Minsk process
The Minsk Trial (also known as the Minsk War Crimes Trial ) took place from January 15 to 29, 1946 in the Belarusian city of Minsk against eighteen defendants, including the German Generals Richert , Herf and von Erdmannsdorff, before a Russian military tribunal .
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 set up. 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 who have been convicted of civilians and of captured Red Army soldiers of murder and ill-treatment, as well as spies and traitors among Soviet citizens are punishable by the death penalty by hanging . Thus, even before the Moscow Declaration of the Allies in the Soviet Union, the prosecution of war criminals and collaborators had been regulated in a Union-wide legal regulation.
process
The trial took place before the Military Tribunal of the Minsk Military District , chaired by Major General Kedrov, and ended with the conviction of all eighteen defendants.
The charges were the liquidation of civilians in the so-called partisan struggle , the plundering of the country with the help of the Eastern Economic Organization , the murder and deportation of men and women, the treatment and murder of prisoners of war and the extermination of the Jewish population.
It was important to all Soviet parties involved in the process to show the degree of personal initiative of each accused. When assigning personal guilt, the court did not always get to the bottom of the facts.
Fourteen defendants were sentenced to death and four to forced labor. The executions by hanging were held on 30 January 1946 more than 100 000 people held at the horse-racing track of Minsk.
| Surname | rank | function | judgment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Johann-Georg Richert | Lieutenant General of the Army | Commander of the 286th Security Division | death penalty |
| Eberhard Herf | Major General of the Police and SS Brigade Leader | Commander of the police in the Minsk area | death penalty |
| Gottfried Heinrich von Erdmannsdorff | Major General of the Army | Commander of Mogilev | death penalty |
| Georg Robert Weißig | Police lieutenant colonel | Commander of the 26th Pol. Regiment | death penalty |
| Ernst August Falk | Police captain | Battalion commander in the 26th Pol. Regiment | death penalty |
| Reinhard Georg Moll | Major of the Army | Commander of Bobruisk and Parichi | death penalty |
| Carl Max Langguth | Army captain | deputy Commander of the Bobruisk POW camp | death penalty |
| Hans Hermann Koch | SS-Obersturmführer and Gestapo commissioner | Chief of the Sipo in Orel Orscha, Borissow and Slonim | death penalty |
| Rolf Oskar Burchard | Special Leader Commanding Bobruisk | death penalty | |
| August Josef Bittner | lieutenant | Special Leader and Chief of the Bobruisk Agricultural Command | death penalty |
| Bruno Max Gotze | Army captain | Commander of Bobruisk | Forced labor |
| Paul Karl Eick | Army captain | deputy Commander in Orsha | death penalty |
| Bruno Franz Wittmann | Constable | Gendarmerie in Minsk | death penalty |
| Franz Hess | SS-Unterscharführer | 32nd SD Special Command in Minsk | death penalty |
| Heinz Johann Fischer | Private | SS division "Totenkopf" | death penalty |
| Hans Josef Höchtl | Private | 718th Training Field Regiment | Forced labor |
| Alois Kilian Hetterich | Private | 595th Infantry Regiment | Forced labor |
| Albert Johann Rodenbusch | soldier | 635th Training Regiment | Forced labor |
At a later interrogation by the Würzburg criminal police in 1975, Alois Hetterich stated that his confession had been pressed from him through beatings, heat treatment and multiple stays in the so-called "stalactite cave".
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.
Manfred Messerschmidt points out that the trial offered the defendants better procedural options than Russian prisoners before German military courts, provided they were allowed to go to court at all.
Manfred Zeidler asserts contradictions in the statements of facts to later testimony of witnesses in other trials and to the results of the investigation of the Ludwigsburg central office and explains that the trial leaves too many questions unanswered.
Web links
- Minsk trials over war criminals 1946 , film (4 minutes; Russian) on YouTube
literature
- Andreas Hilger: Justice takes its course . In: Norbert Frei (ed.): Transnational politics of the past. How to deal with German war criminals in Europe after the Second World War . Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006, pp. 180–246 ISBN 978-3-89244-940-9 .
- Manfred Messerschmidt: The Minsk Trial 1946. In: War of Extermination - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 . Ed .: Heer and Naumann, Zweiausendeins 1997, ISBN 3-86150-198-8 , pp. 551-568.
- Manfred Zeidler: The Minsk war crimes trial of January 1946 . Institute for Contemporary History 2004, Issue 2, pp. 211–244.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Manfred Zeidler: Stalin Justice contra Nazi crimes . Hannah Arendt Institute 1996, ISBN 3-931648-08-7 , p. 28.
- ↑ Manfred Zeidler: Stalin Justice contra Nazi crimes . Hannah Arendt Institute 1996, ISBN 3-931648-08-7 , p. 16 f.
- ↑ Manfred Messerschmidt: The Minsk Trial 1946 . P. 552 f.
- ↑ Manfred Zeidler: The Minsk war crimes trial of January 1946 . P. 231.
- ↑ Manfred Messerschmidt: The Minsk Trial 1946 . P. 565 f.
- ↑ Manfred Messerschmidt: The Minsk Trial 1946 . P. 552.
- ↑ Manfred Messerschmidt: The Minsk Trial 1946 . P. 560.
- ↑ On November 26 and 27, 1941, Germans under the command of Paul Karl Eick murdered most of the ghetto population, about 1,800 people, at the Jewish cemetery . Orscha , in: Guy Miron (Ed.): The Yad Vashem encyclopedia of the ghettos during the Holocaust . Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009 ISBN 978-965-308-345-5 , pp. 554f.
- ↑ Manfred Zeidler: The Minsk war crimes trial of January 1946 . P. 237.
- ↑ Tanja Penter: The judgment of the people . P. 130 f.
- ↑ Andreas Hilger: Let justice take its course . P. 245.
- ↑ Manfred Messerschmidt: The Minsk Trial 1946 . P. 566.
- ↑ Manfred Zeidler: The Minsk war crimes trial of January 1946 . P. 244.