A closer look at the Soviet “Extraordinary State Commission” (ESC) which claims to have investigated “Fascist Crimes” Part IV

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