The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

112 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
authority to the status of helpless prisoner gravely undermined their
moral strength.’ Documents from the trial in Krasnodar suggest that
the defendants relinquished their claims of innocence only as a result
of grueling interrogations and out of a sense of hopelessness.
For example, during his first interrogation, on March 25, 1943,
Tishchenko told his interrogators that he was innocent of most of the
crimes with which he was charged; only after three months of interrogations
did he plead guilty to all. Yet for Soviet authorities, everything
was much simpler: only the guilty would confess.” (For references
see there.)
In addition to “pedagogical” reasons, the trials also had other political
motivations, as Bourtman notes, who also aptly describes the theatric
role all actors had been assigned during these trials (pp. 255f.):
“Thus, […] class issues continued to play an important role in
determining state violence during and after the war. The Soviets
used the military tribunals […] as an instrument for cleansing Soviet
society of elements perceived as unfaithful.
The three defense attorneys in the Krasnodar proceedings had
little impact on the trial’s outcome. Because confession was considered
the ultimate proof of a defendant’s guilt, and all of the defendants
had been made to confess numerous times during the pre-trial
interrogations, the lawyers could not have mounted a cogent defense
even if they had wanted to. The tribunals were structured in such a
way as to give the defense attorneys as marginal a role as possible;
their participation, it seems, was merely symbolic—intended to
demonstrate the fairness of the proceedings. […] Unlike the judges
and the prosecutors, defense lawyers were not allowed to crossexamine
the witnesses. In accordance with the June 1941 decree, no
pre-trial meetings were allowed; defendants and their lawyers met
for the first time on the first day of the trial before the proceedings
began. As a result, the lawyers could do little in court other than
plead for leniency for their defendants […].
For their part, the judges’ role was to support the prosecutor, intervening
only to recapitulate horrific incidents. The three judges in
Krasnodar fulfilled this role precisely. Above all, they pressed the
defendants for details of the atrocities they had [allegedly 67 ] commit-
67 Despite the horrific conditions of these trials described by Bourtman, he never utters
even a word of doubt that the crimes claimed by the prosecution could have been invented
or grossly exaggerated.