CHAPTER 28
Perhaps controlling the work of the Soviet delegation at the International Trial in Nuremberg was one of the main achievements of Abakumov’s SMERSH. The role of this SMERSH team in the trial remained unknown to the Western delegations.
The London Agreement
On June 21, 1945, a series of meetings among the American, British, French, and Soviet delegations had begun at Church House, Westminster (London) to develop a protocol for the upcoming international trial of German war criminals in Nuremberg.1 Major General of Justice Iona Nikitchenko headed the Soviet delegation at these meetings. Apparently, his Western colleagues were unaware that General Nikitchenko was no less guilty of crimes against humanity than were the future German defendants. In the 1930s, as a member of the Military Collegium, he had signed thousands of death sentences of alleged enemies of the people and received the highest Soviet awards for preparing show trials.2 In 1937, in a single telephone conversation, Nikitchenko agreed to sentence 102 defendants to death without even seeing their case files.3 A witness testified in 1940: ‘At the session of the Military Collegium an arrestee claimed he had denied his previous testimonies because he had been beaten [by investigators]. Chairman Nikitchenko told him: “Do you want us to beat you a little bit more?”’4
Ongoing discussions highlighted the differences between the Western and Soviet positions since the Soviet delegation did not want to accept the concept of presumption of innocence.5 The Soviets claimed that the future defendants were already guilty because of the decisions made by Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference on February 4–11, 1944, to ‘bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment’ and to ‘wipe out the Nazi party, Nazi laws, organizations and institutions.’6 In the Soviet opinion, this was enough to label all former German officials and military men as war criminals, without a trial.
Furthermore, it was not easy to overcome differences between Franco-Russian and Anglo-American criminal procedures. The American Judge Telford Taylor who participated in the trial, wrote later in his memoir:
Under the Continental system (known to lawyers as the ‘inquisitorial’ system), most of the documentary and testimonial evidence is presented to an examining magistrate, who assembles all of it in a dossier… The trial proceeds with both the court and the concerned parties fully informed in advance of the evidence for and against the defendant. If the court…decides to take further testimony, the witnesses are usually questioned by the judges, rather than the lawyers, so that cross-examinations by opposing counsel, which play so large a part in Anglo-American trials, do not often occur. The defendant is allowed to testify under oath, but may make an unsworn statement to the court.’7
Although the Soviet show trials of the late 1930s followed the French ‘inquisitorial’ system, there was a huge difference between a trial in a real French court and one in Moscow. In the Soviet system, everything was decided for the most part before the trial, and during important show trials Stalin and the Politburo edited and approved indictments and verdicts. In London, Nikitchenko admitted that he was not familiar with the Anglo-American system, and at the last meeting he asked: ‘What is meant in English by “cross-examine”?’8
Finally a compromise was reached, and on August 8, 1945 the chief prosecutors of the four countries in charge held their first meeting. To the surprise of his Anglo-American colleagues, Nikitchenko, a prosecutor, announced that Stalin had appointed him Soviet Judge to the court, and that Lieutenant–General of Justice Roman Rudenko, Chief Prosecutor of Ukraine, who was unknown to the Western contingent, would be Soviet Chief Prosecutor.
Although he attended only a seven-year school and had no legal training, in 1937 the thirty-year-old Rudenko made a career as a prosecutor at a series of local show trials in the Donbass coal-mining region.9 At these trials, scores of innocent defendants were sentenced to death or to ten to twenty-five years in the labor camps. In 1941, Rudenko graduated from a two-year legal course and began to work at the USSR Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow.10 In August 1942, supported by Nikita Khrushchev (then first Party secretary of Ukraine), Rudenko became Ukrainian Chief Prosecutor.
Most probably, Stalin noticed this talented demagogue in June 1945, during the show trial of sixteen members of the underground Polish government whom Ivan Serov, Beria’s deputy and NKVD Plenipotentiary at the 1st Belorussian Front, secretly arrested in March 1944.11 In fact, the entire government of Poland was kidnapped and brought to Moscow. The NKGB investigated the case.
On June 13, 1945 the Politburo ordered the Poles to be tried in an open session of the Military Collegium chaired by Vasilii Ulrikh, with Chief Military Prosecutor Nikolai Afanasiev and Rudenko as prosecutors.12 Foreign correspondents and diplomats were invited to this show trial, and it was transmitted on the radio. The Poles were accused of collaborating with the Germans and organizing terrorist acts against the Red Army. Brigadier General Leopold Okulicki, the last commander in chief of the Armija Krajowa and head of the underground Polish government, was sentenced to a 10-year imprisonment, and his fifteen co-defendants were sentenced to various terms. On December 24, 1946 Okulicki died in the Butyrka Prison Hospital in Moscow.13 In the USSR, this trial of sixteen Poles made Rudenko famous.
The Politburo’s Choice
In late August 1945, the Soviet leaders decided to send two high-level German prisoners to stand the International Trial in Nuremberg: Hans Fritzsche, former Radio Propaganda Chief in Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, and Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, former commander in chief (until 1943) of the German Navy. They were second-rank officials in the Third Reich, but to Stalin’s embarrassment, the Western Allies had caught all the important Nazi figures. The Politburo selected the names of Fritzsche and Raeder from two separate lists prepared by SMERSH and the NKVD.
On August 18, 1945, Andrei Vyshinsky, first deputy Commissar for foreign affairs, sent his superior, Foreign Affairs Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, a list of proposed defendants for Nuremberg, who were in SMERSH’s custody. The GUKR SMERSH supplied brief biographical data for each person listed:
Top Secret
To Comrade Molotov V. M.
I consider it necessary to include the following individuals among arrestees held in the Soviet Union in the first list of main defendants at the International Tribunal court:
1. Field Marshal SCHÖRNER Ferdinand, born 1892, former commander of the German Army groups ‘South’ and ‘North’ (Courland), and from January 1945 on, Commandant of the Army Group ‘Center.’
In March 1944, SCHÖRNER headed the National Socialist Political Guidance Staff of the Armed Forces. The goal of this organization was to incite hatred among the German soldiers toward people of the anti-German coalition and especially toward nations of the Soviet Union.
In 1941, SCHÖRNER was the most reliable and trustworthy of Hitler’s confidants. He rose quickly through the ranks from Lt. Colonel to General-Fieldmarshal.
Under SCHÖRNER’s supervision, the German troops committed outrageous atrocities against the civilian population and POWs in the Baltic States. The Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Occupants in the Baltic States concluded that SCHÖRNER was responsible for these crimes.
[Schörner] admitted that, while commanding the Army Group ‘Center,’ he refused to follow the order on Germany’s surrender and continued fighting after May 8, 1945. When the situation of SCHÖRNER’s troops became hopeless, after having ordered them to continue fighting, he dressed in civilian clothes and tried to escape.
2. Goebbels’s Deputy of Propaganda FRITZSCHE Hans, born 1900, member of the National Socialist Party from 1933.
[Fritzsche] was one of the main organizers and leaders of Fascist propaganda.
During interrogations, FRITZSCHE pleaded guilty to being the head of Fascist propaganda efforts that slandered the Soviet Union, England, and America before and during World War II.
In speeches and using a radio service he organized, [Fritzsche] stirred up the German people against democratic countries.
In February 1945, on Goebbels’s order, [Fritzsche] developed a plan to create a secret radio center to be used by the German sabotage-and-terrorism organization ‘Werwolf.’
3. Vice-Admiral of the German Navy VOSS Hans-Erich, born 1897, German Navy representative at Hitler’s headquarters.
[Voss] was among those closest to Hitler. He stayed with Hitler until the last days and was one of his confidants.
Beginning in March 1943, VOSS was informed of all German Navy actions since he represented Navy Head Admiral [Karl] Doenitz at Hitler’s headquarters.
4. Plenipotentiary SS-Obergruppenführer BECKERLE Adolf, born 1902, German Ambassador to Bulgaria, former Polizeipresident of Frank-furt-on-Main and Lodz.
During interrogations, BECKERLE testified that Hitler had appointed him Ambassador to Bulgaria because he was an active functionary of the Fascist Party. He actively tried to involve Bulgaria in the war against the USSR and the Allies.
On BECKERLE’s demand, the Bulgarian Fascist government organized provocations against Soviet diplomatic representatives in Bulgaria.
In 1943, [Beckerle] organized an anti-Soviet exhibition in Sofia for anti-Soviet propaganda purposes.
On BECKERLE’s demand, the Bulgarian Fascist government intensified repressive measures against partisans.
5. Lt. General STAHEL Reiner, born 1892, head of the special staff at Hitler’s headquarters and military commandant of Warsaw and Rome.
During interrogations, STAHEL testified that, beginning in 1918 and until 1925, while in Finland, he was among the organizers of the Schutzkorps created to fight the Red Army troops.
As one of Hitler’s most reliable generals and confidants, [Stahel] was used by the German high command and personally by Hitler for special assignments.
In 1943, at the beginning of the democratic movement in Italy, [Stahel] was appointed Commandant of Rome. Using the troops under his command, [Stahel] ruthlessly suppressed democratic elements in Italy.
In 1944, on the eve of the Warsaw Uprising, Hitler personally appointed [Stahel] Commandant of Warsaw. He supervised the suppression of the Polish uprising and the destruction of the city.
In August 1944, because of Romania’s departure from the war, [Stahel] was sent there to move the German troops out of Otopeni, where they were encircled.
I ask for your instructions.
A. Vyshinsky
August 18, 1945
Sent to: Beria
To file.14
As already mentioned, SMERSH operatives captured these prisoners in Romania and Bulgaria in September 1944 and in Berlin in May 1945. By August 1945, interrogators of the 1st Section of the 2nd GUKR Department and of the 6th GUKR Department had extracted the necessary information for the biographical sketches. Later all of them, except Fritzsche, were held in MGB investigation prisons until the end of 1951, when they were finally tried and convicted.
There is Molotov’s note at the top of this letter: ‘A copy should be sent to C.[omrade] Beria for his opinion. August 20, 1945.’ Apparently, Beria responded quickly, because at the bottom of the first page, another handwritten note appears: ‘Letter No. 992/b was sent to C.[omrade] Molotov on August 27, 1945.’ This was a seven-page letter that included a list of seven German arrestees held in the GUPVI’s custody who may also have been considered for trial in Nuremberg. As in the SMERSH letter, a biographical sketch accompanied each name. The handwritten note on the last page indicates that the letter was prepared by Amayak Kobulov, first deputy head of the GUPVI:
Top Secret
Copy No. 2
August 27, 1945
992/b [in handwriting]
NKID USSR [Commissariat for Foreign Affairs]
to Comrade MOLOTOV V. M.
In addition to the list of defendants at the court sent to you by Comrade Vyshinsky, I present a list of individuals (chosen from those held in our facilities) who, in my opinion, could be placed on the list of war criminals to be tried by the International Tribunal.
1. Gross-Admiral RAEDER Erich, born 1876 in the town of Wandsbeck [near Hamburg], a German, son of a Gymnasium Director, has high education, not a Party member. From 1928 to 1943, [Raeder] was Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy. After the end of the war against Poland in 1939, [Raeder] received The Knight’s Cross.
While Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of Fascist Germany, RAEDER developed, planned, and carried out a sea war against the USSR. In 1941 and 1942, [Raeder] personally inspected Soviet bases in the Baltic and Black seas, taken by Germany.
On January 30, 1943, RAEDER resigned because of a dispute with Hitler on the requisite armament and equipment of large ships and their use in sea battle. After his resignation, Hitler promoted him to the rank of Admiral-Inspector of the German Navy.
[ …]
In the case of a decision to send the above-mentioned persons for trial by the Nuremberg Tribunal, it is necessary, in my opinion, to create a commission under the chairmanship of Com.[rade] Vyshinsky, which should include representatives of the Military Prosecutor’s Office, NKVD, ‘SMERSH’ NKO [Defense Commissariat], and so forth.
The commission should examine all documents that might be used for prosecution, if necessary, should organize an additional investigation to obtain documents that could be presented in court to support the indictment.
As a result, the commission should approve a verdict prepared by the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office for each person.
People’s Commissar of the Interior [NKVD] of the USSR
(L. BERIA)15
The other eight Germans placed on the list by Amayak Kobulov were not as important as those listed by the GUKR SMERSH. They were SA-Obergruppenführer Martin Mutschmann, former Gauleiter (Governor) of Saxony, and seven Lieutenant Generals—Friedrich Gustav Bernhardt, Hilmar Moser, Johann Georg Richert, Wilhelm Robert Oksmann, Hans Julius Traut, and Günther Walter Klammt—as well as SS-Obergruppenführer and Police General Friedrich Jeckeln. All were involved in war crimes, especially the notorious Jeckeln, who was personally responsible for ordering the deaths of over 100,000 Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies in the Baltic States during the Nazi occupation.16 Later, Bernhardt and Richert, as well as Jeckeln, were tried by Soviet military tribunals in Moscow, Minsk, and Riga respectively, in parallel with the International Nuremberg Trial. Sentenced to death, they were executed on December 30, 1945, January 30, 1946, and February 3, 1946, respectively.17 Twenty days later, in Nuremberg, Soviet Prosecutor Mark Raginsky presented excerpts from the court-martial verdict against Bernhardt as Exhibit No. USSR-90, after Bernhard had already been executed.18
On September 5, 1945, the Politburo approved the governmental commission on Nuremberg proposed by Beria.19 It had a long name: ‘The Commission on the Guidance of Preparation of Indictment Materials and Activity of Soviet Representatives at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg.’ Two weeks later the commission was renamed the Commission on the Guidance of the Work of Soviet Representatives in the International Tribunal in Nuremberg, and in official documents it was called the Governmental Commission on the Nuremberg Trial for short.20 I will refer to it as the Vyshinsky Commission.
Stalin suggested that Molotov supervise the commission, while Vyshinsky was appointed its chair. Its members were Vsevolod Merkulov and his deputy Bogdan Kobulov (NKGB); Abakumov (SMERSH); Konstantin Gorshenin, USSR General Prosecutor; Ivan Golyakov, Chairman of the Soviet Supreme Court; and Nikolai Rychkov, Commissar/Minister for Justice. Deputy Chief Prosecutor Grigorii Safonov and members of the Soviet Prosecution team in Nuremberg Lev Smirnov and Lev Sheinin, as well as the commission’s scientific consultant, Aron Trainin, frequently took part in the meetings that followed. Decisions of the commission were sent for approval to the Politburo.21
The commission was in constant contact with the Soviet team in Nuremberg. In addition, Vyshinsky himself visited Nuremberg several times. The Allied delegations had no idea about Vyshinsky’s supervisory role and they could only guess why he came to the trial. Lord Shawcross, the Attorney-General of England and Wales and then the United Kingdom’s permanent delegate to the United Nations, told Arkadii Vaksberg, an investigative journalist, in 1988:
We—I mean the British, French and Americans—simply could not figure out why he [Vyshinsky] kept coming to Nuremberg. In the end, not understanding much about the special features of the Soviet state structure, we decided that he was still the Procurator-General and this most likely explained why he was giving instructions during the trial to the prosecutors representing the Soviet side. Strictly speaking, there was nothing for him to do here in this capacity, instructions from Moscow could have been delivered another way, but, strangely enough, his visits somehow did not surprise us.22
In the absence of Vyshinsky, Rychkov chaired meetings of the Commission in Moscow. Ivan Lavrov was the Secretary of the Commission. Colonel of Justice Dmitrii Karev, a member of the Soviet team in Nuremberg, usually recorded notes of the meetings.
By August 29, the international list of the alleged major war criminals contained twenty-four names, starting with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering. 23 To bring Fritzsche safely to Nuremberg was the job of SMERSH.
The Likhachev Team
In early September 1945, Sergei Kartashov, head of the 2nd GUKR SMERSH Department, arrived in Nuremberg.24 He informed Nikitchenko and American officials that Fritzsche and Raeder would be presented in court. Back in Moscow, on September 10, Kartashov had written a detailed report to Abakumov giving his recommendations on how SMERSH representatives should organize their control of events at the pending trial.
A special group of investigators, culled from within GUKR SMERSH, would coordinate the preparation of materials for the trial.25 Led by the above-mentioned deputy head of the 6th Department, Mikhail Likhachev, it also included two main subordinates (mentioned in previous chapters): Pavel Grishaev of the 4th Department and Boris Solovov of the 2nd Department. They were young but experienced interrogators.
Mikhail Likhachev, born in 1913, joined the NKVD in 1937.26 During the war, he made his career in the Investigation Department of the UOO (by February 1942, he was already deputy head of this department) and then in the 6th Department of the GUKR SMERSH. Likhachev did not know German and spoke to the prisoners through a translator.
Pavel Grishaev, born in 1918, joined the NKVD in 1939 as a Kremlin Guard.27 In 1942–44, he served as investigator in the OO NKVD, then UKR SMERSH of the Central/1st Belorussian Front. In December 1944, Grishaev was recalled to the GUKR SMERSH in Moscow, where he became senior investigator in the 2nd Section of the 4th Department. Nikolai Kuleshov, head of this department, was known as one of the cruelest OO investigators who interrogated the Soviet military leaders arrested in June 1941. Possibly learning by example, Grishaev also became a ruthless interrogator.
Boris Solovov, even younger, was born in 1921. In 1941, at the beginning of the war, he joined the NKVD. In 1943–46, he was an authorized officer (operupolnomochennyi) in the 1st Section of Kartashov’s 2nd Department of the GUKR SMERSH. Both Grishaev and Solovov spoke fluent German.
In Nuremberg, the group became known as the Likhachev team. The other investigators of the 1st Section of Kartashov’s department, especially those with a good knowledge of German, were also involved in the work of this team in Moscow—Captain Daniil Kopelyansky, Lieutenants Gushchin and Oleg Bubnov, Junior Lieutenant Soloviev (not to be confused with Solovov), Authorized Officer Anna Stesnova, and a translator, Maria Potapova, prepared documents for the trial.28
On October 12, 1945, Bogdan Kobulov, Vasilii Chernyshev (NKVD Deputy Head), and Abakumov signed a joint letter addressed to Beria requesting his order to transport Fritzsche and Raeder from Moscow to Nuremberg. Three days later the Likhachev team brought Fritzsche to Berlin.29 Several cadets from the Military Counterintelligence School under Senior Lieutenant Gennadii Samoilov served as guards. The group also included a counterintelligence officer, Fyodor Denisov, and four female translators: Yelena Aleksandrova-Dmitrieva, Valentina Valitskaya, Olga Svidovskaya-Tabachnikova, and Elizaveta Shcheveleva-Stenina.30 These translators later assisted Soviet prosecutors and judges.
Before Raeder was taken to Berlin, he and his wife were held at one of the special NKVD mansions near Moscow. When the NKVD officers arrived to take him to the trial, they told him he would be back in a few days. Colonel Pavel Tupikov, head of the NKVD Counterintelligence Department Smersh, along with Turaev, a military translator, escorted Raeder separately from Fritzsche.31 After Tupikov left Nuremberg in January 1946, Grishaev continued to interrogate Raeder.
The two defendants and the Soviet security officers who held them lived in a mansion near Potsdam under the guard of military cadets who arrived with Likhachev. On October 18, 1945, Grishaev and Solovov presented the two defendants with the indictment signed by the Chief of Counsel of the International Military Tribunal. In response, Fritzsche immediately wrote the following:
I, Hans Fritzsche, have received today, October 18, 1945, at 19:50 Berlin time, the Indictment of the Chief of Counsel of the International Military Tribunal, a statement regarding my right to defense, a list of German lawyers, and the Rules of the International Military Tribunal in the German language. The above documents have been handed to me by Red Army Officer Grishajeff, acting on orders of the International Military Tribunal, who advised me in German on the contents of the documents and on my right to defense.32
Later, before the trial, Fritzsche expressed his opinion of the indictment: ‘It is the most terrible indictment of all time. Only one thing is more terrible: the indictment the German people will make for the abuse of their idealism.’33
Admiral Raeder, who, like Fritzsche, mentioned Grishaev in his statement about the indictment, later recalled in his memoirs: ‘This was the first time I had heard of war crimes.’34 After receiving the indictment, he asked for the notes he had left in Moscow. After a few days he received the notes and the text of the deposition he was supposed to sign. Raeder described the situation: ‘When I examined the notes and deposition, however, I refused to sign such a statement since it was [a] fabricated jumble of excerpts from my notes, taken out of context, erroneously translated, and generally misleading.’
Raeder continued: ‘A few days later Fritzsche and I were taken by automobile from Berlin to Nuremberg… Like the other defendants who had preceded us or who came after us, we were incarcerated in individual cells of the Nuremberg Criminal Prison, under glaring electric lights.’35
For the next five months, the Likhachev team became a SMERSH watchdog that controlled the Soviet delegation. Officially Grishaev and Solovov were assigned as investigators for the Chief Prosecutor of the USSR, General Rudenko. In fact, they intervened in the work of prosecutors. On November 16, 1945, at a meeting of the Vyshinsky Commission, Kobulov announced: ‘Our people, who are in Nuremberg at the moment, report to us…[that] Goering, Jodl, Keitel, and the others behave provocatively during interrogations, and that their answers frequently contain anti-Soviet declarations, while our investigator C.[omrade] [Georgii] Aleksandrov [head of the Soviet group of interrogators] responds to them weakly.’36
Three days later Vyshinsky rebutted: ‘Neither the defendants nor witnesses attacked the USSR or me personally during interrogations… The described incident took place on October 18 [1945] in my presence during the interrogation of the defendant [Hans] Frank [former Governor-General in Poland] by the American Lieutenant Colonel Hinkel. After the interrogation, Frank, in fact, called Hinkel ‘a pig’… In my opinion, this report [from Nuremberg] misinformed the government.’37
Colonel Thomas S. Hinkel of the Judge Advocate-General’s office was one of four American lawyers who interrogated defendants before the trial. During the interrogation that Vyshinsky mentioned, the defendant Frank tried to persuade Hinkel that he was innocent of the charges: ‘I want to point out that I am a believing Christian.’38 But Hinkel did not buy Frank’s sudden transformation and Frank was outraged.
Defendant Hans Fritzsche
Although Fritzsche did not belong to the highest Nazi elite, he was the highest-ranking bureaucrat captured by the Soviets. Born in 1900 in Bochum, he studied history, languages, and philosophy.39 In 1923, he joined the nationalistic party Deutschnationale Volkspartei, and in 1933, the Nazi Party. From 1932, Fritzsche headed the Wireless News Service, incorporated in 1933 into Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. In 1938, Fritzsche was appointed deputy head, and then head of the German Press Division. After this he headed the Radio Division of the Propaganda Ministry.
SMERSH operatives arrested Fritzsche in Berlin on May 2, 1945. That day he came to General Vasilii Chuikov’s headquarters, where he proposed a radio broadcast calling upon the German troops to give up all resistance. He was allowed to do so. ‘And then,’ as Fritzsche wrote later, ‘the first of many interrogations that took place in Berlin, in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, and in Nuremberg began.’40 The next day he was taken to Hitler’s Chancellery, where he saw about fifteen burned corpses, and on May 4, he was brought in to identify the corpse of his boss, Goebbels.
Until July 29, 1945, Fritzsche was held along with the dental technician Fritz Echtmann (who identified Hitler’s dentures) in Friedrichshagen Prison in Berlin.41 Finally, on July 29, 1945, Fritzsche and a group of other prisoners, including Vice Admiral Hans Voss, were flown to Moscow.
In Nuremberg, Fritzsche confronted Likhachev in the presence of members of the Western prosecution teams, telling of his treatment at Likhachev’s hands in Moscow during the investigation:
‘You know that in Moscow, you submitted me to twenty-two depositions against my present fellow-prisoners at a time when I knew nothing of an impending trial and you know that I declined to put my signature to those statements—statements which I never made. You know, too, that after three days and three nights I signed [the] twenty-third deposition, one against myself and you will remember that I did so only after some twenty alterations had been made on so-called points of honor. Curiously enough, these alterations are now missing. In addition, you know that I made the following declaration:
“I declare that no question was put to me and no answer given by me in the form in which it is set down here. I confirm the incorrectness of the wording of this deposition throughout its length. I sign solely in order that the three-man tribunal, which twice a month pronounces sentence without examining the accused…may write ‘Sentence of Death’ under my name by way of discharge…”
In the present circumstances, Colonel [Likhachev], I can only reaffirm the declaration which I made to you then.’
Both Li[kh]achev’s hands were now fidgeting. Courteously he pressed Russian cigarettes upon everyone else present: he did not offer me any.42
The hearing of Fritzsche’s personal responsibility for ‘Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity’ began at the morning session on January 23, 1946. A member of the American Prosecution team, Captain Drexel Sprecher, ended his presentation with the following conclusion:
Without the propaganda apparatus of the Nazi State it is clear that the world, including Germany, would not have suffered the catastrophe of these years; and it is because of Fritzsche’s able role on behalf of the Nazi conspirators and their deceitful and barbarous practices in connection with the conspiracy that he is called to account before this International Tribunal.43
Soon after that, on February 21, 1946, Fritzsche had a breakdown after watching a Soviet documentary on the destruction of Soviet cities and cultural monuments. Fritzsche explained to the American psychiatrist Dr. G. M. Gilbert, who visited Fritzsche in his cell: ‘I have had the feeling—of getting buried in a growing pile of filth—piling up week after week—up to my neck in it—and now—I am choking in it.’44
On June 28, 1946 Fritzsche denied all accusations. An intense dispute arose between Fritzsche and Soviet Chief Prosecutor Rudenko, whose questions consisted mostly of general accusations that had nothing to do with establishing Fritzsche’s personal guilt. Fritzsche’s answers revealed the sloppy work of Likhachev and other SMERSH investigators.
Rudenko stated that Fritzsche’s own testimony given in September 1945 in Moscow demonstrated his guilt. To Rudenko’s embarrassment, Fritzsche responded that he had been forced to sign this statement:
I signed this report but at the very moment when I signed it in Moscow I stated: ‘You can do what you like with that record. If you publish it, then nobody in Germany will believe it and no intelligent person in other countries either because this is not my language…’
Not a single one of the answers in that record was given by me in that form and I signed it for reasons which I will explain to you in detail if you want me to…
Only the signature is true.45
After squabbling with Rudenko, Fritzsche added: ‘I gave that signature after very severe solitary confinement which had lasted for several months; and…I hoped that in this manner I would at least achieve being sentenced and thus terminate my confinement.’46
Fritzsche continued: ‘I wished to make 20 or 30 alterations [in the protocol]. Some of them were granted but passages were missing wherein I said in Nuremberg that some of the answers in that protocol contained a certain amount of truth but that none of them actually do represent my own answers.’ In vain Rudenko insisted on Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner’s testimony in Moscow about Fritzsche:
Fritzsche’s political activity in his function as official radio commentator… was subordinated to the main aim of National Socialism, the unleashing of the war against democratic countries, and the contributing by all possible means to the victory of German arms. Fritzsche’s principal method…consisted of…the deliberate deception of the German people… The main guilt of people such as Fritzsche is that they did know the actual state of things, but despite this…fed people with lies.47
Obviously, a German marshal would not use such phrases as ‘the unleashing of the war against democratic countries and the contributing by all possible means to the victory of German arms’; this was a typical Soviet propaganda phrase apparently written by SMERSH investigators. Fritzsche answered Rudenko: ‘That is utter nonsense… I have never seen Herr Schörner… I do not know whether Schörner actually made this statement but I think it would be worthwhile to call General Field Marshal Schörner here as a witness, in order to ask him on what he based his judgment.’48
Rudenko did not succeed in further presenting similar excerpts from the testimonies of Vice Admiral Voss and General Reiner Stahel. Fritzsche’s counsel, Dr. Heinz Fritz, made it absolutely clear that the testimonies sounded suspiciously similar:
Mr. President, General Rudenko, during his cross examination, submitted three interrogation records… I should like to ask the High Tribunal also to compare these three records… Parts of the answers are repeated…totally, word by word… I wish to make an application that at least one of these persons who were interrogated be brought here in person for the purpose of cross-examination.49
Fritzsche added: ‘I can only ask to have all three called.’
Rudenko’s use of Vyshinsky’s technique of prosecution based on generalized accusations did not work in the international court. On October 1, 1946, Fritzsche was acquitted. The Soviet prosecutors were against this decision. Nikitchenko read a long dissenting opinion before the Tribunal with the conclusion: ‘I consider Fritzsche’s responsibility fully proven. His activity had a most basic relation to the preparation and the conduct of aggressive warfare as well as to the other crimes of Hitler’s regime.’50
Hungarian Countess Ingeborg Kalnoky, who ran a guesthouse in Nuremberg for trial witnesses, well remembered the day of Fritzsche’s acquittal:
Perhaps correctly the trial was dismissed by many Germans as a political one… Fritzsche, henchman of Goebbels, mouthpiece of the venal Nazi propaganda machine that had for so long suppressed all freedom of thought and speech, feeding the ignorant lies and hysteria, equally [went] free. But the nameless millions of the nation [the acquitted] had helped so industriously to discredit did not go free. Summarily judged, without benefit of trial, they served their misery and death.51
Four months later, on January 31, 1947, the Bavarian de-Nazification tribunal in Nuremberg sentenced Fritzsche to nine years’ hard labor in a labor camp, confiscation of his main property and the permanent loss of his civil rights. He spent four years in prison until his release in September 1950. On September 27, 1953 Fritzsche, described in his obituary as ‘silken-voiced radio chief in Adolf Hitler’s propaganda ministry,’ died in Cologne.52
The International Tribunal sentenced Admiral Raeder to life in prison. However, due to poor health, he was released from Spandau Prison on September 26, 1955. Four years later he died in Kiel.
The Team in Action
From time to time, members of the Likhachev team interrogated the defendants. A Soviet translator, Svidovskaya-Tabachnikova, later recalled Likhachev’s interrogation of Hans Frank: ‘Likhachev strictly followed a list of questions written on a piece of paper. I was shocked… In short, I could not consider the interrogation by Likhachev to be very professional.’53
Members of the main Soviet delegation guessed what these three men were doing in Nuremberg. Mark Raginsky, USSR Assistant Prosecutor, strongly opposed the presence of Solovov and Grishaev on the prosecutors’ team, openly claiming that they ‘used the work at the Tribunal only as an “umbrella” and that [they] allegedly had some other special task.’54 Apparently, one of the group’s tasks was to control the documents presented in the court. On November 26, 1945, the Vyshinsky Commission developed instructions for Soviet prosecutors. The list of issues prohibited from discussion at the trial included:
The USSR’s attitude to the Versailles Treaty.
The Soviet–German Nonaggression Pact of 1939 and all questions connected with it.
Molotov’s visit to Berlin and Ribbentrop’s to Moscow [in 1940].
Questions concerning the social and political governance in the USSR.
The Soviet Baltic republics [annexed in June 1940].
The Soviet–German agreement regarding the exchange of the German population of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia with Germany [in 1940].
The foreign policy of the Soviet Union and, in particular, the [Turkish] Straits questions [discussed by Molotov in Berlin in 1940], and on the alleged territorial claims of the USSR.
The Balkan question.
The Soviet–Polish relationship (questions of the [annexed] Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia).55
These were sensitive issues that highlighted the differences between Stalin and the Western Allies in their approaches to international politics and emphasized Stalin’s long-term goals for Soviet expansion in Europe. Vyshinsky could rely on the Likhachev team that it would do whatever it took to avoid raising these questions in the courtroom. As Grishaev stated in 1989, in Nuremberg he used to walk ‘arm in arm’ with Vyshinsky.56
Svidovskaya-Tabachnikova recalled that Likhachev was also given the task of bringing to the Nuremberg court Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, former commander of the 6th German Army that surrendered at Stalingrad in February 1943, and General Erich Buschenhagen, former Commander of the 52nd Army Corpus of Paulus’s army. A special group conveyed the two German generals; it included five GUPVI/NKVD officers and Inver Mamedov, a translator attached to the Likhachev team.57 The head of the group was Major General Il’ya Pavlov, deputy head of the Operational Department of the GUPVI, who, during the war, was deputy head of the SMERSH Directorate of the 2nd Belorussian Front, and thus well acquainted with Likhachev.
On February 11, 1946, the Soviet prosecutors suddenly produced von Paulus and Buschenhagen in the courtroom as witnesses. Stalin had secretly ordered this surprise for the court after Vyshinsky told him that the International Tribunal refused to accept the testimony von Paulus made outside of the courtroom.
Despite their cooperation with Soviet investigators and prosecutors, von Paulus and Buschenhagen were not released after the trial. While von Paulus’s release was planned for 1950, it ended up being postponed until 1953.58 In June 1950, the MVD Military Tribunal sentenced Buschenhagen to twenty-five years in prison for war crimes. Held in Prison No. 1 in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), he was released in October 1955. He died in 1994.
On November 20, 1945, three more SMERSH officers from the former UKR of the 1st Belorussian Front, Leonid Kozlovtsev, Krasilnikov, and Khelipsky arrived in Nuremberg.59 Sergei Kartashov personally approved this group, but its duties and function at the trial are unknown. The officers stayed in Nuremberg until October 1, 1946.
Undercover Confrontation
Soviet foreign intelligence also reported on events as well as on the Soviet team in Nuremberg. The secret services were convinced that American intelligence had tricked the SMERSH team and even tried to kill Likhachev. On December 8, 1945, Pavel Fitin, head of the 1st NKGB Directorate (foreign intelligence), reported to Beria:
A copy
Top Secret
To: People’s Commissar of the Interior of the USSR
Comrade BERIA
Special Report
An NKGB officer stationed in Nuremberg described conditions of work of Soviet representatives at the International Military Tribunal.
1. American counterintelligence organized external shadowing of several members of the Soviet team in Nuremberg and is trying to provoke them. At the end of November, Major TARKHOV, who arrived in Nuremberg from the [Office of the] Political Department of the Soviet Military Administration in Berlin, was approached by a man unknown to him. The stranger said he was an illegal agent who had been discharged from Soviet counterintelligence with Romanian documents, and asked [the Major] to connect him with anybody working in Soviet counterintelligence. Major TARKHOV promised to do so.
When he told SMERSH member Colonel LIKHACHEV about this conversation, [Likhachev] approved a new meeting. He ordered that the stranger be told there was no member of Soviet counterintelligence in Nuremberg. Watching the meeting [with the stranger] from his car, Com. [rade] LIKHACHEV observed the American shadow following Com. [rade] TARKHOV.
Soon after this, on November 25, 1945, the American officer HINELY [?] sent a note to Com.[rade] TARKHOV through our communication officers, inviting him to a party of American officers that would also be attended by girls. When the Soviet communication officer answered that he could not come, HINELY told him not to tell anybody about the invitation because ‘some girls’ wanted to spend the evening [personally] with him.
2. It is also necessary to note the careless behavior of many of the Soviet representatives who had recently arrived for the trial. They spent a lot of time outside on the streets, and in restaurants, having friendly drinks with the Americans. Only a small proportion of the Soviet correspondents and writers who are here for the trial actually attend [sessions at] the court systematically.
Head of the 1st NKGB Directorate—Fitin
Sent to:
C.[omrade] Molotov
C.[omrade] Vyshinsky
December 8, 1945.60
The same day there was a strange attempt on Likhachev’s life. Olga Svidovskaya-Tabachnikova recalled:
We spent many evenings in the restaurant of the Grand Hotel, which had been seriously destroyed by American bombs. There was a lobby with a revolving door and a restaurant in the part that had been somewhat restored and had lighting. Half-starved Germans entertained the Allies to the best of their abilities. The whole scene was extremely pitiful, but there was no place else [in the city] to go.
One day we—Likhachev, Grishaev, Solovov, and me—wanted to go, as usual, to the Grand Hotel, but something came up, and Likhachev could not go, so I stayed at home too. In Nuremberg, the Likhachev team was furnished with an exceptional limousine—a black and white ‘Horch’ with red leather upholstery. This was a unique car. There were rumors that the ‘Horch’ had come from Hitler’s personal garage. Likhachev regularly sat to the right of the driver…
[On the evening of December 8, 1945] Grishaev and Solovov got out of the car and entered the hotel. A minute later someone opened the right-side door [of the limousine] and Buben [the driver] was shot at close range. I think Likhachev was the real target, and the shooter had assumed [Likhachev] was sitting in his usual place… The shooter escaped. Before he collapsed, Buben managed to say: ‘An American shot me.’ Boris Solovov claims that the Americans knew very well what, in fact, the ‘Likhachev team’ was about.61
The Horch that Svidovskaya mentioned was an eight-seat hand-made Horch 951, the dream car of all high-ranking officers of the Soviet Administration in Germany. Lieutenant General Vladimir Kryukov, one of the generals closest to Marshal Zhukov, had four cars, including two Horch 951s, one of which, the Horch 951A, was made for Hitler personally. Likhachev’s Horch was possibly made for one of the defendants on trial, either Goering or Alfred Rosenberg. Apparently, Abakumov later used this Horch in Moscow to commute to the Kremlin.
Solovov was right in claiming that American intelligence was aware of the SMERSH presence in Nuremberg. A review of American military counterintelligence (CIC) reports from February 1 to June 15, 1945, reveals:
The activities of the Soviet intelligence group in Nuremberg, their previous professional experience, and their personal qualifications suggest that the members of this group were responsible to the NKGB and/or the GUKR (Counter Intelligence Administration of the Red Army) [i.e., SMERSH], despite the fact that they called themselves NKVD officers and were referred to as such by other Soviet citizens in Nuremberg. The abbreviation NKVD as used in Nuremberg was merely a general intelligence and security designation.62
But Richard W. Cutler, a former American counterintelligence (X-2 branch of the OSS) officer who was in Nuremberg during the trial, does not mention SMERSH and the NKGB in his memoirs.63 He uses the acronym NKVD to describe all Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence activity. The CIC reports also did not mention the Likhachev team or the assassination attempt on Likhachev. One of the reports stated:
Colonel Victor Staatland, alias Bendinov, aka Bimaev, appears to have been the executive or administrative officer of the NKVD Group in Nuremberg until his departure on 12 April [1946]…
Staatland was in constant communication with Moscow by telephone, usually speaking from his hotel room… In court, he sat in the press section. He was always seen in civilian clothes, on which he wore several combat ribbons.
Questioned about his German name, Staatland admitted that it was a ‘working pseudonym’ and that he is known as Bendinov in Moscow.
Another report added:
Staatland…stopped greeting General [Lev] Smirnov, one of the [Soviet] prosecutors, after the latter had talked too openly about Russia’s internal politics…
Staatland…is almost certainly an NKGB man. His detailed personal knowledge of the White Russians living abroad and his preoccupation with the White Russians in Nuremberg suggest INU [NKGB foreign intelligence] connections.64
The CIC information about ‘Colonel Staatland’ makes no sense. Obviously, this was Viktor Shtatland, a famous cameraman who shot documentary films at the fronts during the war. In Nuremberg, Rudenko showed a film called Documentary on Atrocities of the German-Fascist Occupiers, which was made with Shtatland’s participation. In the courtroom, Shtatland, as a member of the camera crew of the noted documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen, filmed the trial. After the trial, the crew produced the documentary Sud narodov (The Judgment of Nations). Naturally, Shtatland talked frequently on the phone with a Moscow film studio.
The CIC report was also wrong about the other Soviet press people: ‘Vsevolod Vitalievich Vishnevsky, Staatland’s assistant, claimed to be a colonel but was always seen in civilian clothes decorated with combat ribbons. He has probably been in intelligence work for some time… Vishnevsky was openly a “strong-arm man,” considerably lower in the administrative and social hierarchy than Staatland. He left Nuremberg on March 28… Staatland once admitted that “Vishnevsky” was not necessarily his real name.’65Even the description of this man, given in this report, ‘stocky build; stiff black hair; narrow Kalmyk eyes; high Mongolian cheekbones; generally tough appearance,’ points to Vsevolod Vishnevsky, a well-known and popular Soviet playwright who also wrote for the newspaper Pravda. He was neither Shtatland’s assistant nor a colonel.
Prosecutor Lev Sheinin was the third person who attracted the CIC’s attention: ‘General Leon Sheinin, who departed from Nuremberg with Staatland on 12 April, was officially a military jurist, but unlike some of his associates appeared to have intelligence background rather than a background in military and international law. His connections with Staatland were very close.’66 Lev Sheinin was, in fact, a jurist; he served as Vyshinsky’s assistant in the 1930s, then headed the Investigation Department at the USSR Prosecutor’s Office. Also, he published detective fiction stories. In 1942, Sheinin defended two Soviet agents in an Ankara court.67 These agents had provided their Turkish adherent with a bomb in an attempt to assassinate the German Ambassador Franz von Papen, now a defendant in Nuremberg. Sheinin, a member of the team of Soviet prosecutors in Nuremberg, also headed a group of Soviet writers and journalists.68
The murder of Likhachev’s driver on December 8, 1945 remains a mystery. In Moscow, Pravda published an angry article about the incident.69 No action followed.
The Mysterious Death of General Zorya
In a March 11, 1946 letter to Robert Jackson, Rudenko openly described the issues the Soviet delegation did not want to hear in the court.70 For some reason, this letter omitted three of the points mentioned on the above list, about the Versailles Treaty (no. 1) and about the Baltic countries (nos. 5 and 6).
Rudenko’s letter and his agreement with the Allied delegations did not save the Soviet prosecution from a courtroom discussion of secret protocols that were part of the Soviet–German Non-Aggression Pact signed in August 1939. On March 25, 1946, Dr. Alfred Seidl, counsel to Rudolf Hess, presented to the court an affidavit written by the former chief of the legal department of the German Foreign Office, Dr. Friedrich Gaus.71 Gaus had participated in negotiations with the Soviets in Moscow in 1939, and his affidavit attested to the existence of secret protocols. Then, during the cross-examination by Seidl, the defendant Joachim von Ribbentrop, former German foreign minister, and then the witness Ernst von Weizsäcker, former state secretary in the German Foreign Office, confirmed Gaus’s affidavit and details of the secret protocols it contained.72
After a recess, the president ruled: ‘The Tribunal has decided not to put the document to the witness.’ Apparently, during the recess a confidential agreement was worked out with Rudenko.
For Rudenko’s assistant, Major General of Justice Nikolai Zorya, Seidl’s démarche ended up being fatal. On May 21, 1946, Seidl visited the Soviet prosecutors’ office, wishing to discuss photocopies of the secret protocols with Rudenko. Only General Zorya was in the office, and Seidl talked to him instead. As Seidl recalled, after thinking over the matter of the photocopies, General Zorya answered: ‘There is no point in having such a conversation.’73
The next day the American newspaper St. Louis Post-Dispatch published texts of the protocols. It is unknown whether Seidl had given a copy to the newspaper. The day after that, on May 23, Gennadii Samoilov, a SMERSH officer, found General Zorya dead in his hotel room with a wound to his head.
Until his own death in 1998, General Zorya’s son, Yurii, was convinced that his father’s death was connected with the presentation of the Katyn massacre question by Soviet prosecutors in Nuremberg, an issue tightly connected with the secret Soviet–German protocols.74 From the beginning Rudenko and other Soviet prosecutors tried to include in the indictment the accusation that German defendants had killed 11,000 Polish officers taken as prisoners of war in 1939 by the Red Army. Despite Rudenko’s objections, on March 12, 1946, the Tribunal complied with the request of Goering’s counsel, Dr. Otto Stahmer, to call witnesses to rebut the Soviet version of events.75 The cross-examination of witnesses presented by both sides took place on July 1 and 2, 1946.76 The testimonies of German witnesses destroyed the Soviet version. Tatiana Stupnikova, the Russian translator of the German testimony, recalled that all Soviet representatives who were in the courtroom on July 1, 1946, called that day ‘the black day of the Nuremberg Trial.’77 However, the Tribunal did not make any conclusive statement on the issue, and the Soviet prosecutors made no attempt to return to the Katyn question again.
No direct evidence presented in Nuremberg connected General Zorya with the issue of the Katyn massacre. The published minutes of the meeting of the Vyshinsky Commission on May 21, 1946, containing instructions regarding Katyn, did not mention Zorya.78Abakumov was ordered to prepare Bulgarian witnesses, while Merkulov’s duties included preparing Soviet medical experts, medical documents (which were forged), and a German witness. Vyshinsky was placed in charge of a documentary film about the massacre, and USSR Chief Prosecutor Safonov was responsible for preparing Polish witnesses. Since this was a plan involving massive falsification, it is possible that Zorya opposed it.
Prosecutors Rudenko and Gorshenin informed Stalin that Zorya had committed suicide. This is also possible if Zorya was afraid of Stalin’s retaliation after the secret protocols appeared in an American newspaper.79 In Nuremberg, Likhachev disseminated a rumor that Stalin said about Zorya: ‘Bury him like a dog!’80
The Soviet delegation was suspiciously hasty in getting rid of the body. On the morning of the death, Rudenko went to the office of chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson to ask his permission to move Zorya’s body from Nuremberg in the American occupation zone to Leipzig in the Soviet zone.81 Rudenko told Jackson that Zorya had accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun. When Jackson sent two of his people to check out the story, they informed him that it was highly unlikely that a Soviet general would have been cleaning his own gun with the muzzle pointed between his eyes. It looked more as if somebody had shot Zorya at close range. If so, either Likhachev or his subordinate Samoilov, who supposedly found the body, would most likely have carried out the assassination.
The events that followed were even more suspicious. D. M. Reznichenko, Soviet Military Prosecutor in Leipzig, later recalled having received two phone calls from Stalin’s secretariat regarding Zorya’s funeral.82 First he was ordered to bring the body to Moscow. The second order was to bury Zorya’s body in an unmarked grave in Leipzig without performing an autopsy. By the next day, May 24, Prosecutor Yurii Pokrovsky had escorted Zorya’s body from Nuremberg to Leipzig. The documents identify Zorya as a private instead of a major general, and later both the name of General Zorya and his photos were removed from all records and reports published in the USSR on the International Nuremberg Trial.
The circumstances of Nikolai Zorya’s death remain a mystery. Since Stalin personally ordered that the body be buried secretly without an autopsy, it is most likely that Stalin gave the earlier order to kill Zorya and that the murderer was Likhachev or his subordinate. Or Stalin deeply hated Zorya for killing himself and this way escaping Stalin’s punishment.
The Team Leaves Nuremberg
Soon after Zorya’s death Likhachev and his team were ordered to leave Nuremberg. In 1951, the arrested Lev Sheinin testified on the reason for Likhachev’s dismissal: ‘Likhachev forced a young interpreter who resided in our building to live with him. After she got pregnant, Likhachev forced her to have an abortion. The operation was performed by a German doctor—unsuccessfully.’83 Rudenko informed Chief USSR Prosecutor Gorshenin about the situation, and Gorshenin reported Likhachev’s behavior to the Central Committee and Abakumov. Likhachev was ordered back to Moscow, and the team left Nuremberg.
In Nuremberg, Colonel Vsevolod Syuganov, deputy head of the 1st Department of the GUKR SMERSH, replaced Likhachev.84 Syuganov joined the OGPU in 1927, and from 1932 on, he worked in Moscow. At the beginning of the war he served in the 3rd UOO Department (counterintelligence in armored troops and artillery), then in the 1st GUKR SMERSH Department (operational work in the NKO). Syuganov’s team included five officers from GUKR in Moscow and an officer from the UKR SMERSH of the GSVOG.85 The fact that one of the officers was from the 8th GUKR Department (ciphering) points to the possibility that the team reported directly to GUKR.
In Moscow, according to Sheinin, Likhachev was reprimanded and spent ten days under arrest as a punishment for his immoral behavior in Nuremberg. However, this brief episode did not ruin his career. He was appointed deputy head of the MGB Department for Investigation of Especially Important Cases or OVD (former 6th GUKR SMERSH Department). Grishaev continued serving in the same department, while Solovov remained in the Investigation Division of the 4th Department of the 3rd MGB Main Directorate (military counterintelligence). All three participated in investigating prisoners from Europe and in 1947–53, of the Soviet ‘enemies of the people.’ Syuganov’s team returned to Moscow soon after that of Likhachev.
Notes
1. Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (New York: Viking, 1994), 32–34.
2. Arkadii Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky, translated from the Russian by Jan Butler (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 101 and 134.
3. A report of the Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to the Presidium of the Central Committee, signed by P. Pospelov and A. Aristov and dated February 9, 1956. Document No. V-15 in Reabilitatsiya: Kak eto bylo. Mart 1953–fevral’ 1956 gg. Dokumenty Presidiuma TsK KPSS i drugie materially, edited by A. Artizov et al., 317–65 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2000) (in Russian).
4. Ibid., 343–4.
5. George Ginsburgs, Moscow’s Road to Nuremberg:The Soviet Background to the Trial (The Hague: Martinus Nujhoff Publishers, 1996), 95–115.
6. Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949), 334.
7. Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 63.
8. Ibid., 64.
9. Yurii Shcheglov, ‘Pered Nurenbergom…’ Kontinent, no. 120 (2004) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/continent/2004/120/shegl14-pr.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
10. Aleksandr Zvyiagintsev and Yurii Orlov, Prokurory dvukh epoch. Andrei Vyshinsky i Roman Rudenko (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2001), 208–12 (in Russian).
11. On the arrest of the sixteen Polish leaders see Document Nos. 42-44 in Iz Varshavy. Moskva, 148–59.
12. Politburo decision P45/277, dated June 13, 1945. See text in ibid., 216.
13. Although many sources claim that General Okulicki was killed, medical documents in his prison file (a copy of the file was handed over to Polish officials in 1990) point to death from natural causes.
14. ‘On the inclusion in the list of main defendants,’ dated August 18, 1945. GARF, Fond R-9401, Opis’ 2 (Molotov’s NKVD/MVD Special Folder), Delo 103, L. 356–7.
15. ‘A list of War Criminals Who Should Be Tried by the International Tribunal,’ dated August 27, 1945. GARF, Fond R-9401, Opis’ 2 (Molotov’s NKVD/MVD Special Folder), Delo 103, L. 330–6.
16. See, for instance, a transcript of Friedrich Jeckeln’s interrogation on December 14, 1945, http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/ftp.py?people//j/jeckeln. friedrich/jeckeln-interrogation.1245, retrieved September 9, 2011.
17. GUPVI’s registration cards of Bernhardt and Richert in I. V. Bezborodova, Generaly Vermakhta v plenu (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvemmyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1998), 61 and 140 (in Russian). In 1947, Generals Klammt and Traut were sentenced to a 25-year imprisonment in labor camps; in October 1955, they were repatriated to Germany. Their cards in ibid., 99 and 146.
18. I will cite the Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 –1 October 1946 (Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein & Co., Inc.) as The Nuremberg Trial. The Nuremberg Trial, Vol. 8, 105, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-22-46.asp, retrieved September 9, 2011.
19. Politburo decisions P46/238 and P46/240, dated September 5 and 6, 1945. Politburo TsK RKP(b)-VKP9b). Povestki dnya zasedanii. T. 3, 1940–1953, edited by G. M. Adibekov, 399 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001) (in Russian). In April 1946, the new MVD Minister Sergei Kruglov replaced Merkulov in the Commission.
20. Politburo decision P47/131, dated September 21, 1945. Politburo, 409.
21. Yu. Zorya, ‘“Prokurorskaya diplomatiya” Vyshinskogo,’ in Inkvizitor. Stalinskii prokuror Vyshinskii (Moscow: Respublika, 1992), 208-88 (in Russian); N. Lebedeva, ‘Kak gotovilsya Nurenbergskii protsess,’ Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’, No. 8 (1996), 99–108 (in Russian).
22. Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor, 260.
23. Details, for instance, in Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (New York: Viking, 2001), 41–42.
24. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki i arkhivnye dokumenty, edited by V. S. Khristoforov et al., 322 (Moscow: Glavarkhiv Moskvy, 2003) (in Russian).
25. Vladimir Abarinov, ‘V kuluarakh dvortsa yustitsii,’ Gorizont, no. 5 (1990), 61–70 (in Russian).
26. Biography of M. T. Likhachev (1913–1954) in Petrov, Kto rukovodil organzmi gosbezopasnosti, 548.
27. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 271.
28. Ibid., 325.
29. P. I. Grishaev and B. A. Solovov, ‘Domyslami nel’zya snyat’ ‘khrestomatiinyi glyanets’ s istorii Nyurenbergskogo protsessa,’ Gorizont, No. 5 (1990), 38–43 (in Russian).
30. Communication by Vladimir Abarinov, 1990.
31. Tupikov was in Nuremberg until January 1946. He left for Moscow and then escorted the Japanese arrestees to the trial in Tokyo.
32. Declarations written by Fritzsche and Raeder on October 18, 1945. The Nuremberg Trial, Vol. 1, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/v1-08.htm, retrieved September 9, 2011.
33. G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 7.
34. Erich Raeder, My Life, translated from the German by Henry W. Drexel (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute, 1960), 386.
35. Ibid., 386–7.
36. Minutes of the Vyshinsky Commission meeting on November 16, 1945, in Nataliya Lebedeva, ‘Neizvestnyi Nurenberg,’ Rodina, no. 6-7 (1991) (in Russian).
37. Vyshinsky’s telegram to Gorshenin, dated November 19, 1945, in ibid.
38. Cited in Overy, Interrogations, 204.
39. Anton Joachimsthaler, The Last Days of Hitler: Legend, Evidence and Truth, English translation by Helmut Bogler (London: Cassell & Co., 2000), 288; ‘Hans Fritzsche’ in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Vol. II, Chapter XVI, 1035–52, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/nca/nca-02/nca-02-16-21-index.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
40. Document No. 193 in Russkii Arkhiv, 15 (4/5), 281–2.
41. Echtmann’s testimony on April 27, 1953, quoted in Joachimsthaler, The Last Days, 238–9.
42. Hans Fritzsche, The Sword in the Scales, as told to Hildegard Springer, translated by Diana Pyke and Heinrich Fraenkel (London: Allan Wingate, 1953), 41.
43. The Nuremberg Trial, Vol. 6, 72, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/01-23-46. asp, retrieved February 20, 2011.
44. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, 163–4.
45. The Nuremberg Trial, Vol. 17, 202, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/06-28-46.asp, retrieved September 9, 2011.
46. Ibid., 203.
47. Ibid., 215.
48. Ibid., 215–6.
49. Ibid., 231.
50. Nikitchenko’s speech, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/juddiss.asp, retrieved September 9, 2011.
51. Ingeborg Kalnoky and Ilona Herisko, The Witness House (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1974), 228–9.
52. Ellensburg Daily Record, September 26, 1953, 14.
53. Quoted in Abarinov, ‘V kuluarakh.’
54. Grishaev and Solovov, ‘Domyslami nel’zya snyat’ ‘khrestomatiinyi glyanets’, 41.
55. Quoted in Abarinov, ‘V kuluarakh,’ 68–69, and discussed in Francine Hirsch, ‘The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,’ The American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008), 701–30.
56. Arkadii Vaksberg, ‘Zasluzhennyi deyatel,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, March 13 (1989), 13 (in Russian).
57. I. F. Finyaev, ‘General-feldmarshal F. Paulus svidetel’stvuet,’ VIZh, no. 5 (1990), 52–54 (in Russian).
58. Report by Vyshinsky and Kruglov with an attached draft of Decision of the USSR Council of Ministers, dated March 29, 1950. Cited in Arkhiv noveishei istorii Rossii. T. 1.’Osobaya papka’ I. V. Stalina, edited by V. A. Kozlov and S. V. Mironenkom 307 (Moscow: Blagovest, 1994) (in Russian).
59. Anatrolii Tereshchenko, SMERSH v boyu (Moscow: Yuza-Eksmo, 2010), 187 (in Russian).
60. Fitin’s report, dated December 8, 1945. GARF, Fond R-9401, Opis’ 2 (Molotov’s NKVD/MVD Special Folder), Delo 105, L. 354–5.
61. Quoted in Abarinov, ‘V kuluarakh.’
62. Drafts (LX-1 and LX-2) and the final version of the report ‘General Observations on the Soviet Intelligence Mission in Nuremberg’ dated October 16, 1946 (February 1—June 15, 1946). NARA (Washington), RG 226, Entry 213, Box 2.
63. Richard W. Cutler, Counterspy: Memoirs of a Counterintelligence Officer in World War II and the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, Inc., 2004), 125—31.
64. The final report, NARA, RG 226, Entry 213, Box 2.
65. Report LX-1 dated February 1–June 15, 1946, NARA, RG 226, Entry 213, Box 2.
66. Ibid.
67. Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor, 232–3.
68. Boris Yefimov, Desyat’ desyatiletii. O tom, chto videl, perezhil, zapomnil (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), 416–7, 428 (in Russian).
69. Pravda, December 12, 1945.
70. Abarinov, ‘V kuluarakh,’ 69–70.
71. Details in Zorya, ‘Prokurorskaya diplomatiya,’ 279–82.
72. The Nuremberg Trial, Vol. 10, 310–4, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/04-01-46.asp; Vol. 14, 285, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/05-21-46.asp, retrieved September 9, 2011.
73. Alfred Seidl, Der Fall Rudolf Hess 1941—1987: Dokumentation des Verteidigers (München: Universitas, 1988), 170.
74. Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich, ‘Doklad Zori,’ Russkii Zhurnal, November 24, 2000 (in Russian), http://old.russ.ru/ist_sovr/other_lang/20001124.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
75. Application of Dr. Otto Stahmer on March 8, 1946, in The Nuremberg Trial, Vol. 9, 2–3, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/03-08-46.asp, retrieved September 9, 2011.
76. Ibid., Vol. 17, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/07-01-46.asp; http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/07-02-46.asp, retrieved September 9, 2011. More information in Taylor, The Anatomy of Nuremberg, 466–72.
77. T. S. Stupnikova, ‘…Nichego, krome pravdy…’ Nurnberg—Moskva: Vospominaniya (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1998), 104 (in Russian).
78. Transcript of the meeting on March 21, 1946. Document No. 222 in Katyn. Mart 1940 g.—sentyabr’ 2000 g. Rasstrel. Sud’by zhivykh. Ekho Katyni. Dokumenty, edited by N. S. Lebedeva, N. A. Petrasova, B. Voshchinski, et al. (Moscow: Ves’ Mir, 2001), 555–6 (in Russian).
79. An interview with the historian Nataliya Lebedeva, in Yekaterina Latartseva, ‘Nepriyatnaya pravda Nyurnberg’, Trud, no. 149, August 31, 2011 (in Russian), http://luke.trud.ru/index.php/article/31-08-2011/267017_neprijatnaja_pravda_njurnberga.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
80. Stupnikova, ‘…Nichego krome pravdy…’ 104.
81. Persico, Nuremberg, 343–4.
82. A letter of D. M. Reznichenko to Yu. N. Zorya, quoted in Abarinov, ‘V kuluarakh,’ page 68.
83. Sheinin’s testimony quoted in Aleksandr Zvyagintsev and Yurii Orlov, Prokurory dvukh epokh. Abdrei Vyshinsky i Roman Rudenko (Moscow:Olma-Press), 215 (in Russian).
84. Grishaev and Solovov, ‘Domyslami nel’zya snyat.’
85. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 324.