Even less was known about the routine military trials in the field. For example, in December 1944, the military tribunal of the 1st Baltic Front tried nine members of a Lithuanian paramilitary group captured by SMERSH. From 1941 to August 1944, that group had arrested Soviet servicemen and parachutists and handed them over to the Germans. They also fought against the advancing Red Army.50 The group’s leader was sentenced to death and shot, and the others were sentenced to ten years in labor camps. It is not surprising that the Soviets wanted to prevent the world from knowing about those who viewed the German invasion as an opportunity to free themselves from the Soviet regime.
Open public trials continued after the war, but now Beria was put in charge of organizing them. On November 2, 1945, he ordered that a special commission consisting of Merkulov (NKGB), Abakumov, and Sergei Kruglov (NKVD) be set up to evaluate the cases of 105 important war criminals being held in POW camps and prisons.51 Three days later, the commission forwarded to Molotov a list of 85 potential defendants for future open trials in Leningrad, Smolensk, Velikie Luki, Kiev, Nikolaev, Minsk, Riga, and Bryansk. Defendants were selected and grouped according to their activities and region. The Politburo approved the plan for future trials and ordered that a commission headed by Vyshinsky, and including Abakumov and Kruglov, be responsible for organizing the trials.52
The trials took place from December 1945 to February 1946, at the same time as the Nuremberg trials.53 Surprisingly, the extermination of Jews was discussed at these trials, making it hard to believe that less than two years later Stalin unleashed his own anti-Semitic campaign against the ‘cosmopolitans’ and the American ‘fifth column’, the code words for identifying Soviet Jews as enemies of the state and supposedly potential American spies. At the trials, all 85 German defendants, including 18 generals, were sentenced either to death by hanging (66 defendants) or twelve to twenty years in the labor camps.
Oddly, during the first trial (December 28, 1945–January 4, 1946) of eleven Germans accused of atrocities committed in the Leningrad region and the cities of Novgorod and Pskov in 1941–42, a prosecutor asked the defendant Arno Diere (in the Russian records, Duere) about the Katyn massacre.54 Diere claimed that he had helped to bury the bodies of Polish officers supposedly shot there by the Nazis. However, it became clear that he was lying. Diere stated that the Katyn Forest was in Poland and not in Russia and that the trench used for the burial was 15–20 and not 1.5–2.0 meters deep, and so on. In fact, Diere had participated in mass killings of Soviet civilians, and by cooperating with the Soviet investigators and lying he had saved his own life.
On January 5, 1946, Major General Heinrich Remlinger—the former military commandant of Pskov, who admitted his guilt but insisted that he had followed orders—and seven other convicts were hanged in Leningrad.55 Diere was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in camps. He survived and in 1954, he admitted that he had lied about his involvement in the Katyn Forest massacre.
On September 10, 1947, the Politburo approved nine more open trials of 137 Germans.56 Stalin personally controlled the decisions of the military tribunals that followed and approved on the phone death sentences for the German generals. Additionally, in October–November 1947, 761 prisoners were sentenced as war criminals in closed sessions of military tribunals.57
Notes
1. Lawrence D. Stokes, ‘From Law Student to Einsatzgruppe Commander: The Career of a Gestapo Officer,’ Canadian Journal of History 37, no. 1 (April 2002), 41–73. Details about the activity of Einsatzgruppe D in Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition 2003).
2. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 315. The ChGK was created on November 2, 1942 and consisted of Shvernik (Chairman); Andrei Zhdanov, a Politburo member; Academicians Nikolai Burdenko, Boris Vedeneev, Trofim Lysenko, Yevgenii Tarle, and Ivan Trainin; the writer Aleksei Tolstoi; a female pilot, Valentina Grizodubova; and the clergyman Metropolitan Nikolai of Kiev. The ChGK played mostly the propaganda role and concealed the anti-Jewish Nazi racial policy and falsely ascribed the Katyn massacre to the Nazis. Marina Sorokina, ‘People and Procedures: Towards a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (Fall 2005), 797–831.
3. The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings of the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1944), 7–44. Also, Ilya Bourtman, ‘“Blood for Blood, Death for Death”: The Soviet Military Tribunal in Krasnodar, 1943,’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23, no. 2 (Fall 2008), 246–65.
4. The defendants: I. F. Kladov, I. F. Kotomtsev, M. P. Lastovina, G. N. Misan, Y. M. Naptsok, V. S. Pavlov, I. I. Paramonov, N. S. Pushkarev, I. A. Rechkalov, V. P. Tishchenko, and G. P. Tuchkov.
5. The People’s Verdict, 21.
6. Executed: Kladov, Kotomtsev, Lastovina, Misan, Naptsok, Pushkarev, Rechkalov, and Tishchenko. See two Soviet documentaries about the trial and execution at http://www.history-vision.de/detail/2702.html and http://www.historyvision.de/detail/3164.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.
7. Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1964), 732.
8. For instance, the memoir by the American prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz, A Visionary for World Peace, Chapter 4. Story 33. The Biggest Murder Trial in History, http://www.benferencz.org/index.php?id=8&story=32, retrieved September 8, 2011.
9. Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, edited by Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Ruckerl, 69–71 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
10. Bernie Farber, ‘Painfully slow court system gives war criminals free pass,’ The Star, February 16, 2010, http://www.thestar.com/Article/764817, retrieved September 8, 2011.
11. On January 31, 1943, Lieutenant General Arthur Kurt Schmidt was taken prisoner along with Field Marshal von Paulus and his other generals. On June 24, 1950 the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District sentenced him as a war criminal to 25 years’ imprisonment. On September 25, 1953 he was repatriated to Germany. Schmidt’s MVD card in I. V. Bezborodova, Generaly Vermakhta v plenu (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1998), 172 (in Russian).
12. Document No. 80 in Stalingradskaya epopeya: Vpervye publikuemye dokumenty, rassekrechennye FSB (Moscow: Zvonnitsa, 2000), 354–63 (in Russian).
13. Moscow Conference, October 1943. Joint Four-Nation Declaration, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/moscow.htm, retrieved January 5, 2011.