By Wilfried Heink

The forth subchapter in the essay by Marina Sorokina is titled:

Viacheslav Molotov: “It Is Time for the ChGK to Get to Work”.

Sorokina writes that it “took more than four month” to organize the ChGK (ESC) and that on 23 February 1943 a draft “Decree on the ChGK” was send to Stalin. Molotov, in the meanwhile, worked on the “structure of the commission”. The decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party “On the Work of the ChGK” was approved on 5 March by the Politburo. “On 19 march, Pavel I. Bogoiavlenskii was confirmed as chief secretary of the commission by a decree of the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars; and on 3 April, so were its staff (116 people) and budget.”[1]

Thus, the ChGK (ESC) was finally established:

“But only as the “Katyn affair” began to unfold in mid-April 1943 did the activity of the ChGK really start to gather momentum. The Soviet leadership was forced to energize the work of the ChGK by concern over the political implications of Katyn and the urgent need for a tough response, combined with the need to restore economic, political, and ideological control over the territories that had either already been or were in the process of being freed.87 The “ChGK Reports” that were published in the central Soviet press became the main form through which the commission’s work became known to the public”. (my emphasis)

(87 The restoration of control over the liberated territories is a separate topic of research. German propaganda in many of the occupied regions of the USSR had borne substantial fruit: here a sizable police force had been created out of the local population; Soviet citizens, especially young people, had formed armed bands; and various industrial, agricultural, scholarly, and cultural institutions were in operation. Moreover, from the beginning of the war, information began to trickle into Moscow about various sorts of Nazi “dramatizations” of “Bolshevik” atrocities. These had a strong emotional and psychological impact on the local population, which remembered all too well the horrors of famine, socialist collectivization, and incessant repression. I might add that the creation of SmERSH and the issuing of the famous decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 19 April 1943 (“On measures of Punishment for German-Fascist Criminals Who Are Guilty of the murder and Torture of Soviet Citizens and Red Army Prisoners of War and for Soviet Citizens Who Are Spies and Traitors to the motherland and for Their Accomplices”) along with the activation of ChGK investigations, were all undoubtedly links in one chain that were intended in part—and perhaps even principally—to help instill “order” in the liberated Soviet territories.) [2] (my emphasis)

Here Sorokina confirms that it was the “Katyn affair”, the uncovering of the NKVD crime by the Germans (and later blamed on the Germans), that was the driving force behind the establishment and workings of the ChGK (ESC), but what we read in footnote 87 is of utmost importance. Sorokina, who seems to not be sure as to which way to lean, writes that “German propaganda” “had borne substantial fruit”, suggesting that it was only propaganda. She later admits however that “the local population” remembers “the horrors of famine, socialist collectivization, and increased repression”. She continues by allowing that “the famous decree”, issued on 19 April 1943, helped to instill “order” (her quotation marks), by “order” she no doubt meant fear. A little about that decree, first a little about how this decree came to be:

“On the day of the German invasion in June 1941, the Soviet government introduced martial law to several regions of the country. Simultaneously, it extended the jurisdiction of military tribunals and courts martial, which were empowered to prosecute all crimes against the state as well as against public order. Martial law, described as “the avenging sword of Soviet justice,” took precedence over civil laws. Defendants in military tribunals were to be tried twenty-four hours after having been indicted. The presence of prosecution and defense attorneys was not necessary, and verdicts passed by military tribunals were final and not subject to appeal. In accordance with Article 4 of the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) Criminal Code and the corresponding articles of the other republics’ criminal codes, military tribunals were also [End Page 2] empowered to try foreigners according to the laws of the union republics and regions where they had committed crimes. The tribunals claimed additional latitude by applying Articles 318-320 of the RSFSR Criminal Process Code, which stipulated that sentences “be based on the evidence presented in a trial and, more important, on the judges’ inner conviction.”[3]

The wording reminds of the “Partisan Warfare and Barbarossa Jurisdiction Order”, issued by Keitel on 13 May 1941 “…upon direct instructions by Adolf Hitler”(the words “Partisan Warfare” are missing from later publications. Wilf).[4] Based on intelligence reports Hitler was no doubt aware of the fact that Russian partisans were being trained as early as spring 1941[5], and was forced to prepare the troops for the encounter with them. That he was right was confirmed later on when Stalin, in a radio broadcast of 3 July 1941, (scorched earth order) less than two weeks after German troops had entered the SU, activated the partisan units.[6] And because partisans were able to spring into action immediately [7] is proof that they had been formed beforehand and that Hitler was right in issuing this order. But, Hitler’s order is deemed to be illegal, the Soviet decree is ignored.

Prusin then provides some details about the decree of 19 April 1943:

“The turning point in Soviet retribution policies came on April 19, 1943. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet signed a decree stipulating public execution or heavy prison sentences for Axis personnel and their accomplices found guilty of crimes [End Page 3] against civilians and POWs. The decree provided no legal definition of war crimes—it used the all-encompassing terms ‘atrocities’ or ‘evil deeds’ (zverstva or zlodeianiia)—but it stated that while the Axis powers and their accomplices had committed horrible crimes against Soviet citizens, ‘to date the punishment meted out to these criminals and their local hirelings is clearly inadequate to the crimes they have committed.’ The decree delegated the prosecution of foreign and domestic war criminals to courts martial, and stipulated two measures of punishment: death by hanging and forced-labor terms of fifteen to twenty years. Executions were to be carried out publicly and immediately after the sentence was pronounced. The corpses were ‘to be left on the gallows for several days so that everyone will be aware that [harsh] punishment will befall anyone who inflicts torture and carnage on the civilian population and betrays his Motherland.’

The 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. By the time the decree was issued, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens had served in various capacities in the Axis armed forces and administration. Consequently, the Soviet government maintained that the tribunals had not pursued with adequate zeal the alleged collaborators.”[8]

This decree was not just “…an instrument of deterrence against collaboration with the Germans”, it no doubt also served to ensure that the correct testimony was forthcoming. As for collaborators, in the “Tätigkeits und Lageberichte” (action and situation reports), issued by the Einsatzgruppen (response forces), no mention is made of collaboration. The reports detail the destruction left behind as a result of Stalin’s “scorched earth” order, but also mentions that farmers and workers assumed their duties, this perhaps was interpreted as collaboration. One report states that farmers in Ukraine are storing the harvested grain in small bins to prevent them from being destroyed by saboteurs (some of those were indeed destroyed by saboteurs). [9] This again was no doubt interpreted as ‘collaboration’, since Stalin had ordered that not one kernel of grain was to be left behind for the Germans. Fact is, this decree instilled fear into the population encouraging them to not ask questions and one can safely assume that as a consequence, crimes that had been committed by the NKVD were blamed on the Germans, no investigation of the alleged crimes has ever been undertaken by impartial experts.

Now back to Sorokina:

“The “Reports” were compiled in Moscow on the basis of documents (testimonies, statements, etc.) sent to headquarters by the various local auxiliary ChGK commissions, and of materials collected by ChGK members while traveling around the country. The idea was for the reports to appear two or three times a week, but this degree of regularity was never reached: the materials received were so weak from a legal standpoint that their “processors” in the ChGK needed a good deal of time to edit them.88 (my emphasis)

This about says it all. Why was the “material received…weak from a legal standpoint”? Because the reports were not based on investigations undertaken by experts, they were a compilation of stories told by people ordered to do so. If those reports would have been the result of proper investigation by experts in the field of crime investigations, their legality would not have been in question and editing not necessary, in fact illegal.

Footnote 88 provides a few details:

“88: See, for instance, the description, quite expressive in its bitter veracity, of the process of compiling the testimonies of German atrocities that was given by the writer Nikolai Atarov not long after he had visited some of the newly liberated areas:

In those days, in the midst of everyday activities—digging through the ashes of huge conflagrations, searching for a place to spend the night or a passing car—everywhere people were seized with the spontaneous need to write, to testify. Stacks upon stacks of testimonies piled up in the political sections of regiments and divisions. They were written on scraps of Gestapo forms, on the backs of idiotic Goebbels posters, and more frequently in school notebooks. There is no statute of limitations for what was written in them.

These statements were composed the hour after the taking of a city or village. The commission was selected sometimes while still under enemy artillery fire. Its members were chosen thoughtfully: soldiers with military awards and medals; teachers and elderly priests; party and Soviet workers who had just returned from the army; nurses and honest old women.

Appointment to the commission was itself an honor, like the trust of widows, orphans, and those who have lost their homes to fire. I knew many of the commission members. It was all the same: the expert in forensic medicine or the old collective farmer, they were all stark indicators of the people’s calamity, sullenly anxious about how the unrest in their spirits might misrepresent not so much the fact as the form of their accounts, as these had been recorded for such documents.

But “the undersigned” are real live people! Despair drew them out of their powerlessness to describe what they had seen and experienced. Figures seemed incomplete and dry, facts seemed bloodless and dead. They stood on top of the excavated mass graves. It began to seem to them that if they named only facts and figures, they would be hiding something. […] They would be hiding both the terrible and the simple, which cannot creep into any document.”(Nikolai Sergeevich Atarov, “Panshin voinu ob˝iasniaet,” in Voennaia publitsistika i frontovye ocherki, ed. Aleksandr Krivitskii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), 445–46.) [10]

And even though “the experts in forensic medicine” is mentioned, if the reports would have been compiled by experts they would have stood on their own, legally, no editing necessary. Also, the Kharkov/Krasnodar trials are evidence of the work done by those “experts”, diesel exhaust had been determined as the killer, and that just one example. Fact is, the stories told by “…soldiers with military awards and medals; teachers and elderly priests; party and Soviet workers who had just returned from the army; nurses and honest old women” were the basis of those reports and thus needed to be edited, they had no legal standing.

“The party secretaries gave the troika of Vyshinskii, Shvernik, and Aleksandrov responsibility for putting out the “Reports.” The procedure for reviewing the texts thus processed by the ChGK staff included the following stages: first, Vyshinskii and Aleksandrov edited them, then Shvernik sent the documents to Molotov for his approval, and finally the ultimate decision was made by Stalin personally. The key figure in this process of preparing the reports was Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Andrei Vyshinskii (1883–1954), without whose verdict Molotov did not approve a single ChGK document. Vyshinskii—who had in recent years served as public prosecutor of the USSR and as an experienced manager of the internal political courts of law in the 930s, and who would go on to head up the Soviet section at the Nuremburg Trials—quickly became the éminence grise of the ChGK and the unofficial chief editor and censor of its reports. Shvernik and Aleksandrov understood their secretly delegated roles as extras and in an almost purely pro forma capacity approved the drafts of the “reports” on which Vyshinskii himself had “creatively” worked.”(my emphasisi)[11]

Sorokina continues to apply quotation marks to “Reports”, for good reason, they were nothing but propaganda, a compilation of tales edited to suit and signed by prominent communist apparatchiks to impress westerners.

A closer look at this “troika” starting with Andrei Ianuar’evich Vyshinskii. Sorokina tells us very little about him, other than that he “…was named by the Politburo as chairman of the Commission for Leading the Work of the Soviet Representatives at the International Tribunal in Nuremberg”[12], thus he was in charge of submitting the “evidence” he helped to create. But, Vyshinskii was also first deputy of foreign minister Molotov. And, he was trustworthy, he earned his credentials when he, as state prosecutor, conducted the first Moscow show-trials of 1936-1938, the evidence based on false testimony. But he also knew that those in power could break him, his misdeed: In July 1917, at the time of the provisional government Vyshinskii, a young prosecuting attorney then, had signed Lenin’s arrest warrant, forcing Lenin to flee to Finland. Stalin, who was able to take advantage of Lenin’s absence by furthering his career, was favourably disposed towards Vyshinskii (because of the arrest warrant?), but this potential danger was ever present for Vyshinskii.[13] Thus, we have a person in charge of editing the “reports” who had the sword of Damocles dangling over his head and was no doubt willing to write whatever was asked of him to prevent the sword from dropping.

Now to Georgii Fedorovich Aleksandrov, Sorokina writes:

“Georgii Fedorovich Aleksandrov (1908–61) was head of the Soviet Communist Party’s Bureau of Agitation and Propaganda in 1940–47; academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1943); director of the Institute of Philosophy, Soviet Academy of Sciences (1947–54); and Soviet minister of culture (March 1954–March 1955). After a scandal involving his personal life in 1955, he was forced to leave the Communist Party. From 1956 to the end of his life, he was an official of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences”.[14]

So we have a prosecutor who could end up in front of a firing squad at the slightest miscalculation on his part – along with a propagandist/agitator editing the “reports”, quite the team.

Comrade Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik appears to have been the typical communist apparatchik. He is mentioned by Voslensky, Solzhenitsyn, in the Black Book of Communism, always following orders – never asking questions. He was in any case only the errant-boy, used to deliver to Molotov what had been concocted by Vyshinskii and Aleksandrov. In fact, all of the three were just stage hands, for: “…the ultimate decision was made by Stalin personally”. And what Stalin ultimately decided to make public might have had nothing to do with what had been “created” by Vyshinskii et al., or the material delivered to the troika.

Sorokina continues:

“The resolutions and corrections of Vyshinskii to the draft “ChGK Reports” illustrate well the sorts of demands he made for the compilation of texts. I will give just one example. On 5 August 943, after studying a draft report on Kursk oblast (district), Vyshinskii explained with some irritation to Academician Trainin a few matters that would have been elementary for any legal expert: “You have to say how all these atrocities were established (by a member of the Extraordinary Commission?), whether statements were taken, by whom, when and where they were taken, and so forth. Otherwise this document loses its significance both as document and as legal testimony. Add this and show it to me again.” The missing information was never added, and so this ChGK report on Kursk oblast remained in the archives.” [15]

Why was the missing information never added and the “report” published? Was it because it was all a story told on demand and not fact based? Sorokina continues: “Vyshinskii demanded from the ChGK staff precision and accuracy in those details of the “Reports” that could be easily checked”. Why then not check the readily available details and add them?

Sorokina tells us that: “Vyshinskii constantly kept in focus the possible social implications of the “reports,” as well as their accessibility for the general reader”. Why “focus (on) the possible social implications” of the “reports”? These were reports of crimes allegedly committed by the “Fascist invaders”, based on investigations undertaken by experts, or so one would assume. Where are those reports? Nothing wrong with publishing material intended for public consumption, with “possible social implications” in mind. But it is those altered “reports”, totally lacking in detail, that were submitted as evidence at the IMT. Question is, where are the original reports compiled by experts? They appear to have been lost and all we are left with are the propaganda versions, why? The only possible answer is that these propaganda versions are the “originals”, but they are – because of lack of detail as to when, where exactly, etc. etc. – useless as evidence, and also, what is alleged is impossible to confirm by an unbiased body, no attempt to do so has ever been made. Why?

“At the same time the former Stalinist public prosecutor did not hesitate to engage in direct falsification of the facts. The process of preparing the re- port entitled “On the Destruction of the City of Smolensk and the Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders against Soviet Citizens” is revealing in this regard. It served as the immediate precursor to the Katyn affair and in a certain sense served as a dress rehearsal for the way information was stage-managed there. On 4 November 1943, Shvernik sent Molotov the Smolensk text with the request to permit its publication. After Molotov approved it, he wrote: “It is necessary to publish this on 6 November. Ask Vyshinskii whether he has any comments.” The message was immediately given to Vyshinskii and the very next day he returned it to Molotov’s secretariat with a number of edits. (my emphasis)

The biggest changes made by Vyshinskii were to the “Testimony of the Group of Experts in Forensic medicine,” which had been signed by a commission composed of permanent ChGK experts Burdenko, V. I. Prozorovskii, V. M. Smol´ianinov, P. S. Semenovskii, and M. D. Shvaikova.”.[16]

One has to be forgiven if a little suspicious of those permanent ChGK (ESC) medical experts, why not ask local officials to participate? The above, save for M.D. Shvaikova, had also been the medical experts in the Kharkov/Krasnodar trials of 1943 and their “expertise” leaves a lot to be desired, since they had determined that diesel exhaust was the killer and never blinked when stating that victims were killed by shots to ”the back of the neck”, a well known NKVD method. As permanent members they were under the influence of those who owned their standing, if not their very existence, to Stalin, thus useless as independent experts. And still, Vyshinskii felt the need to alter what they came up with. Sorokina continues:

“The original testimony had said that “in the graves in the territory of the villages of Magalenshchin and Viazoven´ko, and on the fruit and vegetable farms in the village of Readovka, bodies were found with bullet wounds and with injuries caused by blunt, hard, and heavy objects, and bodies without any sign of physical trauma. With regard to this last [type of] body, taking into account the testimony of a number of witnesses, it can be said with a high degree of probability and plausibility that the cause of death was poisoning by exhaust fumes in special vehicles.” Vyshinskii’s corrections were terse and decisive: instead of the indefinite phrase “with a high degree of probability and plausibility,” his pencil wrote “it can be confirmed”; to the phrase “the testimony of a number of witnesses,” he added “and other data”; and he changed “exhaust fumes” to the more scientific-sounding “carbon monoxide.” Finally, he made a point of deleting from the testimony the doctors’ admissions of doubt, such as: “It is impossible to get objective proof that the poisoning was caused by carbon monoxide, the main toxic substance in exhaust fumes, by conducting forensic, chemical, and spectroscopic tests; such tests clearly cannot be carried out given the advanced decay of the bodies, which were buried more than one year ago”; and “With regard to a certain number of the bodies exhumed from the graves in the above locations, it was impossible to determine the cause of death in view of the advanced degree of rot and tissue decay in them.” Thus in Vyshinskii’s understanding the “document” came to look like a finished legal product.” [17]

This proves hat the “reports” were not just politicized, but that substantial changes were made to the reports. And it also shows what type of information was used as evidence, we read that: “…bodies were found with bullet wounds and with injuries caused by blunt, hard, and heavy objects, and bodies without any sign of physical trauma…taking into account the testimony of a number of witnesses,”. People with bullet wounds? Really? In a war zone? Injuries by blunt object? And then we have witnesses testifying? Who investigated and what did they investigate? The above clearly shows that those were indeed sham investigations. And all the alterations made by comrade Vyshinskii will not change the fact that what was reported was not fact based, no reports compiled by experts as a result of a proper investigation.

But, no need to speculate, Sorokina confirms the obvious:

“Vyshinskii’s tactic of giving the texts of the “Reports” the necessary propaganda spin was shared by all the members of the ChGK, who understood perfectly well what the authorities expected of them.” [18]

Not just propaganda spin, to be sure, they delivered “what…was expected of them”. We then learn that Tolstoi, Stalin’s “golden pen” and anything but an expert on crime investigations had from June to August 1943 in Stavropol krai (administrative region): “personally […] established the facts of monstrous atrocities and the mass murder of peaceful Soviet citizens”, and:

“With his name and reputation he thus “confirmed” the witness declarations, affidavits, and testimonies that the NKVD had for the most part compiled before his arrival in Stavropol, and which served as the documentary basis for the report. In the writer’s personal fond there is a whole set of copies of the original documents, which on closer examination reveal one of the most widespread tricks for garbling the facts, namely the “technology of substitution.”[19]

The NKVD had compiled the material, as mentioned before, but it is never good form to have a criminal investigate his own crime. And Tolstoi lend credence to them with his “name and reputation”: more evidence that those “reports” needed help, even after they were altered.

We then have a little about the alleged “…destruction by Nazis of the Jewish population of the krai” and that the wording was changed to read “Soviet children” and “Soviet citizens”, Prusin writes about it, see footnote 3. Sorokina:

“The goal of unconditionally fulfilling Stalin’s political orders was shared quite consciously by all members of the ChGK. On the eve of a meeting of the “Big Three” foreign ministers in Moscow, the ChGK held sessions on 8 September and 14 October 1943, during which the members discussed the need to “speed up and change some of the working procedures” of the commission. Tolstoi proposed placing the matter on the agenda in just such a formulation, demanding a simplification in the way that damage caused by the Nazis was calculated and insisting that the members stop quibbling over trivial details in the testimony. Academician Vedeneev supported him in this, considering it necessary to make a few compromises in the legal value of the documents, and Academician Tarle put the matter even more transparently and vividly: “We do not need to worry about anyone arguing or legally debating with us […]. If we say there were three chickens instead of two, nobody will be able to tell the difference…“Our commission can leave the documents for the future,” he said, “but right now we need our leader to have at the conference detailed material that lends itself to more general conclusions” [20] (my emphasis)

Yes indeed, why quibble over unimportant details like facts, just estimate and who cares whether two chickens were killed or three, nobody ever questioned what was submitted by that committee. And some of that material, the estimates et al, was later used to concoct what became to be known as “The Holocaust”. But Sorokina is not done:

“Of course, at the root of the practice of intentional distortion or falsification of information about the scale and content of the Nazi crimes lay the political will of Stalin himself, which was taken as a direct guide to action. Already in his first war speech of 3 July 1941 , addressed to the army and the population, he declared that all valuable property that could not be carted off must without exception be destroyed. But even such an open position, bolstered later by a series of secret orders and directives, was carefully disguised on the level of ideological propaganda. 107 Simultaneously the party and state leadership of the Soviet Union carefully hid the true material and human losses in the war, either knowingly publishing incorrect data or classifying “inconvenient” information. However, if the basic outlines of Stalinist “double-entry bookkeeping” are obvious – one ledger for “external” and an-other for “internal” use—then the question of when, by whom, how exactly, and why this or that specific information about destruction and losses was distorted, either by being inflated or deflated, must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. How parts of Soviet society itself—at various levels and often for different motives—may have supported and popularized the initiatives of its leaders is an important and intriguing topic for future investigation.” (my emphasis)

(107 Thus, the editor-in-chief of Krasnaia zvezda, David Iosifovich Ortenberg, recalls the strong displeasure on the part of the head of Sovinformbiuro and secretary of the Central Committee, Shcherbakov, with the newspaper’s publication in the autumn of 94 of an article by Aleksei Tolstoi entitled “The Blood of the People,” in which he devoted much space to the sacrifices made by the people. “Why now make so much noise about the fact that we ourselves blew up hydroelectric stations?!” shouted Shcherbakov…” [21] (my emphasis)

“Intentional distortions and/or falsifications” made up those “reports” and no mention on the destruction caused by the Soviets themselves as ordered by Stalin in his radio address of 3 July 1941. Sorokina then tells us that the GhCK (ESC) was abolished on 9 June 1951 by order of the Soviet Council of Ministers, the files handed over to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Some of the material was used to try and “out” Nazis in the Adenauer cabinet, Oberländer is mentioned, Sorokina concludes:

“Nearly a half-century later, it must be recognized that the Stalinist plan to create the phantom of a “public prosecutor” of fascism was a success. The ChGK fulfilled its representational function during the war years, and in the postwar years faithfully kept the topic of “war crimes” sealed off from Soviet society. The documentary materials it created and collected, however, have turned out to be the latest Russian mass grave. In the process of excavating it, historians will for a long time to come be faced with the sometimes fruitless task of distinguishing “ours” from “others,” and executioners from victims.” [22] (my emphasis)

A resounding success, without those “reports” it would not have been possible to convict Germans at the IMT and later murder them. And, no attempt has been made to date to sort “ours”, crimes committed by the NKVD et al from “others”, the paper historians satisfied with the story. Some graves containing NKVD victims have been found. [23] We read in this article that:

“Most of the approximately 20 skulls we have found here in the last month have similar holes in the same part of the head,” he said, adding that the bullets had been fired into the nape of the neck — the typical execution method in the Soviet Union.”

Yes, and Soviet “medical experts” had determined that shooting in the neck was a German method. And we also have this from the article:

“Muzhdaba said the remains could not belong to Nazi victims because the German army did not reach this area in World War II.”

which would suggest that at some time this crime might also have been blamed on the Germans.

These sham “reports” were used to convict Germans, to murder (judicial murders) and imprison them. The falsehoods contained in them are still used to shore up “The Holocaust”, to demonize Germans and extort more and more money. The sad part is that no one is willing to launch an investigation undertaken by experts in the field of crime investigations to ascertain, or dismiss, what is stated in those “reports”. Prof. Maser wrote that historians are reluctant to do so out of concern not to find what is allegedly there. It is not only historians who are afraid, it appears that the establishment of the whole world is paralyzed, afraid to question anything, they are happy to just continue and blame the Germans.

Armes Deutschland.

Sources:

1.      Marina Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.824

2.      Ibid, pp.824/25

3.      Alexander Victor Prusin, “Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!”: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945-February 1946, pp.2/3 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v017/17.1prusin.html

4.      August von Knieriem, The Nuremberg Trials, Henry Regnery Company, Chicago Illinois 1959, p.362

5.      Rudolf Aschenauer, Krieg ohne Grenzen. Der Partisanenkampf gegen Deutschland 1939-1945, Druffel-Verlag, Leoni am Starnberger See 1982, p.116

6.      Ibid, p.130

7.      Ibid, p.136, 141ff

8.      Prusin, Fascist Criminals…”, pp.3/4

9.      Peter Klein, ed. Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42: Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Haus der Wannseekonferenz, 1997), Tätigkeits und Lagebericht Nr.3, 15.8.-31.8.1941, pp. 168/69

10.  Sorokina, People and Procedures, pp.825/26

11.  Ibid, p.826

12.  Ibid, footnote 91

13.  Michael S. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis wird offenbar. Moskauer Archive erzählen 1917-1991, 1995 by Langen Müller in der F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München, pp.24/25; Stéphane Courtois et al, The Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, London England 1999, pp. 180, 247, 300, 749/50

14.  Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.807, footnote 32

15.  Ibid, p.826

16.  Ibid, p.827

17.  Ibid, p.828

18.  Ibid, p.829

19.  Ibid

20.  Ibid

21.  Ibid, p.830

22.  Ibid, p.831

23.   http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/grave-may-hold-30000-of-stalins-victims/243436.html

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of, nor should they be attributed to, these institutions.

Although it is the 150th anniversary of our Civil War (April 1861), ostensibly fought to ensure that America would be one state with equal rights of citizenship for all, most Americans consider it “inconvenient” (if not downright anti-Semitic) to suggest that Israel/Palestine should also be treated as one state with equal rights of citizenship for all.  To express this very American goal is to refute our overwhelming desire to divide Palestine into two states and oppose a 130-year old dream to create a Jewish state in the Holy Land.

The reality itself is “inconvenient.”  Within the current borders controlled by Israel (including pre-1967 Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights) there is in fact a single state. The land has one electrical grid, one water system, one currency, one major highway system, one postal service, and one external border.  It has one powerful military; there are some militias like the Druze Border Guards, the Hamas fighters in Gaza, the Fatah policemen in Ramallah, and Jewish settlers in Kiryat Arba, but there is really only one army, navy, and air force.

If you are wedded to creating a Jewish State, it is “inconvenient” to admit that over half the population of Israel/Palestine is not Jewish.  If you claim to opposed apartheid, it is “inconvenient” to point out that there are an unambiguous set of Israeli laws that favor Jews over non-Jews.  This is the essence of political Zionism.  It is a philosophy and a movement based on racism, chosenness, and Jewish supremacism, but it is most “inconvenient” to even whisper these facts, at least in the United States.

The fact is that after 130 years, several hundred billion dollars in foreign aid, thousands of deaths, and persistent ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, Israel/Palestine is not a Jewish state any more than South Africa was a white state prior to its end of apartheid.  Israel/Palestine is a state controlled by Jews; it is a state where Jews have superior rights (not the least being the right of return); but with over half the population being non-Jewish, it is self-deceiving to call it a Jewish state.

Zionists from both the right and the left refuse to acknowledge this because of their obsession with, and allegiance to, the dream of a pure, or almost pure, Jewish state.  So the extreme right, like Foreign Minister Lieberman, wants to transfer the Arabs and other non-Jews (including children of migrant workers) out of Israel/Palestine.  Others like Dershowitz, Pipes, and Hagee simply want to wall off the non-Jewish areas and call these reservations or Bantustans a “potential” Palestinian state.   Even the most humanitarian Zionists, like Uri Avnery, who would tear down the mammoth apartheid wall (or security barrier), cannot bring themselves to endorse the right of equal citizenship.

One state already exists in Israel/Palestine.  Those who deny it do so blinded by a racist endeavor that should long ago have been discarded along with Aryan supremacy, Catholic supremacy, Tutsi supremacy, and whatever other supremacy forms the basis for discrimination and disregard for basic human rights.  But for most Americans, opposition to Zionism is simply “inconvenient.”

by Wilfried Heink

The third sub-chapter in the essay by Marina Sorokina is entitled, “The Curve of Your Life is Sloping Upward in Interesting Ways”. (A letter to I. P. Trainin is the source of the quotation used as the heading for this section, ARAN f. 586 [I. P. Trainin], op. 4, d. 3, l.)[1]

Sorokina starts out with:

“For the task of translating the materials into the language of propaganda, Stalin selected a colorful assortment of professionals to serve on the Soviet commission to investigate Nazi war crimes: a trade union leader, the top-ranking politician of a famous and historic city, a female pilot, an Orthodox priest, a writer, a power-engineering specialist, a doctor, an agronomist, a historian specializing in international relations, and a lawyer. moreover, the last six of these also held the prestigious rank of academician.”[2]

Why the need to “translate the materials into the language of propaganda”? Why not just evaluate the reports, the “material”, and publish it? To evaluate anything, experts are needed and this commission was a collection of people of different expertises, not one of them trained in investigating crimes. How then could this commission appraise what was placed in front of it, i.e., the reports of crimes allegedly committed by the “fascist invaders”? And as has been shown, material was collected: “…from local soviets, the People’s Commissariat of Health, and the Union of Architects to academic bodies such as the Commission on the History of the Fatherland War and the Institute of the History of material Culture, among others.”(see part I)[3] Nothing here about investigations by experts in the field of crime investigation, forensic experts and the like. How did this commission of academicians, union leaders, pilots, etc., ascertain whether what was put in front of them was a report of a crime and not just a tall tale? They couldn’t, as this was not their duty; they were selected to add “legitimacy” to whatever was concocted by others. It appears that an attempt was not even made to involve experts—all of it was only for propaganda purposes.

Here then the composition of the ChGK:

“Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik (1888–1970), the head of the Soviet trade unions; Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896–1948), the first secretary of the Leningrad city and regional party committees, and a member of the Politburo; metropolitan Nikolai of Kiev and Galicia (whose secular name was Boris Dorofeevich Iarushevich, 1892 –1961); Valentina Stepanovna Grizodubova (1910–93), pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union; and six full members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences: the historian Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle(1875–1955), the engineer Boris Evgen´evich Vedeneev (1884–1946), the physician Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko (1876–1946), the agrobiologist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976), the writer Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1882 –1945), and the legal scholar Il´ia Pavlovich Trainin (1886–1949)[4]

Sorokina continues:

“Despite their differences in age,65 social origin, and education, almost all the members of the ChGK were in their own way upwardly mobile “careerists” who owed their rise on the professional ladder to the changes that had taken place in their respective institutions after the October Revolution of 1917, and in this sense they personified the concrete opportunities Soviet power had created for specific people…The ChGK members had doubtless been chosen according to their absolute personal devotion to the country’s supreme leader, as well as for the equally important fact that their devotion was proven. Even leaving aside high Soviet officials like Shvernik and Zhdanov, Stalin had met more than once with almost all the ChGK members before the war, and had directly helped advance their careers” (my emphasis)

(65 The age range of the commission members spanned 35 years: the oldest, Tarle, was born in 1875 and the youngest, Grizodubova, in 1910) [5]

A collection of party hacks, apparatchiks and opportunists beholden to Stalin: not even a hint of impartiality and not one expert in crime investigations among them. Sorokina then goes into detail about each one of them, and some of it is of interest:

“Nikolai Burdenko, the highest-ranking Soviet doctor of the time, was part of the special elite of “Kremlin medicine” in the late 930s, having personally treated Stalin, members of the Politburo and the government, and Comintern officials… It might also be noted that as a consequence of old wounds Burdenko lost his hearing as early as 1937, and in the autumn of 1941 he suffered a stroke that deprived him of movement and speech. An energetic but seriously ill man, Burdenko would serve as the principal medical expert on the ChGK and the chair of its special commission on Katyn.”[6]

His participation in the Katyn cover-up of 1944 reveals Burdenko as a liar. His commission determined that the bodies of Polish officials were buried in the fall of 1941, when in fact they had been murdered and buried by the NKVD in 1940. A little about the Katyn commission from the IMT, 14 February 1946:

“We find, in the Indictment, that one of the most important criminal acts for which the major war criminals are responsible was the mass execution of Polish prisoners of war, shot in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk by the German fascist invaders.

I submit to the Tribunal, as a proof of this crone, official documents of the special commission for the establishment and the investigation of the circumstances which attended the executions. The commission acted in accordance with a directive of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union. In addition to members of the Extraordinary State Commission-namely Academicians Burdenko, Alexis Tolstoy, and the Metropolitan Nicolas- this commission was composed of the President of the Pan-Slavonia Committee, Lieutenant General Gundorov; the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Union of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, Kolesnikov; of the People’s Commissar for Education in the R.S.S.F.R., Academician Potemkin; the Supreme Chief of the Medical Department of the Red Army, General Smirnov; and the Chairman of the District Executive Committee of Smolensk, Melnikov. The commission also included several of the best known medicolegal experts.”[7]

Not only can Burdenko be dismissed as untrustworthy, but the same goes for Tolstoi and Nikolai, although his name is spelled “Nicolas” above. Later on Soviet officials still did not dare reveal what really happened at Katyn when the Stalin era came to a close. They feared that if they admitted that their predecessors committed crimes of that enormity, people might feel that the present regime was capable of committing them[8], but also because people might ask what other crimes the Germans were blamed for that were actually committed by the NKVD. Sorokina:

“Valentina Grizodubova was the captain of the female crew that in 1938 completed a famous nonstop flight from Moscow to the Far East, and had numerous unofficial meetings with Stalin while preparing for the flight…In the war years, Grizodubova’s agency was responsible for fulfilling a special government order on flights to foreign countries, and she herself, in addition to directing the long-distance aviation group that took care of special orders for supplying partisan divisions, also headed up the Antifascist Committee of Soviet Women”[9]

Aside from having no clue about crime investigations, Grizodubova can be dismissed as biased, and extremely so.

Now to Il´ia Trainin, who as “…a Jewish youth with not so much as a middle-school education, was made head of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Law”.[10] “…in the prerevolutionary years (Trainin) was involved primarily in the “expropriation of the expropriators,” was repeatedly arrested, exiled to Siberia, and deported abroad; in 1920, he came to work for Stalin in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities. He wrote for the journal Zhizn´ natsional´nostei on both theoretical and practical questions that had to do with the nationalities issue. Having demonstrated an ability both to undergird and to implement the general policy personified by his boss, Trainin soon found himself in charge of the censorship of literature and theater (as chairman of the main Committee for the Control of Repertoire, or Glavrepertkom), then introduced order into the administration of the Sovkino film agency (1926–30) and the Communist Academy’s Institute of Soviet Construction and Law(from 1931 on). It was specifically to him that in 1942 Vyshinskii handed over his position as director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Law—making him the country’s highest-ranking academic jurist…”[11]

Not much needs to be said: Trainin was willing “…to implement the general policy personified by his boss”, i.e., Stalin. Sorokina writes, on footnote 72, p. 820: “It is hardly possible to agree with the opinion that Trainin was an “authoritative scholar… On the contrary, it is more likely that he owed his surprising career entirely to a keen understanding of how to conduct himself around Stalin”. Trainin was also responsible for Article 21 of the IMT Statute [12], which states:

“The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof. It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United Nations, including the acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and of records and findings of military and other Tribunals of any of the United Nations”[13]

Thus it was possible to introduce “copies” of documents and forgeries as evidence at the IMT, as well as some of the findings by this ChGK, ESC, all of it accepted by the Tribunal without question. (footnote 12)[14]

“The scholarly authority Tarle (Evgenii Viktorovich), a renowned specialist on French history, international relations, and Russian foreign policy,  had such an unquestionably high stature that even despite his lack of party affiliation he was recruited to join various experts’ committees in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, where he examined significant foreign policy questions for the Stalinist regime. At the same time, however, an event occurred in Tarle’s life that in large measure determined his subsequent public behavior: in January 1930, the academician was arrested in Leningrad in connection with the notorious “Academy of Sciences affair” (also known as the “Platonov–Tarle affair”) and was exiled for five years to Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan). After a while, Tarle was returned on Stalin’s personal orders and restored to the Academy of Sciences. A man of European culture and enormous talent, Tarle was so shaken by these experiences that had unexpectedly befallen him that in the mid-1930s he practically became the historical mouthpiece for the “great leader of peoples,” providing professional support for the latter’s geopolitical ambitions.”[15]

Another member of the ChGK (ESC) who owed his existence to Stalin.

“’Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo!’ These words, spoken by Stalin in February 1935 at the Second All-Union Congress of Collective-Farm Shock Workers, decisively paved the way for the long and dizzying career of Trofim Lysenko, academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1939), president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1938–56, 1961–62), director of the Genetics Institute of the Academy of Sciences (1940–65), and deputy chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1938–56). Much has been written about how the Lysenko phenomenon was the result of Stalin’s direct patronage.”74

(74 See Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. I. Michael Lerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); and Valerii Soifer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).[16]

“Stalin’s direct patronage”: no comment is even necessary. Voslensky writes that in the 1950s, Lysenko, a careerist and conniver, developed a theory that was supposed to increase agricultural production. As a consequence, the other scientists were chased from the academy. The most famous of them, Nikolai Vavilov, died in jail.[17]

“The famous writer, Aleksei Tolstoi, originally had a decidedly negative attitude toward the Bolsheviks and even cooperated with the propaganda bureau of General Denikin’s Volunteer Army during the Civil War years(1918–19). Later settling in Paris and Berlin, he actively wrote for the émigré press. This did not prevent him from returning home, however: having “changed landmarks”, Tolstoi arrived in the USSR in August 1923, and from this moment on he gave himself to the new regime to such a degree that without a trace of irony he may be called the main “court author” of the prewar regime. Like many Soviet authors, Tolstoi quite consciously made singing the praises of Stalin the springboard for his success, in return for which he received all the privileges available to Soviet writers.”[18]

Tolstoi, Stalin’s “golden pen,” was mentioned above in connection with the Soviet Katyn investigation of 1944. He obviously gave his blessings to anything put before him. Tolstoi was also involved in the sham Krasnodar trial pertaining to the Stavropol region: “Investigation of the crimes committed by the German fascists in the Stavropol region was directed by a prominent Soviet writer and member of the Extraordinary State Commission, Academician Alexey Nikolaevitch Tolstoy, who now is deceased.”.[19] Not only was he involved but the investigations were “directed” by Tolstoi, and in that trial experts determined that the gas vans were diesel powered: all of the accused voluntarily admitted to the alleged killings, a trademark of Soviet sham trials.[20]

“In the 1920s, while still the bishop of Peterhof, Nikolai was repeatedly arrested by the political police (OGPU). He somehow survived and from 1927 to 1940 served as head of the eparchies of Leningrad, Novgorod, and Pskov; in 1940, he became exarch of western Ukraine and Belorussia. At the beginning of the war (July 1941), Nikolai was raised to the rank of metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia, and from the summer of 1941 on, he ran, to all intents and purposes, the eparchy of Moscow. He attended the most important meetings of Orthodox hierarchs with Stalin during the war years 1943, 1945); and when the patriarchate was restored, he was considered as a serious candidate for the position of patriarch of all Rus”.[21]

To “somehow survive” as a bishop in the Russia under Stalin was no small feat. We have this for example:

“During these years [The Great Terror 1936-1938] the authorities sought the “complete liquidation” (to use their own expression) of the last remaining members of the clergy. The census of January 1937 revealed that approximately 70 percent of the popula­tion, despite the pressures placed on them, still replied in the affirmative when asked “Are you a believer?” Hence Soviet leaders embarked on a third and decisive offensive against the church. In April 1937 Malenkov sent a note to Stalin suggesting that legislation concerning religious organizations was out­dated, and he proposed the abrogation of the decree of 8 April 1929. “This decree,” he noted, “gave a legal basis for the most active sections of the churches and cults to create a whole organized network of individuals hostile to the Soviet regime.” He concluded: “The time has come to finish once and for all with all clerical organizations and ecclesiastical hierarchies.” Thousands of priests and nearly all the bishops were sent to camps, and this time the vast majority were executed. Of the 20,000 churches and mosques that were still active in 1936, fewer than 1,000 were still open for services at the beginning of 1941. In early 1941 the number of officially registered clerics of all religions had fallen to 5,665 (more than half of whom came from the Baltic territories, Poland, Moldavia and western Ukraine, all of which had been incorporated in 1939-1941), from over 24,000 in 1936.”[22]

We don’t know why Nikolai was spared, but we may assume that he had Stalin to thank for it. Sorokina sums it up:

“As one can see from this brief survey of the lives of the members of the  ChGK, their absolute loyalty to the Stalinist regime was guaranteed by a tried-and-true method—the carrot and the stick. In each of these people’s lives some event had occurred that in the context of totalitarianism made them completely dependent on the state, making it possible for the state, in one way or another, to monitor or even direct their behavior.”[23]

Yes indeed, and because of that “absolute loyalty to the Stalinist regime”, and in some cases to Stalin himself, anything produced by the ChGK (ESC) can safely be dismissed as payment for services rendered. Sorokina continues by telling us that the person named as chair of the ChGK, Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik, was also of interest. He was chosen because he was: “…a person who, first, was not publicly connected with the internal purges and trials of the 1930s and, second, had been in charge of the Council (later “Commission”) on Evacuation under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and thus had experienced from the inside the many hidden vicissitudes of this process. Stalin accurately saw in the faceless Shvernik a faithful guardian of the most hidden state secrets. Not coincidentally, after the 20th Party Congress, and for the entire period of the “Thaw” (1956–66), Shvernik headed the Soviet Communist Party Control Committee (from 1962 on called the Party Commission), a special organ for party security that, together with the KGB and the ministry of Internal Affairs, guarded all information about the illegal activities of the Stalinist regime for many years.”[24]

Solzhenitsyn tells us a little about the Council, Commission, on Evacuation. On 24 June 1941, two days after German troops entered Russia, this commission was established. Its chair was Shvernik, with Kossygin and Pervuchin as co-chairs. The task: evacuate to safety all party offices and their officials, all industrial installations as well as raw materials, all workers of those industrial plants and their families—up until November 1941 some 12 million people were evacuated. That figure included about 1.1 million eastern Jews and 200,000 western Jews.[25] How many of the party officials and workers were Jews is unknown.

Sorokina then lists the responsibilities of each of the commission members. Trainin, a Jew, was in charge of “…the calculation of atrocities committed by the German occupiers and their accomplices against Soviet citizens”. Lysenko estimated the damage done to farms; Vedeneev to industry; Grizobudova to co-ops and trade unions; Tolstoi, Burdenko and Nikolai calculated the damage done “…to cultural, scholarly, and medical institutions, buildings, and religious paraphernalia”.[26] The job descriptions of the latter three is of interest: no doubt any church destroyed by the Soviets, see above, was counted as a crime committed by the “fascist Invaders and their Accomplices”. Regarding the destruction of property by the Soviets, Solzhenitsyn writes that it was especially appalling to see Jewish communists take part in the destruction of Russian churches.[27]

Sorokina:

“In reality, however, the commission members’ oversight was limited by the fact that the commission’s final documents had to be signed. As protocols of the ChGK show, in practice the commission hardly met, and agreement on its protocols was by “survey”: out of 7 sessions in 1943–44, only 4 involved an actual gathering of the commission members, and these 4 had rather insignificant agendas. The real levers of control over the activity of the ChGK were in the hands of its powerful bosses, who formulated the “political orders,” which the commission apparatus merely implemented.”[28]

And here we have it again, the ChGK (ESC) was only a front, controlled by powerful politicians in the background: “The personnel roster…meant to reflect its special character as an ‘export’”[29] During the war: “…the staff ChGK (department chiefs and inspectors) numbered approximately 50 people… Although the ChGK department “chiefs” (nachal´niki) were the key figures on the staff, none of them had acquired any professional experience before the war in the area for which their particular department was responsible, much less in questions of international criminal law.”80  (my emphasis)

(80 For more detail, see my “Svideteli Niurnberga: Ot ankety k biografii,” in Pravo na imia: Biografiia kak paradigma istoricheskogo protsessa. Vtorye chteniia pamiati V. Iofe. Sbornik dokladov (St. Petersburg: NITC memorial, 2005), 50–63)[30]

Sorokina writes that ChGK officials:

“…were typical mid-level Soviet careerists: a lowly social origin; Red Army service in the Civil War; then, as a rule, a flourishing party or Komsomol career in the provinces; and finally, after receiving a higher education at a communist university or party school, a party or economic career in the capital…The central ChGK was only the tip of a multi-layered iceberg, the bulk of which was made up of a complex system of local commissions assisting in the work of the ChGK, from the republic, krai, and oblast levels (these numbered 19 by the beginning of 1944) down to the village level. Also forming an integral part of this structure were the numerous departmental commissions that accumulated data on the damage caused to institutions and organizations of various people’s commissariats. The makeup of the regional commissions was fundamentally different from that of the central ChGK: they were headed by teams of three, consisting of the first secretary of the regional party committee, plus the heads of the corresponding local Council of People’s Commissars and the NKVD-KGB, which recruited “public representatives” for work on the commissions.82 No document, however, mandated the participation of representatives of the public prosecutor’s office in the investigations.”(my emphasis)

(82  The local commissions were created according to a decree of the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars, no. 299 (“On the Work of the ChGK”), dated 16 March 1943, and personally signed by Stalin. Attached to this document was the “Decree” on the ChGK. Other decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR that regulated the activity of the ChGK were signed by Molotov)

Party hacks and the like “investigated”, but no experts were allowed. As for the participation of the NKVD-KGB, Sorokina tells us that because local party and state officials were busy: “…the decision to staff the local commissions in this manner meant that the whole process of gathering firsthand information on the crimes of the Nazis and the damage they caused was directed and controlled by the local branches of the NKVD-KGB and SmERSH.”( SmERSH was short for Smert´ shpionam! Death to Spies!)[31]

Thus we have the NKVD, responsible for murdering millions of their own peoples, gathering information on crimes allegedly committed by the Germans. Who is to say that they did not just reveal evidence of their own crimes, as happened at Katyn, since few if any Soviet citizens would have dared to protest?

Katyn is not the only example. There are many more and Hoffmann provides details of some. The NKVD committed numerous crimes in the Kharkov region; thousands upon thousands of people were liquidated between 1937 and 1941. When Soviet troops reclaimed Kharkov in the spring of 1943 for a short period of time, NKVD border patrols killed 4,000 people, charging them with collaboration. Among them were young woman who allegedly had sexual encounters with Germans.[32] At Katyn the ChGK (ESC) under Burdenko had “unequivocally established” that the crime was committed by Germans:

“Voslensky, who was an insider, remembers how uneasy everyone felt when the Burdenko report was presented in the Moscow Academy of Science. Especially the part about “shooting in the back of the neck”, presented as a German method, was met with silence because all of them knew that “8gr. of lead in the neck” was an NKVD method”[33]

At the Kharkov Trial the expert commission stated:

“Investigation and medico-legal examinations have established that in addition to poisoning with carbon monoxide, the Germans applied on a large scale, in Kharkov and its environs, mass shooting from automatic firearms, firing as a rule into the back of the head, the back of the neck and the spine. (my emphasis)[34]

Hoffmann rightly concludes that since the NKVD were the killers at Katyn, and since their well-known method of killing was a shot in the neck (Voslensky), we may reasonably conclude that those victims found at Kharkov et al, also killed by shots in the neck, were victims of the NKVD. And these same NKVD killers compiled the “evidence” of German crimes, which no “historian” has yet questioned. Not one of the alleged crime sites has been investigated by impartial bodies, or by experts in crime investigations. Not only were no experts involved in compiling the few ChGK reports, but what was submitted was “edited” before release. More on that will be included in the last part.

To be continued…

Sources:

1. Marina Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.817, footnote 64
2. Ibid
3. Ibid, p.813
4. Ibid, p.817
5. Ibid, 817/18
6. Ibid, p.818
7. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-14-46.asp, pp.425/26; also http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/09/katyn/
8. Michael S. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis wird offenbar. Moskauer Archive erzählen 1917-1991, 1995 by Langen Müller in der F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung München, p.32
9. Sorokina, People and Procedures, pp.819/20
10. Ibid, p.818
11. Ibid, p.820
12. Joachim Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945, Verlag für Wissenschaften, München 1996, p.180
13. http://www.icls.de/dokumente/imt_statute.pdf
14. Franz W. Seidler, das Recht in Siegerhand. Die 13 Nürnberger Prozesse 1945-1949, Pout le Mérite – Verlag für Militärgeschichte, Selent 2007, p.80; http://avalon.law.edu/imt/02-08-46.asp, pp.202ff
15. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.829/21
16. Ibid
17. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis wird offenbar, p.254
18. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.821
19. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp, p.572
20. Regarding the methods used by the Soviets to obtain confessions, see http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v017/17.1prusin.html
21. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.822
22. Stéphane Courtois, et al, The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England 1999, pp.200/01
23. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.822
24. Ibid
25. Alexander Solschenizyn, Zweihundert Jahre zusammen. Die Juden in der Sowjetunion, F.A. Herbig-Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München 2003, pp.362/63
26. Sorokina, People and Procedures, pp.822/23
27. Solschenizyn, Zweihundert Jahre zusammen, pp.286/87
28. Sorokina, People and Procedures, p.823
29. Ibid, p.817
30. Ibid, p.823
31. Ibid, 823/24
32. Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg, pp. 181ff
33. Michael S. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis wird offenbar. Moskauer Archive erzählen 1917-1991, 1995 by Langen Müller in der F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung München, p.31; http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/09/katyn/;  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/06-03-46.asp, pp.289/90
34. The people’s verdict; a full report of the proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German atrocity trials, Hutchinson & Co (Publishers)Ltd., London, New York, Melbourne 1944, p.111

On 30 June 2011 the following news item was published by PRNewswire:[1]

Sixty-six years after the notorious Nazi death camp at Auschwitz was liberated and the horrific crimes of Dr. Josef Mengele were first revealed, Alexander Historic Auctions of Stamford, Connecticut (an affiliate of Alexander Autographs, Inc., www.alexautographs.com) has obtained for auction all of the war criminal’s writings, including his autobiography describing his escape from Germany and life in South America, diaries, philosophical tracts, racial and political commentary, poetry, short stories, and travelogues. The archive is composed of over 3,300 pages of handwritten text, some illustrated, largely in bound journals, written while Mengele was in hiding in Paraguay and Brazil between 1960 and 1975.

The archive will be offered in Alexander’s July 21, 2011 auction of historic militaria and autographs.

[...].

The autobiographical material in this archive, about 25% of its content, is of such historical importance, it was quoted and paraphrased in the mid-1980′s by Bundt Magazine and by authors Gerald Posner and John Ware in their biography of Mengele. Bundt and Posner/Ware quoted excerpts very sparingly, leaving the vast majority of this material unpublished and but for Bundt and Posner/Ware, unviewed.

Writing in the third person, or using the pseudonym ‘Andreas,’ Mengele describes his capture by American forces, hiding on a farm while furtively meeting his wife, escape over the Brenner Pass to Italy, arrest, passage to Argentina, and life in Paraguay and Brazil. (…). He also offers his opinions on a myriad of subjects, including race-mixing, the Nuremburg war crimes trials, justification of the concentration camp system, and denial of the conditions at the camps.

[...].

Bill Panagopulos, president of Alexander Historic Auctions, has a strong opinion on the sale of the archive: ‘Scholarly institutions or historic collections should obtain these writings not as a ‘remembrance’ of a horrific period of world history, but more as a learning tool for future generations to recognize the psychopathic mentality that incited the Holocaust so that similar genocides are never repeated.’

What’s most intriguing in this newsreport is the statement that the Auschwitz doctor’s writings include “denial of the conditions at the camps”. What could this mean, exactly?

The very brief excerpts published by Gerald Posner and John Ware in their Mengele biography Mengele: The Complete Story[2] provide us with some clues in this respect.[3] Mengele did not deny that mass death occured at Auschwitz due to epidemics, malnutrition and other “natural causes” (Posner/Ware, p. 73):

“It is natural and understandable that the camps were suffering very bad hunger after all the problems and therefore I saw what was to be expected.”

According to a Munich pharmacist and his wife who met with him soon after the war, Mengele wanted to turn himself in, but was finally persuaded against it. To this couple Mengele declared his innocence (p. 67):

“I don’t have anything to hide. Terrible things happened at Auschwitz, and I did my best to help. One could not do everything. There were terrible disasters there. I could only save so many. I never killed anyone or hurt anyone. I can prove I am innocent of what they could say against me. I am building the facts for my defense. I want to turn myself in and be cleared at a trial.”

If this quote from memory is correct, then it seems unlikely that Mengele was referring to the use of homicidal gas chambers, because the systematic killing of innocent people in chemical slaughterhouses would not be a “disaster”, but pre-meditated mass murder. Epidemic outbreaks, however, could justly be termed “disasters”.

The defense that Mengele was reportedly building may well be included among the papers now to be auctioned off.

Elsewhere (p. 154) Mengele noted that)

“The political lie triumphs and time and history have been warped and bowed.”

This clearly indicates that Mengele believed that victors of WWII had rewritten the history of what transpired during the war in their own favor.

Then there is the title of one of the autobiographical texts, Fiat Lux, “Let there be light”. A suggested by Robert Faurisson, this title clearly implies that Mengele wished to shed light on what had actually transpired at Auschwitz.

If it is true that Mengele’s writings contain “denial of the conditions at the camps” then it seems most likely that “conditions” refer to either claims of gross mistreatment of prisoners in the form of torture, unlawful punishments etc, or to the allegation that Auschwitz functioned as an extermination camp.

One can only hope that the Mengele documents are purchased by an institution that does not place them behind lock and key, but prefer to reveal their contents to the world. After all, we should never underestimate the Holocaust industry’s tendency to shoot itself in the foot.

[1] “Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele’s Unknown Writings to be Auctioned”,

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/auschwitz-angel-of-death-josef-mengeles-unknown-writings-to-be-auctioned-124801054.html

[2] Gerald Posner, John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, McGraw-Hill, New York 1986.

[3] For more on this biography see my online review at: http://www.codoh.com/review/revmengele.html