On 2 November 1942, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) created the ‘Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices and the Damage Inflicted by Them on Citizens, Collective Farms, Social Organisations, State Enterprises and Institutions of the USSR’ [Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia po ustanovleniiu i rassledovaniiu zlodeianii nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov i ikh soobshchnikov i prichinennogo imi ushcherba grazhdanam, kolkhozam, obshchestvennym organizatsiiam, gosudarstvennym predpriiatiiam i uchrezhdeniiam SSSR, ChGK].
The commission had the task of investigating and recording war crimes against prisoners of war (POWs) and civilians, compiling lists of murdered victims and people deported for forced labour, identifying perpetrators and ‘traitors to the Motherland’, and measuring the material damage that took place during the occupation. The findings were used for criminal prosecutions, propaganda purposes and compensation claims. Soon after the end of World War II, the investigation activities came to a standstill and the work was limited to analysing and processing the material. In the summer of 1951, the ChGK was dissolved and its documents taken over by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR. The ChGK collection continued, nevertheless, to serve as the principal expression of official narratives about wartime atrocities in the Soviet Union until 1991, and in many respects throughout the years since as well.
Setup and Mode of Operation
The ChGK had a pyramid structure. At the commanding heights in Moscow, chairman Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik (1888–1970) was joined by nine other members who were prominent figures in Soviet society, such as the surgeon Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko (1876–1946) and writer Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1883–1945). The central ChGK was supported by a network of republic commissions, which in turn depended upon contributions from auxiliary commissions on the krai, oblast and raion levels that entailed cooperation from ordinary local residents. In Zhytomyr [Russian: Zhitomir] oblast, Ukraine, for instance, the site of one of 98 regional and special auxiliary commissions created over the course of the war, as many as 5 000 people reportedly participated in investigating violent crimes. In contrast, no more than 14 employees ever worked in the central ChGK’s archival department; they were responsible for somehow assimilating all the documentation that flooded into Moscow. As a result, the ChGK constituted an undertaking that Stalinist officials never fully managed to control.
By December 1945, Shvernik informed Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (1878–1953) that seven million people had assembled 54 000 official reports and 250 000 eyewitness testimonies.
The results were summarised by the central commission and prepared for publication, without shying away from serious manipulations in order to achieve the desired propaganda effect. The ethnic identity of the victims was sometimes removed. Murdered Jews and Roma, who had been labelled as such by local commissions, became ‘peaceful Soviet citizens’. The most well-known manipulation was the report of the Katyn Commission, in which the murder of thousands of Polish officers near Smolensk by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 was deliberately reinterpreted as a crime committed by the German occupiers after June 1941. The USSR insisted on this version until nearly the end of its existence, with Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev (1931–2022) acknowledging Soviet responsibility only in 1990.
The propagandistic instrumentalisation by the central and oblast commissions led to great scepticism among historians regarding the source value of the ChGK material as such. In fact, researchers can bypass shifting political motivations by going directly to the ChGK’s raw documentation. Still, even this unfiltered type of source causes problems that are debated in the historiography. Alongside inaccuracies related to time, place and perpetrators of mass crimes, a major problem was the tendency of several raion commissions to overstate the number of victims. Meanwhile, the heterogeneity of the ChGK commissions defies a generalised assessment. A critical analysis of the material, drawing on further sources, makes it possible to confirm numerous local commission findings, as post-war legal investigations and historiographical contributions have shown. Using ChGK materials as a starting point for its fieldwork and interviews in Eastern Europe, the French organisation Yahad-In Unum was even able to identify mass graves which until that point were unmarked or even unknown.
Documentation on Persecution and Murder of Roma
The ChGK raw documentation is also significant in relation to Nazi atrocities against Soviet Roma, even if not all raion commissions paid extended attention to this victim group. For example, all ChGK raion lists of victims in Voronezh oblast, Russia, were compiled without any indication of nationality, so that information about the persecution of local Roma comes exclusively from other sources, as in the case of Sheliakino. In general, it can be assumed that even among the victims known by name, some Roma origins remain unidentified.
In stark contrast, the ChGK investigated the genocide of Roma in Smolensk oblast intensively. This might have been related to the fact that here several ‘national Gypsy kolkhozes’ had been established before the war. By far the most extensive investigation was carried out in Aleksandrovka near Smolensk, where surviving Roma kolkhoz members themselves had submitted the request for an investigation of the massacre to the ChGK. Statements of relatives and eyewitnesses in combination with ChGK exhumations of the two mass graves made it possible to identify the majority of the 176 Roma victims.
Similarly intensive was the ChGK investigation of the German mass murder of Roma in Novorzhev and Pushkinskie Gory, both in today’s Pskov oblast. In the case of Novorzhev, the fact of the mass shooting is confirmed by Wehrmacht reports, although details differ with regard to the course of the events, the motive and the number of victims. In other cases, so-called trophy documents of German origin prove the correctness of ChGK witness testimonies. Several survivors from different parts of the former occupation zone described posters summoning ‘Gypsies’ to register for the purpose of their alleged ‘resettlement’, with the true meaning of this order (complete removal for the purpose of annihilation) well-known from the Nazi persecution of Soviet Jews. In the case of Chernihiv [Russian: Chernigov], Ukraine, one of these calls to the Roma of the city and the surrounding area signed by the local Chief of the Security Police in June 1942 has survived as evidence.
In many cases, the ChGK documents are the only source to mention specific mass shootings of Roma in certain areas. But the opposite can also be found. In the case of Demidov, the deportation and killing of Jews and Roma in April 1942 is mentioned only in the reports of German perpetrators, while neither the ChGK nor other Soviet authorities investigated this crime afterwards. Similar examples can be found in Kushchevskaia, Krasnogvardeisk and other places.
In official Soviet statements, the chaotic elements of the ChGK’s work are on full display when it comes to Roma victims. In Stavropol’ krai, for example, multiple witness testimonies discuss massacres of Roma, as in Voroshilovsk. However, no mention is made of these killings in the communiqué published in Pravda, Izvestiia and Krasnaia zvezda on 5 August 1943, which was disseminated in English two days later. The ChGK’s next communiqué on Orel oblast offers an intriguing contrast. Here, witness testimonies as well as forensic reporting describe the extermination of Roma victims in detail, with forensic experts recording passport information recovered from corpses. In this case, murdered Roma who appear in a quoted witness statement made it into the communiqué published in Russian and English on 7 September 1943. The ChGK’s communiqué about Pskov oblast released one year later was even more explicit. ‘With especial sadism and brutality the German military commandant’s office shot Gypsies, including women and children,’ this publication declared. ‘They were shot only because they were Gypsies.’1“Soobshchenie Chrezvychainoi gosudarstvennoi komissii,” Izvestiia/Krasnaia zvezda, 29 August 1944, 3; Pravda, 30 August 1944, 3; “Statement of the Extraordinary State Committee,” Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Information Bulletin, 6 September 1944, 4. Yet for Latvia, where ChGK documentation includes Roma survivor testimony, the published communiqué again remains silent on the persecution of Roma communities. In the end, ChGK wartime publications explicitly discuss Roma victims only twice. Given that 13 out of a total of 27 communiqués released in 1943 to 1945 discuss Jews in some way, the ChGK clearly devoted more attention to Jewish victims than their Roma counterparts. Like Jews, focusing on the persecution of Roma risked detracting from stories of all-Soviet suffering that were designed to spur contributions to the war effort. There were no influential Roma communities or representatives abroad to which Stalin’s government might appeal, and hence no Roma equivalent to the Jewish Antifascist Committee.
Nuremberg Trials
The extent to which Soviet narratives were in flux, much like war stories elsewhere in the world, took centre stage at the Trial of the Major War Criminals in Nuremberg. When crafting the indictment, the Soviet team insisted that ‘Slavs’ be added to the list of ‘Jews, Poles, and Gypsies’ as groups subjected to mass extermination. Yet once the trial was underway, Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) called for a similarly expansive characterisation of ‘genocide’.2Hirsch, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg, 101, 318, 340. In the courtroom, it was a Soviet prosecutor who presented German records certified by the ChGK that spotlighted forced sterilisation of a Roma woman in Latvia.
At the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial (Case 9) in 1947–48, ChGK materials—alongside captured German perpetrator documents—once again played a decisive role. Otto Ohlendorf (1907–1951), the former head of Einsatzgruppe D of the Security Police and the SD, was interrogated about the mass extermination of Roma in general and in Simferopol’, Crimea, in particular. However, this aspect had no direct influence on the final court’s judgement.
Preservation of the Files and Accessibility
Regardless of the fact that ChGK materials formed the core of the Soviet prosecution during the Nuremberg Trials, they remained off-limits for independent research until the collapse of the USSR. From the late 1960s, however, a relatively extensive West German parallel collection emerged, when the Soviet Union authorised a request for legal assistance and allowed the Central Office of the Land Judicial Authorities for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg to inspect ChGK and even Committee for State Security [Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, KGB] investigation results. In some cases, former ChGK witnesses served as prosecution witnesses in federal German proceedings against former Nazi perpetrators.
With the opening of Eastern European archives after the end of the Cold War, the ChGK documents on violent crimes became fully accessible. Today, the materials of the central ChGK are kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation [Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, GARF] in Moscow; parallel collections and additional material can be found in state, oblast and municipal archives of the successor states of the former USSR. Extensive collections of ChGK document copies are available at the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., USA.
