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Collaboration on Trial: New Source Material on Soviet Postwar Trials against Collaborators

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Tanja Penter
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Abstract

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Three historians comment on the articles. John Connelly considers the moral and historiographical meanings of "collaboration" and "collaborationism" and suggests that even those cases that Friedrich documents do not make Poland into a collaborationist country. In fact, the Nazis were disappointed that Poles refused to collaborate. Connelly emphasizes the complicated choices and intentions among the Polish population and calls for bringing together both the heroic (and true) tale of Polish resistance with the disturbing (and true) tale of Polish accommodation to the slaughter of the Jews. Tanja Penter adds to the discussion the results of her own research in the records of military tribunals for trials of Soviet citizens accused of collaborating with the Germans. These data confirm the Soviet regime's extremely broad understanding of collaboration and provide in-sight into the collective biography of collaborators. They also suggest which crimes the regime believed most harmful to its integrity. While it is difficult to determine motives and even intentions from these trials, these data, like Jones's, indicate the immense loyalty problem that the Soviet government faced in its occupied territories. Martin Dean calls attention to the difficulties of weeding out collaborators in the postwar Soviet Union and agrees with Jones on the limits of representing the "reality" of collaboration. He notes the reluctance, raised by both Friedrich and Jones, of postwar communist governments and nationalists to deal publicly with the phenomenon. Contrasted to the desire in postwar Europe to deal quickly with war criminals, collaborators, and traitors so that people could move on with their lives, Dean emphasizes the necessity and possibility for historians to write a full history of wartime collaboration, one that recognizes multiple human motives and the responses of hundreds of thousands of individuals who had to take far-reaching decisions under swiftly changing circumstances.

Type
Forum: On Collaboration in Poland and the Soviet Union during World War II
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , Winter 2005 , pp. 782 - 790
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2005

References

I want to thank Martin Dean and Vadim Altskan for their support.

1 See Dean, Martin C., Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussiaand Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York, 2000);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Golczewski, Frank, “Organe der deutschen Besatzungsmacht: Die ukrainischen Schutzmannschaften,” in Benz, Wolfgang, Cate, Johannes Houwink ten, and Otto, Gerhard, eds., Die Bürokratie der Okkupation: Slrukturen der Herrschaft und Vertvaltungim besetzten Europa (Berlin, 1998), 173–96;Google Scholar Pohl, Dieter, “Ukrainische Hilfskräfte beim Mord an den juden,” in Paul, Gerhard, ed.,Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche? (Gottingen, 2002), 205–34;Google Scholar Pohl, Dieter, Nationalsozialistische judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944: Organisation und Durch-fuhrung eines staallichen Massenverbrechens (Munich, 1997);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Breitman, Richard, “Himmler's Police Auxiliaries in the Occupied Soviet Territories,” in Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 7 (1990): 23–39;Google Scholar and Black, Peter, “Die Trawniki-Männer und die ‘Aktion Reinhard,’” in Musial, Bogdan, ed., “Aktion Reinhardt": Der Völkermord an denjuden im Generalgouvernement 1941–1944 (Osnabrück, 2004), 309–52.Google Scholar For a study on administrative and economic col-laboration in the Donbas coal mining region, based on Soviet postwar collaboration trials, see Penter, Tanja, “Die lokale Gesellschaft im Donbass unter deutscher Okkupation 1941–1943,” in Beiträge zur Geschichtedes Nationalsozialismus, vol. 19, Kooperation und Verbrechen: Formen der “Kollaboration"im östlichen Europa, 1939-1945 (Göttingen, 2003), 183-223.Google Scholar

2 See O. B. Mozokhin, “Statistika repressivnoi deiatel'nosti organov bezopasnosti SSSR na period s 1921 po 1953 gg.” Available on the Federal'naia sluzhba bezopasnosti (FSB) web site at http://www.fsb.ru/new/mozohin.html (last consulted 1 July 2005). For Ukraine, a recent empirical analysis from the Ukrainian historian V M. Nikol's'kii, based on material from the Kievan Central Sluzhba bezpeki Ukrainy-archive, gives us some pre-liminary numbers. According to this, between the years 1943 and 1957 the NKVD arrested 93,690 collaborators in the Ukraine. See Nikol's'kii, V. M., Represyvna diial'nist' orhaniv derzhavnoï bezpeky SRSR v Ukraïni (kinets' 1920–kh–l950–ti rr.): Istoryko-statystychne doslidzhennia; monohrajiia (Donetsk, 2003), 206–24.Google Scholar

3 As a Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for nine months, I worked with the museum’s collection of trials related to the Holocaust in Ukraine and tried to provide the first systematic analysis of these trials.

4 See, for trials in Donetsk, Penter, “Die lokale Gesellschaft im Donbass unter deutscher Okkupation,” 183–223.

5 See P. Black, “Die Trawniki-Männer unci die ‘Aktion Reinhard,’” 309-52.

6 See, for popular anti-Semitism in postwar Ukraine, Kuromiya, Hiroaki, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (Cambridge, 1998), 198;Google Scholar and Weiner, Amir, Making Sense of War: The Second. World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001).Google Scholar

7 See for example Koval', V. M., “Natsists'kyi henotsyd shchodo evreïv ta ukraïns'ke naselennia (1941–1944 rr.),” Ukraïns'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 1992, no. 2:25–32;Google Scholar Elizavets'kyi, S. Ia., “Evreï v antyfashysts'komu opori i radjans'komu pidpil'no-partyzans'komu rusi v Ukraïni,” Ukraïns'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 1995, no. 3:59–73;Google Scholar Elizavets'kyi, S. la., Katastrofa i opir ukraïns'koho evreistva (1941–1944): Narysy z istoriï Holokostu i oporu v Ukraïni (Kiev, 1999);Google Scholar Liakhovitskii, lu. M., Zheltaia kniga: Svidetel'stva, fakly, dokumenty o natsistskom genotside evreiskogo naseleniia Khar'kova v period okkupatsii, 1941–1943, vol. 3 (Khar'kov, 1994);Google Scholar Kruglov, A. I., Liakhovitskii, lu. M., and Subocheva, lu. G., eds., Evreiskii genotsid na Ukraine v period okkupatsii v nemetskoi dokumentalistike, 1941-1944 (Khar'kov, 1996);Google Scholar Kruglov, A., Katas-trofa ukrainskogo evreistva 1941–1944 gg.: Entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik (Khar'kov, 2001).Google Scholar

8 See Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in theDonbas, 283.

9 See Amir Weiner, “War Crimes Trials and Communal Policing: Western Ukraine, 1940s-1950s” (paper, Workshop on Soviet and Eastern European War Crimes Trials, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.,June 2005).

10 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, RG 31.018M, reel 24, delo 33533.

11 Ibid., reel 2, delo 39455.

12 See Gross, Jan T., Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community injedwabne, Poland (Princeton, 2001);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Martin Dean, “The ‘Local Police’ in Nazi-Occupied Belarus and Ukraine as the ‘Ideal Type’ of Collaboration: In Practice, in the Recollections of Its Members and in the Verdicts of the Courts” (paper, Nord Ost Institut, Luneburg, Germany, 15 November 2003).

13 For example, in several interviews with local people in the Donbas region who lived under occupation, it came out that they remembered postwar trials where they were not personally involved.

14 See Amir Weiner, “War Crimes Trials and Communal Policing.”

15 While the old Soviet Ukrainian territories constituted three-quarters of Ukraine’s 41 million population, western Ukraine constituted only one-quarter. Nevertheless, out of nearly 82,000 people arrested during the years 1946–1953, more than half (58 percent) were arrested in western Ukraine. See Nikol's'kii, Represyvna diial'nist', 572–73.

16 Nikol's'kii, V M., “Orhany derzhavnoï pezpeky na Donechchyni v roky velykoï viiny: Statystyka dii,” Istorychni i politolohichni doslidzhennia, 2000, no. 1:156–58.Google Scholar