The murder of Likhachev’s driver on December 8, 1945 remains a mystery. In Moscow, Pravda published an angry article about the incident.69 No action followed.
The Mysterious Death of General Zorya
In a March 11, 1946 letter to Robert Jackson, Rudenko openly described the issues the Soviet delegation did not want to hear in the court.70 For some reason, this letter omitted three of the points mentioned on the above list, about the Versailles Treaty (no. 1) and about the Baltic countries (nos. 5 and 6).
Rudenko’s letter and his agreement with the Allied delegations did not save the Soviet prosecution from a courtroom discussion of secret protocols that were part of the Soviet–German Non-Aggression Pact signed in August 1939. On March 25, 1946, Dr. Alfred Seidl, counsel to Rudolf Hess, presented to the court an affidavit written by the former chief of the legal department of the German Foreign Office, Dr. Friedrich Gaus.71 Gaus had participated in negotiations with the Soviets in Moscow in 1939, and his affidavit attested to the existence of secret protocols. Then, during the cross-examination by Seidl, the defendant Joachim von Ribbentrop, former German foreign minister, and then the witness Ernst von Weizsäcker, former state secretary in the German Foreign Office, confirmed Gaus’s affidavit and details of the secret protocols it contained.72
After a recess, the president ruled: ‘The Tribunal has decided not to put the document to the witness.’ Apparently, during the recess a confidential agreement was worked out with Rudenko.
For Rudenko’s assistant, Major General of Justice Nikolai Zorya, Seidl’s démarche ended up being fatal. On May 21, 1946, Seidl visited the Soviet prosecutors’ office, wishing to discuss photocopies of the secret protocols with Rudenko. Only General Zorya was in the office, and Seidl talked to him instead. As Seidl recalled, after thinking over the matter of the photocopies, General Zorya answered: ‘There is no point in having such a conversation.’73
The next day the American newspaper St. Louis Post-Dispatch published texts of the protocols. It is unknown whether Seidl had given a copy to the newspaper. The day after that, on May 23, Gennadii Samoilov, a SMERSH officer, found General Zorya dead in his hotel room with a wound to his head.
Until his own death in 1998, General Zorya’s son, Yurii, was convinced that his father’s death was connected with the presentation of the Katyn massacre question by Soviet prosecutors in Nuremberg, an issue tightly connected with the secret Soviet–German protocols.74 From the beginning Rudenko and other Soviet prosecutors tried to include in the indictment the accusation that German defendants had killed 11,000 Polish officers taken as prisoners of war in 1939 by the Red Army. Despite Rudenko’s objections, on March 12, 1946, the Tribunal complied with the request of Goering’s counsel, Dr. Otto Stahmer, to call witnesses to rebut the Soviet version of events.75 The cross-examination of witnesses presented by both sides took place on July 1 and 2, 1946.76 The testimonies of German witnesses destroyed the Soviet version. Tatiana Stupnikova, the Russian translator of the German testimony, recalled that all Soviet representatives who were in the courtroom on July 1, 1946, called that day ‘the black day of the Nuremberg Trial.’77 However, the Tribunal did not make any conclusive statement on the issue, and the Soviet prosecutors made no attempt to return to the Katyn question again.
No direct evidence presented in Nuremberg connected General Zorya with the issue of the Katyn massacre. The published minutes of the meeting of the Vyshinsky Commission on May 21, 1946, containing instructions regarding Katyn, did not mention Zorya.78 Abakumov was ordered to prepare Bulgarian witnesses, while Merkulov’s duties included preparing Soviet medical experts, medical documents (which were forged), and a German witness. Vyshinsky was placed in charge of a documentary film about the massacre, and USSR Chief Prosecutor Safonov was responsible for preparing Polish witnesses. Since this was a plan involving massive falsification, it is possible that Zorya opposed it.
Prosecutors Rudenko and Gorshenin informed Stalin that Zorya had committed suicide. This is also possible if Zorya was afraid of Stalin’s retaliation after the secret protocols appeared in an American newspaper.79 In Nuremberg, Likhachev disseminated a rumor that Stalin said about Zorya: ‘Bury him like a dog!’80
The Soviet delegation was suspiciously hasty in getting rid of the body. On the morning of the death, Rudenko went to the office of chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson to ask his permission to move Zorya’s body from Nuremberg in the American occupation zone to Leipzig in the Soviet zone.81 Rudenko told Jackson that Zorya had accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun. When Jackson sent two of his people to check out the story, they informed him that it was highly unlikely that a Soviet general would have been cleaning his own gun with the muzzle pointed between his eyes. It looked more as if somebody had shot Zorya at close range. If so, either Likhachev or his subordinate Samoilov, who supposedly found the body, would most likely have carried out the assassination.
The events that followed were even more suspicious. D. M. Reznichenko, Soviet Military Prosecutor in Leipzig, later recalled having received two phone calls from Stalin’s secretariat regarding Zorya’s funeral.82 First he was ordered to bring the body to Moscow. The second order was to bury Zorya’s body in an unmarked grave in Leipzig without performing an autopsy. By the next day, May 24, Prosecutor Yurii Pokrovsky had escorted Zorya’s body from Nuremberg to Leipzig. The documents identify Zorya as a private instead of a major general, and later both the name of General Zorya and his photos were removed from all records and reports published in the USSR on the International Nuremberg Trial.
The circumstances of Nikolai Zorya’s death remain a mystery. Since Stalin personally ordered that the body be buried secretly without an autopsy, it is most likely that Stalin gave the earlier order to kill Zorya and that the murderer was Likhachev or his subordinate. Or Stalin deeply hated Zorya for killing himself and this way escaping Stalin’s punishment.
The Team Leaves Nuremberg
Soon after Zorya’s death Likhachev and his team were ordered to leave Nuremberg. In 1951, the arrested Lev Sheinin testified on the reason for Likhachev’s dismissaclass="underline" ‘Likhachev forced a young interpreter who resided in our building to live with him. After she got pregnant, Likhachev forced her to have an abortion. The operation was performed by a German doctor—unsuccessfully.’83 Rudenko informed Chief USSR Prosecutor Gorshenin about the situation, and Gorshenin reported Likhachev’s behavior to the Central Committee and Abakumov. Likhachev was ordered back to Moscow, and the team left Nuremberg.
In Nuremberg, Colonel Vsevolod Syuganov, deputy head of the 1st Department of the GUKR SMERSH, replaced Likhachev.84 Syuganov joined the OGPU in 1927, and from 1932 on, he worked in Moscow. At the beginning of the war he served in the 3rd UOO Department (counterintelligence in armored troops and artillery), then in the 1st GUKR SMERSH Department (operational work in the NKO). Syuganov’s team included five officers from GUKR in Moscow and an officer from the UKR SMERSH of the GSVOG.85 The fact that one of the officers was from the 8th GUKR Department (ciphering) points to the possibility that the team reported directly to GUKR.