USSR ACCUSES YOU

 Nuremberg trials began - an open trial of mankind over Nazism. All protocols will not be enough to list his crimes, much is hidden in the ashes and the earth. The executioners methodically killed millions of innocents, feeling their impunity. Until 1943, no one in the world had the experience of trial of the Nazis and their accomplices! There was no analogue of such cruelty in world history, there were no atrocities of such temporal and geographical proportions, therefore there were no legal norms for retaliation. For justice, it was still necessary to free places of crimes and witnesses, to capture the criminals themselves. The Soviet Union was the first to do all this. It was his lawyers who had an unusual and hard job to investigate mass atrocities and impose an objective sentence. For this, in all the liberated areas, the Extraordinary State Commission collected facts about atrocities and atrocities. For this, millions of prisoners of war were interrogated several times in the camps. So there was a systemic responsibility for millions of atrocities. Most of the ordinary criminals found were convicted in closed custody - there was not enough time and energy. The most bloody and large-scale atrocities were thoroughly investigated for show trials. Punishment was imposed on crime scenes, where victims looked into the eyes of the executioners.

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Already from 1941 until the end of the occupation, open trials were held in partisan detachments and brigades - over traitors, spies, looters. Partisans themselves and, later, residents of neighboring villages were their viewers. In the liberated areas, people's courts held demonstration trials of collaborators accused of injured neighbors. Military tribunals were punished on the front of traitors and Nazis until the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR dated April 19, 1943. According to the Decree, cases of the murder of prisoners of war and civilians were submitted to military courts under divisions and corps. Many of their meetings, on the recommendation of the command, were open, with the participation of the local population. In military tribunals, partisan, people's and military field courts, the defendants defended themselves. A frequent sentence was public hanging, about which leaflets were later issued. Open processes of 1943 in Krasnodar and Kharkov gained wide popularity. These were the world's first full-fledged trials of the Nazis and their accomplices. Before they began, the investigation did a great job of establishing the facts of atrocities, conducting expert examinations by Moscow experts, and collecting evidence and evidence. All this in wartime conditions! The trial went on for several days, dozens of witnesses spoke out, the defendants were defended by lawyers. The Soviet Union tried to provide a wide response: the meetings were covered by foreign journalists and the best writers of the USSR (A. Tolstoy, K. Simonov, I. Ehrenburg, L. Leonov), filmed by cameramen and photographers. The processes were monitored by the entire Soviet Union - meeting reports were published in the central and local press, and the reaction of readers was also posted there. The hanging of the convicts was seen and approved by tens of thousands of Krasnodar and Kharkiv survivors. Brochures were published about the processes in different languages; they were read aloud in the army and in the rear. The documentaries “The Verdict of the People” and “The Court is Coming” were shown by Soviet and foreign cinemas. Resonance received a trial in Krasnodon in 1943 over Nazi collaborators who tortured and killed members of the Young Guard. Newspapers reported on him, letters were sent to the court demanding that the perpetrators be punished. However, the trial was only partially open - the military tribunal tried without defense and prosecution, even the open meetings were not published. But the execution of the three killers was carried out in public - in the presence of thousands of Krasnodon residents. All these processes of 1943 were a warning to traitors and their masters who had not yet been caught. Speaking of hosts. If a country has lost millions of its citizens, this means that among the prisoners of war there were thousands of hiding guilty persons. Therefore, at the end of the Great Patriotic War and after it, the state security bodies massively identified people who stained themselves with atrocities and atrocities in the occupied territory. The directive of the NKVD of the USSR of May 11, 1945 “On the organization of undercover investigative work to identify persons who committed atrocities on the territory of the USSR” helped in this. So prisoners of war talked about each other's crimes. As a rule, they were judged behind closed doors, right in the detention camps. The most thorough investigation of crimes was conducted in the framework of ensuring open trials of war criminals in late 1945 - early 1946. and at the end of 1947.At the first seven such processes, which took place in Bryansk, Smolensk, Leningrad, Velikiye Luki, Minsk, Riga, Kiev, Nikolaev, 84 war criminals were sentenced (most were hanged). The following nine trials in Stalin (Donetsk), Sevastopol, Bobruisk, Chernigov, Poltava, Vitebsk, Novgorod, Chisinau and Gomel, held by decree of the Council of Ministers on September 10, 1947, sentenced 137 people to terms in Vorkutlag.Judging by the reports of the MGB, almost the whole society supported the prosecution and wished the defendants the most severe punishment. The organizers of a series of open processes managed to consolidate public opinion in a single hatred of war criminals and the occupiers in general. The court in Gomel was one of the latest open court proceedings. On November 24, 1947, an order was issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, the Ministry of Justice of the USSR, and the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR No. 739/18/15/311, according to which it was prescribed to consider cases of war crimes accused at closed meetings of military tribunals of the troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the place of detention of the defendants (i.e., practically without calling witnesses) without the participation of the parties and sentencing those guilty to imprisonment for 25 years in forced labor camps. The only exception was the Khabarovsk trial of 1949 over Japanese war criminals who developed biological weapons and tortured Soviet soldiers. This court became an important addition to the Tokyo Tribunal, but it turned out to be more humane - life was saved for all the convicts, after three or seven years in prison, they returned to Japan. The reasons for curtailing open processes are not completely clear; so far no arguments have been found in declassified documents. However, several versions can be put forward. Presumably, the conducted open processes were quite enough to satisfy society, propaganda switched to new tasks. In addition, conducting open trials required highly qualified investigators, they were not enough on the ground in the conditions of the post-war personnel shortage. It is worth considering the material support of open processes (the estimate of one process was about 55 thousand rubles), for the post-war economy these were significant amounts. Closed courts made it possible to quickly and massively examine cases, sentenced defendants to a predetermined period of imprisonment, and, finally, corresponded to the traditions of Stalin's jurisprudence. Alas, all of their materials were classified (even now not everything is open), so the victims and their relatives did not know and do not know if anyone was punished for their suffering. Indeed, not all criminals suffered a deserved punishment. Perhaps if the open trials continued, then all the hidden atrocities and the names of all the executioners would become known. However, the following show trials took place only in the early 1960s, when many killers disappeared into the West. However, war crimes have no statute of limitations, so domestic justice is looking for all the living suspects. 

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Open processes are, as it were, the upper transparent part of the huge iceberg of responsibility for war crimes. The verdicts of the demonstration courts can be considered reasonable even by modern standards, therefore, all convicts were not rehabilitated. The best investigators, qualified translators, authoritative experts, professional lawyers (even German ones were invited to Leningrad!), Numerous witnesses, and talented journalists worked in open trials. In addition, there were only those on the dock whose guilt was repeatedly confirmed. Under the load of evidence, almost all suspects admitted their deed. The authorities and society were sure of their fault. War criminals have become in the eyes of the population symbols of all the evils of war in their native land. But, despite the importance of open processes, we know little about them - for various reasons. The materials of each process amounted to fifty extensive volumes. All of them were not published, since they are stored in the archives of the KGB and are still not fully declassified. In addition, the Soviet Union was divided into recognized and unrecognized republics, and it is difficult for a "foreigner" to obtain access to the funds of special services. Due to the inaccessibility of sources, there are only scattered articles by historians about some processes - in Krasnodar, Kharkov, Kiev, Nikolaev, Vitebsk, Minsk, Novgorod ... There is not enough culture of memory. In 2010, a large museum was opened in Nuremberg, which organizes exhibitions and methodically explores the Nuremberg trials (and the 12 subsequent "small" processes). In the post-Soviet space, there are no similar museums about local processes; you cannot even find expositions in historical museums. And it would be useful for the prevention of neo-Nazism. 

Dmitry Astashkin, candidate of historical sciences

 

Crimes of Nazi invaders in the city of Krasnodar. In the picture: the corpses of Soviet citizens killed by Nazi aggressors by carbon monoxide, dug for forensic examination from an anti-tank ditch on the territory of state farm No. 1 in the vicinity of the city of Krasnodar.

"I do not forgive"

the Letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda on the 20th anniversary of the Victory

 ... I will never forget and I am sure that there will be no man in our country so that he can forget all the atrocities invented to destroy people by these fascist monsters. Is it possible to forget: killed children on the streets of Kharkov, hung on balconies and tortured in dungeons, and thousands of shot innocent Soviet citizens. Which Kharkiv citizen forgot Sovnarkomovskaya street, there was a prison, which the Nazis burned in February 1943, and thousands of our people who were there were burned. And the Oryol prison, where several thousand people were killed, most of whom died of starvation. And the greatest tragedy of the Vadinsky forest, where Hitler’s monsters shot old people, women and children (even infants), and then piled in a heap, doused with gasoline and set on fire. And near Vilnius in Panara for three years, these killers shot about one hundred thousand Jews. And Gross-Lazaret in the city of Slavut of the Kamenetz-Podolsk region, where one hundred and fifty thousand wounded Soviet prisoners of war were destroyed by these brutal Aryans in all manner of ways. And Babi Yar near Kiev, what crime can be compared with this atrocity. And the Belsen concentration camp, where tens of thousands of innocent people were destroyed and the causes of death were: hunger, torture and executions, it was there that the prisoners were given half a liter of “soup” once every 10 days. And Russen camp No. 344, located near the city of Lamsdorf, where the Nazis sentenced (for their failures at the front) all prisoners of war to starvation and thousands of people died from exhaustion. And the atrocities of the Nazi invaders in the city of Minsk, where about half a million Soviet citizens were destroyed during the occupation. And the Lublin extermination camp Majdanek, which can be compared with this death factory, where two million people entered the gate and did not return. And the camp in the city of Auschwitz, where by means of execution, starvation, poisoning and torture, the Nazi bastards killed about 5 million citizens of all European countries, of which more than half were Soviet, where only 10–12 thousand corpses were burned for 24 hours. And dozens of other death camps. And the city of Zhizdra, where there was not a single house left, the Nazis preliminarily doused each building with gasoline, and then set fire to it and blew it up, and shot all or almost all of the inhabitants. And millions of violent thefts into Nazi slavery of peaceful Soviet citizens, of which hundreds of thousands did not return home, but died from deprivation and torment in a foreign land. And thousands of destroyed and burned cities and villages, of which only ash and piles of broken brick remained. Is it possible to forget all this? I did not see how these monsters killed with a blow to the stomach. I did not see how these fascist executioners killed prisoners with a stick on the back of the head. I did not see these wolves hanging prisoners by their hands tied back. I did not see how these vandals threw living people in the oven of crematoriums. I did not see how these savage - German savages took their babies from their mothers from the chest and killed them on the wall in front of their eyes. I did not see (and God forbid) how the fascist cannibals took away small children from their mothers and tore it apart, took it with one hand in one leg, they became a foot on the other, and thus ripped the child apart. I didn’t see all this - but it was! But I saw: our cities and villages destroyed, robbed and burned. I saw full wells of murdered children (Stalin Region, 1943). I saw thousands of corpses of soldiers of different ages. I saw walking skeletons covered in human skin. I saw Soviet civilians hanging on telegraph poles and trees. I saw what millions of people saw: hunger, cold, all kinds of hardships, and death and death at every step, and all this is the fault of these grievous conquerors, these obscurantists, these savages, in whose veins "blue" blood flows. I have seen tens of thousands of orphans, mothers and widows, who to this day mourn their loved ones who died during the war, in whose tears all Nazi criminals could be drowned. I saw the ovens of the Majdanek crematorium and mountains of ash from burnt corpses of people. I saw a concentration camp near the city of Fustenberg, with all its “attractions”: a 4-meter wall, several rows of barbed wire under high-voltage current, watch towers with bunkers and bunkers, and in the middle, as a symbol of the camp, a crematorium. It was there that I saw near the doors of the ovens of the crematorium charred, but had not managed to completely burn the limbs of a person. I saw there a warehouse in which paper bags were stacked in piles up to the ceiling, in which was ash from burnt corpses. It was there that I saw under the canopy huge tiers of wearables of all kinds and sizes that were in use, and next to it were mountains (yes, yes, mountains) of various men's, women's and children's shoes. I saw there the full cellars (office of the concentration camp) of documents belonging to the citizens destroyed in this camp.I saw dozens of huge graves around the camp, where thousands of prisoners who had not time to burn were buried. There is NO measure and there is no edge to indignation, blood runs cold at the only memory of what atrocities the Hitlerite bandits committed to the level of wild beasts ... The Soviet people were never guided by a sense of revenge against the German people, we sympathize and actively help all of those Germans (and other nations) who wish to live in peace with us ... M.E. GALAKOV Frunze May 2, 1965 Source: Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. F.M-98. Op. 3. D. 12. L. 82-86. Script. Cit. by: Know and remember. Crimes of Fascism during the Great Patriotic War / Auth. - comp. N.K. Petrova. M.: Veche, 2012.S. 40-42. 

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