CHAPTER 20

First Trials of War Criminals

With the retaking of Soviet territory by the Red Army, SMERSH also undertook the arrest and investigation of German war criminals and Russian collaborators who had committed atrocities during the occupation. The public trials continued after the war.

First Public Trial

On July 5, 1943, Abakumov reported to Stalin on the investigation by the UKR SMERSH of the North Caucasian Front into the atrocities committed by Sonderkommando SS 10a (SK10a) in the city of Krasnodar during the German occupation.

The SK10a, a sub-unit of Einsatzgruppe D commanded by Otto Ohlendorf, consisted of about 120 men. From June 1941 to August 1942, it operated under SS-Standartenführer Heintz Seetzen, first in the Ukraine, where it exterminated the Jewish population in the towns of Berdyansk, Melitopol, Mariupol, and Odessa, and then in the cities of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov and Rostov-on-Don.¹ In August 1942, SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. Kurt Christmann succeeded Seetzen, who received the War Service Cross (first class) with Swords for his extermination activity. The SK10a continued operations until July 1943, when the German troops began to retreat. According to Abakumov’s report, under Christmann’s command the unit exterminated 4,000 inhabitants of Krasnodar. The SK10a killed its victims using the gas van known as the dushegubka (soul-killing machine) in Russia.

Abakumov described how, after the Red Army had liberated Krasnodar, seven inhabitants had come forward claiming they had been members of an underground Communist organization fighting against the occupation. However, they related so many details of the German atrocities that SMERSH operatives began to suspect that these individuals had participated in the executions. The investigation revealed that, in fact, they were Soviet members of the SK10a unit. With the help of local witnesses, the UKR SMERSH arrested eleven former SK members and investigated their crimes. Abakumov suggested putting these individuals on open trial in Krasnodar.

Georgii Malenkov ordered that the Krasnodar report be considered by a commission consisting of Nikolai Shvernik, Chairman of the Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Atrocities Perpetrated by the German Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices (ChGK); Andrei Vyshinsky, deputy foreign Commissar; Nikolai Rychkov, USSR Justice Commissar; Viktor Bochkov, USSR Prosecutor; and Abakumov.² The ChGK was created after Stalin declined participation in the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes proposed in October 1942 by the British and U.S. governments.

The Malenkov Commission decided that the Military Tribunal of the North Caucasian Front would try eleven defendants in an open trial, which was held in Krasnodar on July 14–17, 1943, and presided over by Judiciary Major N. Y. Mayorov, Chairman of the Military Tribunal of the North Caucasian Front.³ Eleven Soviet collaborators, charged with treason under Article 58-1a (civilians) and 58-1b (Soviet servicemen), were accused of assisting Colonel Christmann’s SK unit in the killing of 7,000 people—patients in the municipal hospital, a convalescent home, and a children’s hospital—in Krasnodar in 1942–43.⁴ The court appointed three counselors to defend the accused. However, Soviet legal procedures allowed the counselors to meet with their clients only in the court and they were not permitted to cross-examine eyewitnesses.

During the trial, two defendants, N. Pushkarev and V. Tishchenko, described in detail the gas vans used by Einsatzkommando 10a for killing Jews and other victims. Until then, the existence of these vehicles was a Nazi secret. A witness named Ivan Kotov, who had been loaded into a gas van but survived, also testified:

On 22 August [1942] I went to Municipal Hospital No. 3… As I entered the courtyard I saw a large truck with a dark-gray body. Before I had taken two steps a German officer seized me by the collar and pushed me into the vehicle. The interior of the van was crammed full of people, some of them completely naked, some of them in their underclothes. The door was closed. I noticed that the van started to move. Minutes later I began to feel sick. I was losing consciousness. I had previously taken an anti-air raid course, and I immediately understood that we were being poisoned by some kind of gas. I tore off my shirt, wet it with urine, and pressed it to my mouth and nose. My breathing became easier, but I finally lost consciousness. When I came to, I was lying in a ditch with several dozen corpses. With great effort I managed to climb out and drag myself.⁵

Eight defendants were sentenced to death and publicly hanged.⁶ The rest were convicted to twenty years in special hard labor camps. Alexander Werth, a British journalist, referred to the trial as ‘first-rate hate propaganda’ aimed at emphasizing the suffering of the Soviet people under the German occupation.⁷ The German SK10a members were not caught and only a few German officers of this unit were ever put on trial. Otto Ohlendorf was the main defendant at the Nuremberg trial of Einsatzgruppen leaders (September 1947–April 1948).⁸ He was sentenced to death and hanged on June 7, 1951. SK commander Seetzen went into hiding near Hamburg after the war under the false name ‘Michael Gollwitzer’. After his arrest by the British authorities in September 1945, he committed suicide.

In 1972, three former SK10a officers tried in West Germany received lenient four-year sentences for the 1941 massacre of 200 Jews in the city of Taganrog and the 1942 massacre of 214 children in the town of Yeisk. In 1973, three more officers were convicted and given from two to four and a half years for shooting hundreds of Jews and other civilians in Ukraine in 1941.

Finally, in 1980, Kurt Christmann was tried in Munich.⁹ From 1946 to 1948, he was interned in the British occupation zone under the false name ‘Dr. Ronda’, after which he successfully fled to Argentina. He returned to West Germany in 1956 and was arrested by West German police in November 1979 on charges of participating in the murders of 105 persons in Krasnodar in 1942–43. On December 19, 1980, a court sentenced Christmann to ten years in prison. He died in 1987.

The last SK10a case—of Helmut Oberlander, who had served in SK10a as an interpreter—ended in November 2009.¹⁰ In February 1942, the seventeen-year-old Oberlander, an ethnic German and Soviet citizen, was conscripted to the occupation troops. In 1954 he arrived in Canada and obtained Canadian citizenship in 1960. His citizenship was revoked in 2001 and 2007, but there was no proof that he had participated in the SK10a atrocities. In 2009 the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal reinstated Oberlander’s Canadian citizenship.

The Kharkov Trial

On September 2, 1943, Abakumov suggested trying several German officers taken prisoner on January 31, 1943, when the 6th German Army surrendered in Stalingrad. These officers had committed atrocities against Soviet POWs, and were the first Germans anywhere to be tried as war criminals. Abakumov wrote:

To: Sovnarkom of the USSR, Comrade Vyshinsky

In mid-January 1943, while tightening the encirclement of the 6th [German] Army, our troops took over a transit camp for POWs, the so-called Dulag-205, located near the village of Alekseevka not far from Stalingrad. Thousands of bodies of Red Army soldiers and commanders were found on and near the territory of the camp. All of the prisoners had died of exhaustion and cold. Also, there were a few hundred extremely exhausted former Red Army servicemen.

The investigation conducted by the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH’ revealed that the German soldiers and officers, following orders of the German high command, severely mistreated POWs—brutally exterminating them by beating and execution, creating unbearable conditions in the camp, and starving them to death. It was also established that the Germans subjected POWs to the same brutality in the camps in Darnitsa near Kiev, Dergachi near Kharkov, and in the towns of Poltava and Rossoshi.

The following direct perpetrators of the death of Soviet people are currently under investigation in the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH’: KÖRPERT, RUDOLF, former commandant of the Dulag-205 camp, colonel of the German Army, born 1886 in the Sudetenland (Germany) to a merchant’s family. Taken prisoner on January 31, 1943, in the city of Stalingrad.

VON KUNOWSKI, WERNER, former chief quartermaster of the 6th German Army, lieutenant colonel, born 1907 in Silesia, a noble, son of a major general of the German Army. Taken prisoner on January 31, 1943, in the city of Stalingrad.

LANGHELD, WILHELM, former counterintelligence officer (Abwehr officer) at the Dulag-205 camp, captain of the German Army, born 1891 in the city of Frankfurt-on-Main to a family of bureaucrats, member of the Fascist Party since 1933. Taken prisoner on January 31, 1943, in the city of Stalingrad.

MÄDER, OTTO, former adjutant to the Commandant of the Dulag-205 camp, senior lieutenant of the German Army, born 1895 in the Erfurt Region (Germany), member of the Fascist Party since 1935. Taken prisoner on January 31, 1943, in the city of Stalingrad.

The testimonies of KUNOWSKI, LANGHELD, and MÄDER confirmed a direct order from the highest command of the German Army to exterminate Soviet POWs, both officers and privates, as ‘inferiors’…

Thus, approximately 4,000 Soviet POWs were imprisoned in the Alekseevsk camp, although it was built to hold only 1,200 prisoners…

As the German officers KÖRPERT, KUNOWSKI, LANGHELD, and MÄDER testified, Soviet POWs were half-starved in the Dulag-205 camp. Beginning in December 1942, the high command of the 6th German Army represented by Head of Staff, Lt. Gen. [Arthur] SCHMIDT, completely stopped food supplies to the camp…¹¹ By the time the camp was liberated by the Red Army, approximately 5,000 men had died. The POWs, almost insane from hunger, were hunted down by dogs during the distribution of food, which was prepared from waste products…

LANGHELD testified: ‘I usually beat the POWs with a stick 4–5 cm in diameter. This happened…also in the other POW camps…’ During the investigation…former Red Army servicemen…held in the Dulag-205 camp, were identified and interrogated…

Thus, ALEKSEEV, A. A…testified…on August 10, 1943:

‘Mortality in the camp was high because…bread and water were not given at all…

‘Instead of water, we collected [and drank] dirty snow mixed with blood, which caused mass illness among the POWs…

‘We slept on the ground and it was impossible to get warm. Our warm clothes and valenki [felt boots] were taken from us, and we were given torn boots and clothes from the dead…

‘Many servicemen, unable to withstand the horrific conditions of the camp, went insane. About 150 men died per day, and during one day in the first days of 1943, 216 men died…The German commanders used to set dogs—Alsatians—on the POWs. The dogs knocked down the weak POWs and dragged them across the ground, while the Germans stood around laughing. Public shootings of POWs were common in the camp…’

KÖRPERT, KUNOWSKI, LANGHELD, and MÄDER admitted their guilt.

The case is still under investigation. I have notified the government that an open trial and its detailed description in the media are necessary.

Abakumov.¹²

Perhaps Abakumov had addressed his report to Vyshinsky, and not to Stalin, because the question of war crimes concerned an agreement with the Allies. A month later, from October 18 to November 11, 1943, a conference of Allied foreign ministers was held in Moscow, resulting in the Moscow Declaration signed by the Soviet, American, British, and Chinese leaders. Its section titled Statement on Atrocities (signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) dealt with German war criminals: ‘Those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the…atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of these liberated countries and of free governments which will be erected therein.’¹³

The trial of the four German officers who participated in atrocities in the Dulag-205 camp did not take place in 1943, probably because SMERSH continued interrogations of Körpert, Mäder, and four other high officials of the camp until the autumn of 1944. However, Wilhelm Langheld, also mentioned in the September 1943 report, was a defendant at a trial that came about because of a new report from Abakumov to the GKO (addressed to Stalin and Molotov) on November 18, 1943. Abakumov suggested launching a new open trial of German war criminals who had participated in the liquidation of Soviet citizens in Kharkov and Smolensk.¹⁴

Using the April 19, 1943, secret decree of the Presidium, which provided a legal basis for the punishment of German war criminals and collaborators, Abakumov proposed trying three captured German officers, including Langheld, and one Soviet collaborator. Abakumov especially emphasized SMERSH’s possession of new proof that the occupiers had used gas vans for mass killings not only in the Krasnodar Region but also in Kharkov and Smolensk, where, in all, 160,000 inhabitants were executed.

Abakumov proposed using eighty-nine witnesses who had testified about German atrocities, materials of the ChGK, and medical reports of exhumations by leading Soviet medical experts, including academician Nikolai Burdenko (who a few months later chaired the commission investigating the exhumed bodies of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest) and Viktor Prozorovsky, USSR chief medical expert.

Abakumov also attached a draft decision to his report, mandating that the trial be held in Kharkov on December 10–12, 1943.¹⁵ The draft proposed that Shcherbakov, a secretary of the Central Committee and head of the GlavPURKKA; Konstantin Gorshenin, the new chief USSR prosecutor (appointed on November 13, 1943); and Abakumov should organize the trial. As events in early December 1943 demonstrate, Abakumov’s plan for the Kharkov trial was approved, but the trial proposed in Smolensk was postponed.

The German atrocities in Kharkov began after the city’s occupation by the 6th German Army under Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau on October 24, 1941. Before capturing the city, on October 10, von Reichenau, an anti-Semite and supporter of the SS-Einsatzgruppen activity, issued his infamous order to the troops in the Eastern territories:

The soldier in the Eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology…

Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry. The Army has to aim at another purpose, i.e., the annihilation of revolts in [the] hinterland which, as experience proves, have always been caused by Jews.¹⁶

The German occupation continued until February 16, 1943, when the Soviet troops of the Voronezh Front liberated the city. But on March 15, 1943, the SS-Panzerkorps recaptured Kharkov.¹⁷ This corps included a group called Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (commanded by SS-Gruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, one of Hitler’s closest confidants) and 3.SS-Panzer-Division Totenkopf (commanders: SS-Obergruppenführer Theodor Eicke, killed February 26, 1943, and SS-Obergruppenführer Max Simon), also mentioned as guilty parties in Abakumov’s indictment because their military actions had resulted in the massacre of retreating Soviet troops. Historian Charles Sydnor described the behavior of the Totenkopf division: ‘The Russians had abandoned most of their vehicles and equipment and were trying to escape on foot…The SSTK [Totenkopf] First Panzergrenadier Regiment…methodically cut down the panicked herds of stampeding Russians fleeing.’¹⁸

The other SS-troops were no better. In his memoirs, Curzio Malaparte, an Italian officer, recalled his conversation with Sepp Dietrich, commander of Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, in Berlin in 1942: ‘I told [Dietrich] about the Russian prisoners in the Smolensk camp who fed on the corpses of their comrades…Dietrich burst out laughing: “Haben sie ihnen geschmeckt?—Did they enjoy eating them?” he laughed opening his small pink-rooted fish-mouth, showing his crowded sharp fishlike teeth.’¹⁹

The Nazi leadership considered the recapturing of Kharkov so important that Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to the city, where, on April 23, 1943, he gave a speech to the SS Panzer divisions praising their ‘dreadful and terrible reputation’.²⁰ Finally, on August 23, 1943, the Soviet troops of the Voronezh, Southwestern, and Steppe fronts recaptured Kharkov, and SMERSH started preparing the trial.

On December 3, 1943, the 6th (Investigation) Department of GUKR wrote a draft indictment of four captured German officers and two Russian collaborators being kept in Moscow Lubyanka Prison.²¹ From December 5 to 15, Abakumov remained in constant contact with Stalin and other Party leaders, coordinating all details of the future show trial. During the trial he reported to the leadership every day, and, until the end of the trial, the trial documents were routinely altered according to instructions from Moscow.

The trial took place in Kharkov from December 15 to 18, 1943, and was the first trial of German servicemen for war crimes. The Military Tribunal of the 4th Ukrainian Front, presided over by Major General of Justice A. N. Myasnikov, tried four defendants—three Germans and one Russian (for some unknown reason, only three Germans and one Soviet defendant were present at the trial), and accused six high-ranking German military, intelligence, and military police officers of war crimes. As in Krasnodar, the court appointed three defense counselors from Moscow. Renowned Soviet writers and journalists, including Aleksei Tolstoi, Konstantin Simonov, and Ilya Ehrenburg, were present, along with foreign journalists, and the trial was filmed.²²

The indictment prepared by GUKR pronounced:

Investigation has established that the atrocities, violence, and plunder in the town and Region of Kharkov were committed by officers and men of the German Army and in particular by: SS Division ‘Adolf Hitler’, commanded by Obergruppenfuehrer of SS troops Dietrich; SS Division ‘Totenkopf’, commanded by Gruppenfuehrer of SS troops Simon; the German Punitive Organs: the Kharkov SD Sonderkommando led by its commander, Sturmbannfuehrer Hanebitter; the group of German Secret police in the town of Kharkov, headed by Polizei Kommissar Karchan and his deputy—Police Secretary Wulf; the 560th group of Secret Field Police attached to the staff of the 6th German Army—Polizei Kommissar Mehritz; the defendants in the present case: Reinhard Retzlaff [Retzlaw in the Russian documents], official of the 560th Group of the German Secret Field Police; Wilhelm Langheld, Captain of German Military Counter Espionage Service; Hans Rietz [Ritz in the Russian documents], Assistant Commander of the SS Company SD Sonderkommando; Mikhail Bulanov, chauffeur of the Kharkov SD Sonderkommando.

The preliminary examination has established the system followed:

Asphyxiation with carbon monoxide in specially equipped automobile ‘murder vans’ of many thousands of Soviet people;

Brutal massacres of peaceful Soviet citizens and destruction of towns and villages of temporary occupied territory;

Mass extermination of old people, women, and small children;

Shooting, burning, and brutal treatment of Soviet wounded and prisoners of war.

All this constitutes a flagrant violation of the rules for the conduct of war established by international conventions, and of all generally accepted legal standards.²³

The prosecutor’s interrogation of the defendants Langheld, Retzlaff, Rietz, and Bulanov in the court went smoothly. Basically, they repeated what had already been included in the detailed part of the indictment. Apparently, this was a typical well-rehearsed show trial, albeit, for once, presenting accurate accusations. Evidently, the defendants learned their roles well while they were held in the Lubyanka. One of the Russian courtroom translators, Anna Stesnova, was even an officer of the 1st Section of the 2nd GUKR Department. The prosecution’s questions focused mainly on the killing of Soviet citizens in gas vans and by shooting. On December 16, Langheld testified that in May 1942 he had witnessed how German soldiers forced prisoners to enter a gas van:

Among the people being loaded into [the] gas van were old men, children, old and young women. These people would not go into the machine of their own accord and had therefore to be driven into the gas van by SS men with kicks and blows of the butt ends of automatic rifles…

I heard from Captain Beukow that the same kind of gas vans were used in… Kharkov, Poltava, Kiev.²⁴

Hans Rietz, a former lawyer and then Assistant SS Company Commander within Sonderkommando 4a, gave similar testimony:

On 31st May, 1943 I arrived in Kharkov and reported to the Chief of the Kharkov Sonderkommando, Hanebitter… The next day…Lt. Jacobi… showed me the vehicle standing in the yard. It was an ordinary closed army transport lorry, only with an airtight body.

Lt. Jacobi opened the doors of the machine and let me look in. Inside the machine was lined with sheet iron, in the floor was a grating through which the exhaust gases of the motor entered, poisoning people inside the van.

Soon afterwards the doors of the prison opened and arrested persons were led out in groups… Those of the prisoners who held back were beaten and kicked.²⁵ Reinhard Retzlaff, an auxiliary officer of the 560th Group of the Secret Field Police (GFP) attached to the headquarters of the 6th German Army, also mentioned Hanebitter in his testimony about the usage of gas vans in Kharkov in March 1942.²⁶

This testimony revealed for the first time that the GFP, like the Einsatzgruppen, had committed atrocities. In Kharkov, Gruppe GFP 560 was active from October 1941 to August 1943. The last defendant, the Soviet collaborator Mikhail Bulanov, driver of a Gestapo truck, also testified to the killing of victims in a gas van.²⁷ All of the defendants also admitted to personally torturing or executing arrested Soviet prisoners.

Currently, there is no doubt that gas vans were also used by Einsatzgruppen in Poland, Belorussia, Smolensk, Riga, and elsewhere.²⁸ However, it is puzzling that the name Kranebitter mentioned by Rietz and Retzlaff in their testimonies was written in the official records as Hanebitter. In fact, SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Fritz Kranebitter, Doctor of Jurisprudence, was the Sipo (Secret Police) and SD commander in Kharkov from March to August 1943.²⁹ He arrived in Kiev in February 1942, then moved to Kharkov and after that, to Dubno. In November 1943, he was appointed head of Amt IV (Gestapo intelligence and counterintelligence) within the Security Police and SD Staff in Italy and left Ukraine. He was never charged and died in Austria in 1957.

Two of the three additional German witnesses, prisoners who were not defendants in this trial, committed just as many atrocities as those being tried. They were SS-Obersturmbannführer Georg Heinisch, former district Commissar (Gebietskommissar) of Melitopol, Ukraine, and Heinz Jantschi, a sergeant-major and Assistant Abwehr officer at the Dulag-231 transit camp for Soviet POWs. Heinisch testified about his own crimes: ‘In the period from 3rd September, 1942, till 14th September, 1943, between 3,000 and 4,000 persons were exterminated in the Melitopol region…During my work in Melitopol, there were three or four mass operations, in particular in December 1942, when 1,300 persons were arrested at once.’³⁰ Then he added:

[SS-Oberführer Otto] Somann [Chief of Security in the Breslau area] told me about the camp in Auschwitz in Germany where the gassing of prisoners was also carried out… Those who were to be executed first entered a place with a signboard with ‘Disinfection’ on it and they were undressed—the men separately from women and children. Then they were ordered to proceed to another place with a signboard ‘Bath’. While the people were washing themselves special valves were opened to let in the gas which caused their death. Then the dead people were burned in special furnaces in which about 200 bodies could be burned simultaneously.³¹

No foreign correspondent attending the trial recognized the importance of this first public evidence of mass killings in Auschwitz. Possibly, this was because the defendants were obviously forced to give testimonies the court wanted to hear. As Arthur Koestler reported, ‘[F]or the foreign observer the Kharkov trial (which was filmed and publicly shown in London) gave the same impression of unreality as the Moscow trials, the accused reciting their parts in stilted phrases which they had obviously learned by heart, sometimes taking the wrong cue from State-Prosecutor and then coming back to the same part again’.³² On December 29, 1943, Time magazine wrote only that three German defendants and one Russian defendant were tried and executed.³³

Tellingly, this trial, like that in Krasnodar, did not mention that most of the victims killed in Kharkov were Jews, although a written report of the local commission on atrocities stated that up to 15,000 Jewish residents of Kharkov were murdered between December 1941 and January 1942.³⁴ Interestingly, after the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, the first reports from the field stated that ‘the mass extermination of people, and in particular, the Jews brought from all over Europe, was the main purpose of the camps’.³⁵ However, in the report to the Central Committee in Moscow, the words ‘the Jews’ had disappeared, and afterwards, the extermination of the Jews in Auschwitz was not mentioned in Soviet documents, only ‘millions of citizens from all over Europe’.

Karl Kosch, a professional architect who served as a private in the German Army, also testified about his knowledge of gas vans in Ukraine in 1943. However, the last witness, Jantschi, talked at length mostly about the movement of Soviet POWs and arrested civilians from a camp near the city of Vyazma to a camp in the city of Smolensk, in which he took part.³⁶ Of 15,000 people who left Vyazma, only 2,000 arrived in Smolensk—the rest died or were exterminated on the way—and of the 10,000 prisoners who were left in Vyazma, 6,000 died. Although this horrific story described the German military authorities’ general attitude toward Soviet prisoners, it had little to do with the events in Kharkov. Most probably, Jantschi’s testimony was prepared for the Smolensk trial that did not take place. Much later this testimony would have grave consequences for Jantschi.

On December 18, 1943, the chair of the tribunal read the verdict, which had been approved in Moscow. The four defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. The verdict specifically mentioned the military and police involved:

Violent atrocities against Soviet civilians were carried out on the territory of the city and region of Kharkov by officers and soldiers of:

The SS Adolf Hitler Division, commanded by Obergruppenführer of S. S. Troops Dietrich, the Death’s Head Division, under the command of Gruppenführer of SS Troops Simon.

By the German punitive organs.

The Kharkov SD Sonderkommando, commanded by Sturmbannführer Hanebitter.

By the Kharkov group of the German Secret Field Police, commanded by Police Commissar Karchan.³⁷

A witness to the execution on the next day later recalled:

Plenty of people gathered at the Blagoveshchensk Market Square. There were four gallows…The convicts were standing in the body of a truck located under the gallows, with its sides pulled down. The Germans were smoking, while the Russian convict, dressed in a black robe, was standing apart from them…

Several [Soviet] soldiers came up [to the convicts] and tied their hands. The Russian dropped on his knees in front of the Red Army soldiers, but they also tied his hands. Then a noose was placed around the neck of each convict. The truck started to move slowly. I looked at the last German. He moved his legs, and then he hung in the air and jerked. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was still jerking. I looked at the crowd. When [the German] hung in the air, a long sound ‘Ah-h-h-h’ was heard from it [the crowd]. Many took steps backward, and some turned around and ran away.³⁸

Apparently, public hanging was so unpopular that in May 1944 it was replaced by nonpublic shooting.³⁹ However, the public execution of war criminals by hanging was restored after the war.

After the defense counselors were back to Moscow, Beria called them to his Lubyanka office and yelled at the aged Nikolai Kommodov, who had just defended Langheld and Rietz: ‘At the trial you acted not as a defense lawyer, but as a prosecutor. This was written in every foreign newspaper!’⁴⁰ This was a lie. Most probably, Beria followed Stalin’s lead knowing that Stalin had not forgotten Kommodov’s defense of Dr. Dmitrii Pletnev, a personal enemy of Stalin’s, who was falsely accused of poisoning the writer Maxim Gorky at the Bukharin Trial in 1938.⁴¹Kommodov was so frightened by Beria’s reprimand that he died of a heart attack a few days later.

The legal outcome of the trial was summarized by one of the leading Soviet jurists Aron Trainin in his book The Criminal Responsibility of the Hitlerites published in 1944.⁴² Trainin wrote that ‘the Hitlerites’ should be tried for launching a war of aggression which was a fundamental ‘crime against peace’. This and other principles discussed in the book became a basis of statements by Soviet prosecutors at the International Nuremberg Trial.

Soviet filmmakers made a propaganda film named Sud idet! (The Court Is In Session!) about the Kharkov Trial, and it was shown throughout the country. The American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) made a shortened version of this film. In July 1944 Lifemagazine published a few stills from this documentary.⁴³ In June 1945, an American movie ‘We Accuse’, compiled from the Soviet, British, and German newsreels and focused on the Kharkov Trial, was shown in a number of New York movie theaters, except those owned by the members of the Hays Office, Hollywood’s censorship bureau.⁴⁴ The office demanded extensive cuts, in particular, of the footage of atrocities. However, soon the U.S. Army Signal Corps released even more horrifying footage of the liberated death camps in Europe.

Later Atrocity Trials

Sepp Dietrich and Max Simon, whom Abakumov connected with atrocities in 1943, were captured and tried by the Allies. On July 16, 1945, the U.S. Military Tribunal at Dachau (Case No. 5–24) sentenced Dietrich to life in prison, commuted to twenty-five years, for the execution of American POWs by his troops in 1944 (the Malmedi massacre). After serving ten years, Dietrich was released. On May 14, 1957, the German court sentenced him to twenty-nine months for his part in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. In 1966, Dietrich died aged seventy-three of a heart attack.

Max Simon was captured by British troops and sentenced to death in 1947 for his complicity in the September 1944 massacre of civilians in Italy. The sentence was commuted and he was released in 1954. In October 1955, a German court tried him again. Twice acquitted, Simon died on February 1, 1961, before the start of a third trial.

Georg Heinisch, who was a witness at the Kharkov Trial, was among those convicted and sentenced to death at the Kiev trial (December 1945– January 1946).⁴⁵ He confessed to his participation in the extermination of 3,000 Jewish children in October 1942. By chance, while working with archival documents, I discovered the fate of the two other Kharkov witnesses, Jantschi and Kosch.

The materials in Jantschi’s Personal File clearly reveal that on August 9, 1943, he voluntarily crossed the front line near the town of Sumy.⁴⁶ This explains his detailed testimony to GUKR investigators concerning Dulag-231 and the horrible treatment of Soviet POWs, which he repeated in Kharkov. However, he also described his personal discovery of six Jews among the Soviet POWs in the Vyazma Camp and seventeen Jews among prisoners in the Miller Camp, all of whom he handed over to the SD command for execution. Additionally, in September 1941, Jantschi was involved in sending Soviet POWs to Germany for slave labor.

On August 7, 1944, both Jantschi and Karl Kosch, the third witness at the Kharkov Trial, were transferred from a prison in Moscow to the special POW Camp No. 27 in the Moscow suburbs. However, on November 13, 1946, both were returned to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, where Sergei Kartashov’s (now the 4th MGB) department started a new investigation. For at least two years the prisoners were kept together and interrogated from time to time. On May 5, 1948, Jantschi made an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Extensive interrogations (fifty-two instances) of Jantschi began in December 1949 and continued through July 1951. Finally, on January 12, 1952, the Military Tribunal of the Moscow District sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison as a German spy (Article 58-6) and a war criminal (April 19, 1943, Decree). Interestingly, no documents in his Personal File mention the Kharkov Trial, although the verdict repeated his testimony in Kharkov almost word for word. On January 15, 1952, the same military tribunal sentenced Kosch as a German spy to twenty-five years in prison, with no credit for the time of the Kharkov trial.

On February 16, 1952, the Supreme Court denied Jantschi’s appeal, in which he pleaded guilty but asked the court to consider the circumstances under which he committed the crimes. The next day he again attempted suicide by hitting his head against a wall. On March 30, 1952, Jantschi was brought to Vladimir Prison, where he was kept in solitary confinement for some time. Kosch arrived in Vladimir later, on May 16, 1952. Like many other German prisoners in Vladimir, Jantschi and Kosch were released in October 1955.

It remains a mystery why SMERSH/MGB considered these two German prisoners so important that they were held without trial until 1952. Only a few high-level German generals and foreign diplomats were treated similarly. Possibly, Jantschi and Kosch were used as cell spies against their own fellow German prisoners. In any case, it is clear that, at least in 1952, military counterintelligence wanted, for unknown reason, to conceal their involvement in the Kharkov Trial.

On January 22, 1944, Abakumov sent the GKO a new report addressed to Stalin, Molotov, and Beria.⁴⁷ The GUKR proposed a new trial in Smolensk for thirteen defendants arrested by SMERSH. The investigation revealed the extermination of 135,000 civilians in the Smolensk region during the German occupation, and also stated that the German authorities had used children for slave labor and forced teenage girls into prostitution. In addition, German intelligence used teenagers as spies in the Red Army’s rear. However, the trial was postponed because from January 16 to 23, 1944, academician Nikolai Burdenko’s commission was working in the Katyn Forest, examining bodies of dead Polish officers and trying to prove that the Germans, and not the NKVD, had shot the victims—a question that was raised at the Nuremberg trial as well.⁴⁸

The only cases proposed for open trials were those that would create public sympathy for the suffering of the Soviet people. Very few knew about the routine military tribunal trials. For instance, in September 1944, Lieutenant General Mikhail Belkin, head of the SMERSH Directorate of the 3rd Baltic Front, completed the investigation of Rudolf Körpert and Otto Mäder (mentioned in Abakumov’s September 1943 letter to Vyshinsky), and four other high-level officers of the Dulag-205 administration.⁴⁹ They were accused of ‘mass extermination of Soviet citizens’ and ‘having implemented the policy of German fascism concerning the extermination of the Soviet population’. On October 10, 1944, not in a public trial, as Abakumov suggested, but in a closed military tribunal, all six were sentenced to death by shooting. It remains unclear if and when Werner von Kunowski, the last general on Abakumov’s September 1943 list, was executed.

Even less was known about the routine military trials in the field. For example, in December 1944, the military tribunal of the 1st Baltic Front tried nine members of a Lithuanian paramilitary group captured by SMERSH. From 1941 to August 1944, that group had arrested Soviet servicemen and parachutists and handed them over to the Germans. They also fought against the advancing Red Army.⁵⁰ The group’s leader was sentenced to death and shot, and the others were sentenced to ten years in labor camps. It is not surprising that the Soviets wanted to prevent the world from knowing about those who viewed the German invasion as an opportunity to free themselves from the Soviet regime.

Open public trials continued after the war, but now Beria was put in charge of organizing them. On November 2, 1945, he ordered that a special commission consisting of Merkulov (NKGB), Abakumov, and Sergei Kruglov (NKVD) be set up to evaluate the cases of 105 important war criminals being held in POW camps and prisons.⁵¹ Three days later, the commission forwarded to Molotov a list of 85 potential defendants for future open trials in Leningrad, Smolensk, Velikie Luki, Kiev, Nikolaev, Minsk, Riga, and Bryansk. Defendants were selected and grouped according to their activities and region. The Politburo approved the plan for future trials and ordered that a commission headed by Vyshinsky, and including Abakumov and Kruglov, be responsible for organizing the trials.⁵²

The trials took place from December 1945 to February 1946, at the same time as the Nuremberg trials.⁵³ Surprisingly, the extermination of Jews was discussed at these trials, making it hard to believe that less than two years later Stalin unleashed his own anti-Semitic campaign against the ‘cosmopolitans’ and the American ‘fifth column’, the code words for identifying Soviet Jews as enemies of the state and supposedly potential American spies. At the trials, all 85 German defendants, including 18 generals, were sentenced either to death by hanging (66 defendants) or twelve to twenty years in the labor camps.

Oddly, during the first trial (December 28, 1945–January 4, 1946) of eleven Germans accused of atrocities committed in the Leningrad region and the cities of Novgorod and Pskov in 1941–42, a prosecutor asked the defendant Arno Diere (in the Russian records, Duere) about the Katyn massacre.⁵⁴ Diere claimed that he had helped to bury the bodies of Polish officers supposedly shot there by the Nazis. However, it became clear that he was lying. Diere stated that the Katyn Forest was in Poland and not in Russia and that the trench used for the burial was 15–20 and not 1.5–2.0 meters deep, and so on. In fact, Diere had participated in mass killings of Soviet civilians, and by cooperating with the Soviet investigators and lying he had saved his own life.

On January 5, 1946, Major General Heinrich Remlinger—the former military commandant of Pskov, who admitted his guilt but insisted that he had followed orders—and seven other convicts were hanged in Leningrad.⁵⁵ Diere was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in camps. He survived and in 1954, he admitted that he had lied about his involvement in the Katyn Forest massacre.

On September 10, 1947, the Politburo approved nine more open trials of 137 Germans.⁵⁶ Stalin personally controlled the decisions of the military tribunals that followed and approved on the phone death sentences for the German generals. Additionally, in October–November 1947, 761 prisoners were sentenced as war criminals in closed sessions of military tribunals.⁵⁷

Notes

1. Lawrence D. Stokes, ‘From Law Student to Einsatzgruppe Commander: The Career of a Gestapo Officer,’ Canadian Journal of History 37, no. 1 (April 2002), 41–73. Details about the activity of Einsatzgruppe D in Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition 2003).

2. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 315. The ChGK was created on November 2, 1942 and consisted of Shvernik (Chairman); Andrei Zhdanov, a Politburo member; Academicians Nikolai Burdenko, Boris Vedeneev, Trofim Lysenko, Yevgenii Tarle, and Ivan Trainin; the writer Aleksei Tolstoi; a female pilot, Valentina Grizodubova; and the clergyman Metropolitan Nikolai of Kiev. The ChGK played mostly the propaganda role and concealed the anti-Jewish Nazi racial policy and falsely ascribed the Katyn massacre to the Nazis. Marina Sorokina, ‘People and Procedures: Towards a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (Fall 2005), 797–831.

3. The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings of the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1944), 7–44. Also, Ilya Bourtman, ‘“Blood for Blood, Death for Death”: The Soviet Military Tribunal in Krasnodar, 1943,’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23, no. 2 (Fall 2008), 246–65.

4. The defendants: I. F. Kladov, I. F. Kotomtsev, M. P. Lastovina, G. N. Misan, Y. M. Naptsok, V. S. Pavlov, I. I. Paramonov, N. S. Pushkarev, I. A.Rechkalov, V. P. Tishchenko, and G. P. Tuchkov.

5. The People’s Verdict, 21.

6. Executed: Kladov, Kotomtsev, Lastovina, Misan, Naptsok, Pushkarev, Rechkalov, and Tishchenko. See two Soviet documentaries about the trial and execution at http://www.history-vision.de/detail/2702.html and http://www.historyvision.de/detail/3164.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

7. Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1964), 732.

8. For instance, the memoir by the American prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz, A Visionary for World Peace, Chapter 4. Story 33. The Biggest Murder Trial in History, http://www.benferencz.org/index.php?id=8&story=32, retrieved September 8, 2011.

9. Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, edited by Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Ruckerl, 69–71 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

10. Bernie Farber, ‘Painfully slow court system gives war criminals free pass,’ The Star, February 16, 2010, http://www.thestar.com/Article/764817, retrieved September 8, 2011.

11. On January 31, 1943, Lieutenant General Arthur Kurt Schmidt was taken prisoner along with Field Marshal von Paulus and his other generals. On June 24, 1950 the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District sentenced him as a war criminal to 25 years’ imprisonment. On September 25, 1953 he was repatriated to Germany. Schmidt’s MVD card in I. V. Bezborodova, Generaly Vermakhta v plenu (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1998), 172 (in Russian).

12. Document No. 80 in Stalingradskaya epopeya: Vpervye publikuemye dokumenty, rassekrechennye FSB (Moscow: Zvonnitsa, 2000), 354–63 (in Russian).

13. Moscow Conference, October 1943. Joint Four-Nation Declaration, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/moscow.htm, retrieved January 5, 2011.

14. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 316–7.

15. Ibid., 317.

16. The English translation of the document UK-81 in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggressio. Vol. VIII (USGPO: Washington, 1946), 572–82; http://www.ess.uwe. ac.uk/genocide/USSR2.htm, retrieved September 8, 2011.

17. Details in George M. Nipe, Jr., Last Victory in Russia: The SS–Panzer–Korps and Manstein’s Kharkov Counteroffensive, February–March 1943 (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2000).

18. Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division 1933–1945 (8 ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 269.

19. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, translated from the Italian by Cesare Foligno (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1946), 19–20.

20. Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: The Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945 (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 196.

21. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 317–8.

22. Soviet documentaries on the trial and execution of the condemned at http://www.history-vision.de/detail/1705.html, http://www.history-vision.de/detail/3162.html, and http://www.history-vision.de/detail/3163.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

23. The People’s Verdict, 48–49.

24. Ibid., 65–66.

25. Ibid., 68–69.

26. Ibid., 78.

27. Ibid., 85–86.

28. For instance, Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka—The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. (Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press, 1987).

29. Karl Pfeifer, ‘Zum Feifer-und Bedenkjahr 2005: Patriotische Einleitung,’ http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/2005/01/einleitung.htm, retrieved September 8, 2011.

30. The People’s Verdict, 89.

31. Ibid., 90.

32. Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar (New York: Macmillan, 1945), 143.

33. ‘Pattern of Hanging,’ Time, December 27, 1943. The American and British officials were cautious about the information on the trial because of the Nazi threat to retaliate against the Allied POWs. Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 69–73.

34. ‘On the mass shooting of Jews by the German murderers in the Drobitzki Valley. Protocol. September 5, 1943,’ http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Kharkov.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

35. Report of Major General I. M. Grishaev, commander of the Political Department of the 60th Army, dated January 29, 1945. Cited in Pavel Polyan, ‘Otvet na evreiskii vopros,’ Novaya gazeta, no. 6, January 28, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/06/17.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

36. The People’s Verdict, 95–99.

37. Ibid., 121.

38. Yurii Zainochkovsky, ‘Kharkovskii prolog Nyurenberga,’ Sobytie, No. 52, December 25–31, 2003 (in Russian), http://www.interami.com/2003-213.html, retrieved January 5, 2011.

39. NKO Order No. 74, dated May 29, 1944. Document No. 221 in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Prikazy, 13 (2-3), 282.

40. Recollections by Nikolai Belov, who defended Mikhail Bulanov, in Zinovii Sagalov, ‘Protsess v Kharkove—prelyudiya k Nurenbergu,’ http://z-sagalov.narod.ru/publi_process.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

41. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge, 88–92.

42. A. N. Trainin, The Criminal Responsibility of the Hitlerites (Moscow: Yuridicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1944), discussed in George Ginsburgs, Moscow’s Road to Nuremberg: The Soviet Background of the Trial (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1996), 71–90, and Francine Hirsch, ‘The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,’ American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008), 701–30.

43. ‘Kharkov Trial. First Pictures From Russian Movie Show Legal Trial and Death of Nazi War Criminals,’ Life, July 10, 1944, p. 94.

44. Producer Irvin Shapiro, commentary written by John Bright and naarated by Everett Sloane. See ‘At the Little Carnegie,’ New York Times, June 4, 1945; ‘The New Pictures,’ Time, June 4, 1945, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,775791,00.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

45. The archive of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a copy of Heinisch’s SMERSH Investigation File from the FSB Central Archive, RG-06.025*02 Kiev, 1945–1946 (N-18762, tom 4), Georg Josef Heinisch.

46. Jantschi’s Personal File, RGVA, Moscow. Also, Jantschi’s and Karl Kosch’s prisoner cards in Vladimir Prison Archive.

47. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 318–20.

48. The Burdenko report falsely stated that German troops were responsible for the Katyn massacre. Details in Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment, edited by Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojcech Materski (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 226–9.

49. Frank Ellis, ‘Dulag-205: The German Army’s Death camp for Soviet Prisoners at Stalingrad,’ The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 19, no. 1 (March 2006), 123–48.

50. Special report by N. G. Khannikov to Abakumov, dated December 20, 1944. Document No. 25 in Tragediya Litvy: 1941–1944 gody. Sbornik arkhivnykh dokumentov o prestupleniyakh litovskikh kollabortsionistov v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Evropa, 2006), 122–4 (in Russian).

51. Ibid., 321.

52. Poliburo decisions P47/107 snd P47/132, dated November 10 and 21, 1945. Document Nos. 330 and 332 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD, 543–4 (in Russian). The commission consisted of Andrei Vyshinsky (chairman), deputy Foreign Minister; Nikolai Rychkov (deputy chairman); Konstantin Gorshenin, USSR Prosecutor; Ivan Golyakov, chair of the Supreme Court; Sergei Kruglov, first deputy NKVD Commissar; Abakumov; and Nikolai Afanasiev, Chief Military Prosecutor.

53. Alexander Victor Prusin, ‘“Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!”: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946,’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17 (2003), no. 1, 1–30.

54. On the Remlinger Trial see Chapter 5 in I. S. Jažbovskaja, A. Yu. Yablokov, and V. S. Parasadanova, Katynskii syndrome v sovetsko-pol’skikh otnosheniyakh (Moscow: Materik, 2005) (in Russian); Diere’s ‘testimony’ was mentioned in ‘Two Nazi Generals Hanged by Russians,’ The New York Times, December 31, 1945.

55. The other condemned to death were Karl Hermann Strüfling, Ernst Böhm, Fritz Engel, Eduard Sonnenfeld, Gerhard Jahnicke, Erwin Skotki, and Ernst Gehrer. Soviet documentaries about the trial and execution of the condemned at http://www.history-vision.de/detail/3177.html and http://www.history-vision.de/detail/3178.html, retrieved January 6, 2011.

56. Politburo decision P59/200, dated September 10, 1947. Politburo TsK RKP(b), 489; Nikita Petrov, ‘Prestupnyi kharakter stalinskogo regima: yuridicheskie osnovaniya,’ Polit.ru, November 19, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.polit.ru/lectures/2009/11/19/stalin.html#pin16, retrieved September 8, 2011.

57. Report of N. Rychkov, K. Gorshenin and S. Kruglov to Molotov and Stalin, dated November 4, 1947. GARF, Fond R-9401, Opis’ 2 (Molotov’s NKVD/MVD Special Folder), Delo 174, Ll. 234–7.