Sub-commission[edit]
A sub-commission, comprising the first five commission members above, conducted thirteen hearings at Leon Trotsky's home in Coyoacan, Mexico, D.F., from April 10 to April 17, 1937. Trotsky was defended by the lawyer Albert Goldman. John Finerty acted as the commission's legal counsel.[3]
The commission proclaimed that it had cleared Trotsky of all charges made during the Moscow Trials and, moreover, exposed the scale of the alleged frame-up of all other defendants during these trials. 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.
The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky had been set up following the first of the Moscow "Show Trials" in 1936. It comprised Franz Boas, John Chamberlain, John Dos Passos, Louis Hacker, Sidney Hook, Suzanne La Follette, Reinhold Niebuhr, George Novack, Norman Thomas and Edmund Wilson. Dewey, then seventy-eight years old, agreed to head its Commission of Inquiry.[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 Dewey Commission published its findings in the form of a 422-page book titled Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary the commission wrote: "Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:
The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups."
Trotsky remarked at the start of the Commission that:
Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué noted that Trotsky had misinformed the Commission when claiming to have had no contacts with followers inside the USSR to form an opposition bloc, though the nature of this bloc had differed markedly from that alleged by the Moscow Trials and had been dissolved shortly after its formation in 1932.[7] American historian J. Arch Getty also noted this, pointing out that "Trotsky and Sedov were reminded of the bloc at the time of the 1937 Dewey Commission but withheld the matter from the inquiry."[8]
Nuremberg Trials[edit]
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...".[9]