways.