Mr. President, General Rudenko, during his cross examination, submitted three interrogation records… I should like to ask the High Tribunal also to compare these three records… Parts of the answers are repeated… totally, word by word… I wish to make an application that at least one of these persons who were interrogated be brought here in person for the purpose of cross-examination.49
Fritzsche added: ‘I can only ask to have all three called.’
Rudenko’s use of Vyshinsky’s technique of prosecution based on generalized accusations did not work in the international court. On October 1, 1946, Fritzsche was acquitted. The Soviet prosecutors were against this decision. Nikitchenko read a long dissenting opinion before the Tribunal with the conclusion: ‘I consider Fritzsche’s responsibility fully proven. His activity had a most basic relation to the preparation and the conduct of aggressive warfare as well as to the other crimes of Hitler’s regime.’50
Hungarian Countess Ingeborg Kalnoky, who ran a guesthouse in Nuremberg for trial witnesses, well remembered the day of Fritzsche’s acquittaclass="underline"
Perhaps correctly the trial was dismissed by many Germans as a political one… Fritzsche, henchman of Goebbels, mouthpiece of the venal Nazi propaganda machine that had for so long suppressed all freedom of thought and speech, feeding the ignorant lies and hysteria, equally [went] free. But the nameless millions of the nation [the acquitted] had helped so industriously to discredit did not go free. Summarily judged, without benefit of trial, they served their misery and death.51
Four months later, on January 31, 1947, the Bavarian de-Nazification tribunal in Nuremberg sentenced Fritzsche to nine years’ hard labor in a labor camp, confiscation of his main property and the permanent loss of his civil rights. He spent four years in prison until his release in September 1950. On September 27, 1953 Fritzsche, described in his obituary as ‘silken-voiced radio chief in Adolf Hitler’s propaganda ministry,’ died in Cologne.52
The International Tribunal sentenced Admiral Raeder to life in prison. However, due to poor health, he was released from Spandau Prison on September 26, 1955. Four years later he died in Kiel.
The Team in Action
From time to time, members of the Likhachev team interrogated the defendants. A Soviet translator, Svidovskaya-Tabachnikova, later recalled Likhachev’s interrogation of Hans Frank: ‘Likhachev strictly followed a list of questions written on a piece of paper. I was shocked… In short, I could not consider the interrogation by Likhachev to be very professional.’53
Members of the main Soviet delegation guessed what these three men were doing in Nuremberg. Mark Raginsky, USSR Assistant Prosecutor, strongly opposed the presence of Solovov and Grishaev on the prosecutors’ team, openly claiming that they ‘used the work at the Tribunal only as an “umbrella” and that [they] allegedly had some other special task.’54 Apparently, one of the group’s tasks was to control the documents presented in the court. On November 26, 1945, the Vyshinsky Commission developed instructions for Soviet prosecutors. The list of issues prohibited from discussion at the trial included:
The USSR’s attitude to the Versailles Treaty.
The Soviet–German Nonaggression Pact of 1939 and all questions connected with it.
Molotov’s visit to Berlin and Ribbentrop’s to Moscow [in 1940].
Questions concerning the social and political governance in the USSR.
The Soviet Baltic republics [annexed in June 1940].
The Soviet–German agreement regarding the exchange of the German population of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia with Germany [in 1940].
The foreign policy of the Soviet Union and, in particular, the [Turkish] Straits questions [discussed by Molotov in Berlin in 1940], and on the alleged territorial claims of the USSR.
The Balkan question.
The Soviet–Polish relationship (questions of the [annexed] Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia).55
These were sensitive issues that highlighted the differences between Stalin and the Western Allies in their approaches to international politics and emphasized Stalin’s long-term goals for Soviet expansion in Europe. Vyshinsky could rely on the Likhachev team that it would do whatever it took to avoid raising these questions in the courtroom. As Grishaev stated in 1989, in Nuremberg he used to walk ‘arm in arm’ with Vyshinsky.56
Svidovskaya-Tabachnikova recalled that Likhachev was also given the task of bringing to the Nuremberg court Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, former commander of the 6th German Army that surrendered at Stalingrad in February 1943, and General Erich Buschenhagen, former Commander of the 52nd Army Corpus of Paulus’s army. A special group conveyed the two German generals; it included five GUPVI/NKVD officers and Inver Mamedov, a translator attached to the Likhachev team.57 The head of the group was Major General Il’ya Pavlov, deputy head of the Operational Department of the GUPVI, who, during the war, was deputy head of the SMERSH Directorate of the 2nd Belorussian Front, and thus well acquainted with Likhachev.
On February 11, 1946, the Soviet prosecutors suddenly produced von Paulus and Buschenhagen in the courtroom as witnesses. Stalin had secretly ordered this surprise for the court after Vyshinsky told him that the International Tribunal refused to accept the testimony von Paulus made outside of the courtroom.
Despite their cooperation with Soviet investigators and prosecutors, von Paulus and Buschenhagen were not released after the trial. While von Paulus’s release was planned for 1950, it ended up being postponed until 1953.58 In June 1950, the MVD Military Tribunal sentenced Buschenhagen to twenty-five years in prison for war crimes. Held in Prison No. 1 in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), he was released in October 1955. He died in 1994.
On November 20, 1945, three more SMERSH officers from the former UKR of the 1st Belorussian Front, Leonid Kozlovtsev, Krasilnikov, and Khelipsky arrived in Nuremberg.59 Sergei Kartashov personally approved this group, but its duties and function at the trial are unknown. The officers stayed in Nuremberg until October 1, 1946.
Undercover Confrontation
Soviet foreign intelligence also reported on events as well as on the Soviet team in Nuremberg. The secret services were convinced that American intelligence had tricked the SMERSH team and even tried to kill Likhachev. On December 8, 1945, Pavel Fitin, head of the 1st NKGB Directorate (foreign intelligence), reported to Beria:
A copy
Top Secret
To: People’s Commissar of the Interior of the USSR
Comrade BERIA
Special Report
An NKGB officer stationed in Nuremberg described conditions of work of Soviet representatives at the International Military Tribunal.
1. American counterintelligence organized external shadowing of several members of the Soviet team in Nuremberg and is trying to provoke them. At the end of November, Major TARKHOV, who arrived in Nuremberg from the [Office of the] Political Department of the Soviet Military Administration in Berlin, was approached by a man unknown to him. The stranger said he was an illegal agent who had been discharged from Soviet counterintelligence with Romanian documents, and asked [the Major] to connect him with anybody working in Soviet counterintelligence. Major TARKHOV promised to do so.