Victory without a dot: how war criminals were caught after World War II
As the world celebrated the end of World War II, Soviet counterintelligence agents continued their inconspicuous but extremely important work — searching for war criminals responsible for numerous atrocities. The key here was the decree "On the measures of punishment of Nazi villains." Adopted on April 19, 1943, it continued to operate after the war. Moreover, some accomplices were identified only decades after the victory. How this methodical and painstaking work was organized is described in the Izvestia article.
Terror of occupation: crimes without a statute of limitations
From the first months of the Great Patriotic War, it became clear that the conflict was not only military, but also frankly destructive. In the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, the Nazi regime deployed a large-scale machine of violence directed against the civilian population. The advancing troops were followed by special punitive units, the Einsatzgruppen, which carried out so—called "sweeps", which in practice meant mass killings and genocide. In some camps, experiments were conducted on prisoners, similar to those led by one of the heroes of the new series "Rooks".
Fascists break into houses of civilians in occupied Minsk
These crimes were not random or isolated episodes. Their consistency was subsequently confirmed at the Nuremberg trials. The killing of civilians, the forcible abduction of people for forced labor, the destruction of entire settlements, and the mistreatment of prisoners of war were considered elements of a unified policy. During the Nuremberg trial, American prosecutor Telford Taylor emphasized that these atrocities were the result of carefully thought-out orders and directives, implemented consistently and purposefully.
Sending Soviet citizens from the occupied territories to forced labor in Germany, October 1941.
Therefore, from the very beginning of the war in the USSR, they actively worked to document these crimes. As early as 1941, government agencies began collecting eyewitness accounts, official documents, and other evidence. Special commissions were set up to record the destruction, mass killings, and specific acts of violence. Later, it was these materials that formed the basis of both the Soviet trials and the Nuremberg trials.
Decree No. 39: How the military justice system worked
In the spring of 1943, the Smersh military counterintelligence was established in the USSR, whose tasks included combating saboteurs, spies and traitors.
The organization was formed on April 19, 1943 and was directly subordinate to the country's top military leadership. The very name "Death to spies" reflected an extremely strict attitude towards combating any manifestations of enemy intelligence and subversive activities. At the same time, the final version of the name was approved personally by Joseph Stalin, who insisted on a universal formulation, not limited only by the German special services.
The fundamental document for the new structure and a key element for the entire system of military justice during the war years as a whole was Decree No. 39 of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR dated April 19, 1943 "On punishments for Nazi villains guilty of murdering and torturing Soviet civilians and captured Red Army soldiers, for spies, traitors from among the Soviet citizens and their accomplices." The document established the legal grounds for the punishment of war criminals, and also formed a special, extremely strict mechanism of judicial proceedings, corresponding to the conditions of wartime.
The Nazis burned down a Ukrainian village
According to Sergey Kondratenko, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Modern Russian History at the Faculty of History of the Historical and Archival Institute of the Russian State State University, "the decree was adopted in wartime conditions and reflected the specifics of the legal practice of that period." According to him, the document was the first attempt to systematically determine responsibility for crimes committed by both the occupiers and their accomplices.
According to the provisions of the decree, the following were sentenced to capital punishment — the death penalty by hanging: "German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Finnish fascist villains convicted of murdering and torturing civilians and captured Red Army soldiers"; "spies and traitors to the motherland from among Soviet citizens." A separate category consisted of accomplices from the local population: they, as a rule, received punishment in the form of hard labor for a period of 15 to 20 years.
— The decree became the first normative act in the USSR that explicitly provided for responsibility for war crimes, and created the basis for the systematic prosecution of Nazi criminals and their accomplices. The document had an impact not only on Soviet, but also on subsequent international practice," the expert emphasizes.
Civilians are returning to their homes to collect the remaining remnants of their property at the site of the burned village.
According to Kondratenko, at the time of the decree's adoption, there were no universal norms in international law governing responsibility for war crimes on the scale that the Second World War had acquired. That is why the Soviet legal system was actually proactive, creating its own instruments of justice.
— An important role in this process was played by the Extraordinary State Commission, established in 1942 to record crimes in the liberated territories. The materials she collected formed the basis of many court cases. Already in 1943, the first open trials of war criminals took place in Krasnodar and Kharkov, which received a wide international response, the historian claims.
A decades-long search
After the end of the Great Patriotic War, the work on identifying Nazi accomplices was not only not completed, it acquired a systematic and long-term character. Already in the first years after the victory, it became obvious that a significant part of those who were involved in crimes in the occupied territories were able to escape, change their documents or disappear among the millions of displaced people. The search for war criminals continued in civilian life.
The extraordinary expert commission inspects the barracks of the concentration camp
As noted by Sergey Rossinsky, Doctor of Law, Professor, Chief Researcher of the Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Criminology Branch of the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in an interview with Izvestia, there was a gradual differentiation of jurisdiction during this period. Cases of high treason, espionage and other crimes against the state were transferred to the state security agencies.
— In 1946, there was a reorganization: the functions of the NKVD were divided among new structures, including the Ministry of State Security, whose investigators dealt with similar cases. At the same time, some crimes that were not directly related to state security issues remained under the jurisdiction of the prosecutor's office, the expert emphasizes.
At the same time, the expert notes, the separation was not as strict as it is today, so employees of any structure could get on the trail of the criminal. As, for example, it happened with Captain Ratnikov in the TV series "Rooks".
A shot from the TV series "Rooks"
Sometimes the criminals were betrayed by chance, but more often than not, each arrest involved lengthy and painstaking work. The investigation was based on archival documents, witness statements and materials of special commissions collected during the war. The materials of the Extraordinary State Commission continued to play a significant role in the evidence base.
Collaboration and the post-war search
Collaboration has become one of the most difficult topics of post-war justice. They were talking about people who collaborated with punitive structures during the occupation and often participated in crimes against civilians. Despite this, many of them managed to hide their past after the war and return to normal life.
One of the most notorious episodes was the tragedy of the Belarusian village of Khatyn, which was destroyed in March 1943 as part of a punitive operation by Nazi troops. At that time, 149 villagers died, including 75 children.
Fascist punishers burned down one of the Belarusian villages near Khatyn
Among the participants in the operation were not only Wehrmacht soldiers, but also collaborators from among former Soviet citizens. In particular, Vasily Meleshko, who served as part of the punitive formation, took part in the extermination of the inhabitants of Khatyn. He was captured on June 22, 1941, and almost immediately began collaborating with the Nazis. He took part in several major punitive operations, but after the war he successfully carried out various checks to which those returning from captivity were subjected. He was reinstated in rank, and then retired from the army and began working as an agronomist. He was first arrested in the late 1940s, but then concealed some of the facts. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, which he served in Vorkuta, but in 1955 Meleshko was granted amnesty. He returned to his wife and children and became the chief agronomist of his collective farm. This helped to expose him — in the 1970s, his picture was posted in the newspaper Molot, telling about the successes of the company, and he was identified by this picture. In 1975, he was sentenced to capital punishment.
Grigory Vasyura, one of the leaders of the punitive unit operating in Belarus, followed a similar path. After the war, he managed to return to civilian life, worked on a state farm and was respected as a veteran. He was first detained on suspicion of collaborating with the occupiers in 1952, but was soon released. They were able to bring him to light only in 1985, when all veterans were awarded the "Order of the Great Patriotic War" — when processing documents, employees found inconsistencies in the archives, which served as a reason for further investigation and arrest. Vasyura was convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad in 1987.
Fyodor Fedorenko in the dock at the Simferopol court
A separate area of the post-war investigation is related to cases that went beyond the borders of the USSR. The story of Fyodor Fedorenko, a guard at the Treblinka death camp, is characteristic. After the war, he emigrated to the United States, where he hid his past for decades. However, in the 1970s, having missed his homeland, he and a tour group came to Crimea - there, despite the years, he was identified and a lengthy international investigation began, which led to an open trial in Crimea in 1986 and the subsequent execution of 80—year-old Fedorenko.
According to the researchers, such cases were not isolated. The exposure of criminals became possible thanks to systematic work with archives, the comparison of evidence and the re-examination of case materials collected during the war period.
It was in this context that a broader cultural reflection on post-war justice was formed. Today, the theme of hidden biographies and long-term searches is reflected in modern culture, including in the series "Rooks", where the personal past of the characters becomes part of the global historical memory, from which it is impossible to completely escape. The series will premiere on April 26.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
