SMT convicts

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SMT convicts are those of the final phase of World War II in the to 1955 Soviet occupation zone and initially in the occupied eastern territories of S owjetischen M ilitär- T ribunalen (SMT) condemned civilians. Around 40,000 Germans were sentenced either to long prison terms (mostly 25 or 10 years), to deportation to the Soviet Union or to death. From 1945 until the temporary abolition of the death penalty in the Soviet Union in 1947, a total of 1,797 death sentences were imposed and carried out, from 1950 to 1953 there were 606. The only public SMT trial in the Soviet occupation zone was the Sachsenhausen trial . In the Soviet occupation zone in Austria , around 2200 civilians were arrested between 1945 and 1955, at least 1000 of whom were convicted and deported to the Soviet Union.

Custody of the SMT convicts in Germany

In the three of the ten Soviet special camps , namely in Bautzen , Sachsenhausen and Torgau (Fort Zinna) , special accommodations were built or prepared for this from November 1945. So came sheet metal panels in front of the cell windows in Bautzen, which only let in a narrow slit of daylight vertically from above. The guards in the house were Soviet uniformed men. In Bautzen there was the toughest penal system from 1945 to 1950; those who had been sentenced to 25 years of forced labor went there. Those sentenced to ten years were sent to Sachsenhausen. While there was a warehouse in Sachsenhausen, Bautzen was kept in cages. Four of the prisoners were crammed into the one-man cell; 400 men came into one room (taken from Benno von Heynitz # 1945–1956 , slightly shortened).

By June 30, 1947, according to Soviet information, the following were sentenced by military tribunals: 8,980 Germans, 1,746 citizens of the USSR and 120 people of other nationalities.

Many death sentences were carried out in Moscow. For 927 Germans executed in Moscow , a memorial stone was inaugurated on July 1, 2005 in the Moscow Donskoy cemetery (see also Wolfgang Waterstraat ).

After the founding of the GDR, the SMT more frequently negotiated cases in which the acts of Germans had been directed against the Soviet Union; They left many other cases to the Stasi and German courts (see e.g. the notorious Waldheim trials and the proceedings against Rudolf Bahro , Georg Dertinger , Karl Wilhelm Fricke , Otto G possibly , Walter Janka , Hans-Ulrich Klose , Josef Kneifel , Erich Loest , Armin Raufeisen , Hannes Sieberer , Wolfgang Welsch ).

Well-known SMT convicts

The list below only includes those SMT convicts for whom an article exists in Wikipedia:

Comment on the SMT judgments

Friedrich-Christian Schroeder , Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Regensburg, states:

"The actions of the Soviet military tribunals against German civilians stood in stark contradiction to the rule of law not only in terms of the legal provisions applied, but also in terms of their practice."

- Friedrich-Christian Schroeder Legal basis for the persecution of German civilians by Soviet military tribunals (PDF; 125 kB)

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The German Gulag , ed. v. Federal Center for Political Education and Robert Havemann Society, last change September 2008, [1]
  2. ↑ Source: Saxon Memorials Foundation, Documentation Center for the History of Resistance and Repression
  3. ↑ Harald Knoll, Barbara Stelzl-Marx: Austrian civil convicts in the Soviet Union. An overview. In: Andreas Hilger, Ute Schmidt , Mike Schmeitzner (eds.): Soviet military tribunals. Volume 2, Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar, 2003, p. 571 ff., ISBN 978-3412068011 .
  4. ↑ From the "Letter from the Head of the Dept. Special Camps to the Deputy Minister of the Interior Serov" of July 10, 1947, p. 290
  5. ↑ Arsenij Borisovich Roginskij, Frank Drauschke and Anna Kaminsky: Shot in Moscow ...: the German victims of Stalinism in the Moscow Donskoye cemetery 1950–1953. Metropol, 2006, ISBN 3938690143 .