The Kharkiv Show Trial of 15–18 December 1943 in Historiography

Abstract

The beginnings of the historiography of the Kharkiv Show Trial can be traced back to the event itself – the first such trial of war criminals from the ranks of the armed forces of Nazi Germany in legal practice. The trial was aimed at more than just the domestic audience; it had significant international reverberations and became one of the many factors that influenced the decision of the Allied governments to initiate criminal prosecution against the leadership of the Third Reich. Soviet and recent Western and Ukrainian scholars have examined the Kharkiv Trial from a variety of angles, using diverse methodological and ideological approaches. Analysis of the work of Soviet researchers reveals an emphasis on the general historical and international-law aspects of the problem and on the study of the criminal acts of the Nazi occupation regime. The issue of bringing war criminals to justice was considered through the prism of the Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946). More recently, the growing interest of Western scholars in the role and significance of the USSR in the “global moment of justice” in the aftermath of World War II has been associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The Kharkiv Trial has been analyzed as part of research on the Holocaust and study of the post-war policy of “retribution” in the USSR. Foreign historians and legal scholars see it as an important episode in the complex and controversial story of punishing Nazi war crimes. Ukrainian historians since independence, employing the latest methodological perspectives, have produced substantial works on little-studied aspects of the German occupation regime. The challenges of today leave no doubt about the need to synthesize the knowledge and experience of the earlier historiographical tradition regarding the Kharkiv Trial and the use of the norms of criminal law to prosecute war crimes.