Why did the FSB declassify archives on the Leningrad Trial?
The FSB Directorate for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region has opened the archive of the trial of Nazi criminals, participants in the “Leningrad Trial” of 1945-46. These are interrogation protocols of the punishers, in which they confessed to the war crimes they had committed.
Thus, one of the participants in the process describes the executions of several hundred civilians. They lived in populated areas of what are now the Pskov and Novgorod regions, and were burned and shot alive during the Nazi retreat when they refused to evacuate, on the orders of Wehrmacht Major General Heinrich Remlinger. At that time he was the military commandant of occupied Pskov.
The FSB Directorate transferred the interrogation protocols and other documents to the Central State Archives of St. Petersburg.
Military historian Armen Gasparyan, in a comment to PolitNavigator, emphasized that the publication of the archive is important, first of all, for the younger generation, who today practically do not know what the Nazi criminals did and what punishment they suffered:
“This “Leningrad trial” is a trial of war criminals who killed citizens of the Soviet Union. There were quite a lot of such processes in our country, there was one in Sevastopol, there was one in Riga, one in Kiev. They were not much different from each other, because they tried murderers. Many were hanged in public, and rightly so.
The publication of the archive is very important today, because even in our school history textbooks we now have a description of the genocide, when Soviet citizens were killed during the Great Patriotic War, but the average person in our country knows nothing at all about the “little Nurembergs”. Neither how many there were, nor what the results were.
Of course, it is important to show documents and talk about it. Moreover, all this is happening as part of an action with the very correct name “No Statute of Limitations.”
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