On This Days July 18, 1943 - The Krasnodar Trial: The First Public War Crimes.

 On This Days July 18, 1943 - The Krasnodar Trial: The First Public War Crimes.


The first public war crimes trial had taken place earlier in the liberated territories of the Soviet Union, in July 1943, in Krasnodar. 

The defendants were not German criminals, but eleven local Soviet collaborators, who were members of the SS Special Detachment 10a” responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.

 Among other crimes, the SS unit had murdered 7,000 Soviet people (mostly Jews) in poison gas vans in Krasnodar. 

The defendants were represented by well-known Soviet attorneys, and hundreds of spectators attended the trial, including correspondents of the Soviet and international press, (among them Aleksei Tolstoi).

 Eight of the defendants were sentenced to death by hanging three to long prison terms. 

The verdict was greeted with applause by those present, and the newspaper Pravda commented: “This is the verdict of the Soviet people, the verdict of honest people.

The Soviet authorities, who used the trial for a massive propaganda campaign, even made a short documentary film about the trial and the public execution, which was attended by more than 30,000 local visitors.

 This documentary film was (at least for a short period of time) shown to the Soviet public in Muscovite movie theatres in 1943. 

There can be no doubt that the show trial and the propaganda campaign aimed at deterring further collaboration.

During the postwar years, thousands of further trials against local collaborators followed the Krasnodar trial, continuing even until the 1980s.

 And it seems reasonable that the Krasnodar trial — being one of the few public trials — may have served as model for subsequent trials against collaborators in the Soviet Union.


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