Enforcement of verdicts
Butyrka Prison. Located in the north-west of Moscow, this fortress-like barracks from the 18th century has served as a prison for political and criminal prisoners since 1879.
Enforcement of verdicts
After the convictions by a Soviet military tribunal (SMT), the Soviet secret service took the prisoners to Moscow to the Butyrka, Lefortovo or Lubyanka prisons.
While still in Germany, many of those sentenced to death applied for clemency. Their petitions, together with the opinions of the military tribunal and the military prosecutor’s office, were submitted to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for a decision. Only about eight percent of the convicts were pardoned, their death sentences commuted to 25 years in a labor camp.
However, other defendants were sentenced to higher sentences in a new trial before the Supreme Military Court in Moscow because the first sentence had been found to be too lenient.
Those sentenced to death were shot by the secret service at night in the cellar of Butyrka prison. The MGB immediately had their bodies cremated in the Donskoye crematorium. The ashes were poured into a mass grave at the Donskoye cemetery.
Vasily M. Blokhin (1895-1955)
Major General and ultimately deputy head of the administration and commander of the NKVD/MGB. Blokhin had been responsible for carrying out death sentences in Moscow since 1926. He was dismissed from the MGB after Stalin’s death.
A map of Moscow marking the locations of Butyrka Prison, the headquarters of the secret police (MGB) at Lubyanka, the Kremlin, and Donskoye Cemetery.
Butyrka prison in the northwest of Moscow.
Kremlin in Moscow, seat of the party and state leadership and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR until 1991, 2005.
Lubyanka – the central building of the Soviet secret service, today the headquarters of the FSB, 2005.
The executions took place in the so-called “Pugachev Tower” of Butyrka Prison in 2009.
Satellite image of Butyrka Prison. The “Pugachev Tower” is the tower on the bottom left. Google Maps, 2025.
Plan of the Butyrka in the prison museum, 2009.
The church in the “New Cemetery” at the historic Donskoye Monastery was converted into a crematorium in 1927 – it was the only one in Moscow for a long time. From 1935, the bodies of those murdered by the NKVD/MGB were cremated here and buried in mass graves. Both the cemetery and the crematorium were used as regular municipal facilities throughout this period. Today, the building is once again a Russian Orthodox church.
Church of the Donskoye cemetery in Moscow, 2005. / Facts & Files, Berlin / Christian Reinhardt
Petition for clemency by Hans Pietschmann (1922-1952)
Hans Pietschmann in MGB custody, ca. 1952.
Hans Pietschmann’s petition for clemency was rejected on February 15, 1952. / S.1
On the night of February 22, 1951, the People’s Police instructor and 19 other Germans were executed in Butyrka prison / p.2
Peer Lange (1930)
Peer Lange in MGB custody, ca. 1952.
Peer Lange as a returnee in the Friedland camp, October 1955.
Nine days after his arrest by the MfS, Peer Lange is said to have left East Berlin University “at his own request” according to a note on the student file dated June 25, 1952.
Confirmation of the prisoner Peer Lange about the notification of his reprieve to 25 years in a labor camp dated November 11, 1952.
Peer Lange was born on July 24, 1930 as the son of a district judge in Riga; the family moved to Germany in 1939. In the winter semester of 1951/1952, Peer Lange began studying history at Humboldt University in Berlin and became involved in an anti-Stalinist resistance group led by Gerd Heinrich. On June 16, 1952, he was arrested by the MfS in Neuruppin and interrogated by the MGB in the Potsdam-Lindenstrasse, Berlin-Karlshorst and Berlin-Lichtenberg prisons. On September 1, 1952, SMT No. 48240 sentenced him to death for “espionage” and he was subsequently deported to Moscow. After his pardon was announced in Butyrka prison on November 11, 1952, he was forced to work in the Workuta coal mine 9/10 from January 1953. On October 6, 1955, he returned to Germany via Friedland and resumed his studies there. From January 1971, he was a scientific consultant for the Foundation for Science and Politics in Ebenhausen and now lives as a pensioner in Berlin and Bavaria.
Coal mines of Workuta, in 1995s. / Memorial International, Moscow