Along with the three Germans on trial, the Soviets added a Soviet citizen: Mikhail Bulanov, a twenty-six-year-old Ukrainian collaborator who worked with the Germans from October 1941 to February 1943. The indictment characterized Bulanov as a shafior (chauffeur) with the Kharkov Sicherheitsdienst. Bulanov was charged with “betrayal of the motherland … [and] with having taken a direct part in the mass extermination of the Soviet people by means of asphyxiation in ‘murder vans,’ [and] with having personally shot civilian Soviet citizens, among whom were old people, women and children.”
The four defendants were charged under both international law and Soviet law. The legal basis under international law was the Moscow Declaration issued by the Allies a month earlier announcing that Germans participating in atrocities would be tried by the countries where the atrocities took place. In the sphere of the Soviet legislation, on April 19, 1943, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (parliament) of the U.S.S.R. issued a decree entitled On measures of punishment for German-Fascist villains guilty of killing and torturing the Soviet population and captive Red Army soldiers, for spies and traitors to the Motherland from among Soviet citizens and their accomplices.17 The April decree became the prime legal tool for prosecution of German Nazis and their Soviet collaborators. Alexander Prusin notes that “[t]he [April] decree became a binding tool with which to handle all accused war criminals, and its very language signifies its designation as an instrument of deterrence against collaboration with the Germans.”18 The decree used the terms “atrocities” and “evil deeds” to broadly encompass the war crimes committed by the German (foreign) and Soviet (domestic) war criminals while stipulating punishment by public execution or long-term prison time.19
The German defendants appeared in court dressed in full military attire, which was not common in Soviet trials. After public reading of the indictment,20 the defendants all entered guilty pleas. However, under continental civil law legal systems, emulated by Soviet socialist law, a plea of guilty is not automatically accepted by the court. The court must still satisfy itself that the evidence proves the guilt. Additionally, evidence is presented to help determine what sentence should be rendered. The trial, therefore, continued despite guilty pleas.
Undoubtedly, the Soviets did not constitute this public trial for the defendants merely to plead guilty and subsequently sentence them without going into specifics of the atrocities committed. Almost all public trials held of Nazi war criminals and collaborators over the last seventy years have had a didactic component, and this first trial of the Nazis was no exception. Detailed evidence of the brutal atrocities committed by the “Fascist-Hitlerite” invaders in the Kharkov region was going to be introduced during the trial and subsequently disseminated to the outside world. As confirmation of this intent, the Soviets translated excerpts of the proceedings into English shortly after the trial’s conclusion and published them in a book, The People’s Verdict. The book included commentary and also excerpts from the Krasnodar trial. The Soviets also produced a documentary, which was widely shown in Soviet theaters, though never screened in the West.
Stevens, the American correspondent, noted that “all legal niceties were observed to a fault. The defendants and their counsel had full latitude to speak or interpolate, and every comma of what was said was translated into German for their benefit.”21 Each defendant took the stand and was questioned by the prosecutor, members of the tribunal, and defense counsel. George Ginsburgs comments that “[t]here [was] no indication that the German defendants had either been rehearsed or coerced.”22
The trial began with the most senior of the three German defendants to take the stand: Captain Wilhelm Langheld. He explained that the German high command encouraged atrocities against civilians and decorated soldiers for fulfilling orders to exterminate Soviet citizens.23 Langheld described the use of gas vans by the German military for mass slaughter:
I saw the “gas van” in Kharkov … [s]ome time in May, 1942, when I was on a service visit to Kharkov…. As far as I remember the “gas van” is a vehicle dark grey in colour, completely covered in, having hermetically sealed doors at the back…. [It holds] [a]pproximately 60 to 70 persons…. I was at 76, Cherniskevsky Street at the H.Q. of the S.D. and heard a terrific noise and screaming outside…. A gas van at that moment had driven up to the main entrance of the building, and one could see how many people were being forcibly driven into it, while German soldiers were standing at the doors of the van…. I was a few paces away from the gas van and saw it being done…. Among the people being loaded into the gas van were old men, children, old and young women. These people would not go into the machine of their own accord and had therefore to be driven into the gas van by SS men with kicks and blows of the butt ends of automatic rifles…. I presume that these people guessed the sort of fate that awaited them.24
Describing the child of a woman who was killed, Langheld explained: “He clung to his dead mother, crying aloud. The lance-corporal who came to take away the woman’s body got tired of this so he shot the child…. Such things happened everywhere. It was a system.”25
Stevens described his observation of Langheld’s testimony:
When the prosecutor asked Langheld whether the German High Command ever punished its soldiers or officers for ill treatment of civilians, he pondered a moment, rocking slightly back and forth on his toes and heels, and then answered, in the same quiet, measured voice in which his entire testimony had been delivered, that on the contrary such treatment was deliberately encouraged and rewarded. At each conclusion of his testimony, Langheld saluted smartly, turned on his heels, and strode back to his seat in the prisoners’ box. 26
The next defendant to take the stand was Second Lieutenant Hans Ritz, who testified that the functions fulfilled by SS troops included “shooting, forcible evacuations of villages, [as well as] the transportation and guarding of arrested persons.”27 Like Langheld, Ritz also indicated his awareness of “the extermination of civilian citizens in Kharkov”28 and his involvement in such killings. Prosecutor Dunayev sought out Ritz’s mindset for his murderous acts:
PROSECUTOR: You, Ritz, are a person of higher legal education and apparently consider yourself a man of culture. How could you not only watch people being beaten, but even take an active part in it, and shoot perfectly innocent people, not only under compulsion but of your own free will?
RITZ: I had to obey orders, otherwise I would have been court-martialed and certainly sentenced to death.
PROSECUTOR: This is not quite so, because you yourself expressed a desire to be present when people were loaded on to the gas vans and nobody specially invited you to be there.
RITZ: Yes, that is true. I myself expressed a desire to be present, but I beg you to take into consideration that I was then still a newcomer on the Eastern Front and wanted to convince myself as to whether it was true that these lorries of which I had heard were used on the Eastern Front. Therefore, I expressed my desire to be present when people were loaded on them.
PROSECUTOR: But you took a direct part in the shooting of innocent Soviet citizens?
RITZ: As I have testified earlier, during the shooting at Podvorki, Major Hanebitter said to me: “Show us what you are made of,” and, not wanting to get into trouble, I took an automatic rifle from one of the SS men and started firing.
PROSECUTOR: Consequently, of your own free will you entered upon this vile course of shooting completely innocent people, as nobody had forced you to do it.
RITZ: Yes, I must admit that.
Ritz also acknowledged that German policy was not to recognize the laws of warfare on the Eastern Front:
PROSECUTOR: Now, Ritz, you are a man with some knowledge of law. Tell us, were the standards of international law observed to any extent by the German Army on the Eastern Front?
RITZ: I must say that on the Eastern Front there was no question of international or any other law.
PROSECUTOR: