Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust. Michael J. Bazyler

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СКАЧАТЬ whereas no more than six to eight people would have been able to live in it under normal circumstances. People stood compressed against each other…. From the dreadful overcrowding, hunger and lack of water, an epidemic of gastro-intestinal diseases broke out…. Robbery and murder were daily occurrences. Usually, the Germans would burst into the room on the pretext of searching for weapons and would steal anything that came to mind. In the event of any resistance, they dragged people out into the yard and shot them….

      On January 2, 1942, at 7:00 am … [a] German sentry shouted out an order for everyone to gather their things and be outside in ten minutes…. I went outside … then German sentries and policemen formed a tight ring around us and announced that we were being evacuated to Poltava. We marched out onto the Chuguyev-Kharkov highway but then were directed away from the city, although the road to Poltava ran through town. It was obvious that they were not taking us to Poltava. But where exactly we were going, nobody knew…. Two kilometers past the last houses of the tractor factory workers’ quarters, they turned us in the direction of a ravine. The ravine was strewn with bits of rags and the remains of torn clothing. It became clear why they had brought us here. The ravine was sealed off by a double row of sentries. On the edge of the ravine stood a truck with machine guns. Terrible scenes erupted when people understood that they had been brought here to be slaughtered…. Many said goodbye to each other, embracing, kissing, exchanging the last supplies they had….

      From the standing column, the Germans began using clubs to drive groups of fifty to seventy people one hundred paces or so forward, then forcing them to strip down to their underwear. It was -20 or -25 degrees C. Those undressed were driven down to the bottom of the ravine from which were heard occasional shots and the chattering of machine guns.

      I was in a daze and did not notice the screaming behind me. The Germans began driving forward the group that I was part of. I moved off, ready to die within a few minutes. Just then, something happened: the Germans brought up the aged and handicapped to be executed. The belongings of those who had been killed had been loaded onto these trucks and brought back to the city. I moved along behind one of these vehicles. Two young Jews were in the truck; the Germans had assigned them to do the loading. In a flash, I jumped into the truck and asked the youngsters to cover me. Then they hid themselves as well. When the truck was full, the German drivers took off with it and in this way took me and the two boys away from the awful ravine….

      I went to find my wife (she is not a Jew and had stayed behind in the city with our adopted daughter) who hid me with a girlfriend of hers. I stayed with her for six and a half months. For four months later after that I wandered from village to village with a false passport and, in this way, held on until February 16, 1943, when Kharkov was liberated for the first time from the German occupiers.⁴

      The German account of the roundup—Operational Situation Report U.S.S.R. No. 164, transmitted from the field to Berlin and dated February 4, 1942—summarizes the actions taken regarding the Jews of Kharkov:⁵

      Einsatzgruppe C—Arrest of the Jews in Kharkov

      The extensive preparations that became necessary in the matter of the arrest of the Kharkov Jews were sped up within the framework of SK 4a responsibilities. First of all, it was necessary to find a suitable area for the evacuation of the Jews. This was accomplished with the closest understanding of the municipality’s housing department. An area was chosen where the Jews could be housed in the barracks of a factory district [in Rogan on the edge of town]…. The evacuation of the Jews went on without a hitch except for some robberies during the march of the Jews in the direction of their new quarters. Almost without exception, only Ukrainians participated in the robberies. So far, no report is available on the number of Jews that were arrested during the evacuation. At the same time, preparation for the shooting of the Jews is underway. 305 Jews who have spread rumors against the German Army were shot immediately.⁶

      An alternative method of killing used in the Kharkov region was through the use of carbon monoxide gas pumped though the exhaust of mobile death vans. The Nazis first tested carbon monoxide gas on Soviet prisoners of war in September 1941 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, located north of Berlin. By the following year, approximately fifteen gas vans had fanned out throughout German-occupied Soviet territory to exterminate Jews and other “undesirables.” The victims were packed into the back of closed vans, specially sealed, while carbon monoxide was piped through a hose attached to the van’s tailpipe. The bodies were then unloaded, and either buried in mass graves or incinerated in open flames.

      When the Red Army liberated Kharkov for the last time in August 1943, almost no Jews remained. That the Nazis had managed to make Ukraine (including Kharkov) judenrein is confirmed by the account of great Soviet Jewish writer and journalist Vassily Grossman, reporting from the field: “There are no Jews in Ukraine. Nowhere—Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, Yagotin…. All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people have been brutally murdered.”⁷

      Grossman’s description is applicable for the rest of Soviet territory occupied by the Germans. Of the approximately 2.5 million Jews who had been trapped in German-occupied Soviet Union, only 100,000 to 120,000 survived. Most did so by joining the Jewish partisans or going into hiding. Yitzhak Arad sums up the aftermath: “All told, of the five million Jews who lived in the Soviet Union on the eve of the German attack on June 22, 1941, about half lost their lives as a result.”⁸

      The Trial

      As the Red Army liberated Soviet territory, it repeatedly found mass graves containing remains of Jews who had been systematically slaughtered. In the Kharkov region some of these sites were discovered after the first liberation in February 1943, but before the German troops recaptured the region a month later. Most of the Jews of Kharkov had already been murdered by that time. The Red Army liberated Kharkov for the second and last time in August 1943. The defendants on trial were part of the German troops captured during this last liberation.

      Earlier in the year, in July 1943, the Soviets put eleven local Soviet citizens who collaborated with the Nazis on trial in the northern Caucasus city of Krasnodar. After a three-day trial, the eleven Krasnodar defendants were found guilty of treason. Eight were executed and three were given sentences of twenty years of hard labor.

      On November 1, 1943, the foreign ministers of the U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R. issued the so-called Moscow Declaration, putting on notice Germans participating in “atrocities, massacres and executions” that they would be tried for their “abominable deeds” in the countries where they committed these deeds. The Kharkov trial of December 1943, the first public trial of German nationals by any Allied power, was the Soviet signal to the Allies that they were now putting into practice the Moscow Declaration. Greg Dawson, in his Judgment before Nuremberg, rightly labels the Kharkov trial as “the first Nazi war crimes trial.”⁹

      Three Germans and one Ukrainian were tried in Kharkov before a military tribunal constituted by the 4th Ukrainian Front of the Red Army, composed of three military judges. The prosecution of the case was led by a military colonel with a legal background, State Prosecutor of Justice Colonel N. K. Dunaev. Three Soviet defense counsel were appointed to represent the defendants. A six-member forensic team of medico-legal experts also took part in the trial, serving as expert witnesses and providing a report.

      The four-day trial began on December 15, 1943, exactly two years after the German massacre of the Kharkov Jews at Drobitsky Yar. To accommodate the large attendance, and to provide the necessary gravitas to the proceedings, the trial was held in the auditorium of the Kharkov Dramatic Theater. The theatrical atmosphere was accentuated by the illumination of the auditorium with klieg lights, used to film the proceedings by a slew of cameras. The audience was rotated each day to ensure maximum attendance. Foreign correspondents were specifically invited to attend but, due to a glitch, only arrived on the last day of the trial.

      The most knowledgeable of the СКАЧАТЬ