CRIMINAL CASE ON THE «ANTI-SOVIET ORGANIZATION» AT THE HIRSCHAU BUTTER FACTORY IN 1937

Abstract

Topic of the repressions in the Soviet Union is not new, but it will stay relevant and urgent for decades. The article reveals the course of the criminal case №22716 from 1937. According to the case agents from the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs arrested a group of six Germans who lived and worked in the Dnipropetrovsk region, in the village Hirschau (nowadays Vladivka, Chernihivsky district of Zaporizhzhia region). 1937-1938 in the USSR were filled with especially harsh repressions and people could have become accused in crimes against the Soviet Union for any reason. Even a few words of criticism of the political regime were enough to get arrested by state security agencies. Thus six people had been accused of creating an anti-Soviet organization on the Hirschau butter factory that was aiming to encourage locals to join Germany in the future war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Based on the documents from this archival state, which are located in the State Archive of Zaporizhzhia region, the author made an attempt to find out the degree of the falsification of this criminal state. The research depicts not only the fate of the detainees but also their political views which had led to their execution later. Author substantiates the probability of having pro-German political views among the soviet Germans in the late 1930-s in the Ukrainian SSR due to the severity of repressions which national minorities had faced earlier. So the article shows the degree of possibility for the arrested ones in this criminal case of being real supporters of the Hitler’s Germany too. The research concludes that NKVD didn’t have enough evidence to assume and judge that arrested people in this case had been planning to support Hitler’s Germany in case of war between the countries. Nevertheless we can draw a conclusion that the executed Germans in case №22716 really had some criticism of the Soviet Union authorities because each of them had lost something as a result of the actions of the communist regime. We can tell that it was enough for Special NKVD “triads” to make anti-human execution judgments. The article considers the negligence and indifference of the NKVD system in relation to the people they’ve executed. It consisted, firstly, of fabricating data on the deaths of the executed ones and secondly, of reporting false information to the relatives of the Soviet regime’s victims. Germans who have been executed in the criminal case №22716 were rehabilitated only in 1989.