Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust. Michael J. Bazyler

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СКАЧАТЬ sources, although these were encountered before the war. I have in mind the idea that the Russian people were uncultured and inferior. That is what they taught us. Then, with total mobilization I was sent to the front. When I reached the Eastern Front I was convinced that there was not a word of truth in these fables of Hitler, Rosenberg, and others; that on the Eastern Front the Germans did not have the slightest understanding of any tenets of international law; that there was no justice here in all the actions of the German authorities. But nothing remained to me but to continue along the same path. On the Eastern Front, I was also convinced of another thing, namely that a system on the banner which is inscribed the words “murder and atrocities” cannot be a right system.

      I realize that the destruction of this system would be an act of justice. I am young. Life is still only beginning with me. I request you to spare my life so that I may devote myself to the struggle against that system.⁴⁹

      The tribunal judges returned with a verdict later that evening. All four defendants were found guilty. The tribunal described the individual guilt of each defendant as follows:

      • Wilhelm Langheld … personally fabricated a number of cases in which about 100 perfectly innocent Soviet war prisoners and civilians were shot.

      • Hans Ritz … directed the shootings carried out by the S.D. Sonderkommando in Taganrog, and during the examination of prisoners beat them up with ramrods and rubber truncheons, thus trying to extort from them false statements.

      • Reinhard Retzlaff … tried to extort from them [Soviet civilians] false statements by means of torture—plucking out their hair and torturing them with needles, drew up fictitious reports in the case of 28 arrested Soviet citizens…. He personally drove into the “murder van” Soviet citizens doomed to death, accompanied the “murder van” to the place of unloading and took part in the burning of bodies of asphyxiated people.

      • Mikhail Petrovich Bulanov, having betrayed the Socialist motherland, voluntarily sided with the enemy, joined the German service as a chauffeur with the Kharkov Gestapo branch, personally took part in the extermination of Soviet citizens by means of the “murder van,” drove peaceful Soviet citizens to the place of shooting and took part in the shooting of sixty children.⁵⁰

      All four defendants were sentenced to death by hanging, with no right to appeal. As Stevens observes: “The sentence of hanging was read by the chief judge around midnight, in a final blaze of klieg projectors.”⁵¹

      The next morning, on December 19, 1943, at 11 a.m., the defendants were publicly hanged in Kharkov City Square. Stevens describes the hanging:

      It was all over in a few moments. The defendants were hoisted into the back of four open trucks and stood on stools. Then the nooses were looped around their necks. There was no blindfolding. During the preliminaries three of the four prisoners had to be propped up. Bulanov had fainted; Ritz and Retsalu [Retzlaff] had turned pasty white; they drooled at the mouths and their knees gave way. Only Langheld, the old soldier, remained stiff as a ramrod throughout, never once flinching. Once the nooses had been adjusted, at a signal the trucks pulled away and the four were left dangling and kicking in mid air.⁵²

      In 1944, the Soviet Union released a full-length documentary of the trial, which was screened throughout the Soviet Union and also in London and New York. Seven months after the trial, Life magazine published a full two-page spread with photos (taken from the documentary film stills) and brief descriptions of the trial and its participants.

      The Kharkov Trial’s Three Audiences and the Absence of Jews as Victims

      The Soviets organized the Kharkov trial for three audiences: (1) their domestic audience, the Soviet populace fighting for their liberation from Germany; (2) their international audience, the U.S.S.R.’s British and American allies with whom they were in a common cause to defeat Nazi Germany; and (3) their enemy, the German military and German political leaders. In this sense, the Kharkov trial was a “show trial,” where political considerations led to the creation of the judicial proceedings. Stalin’s strategy towards these three audiences each featured different considerations, and the trial was supposed to satisfy all of these.

      On the home front, Stalin used the media to publicize the trial and link it to the victories of the Red Army.⁵³ Not only did the publicity aim to promote a positive image of the Soviet Union, but also a negative image of the enemy to “satisfy popular demand for revenge and to stimulate further hatred of the enemy.”⁵⁴ The Soviet Union, in the view of American Ambassador Averell W. Harriman, “meant to show Soviet citizens that the government was sincere in its promise to punish the Germans and to lose no time in doing so.”⁵⁵ The Soviet official daily Pravda declared: “The sword of the Red Army and the armies of our Allies are victoriously preceding the sword of justice…. The sword will not be sheathed until the leaders of the cursed Fascist band shall answer with their heads for their crimes against humanity.”⁵⁶ In effect, Stalin wanted to keep Soviet spirits high in order to ensure success in the war effort.

      On the international front, Stalin wanted to exhibit the Soviets’ determination to track down, and hold responsible, war criminals.⁵⁷ Additionally, Stalin may have wanted to ensure that his allies, the British and Americans, would “keep their pledge about bringing ‘war criminals’ to trial.”⁵⁸

      Finally, Stalin sought to deter Germans from creating further harm while they were in retreat from Soviet territory. Harriman asserted that the Soviets sought to create a fear of retribution among the German army ranks and the SS as well as to encourage the Soviet resolve “to hold individual Germans responsible for crimes committed by them even though they were acting on direct orders from their superiors.”⁵⁹ An article in the Washington Post posited at the time: “The Kharkov trial is a warning to th[e German nation], a warning not merely to Hitler and his hierarchy, not merely to Himmler and his menagerie of trained brutes, but also to the rank and file in the German army, to the German officer class, to Germans generally that as far as the Allies are concerned guilt will be personal as well as collective.”⁶⁰

      In reviewing the Kharkov trial proceedings, we observe one glaring omission: the word evrei (Jew) is never uttered during the trial nor does it appear in any court document. Rather, the primary murder victims of the German invaders are described in generic terms as “civilian Soviet people,” “Soviet citizens,” or “peaceful civilians.” The initial indictment termed the herding of the Jews of Kharkov into a ghetto as the “forceful resettlement of Soviet citizens”—hiding the fact that only Jews were forced to ghettoize while the rest of the local population were free, for the most part, to go about their daily lives, albeit under German occupation.

      Even when different groups are mentioned, the Jews are specifically omitted. In his closing address, Prosecutor Dunayev refers to the extermination campaign fashioned by the Nazi leaders:

      It is a matter of common knowledge that these [atrocities at Kharkov] are no accidental crimes of individual Germans, but a thoroughly considered, well-worked-out programme for the extermination of the Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and other peoples, that this was a system of annihilation of the population in the temporary occupied districts of the Soviet Union.⁶¹

      In their verdict, the judges found Langheld guilty of “shooting and atrocities against … the civilian population.” Ritz was also found guilty of “shooting Soviet civilians.” Retzlaff and Bulanov “personally drove into the ‘murder van’ Soviet citizens doomed to death” and “personally took part in the extermination of Soviet citizens by means of the ‘murder van,’” respectively, without mentioning that it was Jews who were in those vans. The verdict also completely de-Judaizes the ghettoization of the Jews of Kharkov and the Drobitsky Yar massacre, referring to “Soviet civilians … [being] turned out of their houses in СКАЧАТЬ