The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  Kersten found Steele’s article quite accurate and recommended it to Senator Dodd during their meeting on October 1. But he was not fully satisfied with the Life feature. “I don’t know that it brought out sufficiently what I thought was the very important fact that was proved in the trial,” he remembered later, “namely, that while at the same time the Soviet government was preaching peaceful coexistence, they were training professional killers very skillfully trained, to go into the free world to kill carefully selected persons whom they believed to be enemies of their policies. . . . [O]ne of the big factors in their preparations was to prevent any attribution of these murders to the Soviet government.”10

  In his memo to Dodd, Kersten also shared with his old ally that “Stashinsky apparently will plead guilty and is willing to cooperate. The German government, I believe, is also sympathetic to the above objective. I understand that the German prosecutor will ask for clemency for Stashinsky if he goes along with this line.” As far as Kersten was concerned, Stashinsky and the West German prosecution had made a deal. The trial was going to be a political one. He wanted to be there. On the night of October 1, 1962, Charles Kersten and his wife boarded a plane to Munich.11

  PART VI

  TRIAL

  38

  KARLSRUHE

  Monday, October 8, 1962, was another deadly day in Berlin. East German border guards opened fire on two refugees who were trying to escape to the West by swimming across the Spree River. The two didn’t make it. As East German bullets hit the opposite side, West Berlin police returned fire. That same day, the British, French, and American representatives in West Berlin sent a note of protest to the Soviet occupation authorities for barring a British ambulance from reaching a young East German who was shot by border guards while trying to escape. The Soviets refused to accept the note. Willy Brandt, the Social Democratic mayor of West Berlin, who had just returned from a meeting in Washington with President Kennedy, declared at a press conference: “If Khrushchev wants a clash, he can get it.”1

  In Karlsruhe, October 8 was equally full of tension and anxiety. “A fine autumn day, perfect for carefree rest and observation,” wrote a reporter for the Badische neueste Nachrichten, the city’s only daily. “For those going on a late vacation, that is how it may have been, but not for the Karlsruhe security and criminal police. Since yesterday, it has been posted in full force along a one-kilometer perimeter around the Federal Court of Justice in front of the Third Criminal Senate, where, as is well known, the ‘trial of trials’ has begun—the court proceedings in the case of Bogdan Stashinsky, who is accused of having carried out two murders and of treasonous relations with the Soviet intelligence service.”2

  Indeed, the police presence around the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) made public access to the building all but impossible. The London Evening News reported the presence of up to sixty uniformed and plainclothes policemen. A reporter for the Badische neueste Nachrichten rendered the feelings of many who unsuccessfully tried to make their way to the Federal Court: “Policemen seemed to emerge suddenly from beneath the ground in front of passersby who struck them as suspicious; from cars parked in various places, distrustful eyes were trained on everyone who went by them, and we would not be surprised to learn that throughout the whole trial every residence near the Federal Court of Justice, on Herrenstrasse, for instance, concealed officials of the criminal service in order to monitor all that was going on in the vicinity.”3

  Whether that was the case or not, it was easy to imagine a ubiquitous police presence. Average citizens all over Europe were suddenly on the lookout for spies and foreign agents. That day Der Spiegel, the leading West German political weekly, published an article exposing the West German Army’s unpreparedness for war. The publication led to the arrest of the journalist who had written the story and of the publisher for violating the country’s security laws. Two days earlier, on Friday, October 6, Dr. No—the first James Bond movie, starring Sean Connery—was released in Britain, grossing more than $800,000 in the first two weeks of its run. Ironically, the action took place in the Caribbean, where at the time of the movie’s premiere Soviet engineers were making nuclear missiles operational, unbeknownst to the Americans—the first warheads arrived in Cuba on October 4. It was easy to imagine a spy or a plainclothes police officer around every corner.4

  The main concern of the Karlsruhe police posted around the Federal Court building was less the protection of the German public as of Bogdan Stashinsky, who was both the defendant and the star witness. They suspected that the KGB would try to silence him by sending one of his former colleagues with some new type of spray pistol or other murder weapon. Only a few months earlier, Bela Lopusnik, a former official of the Hungarian secret service who had defected to the West, had died under suspicious circumstances in a Vienna hospital. The West German police started taking special precautions with regard to Stashinsky’s diet. In the Karlsruhe prison where he waited before the trial, food was prepared for him in the presence of a police official, and at no point was a single guard allowed to enter his cell—only two at a time.5

  On the day of the trial, the police presence was reinforced not only around the building but inside as well, including within the courtroom. “The entire premises of the court were placed under the strict control of uniformed and plainclothes police,” wrote a reporter. “Anyone wishing to enter the chamber is checked twice: everyone must present personal identification and a separate pass issued by the secretariat of the tribunal.” The media assumed that the passes were numbered and visitors assigned specific seats so as to allow the police to place their own people in strategic positions around the chamber.

  Only half the available seats (of the total ninety-six chairs in the room) were assigned to visitors; the rest were reserved for court officials and participants in the trial. The Bandera people did their best to monopolize the passes for the guest seats, annoying those who failed to get into the room. “German law students fought openly to obtain at least half-day passes to the chamber,” according to one reporter. Few of them were successful. The trial attracted unprecedented publicity, and the courtroom simply could not accommodate all those who wanted to attend the proceedings.6

  “The public that obtained passes for the trial is quite varied,” wrote one reporter, describing the atmosphere in the courtroom. “Men predominate, but there are also more than a dozen women. We even see a priest. Conversations take place in German, French, and English. With interest, we take another close look at the chamber. The front wall consists of large triangular gray and yellow stone slabs. The dark cherry robes of the five judges reflect strikingly against this background.” It was a rather large, windowless room with greenish walls, fluorescent lighting, and six rows of chairs for the public to the right of the entrance. To the left was the area reserved for participants in the trial.7

  Closest to the journalists was a long desk behind which sat members of the victims’ families and their attorneys. The German law allowed victims to have their own legal representation, and they were eager to use that opportunity. Nearest to the entrance door were Lev Rebet’s forty-nine-year-old widow, Daria Rebet, and his twenty-year-old son, Andrii, who had been only sixteen when his father was assassinated. Next was Natalia, the twenty-year-old daughter of Stepan Bandera. Mrs. Bandera did not attend the trial. She was living in Toronto, Canada, along with tens of thousands of other Ukrainian refugees who had moved there a decade earlier. The members of the victims’ families were accompanied by their attorneys—one for Rebet’s family and three for Bandera’s. Charles Kersten sat to the left of Natalia Bandera, Jaroslav Padoch to the right. The West German attorney Hans Neuwirth, whom Kersten and Padoch were supposed to assist, was seated next to Padoch.8

  Hans Neuwirth’s expenses, like those of Charles Kersten and Jaroslav Padoch, were being paid from funds collected by the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in preparation for the trial. The Rebet family relied on the more l
imited funds collected by their own branch of the organization and their supporters. Accordingly, the Rebet family was represented by only one lawyer, the Munich attorney Adolf Miehr. Daria Rebet had found him simply by walking into his office, not far from the place where her husband had been killed in October 1959. Miehr had little knowledge or understanding of Ukrainian émigré realities or of international politics, but Daria Rebet didn’t know anyone who was better qualified. Nor did Miehr have anyone like Jaroslav Padoch to help him grasp the Ukrainian nuances. Lev Rebet’s close colleague Bohdan Kordiuk took a seat next to Miehr, but he was not a lawyer, had no official status at the trial, and was never invited to speak.9

  The members of the victims’ families, the journalists, and the public all waited anxiously for the appearance of the accused. Their first opportunity to see the man they knew so much about and hated so much came at about 9:00 a.m., when a policeman escorted him into the courtroom and seated him on a bench to the left of the main desk reserved for the judges. “So that is he!” wrote a correspondent for the Banderite newspaper The Way to Victory. “This young man of medium height, with a slightly pale complexion, hair combed up, lips pursed, and dressed with exaggerated elegance—dark clothing, a dark blue tie—as if he had just come from the barber shop; this is he—the assassin of the Leader of blessed memory; this is the degenerate who will go down in history as a personification of baseness, like Judas!”

  A reporter for the Frankfurter Rundschau, writing a few days later, was more reserved in his account of Stashinsky’s appearance. He noted that the accused was approximately 1.7 meters tall (about five feet five inches) and had “a handsome, intelligent face [and] very fine hands.” Everyone in the room noticed how pale Stashinsky was. It was difficult to say whether that was due to how little time he had spent outside over the past year or because he was nervous. After entering the room, Stashinsky was approached by his attorney, Dr. Helmut Seidel. He listened, nodded in acknowledgment of what Seidel had to tell him, and then looked at the audience. He was clearly nervous.10

  Stashinsky had always been able to rely on Inge’s support during the most difficult moments of his life in Moscow, and then during his escape to Berlin, but now he was on his own. For security reasons, Inge was not allowed in the court. According to the Stern magazine reporters, she went into hiding after her husband turned himself in to the Americans. She was afraid that she, too, might end up on the KGB death list, or perhaps she would be kidnapped and taken to the East after the Stasi arrested her father. She refused a 20,000 Deutschmark honorarium to tell her story to a West German magazine. As the media learned later, she had moved under a different name to Stuttgart, where she worked as a hairdresser. A reporter for the Hamburger Abendblatt tracked Inge down to an apartment on Böblingerstrasse in Stuttgart. The police, alerted that her cover had been blown, then placed Inge in the home of a police officer. She was also in close touch with Dr. Erwin Fischer of the General Prosecutor’s Office, who specialized in espionage cases and had prosecuted Heinz Felfe, the best-known KGB spy in the BND. Even so, Inge did not show up at the trial. Both she and her police guardians feared that she might be tracked down by the KGB and eliminated as an unwanted witness. Stashinsky would face the trial alone.11

  39

  LOYALTY AND BETRAYAL

  Shortly after 9:00 a.m., everyone in the crowded courtroom rose to acknowledge the panel of judges dressed in crimson robes. According to the German law, they, and not a jury, would decide the fate of the accused. The judges were led by a man in his early fifties wearing glasses with only one lens. Dr. Heinrich Jagusch, the presiding judge, had lost his right eye in the war, in which he had commanded a tank battalion. Jagusch was an experienced judge, and cases of espionage were his specialty. In October 1959, the month when Bogdan Stashinsky assassinated his second victim, Jagusch was appointed president of the Third Senate of the Federal Court of Justice, with jurisdiction in cases of espionage and high treason. Jagusch was very good at sentencing communist spies. Everyone in the courtroom knew that, including Stashinsky. But the statement with which Jagusch opened the proceedings gave Stashinsky a glimmer of hope that this trial might be different.1

  “Soon after the indictment was prepared in this case, toward the end of April 1962, a serious large-circulation weekly declared the defendant a murderer, publishing its conclusions in a long article, printing his photograph, and depicting the deeds confirmed in the indictment,” began Jagusch, referring to the article that had appeared in Christ und Welt earlier in the year. He continued: “In recent days numerous dailies have published similar commentaries, also printing photos of the defendant and declaring him a murderer or a political assassin even before the judicial investigation was concluded. . . . As head of these court proceedings, I am obliged to protect the defendant against inadmissible premature verdicts in public opinion.”2

  Then the trial began. The audience first heard the voice of the accused when Judge Jagusch asked Stashinsky whether he understood German and whether he felt well. Stashinsky responded in the affirmative to both. He looked carefully at the panel of judges, studying the expressions of Jagusch and his colleagues. Jagusch asked the accused to tell the court about himself, and Stashinsky began with his place and date of birth. “I was born on 4 November 1931 in Borshchovychi in the Lviv district,” he began. “At the time of my birth, Lviv and the whole area were under Polish rule, so I was also a Polish citizen at the time.” He spoke in an expressionless monotone, his hands behind his back, in a manner that made many in the audience suspect it was a rehearsed statement.3

  Prompted by Jagusch, who spoke in a friendly manner and managed to create an atmosphere of relative ease, if not trust, Stashinsky explained to the court how on one of his trips home in the summer of 1950 he had been picked up by the railway police. He was nineteen years old at the time, and, as was often the case, he was riding without a ticket. That day he was released, but a few days later a policeman showed up on his doorstep and invited him for a talk at the offices of the railway police. It was there that he first met Captain Konstantin Sitnikovsky of the Ministry of State Security, a predecessor to the KGB. Sitnikovsky wanted him to become a spy for the secret police.

  Stashinsky’s story sent a shock wave through the courtroom. Many reporters asked themselves whether the Soviets indeed used such methods to recruit their agents. But Jagusch, after years of presiding over numerous trials of communist spies, had no trouble believing Stashinsky’s story. “Was that the real reason?” he pressed Stashinsky, digging into his motivations. “I understood that he already knew about me and my circumstances,” came the reply. “Others from the same village who knew even less than I had already been arrested long before, and some had been sent to Siberia, so I realized that what he had said about the intention to arrest us and send my parents to Siberia corresponded to the facts, and that such things also happened. I also saw the futility of the struggle of the Ukrainian underground.”

  In his testimony Stashinsky showed no attachment to the ideology or goals of the resistance movement that was fighting for Ukrainian independence. He portrayed himself as an outsider with no interest in politics. He was aware of the resistance movement from his family members, and that awareness, as well as the direct involvement of his sisters in the movement, was used to blackmail him.

  If anything, Stashinsky’s testimony indicated opposition to the ideology and methods of the nationalists. “Not far from our village, at a distance of one or one and a half kilometers, there was a [Polish] settlement that did not belong to our village,” said Stashinsky. “One night we heard shots, and we could see flames in that direction. In the morning, when we went there, we saw the results of that action. About twenty to twenty-five Polish buildings in that settlement had been burned, and all the men had been shot.” To Jagusch’s follow-up question about the cause of the fighting, Stashinsky responded, “It was an old quarrel between Poles and Ukrainians. . . . For the Poles were supposed to disappear from Western Ukraine and g
o off to Poland. The Poles did the same in retaliatory actions. They surrounded Ukrainian villages and punished the Ukrainian population in the same way.”4

  Jagusch announced the first fifteen-minute break at 10:45 a.m. after probing Stashinsky with further questions on his attitude toward the resistance movement and motives for cooperating with the secret police. For the reporters and members of the public who filled the corridors of the courthouse, heading for restrooms, lighting cigarettes, and exchanging opinions on what they had just heard, there was a lot to digest. Could Stashinsky be trusted? He had made a positive impression on many reporters. “He speaks excellent German with a Slavic accent and has a talent for telling his story without exaggeration,” wrote the reporter for the Frankfurter Rundschau a few days later. “He behaves with refined politeness. In a word, he impresses one as an intelligent overgrown boy with wonderful manners.”5

  Many of the Ukrainians in the courtroom thought differently. Among them was Borys Vitoshynsky, forty-eight years old, who had long been a close associate of Bandera and was covering the trial for the Bandera organization’s newspaper, Shliakh peremohy (The Path of Victory). A lawyer by training and a journalist by vocation, he had joined the organization in high school and marked his twenty-first birthday in the notorious Polish concentration camp of Bereza Kartuzka. He had spent most of the war in Auschwitz, where he had witnessed two of Bandera’s brothers being killed by Polish guards. Despite the socialist leanings of his youth, he was close to Bandera; at Bandera’s funeral, he had been asked to carry a cup of Ukrainian soil in front of the coffin. What Vitoshynsky thought and wrote reflected the thoughts, attitudes, and feelings of quite a few members of the Bandera organization.6