Abstract
This article examines the distinct features of Soviet closed war crimes trials involving civilians accused of crimes against the Jewish population in Crimea during the Nazi occupation (1941–4). Drawing on trial records from 1944 to 1946, it reveals that although detailed information about the mass extermination of Jews was partially omitted from public discourse both during and after the war, regional tribunals in closed trials often regarded offenses against Soviet Jews as severe crimes against the Soviet state. The article analyzes the factors that influenced the investigation process and trial outcomes. While inheriting certain pre-war practices, Stalinist justice adapted to the wartime context, creating a space where various actors could interact and present their accounts of crimes committed during the occupation. The author argues that Soviet closed postwar trials represented a convergence of defendants’ attempts to justify their actions, witnesses’ efforts to present their perspectives, and the decisive role of regional investigators in evaluating these testimonies.
After the Soviet territories were liberated from Nazi invaders during the Second World War, the Soviet government established regional military tribunals to prosecute individuals who had expressed disloyalty to the Soviet Union during the occupation. Throughout the war, up to 60 million people lived in Soviet territories occupied by German forces and their allies. 1 For many, contact with the occupying forces was unavoidable. The Soviet government, deeply suspicious of anyone who had remained in Nazi-occupied territories, employed various methods to uncover what had transpired during the war. Involvement of Soviet citizens in fierce Nazi crimes was initially investigated by military tribunals 2 which arrested and put on trial hundreds of thousands of people during and after the Second World War. 3 In Crimea, this process began in April 1944, when the Red Army reached the peninsula and started to re-establish the Communist regime.
Soviet citizens whom the returning authorities deemed involved in Nazi crimes during the occupation were tried under Article 58 (or corresponding articles in other republics) of the existing Penal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic issued in 1926. 4 This article formulated punishment for ‘any action aimed at overthrowing, undermining or weakening’ the Soviet state, which was too obscure to describe the whole complexity of life under the Nazi occupation. The most precise and clear instructions for determining who should be considered a traitor to motherland appeared in November 1943, when the Plenum of the Soviet Supreme Court issued a corresponding decree concerning the prosecution of those who had been engaged in criminal activities during the Nazi occupation. According to this document, it was a crime if a person passed information which contained a military or state secret to the enemy; gave up or persecuted partisans, Red Army soldiers, Soviet activists and their families; took direct part in murders and violence against the population, robberies, and destruction of property of citizens and property belonging to the state, collective farms, cooperative, and public organizations. If an individual committed any of the listed offenses, then he or she would be tried under Article 58.1 or 58.3 of the criminal code of the Russian Soviet Republic (or corresponding articles from Penal Codes of other Soviet republics). 5 It was not the position held during the occupation itself that held decisive importance for the returning Soviet authorities, but rather the nature of the activities and the extent of violence directed toward civilians. The Soviet leadership imposed limits on which citizens it could arrest, based on their involvement in work under Nazi rule. Over time, it became clear that, during the occupation, the majority of the population was coerced into performing various types of work for the Nazi occupation regime.
In the years since the war, there have been numerous studies devoted to the occupation of Crimea during the Second World War. Some scholars reveal everyday practices in the peninsula under the Nazi occupation. 6 Others focused on the process of persecution and extermination of the Jewish population. These scholars concentrate on features of this process in general, like on the activity of the Einsatzgruppe D or participation of the Wehrmacht's soldiers in mass executions. 7 Some historians analyzed Crimea as a place where Germans conducted a special national policy recruiting Crimean Tatars in Wehrmacht and SS (Schutzstaffel, or Protection Squads). 8 The role of Russians, Ukrainians, and members of national minorities in various administrative positions during the Nazi occupation has also been increasingly examined in recent historiography. 9 This article focuses primarily on the Soviet retribution policy in the region and examines the specifics of closed trials, continuing the discussion on what can be learned from interrogation protocols.
During the last two decades, Soviet war crimes trials have received substantial scholarly attention. 10 Historians hold different views on the credibility and reliability of these sources, given that the systematic use of physical violence to coerce confessions from innocent defendants was a notorious feature of the repressive Stalinist justice system even before the war. 11 Some scholars maintain that the same methods were used during pre-trial investigation during and after the war. 12 Yet, many historians highlight significant differences between the trials of the Great Terror and those addressing the involvement of Soviet citizens in Nazi crimes. Some argue that interrogation protocols contain details that could not have been entirely fabricated or erased by the secret police. 13 Using oral history interviews, Diana Dumitru demonstrates that corroborated sources confirm information contained in interrogation protocols, and that reconsideration of the trials records in another political climate after Stalin's death did not contravene massive involvement of the accused in the Nazi crimes during the war. 14 Others stress that the Nazi crimes were real, not hypothetical, as were the charges in many of the trials of the Great Terror of 1937–8. 15 During the repressive campaign of the 1930s, people were arrested not for crimes committed, but for belonging to those groups of citizens that the Soviet government perceived as a potential threat to the state. 16 In general, historians agree that the events described in the protocols of Soviet war crimes trials did indeed occur, 17 and most Soviet citizens put on trial were involved in real Nazi crimes. 18
However, scholars disagree on what kind of information can be taken from interrogation protocols, and this debate reflects broader historiographical discussions on the interpretative value of Soviet trial records in understanding individual agency and culpability. Tanja Penter has suggested that these sources can reveal motivation of defendants, while Martin Dean calls for more critical examination and rejects possibility of studying the motives of perpetrators. 19 Analyzing Soviet trials of German perpetrators, Aleksander Prusin concluded that trial records are not so useful in determining the individual roles of defendants in the Holocaust. 20 Similarly, Franziska Exeler argues that these documents can provide only factual insights. For instance, during pre-trial investigations, it was possible to establish that a defendant had served in a military unit responsible for crimes against civilians. However, proving their direct personal involvement in those crimes remained elusive. 21 David Brandenberger has recently expressed the most skeptical view on using interrogation protocols as historical sources, arguing that these materials cannot be reliably used as long as the main secret police archives remain inaccessible to historians. Without access to these archives, it is nearly impossible to determine how interrogations were conducted. 22
Soviet interrogation protocols present, indeed, a specific source. Those who experienced the Nazi occupation recounted their stories to secret police interrogators, which inherently imposes certain limitations on how we should interpret these testimonies. While many witnesses undoubtedly saw themselves as victims, there were others whose behavior during the occupation could be interpreted differently, leading them to fear arrest. This also influenced how they presented their experiences to returning representatives of the Soviet state. Interrogation protocols are written in a standardized, refined language, filled with Soviet idioms and clichés, and almost entirely devoid of emotions. As Diana Dumitru pointed out, ‘a violent but emotionless society inhabits the pages of this documentation’. 23 She also emphasized that these documents were produced exclusively by men, which influenced how the history of the occupation is presented in these sources. All these challenges should certainly be kept in mind during analysis.
While records of the Soviet war crimes trials are not accessible in Russian archives (and only partially—in Ukrainian), copies of the documents can be found in the archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, D.C., USA). According to the statistics provided by Oleg Mozochin, between 1944 and 1953, 6027 Soviet citizens were arrested for counterrevolutionary activity in the region. 24 It is not possible to find out exactly how many of them were put on trial for treason since ‘counterrevolutionary activity’, as it has been shown previously, encompassed various actions directed against the Soviet state. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum contains copies of cases of over 1000 Soviet citizens from Ukraine and Crimea, of whom, according to my calculations, 194 people (163 men and 33 women) were convicted for being involved in the Nazi crimes in Crimea during the occupation. 25 This article provides a detailed analysis of three case studies from 1944 and 1946, offering insight into Soviet investigative practices during and after the war. At the core of all these cases are crimes committed against the Jewish population, as this article seeks to challenge, among others, the historiographical argument that victims among Communists, partisans, and underground resistance members were prioritized over civilian victims. 26 While detailed information about the mass destruction of the Jewish population was partially omitted in public discourse both during and after the war, 27 in closed trials the offenses against Soviet Jews were perceived by many regional tribunals as a severe crime against the Soviet state. One possible explanation—apart from the fact that these crimes were both evident and widespread—could be a reaction to the pervasive myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, which was actively propagated by Nazi propaganda on occupied territories. This narrative, equating Jews with Bolsheviks, frequently appeared in interrogation protocols and was viewed by investigators as an aggravating factor during pre-trial investigations.
I suggest that the way pre-trial investigations were conducted and how crimes were presented in court illustrate the perception and understanding of what occurred during the occupation by those who held the monopoly on judging those involved in these crimes. In this article I demonstrate that close reading of interrogation protocols enables to follow how Soviet investigators foregrounded some testimonies of witnesses and overshadowed others. Stalinist justice was undeniably punitive, with investigators primarily focused on securing convictions by presenting the most compelling accusations in court. Yet, I also argue that witnesses exercised their own agency, sometimes shaping their testimonies in ways that aligned with their interests. As a result, postwar trials became a convergence of the defendants’ attempts at self-justification, witnesses’ efforts to present their own narratives of events, and the decisive role of regional investigators in evaluating and interpreting testimonies. While Stalinist justice inherited certain pre-war practices, it also adapted to the realities of war, creating a space where various actors could interact and assert their version of wartime events.
Following recent trends in historiography, I intentionally avoid using the term ‘collaboration’ in this article. Although it would reflect the Soviet understanding of collaboration, the negative and overly politicized connotations of the term prevent me from employing it. 28 During and in the aftermath of the war, Soviet Union did not use this definition describing those who discredited themselves by working for Germans. Instead, terms such as ‘traitor’ (izmennik), ‘accomplice’ (posobnik), ‘betrayer’ (predatel’), ‘chastener’ (karatel’), ‘perpetrator of abuse and atrocities’ (ispolnitel’ izdevatel'stv i zverstv) frequently appeared in interrogation protocols and official Soviet discourse. Thus, since this article analyzes closed Soviet war crimes trials, in one of which the guilt of defendants was found not sufficiently proved in a more political climate after Stalin's death, I prefer to use ‘Soviet citizens put on trial for alleged treason during the Nazi occupation’ leaving aside my personal assessment of their actions during the war.
The mass extermination of the Jewish population started in Soviet territories in summer 1941. Here, on the Eastern Front, Anti-Semitic propaganda was intertwined with anti-Communist rhetoric. Across the occupied Soviet regions, segments of the local population participated in crimes against Jews, with involvement ranging from direct participation in murder to indifferent reporting of those in hiding, often followed by the acquisition of their homes and possessions. 29
On the eve of the Second World War, Crimea was a diverse region inhabited by representatives of many different nationalities. According to the census from 1939, 1,126,429 people lived on the peninsula, from which 49.59% were Russians, 19.43% were Tatars, and 13.68% were Ukrainians. The minority populations consisted of Jewish people, 30 who composed 5.81% of all inhabitants, Armenians—1.15%, Bulgarians—1.36%, and Greeks—1.38%. 31 Unlike other occupied Soviet territories, where the Nazis established civil administration, Crimea was de facto under the Wehrmacht's jurisdiction from November 1941 to April 1944. 32
According to some calculations, about 800,000 people stayed on the peninsula on the eve of the Nazi occupation. 33 Before the war, 65,452 Jews resided in Crimea, and between 25,000 and 35,000 of them were evacuated in summer and fall 1941. 34 Between 35,000 and 40,000 Jews—including Krymchaks—were killed in this region during the Second World War, which means that the Crimean Jewish population, which stayed in the peninsula, was exterminated almost entirely. 35 Taking into account other losses (e.g. those who died of starvation, prisoners of war, people repressed by the Germans as partisans or communists), up to 140,000 people became victims of the Nazi occupation in Crimea. 36
On the peninsula, the initial period of persecution and annihilation for the majority of the Jewish population lasted approximately 1‒2 months and unfolded in several stages. 37 Initially, Jews were registered and forced to wear identification marks on their clothing. Then, individuals aged 16‒70 were subjected to taxation in the form of money, food, or valuable goods. At any given moment, Jews were mobilized for degrading tasks, such as digging trenches or cleaning public toilets. They endured constant maltreatment, movement restrictions, and segregation. At the end, the Jews were gathered and forwarded to places of mass execution. By mid-December 1941, the extermination of Jews had already finished in main Crimean cities (except for Sevastopol where they were annihilated in July 1942). 38 In villages, Jews usually experienced the same stages of discrimination as in the cities. On the eve of the execution, they were separated from the rest of the population and annihilated within a couple of days on the outskirts of inhabited localities. In Crimea, the extermination of Jews in rural areas continued until the summer of 1942. Those few Crimean Jews who managed to survive often joined partisan groups, as this was the most common means of escape.
Mass executions of the Jewish population in fall and winter 1941–2 were conducted primarily by the Einsatzgruppe D and parts of the Wehrmacht subordinated to Korück 553. Eleven Ortskommandaturen and three Feldkommandaturen were stationed in Crimea during the war, and were partially involved in the annihilation of Jews on the peninsula. Romanian soldiers, local police, which consisted of people belonging to different nationalities, and Feldgendarmerie took part in this process at some stages. 39 Policemen in cities and villages helped to organize mass executions, but quite rarely participated in shootings.
The notion that all Jews were Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks were Jews was a fundamental element of Nazi propaganda. The myth of Judeo-Bolshevism had emerged long before the Second World War, but it reached its peak on the Eastern Front in 1941, ultimately contributing to the mass extermination of the Jewish population. 40 In response to this propaganda, the Soviet government imposed increasingly severe penalties for Anti-Semitism during the early phase of the war. Analyzing judicial investigative cases from the Chelyabinsk region in 1941–2, Arsenii Starkov shows that Anti-Semitic propaganda was perceived and punished as anti-Soviet activity. Starkov also demonstrates that Chelyabinsk was not the only region where local courts perceived Anti-Semitism as a severe crime against the Soviet state. 41 The politicization of Anti-Semitism can be traced back to the Civil War period, when the Bolsheviks regarded Jews as the supporters of the new Soviet state and viewed the pogroms against them ‘as a threat to the survival of both Jews and the revolution’. 42
In the newspapers published during the Nazi occupation in Crimea, the idea about inseparability of the Jews and Bolshevism appeared throughout the occupation, as Mikhail Tyaglyy demonstrates in his research. Additionally, Tyaglyy argues that the Nazis attributed a ‘Jewish character’ to Soviet ideology in order to discriminate against it in the eyes of the local population. 43 For Germany, the war in the East was an ideological war, ‘war for extermination’ against Communists and Jews. In a set of orders issued for the Einsatzgruppen by Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, he summarized the main goal clearly when he stated that, ‘It goes without saying that cleansing actions primarily apply to Bolsheviks and Jews’. 44
The Soviet government undoubtedly knew of the Nazis association of Jews with Bolsheviks. Stalin and his entourage constantly received the information about what happened to the Jewish population that remained under Nazi occupation. 45 In a report from Crimea sent to Stalin in April 1944, it was emphasized that the Nazis first targeted Jews for extermination, followed by civilians of other nationalities: ‘As in other Soviet territories temporarily occupied by Germans, fascist invaders annihilated Soviet and party activists, and that was followed by the extermination of Soviet citizens. They exterminated the Jewish population, and then began to kill Soviet citizens of other nationalities’. 46 Thus, the Soviet authorities clearly acknowledged the Holocaust during the war and subsequently imposed severe punishments on Soviet citizens involved in crimes against Jews, as the following case studies demonstrate.
In 1928, 25 Jewish families arrived in Crimea and established one of several Jewish communes on the peninsula, located near Evpatoria: Voyo-Nova (‘New Way’). 47 In 1933, it became incorporated into the Voykov collective farm, situated near the village of Ozgul (after 1945—Listovoe) and the Molotov collective farm. By the onset of the Nazi occupation, many Jews had fled the area. However, by the spring of 1942, nine Jews—three women and six children—still remained in the village Ozgul. These people were rounded up by German soldiers and local policemen, who arrived from Evpatoria. Since the village head was absent that day, a collective farm brigadier assisted them, leading to the location where the remaining Jews were still living. After being transported to the Molotov collective farm, all of the Jews were executed. 48
In a trial that commenced on April 25, 1944, charges were brought against Alexey Kapishen. 49 Born in 1887, Kapishen had relocated to Crimea from the Kiev region in 1931, following the dekulakization campaign, during which the Soviet government confiscated his family's possessions, including 10 sheep, a cow, and a mill. 50 During the Nazi occupation, he continued to perform the duties of a collective farm brigadier, a role he had held since 1932. The Second World War fractured his extended family, dispersing its members across the opposing sides of the conflict. Two of his sons fought in the Red Army, 51 while another two were taken to Germany as forced laborers (Ostarbeiter).
The initial charge in Kapishen's closed trial involved allegations of violent behavior toward the workers of the collective farm. However, the primary focus of the investigation centered on his role in the extermination of the Jewish population. A key question for investigators was whether Alexey Kapishen was physically present at the site of mass execution or merely escorted Jewish individuals to the location where the shooting occurred. The severity of the punishment hinged on his direct proximity to the execution site. During the pre-trial investigation, the defendant was interrogated four times between May 20 and June 16, 1944. He admitted to assisting in the identification of Jews and escorting them to the neighboring Molotov collective farm (located in the village Gartenstadt, which was renamed in 1948 to Zhuravli), but he denied being present at the place of mass execution. Kapishen also admitted that he had taken belongings from the victims, including a coat and a pair of women's shoes. His 20-year-old daughter, Evdokia, later took possession of the shoes and a coat, prompting investigators to question a defendant whether his daughter had been aware of their original owner. According to Kapishen, she was fully aware that she had been wearing the clothes of exterminated neighbors. 52
Six witnesses were interrogated during pre-trial investigation. Four were villagers from Ozgul, while the remaining two resided on the Molotov collective farm. Notably, these two individuals—a married couple—were Jewish, though it remained unclear how they had managed to avoid mass execution. This case enables historians to trace the evolution of witness testimonies, following them from the initial interrogation to the version ultimately presented in court. Only two witnesses stated that the defendant was present at the site of the shootings: one claimed to have seen him there, while the other learned of it from the defendant himself. 53 Pavel Rudenko testified that after the mass extermination of Jews, Kapishen openly described the events to him, stating that after the Jews were shot and thrown into a well, grenades were then tossed in after them. 54 He became one of the key witnesses in the trial, as such a detailed account could not have been fictionalized by a witness, and it proved that Kapishen was present at the place of mass execution. The remaining four witnesses could not confirm whether a defendant was present at the site of the mass execution. They only testified to seeing him assist in gathering Jews and escorting them to the Molotov collective farm. However, during the court hearing, additional witness repeated Pavel Rudenko's account, claiming that she had also heard details of the killings from Kapishen. The testimony of another witness, who continued to insist that she was unsure whether Kapishen was present at the execution site, was crossed out in the final version of the court transcript. 55
Some witnesses—having lost loved ones and endured constant humiliation during the Nazi occupation—viewed local trials as an opportunity for retribution. They sought both justice and an opportunity to help the Soviet state expose those who had mistreated them during its absence. One witness, Matryona Dulina, claimed that Kapishen showed no remorse for the exterminated Jews and further alleged that his daughter engaged in intimate relationships with German and Romanian soldiers. 56 It is no coincidence that Dulina made this accusation, as her own daughter had been forced to cohabit with a Romanian officer during the Nazi occupation. 57 Her testimony likely reflected both a desire for revenge and an attempt to shift the stigma onto Kapishen's daughter while indirectly addressing the circumstances surrounding her own child's victimization. In small communities like this village, where personal reputations carried significant weight, such accusations could have profound and lasting consequences on life of a young woman. The testimonies of Matryona Dulina had been changing during pre-trial investigation and in the court. At the first interrogation on May 20, 1944, she stated that Kapishen only assisted gathering Jews. Two weeks later, she stated that he ‘personally participated in the execution of Jewish families’. Over a month later, during the court session, she additionally recalled him speaking in detail about the day of the killings and about a Jewish woman named Dora, who was holding her sister's child during the mass execution—she was the first victim. One can only speculate why she altered her testimony and presented the most persuasive account in court.
During the Great Terror, secret police interrogators frequently admitted to coercing arbitrarily chosen innocent victims into signing false confessions to fulfill quotas imposed from above. 58 However, during closed war crimes trials, investigators likely believed that those accused of treason were indeed complicit in the crimes, as the evidence of these atrocities was too compelling and eloquent. The final indictment was shaped by a combination of testimonies from both defendants and witnesses, each offering their own recollection of events. Investigators, who held the ultimate authority in these cases, tended to accept the most damning interpretations.
In the case of Alexey Kapishen's trial, as in many others, investigators were inclined to believe the most severe accusations, ultimately sentencing him to death. 59 Had they concluded that he merely identified Jews and escorted them to the execution site, Kapishen might have received a sentence of 10 to 15 years in a forced labor camp. The main prosecutor in the court session was a man with the apparently Jewish surname Kotel’man. He was the one who proposed capital punishment for Kapishen. The state attorney in this trial was a woman named Schneiderman. Although her role was largely symbolic, and defendants were typically deprived of real defense in these trials, one can imagine that it was probably not easy for her to plead for his life. As an argument, she cited his advanced age and 12 years of honest labor in the kolkhoz. Kotel’man questioned Kapishen about whether he had made any efforts to save the Jews, knowing what awaited them. His apparent unwillingness to save them further contributed to the portrayal of him as the accused. Additionally, the prosecutor asked one witness whether Kapishen had also assisted in escorting Jewish children, aiming to portray him as a ruthless and brutal man. The overall depiction of Kapishen's complicity in Nazi crimes was presented in court in such a way as to appear convincing and sufficient to warrant the most severe punishment. A couple of months before Kapishen's trial, prosecutor Kotel’man was involved in another pre-trial investigation. Although his role in this case was limited, it played a notable part in shaping the narrative about crimes against Jews during one of the interrogations.
Located in the western part of the Crimean Peninsula, the village of Novyi Karagurt (after 1948—Mityaevo) was one of many in Crimea where Jews were exterminated during the Nazi occupation. On April 19, 1944, seven men were put on trial, five of whom were charged with aiding in the mass execution of 62 Jews. 60 While this trial could have been one of many similar proceedings, the manner in which it was conducted reveals notable characteristics of wartime trials.
The main defendant, Sergey Menshenin, served as the village head (starosta) during the occupation. He died a month after the investigation began, leaving it unknown how many years he would have been sentenced to had he lived to stand trial. Menshenin was interrogated only once and, during that interrogation, provided the military tribunal with a strikingly clear picture of what had happened with Jews. According to his testimony, in January 1942, he was approached by the Germans who wondered how many Jews had stayed in the village to the moment. Menshenin was aware that Jews were being systematically exterminated in neighboring districts. However, he did not warn them about their impending fate because he ‘did not want them to scatter’. Fifteen days before a mass shooting, the Germans ordered Menshenin to prepare a pit. On March 4, 1942, a German punitive squad arrived in the village. All Jews of the village Novyi Karagurt were gathered in the school building and then shot on the outskirts of the village. 61
The second defendant, Vasilii Saenko, was a bookkeeper for the agricultural community and became the primary source of information following Menshenin's death. Throughout the interrogations, he consistently denied any involvement in the mass execution or the compilation of lists containing the names of Jewish inhabitants, claiming he was out of the village that day. However, he admitted to compiling a list of Jewish belongings and acquiring some of them, including a coat and a wool scarf. 62 Four other defendants were ordinary workers of this community, which is important as they did not occupy any positions in administration of the village. For the returning Soviet power, the moment when a person had agreed to work for German occupation regime played a crucial role during interrogations. In fact, they regarded it as an admission of guilt since, as Exeler described, for the returning Soviet authorities, it was the moment when a person made ‘a moral choice’, wittingly betraying a motherland. 63 In this case, these four men did not discredit themselves while accepting positions under German rule. They were put on trial for their actions against Jews, which lasted one day and resulted in annihilation of the remaining Jewish families. All defendants, coincidentally, were prominent members of the agricultural community during the Nazi occupation. However, it was difficult for investigators to determine the extent of each individual's involvement in the process of rounding up Jews and escorting them to the execution sites.
The materials for this trial were gathered hastily, and the defendants were used as witnesses against one another. Danil Kamchenko, another defendant in the case, actively participated in rounding up Jews and admitted his guilt during numerous interrogations. According to the trial proceedings, he brought a few Jews to the school building, where they were held before being shot. Andrey Prenko was accused of taking grain, potatoes, and cloth from the Jewish residents of the village. Alexandr Lomeyko allegedly admitted to reporting a mixed family (a Russian husband and a Jewish wife) to the Germans, who had tried but failed to avoid execution. 64
The next defendant, Ivan Zima, was the only one who was not involved in repressions against Jews. However, during the occupation, he voluntarily left for Germany as Ostarbeiter together with his wife. Upon returning, he praised life in Nazi Germany and advertised the possibility of working there. Zima also compared Germany with the Soviet Union, allegedly saying that, ‘Jewish Bolsheviks will never come back, they will never exist anymore as the German rule is much better than the Soviet one’. 65 The idea about Jewish Bolshevism and all Bolsheviks being Jews appeared in anti-Soviet propaganda and was often repeated by witnesses and defendants. This main narrative of Nazi propaganda was internalized by both returned Soviet authorities and civilians who survived occupation. Yet, it could have also been attributed to the defendant by an investigator to present the crime more persuasively, as such statements served as an aggravating factor in court.
The most astonishing thing about the pre-trial investigation was its staging. Throughout the testimonies of defendants and witnesses, as well as in the questions asked by investigators, there was a strong narrative about correlation between the Communist regime and the Jewish population. Alexandr Lomeyko, one of the defendants, allegedly testified during the interrogation: Saenko was an active organizer in planning and carrying out the mass shooting of the Jewish population. On multiple occasions, he pressured the village head, Menshenin, to approve the execution of all Jews residing in Novyi Karagurt. Fearing that when the Red Army, guerrillas, and paratroopers returned, the Jewish residents would report him, leading to his execution, Saenko assembled a group of traitors and betrayers, and convinced them to orchestrate the massacre, arguing that the Jews would never allow them to live under Soviet rule.
66
This was the version that was ascribed by investigators, 67 which makes it interesting since they presented the crime against Jews as a conspiracy of ordinary locals. The same story was retold by some witnesses, 68 which confirmed the main version of the investigation. Moreover, it was described as if the mass extermination of Jews was the initiative of defendants, not an order from the Germans. This institutional practice of fabricating imaginary conspiracy groups that supposedly threatened the Soviet state had its roots in the pre-war period, particularly on the eve of and during the Great Terror. 69
This account presents the Jewish population as the main proponent of the Soviet state—those who can report true about what had happened there during the absence of the Soviet power. Another noteworthy aspect of this passage is that the interrogation was conducted in the presence of state prosecutor Kotel’man, who played a leading role in a case of Alexey Kapishen analyzed above. It is reasonable to assume that a personality of those who directed war crimes trials could have influenced the way how pre-trial investigation and court session were conducted. The narrative about a conspiracy group emerged only during interrogations and was not included in the final indictment or mentioned in court, which proceeded without a prosecutor or defense attorney. The final indictment stated that some defendants ‘contributed to the extermination of Jews, i.e. an offence under Article 58.1a’. In doing so, it equated crimes against Jews with counterrevolutionary activity.
Despite the fact that some statements were clearly ascribed to witnesses in this trial, residents of the village testified in conformity with their own interests. One of the accusatory testimonies was provided by Timofey Poluschchenko, whose denunciation served as a reason for their arrest. 70 During the court session, he declared every defendant to be a kulak and accused some of actively spreading anti-Soviet propaganda during the occupation. In doing so, Polushchenko pursued personal goals, as he sought to ensure their conviction. 71 However, a year later, Poluschchenko was himself put on trial and condemned to 10 years of forced labor camps for his wartime activities.
As a result of the closed trial, four men received 10 years of forced labor camp, and Ivan Zima (who spread anti-Communist propaganda) was sentenced to 8 years. Thus, all these men received relatively light sentences. However, a closer examination of their actions reveals how the investigators perceived crimes committed against Jews. The defendants were sentenced to 10 years in forced labor camps, similar to the punishment usually given to policemen. When the case was reopened in 1958–61 following Saenko's complaint, it became possible to trace the fate of the accused men. All of them, except for Kamchenko and Saenko, perished in the Soviet camps. These two men were released in 1955 and came back to the village Novyi Karagurt. The case was ultimately closed in March 1962 due to witnesses being unable to provide more precise testimonies, as more than a decade had passed since the war. However, even in 1961, Kamchenko admitted his guilt. 72
The fact that Soviet investigators paid great attention to crimes against Jews is evidenced by trials that addressed the fate of the Karaites. For Ester Gabai, a Karaite born in 1894, the Nazi occupation ended in April 1944 when the Red Army liberated Evpatoria, where she had lived both before and during the war. In 1927, she was appointed head of the Pushkin Library, one of the oldest and most significant libraries on the peninsula. Ester Gabai continued working there throughout the occupation, during which the library was closed for 11 months before reopening to the public. She led a quiet life, making it all the more surprising when she was summoned for interrogation by a military tribunal on August 14, 1946. 73 The investigator enquired about the individuals who had visited the library during the first year of the occupation. He was particularly interested in whether Viktor Beletskii, who had been arrested in March 1946 for his activities during the war and put on trial in Sevastopol, had been among them. 74
Born in 1886 in Belostok, Viktor Beletskii obtained a higher education in law before the 1917 Revolution and worked as a secretary in a district court in Saint Petersburg. As a former official of the Tsarist regime, he was repressed in 1933 and exiled to Tomsk, with additional restrictions barring him from residing in 12 Soviet cities. 75 When the war between the Soviet Union and Germany began, Beletskii was living in Dzhankoi, Crimea. In December 1941, he moved to Evpatoria, where he applied for a position in the city council (gorodskaya uprava). After being appointed as a notary, Beletskii established connections with the German security service and provided information about local residents upon request. Following the German army's capture of Sevastopol in July 1942, he was appointed deputy Bürgermeister in the newly established administration. 76 While holding this position, Beletskii was involved in various measures aimed at maintaining everyday life in the city under German rule. These included mobilizing civilians for construction work and street cleaning, registering livestock, and checking the passes of newly arrived citizens. In May 1943, Beletskii left Crimea and, after holding various positions in Kherson and Krakow, arrived in Germany in August 1944, where he was later recruited to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in Ratibor 77 as a specialist in the Soviet judicial system. 78 On March 27, 1946, he was arrested in Berlin by the Soviet Military Administration and transferred to Sevastopol for further investigation.
One could surmise that the main accusation against Viktor Beletskii was based on his activities abroad, particularly his connections with the White Russian émigré community in Krakow, where he secured a job in their local library. 79 Although Beletskii was interrogated on this matter, his connections abroad remained a secondary factor in the proceedings. His role as deputy Bürgermeister in the newly established administration of Sevastopol was sufficient to condemn him for betraying the Soviet motherland and collaborating with the occupation regime. However, another aspect of his activities under Nazi rule was thoroughly investigated. In December 1941, the German security service requested that Beletskii submit a report on the origins of the Crimean Karaites, specifically regarding whether they were of Jewish nationality. 80 One of the main accusations in this closed trial centered on whether the defendant had claimed that the Karaites were equal to Ashkenazi Jews, which would suggest that he intended to subject this group to mass annihilation. However, the secret police did not possess the report in question, so investigators interrogated various witnesses in an attempt to prove that Beletskii sought to equate Karaites with Ashkenazi Jews.
Unlike the closed trials of 1944, later investigations were marked by more careful and detailed enquiry, as the war had ended. Additionally, military tribunals had more time and resources at their disposal. In the trial of Viktor Beletskii, 30 witnesses from various Crimean cities were called to testify about his activities during the war. The defendant himself was interrogated 19 times and had six confrontations with witnesses.
Why would the German security service request a Crimean resident to compile a report that would influence the fate of these people? The question of the Karaites’ origins, both in Europe and in the occupied Soviet territories, remained highly contested throughout the Second World War. 81 In Crimea, Germans asked locals to provide information about Karaites—not only in Evpatoria but in other cities as well. 82 A final decision regarding this group in Crimea was made in April 1942, and the information was published in a German newspaper. 83 Unlike the Krymchaks, the Karaites were spared from extermination, as the Nazis recognized their distinctiveness. However, some Karaites were executed alongside other residents of the peninsula due to suspicions of supporting Crimean partisans—a punitive measure of the German occupation regime based on political rather than racial criteria. 84
During pre-trial investigation, Viktor Beletskii defended himself by testifying that he had informed the Germans that, in Imperial Russia, the Karaites enjoyed the same rights as Russians and practiced their own religion in separate kenesas. To support his claims, he allegedly referenced articles from both the Soviet Encyclopedia and the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary while compiling his report. 85 Beletskii's reference led to the decision to summon Ester Gabai from Evpatoria to testify in the case. Gabai stated that she had not seen the defendant visit the library during the occupation, only another Karaite who had also been asked to submit a report to the German security service. 86
Another key witness whose testimony served as primary evidence alongside encyclopedia articles was Elena Voskresenskaya from Evpatoria. Her husband, Fedor Voskresensky, had been arrested in 1946 for his wartime activities but died before he could be called to testify at Viktor Beletskii's trial. According to Elena Voskresenskaya, her husband and Beletskii co-authored the report on the Karaites, discussing its main points in Voskresensky's apartment. Since she was in the next room, Voskresenskaya claimed to have overheard Beletskii advocating for equating the Karaites with Ashkenazi Jews, while her husband opposed the idea. 87 Investigators deemed her testimony valuable and essential for building the case against Beletskii. Alongside the encyclopedia articles, her statements served as the primary evidence supporting the accusation that Beletskii intended to condemn the Karaites to death. In accordance with the logic of punishment established in November 1943, he was sentenced to 10 years in a correctional labor camp, as he had not personally committed acts of violence against civilians and had only performed administrative functions. He could have received this punishment even without the accusations related to writing the report. The investigators’ focus on the Karaites’ case highlights the particular significance of crimes against Jews in Soviet closed war crimes trials.
Nine years later, in April 1955, Viktor Beletskii was serving his sentence in the Yaroslavl region. There, he learned about shifts in the political climate, particularly regarding amnesty for victims of Stalinist repression, 88 and decided to seize the opportunity to appeal to the Soviet government. In his complaint, Beletskii specifically denied the accusation that he had equated the Karaites with Ashkenazi Jews. In an attempt to discredit Voskresenskaya's testimony, Beletskii insisted that she was a Volksdeutsche 89 who had managed to evade the Soviet deportation of Crimean Germans in August 1941. Moreover, as the wife of a man arrested for alleged reason to the Soviet state, she was, according to Beletskii, to portray herself in a favorable light to avoid suspicion. 90 Whether Elena Voskresenskaya was indeed a Volksdeutsche remains unclear. Nonetheless, Beletskii's appeal did not result in either amnesty or rehabilitation.
As in other cases, the issue of housing and belongings seized from exterminated Jews was discussed with both defendants and witnesses. It was revealed that Viktor Beletskii and his wife had been granted an apartment belonging to a Jewish family annihilated in Evpatoria. 91 All the neighbors were aware of this fact, 92 and during their testimonies, they anticipated that such information would have an aggravating effect for a defendant. In Sevastopol, the couple also appropriated belongings from Jewish victims, with Beletskii's wife altering the clothes of murdered Jewish women for her own use. 93 The Beletskii’s were not the only ones who profited from the extermination of Jews—other city administration employees did as well. Jewish belongings taken from Sevastopol were exchanged for food in rural areas, 94 as food shortages in occupied Crimea had worsened steadily since the winter of 1941–2. 95 The food obtained from peasants was then delivered to a special dining room designated for city administration staff. Thus, the eradication of one group of people enabled those loyal to the occupation regime to lead a relatively well-fed life.
Paradoxically, while ignoring the testimony of Ester Gabai, the investigators used excerpts from the Soviet Encyclopedia as evidence of Beletskii's guilt in court. In doing so, they implicitly acknowledged that the Soviet state itself had equated the Karaites with Ashkenazi Jews—a concept that could have led to the extermination of all Karaites in Crimea. Although neither of the articles presented as evidence explicitly stated that the Karaites were identical to Ashkenazi Jews, the court concluded that Beletskii had made this claim in his report to the German security service. Since Beletskii was aware that recognizing the Karaites as Ashkenazi Jews would result in their extermination, he was deemed guilty of intending to facilitate their destruction.
It remains unclear whether the Soviet government was fully aware of the Karaites’ fate during the occupation. However, in a report submitted in 1944, the Karaites were listed among the primary victim groups, alongside Jews and Krymchaks. 96 Between 60 and 120 Karaites were killed in Evpatoria, but in the course of general repressive Nazi policy, not as Jews. 97 Soviet investigators may have assumed that the Karaites were killed as part of the broader extermination policy targeting the Jewish population, which would explain the detailed scrutiny of Beletskii's report. However, it is unlikely that the Soviet government lacked accurate information by 1946–7. If this assumption is correct, it suggests that even if an investigator knew the Karaites had not been exterminated during the occupation, Beletskii was still punished for his intent. This detailed and nuanced investigation underscores the significance that the Soviet authorities placed on crimes against the Jewish population.
The cases analyzed in this article highlight the participation of locals in the crimes against the Jewish population in Crimea. The degree of involvement varied in each of these cases. Civilian population of Crimea scarcely participated in mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppe D and Wehrmacht in winter 1941/2. However, locals were involved in preparatory stages of the destruction process which included registration, gathering Jews, and escorting them to the places of mass execution. So-called ‘second wave’ of hunting Jews in spring and summer 1942 was partially supported by the local population. Many were involved in denouncing Jews and appropriating their apartments and belongings after mass executions.
After the war, thousands of people were put on trial for alleged treason against the Soviet state during the Nazi occupation. The broad interpretation of what could be perceived as ‘counterrevolutionary activity’ heightened the personal role of investigators. They often held their own views about what had transpired in Soviet-occupied territories. Investigators also had the power to emphasize certain factors while disregarding others, which greatly contributed to their decisive role in closed trials. As Tanja Penter pointed out: ‘The arbitrary nature of convictions shows that the regional military tribunals had a certain freedom of action in their decisions, and also the relevant legal regulations left plenty of room for flexibility’. 98
Trials of those who were involved in Nazi crimes inherited some practices from the 1930s, such as prescribed scenarios of investigation and coerced confessions. The early trial of the local men from the Crimean village Novyi Karagurt demonstrates clearly how investigators created an imaginary counterrevolutionary group aimed to annihilate the Jewish population. At the same time, these trials significantly differ from those of the Great Terror, since people put on trial were likely involved in real Nazi crimes. This left little need to falsify the testimonies of witnesses, since they were often eager to testify against insulters. However, exaggeration and distortion of testimonies was not uncommon, and I believe that studying these distortions enables historians to analyze what Soviet investigators considered to be persuasive and convincing testimonies about a crime presented in court. In all three trials analyzed in the article, the defendants denied their guilt both during the pre-trial investigation and the court session. Many of them confessed to partial involvement in the crimes they were accused of, yet it was still possible to deny the most serious charges. If investigators had wanted to fabricate complete cases, it would not have been difficult to invent the scenarios they needed and force people to sign false confessions within a few days, as had been the case during the Great Terror. However, even in 1944, when the war was still ongoing, pre-trial investigations could last for months. What is also remarkable is that the testimonies of witnesses, rather than the confessions of defendants, began to play a more significant role. These testimonies became sufficient to convict a person, even if defendants insisted on their innocence.
On the Eastern Front, the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism reached its peak, leading to the systematic extermination of the Jewish population starting in June 1941. Given that the Nazis declared war on both Jews and Communism, the Soviet government was particularly sensitive to crimes committed against the Jewish population. Some of the trials analyzed in this article suggest that at least some local military tribunals were also attuned to crimes against the Jewish population. And yet, even though crimes against Jews were punished severely, at the trials against Jews, who were members of Judenrat or served as ghetto policemen during the Nazi occupation, the Soviet government expressed in many cases very limited compassion toward Jews who were obliged to make ‘choiceless choices’. 99 Thus, the judicial system remained contradictory and flexible, constantly evolving under the pressure of various factors, including the locals’ desire for revenge for their suffering, the military tribunals’ eagerness to punish disloyal Soviet citizens, and the differing perceptions of what had occurred under German rule and how it should be punished.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The first draft of this text was presented at the University of Florida's Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies, and I am grateful to Norman Goda and Natalia Aleksiun for their valuable feedback. Paula Chan, Yanina Karpenkina, Aleksandra Riabichenko, Jan Rybak, and Lorena de Vita read various drafts of this article and provided insightful comments and encouragement. This work greatly benefited from thought-provoking discussions with Arsenii Starkov, whose insights inspired me to write this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their perceptive and fair critiques.