Just two days after the liberation of Sevastopol, Stalin signed a top secret document, State Defense Committee (GKO) Decree No. 5859ss, which authorized a massive operation to punish the Crimea Tatars. The document stated that:
During the Patriotic War, many Crimean Tatars betrayed the Motherland, deserting Red Army units that defended the Crimea and siding with the enemy, joining volunteer army units formed by the Germans to fight against the Red Army; as members of German punitive detachments, during the occupation of the Crimea by German fascist troops, the Crimean Tatars particularly were noted for their savage reprisals against Soviet partisans, and also helped the German invaders to organize the violent roundup of Soviet citizens for German enslavement and the mass extermination of the Soviet people.
The Crimean Tatars actively collaborated with the German occupation authorities, participating in the so-called “Tatar national committees,” organized by the German intelligence organs, and were often used by the Germans to infiltrate the rear of the Red Army with spies and saboteurs. With the support of the Crimean Tatars, the “Tatar national committees,” in which the leading role was played by White Guard-Tatar emigrants, directed their activity at the persecution and oppression of the non-Tatar population of the Crimea and were engaged in preparatory efforts to separate the Crimea from the Soviet Union by force, with the help of the German armed forces.
Stalin put Lavrentiy Beria, the sadistic head of the NKVD, in charge of the operation against the Crimea Tatars. Beria assembled a force of 32,000 NKVD troops in the rear of Tolbukhin’s 4th Ukrainian Front and waited for German resistance in the Crimea to be extinguished. On May 18, Beria’s NKVD troops moved to major Crimean Tatar settlements and began rounding up all the inhabitants at gunpoint. Most were given just a few minutes to gather a few items and then forced on to waiting trucks. In just three days, Beria’s troops rounded up more than 150,000 Crimean Tatars, who were assembled at the rail stations at Simferopol and Dzhankoy for rail transport to Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, all ethnic Crimean Tatar troops serving in either the Red Army or Crimean partisan brigades were separated and dispatched to forced-labor camps in the Soviet Gulag system. Some remote Tatar settlements were not rounded up until later in the month, and some people hid in the mountains, but by the end of May 1944 the NKVD reported rounding up 183,155 Crimean Tatars. Another 10,000 were found in subsequent operations. Stalin intended to “Russify” the Crimea and remove the Tatar presence once and for all, and their collaboration with the Germans became the pretext for massive ethnic cleansing. The Tatars referred to their forced deportation as the Sürgün (exile).[16]
A few Tatars escaped the Soviet dragnet. The Tatar leader Edige Kirimal was in Germany when the Crimea was liberated by the Red Army, and had the good fortune to fall into the hands of the Western Allies in 1945. A few others made their way to Turkey or the Near East. Yet the bulk of the Crimean Tatar population was removed from the Crimea, and their deportation was conducted under very harsh conditions, little different from German round-ups of targeted groups. At least 6,400 Crimean Tatars perished en route to the labor camps in Uzbekistan, and 30,000 died within the first year. Within 30 months, more than half of those deported – 109,000 Crimean Tatars – were dead from illness, starvation, and mistreatment in NKVD-run camps.
However, Beria’s ethnic-cleansing operations in the Crimea continued after the main operation against the Crimean Tatars. In June 1944 he received authorization from Stalin to round up Armenians, Bulgars, Greeks, and other non-Russian minorities; they too were put on trains and sent eastward. In mid-July, Beria was chagrined to learn that his NKVD troops had neglected to search the Arabat Spit, and that a number of Crimean Tatars were still there. Apparently, he had already reported to Stalin that all of the Crimean Tatars had been removed, and the discovery of these “un-persons” was an embarrassment. He hastily sent troops to round up the villagers on the Arabat Spit, but instead of loading them onto trains, they were loaded onto barges left over from the amphibious landings of 1943. Around July 20, 1944, the barges were towed out into the Sea of Azov and scuttled, drowning hundreds of civilians. Details of this event are still obscure. The Soviet ethnic-cleansing operations in the Crimea were a heinous crime that bore a striking similarity with the German “special actions” in the Crimea. Oddly, both Jews and Muslims in the Crimea faced persecution and extermination by the opposing sides, but as is well known, it is the victors who write history, so the German crimes in the Crimea have been exposed to the world, while Soviet crimes both before and after World War II have been hidden.
As if to reinforce their point that they were the victims, the Soviet regime decided to hold war-crimes trials in Sevastopol in November 1947. Generaloberst Erwin G. Jaenecke, the former commander of AOK 17, was the most senior German officer indicted by the Soviet tribunal, but it is interesting that the specific charges against him related to his use of the “Taifun” weapon system near Kerch in November 1943.[17] The Soviets claimed that “Taifun” was a chemical weapon, and Jaenecke was charged with authorizing its use. He was convicted by the Soviet tribunal and spent eight years in a Soviet work camp until released in 1955. The Soviets also tried and convicted a number of other Germans for offenses committed in the Crimea, but usually for reprisals against Soviet POWs or partisans, not for the ethnic-cleansing operations of 1941–42. While Stalin was alive, and even for many years afterwards, Soviet historians were reticent to raise the subject of the Holocaust, since it was too close a subject to other Soviet-era crimes.
CHAPTER 10
Postscript, 2014
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
In 1954, the Soviet Union legally transferred the Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Nikita Khrushchev believed that the “gift” of the Crimea would help to solidify Ukrainian support for the communist regime, which had been tenuous from the beginning. However, Khrushchev had not counted on the Soviet Union crumbling into the “ashbin of history” less than four decades later, leaving the whole question of Russian-Ukrainian solidarity a moot point. Instead of wistful notions of Slavic Brotherhood, the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 enabled the Ukraine to make a break for the open prison door in order to gain its independence and seek a different course. The new government in Kiev retained control over the Crimea, and Russia was too overwhelmed by internal chaos at the time to press its interests. Ironically, after using force to acquire the Crimea in 1920 and 1944, the Russians lost control over the region by peaceful means in 1991.
16
Greta Lynn Uehling,
17
RG-06.025.05, N-19096, tom 1, Sevastopol, 1946–1947, Trial of Erwin Gustav Jaenecke, U.S. Holocaust Museum Archives.