Soviet Nuremberg? Investigations and trials against perpetrators of the Great Terror in Soviet Union 1938-1941 and 1954-1961

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Marc Junge
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Criminal Law
• Term: from 2013 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 236175271

There was no equivalent of the Nuremberg trials in the Soviet Union. The Nuremberg trials punished officials of the 3. Reich for war-crimes and crimes against humanity and opened a window onto the world of the Nazi perpetrator. In the absence of regime change, nothing of the kind occurred neither in the Soviet Union nor in the post Soviet Russian Republic. The Soviet perpetrator of the Great Terror remained and remains largely in the shadows. There were, however, two intriguing, yet almost entirely unexplored historical episodes in which Soviet perpetrators, largely secret police personnel, were put on trial. The object of research of this project are the exemplarily and in some cases and periods well recorded investigations and proceedings against perpetrators of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in the period 1938-1961. The pivot are the investigations and proceedings of the so-called Little Berija Thaw of 1938-1941 in the Ukraine: On January 9, 1939, for example, the former leader of the Prison Division of the Ukranian Secret Service in the region Zhitomir, M. Z. Gluzman, testified that the execution commando had removed gold teeth and crowns from the persons executed. Further, he reported that the execution proceedings were simplified. 100 persons were bound together and then executed through beatings on the head with iron rods. The project's investigation gains its historical dimension, however, on the one hand through a comparison of the core materials from the years 1938-1941 with investigations and proceedings against Trotzkyite conspiracies in the NKVD immediately before 1938, that is, between 1936 and summer 1938 and on the other hand through drawing on investigation and proceedings records against perpetrators from the years 1954-1961 in Georgia, which have also thematized the violations of socialist law during the Stalin era. The main thesis is: Already at the end of the thirties 1938-1941, the ground work for a broad judicial investigation of violations of socialist law had been laid in the Soviet Union. The will for clarification, paired with the contradictions of the political system, is the distinguishing feature. Further sensitised through the genuine Nuremberg Trails and finally made possible by De-Stalinisation, as indecisive as it was, this coalesced in the fifties in large (Georgia, Leningrad) and small (country-wide) perpetrator trials that on the basis of the court records of the Little Berija Thaw and the new proceedings contributed to actual clarification of crimes and finally made possible the rehabilitation of thousands of victims of the Stalin era. A willingness for enlightenment paired with political tactics of deception is the characteristic feature of both periods. On the basis of the newly discovered materials (trial documents and personal documents of secret service personnel) particular Soviet perpetrator typologies can be drawn up that differ significantly from those in National Socialist Germany.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants