On Wednesday morning, December 15, 1943, hundreds of residents of liberated Kharkov filed into the Opera House on Rymarska Street, which runs parallel to Sumskaya Street, where the SS and German military command were headquartered during occupation of the city. A grand, neo-classical structure, the Opera House had miraculously emerged unscathed from two years of brutal Nazi rule, punctuated by four battles for the city, which left much of Kharkov in ruins. The ornate hall had been transformed into a courtroom where three German officers and a Russian collaborator were cast as antagonists in a drama whose denouement was as predictable and eagerly awaited as the grand operas presented on the stage.
Each person entering the Opera House held a red ticket good for that session only. Every day the seats would be filled by a different group of lucky citizens holding the toughest ticket in town—even more coveted than a ticket to a Deanna Durbin picture showing in one of the reopened movie theaters in Kharkov, which was slowly coming back to life after the suspended animation of the Nazi occupation. The tickets “were distributed to factory workers and office employees through their trade union organizations, so that the audience kept rotating,” Edmund Stevens wrote in the Christian Science Monitor.
The Soviets prepared for and gained international coverage of the trial—and not just from correspondents for major newspapers such as the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. Stories from Reuters, Associated Press, United Press, and other agencies ran on the front pages of small-town newspapers across America. “First War Guilt Trial Held On Kharkov Deaths” was the headline in The Oelwein (Iowa) Daily Register. “Nazi Soldiers Describe Brutal Execution Methods During Trial at Kharkov,” said The Rhinelander (Wisconsin) Daily News. Page 1 of The Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette: “Traitor Bares Nazi Horrors.”
Foreign reporters were admitted only to the final day of the four-day trial (and were free to witness the subsequent public executions). Their earlier stories were based on published accounts by Soviet writers—the crème de la crème of Soviet journalism—whose reports were funneled through Moscow. This led to confusion at some U.S. newspapers such as The Port Arthur (Texas) News, which ran a bold-type headline: “Murder Of Children Described At Moscow Trials.”
Klieg lights were set up in the makeshift courtroom to film the trial for a feature-length documentary. In format and presentation it certainly was an elaborate mise en scène like the infamous show trials of the 1930s. And what better place for a staged production than an opera hall? The Soviets were hungry for payback and eager for the world to learn about Nazi crimes against the Motherland. A good “show” would further that goal. But there was a show, a masquerade, within the show—like two matryoshka dolls, the larger one missing a crucial detail, a single paint stroke. Hidden inside was the true face, the momentous truth Soviet authorities were denying: this was the first trial of Germans for crimes that would become known as the Holocaust. The murdered Jews of Kharkov were among the first of the six million to die. Yet, they were invisible at the Kharkov trial.
“Both the Krasnodar and Kharkov trials omitted mention of the Nazi murder of Jews,” wrote Alexander Prusin. “Although by 1943 the Holocaust had become common knowledge and the ESC (Extraordinary State Commission) possessed massive evidence of the scope of the genocide, the tribunals referred to the executions of Jews as ‘massacres of Soviet citizens.’ The indictment in Kharkov referred to the ghettoization of Jews as ‘forceful resettlement of Soviet citizens’ to the outskirts of the city.”1 The Soviet government knew for certain in January 1942 “that the Jews were being annihilated, and up to the end of the war, neither Stalin nor his counterparts in Soviet leadership made any public reference to the matter,” Arad wrote.
The charade was dutifully maintained by Molotov in notes he sent to diplomats of friendly nations. In an April 1942 note, Molotov “detailed the murder of 3,000 civilians in Taganrog on October 27, 1941, of 7,000 inhabitants of the Crimean town of Kerch, of 6,000 people in Vitebsk, of 10,000 in Pinsk, of 12,000 in Minsk, and of 14,000 in Kharkov. Nowhere in the note does Molotov mention that the murdered victims were Jews.”2
The determined air-brushing of Jews from the picture reached Alice in Wonderland heights of absurdity in subsequent Soviet trials held in 1945–46 “where defendants and eyewitnesses revealed the horrors of ghettos, concentration camps, and mass executions, and where the charge of perpetrating the Holocaust—without its explicit mention—would frequently constitute the only basis for indictment,” Prusin wrote.3
Stalin had complex reasons, personal and practical, for maintaining the fiction of a non-Jewish Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Stalin was fervently anti-Semitic, but it was bloodless pragmatism that led him to sell out the Jews after signing of the Ribbentrop–Molotov treaty in August 1939. All reports of Nazi persecution of Jews in German-occupied territories suddenly vanished from the Soviet press, which began strewing rose petals in the Führer’s path. Consequently, Jews never knew what hit them two years later when Hitler tore up the treaty, invaded, and sent the Einsatzgruppen after them. Hitler’s betrayal had the effect of distancing Stalin even further from the discrete plight of the Jews. The consistent theme of his wartime speeches was that Nazi Germany aimed to exterminate the Slavic and Russian people—a narrative that would be watered down by reference to Jews, the only group of Soviets in actual danger of extermination. Stalin also meant to blunt German propaganda that it was making war not against the Russian people but rather “Judeo-Bolshevism”—a notion that might appeal to anti-Semitism among Ukrainian soldiers and lessen their hatred for the invaders. Stalin’s erasure of the Jews was not simply a wartime expedience, as demonstrated by his post-war banning of The Black Book, a collection of eyewitness testimonies to Nazi crimes against Jews in Ukraine and other territories. Soviet censors stopped publication of The Black Book in 1947, and it did not see full light of day until 1980 when Yad Vashem published it in Russian.
Thus, it is hardly surprising—indeed, it is entirely consistent with the delusion fostered by Stalin—that in the first state-run trial of Germans there would be no mention of “Jews,” the primary victims whose slaughter was the very reason for the trial. Here is a key passage from the indictment read in court:
“In Kharkov, on Gestapo orders, many peaceful Soviet citizens were moved from their flats in the city to specially designated barracks on the territory of a workers’ settlement of the Kharkov tractor plant. The Soviet citizens on their way to the workers’ settlement were repeatedly plundered and subjected to humiliations. Having put the people in barracks, the Germans divided them into groups of two or three hundred people, including adolescents, children, and old folks, and then drove them to a gully four to five kilometers away from the tractor works where they were shot near large pits that had been prepared beforehand.”
This is a sanitized, Judenfrei version of the story my mother told me and which I recounted in Hiding in the Spotlight. In December 1941, her family and 16,000 other Jews were marched by Germans and Ukrainian collaborators from Kharkov to the tractor factory, where they were held for two weeks without food and water before being taken to Drobitsky Yar for execution. The singularly Jewish quality of this slaughter—contrary to the Soviet whitewashing at the trial—is found in numerous accounts by civilians and soldiers, both Russian and German. The small obelisk erected in 1955 at Drobitsky Yar with the inscription, “The victims of Fascist Terror 1941–1942 Lie here,” now stands as a monument to the madman’s denial of the Holocaust. Stalin lied here.
In September 1943, an eleven-member commission of Kharkov city officials, academics, an army general, a priest, and two representatives of the ESC issued a report titled “On the Mass Shooting of Jews by the German Murderers in the Drobitzki Valley.” During German occupation of Kharkov, “The Jewish population was totally destroyed one by one,” the report stated. “Upwards of 15,000 Jewish residents of the city were shot during the months of December 1941 and January 1942 alone near the so-called valley of Drobitzki. The barbarity inflicted on innocent victims was confirmed by evidence obtained from witnesses, from protocols by medical experts, and from other reliable documents.” By the time the report reached the courtroom in Kharkov, all references to “Jews” had been removed and replaced with various euphemisms such as “peace-loving citizens.”
The two-stage death march of Kharkov Jews—first to the tractor factory for temporary warehousing, then to Drobitsky Yar—is chronicled in Einsatzgruppe field reports sent back to Berlin, and by testimony of German soldiers in later inquiries by the West German government. In one deposition, a former member of a German police battalion said he was sent to a secluded area outside Kharkov sometime after Christmas 1941. “We were taken to hilly terrain where we had to form a huge seclusion ring that the civilian population was not allowed to enter. Into this the Jews from the ghetto were taken with trucks. The Jews had to undress and to lie down nearby or right inside crevices in the earth. The crevices were natural ones and not tank ditches or other dugouts. In these pits the Jews were shot by the S.D.”
Despite similar stagecraft, the Kharkov “show” was no rerun from the thirties. There was no need for fabricated evidence in the opera hall, wrote Prusin, because “traces of German crimes in the Soviet Union were visible, widely known, and undeniable.”
And they continued—even as the Kharkov trial proceeded. Kiev and Kharkov were now liberated cities, but in areas to the west the retreating Nazis were still burning villages and slaughtering civilians. At the same time, the most gruesome cover-up in history was underway across Ukraine—the exhuming and incinerating of more than a million bodies, most of them Jewish, under the supervision of tormented Col. Blobel. It seemed an odd task for a man who quaked at the sight of fifty bodies in a gangswagen, much less tens of thousands of corpses festering in their own blood and vomit.
By December 1943, the tide was turning dramatically against Germany—Berlin and other cities had been under heavy Allied bombardment since mid-November—but the end of the war was still eighteen months away. The Kharkov trial came as a surprise to Churchill and Roosevelt, co-signers with Stalin of the Moscow Declaration just six weeks earlier. The Declaration stipulated that any accused Germans be returned to the scene of their crimes for trial and punishment, and in language unusually vivid for official statements it noted that “in their desperation the recoiling Hitlerites and Huns are redoubling their ruthless cruelties. This is now evidenced with particular clearness by monstrous crimes on the territory of the Soviet Union which is being liberated from Hitlerites, and on French and Italian territory.” Still, no one expected the Soviets to act on the Declaration before the ink was dry.
“After the Moscow meeting many persons regarded the decision about war criminals as something for the future, something to be attended to after the fighting was over,” Edwin James wrote in the New York Times on the third day of the Kharkov trial. “Many recalled the now famous 1919 cry of ‘Hang the Kaiser’ and recalled that it came to nothing, and classified the Moscow ruling as something for later on. Not so Stalin.”
Stalin’s reasons for jump-starting the judicial process are not known but could have included: boosting the morale of the battered Soviet people for the battles ahead; putting the rest of the German military on notice about what to expect if it committed similar atrocities; and establishing in the public mind a straight line between the criminal acts of German soldiers in the field and Hitler and the Nazi High Command. And perhaps, in addition, to throw a veil over his own crimes against humanity, including those from the past decade and those he was still planning to commit.
John Balfour, the British minister in Moscow, believed that Stalin was conducting the Kharkov trial in order to throw “a cloak of legality” over random hangings of German prisoners which had been reported in Kiev—where bodies were left twisting in the wind from balconies—and in a village west of Kremenchug after a hasty field court-martial. “The gallows was a tree where a village woman had been executed for killing poultry without permission of the German agricultural authorities” a few months prior, the New York Times reported.
If the Kharkov trial was designed as a cloak of legality, it was exceedingly threadbare by Western standards. There was no presentation of documentary (physical) evidence; defense attorneys (state lawyers) were not permitted to cross-examine witnesses; the judge often acted as a prosecutor in questioning defendants and witnesses; and the guilt of individual defendants was established through confessions, and by linking them to similar crimes committed by other German military in the region—guilt by nonassociation. Two of the defense attorneys had “represented” defendants in the show trials. As Stevens noted, “This, too, was a military tribunal: judges, prosecutor, and attendants were all in uniform.”
In short, the Kharkov trial—along with those held later at the time of the Nuremberg trials—was typical Soviet justice. “While the war crimes trials followed the format of the prewar show trials, they were administered in full accordance with contemporary Soviet laws and definitions of legality,” wrote Prusin. In its own way, Soviet justice was blind. The principles and procedures of the Kharkov courtroom were identical to those used to convict eleven collaborators at Krasnodar just months earlier.
The Soviets held thousands of German prisoners in December 1943. Their reasons for choosing these three—Reinhard Retzlaff, Wilhelm Langheld, and Hans Ritz—to prosecute are as uncertain as Stalin’s motivation for having the trial. Prusin has speculated, “The German defendants were selected to represent an assortment of military ranks and branches of the German armed forces: an NCO (noncommissioned officer) of the Secret Field Police, a captain of military counterintelligence, and an SS second lieutenant. They appeared in court in full military regalia—a rare practice in Soviet trials. The prosecution pointed out that the decorations were rewards received for atrocities committed against Soviet people.”4
With the seats filled and all the actors in place, the Military Tribunal of the 4th Ukrainian Front came to order. Before the packed hall, under bright lights and the hum of motion picture cameras, the Secretary of the Court, Justiciary Captain Kandibin, read the indictment, “In the case of the atrocities committed by the German fascist invaders in the town of Kharkov during the period of their temporary occupation.”
“Under the direction of their superiors, the German fascist troops asphyxiated in specially equipped ‘murder vans,’ hanged, shot or tortured to death many tens of thousands of Soviet people; plundered the property of state, economic, cultural, and public organizations; burned down and destroyed entire towns and thousands of inhabited places; and drove to slavery in Germany hundreds of thousands of the peaceful population. All these crimes and outrages are not isolated facts, but only a link in the long chain of crimes which have been and are being committed by the German invaders on the direct instructions of the German government and the Supreme Command of the German Army.”
The opening salvo was supported by a lengthy rehearsal of Nazi atrocities described by civilian and military witnesses including several Germans. In this nightmare litany, murder by gas wagon seemed the gentlest of methods—a mercy killing compared to the fate of starving prisoners in one camp waiting for food. “During the distribution of scanty rations, soldiers used to set dogs on the exhausted and hungry people,” the indictment stated. “The dogs jumped into the crowd, tore to shreds the clothes and bodies of the war prisoners, knocked them down, dragged and mauled them on the ground. Some of the badly mauled prisoners and civilians were then shot by soldiers and thrown over the fence so as to avoid bothering about their treatment.”
The indictment asserted that the “whole weight of responsibility” for atrocities committed by Nazis in Kharkov “is borne by the leaders of the predatory fascist government of Germany and by the Supreme Command of the German Army”—but that the instruments of their terror were equally guilty. One by one, the indictment detailed the crimes of Retzlaff, Ritz, Langheld, and Mikhail Bulanov, the Russian collaborator.
“As a result of the foregoing exposition,” the indictment concluded, “the persons enumerated are committed for trial before the Court of the Military Tribunal.”
Symbolically at least, this was the trial of the men who murdered my grandparents and great-grandparents at Drobitsky Yar. Yes, it could have been worse. They could have been torn to pieces by dogs. If this was a “show trial,” it was because the victims were showing the perpetrators far more justice than they deserved.