RT Article
T1 “Blood for Blood, Death for Death”: The Soviet Military Tribunal in Krasnodar, 1943
JF Holocaust and genocide studies
VO 22
IS 2
SP 246
OP 265
A1 Bourtman, Ilya
LA English
YR 2008
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/181447868X
AB Although much has been written about the Nuremberg Trials of the 1940s, relatively little research has been done on the Soviet military tribunals that took place during and after World War II. The Soviet government conducted thousands of open and closed tribunals through the 1980s, trying tens of thousands of Germans and Soviet collaborators for crimes committed on Soviet territory. The 1943 Krasnodar trial was the first open military tribunal to take place during the war. Eleven Soviet citizens accused of betraying their country and collaborating with the Nazis were found guilty; eight were hanged in front of tens of thousands of cheering Soviet citizens. In light of recently declassified Soviet archival materials, and with the help of recent scholarship, it is now possible to reconstruct the roles of the major actors as well as to assess the social impact of the publicity that the military tribunals received. Finally, a close analysis of the Krasnodar tribunal brings to light the authorities' motivations—political, economic, and ideological—for conducting such trials.*
DO 10.1093/hgs/dcn027