Nikolaj Leont’ev was one of the witnesses whom internationally known Soviet writer, journalist, and critic Lev Ginzburg congratulated in 1965 for the courage of his testimony at the trial that June of six mass murderers in Krasnodar. The defendants, like Leont’ev, had been Red Army prisoners of war who, in the fall of 1941, entered the SS and police guard forces (Wachmannschaften) and served in the Nazi German extermination centers in occupied Poland in 1942–44. Leont’ev (and key witnesses like him) were free to testify against the defendants as direct participants in the killing only because no one had accused him also of participation. Leont’ev had told the court about the crime scene—the Bełżec extermination center in the General Government. The six were convicted and executed on October 7–8, 1965. Leont’ev’s prewar biography was indistinguishable from the lives of most Red Army men in 1941. His life had also been indistinguishable from the defendants’ lives in another way: together with them, he surrendered to German forces in the summer of 1941, then was recruited by the SS training camp in Trawniki (near Lublin in the General Government) to perform armed service for the SS and police. They had served as guards in the liquidation of the Lublin Jewish ghetto and at the Bełżec extermination center. His biography diverged from that of the defendants, however, because he had deserted to the partisans in early 1943 and ended the war “on the right side.” Their biographies converged again: all were arrested and tried for treason during the immediate postwar years and sentenced to long terms in labor camps, then amnestied after Stalin’s death.

To Soviet security authorities, Trawniki-trained men like Leont’ev were undoubtedly traitors: they had surrendered to the Germans and sworn an oath to serve Nazi authorities loyally. They were subjected to the rightly notorious justice of Article 58 simply by virtue of having served the Germans. Some, however, had also been accomplices in Nazi-led mass state crimes. The Soviet security apparatus uncovered who the Trawniki men were—the two thousand Red Army men that surrendered and another two thousand western Ukrainian civilian recruits.