Dewey Commission

Its other members were Carleton Beals, Otto Rühle, Benjamin Stolberg, and Secretary Suzanne La Follette, Alfred Rosmer, Wendelin Thomas, Edward A. Ross, John Chamberlain, Carlo Tresca, and Francisco Zamora Padilla [es].

[1][2] Following months of investigation, the Dewey Commission made its findings public in New York on September 21, 1937.

Among its conclusions, it stated: "That the conduct of the Moscow trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no effort was made to ascertain the truth.

"[3] According to French historian Michel Olivier, the Dewey Commission benefited from the documentary work of Communist dissident Gabriel Miasnikov, who was in exile in Paris at the time.

[4] The hearings claimed to bring to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true.

The next morning, before the opening of the session, Mrs. Beals brought us his resignation, in which he charged that the Commission was not conducting a serious inquiry.

[3]Beals subsequently wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled "The Fewer Outsiders the Better", criticizing the commission as biased and in the hands of a "purely pro-Trotsky clique".

Some ten years later, the Dewey Commission was cited in great detail, when in an open letter to the British press dated 25 February 1946, written by George Orwell and signed by Arthur Koestler, C. E. M. Joad, Frank Horrabin, George Padmore, Julian Symons, H. G. Wells, F. A. Ridley, C. A. Smith and John Baird, among others, it was suggested that the Nuremberg Trials then underway were an invaluable opportunity for establishing "historical truth and bearing upon the political integrity" of figures of international standing.

Specifically they called for Rudolf Hess to be interrogated about his alleged meeting with Trotsky and that the Gestapo records then in the hands of Allied experts be examined for any proof of any "liaison between the Nazi Party or State and Trotsky or the other old Bolshevik leaders indicted at the Moscow trials...".