Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust. Michael J. Bazyler

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СКАЧАТЬ the Soviet Union in 1934 to study the “Russian experiment” and married a Russian woman who returned with him and their son to the United States before the war. In 1945, he published Russia Is No Riddle,¹⁰ describing his journeys through the Soviet Union before and during the Second World War. The book included a chapter about his visit to the Kharkov trial. Unlike some Westerners that became enamored with the Bolshevik revolution, and so viewed all things Soviet in a positive light, Stevens aimed to be objective about what he observed. His descriptions of the court proceedings in the Kharkov Dramatic Theater reflected this critical outlook:

      The Russians are past masters at mise en scène,¹¹ and the atmosphere of that Kharkov trial room was distinctly reminiscent of the famous Treason Trials of 1936–38. In fact, two of the defense lawyers, Kommodov and Kaznacheyev, had defended some of the figures in the treason trials. Their presence provided an element of direct continuity. This, too, was a military tribunal: judges, prosecutor, and attendants were all in uniform….

      During the recesses, I discovered that many of the people in the audience had personal knowledge or experience of the events and atrocities described, and had seen or known the defendants during the German occupation. Several times during more gruesome bits of evidence there were stifled sobs from some woman—not out of pity for the defendants. For the most part the proceedings took place against a background of concentrated silence.¹²

      The defendants were correctly characterized by Stevens as “small fry” and “non-entities”¹³—chosen to embody various ranks of the German military command that occupied the Kharkov region. He describes the three Germans on trial at Kharkov as follows:

      • Wilhelm Langheld, a fifty-two-year-old captain of the German Military Counter-Espionage Service (Abwehr) and a commander of a POW camp for Soviet prisoners. Stevens describes Langheld as “stocky, red-headed [and] beefy-faced … whose carriage, heel-clicking, and rows of ribbons proclaimed a German soldier of the old school.”¹⁴

      • Hans Ritz, an SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), one of the security organizations of the SS, and an assistant SS Company Commander of a Sonderkommando unit. Stevens describes Ritz as a “Nazi horse of a different color from the hard-bitten Langheld[,]…. a baby-faced youth of twenty-four, with a tender little mustache.”¹⁵ Ritz, trained in music and law, worked as a lawyer before fighting with the SS on the Eastern Front.

      • Reinhard Retzlaff, a thirty-six-year-old corporal and member of the 560th Group of German Secret Field Police. Unlike the other two German defendants, Retzlaff was not a Nazi Party member.

      All three Germans were charged with playing a “direct part in [the] mass and brutal extermination of civilian Soviet people by the use of specially equipped automobiles known as ‘murder vans,’ and also with having taken a personal part in mass shootings, hangings, burnings, plunder and outrages on Soviet people.”¹⁶

      Along with the three Germans on trial, the Soviets added a Soviet citizen: Mikhail Bulanov, a twenty-six-year-old Ukrainian collaborator who worked with the Germans from October 1941 to February 1943. The indictment characterized Bulanov as a shafior (chauffeur) with the Kharkov Sicherheitsdienst. Bulanov was charged with “betrayal of the motherland … [and] with having taken a direct part in the mass extermination of the Soviet people by means of asphyxiation in ‘murder vans,’ [and] with having personally shot civilian Soviet citizens, among whom were old people, women and children.”

      The four defendants were charged under both international law and Soviet law. The legal basis under international law was the Moscow Declaration issued by the Allies a month earlier announcing that Germans participating in atrocities would be tried by the countries where the atrocities took place. In the sphere of the Soviet legislation, on April 19, 1943, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (parliament) of the U.S.S.R. issued a decree entitled On measures of punishment for German-Fascist villains guilty of killing and torturing the Soviet population and captive Red Army soldiers, for spies and traitors to the Motherland from among Soviet citizens and their accomplices.¹⁷ The April decree became the prime legal tool for prosecution of German Nazis and their Soviet collaborators. Alexander Prusin notes that “[t]he [April] decree became a binding tool with which to handle all accused war criminals, and its very language signifies its designation as an instrument of deterrence against collaboration with the Germans.”¹⁸ The decree used the terms “atrocities” and “evil deeds” to broadly encompass the war crimes committed by the German (foreign) and Soviet (domestic) war criminals while stipulating punishment by public execution or long-term prison time.¹⁹

      The German defendants appeared in court dressed in full military attire, which was not common in Soviet trials. After public reading of the indictment,²⁰ the defendants all entered guilty pleas. However, under continental civil law legal systems, emulated by Soviet socialist law, a plea of guilty is not automatically accepted by the court. The court must still satisfy itself that the evidence proves the guilt. Additionally, evidence is presented to help determine what sentence should be rendered. The trial, therefore, continued despite guilty pleas.

      Undoubtedly, the Soviets did not constitute this public trial for the defendants merely to plead guilty and subsequently sentence them without going into specifics of the atrocities committed. Almost all public trials held of Nazi war criminals and collaborators over the last seventy years have had a didactic component, and this first trial of the Nazis was no exception. Detailed evidence of the brutal atrocities committed by the “Fascist-Hitlerite” invaders in the Kharkov region was going to be introduced during the trial and subsequently disseminated to the outside world. As confirmation of this intent, the Soviets translated excerpts of the proceedings into English shortly after the trial’s conclusion and published them in a book, The People’s Verdict. The book included commentary and also excerpts from the Krasnodar trial. The Soviets also produced a documentary, which was widely shown in Soviet theaters, though never screened in the West.

      Stevens, the American correspondent, noted that “all legal niceties were observed to a fault. The defendants and their counsel had full latitude to speak or interpolate, and every comma of what was said was translated into German for their benefit.”²¹ Each defendant took the stand and was questioned by the prosecutor, members of the tribunal, and defense counsel. George Ginsburgs comments that “[t]here [was] no indication that the German defendants had either been rehearsed or coerced.”²²

      The trial began with the most senior of the three German defendants to take the stand: Captain Wilhelm Langheld. He explained that the German high command encouraged atrocities against civilians and decorated soldiers for fulfilling orders to exterminate Soviet citizens.²³ Langheld described the use of gas vans by the German military for mass slaughter:

      I saw the “gas van” in Kharkov … [s]ome time in May, 1942, when I was on a service visit to Kharkov…. As far as I remember the “gas van” is a vehicle dark grey in colour, completely covered in, having hermetically sealed doors at the back…. [It holds] [a]pproximately 60 to 70 persons…. I was at 76, Cherniskevsky Street at the H.Q. of the S.D. and heard a terrific noise and screaming outside…. A gas van at that moment had driven up to the main entrance of the building, and one could see how many people were being forcibly driven into it, while German soldiers were standing at the doors of the van…. I was a few paces away from the gas van and saw it being done…. Among the people being loaded into the gas van were old men, children, old and young women. These people would not go into the machine of their own accord and had therefore to be driven into the gas van by SS men with kicks and blows of the butt ends of automatic rifles…. I presume that these people guessed the sort of fate that awaited them.²⁴

      Describing the child of a woman who was killed, Langheld explained: “He clung to his dead mother, crying aloud. The lance-corporal who came to take away the woman’s body got tired of this so he shot the child…. Such things СКАЧАТЬ