2015 is going down in history - the seventieth year since the end of World War II. Hundreds of articles, documents, photographs dedicated to the holy anniversary were published by Rodina this year. And we decided to devote the December issue of our "Scientific Library" to some of the results and long-term consequences of the Second World War.
Of course, this does not mean that the military theme will disappear from the pages of Motherland along with the anniversary year. A June issue is already planned, which will be dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, analytical materials from prominent Russian and foreign scientists are waiting in the editorial portfolio, letters about native front-line soldiers continue to come for the "Home Archive" column …
Write to us, dear readers. There are still many unfilled shelves in our "Scientific Library".
Rodina editorial staff
Open trials of the Nazis
The history of World War II is an endless list of war crimes of Nazi Germany and its allies. For this, the main war criminals were openly judged by mankind in their lair - Nuremberg (1945-1946) and Tokyo (1946-1948). Because of its political-legal significance and cultural footprint, the Nuremberg Tribunal has become a symbol of justice. In its shadow remained other show trials of the countries of Europe over the Nazis and their accomplices and, first of all, open trials held on the territory of the Soviet Union.
For the most cruel war crimes in 1943-1949, trials took place in 21 affected cities of five Soviet republics: Krasnodar, Krasnodon, Kharkov, Smolensk, Bryansk, Leningrad, Nikolaev, Minsk, Kiev, Velikiye Luki, Riga, Stalino (Donetsk), Bobruisk, Sevastopol, Chernigov, Poltava, Vitebsk, Chisinau, Novgorod, Gomel, Khabarovsk. They were publicly condemned 252 war criminals from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Japan and several of their accomplices from the USSR. Open trials in the USSR over war criminals carried not only the legal sense of punishing the guilty, but also political and anti-fascist. So they made films about the meetings, published books, wrote reports - for millions of people around the world. Judging by the reports of the MGB, almost the entire population supported the accusation and wished the accused the most severe punishment.
At the show trials 1943-1949. the best investigators, qualified translators, authoritative experts, professional lawyers, and talented journalists worked. About 300-500 spectators came to the meetings (the halls could no longer fit), thousands more stood on the street and listened to radio broadcasts, millions read reports and brochures, tens of millions watched newsreels. Under the weight of evidence, almost all of the suspects confessed to what they had done. In addition, there were only those in the dock whose guilt was repeatedly confirmed by evidence and witnesses. The verdicts of these courts can be considered justified even by modern standards, so none of the convicts was rehabilitated. But, despite the importance of open processes, modern researchers know too little about them. The main problem is the unavailability of sources. The materials of each trial amounted to up to fifty extensive volumes, but they were hardly published1, since they are kept in the archives of the former KGB departments and are still not fully declassified. The culture of memory is also lacking. A large museum opened in Nuremberg in 2010, which organizes exhibitions and methodically examines the Nuremberg Tribunal (and 12 subsequent Nuremberg Trials). But in the post-Soviet space, there are no such museums about local processes. Therefore, in the summer of 2015, the author of these lines created a kind of virtual museum "Soviet Nuremberg" 2 for the Russian Military Historical Society. This site, which caused a great resonance in the media, contains information and rare materials about 21 open courts in the USSR in 1943-1949.
Reading the verdict at the trial in the case of fascist atrocities in the territory of Novgorod and the Novgorod region. Novgorod, December 18, 1947 Photo:
Justice in war
Until 1943, no one in the world had the experience of trying the Nazis and their accomplices. There were no analogues of such cruelty in world history, there were no atrocities of such a time and geographical scale, therefore there were no legal norms for retaliation - neither in international conventions, nor in national criminal codes. In addition, for justice it was still necessary to free the scenes of crimes and witnesses, to capture the criminals themselves. The Soviet Union was the first to do all this, but also not immediately.
From 1941 until the end of the occupation, open trials were held in partisan detachments and brigades - over traitors, spies, looters. They were watched by the partisans themselves and later by residents of neighboring villages. On the front, traitors and Nazi executioners were punished by military tribunals until the decree N39 of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of April 19, 1943 was issued "On punishment measures for German fascist villains guilty of murder and torture of the Soviet civilian population and captured Red Army soldiers, for spies, traitors to the motherland. from among Soviet citizens and for their accomplices. " According to the Decree, cases of the murder of prisoners of war and civilians were filed with the military-field courts at divisions and corps. Many of their meetings, on the recommendation of the command, were open, with the participation of the local population. In military tribunals, guerrilla, people's and field-military courts, the accused defended themselves, without lawyers. Hanging in public was a frequent verdict.
Decree N39 became the legal basis for systemic responsibility for thousands of crimes. The evidence base was detailed reports on the scale of atrocities and destruction in the liberated territories, for this, by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of November 2, 1942, an "Extraordinary State Commission was established to establish and investigate the atrocities of the German fascist invaders and their accomplices and the damage they caused to citizens," collective farms, public organizations, state enterprises and institutions of the USSR "(ChGK). At the same time, in the camps, investigators interrogated millions of prisoners of war.
The open trials of 1943 in Krasnodar and Kharkov were widely known. These were the first full-fledged trials of the Nazis and their accomplices in the world. The Soviet Union tried to provide a worldwide resonance: the sessions were covered by foreign journalists and the best writers of the USSR (A. Tolstoy, K. Simonov, I. Ehrenburg, L. Leonov), filmed by cameramen and photographers. The entire Soviet Union followed the proceedings - the reports of the meetings were published in the central and local press, and the reaction of readers was also posted there. Brochures in different languages were published about the trials; they were read aloud in the army and in the rear. Almost immediately, the documentaries "The People's Sentence" and "The Court Is Coming" were released, they were shown in Soviet and foreign cinemas. And in 1945-1946 the documents of the Krasnodar trial on "gas chambers" ("gas vans") were used by the international tribunal in Nuremberg.
It's cramped in the dock. Minsk, January 24, 1946. Photo: Homeland
On the principle of "collective guilt"
The most thorough investigation was carried out in the framework of ensuring open trials of war criminals in late 1945 - early 1946. in the eight most affected cities of the USSR. According to the directives of the government, special operational-investigative groups of the UMVD-NKGB were created on the ground, they studied archives, acts of the ChGK, photographic documents, interrogated thousands of witnesses from different regions and hundreds of prisoners of war. The first seven such trials (Bryansk, Smolensk, Leningrad, Velikiye Luki, Minsk, Riga, Kiev, Nikolaev) sentenced 84 war criminals (most of them were hanged). Thus, in Kiev, the hanging of twelve Nazis on Kalinin Square (now Maidan Nezalezhnosti) was seen and approved by more than 200,000 citizens.
Since these trials coincided with the beginning of the Nuremberg Tribunal, they were compared not only by newspapers, but also by the prosecution and defense. Thus, in Smolensk, the public prosecutor L. N. Smirnov built a chain of crimes from the Nazi ringleaders accused in Nuremberg to specific 10 executioners in the dock: "Both of them are participants in the same complicity." Kaznacheev's lawyer (by the way, he also worked at the Kharkov trial) also spoke about the connection between the criminals of Nuremberg and Smolensk, but with a different conclusion: "An equal sign cannot be put between all these persons."
Eight Soviet trials of 1945-1946 ended, and the Nuremberg Tribunal ended. But among the millions of prisoners of war, there were still thousands of war criminals. Therefore, in the spring of 1947, by agreement between the Minister of the Interior S. Kruglov and the Minister of Foreign Affairs V. Molotov, preparations began for the second wave of demonstration trials against German servicemen. The next nine trials in Stalino (Donetsk), Sevastopol, Bobruisk, Chernigov, Poltava, Vitebsk, Novgorod, Chisinau and Gomel, held by the resolution of the Council of Ministers on September 10, 1947, sentenced 137 people to terms in Vorkutlag.
The last open trial of foreign war criminals was the Khabarovsk trial of 1949 over Japanese biological weapons developers who tested them on Soviet and Chinese citizens (more on this on page 116 - Ed.). At the International Tribunal in Tokyo, these crimes were not investigated, since some potential defendants received immunity from the United States in exchange for test data.
Since 1947, instead of separate open processes, the Soviet Union began to massively conduct closed ones. Already on November 24, 1947, the order of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, the USSR Ministry of Justice, the USSR Prosecutor's Office N 739/18/15/311 was issued, according to which it was ordered to consider cases of those accused of committing war crimes at closed meetings of the military tribunals of the Ministry of Internal Affairs troops at the place of detention of the defendants (that is, practically without calling witnesses) without the participation of the parties and sentencing the perpetrators to imprisonment for 25 years in forced labor camps.
The reasons for the curtailment of open processes are not completely clear, no arguments have yet been found in the declassified documents. However, several versions can be put forward. Presumably, the open processes were enough to satisfy the society, the propaganda switched to new tasks. In addition, the conduct of open trials required high qualifications of investigators, they were not enough in the field in the conditions of the post-war personnel shortage. It is also worth considering the material support of open processes (the estimate for one process was about 55 thousand rubles), for the post-war economy these were significant amounts. Closed courts made it possible to quickly and en masse consider cases, sentence the defendants to a predetermined term of imprisonment, and, finally, corresponded to the traditions of Stalin's jurisprudence. In closed trials, prisoners of war were often tried on the principle of "collective guilt", without concrete evidence of personal involvement. Therefore, in the 1990s, the Russian authorities rehabilitated 13,035 foreigners convicted under Decree N39 for war crimes (in total, in 1943-1952, at least 81,780 people were convicted under the Decree, including 24,069 foreign prisoners of war) 4.
In all the cities where the trials took place, the halls were overcrowded. Photo: Homeland
Statute of limitations: protests and disagreements
After Stalin's death, all foreigners convicted in closed and open trials were transferred in 1955-1956 to the authorities of their countries. This was not advertised in the USSR - the residents of the affected cities, who well remembered the speeches of the prosecutors, clearly would not have understood such political agreements.
Only a few who came from Vorkuta were imprisoned in foreign prisons (this was the case in the GDR and Hungary, for example), because the USSR did not send investigative cases with them. There was a "cold war", the Soviet and West German judiciary in the 1950s did not cooperate much. And those who returned to the FRG often said that they had been slandered, and that confessions of guilt in open trials were knocked out by torture. Most of those convicted of war crimes by the Soviet court were allowed to return to civilian professions, and some were even allowed to enter the political and military elite.
At the same time, part of West German society (primarily young people who themselves did not find the war) sought to seriously overcome the Nazi past. Under pressure from society in the late 1950s, open trials of war criminals were held in the Federal Republic of Germany. They determined the creation in 1958 of the Central Department of Justice of the Lands of the Federal Republic of Germany for the prosecution of Nazi crimes. The main goals of his activities were the investigation of crimes and the identification of persons involved in crimes who can still be prosecuted. When the perpetrators have been identified and it has been established under the jurisdiction of which prosecutor's office they fall, the Central Office completes its preliminary investigation and transfers the case to the prosecutor's office.
Nevertheless, even the identified criminals could be acquitted by a West German court. In accordance with the post-war Criminal Code of the Federal Republic of Germany, most of the crimes of the Second World War in the mid-1960s should have expired. Moreover, the twenty-year statute of limitations extended only to murders committed with extreme cruelty. In the first post-war decade, a number of amendments were made to the Code, according to which those guilty of war crimes, who did not directly participate in their execution, could be acquitted.
In June 1964, a "conference of democratic jurists" gathered in Warsaw strongly protested against the application of the statute of limitations to Nazi crimes. On December 24, 1964, the Soviet government issued a similar declaration. The note dated January 16, 1965 accused the FRG of seeking to completely abandon the persecution of the Nazi executioners. The articles published in the Soviet editions on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Nuremberg Tribunal5 spoke of the same thing.
The situation seems to have changed the resolution of the 28th session of the UN General Assembly of December 3, 1973 "Principles of international cooperation in relation to the detection, arrest, extradition and punishment of persons guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity." According to its text, all war criminals were subject to search, arrest, extradition to those countries where they committed their atrocities, regardless of the time. But even after the resolution, foreign countries were extremely reluctant to transfer their citizens to Soviet justice. Motivating by the fact that the evidence from the USSR was sometimes shaky, because many years have passed.
Archpriest of the Orthodox Church of the city of Rezekne, Latvian SSR, E. N. Rushanov gives testimony. 1946 Photo: Homeland
In general, due to political obstacles, the USSR in the 1960s-1980s tried in open trials not foreign war criminals, but their accomplices. For political reasons, the names of the punishers hardly sounded at the open trials of 1945-1947 over their foreign owners. Even the trial of Vlasov was held behind closed doors. Because of this secrecy, many traitors with blood in their hands were missed. After all, the orders of the Nazi organizers of the executions were willingly carried out by ordinary traitors from the Ostbatalions, Yagdkommands, and nationalist formations. So, at the Novgorod trial of 1947, Colonel V. Findaizen6, Coordinator of Punishers from the Shelon Ostbatalion. In December 1942, the battalion drove all the inhabitants of the villages of Bychkovo and Pochinok onto the ice of the Polist River and shot them. The punishers concealed their guilt, and the investigation was unable to link the cases of hundreds of Sheloni executioners with the case of V. Findaisen. Without understanding, they were given general terms for traitors and, together with everyone, were amnestied in 1955. The punishers fled in all directions, and only then the personal guilt of each was gradually investigated from 1960 to 1982 in a series of open trials7. It was not possible to catch all of them, but the punishment could overtake them back in 1947.
There are fewer and fewer witnesses, and every year the already unlikely chance of a full investigation of the atrocities of the occupiers and the holding of open trials is decreasing. However, such crimes have no statute of limitations, so historians and lawyers need to search for data and prosecute all still living suspects.
Notes (edit)
1. One of the exceptions is the publication of materials of the Riga trial from the Central Archives of the FSB of Russia (ASD NN-18313, v. 2. LL. 6-333) in the book of Kantor Yu. Z. Baltics: war without rules (1939-1945). SPb., 2011.
2. For more details see the project "Soviet Nuremberg" on the website of the Russian Military Historical Society
3. The trial in the case of German-fascist atrocities in the city of Smolensk and the Smolensk region, meeting on December 19 // News of the Soviets of Working People's Deputies of the USSR, N 297 (8907) of December 20, 1945, p. 2.
4. Epifanov AE Responsibility for war crimes committed on the territory of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. 1941 - 1956 Volgograd, 2005. S. 3.
5. Voisin V. "" Au nom des vivants ", de Leon Mazroukho: une rencontre entre discours officiel et hommage personnel" // Kinojudaica. Les representations des Juifs dans le cinema russe et sovietique / dans V. Pozner, N. Laurent (dir.). Paris, Nouveau Monde editions, 2012, P. 375.
6. For more details, see D. Astashkin. Open trial of Nazi criminals in Novgorod (1947) // Novgorod historical collection. V. Novgorod, 2014. Issue. 14 (24). S. 320-350.
7. Archive of the FSB administration in the Novgorod region. D. 1/12236, D. 7/56, D. 1/13364, D. 1/13378.
