In 1941, the Soviet Union had spent months ignoring warnings from Western powers about German troops massing along its western borders. When Germany and its Axis partners invaded on June 22, 1941, they achieved near-total tactical surprise. Much of the existing Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground, and Soviet armies were initially overwhelmed.
As the German army advanced deep into Soviet territory, SS and police units followed. The first to arrive were the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi mobile death squads tasked with carrying out mass shootings of Jews, communists, and others deemed a threat to long-term German rule.
On October 24, 1941, the Germans occupied Kharkov, one of the largest industrial centers in the Soviet Union. On the eve of the occupation, the city had roughly 1.5 million residents. By the time Kharkov was liberated in August 1943, fewer than 200,000 remained alive.
Among the German personnel in the city was a man who specialized in loading women and children into gas vans and in extracting false statements from Soviet civilians through torture. His name was Reinhard Retzlaff.
Retzlaff was born in 1907 in Berlin, then part of the German Empire. He received a secondary education, and when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, he was 25 years old. Unlike millions of Germans, however, he did not join the Nazi Party.
The main goals of Nazi policy had included, since the 1920s, the destruction of the Soviet Union by military force, the permanent elimination of the supposed communist threat to Germany, and the seizure of prime land in Soviet territory as Lebensraum, living space for long-term German settlement. Hitler believed Germany had to conquer and settle these lands so that the German race could win the constant struggle for survival among races.
The Nazis claimed that Jews had created Bolshevik communism and were using it to gain world domination. As a result, they often labeled communism "Judeo-Bolshevism" and described it as a Jewish conspiracy against Germans. The Nazis saw the conquest of the Soviet Union as a necessary step toward destroying Jewish influence in the world. They also believed that Slavs and other ethnic groups in the Soviet Union were racially inferior and inherently enemies of the German race.
For the first six years of Nazi rule, Nazi propaganda viciously attacked the Soviet Union, and in private Hitler repeatedly spoke of a future conflict. Yet in 1939, Nazi Germany launched a temporary policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union. This provisional shift reflected Hitler's tactical decision to secure his eastern flank while Germany destroyed Poland and defeated Britain and France.
Before the war began, Reinhard Retzlaff worked as deputy head of newspaper distribution in Frankfurt. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Poland found itself at war on two fronts when the Soviet Union invaded from the east on September 17. Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on September 28, and a day later Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland in accordance with a secret protocol to their non-aggression pact.
On Sunday, June 22, 1941, under the code name Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, its partner in the war against Poland. The Battle of Kharkov began on October 20, 1941, when the Germans advanced to the western edge of the city. Four days later, they managed to take control of what had been one of the largest Soviet industrial centers, located in northeastern Ukraine. By that time, however, most of Kharkov's industrial facilities had already been evacuated or disabled by the Soviets.
After the battle ended, Kharkov experienced its first wartime occupation, which lasted until February 16, 1943. German units in the city acted on the basis of the Reichenau Order, which supported Nazi genocidal policy and called for punishment of the so-called subhuman Jews and the extermination of Judeo-Bolshevism in Europe. The order prepared the ground for mass killing of Jews and encouraged German soldiers to murder Jewish civilians on the Eastern Front. All Jews were to be treated as partisans, and commanders were instructed to shoot them en masse or hand them over to Einsatzgruppen execution squads. To leave no avengers behind, women and children were to be shot as well.
German terror in Kharkov began shortly after the battle, when several bodies of Soviet commanders were displayed on balconies to instill fear in those who remained. Over the following months, members of Sonderkommando 4a, commanded by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel of Einsatzgruppe C, murdered an estimated 16,000 to 30,000 local residents, mostly Jews. On December 15, 1941, when temperatures reached minus 15 degrees, about 15,000 Jews were shot in the ravine of Drobytsky Yar. To save ammunition, children were thrown into the pits alive, where they were left to freeze to death quickly.
The killing continued in January with the use of a gas van, a truck converted into a mobile gas chamber that could hold 50 people. The vehicle drove through the city, slowly killing those trapped inside with carbon monoxide produced by the vehicle itself and routed into the airtight compartment. Victims died from a combination of carbon monoxide poisoning and suffocation.
Reinhard Retzlaff served in Kharkov with the 560th Group of the German Secret Field Police and specialized in loading women and children into gas vans using clubs and rifle butts. Once loaded, the victims—the elderly, women, and children—were suffocated. Retzlaff later confirmed the existence of the gas vans.
He said: "In early March 1942, during an inspection visit to the Kharkov prison, I saw a large dark gray enclosed vehicle in the courtyard. I asked a member of the Kharkov security service headquarters named Kaminsky, whom I knew, what this enclosed vehicle was for. Because I knew that people were being taken away to be shot in open trucks. Kaminsky said it was a method of liquidating Russians that saved a lot of time and also all the unpleasantness associated with blanket shooting. He further explained that the exhaust gases from the engine would enter the van and after a short time poison its occupants. Then all that remained was to unload the dead and bury them. The purpose of the van was strictly secret. Nevertheless, some of the prisoners apparently knew what it was for. Some people resisted when being loaded into the gas van, but they were subdued with clubs and the butts of rifles and pistols. I personally took part in loading the gas van twice, in March and July 1942. On each occasion about 20 people were loaded. Other members of the secret field police also took part. On the day I was there, a terrifying scene occurred. Women cried loudly, some fell to their knees and begged to be sent back to prison. All of them were murdered."
As Retzlaff later admitted, he also took part in burning the bodies of the murdered. His next task in the secret police was to obtain false statements from Soviet civilians using torture, hair-pulling, and torture with needles. The victims included women and children.
Retzlaff later recalled that every person detained by the military authorities and sent to the secret field police for investigation was first beaten. If a prisoner provided the required evidence, the beating stopped, while those who refused to testify were beaten further, which often ended in their death. This meant that if someone did not confess, they were beaten to death, and if they confessed, they were shot.
Retzlaff later described what happened in the town of Derhachi, located 12 kilometers from Kharkov. He said: "Twenty women were brought one by one into the interrogation room. Because none of them confessed, brutal measures were used. We threw them onto a bench, stripped them naked, and beat them. All 20 innocent women were shot on my order."
During his time in German-occupied Ukraine, Retzlaff also took part in the killing of civilians that occurred near Kharkov. For example, in the town of Poltava, he burned a mother and three children alive.
Kharkov was temporarily retaken by the Red Army in February 1943 and then again occupied by the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, in April of that year. In the spring of 1943, Soviet authorities discovered mass graves of victims, mostly Jews. By the time Kharkov was definitively liberated in August 1943, practically no Jews remained alive in the city.
For the crimes committed in Kharkov, however, three Germans and one Soviet collaborator were brought to trial. In December 1943, the Kharkov trial began, during which four men were accused of participating in the murders of Soviet citizens: Reinhard Retzlaff, Wilhelm Langheld, Hans Ritz, and Mikhail Petrovich Bulanov. Bulanov was also charged with treason for collaborating with the Germans.
Among the spectators in the courtroom were people whose families had been murdered, and many witnesses were summoned. Every statement in the trial was translated into German, and each defendant was represented by a defense lawyer. All three Germans were accused of direct participation in the mass and brutal extermination of peaceful Soviet civilians using gas vans, as well as personal participation in mass shootings, hangings, burning, looting, and the perpetration of injustices against the Soviet people.
All the accused confessed. Retzlaff said: "I confess to all the crimes I committed on the orders of my direct superiors. If I had not obeyed these orders, I would have found myself in the same position as my victims."
During the trial, the defense strategy consisted of claiming that the accused had merely followed orders. The prosecution acknowledged that the men had indeed acted on the orders of superiors but rejected this as a sufficient defense. During the proceedings, the state prosecutor asked Reinhard Retzlaff whether cases had ever been manipulated and evidence falsified, to which Retzlaff replied: "Yes, all of that happened, and quite often. It can be said that it was a completely common procedure."
The trial ended on December 18, 1943, and the four men were sentenced to death. All the accused, however, applied for clemency. Wilhelm Langheld stated that he had personally beaten women to death but stressed that he was not the only one. He said: "That is the whole German army." Retzlaff's defense was different. He said: "I want to open the eyes of the German people and show them the deeds of the fascist occupiers. I therefore ask that I be granted clemency so that I can return to Germany and carry out my intention."
Their requests were rejected. Their execution took place on December 19, 1943, at 11:00 on Kharkov Square. It was public and became a theater of horror. Some foreign correspondents reported that 50,000 people watched the hangings on the snow-covered square.
The American journalist Edmund Stevens described the execution in these words: "It was all over in a few moments. The defendants were lifted onto the beds of four open trucks and stood on stools. Then nooses were placed around their necks. Their eyes were not blindfolded. During the preparations, three of the four prisoners had to be supported. Bulanov fainted. Ritz and Retzlaff turned white, had saliva at their mouths, and their knees buckled. Only Langheld, an old soldier, remained firm as a battering ram the whole time and did not tremble once. Once the nooses were set, the trucks moved off on command, and the four men were left hanging and kicking in the air."
After their execution, loud cheers rose from the crowd. The hanging of the four men was carried out using the short-drop method, in which the body does not fall from a great height. The result was an agonizing death by strangulation that lasted a long 10 to 20 minutes.
The Kharkov trial, which sentenced four men to death by hanging, was the first case in which German personnel were tried by the Allies for war crimes during and after World War II. No tears were shed for the Nazi murderers.