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kiril feferman

Soviet legal procedureS againSt

the nazi criminalS and Soviet collaboratorS aS hiStorical SourceS

In his article, historian Kiril Feferman presents the unique methods the Soviet legal system used to contend with war crimes committed in the Soviet Union during the Nazi occupation. The documentation of war crimes in the Soviet Union had begun already in 1942, when the Red Army began to recapture territories that had fallen to Nazi occupation. Stalin’s draconian punitive policy, argues Feferman, produced a very comprehensive retribution policy against those who had participated in the “Final Solution,” including many who were innocent, and was more thorough than that of any other European country. Nevertheless, the investigations that led to the conviction of collaborators during the Stalin era were mostly very swift and cursory. In the post-Stalin period, since the 1960s, Soviet scholars have strived to consolidate a more thorough investigative system and have generated valuable historical and legal documentation, some of which has even been used in legal proceedings held in the West.

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introductionAs the late Professor David Bankier once told me, the Soviet approach towards persecuting its enemies, as it evolved by the time the Second World War had broken out and during its course, differed drastically from Nazi policy. On the whole, German leaders preferred to deal with their enemies, real and imagined, by employing extra-legal procedures. The most notorious Nazi crimes were committed outside of the territory of the Reich, beyond the area where the German legal bureaucracy, however Nazified it was, could intervene and impede the smooth killing processes envisaged and set in motion by Nazi leadership. Needless to say, the Nazis created only a vague legal framework to define their criminal policies, especially at the stage of extermination. As a result, hundreds of thousands and probably millions of people disappeared in German-controlled Europe with little documentation of

this large-scale process. The great majority of Holocaust victims appear to have perished in this way.

In contrast, in wake of the turmoil during its Civil War, the Soviet Union created a legal framework to deal with its enemies. Soviet laws stipulated that even the smallest offense against the regime could be legally punished. Certainly, policies varied from time to time, but this aspect remained unchanged. What is especially important for the central concern of this article is the fact that the Soviet proceedings against those accused and charged – in the Soviet reality these terms turned out to be synonymous – were duly recorded. Once the Soviets began to view what we now know as “The Final Solution” as crimes deserving of legal punishment, their investigations had to be recorded. This resulted in the creation of valuable and voluminous sources of information. This article examines

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the emergence of these historical documents, the evolution of Soviet policies towards legal procedures against the Nazi criminals and Soviet collaborators, as well as the merits and disadvantages of these sources.

General concernsAt the very beginning of the Soviet-German hostilities, the Soviet approach towards the Nazi atrocities committed on Soviet territory was ambiguous. The war with Nazi Germany began terribly for the Soviet Union. In the first two years of the war, the country was at times merely a step away from total military disaster. Those were the years of the mass extermination of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. In those two years, the Soviet leadership struggled fiercely to maintain the allegiance of millions of its people, and especially of the Red Army units subjected to aggressive and direct Nazi propaganda. It is evident that under these circumstances, the Soviet leadership was reluctant to allocate considerable resources for the investigation of German policies against Soviet civilians and captured prisoners-of-

war. Although captured Germans and their allies were executed in the initial period of the war, no thorough investigation into their deeds in the occupied territories was conducted. This phenomenon was widespread when the Red Army was in speedy retreat and was not logistically prepared to conduct investigations and take prisoners with it. This was also the case with Soviet partisans, who widely resorted to killing collaborators in order to intimidate their peers and other potential collaborators, as well as to take revenge for the collaborators’ involvement in the activities against the partisans and the Soviet civilian population. The partisans, likewise, were neither logistically equipped, nor willing to conduct meticulous investigations on the spot.

Concomitantly, another tendency became gradually noticeable. Several months after the beginning of the war, when it became clear that the Soviet Union would not collapse as a result of the Blitzkrieg, there emerged a general understanding among the Soviet leadership on all levels that what the Nazis were doing during this war, whether against the Red Army or in the

A Nazi war-crimes trial held in Kharkiv, December 1943 (Yad Vashem Archives)

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occupied Soviet territories, should be recorded with an eye to further investigation, when a more propitious opportunity presented itself. By bolstering the fighting spirit of the Red Army and Soviet population, these procedures could bear tangible propaganda fruits in real time. With a longer view, once Nazi crimes against Soviet civilians and property could be established, this could serve as a compelling reason for future Soviet damage claims against Nazi Germany. Finally, the Soviet government, whatever its policies towards its own civilians, would not tolerate another power doing whatever it wished on its territory.

Occasional information on atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis against the civilian population (including Jews) was made available to the Soviet government from the reports of retreating Soviet soldiers, civilians, emerging partisan units, and Soviet agents placed in these areas in order to engage in or to coordinate the underground activities against the Germans. Sometimes they were able to personally eyewitness the brutalities, or more often to contact those who managed to witness and survive them. For the most part, these testimonies could be established only by on-the-spot investigations, and this could be achieved only after the Soviet Union recaptured its previously lost territories. This began during the 1941-1942 winter campaign when the Red Army recaptured mostly Russian areas. The process of the large-scale liberation of Soviet territories began in the summer of 1943, and was completed by late 1944.

With respect to mentioning Jewish victimhood, let alone emphasizing it, it should be taken into consideration that virulent Nazi propaganda highlighted the alleged link between Jews and the Bolshevik regime in an attempt to discredit the Soviet regime and foment intense anti-Semitism. It is not easy to ascertain the extent to which the Soviet civilian population, and the Red Army’s soldiers and officers were receptive to this propaganda. However, it is likely that in the initial stages

of the war when the German Army was particularly successful, Nazi propaganda produced many adherents among Soviet civilians and soldiers. Therefore, leaving aside dormant Soviet anti-Semitism, the Soviets felt forced by Nazi propaganda to downplay the Jewish nature of the Holocaust – that is, the large percentage of Jewish victims among the Soviet civilians killed by the Germans.

creation of soviet sourcesStarting from early 1942, Red Army troops that were engaged in gradually recapturing Soviet territories also became involved in the process of documenting Nazi crimes in the USSR. Upon their entry into a certain locality, the military unit would form an ad-hoc commission consisting of several officers and soldiers; the commission usually included a military commander and political brass. Then, these commissions briefly questioned local inhabitants and drew their conclusions. Considerable army resources were employed to achieve this goal, exceeding those of any other Soviet agency. In terms of the evidence necessary to launch investigations, the army came into possession of a unique set of materials consisting of the testimonies offered by the captured German soldiers and the seized Nazi documents. However, the process of recording Nazi crimes by Red Army troops was less than ideal. Military commissions attached to constantly moving troops could hardly carry out a thorough investigative process. Finally, the army was primarily engaged in military tasks and, thus, was in no position to assign professionals to investigate German crimes. In general terms, the army laid the groundwork for the legal proceedings against those involved in murdering Soviet citizens, which would be later launched by other Soviet agencies.

In March 1943, the Red Army gained its most important victory over the Wehrmacht, near Stalingrad, and the Soviet government began to feel more secure about the outcome

Soviet partisans in Byelorussia (Yad Vashem Archives)

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of the war. The government sensed that the time was ripe to launch an all-out effort to collect testimonies on Nazi crimes committed on Soviet soil. The coordination of this task was assigned to the Extraordinary State Commission on Reporting and Investigating the Atrocities of the German Fascist Occupiers and their Henchmen and the Damages inflicted by them to Citizens, Kolkhozes, Public Organizations, State Enterprises (ESC).1 Soviet leadership allocated considerable resources for its smooth functioning and gave it broad, albeit vaguely defined powers to establish the extent and nature of the Nazi crimes in the USSR. The ESC amassed considerable findings demonstrating that the Nazis had perpetrated atrocities in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union.

As a rule, the process of collecting information for the ESC began when officers of various Soviet law enforcement agencies interrogated or questioned witnesses of the crimes, or local inhabitants accused of having collaborated with the German authorities and/or of having committed these crimes themselves. Among the Soviet law enforcement agencies involved in this process were: 1) The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), 2) The People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB), 3) The Prosecutor’s Office, and 4) military counter-intelligence (SMERSH). Occasionally local Soviet executive bodies and party authorities contributed to collecting testimonies for the Commission. Yet, there were clear limits on the exposure of the ESC to more independent scrutiny, as indicated by its refusal to let the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee be involved in the ESC probes related to the maltreatment of Jews. The Commission’s findings were widely used by the Soviet authorities in the legal proceedings conducted against Nazi criminals and their Soviet collaborators.

On paper, the Soviet directives excluded from prosecution those who had worked in the administrative apparatus created by

the Germans but “rendered aid to partisans ... sabotaged the demands of the German authorities ... or actively contributed to the struggle against the German Fascist occupiers.”2 Soviet law regarding collaborators was extremely harsh, and its interpretation of the poorly defined boundaries between collaboration and aid to Soviet forces by handpicked courts was very liberal, and as a result, almost anyone could be considered a collaborator. The verdicts depended solely on the winds blowing from the Kremlin – and those winds always blew in the direction of Siberia. The following evidence underscores this point. On November 25, 1943, the Plenary Meeting of the USSR Supreme Court (in charge of the military courts dealing with collaboration with the enemy and participation in atrocities against Soviet citizens) issued a clarification to the military courts. It forbade condemning workers and petty employees who, under the German rule, had pursued their professions, unless they committed crimes.3 The corollary of this clarification is that prior to it, Soviet courts had regarded all those that continued to pursue their profession during the occupation to be collaborators with all that this entailed. One is also left wondering what was considered ‘pursuit of one’s profession.’ Nevertheless, however distorted, this was a legal procedure, and that is why we now have access to millions of files of those who went

A German soldier waving a white flag of surrender, Stalingrad, February 1943 (Yad Vashem Archives)

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through the mill of Stalin’s judiciary (except for those that are still locked away in secret Russian archives.)

During and soon after the war, the Soviet regime arranged some widely covered trials of Nazi criminals and their Soviet accomplices in the liberated areas.4 Yet, the make-up of defendants in these open trials changed as the war drew to a close. In the first public trials, Soviet nationals were occasionally put in the dock. This was the case for a certain R. Katolikov, a former policeman in one of the rural areas of Krasnodar territory in the North Caucasus.5 He joined a police force set up by the Germans after their occupation of the Caucasus in August 1942. After failing to join the retreating Wehrmacht in January 1943, he was seized and tried by a Soviet court in the summer of 1943.

During the trial, R. Katolikov dismissed any ideological motivation for joining the police and persecuting Soviet nationals, among them Jews. It was only because of material benefits, claimed Katolikov, hoping that the Soviet court would thus regard his actions as a lesser infringement and not as high treason, with all that such a serious crime entailed. The former policeman cursorily described the final days of a small Jewish

community in one of the villages in the Krasnodar territory. Soviet investigators were interested primarily in establishing the Jewish victims’ basic biographical and statistical data, not on learning how they had lived prior to their destruction, unless the specific defendant was also charged with mistreating them in the early stages of the occupation.

Then, quite predictably, R. Katolikov testified that his contribution to the murder of the village’s Jews was limited to gathering Jews from all over the village and the adjacent area and bringing them to a certain point. He made it clear that all the Jews, 57 people, had been assembled, including infants below the age of one year and the ill, who were unable to stand on their feet. He then saw several Jews ordered to dig holes. He realized they were all about to be killed. The testimony proceeds to provide a detailed description of the execution itself that, if Katolikov’s testimony is to be believed, was carried out only by a German officer. This seems to be a rather typical Soviet wartime testimony, characterized by an emphasis on the last phase of the ‘Final Solution.’ While historians can learn a great deal about how the Jews were exterminated, they get little sense of how they lived prior to this point.

In later proceedings conducted during the war and immediately after it, Soviet nationals were entirely overshadowed by the Germans. I assume that the Bolshevik regime was reluctant to openly acknowledge the large extent of the collaboration of the Soviet people with the enemy by trying them publicly. But of course, the majority of these people were “taken care of” in a less public fashion. The proceedings of these trials are a valuable source of information mainly because of their proximity in time to the events. Yet, the specific Soviet methods of extracting truth and establishing facts, as they were developing in the 1940s, when the witness’s confession constituted the principal evidence, diminish their value as a historical source. At the same time, when the Soviet authorities succeeded in amassing more

Members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

(Yad Vashem Archives)

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evidence pointing to German crimes, especially when they produced German materials, this significantly increases the value of such sources and their overall credibility.

Stalin’s punitive policies with respect to the Holocaust were also characterized by ambiguity. In the reports drawn by the Extraordinary State Commission, Jews were frequently referred to as ‘Soviet civilians’, and it is only by juxtaposing these reports with other sometimes indirect evidence that we can guess that it was Jews who were murdered in this case. Under Stalin, the odds were high that accomplices of anti-Jewish atrocities would be found, convicted and punished. The reason is simple: the philosophy behind the Soviet punitive system was ‘guilty until proven innocent’; in case of any doubt regarding the innocence or guilt of possible collaborators, the Soviets preferred to see them behind the bars. The result was that as cruel as it was, the Soviet retribution policy under Stalin led to very large-scale punishments of Holocaust perpetrators, which by all accounts was more thorough than in any other European country. And yet, the investigations that led to collaborators being charged and convicted were frequently too swift and cursory, with the investigators contenting themselves with the defendants’ confessions that they had been involved in the murder of ‘peaceful Soviet civilians or POWs.’ This significantly diminished their value as a historical source.

After Stalin’s death, the nature of the regime began to change. A gradual transformation took place in the Soviet Union as it moved from a repressive state towards a more moderate society. A more lenient attitude towards prisoners convicted for collaboration with the enemy was determined by a 1955 Decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, “On amnesty for Soviet citizens who collaborated with the occupiers during the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945.” It applied to a wide circle of convicted prisoners but stipulated that it would not affect those guilty of committing murder and torture of Soviet citizens – and the murder of Jews certainly fell into this category. Following these new policies in the second half of the 1950s, many thousands of Germans and Austrians – former officers and soldiers of the Wehrmacht as well as ‘workers’ of other German agencies active in the occupied Soviet territories – were released from Soviet prisons and labor camps and allowed to return to their native countries.6

Yet, with respect to those convicted of committing ‘crimes against the civilian Soviet population’ (the reference was very often to the murder of Jews), this clemency campaign turned out to be too sweeping. It was the polar opposite of the extreme stringency of the Soviet punitive system under Stalin when suspects were convicted on flimsy evidence. Despite recurrent Soviet declarations that these clemency measures would never apply

Judges at a trial of Nazi war criminals, Kharkiv, December 1943 (Yad Vashem Archives) KGB building in Krasnodar (Yad Vashem Archives)

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to war criminals convicted of committing atrocities against the Soviet people, a number of well-known Nazi figures were released. Later, some of them stood trial in Germany and Austria.7 Occasionally, the same held true for convicted Soviet nationals: Some of them were released from Soviet prisons and camps in the 1950s only to be hunted down, caught and retried five or ten years later when new winds started to blow from Moscow.

The Soviet search for former collaborators resumed in the early 1960s, partly as a response to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem,8 and continued unceasingly until the country collapsed in 1991.9 The KGB had a special department assigned to seek out former collaborators inside the country. Although, as far as we can judge, the department did not possess vast resources, quite a number of former collaborators were identified – overwhelmingly as a result of denunciations – arrested, brought to trial and convicted. These trials were held, mostly behind closed doors, until the mid-1980s.

reliability of soviet leGal sourcesSince legal proceedings against the Germans and their Soviet collaborators were considered security rather than criminal offenses, they were mostly handled by Soviet security agencies. During the war this was the NKVD (until April 1943), NKGB (until April 1946), Ministry for State Security, the MGB (until March 1953), the Ministry of Interior, MVD (until March 1954), and the Committee for State Security, KGB (until the end of the Soviet era). This is a very interesting complex of materials, which to this day remains largely inaccessible to researchers in most post-Soviet states. Two notable exceptions are Lithuania and Ukraine. Equally unreachable are the archives of the Soviet courts and Prosecutor’s office.

Judging by a very limited number of sources from these archives currently available to researchers, these materials are

of considerable historical value. In contrast to the war period and the immediate postwar years, Soviet investigators were in no hurry to amass compelling evidence pointing to the defendants’ guilt. As a result, they mainly succeeded in producing a by far more thorough investigative process by focusing on questioning a large number of witnesses, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Significantly, unlike during the Stalinist investigations, now Soviet civilians were less fearful of discussing the large-scale involvement of Soviet nationals in the murder of Jews, and Soviet investigators did not shy away from documenting this involvement.

At the same time, we should realize that the victims’ and bystanders’/rescuers’/local perpetrators’ perspective was frequently limited. First, as a rule, Jews and bystanders were unaware of what was happening to other Jews, even in adjacent communities, let alone in more remote areas. Collaborators, depending on their ranks and duties, were often better informed about the events on the macro level. Second, the more time that had elapsed since the events, the less authentic was the picture imprinted in their memory. Third, since these testimonies were offered to ever-suspecting Soviet agencies, the accounts were occasionally misrepresented to prove that the witnesses and bystanders had not collaborated with the occupying authorities in order to save their lives. At the same time, collaborators were frequently inclined towards providing important information on the course of the Final Solution that did not compromise their own position. However, these details could not be corroborated from other sources. Overall, these testimonies present a unique view of the way the Nazi extermination machine functioned in the occupied Soviet territories.

Of particular interest are Soviet sources prepared for legal proceedings conducted in the West (and to a lesser degree in Eastern Europe) against those suspected of being involved in committing crimes against Soviet

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civilians and POWs. Some of them stood trial in their own countries, while others faced extradition requests prepared by the USSR or occasionally other countries of the Soviet bloc. The Soviets began amassing such evidence from about the mid-1960s. They did it in spite of their officially voiced, not unfounded pessimism about the true intentions of ‘the ruling circles in the West’ to bring Nazi criminals and their Soviet collaborators to justice. This was apparently done with the aim of embarrassing the West, because in the atmosphere of the Cold War, many of those convicted in such trials received mild sentences and Soviet extradition requests were overwhelmingly rejected, following protracted legal battles.

The materials collected in the USSR were sent to the relevant authorities in Western countries and were widely used in the legal proceedings conducted there. Despite generally suffering from the same flaws as other Soviet legal sources, these materials were prepared with especial thoroughness, and were crosschecked and – this is my impression – carefully selected to meet strict Western legal standards. Of note is the fact that some of these materials are accessible to researchers, mainly in the archive in Ludwigsburg10 and the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. This relatively small complex of documents is of special value as a historical source.

Last but certainly not least is the question, given the notorious prewar record of Soviet law enforcement agencies,11 of whether their records or the records produced on the basis of their records are to be believed. After all, these were frequently the very same investigators who had acquired experience in ‘extracting the truth’ from Soviet civilians in the 1930s. Also, it is safe to assume that they worked in accordance with the same instructions that had guided the NKVD investigators in the 1930s. And if we question, and rightly so, the reliability of the NKVD findings relating to the prewar period, how can we accept the results

of their work exposing Nazi crimes, including those related to the ‘Final Solution’?

The answer has several dimensions. We should bear in mind that this is an old argument, first employed by Nazi propagandists who claimed that all the atrocities in the occupied areas had been in fact committed by the Bolsheviks.12 The Soviet record is indeed far from being flawless, as their forces operating in the occupied territories conducted harsh policies towards Soviet civilians,13 including local collaborators and also, although this is less relevant for our concerns, towards the occupying forces. Nevertheless, it is safe to assume that the Soviet mistreatment of the civilian population in these areas was considerably less extensive than that committed by the Germans, their allies and local collaborators. Possible explanations include but are not limited to Soviet pragmatism, i.e. the need to preserve human resources once they returned, and humanitarian concerns for their compatriots. In contrast, German policies towards Soviet civilians were impacted solely by pragmatism (which could involve the desire to preserve human resources but could likewise entail the desire to cleanse the area of pro-Soviet civilians).14 With respect to the mistreatment of Jews in the occupied areas, the case seems to be even stronger because of the abysmal discrepancy between the Nazi genocidal approach towards the Jews and Soviet policies, which ranged from compassion to pragmatic indifference. Given the multitude of these considerations, it seems plausible to

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give cautious credence to Soviet records on the mistreatment of the civilian population, and in particular, to those records that shed light on the extermination of Jews.

conclusionAs we have seen, from 1942-1943 to 1991, from the early stages of the war until the Soviet Union’s dismantlement, the Soviet Union consistently prosecuted foreign citizens (Germans and their allies), as well as its own people accused of committing crimes against Soviet people, including Jews. During the Stalin era, the Soviets ‘cast a wide net.’ This method, despite the Soviet prewar record and the very high number of potential targets, led to the efficient punishment of Nazi criminals and their local collaborators, including those who had been involved in the murder of Jews. At the same time, the Soviet records created during this period were not very thorough, as they themselves contend, in establishing facts on the ground. Furthermore, we should make allowances for the fact that almost every side involved in the creation of these documents: Jewish and non-Jewish witnesses, collaborators, and the report compilers, who worked for various Soviet government agencies, could have had an interest in willingly or unwillingly distorting the truth.

The post-Stalin return to ‘socialist legality’ involved a rapid and sweeping release of many real Nazi criminals and collaborators. At the same time, it also led to a more nuanced and more targeted prosecution of criminals. Therefore, records produced starting from the 1960s, especially those prepared for legal proceedings in the West, offer a more insightful view of the German occupation, including the ‘Final Solution’ in the Soviet territories.

1 In Russian: Chrezvychainaya gosudarstvennaya kommissiya po ustanovleniyu i rassledovaniyu zlodeyanii nemetsko-fashystskikh zakhvatchikov i ich soobshnikov i prichinennogo imi usherba grazhdanam, obshestvennym organizaziyam, gosudarstvennym predpriyatiyam i uchrezhdeniyam SSSR. On the Commission, see

e.g., Kiril Feferman, Soviet Jewish Stepchild: The Holocaust in the Soviet Mindset, 1941-1964, Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2009, pp. 28-42; Marina Sorokina, “People and Procedures Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, 4 (Fall 2005), pp. 797–831.

2 Order of the USSR Prosecutor “On categorizing the crimes committed by those who defected and served the German Fascist occupiers in the areas temporarily occupied by the enemy,” May 15, 1942. In Obukhov Vyacheslav. Pravovye osnovy organizatsii i deyatel’nosti voennykh tribunalov voisk NKVD SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941-1945 gg. PhD dissertation, Moscow: Moscow University of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, 2002., p. 143.

3 Yuri Stetsovskii, Istoriya Sovetskikh repressii, Moscow: Znak - SP, 1997, vol. 1, p. 84.

4 On the trials conducted during the war, see Ilya Bourtman, “Blood for Blood, Death for Death”: The Soviet Military Tribunal in Krasnodar, 1943,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22 (2008), pp. 246-265. For the post-war period, see for example, Pentner Tanja. “Local Collaborators on Trial. Soviet war crimes trials under Stalin (1943-1953).” Cahiers du Monde russe 49, 2-3 (2008), pp. 341-364; Alexander V. Prusin, “Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!”: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17 (2003), pp. 1-30.

5 Boris Kovalev, “Uchastie kollaboratsionistov v repressiyakh protiv evreiskogo naseleniya i voennoplennykh na Yuge Rossii,” Istoriya Holokosta na Severnom Kavkaze i sud’by evreiskoi intelligentsia v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny, Kiril Feferman (ed.), Moscow: Tsentr “Holokost,” 2013, pp. 55-56.

6 Andreas Hilger, “Stalins Justiz auf dem Prüfstand? Deutsche ‘Kriegsverurteilte’ zwinschen Repatriierung und Rehabilitierung, 1953-2002,” Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte 8 (2004), pp. 123-150.

7 Emanuel Brand, “Nazi Criminals on Trial in the Soviet Union, 1941-1945,” Yad Vashem Bulletin 19 (1966), pp. 36-38.

8 Nati Kantorovich, “Soviet Reactions to the Eichmann Trial: A Preliminary Investigation 1960–1965,” Yad Vashem Studies 35, 2 (2007), pp. 103-141.

9 E.g., Lev Simkin, “Death Sentence Despite the Law: A Secret 1962 Crimes-against-Humanity Trial in Kiev,” Holocaust Genocide Studies 27, 2 (Fall 2013), pp. 299-312.

10 Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes.

11 E.g., Goldman Wendy Z. Inventing the enemy: Denunciation and terror in Stalin’s Russia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Cf. Paul Hagenloh. Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center. 2009.

12 E.g., Mattew Kott. “The Portrayal of Soviet Atrocities in the Nazi-Controlled Latvian-Language Press and the First Wave of Antisemitic Violence in Riga, July-August 1941.” D. Gaunt, P. Levine & L. Palosuo (eds.). Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bern 2004, pp. 127-160.

13 E.g., Brakel Alexander. “Das allergefährlichste ist die Wut der Bauern.” Die Versorgung der Partisanen und ihr Verhältnism zur Zivilbevölkerung. Eine Fallstudie zum Gebiet Baranowicze 1941–1944.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 55 (2007), pp. 393-424.

14 E.g., Kilian Jürgen. “Wehrmacht, Partisanenkrieg und Rückzugsverbrechen an der nördlichen Ostfront im Herbst und Winter 1943.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 61 (2013), pp. 173-199.