Stalin's terror: Jewish victims and executioners

Here I am looking at a document that is 75 years old - dated November 13, 1941, and trying to imagine this state security captain Kogenman sitting in a well-heated office in Lubyanka. German tanks are rushing to the outskirts of Moscow, but Samuil Moiseevich, a descendant of the priests of the Jerusalem Temple, writes instructions to his high-ranking colleague in the Gulag, David Loydin, on the correct removal of gold teeth from dead prisoners.

The main executioner’s role in launching mass repressions in Ukraine was played by Israel Leplevsky, People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR from June 1937 to January 1938. During the same six months, the “shooting” of the previous generation of Jewish security officers began, which reduced their share in the leadership of the NKVD of the republic from 66 percent to 46 percent.

In two regional departments of the NKVD, the 3-4 staff was replaced in two years, and sometimes Jewish deputies came to replace the executed Jewish investigators and department heads, who were also turned to the wall six months or a year later.

When the Ukrainian Physicotechnical Institute in Kharkov was smashed in 1937-38 (the future Nobel laureate Lev Landau was also arrested in this case), it was not some “secret anti-Semites” who beat Jewish scholars, but investigators Kogan, Reznikov, Shalit, Weissband and Drescher under the command of Leo Reichman. The farcical horror of the epoch: the KGB Jews with torture compel the Jewish physicists to admit their connection with the Jew Trotsky.

In the same Kharkov, the all-powerful head of the regional NKVD Solomon Mazo, a very intelligent man, a graduate of a pre-revolutionary gymnasium and university, shot himself on July 4, 1937 in his office. Mazo (Hebrew abbreviation for the descendants of the kohanim of the Jerusalem Temple - “Mi-zera Aharon”) left a note before the shot: “Comrades, where does this line of mass arrests lead?”

The Kharkov NKVD was headed by State Security Major Lev Reichman. Later he will be shot - like the former head of the Kharkov GPU Iosif Blat, the deputy head of the Kharkov NKVD Yakov Kaminsky, and the head of the secret political department of the regional NKVD Abram Simkhovich.

Solomon Mazo (left) and Israel Leplevsky (right).

Then, when in 1938-1939 the next People's Commissar, the poorly hidden anti-Semite Alexander Uspensky, will “cleanse” Leplevsky’s people, almost all the Jews who previously held high positions in the punitive system will be destroyed. It was Uspensky who gave instructions for the arrests of Jewish security officers based on nationality, citing the discovery of the “Zionist underground in the authorities.”

The enemy of Zionism and former Bundist Israel Leplevsky, who, together with his assistants, terrified Ukraine in 1937, was himself shot in the case of “Zionism”, and he was tortured during interrogation by Jewish investigators Lulov and Wiesel.

A researcher of the Soviet punitive organs, Vadim Zolotarev, told me several years ago that the situation when Jews repressed Jews was repeated in Ukraine thousands of times. According to Vadim Zolotarev, the crimes of the Jewish chekists were no worse and no better than what was done by their non-Jewish colleagues.

Why am I writing all this? In order to remember our victims of the Stalinist terror, we did not forget our executioners. And in order for us to think about how and why a person can get to this.

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