The German account of the roundup—Operational Situation Report U.S.S.R. No. 164, transmitted from the field to Berlin and dated February 4, 1942—summarizes the actions taken regarding the Jews of Kharkov:5
Einsatzgruppe C—Arrest of the Jews in Kharkov
The extensive preparations that became necessary in the matter of the arrest of the Kharkov Jews were sped up within the framework of SK 4a responsibilities. First of all, it was necessary to find a suitable area for the evacuation of the Jews. This was accomplished with the closest understanding of the municipality’s housing department. An area was chosen where the Jews could be housed in the barracks of a factory district [in Rogan on the edge of town]…. The evacuation of the Jews went on without a hitch except for some robberies during the march of the Jews in the direction of their new quarters. Almost without exception, only Ukrainians participated in the robberies. So far, no report is available on the number of Jews that were arrested during the evacuation. At the same time, preparation for the shooting of the Jews is underway. 305 Jews who have spread rumors against the German Army were shot immediately.6
An alternative method of killing used in the Kharkov region was through the use of carbon monoxide gas pumped though the exhaust of mobile death vans. The Nazis first tested carbon monoxide gas on Soviet prisoners of war in September 1941 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, located north of Berlin. By the following year, approximately fifteen gas vans had fanned out throughout German-occupied Soviet territory to exterminate Jews and other “undesirables.” The victims were packed into the back of closed vans, specially sealed, while carbon monoxide was piped through a hose attached to the van’s tailpipe. The bodies were then unloaded, and either buried in mass graves or incinerated in open flames.
When the Red Army liberated Kharkov for the last time in August 1943, almost no Jews remained. That the Nazis had managed to make Ukraine (including Kharkov) judenrein is confirmed by the account of great Soviet Jewish writer and journalist Vassily Grossman, reporting from the field: “There are no Jews in Ukraine. Nowhere—Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, Yagotin…. All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people have been brutally murdered.”7
Grossman’s description is applicable for the rest of Soviet territory occupied by the Germans. Of the approximately 2.5 million Jews who had been trapped in German-occupied Soviet Union, only 100,000 to 120,000 survived. Most did so by joining the Jewish partisans or going into hiding. Yitzhak Arad sums up the aftermath: “All told, of the five million Jews who lived in the Soviet Union on the eve of the German attack on June 22, 1941, about half lost their lives as a result.”8
The Trial
As the Red Army liberated Soviet territory, it repeatedly found mass graves containing remains of Jews who had been systematically slaughtered. In the Kharkov region some of these sites were discovered after the first liberation in February 1943, but before the German troops recaptured the region a month later. Most of the Jews of Kharkov had already been murdered by that time. The Red Army liberated Kharkov for the second and last time in August 1943. The defendants on trial were part of the German troops captured during this last liberation.
Earlier in the year, in July 1943, the Soviets put eleven local Soviet citizens who collaborated with the Nazis on trial in the northern Caucasus city of Krasnodar. After a three-day trial, the eleven Krasnodar defendants were found guilty of treason. Eight were executed and three were given sentences of twenty years of hard labor.
On November 1, 1943, the foreign ministers of the U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R. issued the so-called Moscow Declaration, putting on notice Germans participating in “atrocities, massacres and executions” that they would be tried for their “abominable deeds” in the countries where they committed these deeds. The Kharkov trial of December 1943, the first public trial of German nationals by any Allied power, was the Soviet signal to the Allies that they were now putting into practice the Moscow Declaration. Greg Dawson, in his Judgment before Nuremberg, rightly labels the Kharkov trial as “the first Nazi war crimes trial.”9
Three Germans and one Ukrainian were tried in Kharkov before a military tribunal constituted by the 4th Ukrainian Front of the Red Army, composed of three military judges. The prosecution of the case was led by a military colonel with a legal background, State Prosecutor of Justice Colonel N. K. Dunaev. Three Soviet defense counsel were appointed to represent the defendants. A six-member forensic team of medico-legal experts also took part in the trial, serving as expert witnesses and providing a report.
The four-day trial began on December 15, 1943, exactly two years after the German massacre of the Kharkov Jews at Drobitsky Yar. To accommodate the large attendance, and to provide the necessary gravitas to the proceedings, the trial was held in the auditorium of the Kharkov Dramatic Theater. The theatrical atmosphere was accentuated by the illumination of the auditorium with klieg lights, used to film the proceedings by a slew of cameras. The audience was rotated each day to ensure maximum attendance. Foreign correspondents were specifically invited to attend but, due to a glitch, only arrived on the last day of the trial.
The most knowledgeable of the foreign observers was American journalist Edmund Stevens. Stevens was a seasoned Soviet “old hand” who first went to the Soviet Union in 1934 to study the “Russian experiment” and married a Russian woman who returned with him and their son to the United States before the war. In 1945, he published Russia Is No Riddle,10 describing his journeys through the Soviet Union before and during the Second World War. The book included a chapter about his visit to the Kharkov trial. Unlike some Westerners that became enamored with the Bolshevik revolution, and so viewed all things Soviet in a positive light, Stevens aimed to be objective about what he observed. His descriptions of the court proceedings in the Kharkov Dramatic Theater reflected this critical outlook:
The Russians are past masters at mise en scène,11 and the atmosphere of that Kharkov trial room was distinctly reminiscent of the famous Treason Trials of 1936–38. In fact, two of the defense lawyers, Kommodov and Kaznacheyev, had defended some of the figures in the treason trials. Their presence provided an element of direct continuity. This, too, was a military tribunal: judges, prosecutor, and attendants were all in uniform….
During the recesses, I discovered that many of the people in the audience had personal knowledge or experience of the events and atrocities described, and had seen or known the defendants during the German occupation. Several times during more gruesome bits of evidence there were stifled sobs from some woman—not out of pity for the defendants. For the most part the proceedings took place against a background of concentrated silence.12
The defendants were correctly characterized by Stevens as “small fry” and “non-entities”13—chosen to embody various ranks of the German military command that occupied the Kharkov region. He describes the three Germans on trial at Kharkov as follows:
• Wilhelm Langheld, a fifty-two-year-old captain of the German Military Counter-Espionage Service (Abwehr) and a commander of a POW camp for Soviet prisoners. Stevens describes Langheld as “stocky, red-headed [and] beefy-faced … whose carriage, heel-clicking, and rows of ribbons proclaimed a German soldier of the old school.”14
• Hans Ritz, an SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), one of the security organizations of the SS, and an assistant SS Company Commander of a Sonderkommando unit. Stevens describes Ritz as a “Nazi horse of a different color from the hard-bitten Langheld[,]…. a baby-faced youth of twenty-four, with a tender little mustache.”15 Ritz, trained in music and law, worked as a lawyer before fighting with the SS on the Eastern Front.
• Reinhard Retzlaff, a thirty-six-year-old corporal and member of the 560th Group of German Secret Field Police. Unlike the other two German defendants, Retzlaff was not a Nazi Party member.
All three Germans were charged