Apparently, public hanging was so unpopular that in May 1944 it was replaced by nonpublic shooting.39 However, the public execution of war criminals by hanging was restored after the war.
After the defense counselors were back to Moscow, Beria called them to his Lubyanka office and yelled at the aged Nikolai Kommodov, who had just defended Langheld and Rietz: ‘At the trial you acted not as a defense lawyer, but as a prosecutor. This was written in every foreign newspaper!’40 This was a lie. Most probably, Beria followed Stalin’s lead knowing that Stalin had not forgotten Kommodov’s defense of Dr. Dmitrii Pletnev, a personal enemy of Stalin’s, who was falsely accused of poisoning the writer Maxim Gorky at the Bukharin Trial in 1938.41 Kommodov was so frightened by Beria’s reprimand that he died of a heart attack a few days later.
The legal outcome of the trial was summarized by one of the leading Soviet jurists Aron Trainin in his book The Criminal Responsibility of the Hitlerites published in 1944.42 Trainin wrote that ‘the Hitlerites’ should be tried for launching a war of aggression which was a fundamental ‘crime against peace’. This and other principles discussed in the book became a basis of statements by Soviet prosecutors at the International Nuremberg Trial.
Soviet filmmakers made a propaganda film named Sud idet! (The Court Is In Session!) about the Kharkov Trial, and it was shown throughout the country. The American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) made a shortened version of this film. In July 1944 Life magazine published a few stills from this documentary.43 In June 1945, an American movie ‘We Accuse’, compiled from the Soviet, British, and German newsreels and focused on the Kharkov Trial, was shown in a number of New York movie theaters, except those owned by the members of the Hays Office, Hollywood’s censorship bureau.44 The office demanded extensive cuts, in particular, of the footage of atrocities. However, soon the U.S. Army Signal Corps released even more horrifying footage of the liberated death camps in Europe.
Later Atrocity Trials
Sepp Dietrich and Max Simon, whom Abakumov connected with atrocities in 1943, were captured and tried by the Allies. On July 16, 1945, the U.S. Military Tribunal at Dachau (Case No. 5–24) sentenced Dietrich to life in prison, commuted to twenty-five years, for the execution of American POWs by his troops in 1944 (the Malmedi massacre). After serving ten years, Dietrich was released. On May 14, 1957, the German court sentenced him to twenty-nine months for his part in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. In 1966, Dietrich died aged seventy-three of a heart attack.
Max Simon was captured by British troops and sentenced to death in 1947 for his complicity in the September 1944 massacre of civilians in Italy. The sentence was commuted and he was released in 1954. In October 1955, a German court tried him again. Twice acquitted, Simon died on February 1, 1961, before the start of a third trial.
Georg Heinisch, who was a witness at the Kharkov Trial, was among those convicted and sentenced to death at the Kiev trial (December 1945–January 1946).45 He confessed to his participation in the extermination of 3,000 Jewish children in October 1942. By chance, while working with archival documents, I discovered the fate of the two other Kharkov witnesses, Jantschi and Kosch.
The materials in Jantschi’s Personal File clearly reveal that on August 9, 1943, he voluntarily crossed the front line near the town of Sumy.46 This explains his detailed testimony to GUKR investigators concerning Dulag-231 and the horrible treatment of Soviet POWs, which he repeated in Kharkov. However, he also described his personal discovery of six Jews among the Soviet POWs in the Vyazma Camp and seventeen Jews among prisoners in the Miller Camp, all of whom he handed over to the SD command for execution. Additionally, in September 1941, Jantschi was involved in sending Soviet POWs to Germany for slave labor.
On August 7, 1944, both Jantschi and Karl Kosch, the third witness at the Kharkov Trial, were transferred from a prison in Moscow to the special POW Camp No. 27 in the Moscow suburbs. However, on November 13, 1946, both were returned to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, where Sergei Kartashov’s (now the 4th MGB) department started a new investigation. For at least two years the prisoners were kept together and interrogated from time to time. On May 5, 1948, Jantschi made an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
Extensive interrogations (fifty-two instances) of Jantschi began in December 1949 and continued through July 1951. Finally, on January 12, 1952, the Military Tribunal of the Moscow District sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison as a German spy (Article 58-6) and a war criminal (April 19, 1943, Decree). Interestingly, no documents in his Personal File mention the Kharkov Trial, although the verdict repeated his testimony in Kharkov almost word for word. On January 15, 1952, the same military tribunal sentenced Kosch as a German spy to twenty-five years in prison, with no credit for the time of the Kharkov trial.
On February 16, 1952, the Supreme Court denied Jantschi’s appeal, in which he pleaded guilty but asked the court to consider the circumstances under which he committed the crimes. The next day he again attempted suicide by hitting his head against a wall. On March 30, 1952, Jantschi was brought to Vladimir Prison, where he was kept in solitary confinement for some time. Kosch arrived in Vladimir later, on May 16, 1952. Like many other German prisoners in Vladimir, Jantschi and Kosch were released in October 1955.
It remains a mystery why SMERSH/MGB considered these two German prisoners so important that they were held without trial until 1952. Only a few high-level German generals and foreign diplomats were treated similarly. Possibly, Jantschi and Kosch were used as cell spies against their own fellow German prisoners. In any case, it is clear that, at least in 1952, military counterintelligence wanted, for unknown reason, to conceal their involvement in the Kharkov Trial.
On January 22, 1944, Abakumov sent the GKO a new report addressed to Stalin, Molotov, and Beria.47 The GUKR proposed a new trial in Smolensk for thirteen defendants arrested by SMERSH. The investigation revealed the extermination of 135,000 civilians in the Smolensk region during the German occupation, and also stated that the German authorities had used children for slave labor and forced teenage girls into prostitution. In addition, German intelligence used teenagers as spies in the Red Army’s rear. However, the trial was postponed because from January 16 to 23, 1944, academician Nikolai Burdenko’s commission was working in the Katyn Forest, examining bodies of dead Polish officers and trying to prove that the Germans, and not the NKVD, had shot the victims—a question that was raised at the Nuremberg trial as well.48
The only cases proposed for open trials were those that would create public sympathy for the suffering of the Soviet people. Very few knew about the routine military tribunal trials. For instance, in September 1944, Lieutenant General Mikhail Belkin, head of the SMERSH Directorate of the 3rd Baltic Front, completed the investigation of Rudolf Körpert and Otto Mäder (mentioned in Abakumov’s September 1943 letter to Vyshinsky), and four other high-level officers of the Dulag-205 administration.49 They were accused of ‘mass extermination of Soviet citizens’ and ‘having implemented the policy of German fascism concerning the extermination of the Soviet population’. On October 10, 1944, not in a public trial, as Abakumov suggested, but in a closed military tribunal, all six were sentenced to death by shooting. It remains unclear if and when Werner von Kunowski, the last general on Abakumov’s September 1943 list, was executed.