Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust. Michael J. Bazyler

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СКАЧАТЬ of 33,000 exterminated Soviet citizens given by accused and some witnesses is only approximate and undoubtedly too low.

      In the 13 grave-pits opened in Kharkov and its immediate vicinity were found a huge number of corpses. In most graves they lay in extreme disorder, fantastically intertwined, forming tangles of human bodies defying description. The corpses lay in such a manner that they can be said to have been dumped or heaped but not buried in common graves. In two pits in the Sokolniki forest park bodies were found lying in straight rows, face downward, arms bent at the elbow and hands pressed to faces or necks. All the bodies had bullet wounds through the heads. Such a position of the bodies was not accidental. It proves that the victims were forced to lie down face downward and were shot in that position…. The fact revealed by the investigation—namely, that before being murdered Soviet citizens were stripped of their footwear—is fully confirmed by the medico-legal examinations: during exhumation the experts in most cases discovered naked or half-naked bodies.

      In order to ascertain which Soviet citizens were exterminated and in what manner, the experts exhumed and examined 1,047 bodies in Kharkov and its environs. These included the bodies of 19 children and adolescents, 429 women and 599 men. The dead ranged in age from two to seventy years. The fact that the bodies of children, adolescents, women and old men as well as invalids were discovered in grave-pits with civilian clothes and articles of domestic use and personal effects on the bodies or near them proves that the German fascist authorities exterminated Soviet citizens regardless of sex or age. On the other hand, the fact that [among] the bodies of young and middle-age men were found clothes of military cut worn in the Red Army, also articles of military equipment (pots, mugs, belts, etc.) is evidence of Soviet war prisoners. […] On the basis of all the combined data of their proceedings—the medico-legal experts have established the presence of: (a) A vast number of burial sites in the city of Kharkov and its immediate environs. (b) A huge number of bodies in the grave-pits. (c) Varying times of burial in various graves. (d) Varying degrees of preservation of the bodies in the same graves. (e) Distinction of bodies in regard to sex and age. (f) Uniformity of methods of extermination of human beings.

      We regard the above as proofs of systematic, methodically organized, mass extermination of Soviet civilians and war prisoners.³⁴

      The defense strategy was to argue that ultimate guilt for the defendants’ crimes lay with the Nazi regime and immediate higher-ups. Langheld explained: “I fulfilled the orders of my superiors. Had I not done so I would have been court-martialed.”³⁵ Retzlaff stated: “I plead guilty to all the crimes I have committed upon the orders of my immediate command.”³⁶ The reliance on following superior orders and the defense of duress were, of course, the most-repeated defenses in subsequent trials of Germans and local accomplices by the Allies, both at Nuremberg and thereafter.

      On the morning of December 18, 1943, after three days of testimony, prosecutor Dunayev gave his closing argument. While seeking to confirm that the defendants all acted on the superior orders of others, he argued that this should not exculpate defendants from their personal guilt. In so doing, Dunayev utilized an argument that was later to be used in the Nuremberg trials: German law itself rejected the defense of superior orders. The precedent specifically relied on by Dunayev was a result of the trials held in Weimar Germany after the First World War before the German Supreme National Tribunal at Leipzig, where German judges found German military defendants guilty of war crimes.³⁷

      One of the classic decisions from the Leipzig tribunal is the Llandovery Castle case in 1921, in which two German naval submarine officers were convicted of war crimes for shooting survivors in lifeboats after torpedoing the Canadian hospital ship Llandovery Castle, despite the fact that their acts of shooting upon the lifeboats was carried out on orders of their submarine captain. Dunayev specifically referred to the case in his closing argument.³⁸

      Dunayev concluded on an emotional note. After an obligatory nod to “[t]he heroic Red Army, led by the great Stalin,” he ended:

      Concluding my speech for the prosecution, I appeal to you, citizen judges, to inflict severe punishment on the three base representatives of fascist Berlin, and on their abominable accomplice, who are sitting in the dock, to punish them for their bloody crimes, for the sufferings and the blood, for the tears, for the lives of our children, of our wives and mothers, of our sisters and brothers!

      Today they are answering to the Soviet Court, to our people, to the whole world, for the felonies they committed on a scale and of a baseness far surpassing the blackest pages of human history, the horrors of the Middle Ages and of barbarism! Tomorrow their superiors will have to answer—the chieftains of these bandits who invaded our peaceful, happy land on which our people toiled, reared their children, and built our free State. I accuse Retzlaff, Ritz, Langheld, and Bulanov of the crimes specified in Part I of the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., dated 19th April 1943.

      In the name of the law and of justice, in the name of tens of thousands of peoples maimed and tortured to death, in the name of the entire people—I, as State Prosecutor, beg you, citizen judges, to sentence all four base criminals to death by hanging.³⁹

      Defense counsel did not argue with the prosecution’s request for a guilty verdict, only that extenuating circumstances called for the defendants’ lives to be spared. Defense counsel Kommodov explained: “[T]hese men were made into assassins by, first of all, killing their souls, and it is this doubt which gives me, comrades, judges, the moral right to pose the question of the possibility of a lesser penalty than that demanded by the Prosecutor.”⁴⁰ His colleague, defense counsel Kaznacheyev, described the crimes as being committed by an army in which “human feelings were considered a weakness, and ruthlessness and fanaticism a virtue.”⁴¹ Focusing on defendant Retzlaff, Kaznacheyev argued that because “Retzlaff … is now conscious of what he has done and has undergone a psychological transformation, I consider it possible to ask that his life be spared.”⁴² With regard to Bulanov, the defense argued that he also had repented, and this should be taken into account in the determination of a final sentence.⁴³

      The four defendants were allowed to make final statements. Langheld stated: “I do not want to minimize my guilt in any way, but I should like to point out that the underlying reasons for all the atrocities and crimes of the Germans in Russia are to be sought in the German Government…. The Hitlerite regime has succeeded in stifling the finest feelings of the German people, by implanting base instincts in them.”⁴⁴ According to Langheld, who argued that he had to follow the evil “orders or directives” of his superiors, like the deceased, “I was also a victim of these orders and directives.”⁴⁵ Retzlaff repeated the defense of compulsion: “If I had not obeyed these orders, I would have been put in the same position as my victims.”⁴⁶ Bulanov begged: “I ask one thing of you, citizen judges, that in passing sentence you spare my life so that I may in the future atone for my guilt before the country.”⁴⁷

      Ritz, the young lawyer, gave the most eloquent speech in an attempt to save his life. Like Langheld, he argued the defense of duress: “I would like to ask the Court to take into consideration an old principle of Roman Law: Crime under duress. You must believe me that if I had not obeyed orders I should have been arraigned before a German military tribunal and sentenced to death.”⁴⁸ But he then detailed particular circumstances that led him to commit his crimes:

      I beg you, gentlemen of the Court, also to take into consideration the facts of my life. When the Hitlerite system came to power I was a child of only thirteen. From that time on I was subjected to the systematic and methodical influence of the Hitlerite system and education in the spirit of the legend of the superiority of the German race; an education which taught me that only the German people were destined to rule, and that other nations and races were inferior and should be exterminated. I was subjected to systematic training by such teachers as Hitler, [Alfred] Rosenberg, and Himmler, who educated the whole German people in the same spirit.

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