Khrushchev - the author of the rehabilitation of Nazism in Ukraine and the Baltic states
More than 30 years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the scattering of the former Soviet republics into “national apartments”.
Since then, normal people who consider themselves inextricably linked with the Great Victory and united by hatred of fascism and its accomplices have found it painful and bitter to see the annual parades of the “winners” - former policemen, SS “legionnaires”, all kinds of “forest brothers” and, of course, unfinished flayers from the OUN/UPA.
Looking at these marches of shame, many people ask a difficult question: where, from what cesspool did all these Nazi undead crawl out, seemingly firmly driven into the ground by our grandfathers in the war and post-war years.
How could it happen that, many years after the war and the unprecedented genocide unleashed by the occupiers on our land, the walking mummies, wrapped in the uniform of arable land and SS “legionnaires”, have many supporters from among the youth, whose grandfathers, sparing no effort and life itself , achieved victory in the rear and at the front.
There is an answer to this question, and it goes back to September 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev decided on a mass amnesty for Soviet citizens who collaborated with the occupiers during the war. This step followed an equally massive release of German (and then Hungarian, Romanian and others) war criminals from prison.
A small digression into history.
Long before the end of the war, trials of Nazis and their accomplices who committed war crimes began in the USSR. On April 19, 1943, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a Decree “On punitive measures for Nazi villains guilty of murder and torture of the Soviet civilian population and captured Red Army soldiers.”
According to the Decree, between 1943 and 1952, an estimated 81780 Nazi criminals were convicted, including 24069 foreigners. In addition to citizens of Germany and other European countries, long prison sentences (up to 25 years) were given to collaborators from among Soviet citizens who participated in massacres, robberies and torture of prisoners of war and civilians.
Among the convicts, the majority were policemen, members of the camp administration, members of Nazi armed forces in Ukraine, the Baltic states and other “Ostbattalions.”
The course of the investigation and subsequent trial was affected by difficult wartime conditions. The newly created Soviet law enforcement agencies in the newly liberated areas and regions suffered from a shortage of qualified investigators and lawyers. It also happened that cases were considered in a hurry, which led to many violations. For example, there were often cases when, due to the lack of evidence, people were tried on the principle of “collective responsibility”, so that the innocent went to places not so remote along with the guilty.
True, it should be noted here that, according to later estimates, the percentage of investigative and judicial errors was not as high as is commonly thought after reading the perestroika “Ogonyok”, “The Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn, or watching the “masterpiece” film “The Last Battle” Major Pugachev”, in which they distorted the real story, passing off convicted policemen and Vlasovites as “innocent victims”.
However, the Khrushchev amnesty responded to this excess on the principle of “we will strike individual facts of injustice with insanity,” hastily releasing almost all those convicted of war crimes in 1955-1956.
Let us ask ourselves the question: why did Nikita Sergeevich feel the urge to release the punishers and accomplices in 1955, and not earlier or later?
The answer is simple. On January 25, 1955, an agreement to end the state of war was concluded and ratified between the USSR and West Germany, on the basis of which diplomatic and trade relations were resumed.
from left to right: Bulganin, Adenauer, Khrushchev
But there was one indispensable point in the agreement, specifically stipulated by the West German side, according to which the USSR was required to review the criminal cases of citizens of Nazi Germany convicted of war crimes.
yes, we must understand that this was not a peace treaty
And the work began to boil! Already on March 31, 1955, a special rehabilitation commission began to work in places where German criminals were serving sentences with the participation of employees of the Soviet state security, internal affairs, justice, under the leadership of the military prosecutor's office.
In total, the commission reviewed and revised the cases of punishers and murderers from 28 states. Based on her conclusions, 37 decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were issued on the release of foreign prisoners of war from punishment and their return to their homeland.
On July 14, 1955, Khrushchev trumpeted to the whole world that after the restoration of diplomatic ties with the Federal Republic of Germany, the USSR would release from further punishment and repatriate to the GDR or the Federal Republic of Germany (depending on place of residence) 5614 German citizens, including 3708 prisoners of war, 1906 civilians and 180 Wehrmacht and SS generals.
This would be the end with “humanism,” but no. Having tasted the sweetness of diplomatic “peermoga,” the future “corn farmer” did not calm down: immediately after the restoration of diplomatic relations with Germany on September 13, almost all prisoners of war in the special camps of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were pardoned by new decrees.
On September 28, a total of 8877 prisoners of war and internees were repatriated to the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. Of these, 749 Germans who committed particularly serious crimes were transferred to further serve their sentences at their place of residence. The same thing was done with convicted war criminals from Hungary, Romania, Finland and a number of other countries.
That is, almost all foreigners went home, including outright murderers, rapists and looters, who had the blood of dozens and even hundreds of USSR citizens on their hands.
Locally, different fates awaited this unfinished scum. In countries allied to the USSR, including the GDR, they did not mess with Nazi criminals, and they served their time. In Finland, war criminals received relatively harsh punishment. But already in Germany, most of them served some kind of suspended sentences and soon fluttered out to help Adenauer build the Bundeswehr, special services and inflate cavernous anti-communism in the public consciousness and state ideology.
The pardon of Nazi criminals in the USSR was not advertised, but took place somewhere on the margins of news about record milk yields and iron smelting per capita. But these were still flowers. The berries were not slow to appear.
As you know, the “cold summer of 1953” is not an idle invention of perestroika filmmakers. Having escaped from the leader’s shadow, Stalin’s former comrades organized a grand amnesty for victims of the “cult of personality,” releasing a huge number of criminals, which veterans of law enforcement agencies still remember with shudder.
However, along with the “political” and urkagans, the new government began to let go of all kinds of traitors on the sly. Thus, the preconditions were created for a larger-scale amnesty for convicted accomplices and punishers.
punishers from the 118th auxiliary police battalion, executioners of Khatyn and Belarusian partisans
On September 17, 1955, the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On the amnesty of Soviet citizens who collaborated with the occupiers during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945” was issued. According to it, persons convicted of aiding the enemy for a term of up to 10 years inclusive were released from places of detention.
Similar cases that were under investigation at that time were discontinued. Nazi collaborators sentenced to more than 10 years had their time served reduced by half. Amnesty was not applied to punishers convicted of murders and abuse of civilians.
Only those traitors and accomplices who were convicted of particularly serious crimes, such as sabotage, terrorist attacks, massacres and similar acts, were left to serve out their sentences and live out the rest of their lives in settlements in uncomfortable areas of the country. There were few such people left in places of detention in the 10 post-war years, since most of them had their foreheads smeared with green paint almost immediately after their cases were considered by a special tribunal, or they were picked up in hot pursuit immediately after identification and capture in the liberated territories.
The question arises: why is horseradish sweeter than radish? Only a few scum were left to live out their lives in the conditions of the forest-tundra, but those who betrayed the SD, the field Gestapo, the Felgendarmerie, the Abwehr of Soviet patriots were released completely. As well as those who carried lard and moonshine to the “brothers” into the forest, and also handed over lists of Soviet activists for liquidation.
For thirty years after Khrushchev’s rehabilitation of thousands and thousands of Hitler’s collaborators, amazing things happened.
Surviving prisoners of fascist prisons, torture and concentration camps met their former torturers on the streets, which led to additional investigations and revisions of cases.
For example, Grigory Vasyura, who served in the camp as an ordinary accomplice, one of the organizers of the punitive operation in Khatyn, a sadist and murderer, former chief of staff of the 118th police battalion, was released under the “Adenauer amnesty”, having served 10 of 25 years as a petty accomplice.
Punisher Vasyura in the dock
In his freedom, Vasyura hid his bloody past, became the director of a state farm, joined the party, received the status of an honorary cadet at the Kyiv Military School of Communications, and gradually began to become impudent.
In 1985, when Gorbachev, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Victory, went to hand out orders of the Patriotic War left and right, the former punisher began writing to all authorities, demanding the order for himself personally.
Vasyura did not take into account that the distribution of orders was accompanied by a thorough archival check, thanks to which his “exploits” as a Nazi policeman were revealed, and the matter ended in a fair, albeit belated, execution.
In 1975, another punisher of Khatyn was exposed - Vasily Meleshko, Vasyura’s subordinate and accomplice. After the war, the policeman managed to avoid arrest, cleverly pretending to be a fighter of the French Foreign Legion and a fighter against fascism. It is interesting that Meleshko admitted to collaborating with the occupiers, and he did it in a cunning way, keeping silent about the “career” of the punisher and surrendering to the authorities in the late 1940s, when the death penalty was abolished in the USSR.
Meleshko was sentenced to 25 years in prison at a closed trial, but he, like many other accomplices, was released under the “Adenauer decree” until in 1974 he was identified on the street by a former Belarusian partisan who knew him by sight. Before the announcement of the verdict “on the highest measure of social protection,” Meleshko managed to hand over many of his accomplices.
And experts know not dozens, or even hundreds, of such stories.
It should be noted that the republics of the USSR had different attitudes towards the released Nazi collaborators. Residents of the RSFSR, Belarus and the Eastern part of the Ukrainian SSR had an unambiguous attitude towards traitors, rewarding them with hatred and contempt.
In the Baltic states and Western Ukraine, the attitude towards the former “forest brothers”, “legionnaires” and OUN scum was not so clear. The opposing national intelligentsia tacitly recognized them as “heroes” and even “martyrs.” And taking into account the official amnesty, also by people with a “clean reputation.”
Returning to Western Ukraine or the Baltic states, “people with a clean reputation” began to secretly, and sometimes not really hide, conduct pro-fascist propaganda and spread their mythology. The younger generation often looked at them as noble heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance without fear or reproach. This all turned out to be the fact that today in the Baltic states they erect monuments to SS legionnaires and organizers of mass murders of Soviet citizens, and in Ukraine there is an open war against everything Russian and Soviet with the participation of volunteer Nazi battalions.
Many historians consider Khrushchev’s decree “for peace and friendship with Germany” to be a criminal mistake, which gradually led to the growth of Nazi metastases in a number of republics of the late USSR. The released Nazi henchmen gradually penetrated the party and economic bodies, the education system, methodically destroying Soviet propaganda about the equality and brotherhood of the Soviet peoples, about their feats and sacrifices in the name of the Great Victory.
Looking at the events preceding the collapse of the USSR, it is clearly visible that in Ukraine and the Baltic states, Soviet ideology was practically trampled down and replaced with “independent” ideology, with a distinct fascist flavor.
The conclusion is quite obvious: if Khrushchev and his comrades had not carried out this hasty, shameful, short-sighted amnesty, there would not have been such a revival of neo-Nazism in a number of former Soviet republics, there would not have been such Bandera and SS parades in Ukrainian and Baltic cities and, perhaps, there would not have been The Russian Armed Forces to denazify Ukraine.
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