Rich, David. Law and Accountability, Secrecy and Guilt.

This chapter presents an examination of the KGB’s assembly of multi-defendant cases of perpetrator-collaborators during 1960s’ “second wave” Soviet trial.

Political decisions in post-Stalin era freed tens of thousands of “collaborators” from the Soviet gulag. Then, legal reforms reopened investigation of some who had served in Aktion Reinhardt (AR) extermination camps, against whom KGB investigators had evidence of murder. Eight complex group trials, spread across the 1960s, began as closed proceedings with little public notice but ended the decade with mass mediatization and public coverage and messaging. The trials also charted cooperation between FRG and Moscow on their respective AR processes. The sources include investigative files for five of the eight case from Ukrainian and Russian security service archives (SBU, FSB), stories from local Soviet press, records from Ludwigsburg (ZSt), and 1960s documents from the Ukrainian Procuracy-General. Findings extend the understanding of Soviet “second wave” trials first explored by Prusin (2018), Sklokina (2019), and Voisin (2014).

This chapter forms part of the edited volume Seeking Accountability for Nazi and War Crimes in East and Central Europe: A People’s Justice?, edited by Eric Le Bourhis, Irina Tcherneva, and Vanessa Voisin.

David Alan Rich, “Law and Accountability, Secrecy and Guilt: The Soviet Trawniki Defendants’ Trials, 1960-1970,” in Le Bourhis, Eric, Irina Tcherneva, and Vanessa Voisin (eds.), Seeking Accountability for Nazi and War Crimes in East Europe: A People’s Justice? (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2022), 221-256.