Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust. Michael J. Bazyler

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СКАЧАТЬ two to three hundred to a gully in the vicinity and were shot.”⁶²

      In publicizing the Kharkov trial, noted Soviet war correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg tried to correct this glaring omission against his Jewish brethren by writing in his dispatches “explicitly about the Jewish victims and descri[bing] with contempt how German officers spoke without emotion about helpless [Jewish] women and children, as if hoping they could ‘emerge dry from the water.’”⁶³ Robert Chandler explains the Soviet policy of avoiding the mentioning of Jews as specific targets of the Nazi murder process:

      The official Soviet line … was that all nationalities had suffered equally under Hitler; the standard retort to those who emphasized the suffering of the Jews was “Do not divide the dead!” Admitting that Jews constituted the overwhelming majority of the dead would have [also] entailed that other Soviet nationalities—and especially Ukrainians—had been accomplices in the genocide; in any case, Stalin was anti-Semitic.⁶⁴

      The omission of Jews from the historiography of the Great Patriotic War continues, unfortunately, to the present day. In 2000, more than a half-century after the trial, the Drobitsky Yar Memorial Committee in Kharkov installed a plaque at the entrance of the Kharkov Theater to commemorate the trial. It reads, in Ukrainian:

      In this building, on 15–18 December, 1943 there took place the first trial in history of war criminals for atrocities they committed against the civilian population of Kharkov and Kharkov region, who, according to verdict of the Military Tribunal of the 4th Ukrainian Front, were sentenced to death by hanging.

      Was the Kharkov Trial Another Typical Stalinist Show Trial?

      The show trial is one of the special hallmarks of the Stalin era and of Stalinism. The first Stalinist purge trial of fellow Communist Party members in August 1936 typifies the process by which Soviet courts became instruments of political repression. Sixteen party leaders were charged in organizing a “terrorist” center on behalf of the exiled Leon Trotsky. After their arrest and interrogation, most confessed to the false charges—a common occurrence in such trials. Stalin’s instructions to the secret police, the NKVD, for interrogation were as follows: “Mount your prisoner and do not dismount until they have confessed.”⁶⁵ Defendants were told (falsely) that if they signed a confession, their lives would be spared. Prosecution witnesses were forced to provide false evidence by the same method.

      For those trials, as William Chase notes, Stalin was the producer, controlling the show in the courtroom. For the August 1936 trial, Stalin “helped phrase the charges, decided on the slate of defendants, crafted the [false] evidence, and prescribed the sentences. He even dictated [prosecutor Andrei] Vishinsky’s emotional speech as the grand finale of the trial and polished its style.” ⁶⁶

      Considering the pedigree of the trial process in Stalin’s Soviet Union and when it took place, it is difficult to see the Kharkov trial as anything other than one more Stalinist show trial. The making of a full-length documentary film on the trial and its screenings in Soviet movie theaters adds to this notion. Even the publication in English in 1944 of the proceedings of the Kharkov trial, to be sold in the United States and the U.K., is further proof that the Kharkov trial followed in the tradition of a typical Stalinist show trial.

      With regard to Soviet show trials, Susan Arnold notes that there is a gulf difference between Soviet-style show trials and a true war crimes trial: “A real trial involves risk and assuming that risk is a political decision.”⁶⁷ Why were the Nuremberg trials not show trials? The consensus is that because not all of the defendants were convicted. As noted by David Luban: “The best proof of the fairness of the Nuremberg Tribunal lies in its acquittal of such major figures of the Third Reich as Fritzsche, Papen, and Schacht.”⁶⁸

      The “show” element of the trial, however, does not necessarily make the trial unfair. Rather, in addition to providing procedural due process, the trial can be used for a didactic purpose. The Eichmann trial was a show trial in that sense also, since Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and prosecutor Gideon Hausner aimed to use the trial of Eichmann to teach both young Israelis and the outside world about the Holocaust. As Lawrence Douglas observes: “The Eichmann trial, even more explicitly than Nuremberg, was staged to teach history and shape collective memory.”⁶⁹

      Modern-day proceedings before international criminal tribunals, such as the International Criminal Court and the U.N.-created tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, likewise have an important “show” element to them. As Asli Bâli has noted: “Trials that exemplify international standards of accountability for atrocities are for show in the best possible sense: they provide a public forum for local and international audiences that demonstrates that justice is being served and leaders are being held accountable for their crimes.”⁷⁰ For this reason, Jeremy Peterson asserts: “[T]his does not mean that all show trials are damnable. It also may be true that some show trials are defensible.”⁷¹

      The Kharkov trial can be characterized as such a defensible show trial. As Arieh Kochavi observes:

      American correspondents who followed the trial [in Kharkov] and attended the hanging of the convicted men were generally convinced of the guilt of the accused and of genuineness of the Soviets’ charges of organized atrocities. They thought that the Russians had been punctilious in their observance of the legal proprieties of the trial and found no evidence of duress. The self-abasing testimony of the accused, the journalists observed, was reminiscent of the purge trials of the mid-1930s. Still, this was largely attributed to the care that had been exercised in selecting those who were placed on trial.⁷²

      Unlike a paradigmatic “show trial,” whose purpose is to stage-manage falsehoods, the defendants on the dock in Kharkov were indeed guilty of the crimes accused. From the perspective of Greg Dawson, whose mother and aunt are the last-known living survivors of the Drobitsky Yar massacre, the Kharkov trial, “[s]ymbolically at least, was the trial of the men who murdered my grandparents and great-grandparents at Drobitsky Yar…. If this was a ‘show trial,’ it was because the victims were showing the perpetrators far more justice than they deserved.”⁷³ Soviet Jewish lawyer Aaron N. Trainin, in the aftermath of the trial, correctly observed that in the Kharkov trial defendants “were tried for the misdeeds which they themselves committed, with their own hands, for the crimes committed by them personally.”⁷⁴ Justice, therefore, was meted out in Kharkov by the Soviet judges, albeit through the vehicle most familiar to Soviet jurists at the time, the Stalinist show trial.

      The Aftermath

      At the outset of the Kharkov trial, Ehrenburg wrote the following while sitting in the press box:

      I waited a long time for this hour. I waited for it on the roads to France…. I waited for it in the villages of Belarussia, and in the cities of … Ukraine. I waited for the hour when these words would be heard: “The trial begins.” Today I heard them. The trial commences. On the dock, beside a traitor, three Germans. These are the first. But these are not the last. We will remember the 15th of December—on this day we stopped speaking about a future trial for the criminals. We began to judge them.⁷⁵

      Ehrenburg’s words did not come to pass. The Kharkov trial was not succeeded by other Soviet public trials of captured Nazis. After Kharkov, Stalin acceded to Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s request not to conduct any more high-profile prosecutions of captured Germans for fear that the Nazis would do the same to captured Western POWs. The documentary film of the trial was soon taken off Soviet screens.

      For the rest of the war, the Soviets returned to their pre-Kharkov trial behavior of trying captured Nazis and collaborators in secret. The only evidence of such trials was their aftermath: the sudden appearance of gallows with dead men hanging from them.

      After the war, СКАЧАТЬ