After the Second World War, numerous individuals were prosecuted for Nazi crimes throughout Europe (although many more were never investigated). Among the Soviet satellite countries, no country was as active as Poland in that regard. Until the late 1950s, Polish courts tried and convicted around 5,500 German or Austrian nationals or ethnic Germans for Nazi crimes. Running parallel to their trials was the prosecution of suspected wartime collaborators and political opponents (real and imagined), in legally flawed proceedings that the regime increasingly exploited for its own political ends.

But was that also the case with the Nazi trials? In their study, Gabriel N. Finder and Alexander V. Prusin examine the nature of these trials. The book makes two main arguments. For one, the trials, although not free of flaws, were not Stalinist-type show trials but resembled similar proceedings in western democratic countries (which were not without problems either). Secondly, despite widespread antisemitism, the trials addressed the Holocaust in a relatively open and even-handed manner, with a substantial number of Jewish survivors and Jewish expert witnesses taking part. In general, the trials acknowledged the distinctiveness of the Holocaust, or even dealt specifically with it, such as the 1947 trial of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss.

The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 analyzes the first big wave of trials from 1944 to 1947, which initially were under the jurisdiction of special penal courts, but from November 1946 on conducted by district and provincial courts. The second chapter examines the role of the Polish delegation at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In contrast to the Soviets and the Western Allies, who for different reasons failed to distinguish Nazi crimes against Jews from Nazi crimes against other peoples, the Polish delegation highlighted that the German murder of Jews had a distinct ideological underpinning. The third chapter discusses the workings of Poland's Supreme National Tribunal. Operating between 1946 and 1948, it prosecuted major Nazis and alleged collaborators in open and heavily-publicized trials. The fourth chapter explores the 1948–1953 prosecutions, mostly of high-ranking SS officers, that local courts conducted during the Stalinist purges. The fifth chapter analyzes the participation of Jewish expert witnesses at the trials. Although these had to make certain compromises, the judicial authorities generally welcomed their contribution, and the two sides developed a close, unique working relationship. The sixth chapter examines the role that the last 1954–59 Nazi trials played in constructing an official narrative of the war years, in particular of the Warsaw Uprising. By exposing the failures of de-Nazification in Germany, the Polish government also conceived of them as a stage from which to wage the ideological battles of the Cold War.

Impressively researched and rich in detail, Justice behind the Iron Curtain is the first comprehensive study of Nazi trials in postwar Poland, and as such constitutes a very important contribution to scholarship on the history of war crimes prosecution. The book provides fascinating insights into how the trials created an institutional space (perhaps the only one in postwar Poland) in which the specific suffering of the Jewish people was acknowledged—even though this ran counter to the official communist memory of the war, which erased the distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazism.

At the same time, though, there are some inconsistences in the assessment of the extent to which these trials corresponded to the rule of law. The authors argue that Polish trials of Nazi crimes were generally conducted “in the spirit of the rule of law” (6), yet later the reader learns that significant differences existed between the special penal courts and local courts (whose trials often lacked documentary evidence or were hastily conducted) and the Supreme National Tribunal (with its distinguished lawyers, extensive documentary evidence, and ample witness testimony). At the same time, the post-1948 trials functioned “more or less in conformity with rule-of-law principles” (132). My concern here is not about the comparison as such; on the contrary, Justice behind the Iron Curtain stands out precisely because it questions conventional assumptions about the nature of trials in a state that, by the late 1940s, had clearly turned illiberal. Still, to avoid confusion, the analysis would have benefitted from a more precise definition of what the rule of law means.

As the book went into print, Alexander V. Prusin passed away unexpectedly. His death is a tremendous loss for the historical profession; his extraordinary scholarship will be greatly missed within the field of east European and Soviet history.