![]() So the Russians made no efforts to obtain Koch’s extradition. too recent for a Ukrainian state trial to be desirable. One may hazard a guess that in 1949, when Erich Koch was discovered to be among the living, the memory of the Ukrainian nationalists who had fought Germans and Russians alike was. If one asks the “Ukrainian German” nationalists how many German occupiers they destroyed, how many German formations they wiped out, how many bridges they blew up in order to prevent the aggressors from transporting arms for subjugating and annihilating the Ukrainian people, they can make no reply. In 1944, shortly after the complete reconquest of the Ukraine from the Germans, Khrushchev is reported to have used these words: 2 And, as for Stalin’s present successor, the former secretary of the Communist party for the Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, his attitude toward the subjects and victims of Erich Koch was perhaps no different. Did those in power want any joyous occasion for the Ukraine? Stalin was said never to have forgotten the fact that his terrible campaign to collectivize Ukrainian agriculture in the early 30’s had ended in some degree of compromise. In a dozen Ukrainian cities the trial of Erich Koch would have been a joyous occasion, but that begged the question. He was the epitome of two years of repression, resistance, and anarchy, unequaled even in Ukrainian history. To the Poles of Warsaw Koch was, it is true, a war criminal of some consequence, who had misgoverned the annexed Kommissariat of Bialystok, but to the Ukrainians Koch was much more than that. ![]() A state trial of the former tyrant to take place in Kiev or in Rowné, his former capital, would have been only fitting. At the beginning of 1950, when the British occupation authorities reluctantly extradited Koch to Poland, the Russians staked no claim for him. ![]() Ironically, however, the Russian authorities have never demanded Koch’s body-the same Russians who once tried a German SS general in the morning and hanged him in the afternoon. Koch, Stalin is alleged to have said, reminded the Soviet citizen every day of what he had to fight against. It meant the most outright die-hard Nazi, a man who could hardly talk about any subject at all without mentioning shooting, a man for whom there were only conquerors and sub-humans, a man whose utterances became so notorious that even Stalin noticed them. Sixteen years ago, when the Germans still held most of the Soviet Ukraine, Koch was a name to frighten children with. Only the abundant swept-back hair and the Hitler mustache, now running to grass, conveyed something of that former hero. A querulous invalid of sixty-two, wild-eyed and haggard, the subject bore little resemblance to the large, pink, boyish, and truculent face of the Erich Koch who had been Hitler’s tyrant for the Ukraine. The defendant was a solitary German war criminal who had been immured in Warsaw’s Mokotow prison for nearly nine years, and whose crimes were at least fourteen years old. Furtively presented in stray paragraphs of the world press during October and November 1958, an assiduous student might find traces of a weird, sacrificial, and Kafka-like Polish trial.
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