Extraordinary State Commission

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The Extraordinary State Commission (in full: "Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the German-Fascist Aggressors and their Accomplices, and the Damage they have done to the citizens, collective farms, public organizations, state enterprises and institutions of the USSR" ; russian Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия - TschGK ) was a commission for the "investigation and punishment of the crime of German-fascist aggressors" and their allies. It was founded on November 2, 1942 by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet .

Investigation of mass graves at the Lemberg-Janowska forced labor camp , 1944

In detail, the commission had the following tasks:

  • collect the full extent of crimes and material damage,
  • review and edit the information received and prepare it for publication,
  • bundle the surveys that have already started,
  • determine the extent of possible compensation and redress for personal suffering,
  • track down the perpetrators and hand them over to the courts for severe punishment.

According to the TschGK, 32,000 officials took part in the work of the commission and 7,000,000 Soviet citizens took part in the collection and preparation of documents. The commission collected 54,000 statements and logged more than 250,000 testimonies about Nazi crimes in addition to nearly 4,000,000 documents about the damage caused. The exhumations of mass graves of the victims of the German occupiers were investigated on behalf of the commission, and the reports were brought into war crimes trials . The head of the Scientific Research Institute for Forensic Medicine (NISM) at the People's Commissariat for Health of the USSR, Viktor Prosorowski , who also testified at the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals in 1946, supervised the exhumations .

The Commission produced hundreds of thousands of individual files that were available to the Soviet authorities. "Enemies of the people", by which deserters of the Red Army, Eastern workers and other persons who had been in the service of the German occupying power were understood, could be found and arrested by the NKVD , NKGB and Smersch .

The 32 reports of the TschGK up to 1945 formed the core of the Soviet indictment in the Nuremberg trials and the Japanese war crimes trials. Since no Soviet editorial team was available for the trials in Nuremberg, all reports were published in English or German. The documents of the TschGK are now in the State Archives of the Russian Federation. Numerous documents can also be found in the Molotov and Vyshinsky Archives Fund in the Foreign Policy Archives of the Russian Federation.

Nikolai Michailowitsch Schwernik (1888–1970), the chairman of the Soviet Council of Trade Unions since 1930, was chairman of the commission .

The TschGK also belonged to:

The TschGK published a communiqué on August 24, 1944 under the heading "Finland unmasked". Finland had transferred the entire Soviet population of the occupied territories to concentration camps, to which 40% of the inmates fell victim. Accusations similar to those made against Finland were made against Romania on June 22nd.

The Leningrad blockade , which killed more than a million people, was cited as one of the most terrible crimes of the “German-fascist conquerors” .

The TschGK was subordinate to the Burdenko Commission , which was supposed to present evidence of the German perpetrators in the Katyn massacre . On January 24, 1944, a communiqué entitled “The Truth About Katyn. Report of the special commission to establish and investigate the circumstances of the shooting of prisoners of war Polish officers by the German fascist invaders in the Katyn forest ”published. The extensive document claimed "with irrefutable clarity" that the "German fascists" had shot the Poles.

Evaluation of the sources

The historian Dieter Pohl warns against recourse exclusively to the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission , whose own history has not yet been examined in detail. For example, "the influence of regional Communist Party organizations and the secret police, which were closely linked to the State Commission, cannot be accurately assessed on the results of the investigation." What is striking are "the sometimes relatively general estimates of the number of victims, and generally a rigidly prescribed examination scheme". 

Dieter Pohl regrets the premature, apparently political, termination of the investigation, mostly in 1945. Nevertheless, Pohl considers the extensive material of the State Commission, which occasionally also contains captured German documents, to be important. The innumerable Soviet brochures directed against former collaborators are a murky source .

literature

  • Alexander E. Epifanow: The Extraordinary State Commission . Stöcker, Vienna 1997.
  • Stefan Karner : “On dealing with historical truth in the Soviet Union. The "Extraordinary State Commission" 1942 to 1951 ", in: W. Wadl (ed.): Kärntner Landesgeschichte und Archivwissenschaft. Festschrift for Alfred Ogris. Klagenfurt 2001, pp. 508-523.
  • Marina Sorokina: “People and Procedures. Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR ”, in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, 4 (Fall 2005), pp. 797-831.
  • Andrej Umansky: "Reluctant historian? Insight into the sources of the" Extraordinary State Commission "and the" Central Office "", in: A. Nußberger u. a. (Ed.), Conscious Remembering and Conscious Forgetting. Legal Dealing with the Past in the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Tübingen 2011, pp. 347–374.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stefan Karner : Material for "Retaliation" and Campaigns: On the Work and Instrumentalization of the "Extraordinary State Commission" of the Soviet Union ( online)
  2. ↑ Claudia Weber : War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 268.
  3. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 320.
  4. ^ Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal , 1949, Volume XXXIX "Documents and Other Material in Evidence", Editor's Note and pp. 241–555.
  5. ^ Katrin Boeckh: Stalinism in the Ukraine: The Reconstruction of the Soviet System after the Second World War , Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 978-3-447-05538-3 , p. 268.
  6. ↑ English-language edition of the report of the Burdenko Commission in: Supplement to the "Soviet War News Weekly" (PDF; 2.0 MB)
  7. ↑ Dieter Pohl: The local research and the murder of Jews in the occupied territories. P. 206 / In: Wolf Kaiser: perpetrators in the war of extermination. Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-549-07161-2 , pp. 204-216.