Krasnodar War Crimes Trial

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The Krasnodar war crimes trial took place from July 14 to 17, 1943 in the Russian city of Krasnodar against eleven male Soviet citizens and members of SS-Sonderkommando 10a as well as against fifteen German defendants in their absence, including the commander of the 17th Army of the Wehrmacht , Richard Ruoff , and the Gestapo - officer Kurt Christmann instead. It was the first public war crimes trial of World War II . The high-profile procedure served as a model for a number of other procedures.

Legal bases

By decree of November 2, 1942, the “ Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the German Fascist Invaders ” was brought into being. On April 19, 1943, the issued Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the ukase 43 , who ordered that German , Italian , Romanian , Hungarian and Finnish criminals against civilians and the murder and mistreatment captured Red Army soldiers have been convicted, as well as spies and traitors among Soviet citizens' to be punished with the death penalty by hanging . Thus, even before the Moscow Declaration of the Allies in autumn 1943, the prosecution of war criminals and collaborators in the Soviet Union had been regulated in a Union-wide legal provision.

process

The trial took place in front of the military tribunal of the North Caucasus Front , chaired by Colonel Majorov, and the staging of the trial was planned in detail by the highest authority. The process was given an almost demonstrative legal formality, whereby the outcome was not open since no new evidence was presented and the accused and witnesses only repeated statements made in the preliminary investigation. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and former chief prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky had already informed the General Secretary of the Central Committee Josef Stalin about the planned dramaturgy of the show trial on July 10th .

Soviet defendants

The accused present were ethnic Russians, the majority of whom were 25 to 34 years old and came from a rural background. Half of them were members of the Communist Party or the Komsomol before the war . The main charge related to the offense of treason according to Section 58.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic . Only four defendants were charged with specific crimes, the remaining seven had to answer for their membership in Sonderkommando 10a and thus their alleged involvement in German crimes. The complicity consisted mainly in the participation in the arrests of partisans and underground fighters, guarding and transport to execution sites and participation in gas truck operations . It is likely that the accused's confessions were extorted through grueling interrogation and interrogation methods.

Eight defendants were sentenced to death and three to twenty years of forced labor. The executions took place on July 18, 1943 by hanging in the market square of Krasnodar in front of 30,000 spectators.

Documentation of the main German perpetrators

In the detailed questioning of witnesses and perpetrators, the prosecution worked out the responsibility of the local German units, namely the commander of the 17th Army and the Gestapo chief of Krasnodar with 13 Gestapo people. The accused would therefore have complied with the criminal will of the fascist government and the high command. The Soviet perpetrators were described as tools for carrying out the criminal orders. Although the trial did not have a single German accused, it is now considered to be an early pioneer in prosecuting the major German war criminals . In the Moscow Declaration of the Allies took place shortly afterwards the announcement of the punishment of the major war criminals.

propaganda

The Soviet Union saw international law as an important instrument for shaping the post-war order. The Soviet leadership tried to present the process internally and externally as part of an international standard of legal culture with a media staging. The trial was intended to meet the population's need for retaliation, and at the same time the prosecution of often actual criminals even served to retrospectively legitimize show trials of the 1930s and thus restalinize society.

The media painted the image of loyal resistance fighters and enemy collaborators, which did not do justice to the realities of the war. The talk of the murder of partisans , communists , Soviet activists and completely innocent Soviet citizens created a hierarchization of the victims, whereby Jews were not mentioned at all, although the perpetrators and witness statements had named Jews as victims.

reception

Research on the war crimes trials in the Soviet Union assesses the contribution to the legal processing of National Socialism as negative overall. It would have been a show trial, which was not about establishing the truth, but about collective punishment, political goals and propaganda exploitation.

However, in the post-war period, the Soviet leadership made massive efforts to professionalize and bureaucratize the judicial organs and achieved significant success there - measured by Soviet standards. The quality of the case law of the Soviet military tribunals actually improved in the post-war years.

According to Andreas Hilger , it is particularly tragic that the Soviet Union , which with its citizens had been the primary goal of Germany's extermination policy, proved itself incapable of making a valid contribution to the judicial processing of this period.

In 1987 Irmgard and Bengt von zur Mühlen created the documentary "The trial of Krasnodar, 1943" on VHS, 52 min.

Web links

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tanja Penter: The judgment of the people . P. 117.
  2. ↑ Manfred Zeidler: Stalin Justice contra Nazi crimes . Hannah Arendt Institute 1996, ISBN 3-931648-08-7 , p. 16 f.
  3. ↑ Tanja Penter: The judgment of the people . P. 120.
  4. ↑ Tanja Penter: The judgment of the people . P. 121 f.
  5. ↑ Manfred Zeidler: Stalin Justice contra Nazi crimes . P. 25.
  6. ^ Arieh J. Kochavi: Prelude to Nuremberg . University of North Carolina Press, 1998, ISBN 0-8078-2433-X , pp. 64 f.
  7. ^ George Ginsburgs: The Nuremberg Trial: Background . In: The Nuremberg Trial and International Law . Ed .: Ginsburgs and Kudriavtsev, Martinus 1990, ISBN 0-7923-0798-4 , p. 21.
  8. ↑ Tanja Penter: The judgment of the people . P. 128 f.
  9. ↑ Tanja Penter: The judgment of the people . P. 127 f.
  10. ↑ Tanja Penter: The judgment of the people . P. 130 f.
  11. ↑ Andreas Hilger: Let justice take its course . P. 245.
  12. ^ Krasnodar the trial of Krasnodar, 1943 / by Irmgard and Bengt von zur Mühlen . USHMM, accessed June 8, 2020.