People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR

Once I received a request for information from a well-known British historian of medicine about something virtually unknown in Western historiography—the Soviet "academic" commission for the investigation of Nazi crimes.¹ This inquiry turned out to be the impetus for my investigation into the social history of scholarship during World War II. A preliminary search showed that my colleague was thinking of the Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia (ChGK)—the "Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR." A series of "Reports" (Soobshcheniia) on Nazi war crimes in Soviet and Polish territory was published under the imprimatur and in the name of this commission in Russian and English in 1943–45. The transformation of the commission into an "academic" institution in the minds of Western historians most likely occurred because six of its ten titular members were academicians of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

The fact that the Stalinist "Extraordinary State Commission" could be viewed in the West as academic is quite telling, and demonstrates just how effective, propaganda-wise, the Soviet leadership was in its choice of who would play the role of "public prosecutor" of fascism. How and why did the Soviet authorities specifically select representatives of the scholarly elite to present testimony about Nazi atrocities to Western public opinion?² What was the role of these representatives, and what was the level of their genuine participation in the process of preparing the future international war crimes tribunal on Nazism? Finally, what significance did the participation of a sizable group of scholars in the work of the ChGK, from academicians to research assistants, have for the postwar development of Soviet scholarship and the scientific community? These questions were initially the reason I began examining the investigation of war crimes, which might at first glance seem far removed from the field of the social history of science.³

It became impossible, however, to study these historical and scholarly processes without a firm understanding of the declared and undeclared tasks of the ChGK, its visible and invisible participants, the authors and editors of its final "Reports," and the ways the commission created, collected, and drew general conclusions from the documents it generated. At the same time, it proved rather difficult to find treatment of the subject of Nazi war crimes investigations in the USSR in Western, Soviet, and Russian historiography alike.⁴ After the publication in the late 1940s and early 1950s of the monographs of B. S. Utevskii, M. Iu. Raginskii, and S. Ia. Rozenblit, which were products of the spirit and constraints of that time, subsequent published historical works on the subject tended to be primarily journalistic or legal in nature.⁵ Even after the ideological break of the 1990s, the subject has been treated mostly in the context of studying the fate of foreign prisoners of war.⁶

The following account of the creation of the Soviet Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, therefore, emerged from a search for basic answers about a virtually unknown topic. In discussions with colleagues, the following overview evoked polar-opposite reactions that ran the gamut from enthusiastic approval to complete rejection. The conclusions may be provocative, but it is hoped that the investigation will at least prompt a much closer historical look at the sources discussed.

The War Myth: Sources and Historiography

In contrast to Europe and the United States, the historical pedigree of national-level public investigations was equally undistinguished in both the Russian empire...