Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust

Michael J. Bazyler, Frank M. Tuerkheimer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479849932
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

In the wake of the Second World War, how were the Allies torespond to the enormous crime of the Holocaust? Even in an ideal world, itwould have been impossible to bring all the perpetrators to trial.Nevertheless, an attempt was made to prosecute some. This book uncovers ten “forgotten trials” of the Holocaust,selected from the many Nazi trials that have taken place over the course of thelast seven decades. It showcases how perpetrators of the Holocaust were dealtwith in courtrooms around the world, revealing how differentlegal systems responded to the horrors of the Holocaust. The book provides agraphic picture of the genocidal campaign against the Jews through eyewitnesstestimony and incriminating documents and traces how the public memory of theHolocaust was formed over time.

The four defendants at the Kharkov Trial: (l to r) Wilhelm Langheld, Reinhard Retzlaff, Hanz Ritz, and Mikhail Bulanov. Photo Archive, Yad Vashem.

1

The Kharkov Trial of 1943

The First Trial of the Holocaust?

In the brutal history of humanity, no other tragedy compares to the scale of death and destruction brought by Germany in the years between 1941 and 1945 to the territories of present-day Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine. During the forty-seven months of what is known in the region as the Great Patriotic War, approximately 30 million Soviet civilians and soldiers lost their lives. Twenty million of these were civilians. Over sixty years later, more than 2.4 million are still officially considered missing in action, while 6 million of the 9.5 million buried in mass graves remain unidentified.

When describing what befell them, the people of the region often reference the brutal hordes of Mongol invaders in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Such an analogy is a fair one. In a throwback to the Mongol style of warfare, and on direct orders from Hitler, the German military on its Eastern Front did not follow the rules of warfare that had been developed by Europeans over the centuries to minimize civilian casualties as well as special status recognition of captured enemy soldiers.

Prior to the start of military operations in June 1941, Hitler announced to his generals: “The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness.”¹ Pursuant to Hitler’s instructions, the German generals issued specific orders to their regiments regarding how the upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union was to be conducted. This included the so-called “commissar order,” instructing the troops to take severe and decisive measures against “Bolshevik agitators” (the Soviet political commissars), partisans, saboteurs, and Jews. These orders provided the purported legal basis under German law for the mass executions of suspected political opponents and, eventually, Soviet Jews. It also permitted the German military to conduct a policy whereby approximately three million Soviet soldiers would die of starvation or cold in German POW camps.

In Ukraine, some of the fiercest battles between the German forces and the Red Army took place around Kharkov, Ukraine’s second-largest city. As a result of these battles, Kharkov became the only Soviet territory that changed hands four times during the war. The Germans captured Kharkov and the rest of eastern Ukraine in October 1941. In May 1942, the Red Army led a disastrous counterattack in an attempt to recapture the city. Hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers lost their lives in what David Glantz calls “one of the most catastrophic offensives in Russian military history.”² In February 1943, the Red Army launched another offensive, this time successfully liberating the city. Soon thereafter, German forces countered with another attack, recapturing Kharkov in March 1943. This turned out to be the last major German victory on the Eastern Front. On August 23, 1943, the Red Army carried out what is known as Operation Rumiantsev and liberated Kharkov once and for all from German occupation.

Four months later, in December 1943, the Soviet Union conducted a trial in Kharkov of three captured Germans and one Ukrainian collaborator, charging them with the murder of Kharkov civilians, almost all Jews. The highly publicized Kharkov trial was the first trial of Germans held by any of the Allied powers. Earlier that year the Soviets held a public trial at Krasnodar, but the defendants were all Soviet citizens tried for treason stemming from their collaboration with the German invaders. The Soviets had also been conducting summary military trials of captured Germans, followed by quick executions. These, however, were not public trials and so were virtually unknown to the outside world. In contrast, the Kharkov trial was a highly publicized affair, and an attempt (partly successful, as we shall see) by the Soviets to conduct a Western-style legal proceeding.

It would take another two years, after Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945, for the Allies to organize and begin the trial of the so-called major war criminals at Nuremberg. As we noted earlier, the trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was not, in a strict sense, a trial of the Holocaust since the murder of the Jews was not the central focus at Nuremberg. In Kharkov, in contrast, much of the focus of the trial was on the murder of the Jewish population of Kharkov, although not identified as such. Instead, the victims were referred to in the generic as “Soviet citizens”—for reasons discussed below.

The Holocaust in Kharkov

The Jews of the Soviet Union were the first group to be targeted for mass murder. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, special action murder squads known as the Einsatzgruppen followed the regular German army into newly conquered territory. Operating just behind the advancing German troops, these mobile killing squads would round up and murder all the Jews and other “undesirables” such as the Roma and the Sinti (commonly known as Gypsies), perceived communist political leaders, professionals, and “criminals,” often with assistance from the local populace. The regular German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, also were heavily involved in the killings.

Later on, police battalions—initially organized to keep order in the occupied territories—joined in the killing process. They were supplemented by troops of the Waffen-SS (the military wing of the SS), the German Order Police, and non-German-staffed auxiliary police units comprised of Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Crimean Tartars, Belorussians, and Russians—all of whom participated in mass killings of civilians. As Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad notes: “A substantial number of people, particularly in the Baltic countries and Ukraine, collaborated with Hitler’s troops, and many participated in the murder of the Jews. Without the active support of the local inhabitants, tens of thousands of whom served in police units, the Germans would not have been able to identify and exterminate as many Jews in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.”³

The murder operations in Ukraine were conducted by Einsatzgruppe C, organized with the other three Einsatzgruppen in a police academy in Pretzsch, a town about fifty miles southwest of Berlin. Einsatzgruppe C troops were transported to Ukraine, where they joined the Army Group South, composed of Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS troops, which spread itself across the western Ukraine, including Kiev and Kharkov. On September 19, 1941, German forces captured Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Ten days later, detachment 4a of Einsatzgruppe C led by SS-Standartenführer (colonel) Paul Blobel massacred, over a period of two days, 33,771 Kiev Jews in the ravine at Babi Yar.

The German forces first entered Kharkov a month later, on October 23–24, 1941. In November 1941, they ordered that a census of the city be taken, in order to identify Jews among the population. In December 1941, the Jews of Kharkov were forced into a ghetto and then taken, in a similar fashion to Kiev, to the countryside to be shot. During this killing operation, at a ravine outside Kharkov known as Drobitsky Yar, approximately 15,000 Jews were murdered by the same detachment 4a troops and their collaborators. In total, Unit 4a—according to field reports sent to Berlin—executed 59,018 Jews in the Ukraine. The Drobitsky Yar mass grave is exceeded numerically only by the mass grave at Babi Yar, but remains largely unknown today to the outside world.

The Unknown Black Book, a compilation of testimonies from Jews who survived open-air massacres and other atrocities carried out by the Germans and their collaborators in Soviet territories, contains the testimony of one survivor of the Drobitsky Yar massacre, engineer S. S. Krivoruchko:

I, a resident of Kharkov, by nationality a Jew, by training an engineer, could not be evacuated from the city in October 1941, due to illness…. On the morning of December 14, a decree was posted throughout the city from the German commandant of Kharkov ordering all Jews to move to barracks on the grounds of a tractor factory within two days; persons found in the city after December 16 would be shot on the spot.

Starting on the morning of December 15, whole columns of Jews headed out of the city…. For many of the elderly and the handicapped, the journey from the city to the barracks of the tractor factory was the last of their lives. The corpses of no fewer than thirty old people lay on the ground. The pogrom began at about twelve o’clock, along with the robbing of the Jews who were on the move. As a result, many Jews arrived at the barracks without anything to their name and, more importantly, with barely any food….

The barracks … were one-story, ramshackle structures, with smashed windows, torn away floors, and holes in the rooftops…. In the room which I had found myself more than seventy people had arrived by evening, whereas no more than six to eight people would have been able to live in it under normal circumstances. People stood compressed against each other…. From the dreadful overcrowding, hunger and lack of water, an epidemic of gastro-intestinal diseases broke out…. Robbery and murder were daily occurrences. Usually, the Germans would burst into the room on the pretext of searching for weapons and would steal anything that came to mind. In the event of any resistance, they dragged people out into the yard and shot them….

On January 2, 1942, at 7:00 am … [a] German sentry shouted out an order for everyone to gather their things and be outside in ten minutes…. I went outside … then German sentries and policemen formed a tight ring around us and announced that we were being evacuated to Poltava. We marched out onto the Chuguyev-Kharkov highway but then were directed away from the city, although the road to Poltava ran through town. It was obvious that they were not taking us to Poltava. But where exactly we were going, nobody knew…. Two kilometers past the last houses of the tractor factory workers’ quarters, they turned us in the direction of a ravine. The ravine was strewn with bits of rags and the remains of torn clothing. It became clear why they had brought us here. The ravine was sealed off by a double row of sentries. On the edge of the ravine stood a truck with machine guns. Terrible scenes erupted when people understood that they had been brought here to be slaughtered…. Many said goodbye to each other, embracing, kissing, exchanging the last supplies they had….

From the standing column, the Germans began using clubs to drive groups of fifty to seventy people one hundred paces or so forward, then forcing them to strip down to their underwear. It was -20 or -25 degrees C. Those undressed were driven down to the bottom of the ravine from which were heard occasional shots and the chattering of machine guns.

I was in a daze and did not notice the screaming behind me. The Germans began driving forward the group that I was part of. I moved off, ready to die within a few minutes. Just then, something happened: the Germans brought up the aged and handicapped to be executed. The belongings of those who had been killed had been loaded onto these trucks and brought back to the city. I moved along behind one of these vehicles. Two young Jews were in the truck; the Germans had assigned them to do the loading. In a flash, I jumped into the truck and asked the youngsters to cover me. Then they hid themselves as well. When the truck was full, the German drivers took off with it and in this way took me and the two boys away from the awful ravine….

I went to find my wife (she is not a Jew and had stayed behind in the city with our adopted daughter) who hid me with a girlfriend of hers. I stayed with her for six and a half months. For four months later after that I wandered from village to village with a false passport and, in this way, held on until February 16, 1943, when Kharkov was liberated for the first time from the German occupiers.⁴

The German account of the roundup—Operational Situation Report U.S.S.R. No. 164, transmitted from the field to Berlin and dated February 4, 1942—summarizes the actions t...