Ongoing discussions highlighted the differences between the Western and Soviet positions since the Soviet delegation did not want to accept the concept of presumption of innocence.5 The Soviets claimed that the future defendants were already guilty because of the decisions made by Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference on February 4–11, 1944, to ‘bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment’ and to ‘wipe out the Nazi party, Nazi laws, organizations and institutions.’6 In the Soviet opinion, this was enough to label all former German officials and military men as war criminals, without a trial.
Furthermore, it was not easy to overcome differences between Franco-Russian and Anglo-American criminal procedures. The American Judge Telford Taylor who participated in the trial, wrote later in his memoir:
Under the Continental system (known to lawyers as the ‘inquisitorial’ system), most of the documentary and testimonial evidence is presented to an examining magistrate, who assembles all of it in a dossier… The trial proceeds with both the court and the concerned parties fully informed in advance of the evidence for and against the defendant. If the court… decides to take further testimony, the witnesses are usually questioned by the judges, rather than the lawyers, so that cross-examinations by opposing counsel, which play so large a part in Anglo-American trials, do not often occur. The defendant is allowed to testify under oath, but may make an unsworn statement to the court.’7
Although the Soviet show trials of the late 1930s followed the French ‘inquisitorial’ system, there was a huge difference between a trial in a real French court and one in Moscow. In the Soviet system, everything was decided for the most part before the trial, and during important show trials Stalin and the Politburo edited and approved indictments and verdicts. In London, Nikitchenko admitted that he was not familiar with the Anglo-American system, and at the last meeting he asked: ‘What is meant in English by “cross-examine”?’8
Finally a compromise was reached, and on August 8, 1945 the chief prosecutors of the four countries in charge held their first meeting. To the surprise of his Anglo-American colleagues, Nikitchenko, a prosecutor, announced that Stalin had appointed him Soviet Judge to the court, and that Lieutenant–General of Justice Roman Rudenko, Chief Prosecutor of Ukraine, who was unknown to the Western contingent, would be Soviet Chief Prosecutor.
Although he attended only a seven-year school and had no legal training, in 1937 the thirty-year-old Rudenko made a career as a prosecutor at a series of local show trials in the Donbass coal-mining region.9 At these trials, scores of innocent defendants were sentenced to death or to ten to twenty-five years in the labor camps. In 1941, Rudenko graduated from a two-year legal course and began to work at the USSR Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow.10 In August 1942, supported by Nikita Khrushchev (then first Party secretary of Ukraine), Rudenko became Ukrainian Chief Prosecutor.
Most probably, Stalin noticed this talented demagogue in June 1945, during the show trial of sixteen members of the underground Polish government whom Ivan Serov, Beria’s deputy and NKVD Plenipotentiary at the 1st Belorussian Front, secretly arrested in March 1944.11 In fact, the entire government of Poland was kidnapped and brought to Moscow. The NKGB investigated the case.
On June 13, 1945 the Politburo ordered the Poles to be tried in an open session of the Military Collegium chaired by Vasilii Ulrikh, with Chief Military Prosecutor Nikolai Afanasiev and Rudenko as prosecutors.12 Foreign correspondents and diplomats were invited to this show trial, and it was transmitted on the radio. The Poles were accused of collaborating with the Germans and organizing terrorist acts against the Red Army. Brigadier General Leopold Okulicki, the last commander in chief of the Armija Krajowa and head of the underground Polish government, was sentenced to a 10-year imprisonment, and his fifteen co-defendants were sentenced to various terms. On December 24, 1946 Okulicki died in the Butyrka Prison Hospital in Moscow.13 In the USSR, this trial of sixteen Poles made Rudenko famous.
The Politburo’s Choice
In late August 1945, the Soviet leaders decided to send two high-level German prisoners to stand the International Trial in Nuremberg: Hans Fritzsche, former Radio Propaganda Chief in Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, and Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, former commander in chief (until 1943) of the German Navy. They were second-rank officials in the Third Reich, but to Stalin’s embarrassment, the Western Allies had caught all the important Nazi figures. The Politburo selected the names of Fritzsche and Raeder from two separate lists prepared by SMERSH and the NKVD.
On August 18, 1945, Andrei Vyshinsky, first deputy Commissar for foreign affairs, sent his superior, Foreign Affairs Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, a list of proposed defendants for Nuremberg, who were in SMERSH’s custody. The GUKR SMERSH supplied brief biographical data for each person listed:
Top Secret
To Comrade Molotov V. M.
I consider it necessary to include the following individuals among arrestees held in the Soviet Union in the first list of main defendants at the International Tribunal court:
1. Field Marshal SCHÖRNER Ferdinand, born 1892, former commander of the German Army groups ‘South’ and ‘North’ (Courland), and from January 1945 on, Commandant of the Army Group ‘Center.’
In March 1944, SCHÖRNER headed the National Socialist Political Guidance Staff of the Armed Forces. The goal of this organization was to incite hatred among the German soldiers toward people of the anti-German coalition and especially toward nations of the Soviet Union.
In 1941, SCHÖRNER was the most reliable and trustworthy of Hitler’s confidants. He rose quickly through the ranks from Lt. Colonel to General-Fieldmarshal.
Under SCHÖRNER’s supervision, the German troops committed outrageous atrocities against the civilian population and POWs in the Baltic States. The Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Occupants in the Baltic States concluded that SCHÖRNER was responsible for these crimes.
[Schörner] admitted that, while commanding the Army Group ‘Center,’ he refused to follow the order on Germany’s surrender and continued fighting after May 8, 1945. When the situation of SCHÖRNER’s troops became hopeless, after having ordered them to continue fighting, he dressed in civilian clothes and tried to escape.
2. Goebbels’s Deputy of Propaganda FRITZSCHE Hans, born 1900, member of the National Socialist Party from 1933.
[Fritzsche] was one of the main organizers and leaders of Fascist propaganda.
During interrogations, FRITZSCHE pleaded guilty to being the head of Fascist propaganda efforts that slandered the Soviet Union, England, and America before and during World War II.
In speeches and using a radio service he organized, [Fritzsche] stirred up the German people against democratic countries.
In February 1945, on Goebbels’s order, [Fritzsche] developed a plan to create a secret radio center to be used by the German sabotage-and-terrorism organization ‘Werwolf.’
3. Vice-Admiral of the German Navy VOSS Hans-Erich, born 1897, German Navy representative at Hitler’s headquarters.
[Voss] was among those closest to Hitler. He stayed with Hitler until the last days and was one of his confidants.
Beginning in March 1943, VOSS was informed of all German Navy actions since he represented Navy Head Admiral [Karl] Doenitz at Hitler’s headquarters.