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 heard from Captain Beukow that the same kind of gas vans were used in… Kharkov, Poltava, Kiev.24
Hans Rietz, a former lawyer and then Assistant SS Company Commander within Sonderkommando 4a, gave similar testimony:
On 31st May, 1943 I arrived in Kharkov and reported to the Chief of the Kharkov Sonderkommando, Hanebitter… The next day… Lt. Jacobi… showed me the vehicle standing in the yard. It was an ordinary closed army transport lorry, only with an airtight body.
Lt. Jacobi opened the doors of the machine and let me look in. Inside the machine was lined with sheet iron, in the floor was a grating through which the exhaust gases of the motor entered, poisoning people inside the van.
Soon afterwards the doors of the prison opened and arrested persons were led out in groups… Those of the prisoners who held back were beaten and kicked.25 Reinhard Retzlaff, an auxiliary officer of the 560th Group of the Secret Field Police (GFP) attached to the headquarters of the 6th German Army, also mentioned Hanebitter in his testimony about the usage of gas vans in Kharkov in March 1942.26
This testimony revealed for the first time that the GFP, like the Einsatzgruppen, had committed atrocities. In Kharkov, Gruppe GFP 560 was active from October 1941 to August 1943. The last defendant, the Soviet collaborator Mikhail Bulanov, driver of a Gestapo truck, also testified to the killing of victims in a gas van.27 All of the defendants also admitted to personally torturing or executing arrested Soviet prisoners.
Currently, there is no doubt that gas vans were also used by Einsatzgruppen in Poland, Belorussia, Smolensk, Riga, and elsewhere.28 However, it is puzzling that the name Kranebitter mentioned by Rietz and Retzlaff in their testimonies was written in the official records as Hanebitter. In fact, SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Fritz Kranebitter, Doctor of Jurisprudence, was the Sipo (Secret Police) and SD commander in Kharkov from March to August 1943.29 He arrived in Kiev in February 1942, then moved to Kharkov and after that, to Dubno. In November 1943, he was appointed head of Amt IV (Gestapo intelligence and counterintelligence) within the Security Police and SD Staff in Italy and left Ukraine. He was never charged and died in Austria in 1957.
Two of the three additional German witnesses, prisoners who were not defendants in this trial, committed just as many atrocities as those being tried. They were SS-Obersturmbannführer Georg Heinisch, former district Commissar (Gebietskommissar) of Melitopol, Ukraine, and Heinz Jantschi, a sergeant-major and Assistant Abwehr officer at the Dulag-231 transit camp for Soviet POWs. Heinisch testified about his own crimes: ‘In the period from 3rd September, 1942, till 14th September, 1943, between 3,000 and 4,000 persons were exterminated in the Melitopol region… During my work in Melitopol, there were three or four mass operations, in particular in December 1942, when 1,300 persons were arrested at once.’30 Then he added:
[SS-Oberführer Otto] Somann [Chief of Security in the Breslau area] told me about the camp in Auschwitz in Germany where the gassing of prisoners was also carried out… Those who were to be executed first entered a place with a signboard with ‘Disinfection’ on it and they were undressed—the men separately from women and children. Then they were ordered to proceed to another place with a signboard ‘Bath’. While the people were washing themselves special valves were opened to let in the gas which caused their death. Then the dead people were burned in special furnaces in which about 200 bodies could be burned simultaneously.31
No foreign correspondent attending the trial recognized the importance of this first public evidence of mass killings in Auschwitz. Possibly, this was because the defendants were obviously forced to give testimonies the court wanted to hear. As Arthur Koestler reported, ‘[F]or the foreign observer the Kharkov trial (which was filmed and publicly shown in London) gave the same impression of unreality as the Moscow trials, the accused reciting their parts in stilted phrases which they had obviously learned by heart, sometimes taking the wrong cue from State-Prosecutor and then coming back to the same part again’.32 On December 29, 1943, Time magazine wrote only that three German defendants and one Russian defendant were tried and executed.33
Tellingly, this trial, like that in Krasnodar, did not mention that most of the victims killed in Kharkov were Jews, although a written report of the local commission on atrocities stated that up to 15,000 Jewish residents of Kharkov were murdered between December 1941 and January 1942.34 Interestingly, after the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, the first reports from the field stated that ‘the mass extermination of people, and in particular, the Jews brought from all over Europe, was the main purpose of the camps’.35 However, in the report to the Central Committee in Moscow, the words ‘the Jews’ had disappeared, and afterwards, the extermination of the Jews in Auschwitz was not mentioned in Soviet documents, only ‘millions of citizens from all over Europe’.
Karl Kosch, a professional architect who served as a private in the German Army, also testified about his knowledge of gas vans in Ukraine in 1943. However, the last witness, Jantschi, talked at length mostly about the movement of Soviet POWs and arrested civilians from a camp near the city of Vyazma to a camp in the city of Smolensk, in which he took part.36 Of 15,000 people who left Vyazma, only 2,000 arrived in Smolensk—the rest died or were exterminated on the way—and of the 10,000 prisoners who were left in Vyazma, 6,000 died. Although this horrific story described the German military authorities’ general attitude toward Soviet prisoners, it had little to do with the events in Kharkov. Most probably, Jantschi’s testimony was prepared for the Smolensk trial that did not take place. Much later this testimony would have grave consequences for Jantschi.
On December 18, 1943, the chair of the tribunal read the verdict, which had been approved in Moscow. The four defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. The verdict specifically mentioned the military and police involved:
Violent atrocities against Soviet civilians were carried out on the territory of the city and region of Kharkov by officers and soldiers of:
The SS Adolf Hitler Division, commanded by Obergruppenführer of S. S. Troops Dietrich, the Death’s Head Division, under the command of Gruppenführer of SS Troops Simon.
By the German punitive organs.
The Kharkov SD Sonderkommando, commanded by Sturmbannführer Hanebitter.
By the Kharkov group of the German Secret Field Police, commanded by Police Commissar Karchan.37
A witness to the execution on the next day later recalled:
Plenty of people gathered at the Blagoveshchensk Market Square. There were four gallows… The convicts were standing in the body of a truck located under the gallows, with its sides pulled down. The Germans were smoking, while the Russian convict, dressed in a black robe, was standing apart from them…
Several [Soviet] soldiers came up [to the convicts] and tied their hands. The Russian dropped on his knees in front of the Red Army soldiers, but they also tied his hands. Then a noose was placed around the neck of each convict. The truck started to move slowly. I looked at the last German. He moved his legs, and then he hung in the air and jerked. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was still jerking. I looked at the crowd. When [the German] hung in the air, a long sound ‘Ah-h-h-h’ was heard from it [the crowd]. Many took steps backward, and some turned around and ran away.38