On the home front, Stalin used the media to publicize the trial and link it to the victories of the Red Army.53 Not only did the publicity aim to promote a positive image of the Soviet Union, but also a negative image of the enemy to “satisfy popular demand for revenge and to stimulate further hatred of the enemy.”54 The Soviet Union, in the view of American Ambassador Averell W. Harriman, “meant to show Soviet citizens that the government was sincere in its promise to punish the Germans and to lose no time in doing so.”55 The Soviet official daily Pravda declared: “The sword of the Red Army and the armies of our Allies are victoriously preceding the sword of justice…. The sword will not be sheathed until the leaders of the cursed Fascist band shall answer with their heads for their crimes against humanity.”56 In effect, Stalin wanted to keep Soviet spirits high in order to ensure success in the war effort.
On the international front, Stalin wanted to exhibit the Soviets’ determination to track down, and hold responsible, war criminals.57 Additionally, Stalin may have wanted to ensure that his allies, the British and Americans, would “keep their pledge about bringing ‘war criminals’ to trial.”58
Finally, Stalin sought to deter Germans from creating further harm while they were in retreat from Soviet territory. Harriman asserted that the Soviets sought to create a fear of retribution among the German army ranks and the SS as well as to encourage the Soviet resolve “to hold individual Germans responsible for crimes committed by them even though they were acting on direct orders from their superiors.”59 An article in the Washington Post posited at the time: “The Kharkov trial is a warning to th[e German nation], a warning not merely to Hitler and his hierarchy, not merely to Himmler and his menagerie of trained brutes, but also to the rank and file in the German army, to the German officer class, to Germans generally that as far as the Allies are concerned guilt will be personal as well as collective.”60
In reviewing the Kharkov trial proceedings, we observe one glaring omission: the word evrei (Jew) is never uttered during the trial nor does it appear in any court document. Rather, the primary murder victims of the German invaders are described in generic terms as “civilian Soviet people,” “Soviet citizens,” or “peaceful civilians.” The initial indictment termed the herding of the Jews of Kharkov into a ghetto as the “forceful resettlement of Soviet citizens”—hiding the fact that only Jews were forced to ghettoize while the rest of the local population were free, for the most part, to go about their daily lives, albeit under German occupation.
Even when different groups are mentioned, the Jews are specifically omitted. In his closing address, Prosecutor Dunayev refers to the extermination campaign fashioned by the Nazi leaders:
It is a matter of common knowledge that these [atrocities at Kharkov] are no accidental crimes of individual Germans, but a thoroughly considered, well-worked-out programme for the extermination of the Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and other peoples, that this was a system of annihilation of the population in the temporary occupied districts of the Soviet Union.61
In their verdict, the judges found Langheld guilty of “shooting and atrocities against … the civilian population.” Ritz was also found guilty of “shooting Soviet civilians.” Retzlaff and Bulanov “personally drove into the ‘murder van’ Soviet citizens doomed to death” and “personally took part in the extermination of Soviet citizens by means of the ‘murder van,’” respectively, without mentioning that it was Jews who were in those vans. The verdict also completely de-Judaizes the ghettoization of the Jews of Kharkov and the Drobitsky Yar massacre, referring to “Soviet civilians … [being] turned out of their houses in the town into barracks in the area of the Kharkov Tractor Factory. Later they were taken away in groups of two to three hundred to a gully in the vicinity and were shot.”62
In publicizing the Kharkov trial, noted Soviet war correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg tried to correct this glaring omission against his Jewish brethren by writing in his dispatches “explicitly about the Jewish victims and descri[bing] with contempt how German officers spoke without emotion about helpless [Jewish] women and children, as if hoping they could ‘emerge dry from the water.’”63 Robert Chandler explains the Soviet policy of avoiding the mentioning of Jews as specific targets of the Nazi murder process:
The official Soviet line … was that all nationalities had suffered equally under Hitler; the standard retort to those who emphasized the suffering of the Jews was “Do not divide the dead!” Admitting that Jews constituted the overwhelming majority of the dead would have [also] entailed that other Soviet nationalities—and especially Ukrainians—had been accomplices in the genocide; in any case, Stalin was anti-Semitic.64
The omission of Jews from the historiography of the Great Patriotic War continues, unfortunately, to the present day. In 2000, more than a half-century after the trial, the Drobitsky Yar Memorial Committee in Kharkov installed a plaque at the entrance of the Kharkov Theater to commemorate the trial. It reads, in Ukrainian:
In this building, on 15–18 December, 1943 there took place the first trial in history of war criminals for atrocities they committed against the civilian population of Kharkov and Kharkov region, who, according to verdict of the Military Tribunal of the 4th Ukrainian Front, were sentenced to death by hanging.
Was the Kharkov Trial Another Typical Stalinist Show Trial?
The show trial is one of the special hallmarks of the Stalin era and of Stalinism. The first Stalinist purge trial of fellow Communist Party members in August 1936 typifies the process by which Soviet courts became instruments of political repression. Sixteen party leaders were charged in organizing a “terrorist” center on behalf of the exiled Leon Trotsky. After their arrest and interrogation, most confessed to the false charges—a common occurrence in such trials. Stalin’s instructions to the secret police, the NKVD, for interrogation were as follows: “Mount your prisoner and do not dismount until they have confessed.”65 Defendants were told (falsely) that if they signed a confession, their lives would be spared. Prosecution witnesses were forced to provide false evidence by the same method.
For those trials, as William Chase notes, Stalin was the producer, controlling the show in the courtroom. For the August 1936 trial, Stalin “helped phrase the charges, decided on the slate of defendants, crafted the [false] evidence, and prescribed the sentences. He even dictated [prosecutor Andrei] Vishinsky’s emotional speech as the grand finale of the trial and polished its style.” 66
Considering the pedigree of the trial process in Stalin’s Soviet Union and when it took place, it is difficult to see the Kharkov trial as anything other than one more Stalinist show trial. The making of a full-length documentary film on the trial and its screenings in Soviet movie theaters adds to this notion. Even the publication in English in 1944 of the proceedings of the Kharkov trial, to be sold in the United States and the U.K., is further proof that the Kharkov trial followed in the tradition of a typical Stalinist show trial.
With regard to Soviet show trials, Susan Arnold notes that there is a gulf difference between Soviet-style show trials and a true war crimes trial: “A real trial involves risk and assuming that risk is a political decision.”67 Why were the Nuremberg trials not show trials? The consensus is that because not all of the defendants were convicted. As noted by David Luban: “The best proof of the fairness of the Nuremberg Tribunal lies in its acquittal of such major figures of the Third Reich as Fritzsche, Papen, and Schacht.”68
The “show” element of the trial, however, does not necessarily make the trial unfair. Rather, in addition to providing procedural due process, the trial can be used for a didactic purpose. The Eichmann trial was a show trial in that sense also, since Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and prosecutor Gideon Hausner aimed to use the trial of Eichmann to teach both young Israelis and the outside world about the Holocaust. As Lawrence Douglas observes: “The Eichmann trial, even more explicitly than Nuremberg, was staged to teach history and shape collective