Das grosse Verhör. Aus der Praxis des NKWD
The Big Questioning. On the Practice of NKVD

Summary/Abstract: "The production of one of the great political melodramas in the courtrooms of Moscow, Prague, or Budapest, as Arthur Koestler writes in his preface to the book Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski‘s," requi-res as many months of careful preparation as a film or a Broadway production." The selection of a sui-table defendant is one of the first steps. In the era of the great cleansing processes of 1936-1938, the following conditions were essential: 1. he must have known Bukharin or one of the other figures of the alleged conspiracy personally; 2. he must have had contacts with foreign countries; and (3) he had to occupy a position of great importance so that he could be charged with actions such as a conspiracy for the murder of Stalin, or the like, at least with a hint of probability. These three conditions were met by the Austrian physicist Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski, who worked at the Ukrainian Physical Institute in Kharkov, and who was arrested by the NKVD after his divorced wife had been arrested in Moscow. In the course of the investigation, it should then emerge that he was not suited for his role. Thus Alexan-der Weissberg-Cybulski did not see the spotlight of the great schauprozesse, but only knew the hidden sample work. While the unsuitable extras were usually removed without a trace, he miraculously survi-ved to tell his story and those of his innumerable fellow-sufferers, first at the lawsuit of David Rousset against the "Lettres Françaises" (cf "Der Monat", issue 28) And now in his book "Hexensabbat", which will be published in the „Frankfurter Hefte Verlag“.

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