Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust. Michael J. Bazyler

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СКАЧАТЬ Germans were tried in the western Russian city of Smolensk. Other similar trials followed. Prusin notes: “As in the Krasnodar and Kharkov cases, the trials were held to pursue political and ideological objectives. The timing of the trials was chosen carefully to correspond with the Nuremberg Military Tribunal.”⁷⁶ Sporadic trials of Nazis took place in the Soviet Union well into the 1960s. In total, it appears that the Soviets convicted approximately 25,000 German and Austrian Nazis, with most of the trials taking place within a few years after the end of the war.⁷⁷

      Additionally, over a million German POWs in the Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe were used as laborers to rebuild the destruction that resulted from the war. Many of these men were not returned to Germany until many years after the war ended.⁷⁸ It would not be until 1955 that the last surviving German POWs returned from the U.S.S.R.

      Formation of Holocaust Memory in Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras

      In the Soviet Union, immediately after the war, discussion of the mass murder of Soviet Jews during German occupation was repressed, as it had been during the war and at the Kharkov trial. According to Zvi Gitelman, “the term ‘Holocaust’ [was] completely unknown in the Soviet literature. In discussions of the destruction of the Jews, the terms unichtozhenie (‘annihilation’) or katastrofa (‘catastrophe’) [had] been used.”⁷⁹ Gitelman adds: “It is only recently [as of 1997] that ‘Holocaust,’ transliterated from English [as Holocost/Xолокост]” appears in the public vocabulary.⁸⁰

      Gitelman provides a leading rationale behind the official Soviet policy of treating the suffering of all nationalities and ethnic groups in the Soviet Union under German occupation equally, encapsulated in the above-noted Soviet slogan “Do Not Divide the Dead”:

      [N]o country in the West lost as many of its non-Jewish citizens in the war against Nazism as did the U.S.S.R., so that the fate of the Jews in France, Holland, Germany, or Belgium stands in sharper contrast to that of their co-nationals or co-religionists than it does in the East…. Thus the Soviet Union did treat the issue differently from the way it was treated in most other countries, whether socialist or not, though the Soviet treatment was not uniform … the Holocaust was seen as an integral part of a larger phenomenon—the murder of civilians—whether Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Gypsies, or other nationalities. It was said to be a natural consequence of racist fascism…. If the Nazis gave the Jews ‘special treatment,’ the Soviets would not.⁸¹

      With respect to discussion of the Holocaust of Ukrainian Jews, Dawson explains: “It’s been said that history is written by the winners, but in the history of the Holocaust it’s as though the chapter on Ukraine had been written by Himmler himself. For all practical purposes, the pages are blank.”⁸² Dawson reflects:

      The slaughter by gunfire in Ukraine should have become Hitler’s original sin and Babi Yar—where 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days—the darkest icon of the Shoah. But when the war ended, Stalin abetted Himmler’s cover-ups by throwing an Iron Curtain around his crime scene, off limits to writers, journalists, and historians. The only deaths in the Great War to defend the Motherland would be “Russian” deaths. And so, by default, the liberation of Auschwitz and other camps became the defining images of the Holocaust. Hitler’s crime in Ukraine began to fade slowly from public view and consciousness till it became what it is today—barely a footnote in popular understanding of the Holocaust. ⁸³

      After the war, some effort was made by Soviet Jews themselves to bring to light the suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of the Germans and local collaborators. In 1946, Soviet Jewish writers Ilya Ehrenberg and Vassily Grossman published the Black Book in the United States and other foreign countries. The Black Book became the “best source of primary material on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,”⁸⁴ but was banned from publication in the U.S.S.R. because, in the eyes of Soviet officials, it emphasized that “the Germans murdered and plundered Jews only. The reader unwittingly gets the impression that the Germans fought against the U.S.S.R. for the sole purpose of destroying Jews.” ⁸⁵ The volume only made its appearance in Russia and the other former Soviet states in 1993, after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

      Despite attempts by Soviet officials to restrict the memory of the atrocities committed against the Jews during the war, Soviet Jews did attempt to commemorate their special suffering. One of the first gatherings to commemorate Holocaust victims took place in Kharkov in January 1945 to mark the anniversary of the Drobitsky Yar massacre. The Drobitsky Yar commemoration was an exception. Public commemoratory gatherings and burials became forbidden, though “appropriate institutions” such as synagogues were able to hold memorial services. According to Mordecai Altshuler: “[There is] evidence of extensive Jewish activity in the commemoration of Holocaust victims. Jews from various towns participated in these efforts, and religious circles and prominent figures in the Soviet establishment maintained cooperative relations in their joint endeavors.”⁸⁶ This commemoration continued even when it was forbidden. Unlike in other European nations where commemoration was allowed, Soviet Jews had to make “strenuous efforts” and “maneuver among various Soviet authorities in order to implement, albeit partly and often unsuccessfully, even a few of their plans in this respect.”⁸⁷

      Finally, in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, discussion of the “Holocaust” and access to the massive Soviet archives were finally allowed. Reference to the victims of the Holocaust as “Jews” in the monument for Babi Yar was made for the first time. The monument had not even been constructed until 1976, well after Yevgenii Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” brought the world’s attention to the massacre (its opening words were: “No monument stands over Babi Yar”).

      We noted above how the plaque installed in 2000 at the Kharkov Theater noting the trial makes no mention of Jews as victims. However, in 2002 a memorial was dedicated in the presence of Ukraine’s president, Leonid Kuchma, at Drobitsky Yar. A nine-foot-tall menorah stands beside the highway at Drobitsky Yar: “To one side, a tree-lined road winds to a massive white arch with the years ‘1941–1942’ framed in a circle on the outside and bright blue Stars of David within. Below the arch is a sculpture depicting the tablets of the Ten Commandments. ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ [is] engraved in several languages, including Yiddish and Ukrainian.”⁸⁸

      And in 1996, the Kharkov Holocaust Museum opened in Kharkov. It contains an exhibit devoted to the murder campaign against the Jews and the trial at Kharkov in 1943, including photos, a documentary of the trials, and other archival materials. The museum remains “the only public Holocaust museum in Ukraine.”⁸⁹

      Prime Minister Pierre Laval meeting with Reich Marshal Hermann Göring. Photo Archive, Yad Vashem.

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      The Trial of Pierre Laval

      Criminal Collaborator or Patriot?

      Once Germany began its conquest of Europe, the only European countries that could stop the German military onslaught were the other regional military powers: France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany never succeeded in conquering Britain and the Soviet Union. It conquered France in just thirty-three days.¹ What came afterwards remains one of the most shameful periods in French history.

      Approximately 75,000 Jews were deported from French transit camps to their deaths in occupied Poland between 1942 and the end of German occupation, in December 1944. Almost a third of these were French citizens, and over 8,000 were children under thirteen. The roundup of the Jews was conducted by the French police and pursuant to laws enacted by French authorities. It took over forty years for France to finally acknowledge its role in the Holocaust. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac spoke for the first time about France’s СКАЧАТЬ