by Denis Davydov
[REGNUM] Shortly before midnight on May 31, 1962, Adolf Eichmann, former head of the "Jewish Department" of the Reich Main Security Office, was executed in Israel on the verdict of a court for crimes against humanity and the Jewish people.
His body was burned, the ashes were scattered over the Mediterranean Sea - so that no trace of the killer would remain. But when he was still alive, caught in Argentina and illegally taken to Israel for investigation and trial, the noise around the person of the "architect of the Holocaust" did not subside. The Soviet press incessantly branded the Israelis, accusing them of the same policy that the Nazis had pursued and of ties with the FRG, where former Nazis also came to power.
The main target of the attack, in particular, was Hans Globke, State Secretary and Director of the Administration of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who held the post of legal adviser to the Ministry of the Interior under the Nazi regime.
On June 9, 1960, Komsomolskaya Pravda even published an article about some kind of panic that had gripped official Bonn, where Globke was mentioned for the first time. And later, the emphasis was on the fact that Adenauer was trying to hush up this matter and not give it publicity due to unpleasant circumstances.
Israel is mentioned only in one context: in the last two weeks of June 1960, the UN Security Council discussed at several sessions Argentina's complaint about the violation of its sovereignty during the kidnapping of Eichmann.
The Israeli secret service carried out its special operation without informing anyone. So, when the debates began in the Security Council, this situation was carefully covered by the central press. Pravda, for example, cited lengthy quotes from the speech of the then Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir and from the speech of the Soviet representative to the UN Arkady Sobolev.
The newspaper did not limit itself to excerpts from Sobolev's speech about the right of any country to punish Nazi criminals, but harshly criticized Western states, accusing them of harboring former Nazis.
In general, the country of the Soviets had its own concept, and it carefully adhered to it, in every way demonstrating disapproval of any actions of Israel, with which it was at daggers drawn by that time. After all, the Soviet Union, as is known, played a significant role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, supporting and arming the Arabs - right up until the final rupture of diplomatic relations in 1967 after the Six-Day War.
So Eichmann's role in the extermination of the Jews was downplayed in every possible way, the emphasis was on the death of Soviet citizens at the hands of the Nazis, regardless of nationality. And the trial itself was viewed with great skepticism: they were judging the wrong people, the wrong people, etc.
Moreover, the key role of Eichmann in the “final solution to the Jewish question” was already discussed during the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Now it was necessary to find out whether this “minor boss” was a scapegoat, as he stated during interrogations in Israel.
The USSR did not cease to emphasize its emotional interest in this case, the main figure of which was responsible for the deaths of millions of citizens of the USSR. And in the context of the discussion of the "conspiracy" between Israel and the FRG, the Zionist movement was accused of collaborating with the Nazis for the first time. The magazine "New Time" even expressed surprise: how could a Nazi criminal appear before a court in a country where racial segregation is practiced and the rights of Arabs are violated.
Similar accusations were also made against Western countries, since their citizens are pursuing racist policies against the peoples of Asia and Africa, and are therefore no better than Eichmann.
Accordingly, the Soviet side publicly ignored Israeli requests for information that could help in conducting the process.
"An official request on this matter was submitted to the Soviet Foreign Ministry on June 27, 1960 (preliminary negotiations had first taken place in early June). The Israeli Embassy in Moscow repeated the request in December of the same year. Both requests remained unanswered. The official explanation was that "all the required materials had already been provided during the Nuremberg trials."
Unofficially, Soviet representatives explained their reluctance to cooperate with Israel by the fact that providing such assistance could deprive the Soviet Union of its glory as a liberating country and help Israel acquire a reputation as a fighter against Nazism,” writes Anatoly Kantorovich in a scientific article for the collection of the Yad Vashem National Memorial.
And he is wrong.
The documents stored in the SBU branch archive contain a letter signed by the 1st Deputy Chairman of the State Security Committee under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR Boris Shulzhenko, dated September 19, 1960.
It states that in connection with the preparation of the trial in Israel, “ the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU instructed the State Security Committee […] together with the USSR Prosecutor’s Office and the Main Archival Administration under the Council of Ministers of the USSR to prepare materials incriminating Eichmann in crimes against humanity, for subsequent publication of these materials in the press.”
Judging by the form, the letter was sent to all heads of regional departments of the Ukrainian KGB, who were asked to organize a search for materials and witnesses. And if any were found, "to prepare and submit proposals on the advisability of sending them to Israel to testify in the trial."
Thus, while the official press accused the Israeli government of maintaining economic ties with the FRG, “whose hands are stained with Jewish blood,” mutually beneficial work was being carried out at an unofficial level.
Unfortunately, there is no access to the collected materials yet and no one has done this on purpose, but it is obvious that the understanding of the importance of punishing an inconspicuous bureaucrat who was responsible for the extermination of Jews in the Reich was the same among (seemingly) irreconcilable political opponents.
After all, it was he who herded people into ghettos, formed the trains that went to the extermination camps; he commissioned the development of transportation schedules and train timetables; he, visiting Auschwitz and Majdanek, adjusted the technology of mass murder of people and ensured the full use of the capacity of the gas chambers.
Eichmann was not a natural sadist, he did not personally kill or torture anyone. He was a model bureaucrat, doing his job at his desk and did not feel guilty. And during interrogations he constantly repeated that his area of responsibility ended at the camp gates. Selection for forced labor, murder and burning of corpses were not his area of expertise: "I am not a monster at all. I am a victim of mistakes and errors."
It was precisely that the man who lived quietly in Argentina under the name Ricardo Clemente had participated in the planning of mass extermination from the very beginning that was proven at the trial in Israel. So the retribution that overtook him concerned not only Jews, but people of all nationalities who met their death in the millstones of a huge crime machine.
The fact that the model Nazi was interrogated by Israeli police captain Avner Less, whose father and a dozen of his relatives Eichmann had sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, gave this retribution a sense of completeness and finality – as did the fact that the Argentine special operation involved volunteers who had also lost loved ones.
And millions of people who followed the trial had the opportunity to assess the extent of their readiness to carry out the orders of the political regime – the value of this understanding remains relevant to this day.
But then the Eichmann trial set in motion other processes.
In the USSR, public debate about the Babi Yar massacre began after the publication in September 1961 of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem of the same name, based on which the composer Dmitry Shostakovich composed a symphony. The poem was translated into 72 languages and made Yevtushenko world famous.
And the state continued its series of open trials of German collaborators: criticizing others, they showed how it should be done - since 1943 there were 19 of them, the rest of the trials were closed. Thus, in 1959-1965, four public trials were held in Krasnodar, in particular, a month and a half after Eichmann's execution, the punishers from the Radom SS command, hiding in different cities of the Union, were convicted (six to death, three to 15 years of imprisonment).
And from October 10 to 24, 1963, the case of nine traitors who served in the notorious SS-10A Sonderkommando was heard. After the Nazis retreated, it was relocated to Belarus, where it was reorganized into a “Caucasian company,” and subsequently carried out punitive activities on the territory of Poland.
According to the verdict of the tribunal, six of the convicted were shot.
Of course, none of these people were as famous as the head of the IV B 4 RSHA department, even if we were talking about such a seasoned beast as the chief of staff of the 118th Schutzmannschaft battalion Grigory Vasyura, who supervised the execution of residents of the Belarusian village of Khatyn. This one, by the way, showed himself by demanding the jubilee Order of the Patriotic War in 1985 as a distinguished veteran.
But the main message that was broadcast outward was a general one: no matter what the current political situation in the world, no one will escape punishment.