Despite being a nearly closed sea and not much indepth, the Baltic Sea is rich in 

maritime disasters.

Especially during WWII there were many sinking boats, many of them full of civilians. The last one 7 September 1994 (Finland). 852 dead and 137 survivors in the sinking of the Estonian ferry linking Tallinn with Stockholm.

One of the worst desasters was the Soviet evacuation of Tallinn, also called Tallinn disaster or Russian Dunkirk, was a Soviet operation to evacuate the 190 ships of the Baltic Fleet, units of the Red Army, and pro-Soviet civilians from the fleet’s encircled main base of Tallinn in the Soviet Republic of Estonia ( That belonged to Russia from XVIII century ) during August 1941.

 As is often the case when the victims are Russian, the facts are minorised or blamingly concealed. No doubt because humanizing the enemy is against the rules.

Planned route

Given the German advance and the atrocities they were committing against civilians in their way, the Soviet command considered it convenient to evacuate the Russian fleet so that it would not fall to the invaders together with the maximum number of civilians possible.

In expectation of a Soviet breakout, the Kriegsmarine and the Finnish Navy had started on 8 August 1941 to lay minefields off Cape Juminda on the Lahemaa coast. While Soviet minesweepers tried to clear a path for convoys through the minefields, German coastal artillery installed a battery of 150 mm (5.9 in) guns near Cape Juminda and the Finnish navy gathered their Flotilla with patrol boats VMV9, VMV10, VMV11 and VMV17. At the same time the German 3. Schnellbootflottille with E-boats S-26, S-27, S-39, S-40 and S-101 was concentrated at Suomenlinna outside Helsinki. German bombers based on airfields in Estonia were put on alert. 

The Germans started their  attack on Tallirm on August ]9, but the Russians, supported by the guns of the coastal defences and warships were able to hold their ground for nearly a week, 011 August 26:r however,the Cermans broke ínto the city, and the Russian Suprerne Comrnand ordered the evacuation of Tallin, , Afrer two more days of intenslve streer Ilghtlng, the convoy of troop transports and warships sailed frorn Tallinn harbour. The Germans claimed that “not a single ship” would be able to leave Tallirm; but, according tq, the Russians, “most” of the ships, including the flag-ship Fivfinsk_r got through, despíte constant attacks frorn German aircraft and torpedo boats, and floatingmines whích the Gerrnans had scattered throughout the Gulf of Finland.

   During the night of 27/28 August 1941 the Soviet 10th Rifle Corps disengaged from the enemy and boarded transports in Tallinn.

   The embarkation was protected by smoke screens, however, the mine-sweeping in the days before the evacuation began was ineffective due to bad weather, and there were no Soviet aircraft available for protecting the embarkation. This, together with heavy German shelling and aerial bombardment killed at least 1,000 of the evacuees in the harbour.

Kirov cruiser with smoke screen.

   Twenty large transports, eight auxiliary ships, nine small transports, a tanker, a tug, and a tender were organized into four convoys, protected by the Soviet cruiser Kirov, with Admiral Vladimir Tributs on board, two flotilla leaders, nine destroyers, three torpedo boats, twelve submarines, ten modern and fifteen obsolete minehunters, 22 minesweepers, 21 submarine chasers, three gun boats, a minelayer, thirteen patrol vessels and eleven torpedo boats. When these ships had departed, forming into a column some 15.5 miles (25 km) long as they moved out into open water.

   On 28 August Luftwaffe bomber sank the steamer Vironia, the  Lucerne, the Atis Kronvalds and the  ice breaker Krisjanis Valdemars. The rest of the Soviet fleet were forced to change course. This took them through a heavily mined area. As a result, 21 Soviet warships, including five destroyers, struck mines and sank. On 29 August, the Luftwaffe,  accounted for the transport ships Vtoraya Pyatiletka , Kalpaks and Leningradsovet  sunk. In addition, the ships Ivan Papanin, Saule, Kazakhstan and the Serp i Molot were damaged by I./KG 4, which also sank three more. Some 5,000 Soviet soldiers died.

Kirov cruiser

  Later that evening the armada was attacked by Finnish and German torpedo boats, and the chaotic situation made organized mine sweeping impossible. Darkness fell at 22:00 and the Soviet armada stopped and anchored at midnight in the heavily mined water.

  Early on 29 August Ju 88 bombers attacked the remains of the convoys off Suursaari, sinking two transports. Meanwhile, the undamaged ships made best speed to reach the safety of the Kronstadt batteries. The heavily damaged merchant ship Kazakhstan disembarked 2300 men of the 5000 on board before steaming on to Kronstadt. In the following days ships operating from Suursaari rescued 12,160 survivors.

  The biggest losses were suffered by the trawlers and destroyers trying  to take the Convoy through the Gerrnan rníneflelds. In the end, the “greater part” of the ships, carrying several thousands soldioers, landed ein Kronstaadt or Leningrad.

The Russian naval garrisons of Dagö, and other íslands off the Estonian coast, held out till the middle of October, when the 500 survívors of the defence of Dagö succeeded in sailing under cover of night to Hangö, the Russian naval base in Finland, which was then stíll in Russian hands,  

The Soviet evacuation of Tallinn succeeded in evacuating 165 ships, 28,000 passengers and 66,000 tons of equipment.The evacuation of Tallinn succeeded in recovering 165 ships, 28,000 persons and 66,000 tons of equipment, but the losses were more than 12,000 military and civilian dead as well as 13 warships and 34 merchant vessels.
At least 12,400 are thought to have drowned .
The evacuation may have been the bloodiest naval disaster since the battle of Lepanto

But unknown for the Westerners.

The human tragedy 

The numbers are cold, 12,000 dead dozens and sinking ships do not impress us much, but when we put the magnifying glass on the disaster and see the people and their dramas, everything is very different.

Harrison.E. Salisbury in his book “The 900 days” give us more human details.

“Aboard the Virona it was also the mess hour. Mikhailovsky, his notebook in hand, sat down at the long table. Among those waiting on table was a young girl with black braids, sensitive face, blue eyes. She looked to Mikhailovsky like a girl graduate. After dinner everyone went on deck to atch the German planes. The girl, her hair neatly braided, stood next to Mikhailovsky.

“How strange war begins”, she said.”So unexpected. I just don´t understand anything”.

“Are you from Leningrad?” he asked.

“Yes”, she said, ” and I Happened to be in Tallin quite by accident”.

The talked for a while, then the ship moved on to the east…..

…….

The whistle of falling bombs filled the air.Suddenly Mikhailovsky felt the ship shudder. The deck under his feet seemed to rise up. The next moment he was under water, sinking to the bottom. To the end. So it seemed. Then he rose…….

……………

He felt something in the water-something firm and cold.He turned about and saw a body floating, the skull crushed an the face a mass of pulp. Only by the black braids did he recognice the schoolgril from Leningrad who had found hersef in Tallin by sheer chace.”

” A sailor on the gunboat Sneg saw the Virona sink. The passengers were mostly staff of the Baltic Fleet, officer´s wives, propaganda workers, newspapermen, Party officials,The quarterdeck was crowded, but in the sea the sailor colud perceive the dark figures of people swimming. Across the watery expanse heheard the faint sound of the Internationale. The crowd on the deck was singing, ant the stirring strains rolled over the waves. Then the sailor heard the thin crack de shots and the yellow flash of flame as officers took their own lives in the last moment befor the shipp disappeared below the waves.

The Sneg picked up dozens of survivors. Some of the womwn has lost all their clothes.Some of the men were histerucal. Later another gunboat picked up a woman who had clung to a German mine for hours before she was taken off. She was a commander´s wife. She had sung the Internationale with the others . But she put no bullet in her head. She simply leaped into the water and eigteen hours later was rescued.

Anataly Tarankesov jumped from the ship in full uniform, wearing his greaycoat, hispocket filled with manuscripts and notes, his pistol in his belt. He joined a circle of passengers who were holding hand and attempting to support each other with the help of life belts. Soon his limbs grew stiff, and he slowly swamoff. How long he had been swimming he don´t know when a tug appeared and he was hauled aboard.”.

Leningrad´s ruins

Fair punishment

At the end of World War II the Germans tried their own medicine. Before the advance of the Russian army, attempts were made to evacuate civilians from East Prussia to the west by ship, and several ships were sunk, including the Wilhem Gustoff on January 30, 1945 with a total of 10,582 passengers and crew. From them 9600 were dead.

All four captains on the Gustloff survived and that its sinking, but an official naval inquiry was started only against Wilhelm Zahn. His degree of responsibility was never resolved. There does not seem to be much value on their part as the Costa Concordia captain recently also demonstrated.

This topic is limited to the last years of World War II and to Eastern Europe: Slavic children were kept in special camps for the sole purpose of delivering blood to wounded German soldiers and officers in military lazarettos. More than a dozen such camps have been named and recognised by sources and witnesses; towards the end of WWII some of the “Vampire Camps of the Wehrmacht” were transferred to Germany. 

The children were collected on the street or taken by force from their parents. Depending on the rarity of their blood group they had to deliver blood once a week, or even more frequently. The age-limit was from 5 years (often lower) till puberty. The withdrawal of blood is remembered by the victims as a coarse procedure that caused considerable pain. 

After blood withdrawal, the children were given candy – but no nourishing sustenance. When the children inmates of these camps were bled dry, they were disposed of by gas-wagon or shut. Very few survived. The documentation on the procedure is poor. Relevant historical documents from the times were found mostly in Eastern Europe, not in Germany. Systematic historic research has not yet been undertaken anywhere. 

The paucity of documents deserves special interest: The demand for fresh blood increased during the course of the war. Medical personnel indoctrinated in Nazi race theory knew of the “risks” they run of mix Slavic with Arian blood. The loss in manpower could be reduced by transfusing “inferior” Slavic children’s blood to wounded German combatants – a typical dilemma between ideology and experience. Transfusing Slavic blood to Arian military had to be kept as a strict secret by the Wehrmacht, particularly from the SS. The transfusions from child to wounded had to be conducted with extreme division of labour and careful compartmentalization, avoiding personal contact between “donor” and recipient. Following WWII the Soviet authorities had no interest in recognising this small group of children as victims. The practice came to light only as a by-product of war crime trials and thanks to recent testimony of survivors.

Vincent C. Frank-Steiner (Basel, Switzerland) – Slavic children forced to donate their blood for wounded enemy soldiers

One of these unknown massacres that occurred after the war was the one committed against Italians residing in the Istria peninsula, simply for being Italians and to evict them from the land they had occupied for centuries.The Foibe massacres were called.

  The peninsula was always populated mainly by Italians and Slavs.

Italian presence 1900-1910

Italian sources estimate that some 350,000 Italians (along with a few thousand anti-Communist Slovenes and Croats) were forced to flee these areas as a result of the conflict. Many were terrorized by Tito’s paramilitary forces, who massacred thousands of Italians in the Foibes and requested indiscriminate bombardment by the allies of the Italian civilian population, such as in small Zara. 

Italian victims

The name was derived from a local geological feature, a type of deep karst sinkhole called foibe, because the murderers threw their victims at those foibes. 

After the Italian defeat, these actions became widespread, now directed exclusively towards the Italian population and in greater numbers, from several hundred to many thousands of people, according to Slavic or Italian sources. 

Some places of killings

Tens of thousands of Italian fascists, anti-fascists and also civilians were thrown into the foibe. Some were first shot; other times they were thrown alive; or they were tied two by two, only one received the shot and they were thrown together to death in the pit [appointment required]. Many of these corpses are still there, not located, since in the Istrian area alone, more than 1,700 narrow sinkholes up to 200 meters deep are cataloged.6 170 bodies have already been extracted from these graves.7 Some of the associated names to this massacre would be those of Norma Cossetto or Francesco Bonifacio.

Norma Cosetto´s story deserves to be remembered.

Norma Cossetto was born in Visinada (Western Istria) in 1920, into an Italian bourgeois family from Istria. From a young age she joined the Italian youth organizations of Pola and enrolled in 1939 at the University of Padua to graduate as a professor of Italian literature. 

Norma Cosetto

In September 1943 (after the Italian Armistice) Norma was preparing her graduation thesis (entitled “Istria Rossa”), when she was kidnapped by Tito’s troops and imprisoned for having refused to collaborate with the partisans against the Italians.

On October 5, 1943, after being repeatedly tortured and raped, she was thrown alive in a foiba, along with three dozen other Italians. Out of extreme contempt, Norma (who was a physically beautiful girl, 2) had her breasts amputated by executioners before being thrown into the chasm. A week later, his remains were found by German troops, who shot some of his torturers.

The foiba where student Norma Cossetto was thrown alive is located near Pirano, in northwestern Istria.

After the Second World War his death has been prosecuted as emblematic of the Foibe massacres and the ethnic cleansing carried out by Slavs in Istria: in 1949 the University of Padua awarded him the laurea “honoris causa” and at the beginning of 2005 the Italian President Ciampi awarded him the “Medaglia d’oro al merito civile”.

In July 2011 the cities of Trieste and Narni (Terni) dedicated a street to it.

Some italians films, and books, deal with the subject.

https://www.filmaffinity.com/ie/film385770.html

https://www.filmaffinity.com/ie/film411183.html

https://books.google.es/books?id=hhD0R8DBr_UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Petacco&ei=UY49R9e7OpeS7QKTuu3BAg&sig=093Luifi2PuSl4AyuVhwZFe-GUA&redir_esc=y&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Petacco&f=false

Belarus is a Soviet republic that has been part of Russia centuries ago, After 1918, borders Poland on its western border, previously the Russian empire included Poland and extended to limit with Germany.

Belarus suffered enormous human and material losses. According to official figures, 2 million 200 thousand citizens were destroyed (every 4 inhabitants). Some researchers increase this number to 2.9 million people. 380,000 people were taken to forced labor in Germany, of which 260,000 did not return to their homeland, and most of them died.

Rosgachev District

Khatyn is a town where the Germans burned all its inhabitants alive, as they did in thousands of villages.

An inscription is engraved on one of the Khatyn monuments: “We burn ourselves alive in the fire. Our request to all: that pain and sadness become a powerful power so that it can perpetuate peace and tranquility on Earth” . These words are addressed to us and to our children.

There is a very interesting book :

CRIMES GERMAN Fascist Occupants IN BELARUS 1941 – 1944 Compiled by:

3. I. Beluga, N. And Kaminsky, A. L. Manaenkov,

A.V. Semenova, A.A. Factorovich, I.P. Khovratovich,

Candidate of Historical Sciences G. N. Shevela

Editors:

Candidates of historical sciences

P.P. Lipilo and V.F. Romanovsky

Bielorrusia, 1965 .– 464 p.

This book details the atrocities committed by the Germans narrated by survivors to commissions of inquiry after the populations were liberated by the Russian army.

Rosgachev District

The No. 126 details the atrocities committed in Rogachev’s dostrict. It is very interesting because in addition to the systematic destruction of the region’s wealth and culture, it details the murder of the inhabitants by various methods, burying them alive, burning their houses with them inside, shooting them and all kinds of atrocities. And how the German assassins tried to erase the traces of their crimes when the Russian army approached.

It even has a list of the main assassins at the end of the writing.

It is a compendium of everything they did in Belarus and the areas occupied by them.

Number 126

From an act of the Rogachev district commission for the investigation of atrocities committed by Nazi invaders in the district in 1941—1943

December 15, 1944

We, the undersigned, are a commission composed of the chairman of the commission,

Secretary of Rogachev RK CP (b) B Sverdlov Samuil Monosovich, members of the commission: Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Rogachev District Council

deputies of workers Drachev Karp Mikhailovich, chairman of the executive committee of the Rogachev city Council of deputies of workers Yakutovich

Roman Grigoryevich, the prosecutor of the Rogachev district Levina Raisa Samuilovna, residents of the mountains. Rogachev: Shubin Evgeny Stepanovich, Streltsov Stepan Alekseevich, Pogulyaev Ivan Grigoryevich, Rector

Rogachev Orthodox parish priest Alexander MikhailoVich Khvedosyuk, doctor of the Rogachev hospital Anatoly Sorokoumov Ivanovich and teacher of Rogachev secondary school Fedchenko Yadvigi Alexandrovna, drew up the present act of atrocities and atrocities committed by the Nazi invaders and their accomplices civilians of the Rogachev district of the Gomel region Belorussian SSR.

On August 15, 1941, the Nazi invaders, having occupied the territory of the Rogachev district, introduced the regime of bloody terror and robbery.and violence.

During the period of occupation of the Rogachev district, German occupants destroyed and destroyed the entire industry of the region: a canned milk factory, a timber factory, a cardboard factory, a flax factory, a distillery,bakery, brick factory and 22 industrial cooperatives.

Grodno

The Germans destroyed the city’s public utilities. In the mountains. Rogachev 1,230 homes were burned and destroyed. The invaders destroyed and destroyed Cultural and educational institutions of the region: Teacher Institute,school of tractor mechanics, school of nurses, school [for] training agricultural personnel, vocational school, [school] FZO, destroyed 51 schools, 5 orphanages, 8 kindergartens, 23 houses of social cultureand a club, the House of Pioneers, the House of party inquiry, the House of the teacher, a cinema, 52 libraries, a printing house. Germans destroyed healthcare facilities district, destroyed collective farms, state farms, MTS, burned all public

the construction of collective farms and 5,109 houses of collective farmers and individual farmers, sacked collective farm livestock, and seized livestock from 79 percent.collective farmers and individual farmers …

Nazi occupiers and their accomplices did not stop on destruction and looting. From the very first days of the occupation, they began mass extermination of peaceful Soviet citizens of all nationalities

of any gender and age by killing, executions, burning, burial alive in the ground, starvation [and other] brutal ways.

The extermination was carried out according to the premeditated Nazis plan, without investigation and trial.

Partisan hanged Minsk

The first executions were carried out by German executioners near the sawmill, in the basements and in the courtyard of the former. central warehouse. As pointed witness Naydenova, there the Germans were shot ex. the chairman Maxim Pribylsky plant’s plant committee, employee of the district executive committee Frumenkov and many others.

In the first week of November 1941 in the mountains. Rogachev fascist barbarians committed the most bloody and atrocious crime: in a ditch behind a cardboard factory 70 meters from the river. The German executioners killed about 3 thousand Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality. By means of this wild bloodthirsty pogrom, the fascist bastards destroyed everything that was completely left in Rogachev, the Jewish population of all ages – from infants to the deep old people. Before the execution, the executioners scoffed at their victims for a long time. Fascists kept men, women and children in raw cold cellars of the former warehouse, from where they drove them every day to the hardest work. Driven by German sticks, the doomed removed stones and bricks, carried sand and water. Women and teenagers raked hands of sewage from the latrines, on which there were signs: “Only for the Germans. ”

Burning factories

Mocking defenseless people in early November

Fascist cannibals drove all the Jews into the building of the former warehouses, divided the people and took them to the moat in batches. The Nazis forced their victims to lie in rows in the ditch, and then they shot them with machine guns and rifles or simply killed them with butts.

The Nazis took small children by the feet, hit their head on frozen ground and threw them into the ditch into a common pile of the dead.

In March 1942, in the same ditch, they were tortured and executed.

300 Soviet citizens of Jewish and Gypsy nationalities, gathered from all over the region. A little later, mass executions of Soviet citizens were carried out by German executioners in the Russian cemetery over the Dnieper. This terrible place Rogachev called “the valley of death.”

Here executions were carried out daily. Germans in the cemetery in advance dug a hole 3 m wide, 6 m long and 3 m deep, and when this hole filled with corpses, pulled out a new hole. There are such pits in this “valley death ”was 10.

The reprisal at the cemetery was usually carried out as follows: the Nazis led to the next well of the doomed, put them in a row and shot.

The bodies were covered with a thin layer of earth. Then another party followed, etc.

To the “valley of death” from the Gestapo building was trodden by hundreds suicide bombing track. There they shot loners, in groups of 10— 20 pax Witness Simanenko Nina says that in the “valley deaths ”, well-known residents of Rogachev Karasik, Khokhov were shot

Mikhail, teacher Andreev Grigory and others, as well as the director of the Gorodets MTS Soldatenko, chairman of the Zabolotsky village council Shevelev, Chairman of the collective farm “Revolution” Kupreev Prokop, his son Nikolai and many others

November 28, 1943 in the mountains. Rogachev the Nazis drove into the barn more 200 people and burned them alive, but those who managed to escape from the flame, they shot and threw back into the fire.

Witness Chasov Mikhail Nikolaevich, living on the street. Drutskoy, d. No. 28, says: “November 27, 1943 at 2 o’clock. of the day the Germans began to throw my property out of the barn. Nearby were carts with draws.

At 6 o’clock. in the evening a closed car came to the barn. November 28 even before dawn, I again saw a closed car. From the attic of your home I began to watch what was happening. The Germans set fire to my barn and shed my neighbor Kolesnikov Lavra. Terrible screams came from the sheds.

Suddenly I saw that a man in one underwear ran out of Kolesnikov’s barn.

The man ran stumbling. Following him, the Germans began to shoot. Person fell down. Two Germans ran up, grabbed him and dragged him, and the third was walking followed by the feet and rubbed the bloody track remaining on the road. ”

There is no village or village in the region where the fascist invaders did not commit atrocities against Soviet citizens, and some villages and their inhabitants were subjected to mass extermination or were driven into fascist slavery.

Russia, search of civilians by soldiers, in Belorus there were thousands of images like this one.

So, back in 1942, the Germans burned the village of Pakhar, and on June 12, 1943

the Germans wiped out the Molot collective farm of the Malostrelkovsky village council. Eyewitnesses of this terrible picture of Starovoitov Ignat and Stolyarov

Galina said: “Early in the morning of June 12, 1943, German punitive

detachment burst into the village. The Germans began to drive residents out of their homes,

beat with butts. 6 pax were immediately killed on the street. In the hut of Kirilenko

Isaac Germans drove 20 people. residents, shot at the unfortunate with machine guns, threw grenades at the windows, then lit them. The house burned down with people. In the hut of Stolyarov Sergey, the Germans drove 25 people. and burned too. If he who tried to escape was shot. ”

The Germans burned and looted the village. Selets Stankovsky village council, where 204 people were shot, tortured and burned alive. civilians.

Timofey, the collective farmer Muzychenko accidentally saved from death, said: “On November 2, 1943, a German punitive detachment surrounded dawn the village. The Germans broke into the village, went into the houses, butts drove residents into the street. Who did not have time to leave or fell behind shot. All villagers were driven into 2 large houses.

The Germans closed the doors, opened machine-gun fire at the windows and threw grenades, and then lit the houses. The unfortunate residents who jumped out of the windows and tried to flee were shot by the Germans. After the fire on the streets there were only smoldering firebrands

and charred corpses of the inhabitants. ”

Russia, civilians on the run

Unheard of atrocities were committed by German occupiers in the Tikhinichsky village council. Here, on October 13, 1943, a German detachment of 65 men, armed with machine guns, machine guns and mortars, accompanied by a tank, broke into the village. Tolochkov. The Germans dispersed through the village, became kill everyone who catches your eye.

On the same day, 100 people. Germans broke into another locality

Tikhinichsky village council – der. Mortkovo. The village was burned, and all residents who were at home were shot.

Resident of the village The Germans put the old village of Vikhrov Mikhail Borisovich in a cage where there were German shepherds. Vikhrov sat with the dogs for a day, and then he was taken to the railway and shot.

Stepanchikov Ivan Korneevich, resident of the village Old Mazolov, the Germans tied their legs to the sleigh, harnessed the horse and dragged until until he passed out, and then killed with a hammer.

Dead civilians near Minsk

October 13, 1943 German punitive detachment in the amount of 100 people.

surrounded der. Falevichi of the Krushinovsky Village Council, burned the village and exterminated the villagers in the amount of 235 people.

In Rogachev, Gadilovichi and the Palace there were camps for prisoners of war of the Red Army captured by the Red Army, the German executioners cruelly mocked, starved and cold. Every day from the corpses carried out the corpses of prisoners of war of the Red Army.

In the long chain of crimes of the Nazi invaders, a special place is occupied by the forcible deportation of Soviet citizens to Germany, their brutal exploitation and systematic extermination. Germans arranged uniform raids on people in the village and the city. They broke into villages and took able-bodied adults and youth. In the city, there were people in homes, institutions, the bazaar, and even in movie theaters; they put them in cars, drove them to the railway station, loaded them into freight cars and took them to Germany.

Hitler’s killers tried their best to hide their traces crimes.

In 1942, in the spring, as shown by numerous witnesses of the mountains. Rogachev, the water eroded the moat, where there were more than 3 thousand corpses. Corpses swam in the river Drift. The Germans mobilized the entire population to catch swimming corpses with hooks and just with their hands, forced to bury again.

In December 1943, before retreating from the city, the Germans rummaged the whole ditch to hide the traces of his atrocities. And from the earth were dug all decomposed corpses, skeletons, bones and stacked in such stacks way: a series of corpses and bones, and on it – a series of logs. These piles were doused with kerosene, tar and ignited. Tr and day and three nights far was visible fire. The Germans did not allow anyone to tear. Produced in November and in December 1944, thorough inspections of the places of mass extermination of Soviet citizens by a special commission discovered sites in the ditch and in the cemetery, loaded with a layer of 40 cm, consisting of the remains of fired bones, ashes, lumps of very humus, residues metal parts of clothing: hooks, buttons, buckles from trousers, etc.

Despite all the tricks of the German invaders to hide traces their bloody crimes, based on statements by Soviet citizens, the interrogation protocols and testimonies the commission established that during the period of occupation of the territory of Rogachev district by German the invaders,were shot, hanged, burned alive and tortured 6 353 people peaceful Soviet citizens. The case materials are attached

lists of names for 2,225 people *, and the names of the rest are currently not possible to establish. 1 478 people were driven into German slavery. Lists attached for 1312 people. *, and the names of the rest could not be established.

Based on statements by Soviet citizens, interrogation protocols and testimony the commission found that the destruction in the mountains. Rogachev, villages and villages of the Rogachev district, the total robbery of the population, the mass extermination of peaceful Soviet citizens took place with the personal participation and direct leadership of the commandant

German Field Commandant Major Merlot, his deputy. major

Diller, commandant of the city commandant’s office of Lieutenant Rudolph,

Commissioner for Agriculture, Captain Zipkeh (large German landowner), Gestapo chief Lieutenant Mentrop, district ** agricultural commandant Bush (landowner), his deputy. Major Rolke Anthony (landowner), head of the central trading Bushman Society (Berlin entrepreneur), his deputy. Cresse, Chef Shturbana, Lieutenant Moor. About which this act is drawn up.

Chairman of the Commission Sverdlov;

members of the commission:

9 signatures are illegible

Signature assures

Chairman of the Rogachev Executive Committee

District Council of Workers’ Deputies Drachev

Civil population in Borisov

“Simple crimes and atrocities do not constitute the most serious point of the charges brought. What is serious is the fact of having consciously participated in a system of tremendous cruelty and injustice with absolute disregard for all moral principles in civilized nations ” American magistrate Dan Haywood, played by a sensational Spencer Tracy, in the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg.” 1961.

Foto film Judgment at Nuremberg.

There is a common feeling in the West that the leading German assassins were tried and punished after WWII. Nothing is further from reality. Only a handful of assassins were tried, not even the tip of the iceberg, the German assassins tried represent only the size of a seagull perched on the iceberg.

In the well-known Nuremberg trials in 1945, only 24 high-ranking German assassins were tried and not even all were punished, some were acquitted!

There were other trials :

• 1st Auschwitz trial  (1947 Krakow. Poland Polish judges )…40 criminals tried…21 executed …18 terms imprisonment…..1 acquited
• Belsen trial….( 1945 Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, Germany . British judges )….45 criminals tried…12 executed….18 terms imprisonment……. 14 acquitted…1 unable to stand trial .
• Belzec trial ( 1963-65 Munich. Germany. German judges ) ,  eight SS men of the Belzec extermination camp….8 criminal tried….1 short term imprisonment…… 7 acquited
• Chełmno trials of the Chełmno extermination camp ( 1945 Lodz. Poland Polish judges. ) 3 tried…2 ececutes…1 term imprisonment.

1963-65 Cologne. Germany. German judges.)  13 tried…. 7 term imprisonment….6 acquitted.

2001 Lodz Poland. Polish judges  ) 1 criminal tried….1 term impprisonment. He was sentenced to 8 years’ imprisonment, with consideration given to his advanced age

• Dachau trials…245 criminal tried…132 executed…103 terms imprisonment…10 acquitted

• Frankfurt Auschwitz trials…. 22 tried….0 executed …18 terms imprisonment…4 acquited ( German judges )

A public opinion poll conducted after the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials indicated that 57% of the German public were not in favor of additional Nazi trials.

• Majdanek trials, the longest Nazi war crimes trial in history, spanning over 30 years…The first one in Lublin ( Poland ) 6 tried…5 executed, 1 suicide.

The second one in Lublin an other cities of Poland 1946-1948 . 95 tried …7 executed…88 terms imprisonment, most very shorts.

Third Majdanek trial 1975-1981 Düsseldorf , Germany, 16 tried…5 acquitted, 11 shorts terms imprisonment ( German Judges )

• Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials ( Dachau Germany , USA judges )
• First trial….61 tried…49 executed…12 terms imprisonment
• Second trial …8 tried…4 executed…3 terms imprisonment…1 acquitted
• Hamburg Ravensbrück trials ( 1946-1948. Hamburg. Germany. British judges ) …38 tried…7 executed… 27  terms imprisonment……  4 acquitted
• Sobibór trial held in Hagen, Germany, in 1965 against the SS men of the Sobibor extermination ( German judges ) camp…12 tried…6 terms imprisonment…6 acquitted

• 1. Frenzel, Karl, carpenter; arrested in 1962. Accused of personally killing 42 Jews and helping to murder approximately 250,000 Jews. Found guilty of personally killing 6 Jews and of helping to murder approximately 150,000 Jews. Sentenced to life in prison.4. Ittner, Alfred, laborer. Accused of helping to kill approximately 57,000 Jews. Found guilty of having assisted in the murder of approximately 68,000 Jews. Sentenced to four years in prison.7. Lachman, Erich, mason; accused of helping to kill approximately 150,000 Jews; freed.10. Juhrs, Robert, porter and janitor; accused of helping to kill approximately 30 Jews; freed.
• 12. Lambert, Erwin, tile layer; accused of helping to kill an unknown number of Jews; freed
• 11. Zierke, Ernest, saw mill worker; accused of helping to kill approximately 30 Jews; freed.
• 9. Unverhau, Heinrich, male nurse; accused of helping to kill approximately 72,000 Jews; freed.
• 8. Shutt, Hans, salesman; accused of helping to kill approximately 86,000 Jews; freed.
• 6. Fuchs, Erich, truck driver. Helped in the construction of the gas chambers at the death camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka and was convicted for having directed experimental gassings that killed at least 3,000 Soviet prisoners. Also found guilty of assisting in the murder of at least 79,000 Jews. Sentenced to four years in prison. He died in 1984.
• 5. Dubois, Werner, mechanic. Accused of helping to kill approximately 43,000 Jews. Found guilty of having assisted in the murder of at least 15,000 Jews. Sentenced to three years in prison.
• 3. Wolf, Franz, warehouse clerk; arrested in 1964. Accused of personally killing one Jew and helping to murder 115,000 Jews. Found guilty of having assisted in the murder of at least 39,000 Jews. Sentenced to eight years in prison.
• 2. Bolender, Kurt, hotel porter; arrested in 1961. The former commander of extermination Camp III was accused of personally killing approximately 360 Jews and of helping to murder approximately 86,000 Jews. Committed suicide in prison before sentencing.

Gustav Wagner, Deputy Commandant of Sobibor, who had ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews as chief of the selections and had been sentenced to death in absentia by the Nuremberg Tribunal. With the help of the Vatican, Wagner and Franz Stangl escaped to Brazil, where Wagner was admitted as a permanent resident on April 12, 1950. Wagner lived openly in Sao Paulo until his arrest in May 1978, but the Brazilian Supreme Court refused to extradite him to Germany. According to his attorney, Gustav Wagner comitted suicide in October 1980.

• Treblinka trials in Düsseldorf, Germany.( 1951-1988 . Frankfurt & Düsseldorf, Germany , Jerusalem , Israel)  12 tried….0 executed….10 terms imprisonment…2 acquitted.

The first SS man brought to trial for war crimes committed in Treblinka was Josef (Sepp) Hirtreiter in 1951.

He was rearrested and brought to trial in Frankfurt am Main in March 1951, at his trial he was recognised by Sawek Warszawski, who left for dead in a burial pit, survived.Hirtrieier was found guilty of war crimes and was sentenced to life imprisonment on 3 March 1951.

Hirtreiter was released from prison in 1977 due ti illness. He died 6 months later in a home for the lederly in Frankfurt.

Among the crimes of which he was found guilty of were beating two prisoners until they were unconscious, because money had been found on them, then hanging them by their feet and finally killing them with a shot in the head: killing many young children ages one and one –half to two, during the unloading of transports, by seizing them by the feet and smashing their heads against the boxcars.
A very approximate summary of the judgments of the trials gives us this graph.

Importantly, many sentenced to death and all sentenced to life imprisonment had their sentences commuted for a few years in prison and in the early 1950s virtually all were free walking the streets of Germany.

Another graph of sentences when judges were Germans. 0 death sentences.

And still today the news is being heard of an old man who is being tried for his crimes, most of the time they do not even go to trial or are acquitted because of their age. The collaborationism of German justice with the Nazi assassins deserves a separate chapter.

Since the end of WWII, western historiography has led us to believe that the Normandy landing was the decisive element for the victory in Europe. Nothing is further from reality.
The Russians were already near Poland and in Operation Bragation they defeated, and eliminated, the German Army Group Center, causing them more casualties than in Stalingrad.
The Russians would have arrived alone at the Atlantic and some say that the Anglo-Saxon landing was to avoid it, because Churchill had been delated it so that the human waste in front of the Germans would suffer the Russians.

If you look at the number of Anglo-Saxon soldiers in front of the Russians, you can see the difference in effort, 2.5 million Russian soldiers against 160,000 Allied soldiers in Normandy the day of invasion (about 2 million at the end of August ), and only 50,000 in the South of France.

The initial D-Day landings were made with approximately 175,000 Allied troops against about 80,000 Wehrmacht soldiers.

Operation Bagration, which was launched on June 22, 1944, pitted 2.3,  million Russian troops, supported by 36,400 artillery pieces, 5,200 tanks and 5,300 aircraft, against the Germans’ Army Group Centre, which numbered 700,000 men, 900 tanks and 1,350 aircraft.

Within a month of launching, Bagration had succeeded. In relentless lightning attacks, Soviet forces annihilated 17 German divisions and reduced another 50 to half-strength, which translated into a net German loss of 42 divisions. Army Group Centre was no more. Moreover, the Soviets had punched a hole 400 kilometres wide and 160 kilometres long in the German front. By September, they would be knocking on German-occupied Warsaw’s door.*

Meanwhile, the western Allies, wedded to Montgomery’s unimaginative tactics, were still mired on the Normandy beachhead. Only on July 26, 1944, did their attempts to break out succeed, under Patton’s — not Montgomery’s — leadership.

Their breakout was aided by the fact that Bagration had forced the Wehrmacht to redeploy 46 divisions, including some from France, to the eastern front. Even then, the western Allies’ failure to close the Falaise pocket in August allowed the retreating Germans to escape. The Soviet juggernaut made no such mistake. Indeed, as Bagration showed, by the time the western Allies got around to launching their second front, which Stalin had been clamouring for since 1941, the Red Army almost didn’t need it.*

The total casualties in Normandy of the allies were . from D-Day to 21 August 225.000 about , in the D Day operation about 10.000.

The Red Army suffered 178.507 killed and missing and 587.308  wounded and non-battle casualties, 765.815 in total *

The casualties of the Germans , against the Russians, only in the Operation Bragation were 445.000 about.

In the West, twenty-five out of 38 German divisions had been utterly destroyed. The rest had been reduced to shattered remnants. In total, the Germans suffered 290,000 casualties in Normandy, including 23,000 dead, 67,000 wounded and around 200,000 missing or captured.

*https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-operation-bagration-was-the-real-d-day-1.1127733

** Hitler´s Greatest Defeat . Paul Adair 

 By the end of May 1944 the Wehrmacht had 58 divisions in the west, of which only 11 were deployed against the D-Day landings. At the same time, however, the Germans deployed 228 divisions in the east. Thus, the Germans had almost four times as many troops facing the Soviets. And they had less than one-20th of that number in Normandy

In order to show the outside world the magnitude of the victory of Operation Bragation, some 57,000 German prisoners, taken from the encirclement east of Minsk, were paraded through Moscow: even marching quickly and twenty abreast, they took 90 minutes to pass

Parade German Prisoners in Moscow.

Operation Bragation

So, the Operation Bragatios was a lot more important that D Day, and some people said that the D Day Celebration would have to be changed by Operation Bragation´s celebration, but that is a utopia when Russia is not even invited to the events celebrating D-Day.

My theory is that the people have a collective soul that is inherited through generations, instilled by mothers, grandmothers and relatives who make a people more hard-working, more studious or more cruel than others.

 The theory that the Nazis led by Hitler were paratroopers who fell on a peaceful and music-loving people are mere hoaxes. Given the collective amnesia suffered by the Germans who perpetrated the genocities they committed on what happened, barely softened by some official statements and with a silence that reaches new generations, it is necessary to examine the past to see the origin of the cruelty of the German people, including Austria of course.

 In the future we will talk about the behavior of the Germans in their colonies or even their behavior in America when some went with the Spanish soldiers as they had the same emperor. Now we will talk about a little known aspect, his collaboration with the Turks in the Armenian genocide.

 In his article “Today’s Turkey continues the Armenian genocide” 

https://www.voltairenet.org/article187587.html,

Thierry Meissan said : 

The declarations of President Gauck

By recognising German « co-responsibility, and even, potentially, complicity » in the 1915 massacres, German President Joachim Gauck lifted the taboo concerning the continuance of the crime, and he did so with even more courage considering the strong Turkish presence in Germany and the absence of an Armenian electorate.

An exemplary officer, Rudolf Höß acquired skill in matters of genocide in Turkey, during the 2nd Reich. He then became the director of the Auschwitz camp during the 3rd Reich.

Historians established the role of the German delegation in the genocide a long time ago. The orders of deportation signed by the Ottoman Vice-Chief of Staff, German general Fritz Bronsart von Schellendorf, have been published. The German Empire of William II had already tested genocide by exterminating the Hereros and the Namas in South-West Africa (now Namibia) in 1905. The German officers who observed and sometimes participated in the genocide of non-Muslims in Turkey put their skills to use during the Nazi régime. For example, this was the case for Rudolf Höß – his father participated in the genocide of the Hereros in 1905, as he did himself with the Armenians in 1916. He then became the commandant of the camp of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, where he massacred Jews, gypsies and Slavs.

In order to understand and prevent genocides, we must not study them from the point of view of the victims, but by correctly understanding the point of view of the executioners.

Until now, we have belived, wrongly, that the Young Turks and the Nazis were the only ones responsibles for the Armenian and Jewish genocides. But History shows us that the ideologies which led to these crimes were shared by others, before and after them, who also attempted to perpetrate them. Contrary to what we might imagine, there is no example of a genocide which was accomplished in a single operation, nor against a single population. These crimes continue for a very long time, and always concern several ethnic groups. It is therefore essential to condemn the first massacres, and to condemn the underlying ideologies in order to prevent the continuance of genocides. 

Friedrich (Fritz) Bronsart von Schellendorf He was the chief of Staff of the Ottoman Army, part of German military mission in the Ottoman Empire. . He was instrumental drafting initial war plans for the Ottoman Army. He is “depicted as the actual initiator of the scheme of the Armenian Genocide“. He was an ardent supporter of Hitler during 1930s also.

Role during the Armenian Genocide (*)↑

Because of the question of his involvement in the genocide of Armenians, Bronsart von Schellendorf attracted increased attention in recent historiography . In his controversial study of the role of German officers in the Armenian genocide, Vahakn Dadrian identified Bronsart von Schellendorf’s direct complicity, even seeing him as an instigator. Recent research has questioned this accusation. Bronsart von Schellendorf was willing to accept the Turkish measures of violence against the Armenians   and took the anti-Armenian view of the Young Turks . But, as Isabel Hull has pointed out, he was primarily guided by “military necessity”. Under this premise, he agreed to the deportation of Armenians from the border areas to Russia, focusing solely on his military responsibilities. Behind the phrase “military necessity” was the strong mistrust of the Armenian population in the hinterland of the front. Fearing a possible

Armenian uprising, German officers like Bronsart von Schellendorf, and Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz (1843-1916), supported a deportation of the Armenian population. At the same time, Bronsart von Schellendorf did not intend to destroy the Armenians. Nevertheless, by supporting the deportation plan he accepted the risk of  Armenians being killed in the deportation. Thus, he was involved in the genocide planned and undertaken by the Young Turks. But even when the genocidal intention of the Turks became unmistakable, Bronsart von Schellendorf was not willing to distance himself from their actions or even to intervene, as other German officers such as Colmar von der Goltz or Otto Liman von Sanders did. Moreover, after the First World War, he repeatedly defended the Young Turk leadership in newspaper articles. In an article in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of July 24, 1921, on the occasion of the trial of the Talat Pasha (1874-1921) murderer, he attempted to justify the Turks and himself by explaining that the death of the Armenians was only the effect of the inability of the Turks to carry out an orderly deportation. In doing so, he not only drew on widespread images of well-organised Germans and disorganised Orientals, but also denied the Young Turks’ intention of destroying the Armenians. Thus, together with a number of other former German officers (including Hans Humann (1878-1933), he contributed towards the denial of the murder of the Armenians. The motive for this behavior was partly due to a continued loyalty to the Turks and partly to a fundamentally defensive attitude against all allegations of the Entente regarding German involvement. In the case of Bronsart von Schellendorf, there was direct personal involvement as Ottoman chief of staff.

(*) https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/bronsart_von_schellendorf_friedrich

Among the ramblings of WWII, those committed on children are, in my opinion, the worst. Of course the Germans are the main culprits of what happened, since they not only committed them but also induced their partners, the Baltic countries, the Austrians, the Romanians, the Hungarians, etc. to carry out all kinds of atrocities. One of the German specialties was to murder entire towns, men, women and children, in Belarus and throughout the USSR thousands of towns were the victims, but as is often the case, even today, the further east the atrocities occur, the more unknown they are. The Lidice massacre was the complete destruction of the village of Lidice, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. In reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich  

Reinhard Heydrich

In the late spring of 1942,all 173 males from the village who were over 15 years of age were executed on 10 June 1942. A further 11 men from the village but who were not present at the time, were later arrested and executed soon afterwards, along with several others who were already under arrest. The 184 women and 88 children were deported to concentration camps; a few children who were considered racially suitable and thus eligible for Germanisation were handed over to SS families and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp where they were gassed.

But it is not our intention to describe the horror suffered by the unhappy inhabitants of that village, for this you can see the links at the bottom of this article, but rather to follow the fate of the rare children abducted and who survived that barbarism.

Three days after the attack, Nazi officials separated the young from their mothers, assuring all that a reunion would follow relocation. The women boarded trucks bound for Ravensbrückconcentration camp, and most of the children left for a camp in Łódź, Poland.

The young survivors arrived in Łódź with a message from their Nazi captors: “The children are taking with them only what they wear. No special care is to be provided.” Indeed, the only “care” given at the camp was extensive physical testing. German doctors measured the children’s facial features, identifying those with “Aryan” characteristics as candidates for Germanization —a process where suitably featured non-German children were adopted by German families.

In total, nine children met the criteria for Germanization and were sent to Puschkau, Poland, to learn German and begin the assimilation process. On July 2, the remaining 81 children arrived at Chelmno  extermination camp. Historians believe they were killed in mobile gas chambers that same day. 

By the end of the war, 340 of Lidice’s 503 residents were dead as a direct result of the June 10 massacre. 143 women and 17 children, including those born just after the attack, eventually returned to the ruins of their hometown and began the arduous task of resurrecting the community.

(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-lidice-massacre-180970242/ )

Only 17 children come back, many only speaking German because they were adopted by German families ( nazis of course ).

Lidice School

Some histories of the survivors :

Anna Hanfová, one of three siblings selected for Germanization, was one of the first lost children to return. She spent the remainder of the war living in eastern Germany but maintained limited contact with her sister Marie and cousin Emilie Frejová, and when Anna returned to Lidice, she led authorities to both relatives’ new German homes.

Otto and Freda Kuckuk, a well-to-do couple with strong SS ties, had adopted Frejová. In Witnesses to War, author Michael Leapman writes that Frejová adjusted well, but Marie’s new life was more complicated: Her adoptive family treated her like a slave and convinced her that the Czech were a subservient race. It took several years for Marie to overcome this indoctrinated belief.

Václav, the third sibling, refused to cooperate with his captors; he drifted between children’s homes and incurred brutal punishments for unruly behavior. In late 1945, Josefina Napravilova, a humanitarian who located about 40 lost Czech children during the aftermath of the war, encountered Vaclav at a displaced persons camp. He was slow to trust her but later dubbed Napravilova his “second mother.”

Elizabeth White, a historian at theUnoited States Holocaust Memorial Museum, , explains the difficulty of the children’s rehabilitation process, as most selected for Germanization were taken from home at a young age and eventually forgot their Czech heritage.

“When [the children] were found and sent back, they didn’t remember how to speak Czech,” White says. “One girl’s mother survived Ravensbrück but had tuberculosis and died four months after she came back. At first when they spoke, they had to use a translator.”

(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-lidice-massacre-180970242/)

Lídice massacreThe exterminion of Lidice

The massacre of Lidic

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/lidice.html
The lost children

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-lidice-massacre-180970242/

Nazis filmed the destruction of my village.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-27924054
One survivor

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-19506080

Another survivor

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.obituaries/c/AU_jl7myfNA?pli=1
Tjhe Lidice massacre after 65 years

https://english.radio.cz/lidice-massacre-after-65-years-8607185
An example of collective guilty 70 years after

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/columnists/lidice-an-example-of-collective-guilt-70-years-later

At a time when phil-Nazi or openly Nazi movements are emerging in Europe, especially in Ukraine and the Baltic regions, it is important to remember the atrocities committed by Ukrainian collaborators with the Germans in Belarus.
An artícle of Vitaly SNEGIRYOV, 21 March 2014, in the Internet magazine  Pитм Eвразий literally makes your hair stand on end.

https://www.ritmeurasia.org/news–2014-03-21–krovavyj-sled-banderovcev-v-belorussii-11911

OUR HISTORY

Today, the events taking place in Ukraine are closely watched in neighboring Belarus. And not only because of certain geopolitical and historical parallels. In partisan Belarus, the memory of the crimes committed against the Belarusian people by the Bandera detachments, transferred to the aid of the occupying Nazi units and garrisons, is alive.

Portraits of Bandera and Shukhevych in the center of today’s Kiev make old veterans from Belarus re-experience everything that they saw during the Great Patriotic War, and even after its end. The attempt to protect the murderers and rapists from the OUN-UPA by the official representative of Ukraine to the UN, who stated that the Russian / Soviet justice fabricated materials about the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists for the Nuremberg trials, cannot but be outraged.

Bandera became the banner of the Kiev Maidan

The bloody trail left by the Bandera on the Belarusian soil still excites the people’s memory, appeals to the condemnation of both the collaborators themselves and their modern lawyers.

The so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army was created on October 14, 1942. The UPA was headed by Roman Shukhevych – the owner of two knightly orders of Nazi Germany. It was the UPA that the fascists tried to oppose to the truly popular mass partisan movement that had flared up in Belarus. For this purpose, not only were the UPA units formed in Ukraine actively used, but also combat units were created from among the prisoners of the Red Army-Ukrainians, whom the representatives of the UPA actively processed. Moreover, this activity of Ukrainian emissaries, with the active assistance of the German fascist administration, began on the territory of Belarus even before the official creation of the UPA – in 1941.

 As a result, Ukrainian auxiliary police battalions were created, which were reinforced by 8 battalions formed directly in Ukraine (101, 102, 109, 115, 118, 136, 137 and 201st). Later, other Bandera units were also deployed to Belarus.

Armed and ready to “work”

Due to the fact that the Belarusian policemen were reluctant to carry out punitive operations, as they feared for their fate, the Nazis entrusted these “functions” to the alien battalions of Bandera. And they fully justified the hopes of the invaders – they burned and killed indiscriminately and with pity, leaving continuous ashes and mountains of people tortured and burned alive on the Belarusian land.

One of the most famous and monstrous crimes was the participation of a company of the 118th battalion, most of whose personnel were Ukrainian nationalists, in a joint operation with the Germans to destroy the village of Khatyn on March 22, 1943. The village was burned to the ground. Together with the buildings, 149 civilians were shot and burned alive. About half of them are minor children, most of the other half are women and frail old people. Now Khatyn is known all over the world – a memorial complex was created on the site of the burnt village.

Have already “worked” …

Modern followers of Bandera and Shukhevych diligently disown the crime committed in Khatyn, trying to prove that Ukrainian nationalists from the 118th battalion were “immigrants from the Red Army.” However, the “handwriting” of sadists and punishers is quite recognizable. The militants of Shukhevych and other Bandera punishers and scum in Belarus also committed other atrocities, which have been fully proven to date, but have not received such fame as the Khatyn tragedy. Particularly distinguished was the 201st battalion, the 1st hundred of which, before the creation of the UPA, was commanded by the “hero” of present-day Ukraine Roman Shukhevych (this “high rank” was awarded to him by President V. Yushchenko, with which the current illegitimate “rulers” of Ukraine and leaders of the Maidan). Punishers and scoundrels from the 201st battalion of the Schutzmanschaft (security police) left a bloody memory of themselves, zealously helping the Nazis during the punitive operations “Swamp Fever” in the Vitebsk region, “Triangle” in the Brest region, “Cottbus” in the Minsk and Vitebsk regions …

Operation Swamp Fever was carried out by the Nazis with the active participation of Bandera from August 25 to September 20, 1942 in the area of ​​Lake Domzharitskoye in order to defeat the partisan detachment “Roman” (commander RA Dyakov). But in stubborn battles, the partisans inflicted heavy counterattacks on the punishers, and they refused to pursue. And the second stage of this operation was unsuccessful for the Germans and Bandera. It was supposed to destroy the partisan detachments “Avenger” (commander VT Voronyansky) and “Struggle” (commander SN Dolganov), which held the defense in the interfluve of Viliya and Ilia. The partisans not only escaped from the encirclement, but also led the bulk of the civilian population to the area of ​​the Pedan-Mstizh villages.

Then, the Nazis and Bandera, who were brutalized by failures, conducted four punitive operations against the defenseless civilian population. They did much better at fighting defenseless people. As a result, more than 10 thousand people were killed and burned alive, more than 1200 were taken to work in Germany. In the villages of Bobrovichi and Vygoschi, 707 people were killed at the same time. On September 10, 1942, chastisers destroyed all 37 houses and 135 inhabitants of the Zatishye village. On September 15, 217 residents of the village of Vyada were killed, and the village itself was burned. 143 residents of the neighboring village of Tupichitsa were killed, and their houses were burned. Like Khatyn, Tupichitsy, which have been known to historians since 1552, irrevocably disappeared from the map of Belarus.

This is also the work of punishers

During Operation Triangle in the Brest region, on September 11, 1942, residents of the village of Dremlevo in the Zhabinka district gathered to celebrate the feast of John the Baptist, which, according to historians, they celebrated annually since 1561, especially since the occupiers did not formally object to religious rituals. But right during the holiday, punishers burst into the village – many residents were killed right on the street, the rest were driven into a barn and burned. 190 Belarusians were killed.

Operation Triangle lasted 17 days. In the village of Borisovka, 206 people were shot, 225 houses were burned. In the village of Leplevka, the monsters killed 54 children and their teacher, an employee of the Domachevo orphanage. The same atrocities were committed in Kamenka (152 people died), Borki (705 people, including 372 women and 130 children), Zelena Buda (28 dead), Zabolotye (289 dead). Ukrainian nationalists were in the forefront of the punishers in all these cases.

Operation Cottbus began on June 20, 1943. Among others, the 15th, 102nd, 118th and 237th auxiliary police battalions were involved. The operation was carried out in the Minsk and Vitebsk regions with the active support of tanks, aviation and artillery. Not only partisan detachments were surrounded, but also many civilians and children. The partisans were forced to retreat into impenetrable forests and swamps. Civilians were hiding with them. A terrible hunger began. As a result of Operation Cottbus, more than 10 thousand people were killed.

In a letter to Metropolitan A. Sheptytsky, the idol of today’s Maidan Ukraine, Shukhevych, unabashedly reported in the summer of 1942 about his “exploits”: “Your holy excellence. We are doing well, the Germans are satisfied with our work. ” The “work” was murder and torture, the destruction of children, old people and women. It is no coincidence that the high-ranking SS man Bach-Zalevsky, who later testified at the Nuremberg Tribunal, considered this battalion the best among his punishers. Shukhevych, whose portraits adorn the center of Kiev today, was eventually awarded the Iron Cross “for diligence in military work.”

Meanwhile, in clashes with the partisans, the Schutzmans were much less successful. After heavy punitive battles in the Lepel area (Vitebsk region), the Bandera simply fled, fleeing the zone saturated with partisans.

The UPA, by the way, was the direct ideological successor of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), whose members formed the backbone of the new organization. On the territory of Belarus, the OUN members, actively supported from abroad, began their activities since the reunification of Western Belarus and Ukraine with the USSR in 1939. After the start of the Nazi occupation, the southern regions of Belarus were included in the Reichskommissariat “Ukraine”. In this regard, it was the Brest region, as the southern region of Belarus, that was subjected to powerful attacks by punishers from the UPA. In total, about 250 units of Ukrainian nationalists operated in the Brest region. OUN activists under the leadership of Bandera and Melnik actively joined the SS Galicia division created with the direct support of Himmler himself.

Such posters called punishers to fight “Bolshevism”, but in reality – with the elderly, women and children

In the summer of 1942, another SS battalion, consisting of Ukrainian nationalists, arrived in Brest. The Jews had already been destroyed by this time, therefore, mass executions of Poles, underground workers, and all Belarusians began, who showed the slightest dissatisfaction with the “new” fascist “order” or were suspected of having links with partisans.

The village of Lelikovo in the Kobrin district of the Brest region of Belarus is located just a few kilometers from the current Belarusian-Ukrainian border. This is a typical Belarusian village, whose fate has been repeated by hundreds of villages. Despite the fact that Belarusians-Poleshuk (residents of Polesie – the southern part of Belarus), both in speech and in customs, differ little from the population of the border part of Ukraine, the Belarusian-Ukrainian border became a significant border, beyond which the influence of the OUN and UPA ended. Poleshuk, like the rest of the Belarusians, in their overwhelming majority supported the Soviet partisans. It was in Polesie that the detachments of Ukrainian nationalists, hoping to find allies for themselves in the “struggle for Great Ukraine”, met fierce resistance from partisan detachments.

OUN and UPA did not forgive the Belarusians for this. After the Red Army units and the partisan brigades that joined their ranks went to the west to beat the retreating fascists, a ruthless terror was launched against the civilian population of Belarusian villages by Bandera gangs. In Lelikovo, the journalists of “Sovetskaya Belorussia” conducted a mass poll of the local population in 2006 immediately after it was announced in Kiev that the OUN-UPA members of Bandera were now “heroes” of Ukraine. The inhabitants of the Belarusian village were outraged to the depths of their souls about what had happened. Here are just a few responses. “Bandera’s people killed us. What kind of heroes are they? What kind of liberators are they? ” – Petr Shepetyuk, head of the Lelikovsky village club, was indignant. He was supported by his wife Anastasia: “Although I was a child, I remember well how my father discussed the next raids of Bandera at the evenings with fellow villagers.” Her uncle Ivan Shepetyuk (in Polesie often residents of an entire village have the same surname) remembered how Bandera killed his father, also Ivan Shepetyuk. Their father was also killed at Evdokia Gogniuk. During the war he mined salt for the partisans. And Nikolai Korzh recalled in detail the day of April 24, 1945: “We, small children, hid on the street, in a potato pit. Bandera’s men saw us and threw a grenade. Mitya, he was already 14 years old, did not have time to jump out of the pit with the one-year-old Yakov in his arms. Perished. “

The same situation, as in Lelikovo, was in almost all the villages of the Divinsky district and other places in Polesie. Most of all, Belarusians are outraged by the fact that the brutal murders and tortures that took place almost until the mid-1950s, until the OUN-UPA Bandera members were finally defeated, were not committed by some aliens, but by residents of neighboring Ukrainian villages located just a few kilometers from Belarusian villages – the detachments of Dvorko, Ermak, Konopelko, Artemchuk, Yushchik, Savchuk and other scoundrels and scum. In the period from 1944 to 1946 alone, the OUN-UPA carried out 2384 terrorist attacks and sabotage in Belarus. 1,012 people were killed. There is data for 1945. Of those who fell at the hands of Bandera, only 50 were employees of the NKVD, 8 were officers, 28 were privates and sergeants of the Red Army. The remaining 298 people killed in the border regions of Belarus in 1945 were women, old people and children.

No forgiveness for the fiends!

Khatyn. A common memorial in memory of the Belarusian villages burned down by punishers

But here’s what is disturbing. It would seem that in Belarus, where every fourth resident died during the war, and according to updated data, every third resident, the coming to power in Kiev of the Maidan forces, acting under Bandera slogans, should cause hostility and alarm. But the younger generation, who does not know anything about the war, increasingly begins to believe the fables that the bloody scum and scoundrels from the OUN-UPA are in fact “heroes who fought for the freedom of Ukraine”. And recently, on the state Belarusian TV, TV journalist Tengiz Dumbadze, who came from Georgia and made a rapid career in publicly supporting the authorities’ position on the non-recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, said at all: you need to understand and even accept that Bandera and Shukhevych are real heroes for many Ukrainians …

It is a pity if the lessons of the Maidan did not teach anyone anything. Whoever forgets the indelible bloody trail of the OUN-UPA militants on the Belarusian soil, he risks that someday the same trail will be left on his fate.

And more attrocities of the Germans in Bielorrusia.

German attrocities

___________

Phото – http://www.radzima.org/ru/mesto/hatyny.html

 The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaky left thousands of victims, but it also left thousands of orphans and their history is unknown to the general public.

One hopes that after this tragedy the survivors and the rest of Japan would turn to help these unhappy children, but for many it was just the opposite, they took advantage of them until they caused their death in many cases.

The help to these children was little or no, many died in the following days.

Shoso Kawamoto, a survivor of the US atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, has been telling the “untold story” of the nuclear attack on August 6, 1945

Kawamato lost his parents and four of his six siblings in the atomic attack when he was just 11.

Following the devastation, some orphans died of starvation and many girls were sold to the Yakuza [organized crime syndicate] to work as prostitutes, Kawamoto said.

“We were desperate for survival, desperate for food,” the 82-year-old museum volunteer recalled. “Some orphans assaulted whoever had food and snatched it from their hand.”

Orphans did not receive any support during the chaos of the postwar period, so they had no choice other than to work for the Yakuza, who came to Hiroshima and started taking care of them, he said.

takakao Gokan was 11 years old when the atomic bomb spread terror in Hiroshima,she is now 86 and tells it in first person.

“I felt like a star full of needles went through my body. And suddenly the fire arose. I don’t remember well, but a few minutes later, I heard a great crash that threw me at a distance of more than 8 meters. I heard a person yelling at me : “Danger!” At that moment the entire school building collapsed and a soldier covered me overhead. It was probably he who shouted “Danger!”. Everything was dark and I couldn’t hear anything. Little by little “I started to see and a little light came in. I dug through the remains to get out and when I could see myself I noticed that my face was swollen and my skin hung down. I didn’t recognize anyone’s faces.”

“At that moment Ishizaki, one of my teachers, appeared and carried me on his shoulders to the school gym where my injured classmates were. They gave me an injection of camphor. I was almost dead. Everything was scorched, full of ashes … no You could tell if there were people or buildings. There were no doctors, no food, no medicine. We were just lying down and trying to sleep. They put a heart-shaped flower leaf on the wounds. The heart heals everything. As a result of the explosion two fingers of my right hand joined me. They separated when I put that flower. I was in the gym for three months. It was very hard. I remember a child my age who asked for water and no one could give it to him, of course. dying. His face was full of roe and flies. That memory still comes to me today; it marked me a lot. I don’t remember his name. I saw a window from which smoke was coming out. And I understood that the child, my companion, had died and they were burning him. She had burns on her arm and bugs. I wondered if I would be next. “

Family members and acquaintances came to the gym asking why we were there. A lady asked me for my name. She was looking for her daughter, but she did not find her, and she gave me some fruit. For the first time since the atomic bomb fell I felt some life. We slept on the ground. We were still without beds or medicine. In all that time (two weeks had already passed) only one doctor came from Tokyo twice. Nearby was a stone staircase. When the bomb exploded, someone died instantly. Only the shadow of the person remained. “

The role of the Yakuza, that sinister organization in the trade of children was deplorable, the unfortunate who fell into its clutches suffered horribly.

One of the Yakuza’s businesses was sexual exploitation,

After helping the Japanese government procure “comfort women” for Japanese and then American soldiers, the yakuza continued to develop the commercial sex industry in Japan. The 1970s and 1980s proved to be a prosperous time for Japan and the yakuza. Towards the end of the 1960s, the tourism industry exploded as Japanese citizens earned larger incomes and a strong yen made travel abroad relatively inexpensive. Tourism was not utilized to strengthen cultural education, though. Rather, Japanese men lined up at airports to experience wild weekends abroad with an itinerary focused on sex parties. Although the yakuza did not invent sex tourism, they capitalized on this new tourism frenzy by organizing large-scale sex tours throughout East Asia.

The yakuza first exploited this new industry in Taiwan and then Korea. In Korea, they organized trips to kisaeng parties. Kisaeng is a Korean word traditionally associated with female entertainers, very similar to Japanese geisha, but with the influx of tourists these women simply became known as prostitutes. By the end of the 1970s more than 650,000 Japanese citizens visited Korea annually with eighty percent of visitors listing kisaeng as the primary focus of their trip. Sex tourism became so popular that major airlines such as Japan Air Lines listed kisaeng parties amongst the recommended tourist activities in their guidebooks for Korea.

During the 1970s the yakuza expanded the sex tourism industry to Thailand and the Philippines where many of the sex workers were sold into sex slavery by their poor families. The Yakuza did not control the industry in these countries; instead they worked with local gang members to bribe local village leaders to convince families to sell daughters into the sex industry. The yakuza also financed many of the clubs in which Japanese men frequented in these foreign countries and led many of the sex tours as guides to the best “sex spots.”

Japan has not ratified the United Nations’ Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons (UNTIP). Although several news stories highlighted the plight of foreign sex slaves in Japan throughout the 1990’s, the Japanese government did little to decrease human trafficking until 2004. In 2004 the U.S. Department of State placed Japan on the “Tier 2 Watch List” which harmed Japan’s image as a safe and relatively crime free country and motivated the Japanese government to act.*

* http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1265/human-trafficking-the-japanese-commercial-sex-industry-and-the-yakuza-recommendations-for-the-japanese-government

More about the orphans

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/795/

Sosho Kawamoto remembers

   The history of WWII has been told almost 100% from the Western point of view and more specifically German. Now in the second decade of the 21st century and 75 years after the end of the war we know that the majority of the German government, police, army and secret police of West Germany was composed of a majority, or all, of Nazis. The Americans gave priority to the cold war against Russia and the punishment of the murderers was relegated to second or third place. The historiography about the war came practically from the German side, especially from the war in the East, and Anglo-Saxon historians, in many cases, relied on them. It was not until a few decades ago that English and American historians directly consulted Russian archives that offer a totally different experience from what happened in the  East.

Russian women and children

   An example of this is the reality of the rapes of     women. The rapes of German women by the Russians have been publicized ad nauseam. Also recently it has been shown that other allies also raped German women but the rape, and murder, of Russian women and girls by the Germans lies in complete oblivion. With the aggravating circumstance that the vast majority of the raped German women were still alive, but the percentage of Russian women, and those from other nations, murdered after raping them by the Germans is very high.

To this is added that Russian historians and the Russian people in general are reluctant to deal with this subject that threatens their honor.

Moscow historian Ksenia Sak recently published a book called “Missing and Forgotten: Women Raped in the Soviet Occupied Territories.”

The report is emotionally horrible in terms of factual content, but on this subject it is necessary to speak: violence against women by the occupiers of the Axis countries and local collaborationist units was actually legalized as part of the implementation of the plan. Ost for genocide. civilians in Poland, Russia, Belarus, the Baltic countries and other territories within the Soviet Union.

The Germans used rape in many cases in a systematic way, creating brothels with forcibly recruited women, in the occupied cities there was a veritable hunt for young women for those brothels and many mothers who went out to look for some food never returned.

Some examples :

In Moldova, the Germans raped a 9-year-old girl – her mother found her covered in blood, unconscious. The next day, her mother went to the commander’s office and filed a complaint – they laughed at her, it all ended in nothing.

The historian found in the archives the fact of the rape by German soldiers of a 9-year-old girl who was skiing. There have been cases of rape of older women, up to the age of 68. These crimes were almost always accompanied by beatings and injuries, and some victims went crazy and tried to hang themselves.

According to Ksenia Sak, the rapes of Soviet women committed by soldiers of the Wehrmacht, SS, SD and collaborators in the occupied territories were practically not documented during the first year and a half of the Great Patriotic War. But after Army Group Center, Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch was expelled from Moscow, thousands of rape cases were revealed. In 1942 the Extraordinary State Commission (CHGK) was created, which registered, among other things, this type of crime. The author of the report gave an example from the ChGK newscast about the third year of the war in Rzhev. This chronicle was shown during the Nuremberg Tribunal. “Next door, a family tortured by Nazi soldiers. Their 18-year-old son Valentin was shot in the eye. Raya’s 15-year-old daughter was stabbed to death with a bayonet. Katya’s daughter , 5 months old, was shot in the temple. Daughter Zina, 18 years old.

In the village of Khanino, a group of German officers organized a drunken party to which they dragged a local teacher and raped her one by one. Sixteen-year-old collective farmer Ch. She was raped by five German soldiers. The Nazis rounded up all the girls and young women from Tokarevo and the surrounding villages and led them in an unknown direction.

(Red Star, September 11, 1941)

In the Ukrainian village of Borodaevka, the Nazis raped all the women and girls.

Unfortunately, the facts of these crimes did not become part of the Nuremberg trials by the Nazis, and most Soviet women chose to hide their shame. There was an idea to demand reparations from Germany: 3,000 rubles for a raped woman and 5,000 rubles for a disgraced girl, but the Soviet leadership did not support it.

To be continue….

Of all the murders committed by the Germans, a veritable army of murderers, the murders of children are the most painful.

The Germans murdered children in all the zones and countries they occupied, France, Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, etc, we are going to relate what they did with the unfortunate children they caught at the limit of their advance in the USSR in the Caucasus.

In the resort town of Teberda in the KCR, in the 1940s, there was a sanatorium for children with bone tuberculosis. Patients of the Crimean sanatorium were also evacuated there. By this time, the peninsula was already occupied by the Germans.

The enemy was approaching the Caucasus. The medical staff of the sanatorium decided to evacuate children who could walk on crutches from the sanatorium to the Transcaucasus. A group of children, accompanied by adults, in December 1942, under the cold rain and snow, crossed the Klukhorsky pass and were rescued.

Meanwhile, Teberda was occupied by the Nazis. The bedridden children remained in the sanatorium. On December 22, 1942, a truck drove up to the building. The soldiers pushed 54 sick children into it. The youngest of them was three years old. Having closed the doors of the car, the Nazis turned on the gas. After that, the car drove out of the sanatorium. The bodies of the dead children were dumped in the Gunachgira gorge. Today, in Karachai, near Lysaya Gora, there is a monument to these innocent victims of the war.

The Nazis also cruelly dealt with the children of Kislovodsk. Not far from the resort town, near the Ring Mountain, a pit was discovered in which there were children’s remains. Children between the ages of two and 12 were thrown there alive.

In North Ossetia, the Nazis also committed atrocities against children. The Otaraev family lived in the village of Nizhnyaya Saniba. The grandmother and 11 children were hiding in the basement. The Nazis, having learned about this, threw hand grenades there. The Otaraevs had no chance to survive.

In the village of Ardonskaya, a Nazi pierced a baby with a bayonet only because he was crying loudly. A three-year-old boy was killed by the Nazis for humming a Soviet song. The mother rushed to protect the baby, they killed her too. There were a lot of such examples of the atrocities of the fascists in the Caucasus.

Orphanage by the sea

The resort town of Yeysk is located on the estuary of the Sea of Azov. Narrow streets, neat old houses with openwork facades, cobbled sidewalks – this is the city today and this is the way it was in the spring of 1942, when more than a hundred children from the orphanage were evacuated here from Simferopol. The boys were urgently taken to the Kuban, as the Nazis were trying to reach the Crimea via Perekop.

“At first they wanted to send them to Goryachy Klyuch, but as the enemy kept attacking the Caucasus and the city would inevitably be on the way, they were taken to the small tourist town of Yeisk,” says the deputy director of Yeisk. Museum of History and Local Customs. V.V. Samsonova Marina Sidorenko. – There were several reasons for this decision. Firstly, the children suffered from bone tuberculosis and could cure their health by the sea, and secondly, no one expected the Germans to get there.

The children were housed in an orphanage building on the outskirts, in the gardens. Children with mental retardation are raised in this institution: bedridden patients lived in two buildings and those able to work lived in the third. It was an ordinary life: every day the children went to classes in a new secondary school No. 1, located near Pushkin Street, performed in a musical ensemble, drew, played chess. And in August, enemy vehicles rumbled through the streets.

“On behalf of the victims”

The Yeisk Museum contains a manuscript of a documentary story written by Leonid Dvornikov, a former orphanage who miraculously escaped death in a gas chamber. Twelve notebooks are carefully stitched, the yellowed pages are covered with uniform calligraphy.

Leonid Vasilievich lost both legs as a child. After the death of his parents, he ended up in an orphanage in Crimea, which was evacuated to Yeisk. An accident, one might say, snatched him from the hands of death; During the raid, a German grabbed him and dragged him to the rear of the car, when the cry of a boy who was furiously resisting was heard from behind. The Gestapo man, believing that Lenya wouldn’t run far with her prosthesis, dropped the sleeve of her sweater and rushed to help. Seizing the moment, he hid in a nearby courtyard.
“After the war, Leonid Dvornikov graduated from the Krasnodar Pedagogical Institute, became a philologist and subsequently compiled a file on the tragic events at the orphanage to testify in the trials against members of the SS Sonderkommando 10-a”, explains Marina. Sidorenko. -In 1963 he sent his story to the Krasnodar Book Publishing House. They returned it with the words: “In principle, the manuscript is ready for publication, but why is it necessary?” The country was recovering from the devastation of war and few people wanted to remember the horrors of it. He then he donated the notebooks to the museum. I came across them by accident after his death in 2010. The work is written in plain language, but difficult to read. And the idea to reprint it came up. Then three years ago a book appeared.

Death machine

The chronicle of those days is reflected in the testimony (about 50 people survived) … On October 9, 1942, a car with a padded iron body, without a single window, stopped on the porch. The orphans took to the streets without even suspecting that they were facing a real instrument of death. Less than five minutes later, the Nazis began dragging reluctant boys and girls into the open doors of the body, paying no attention to their physical ailments. The SS men answered questions from staff where they were going to take the children, through translators, with satisfied smiles: “for treatment in Krasnodar,” “carry seeds,” or “to the bathhouse.”
In the museum room you can see the only surviving photograph of a student from the orphanage: Vasya Druzhinin. In the car itself, he managed to put on a pioneering tie – the Gestapo tried to rip him off, but failed. His arms are short. “We were born once, and once we will die!” he screamed at the hated face of the enemy. So he died with a pioneer tie around his neck …
The car could not accommodate all the children, so the Germans returned for them in the morning of the next day, October 10.
14 children died, they were thrown into an anti-tank ditch a few kilometers from the city and covered with dirt. I suppose some were still showing signs of life, so they fell asleep. After all, when the Germans carried out the execution, they put people in front of the well, shot and left, the historian continues.
From the information disclosed, it is now known that the victims included children of different nationalities (from 4 to 17 years old): Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, Tatars, Czechs and even two Germans. But they all had a group of disabled people, and these people were mercilessly exterminated by the Nazis as part of their T-4 sterilization program.
The first exhumation of the bodies took place on April 15, 1943, but the military field doctors present were unable to determine the exact cause of death. “The death of the children was due to suffocation (strangulation)”, as a close examination revealed no gunshot wounds or mutilations on the bodies. Some of the remains were later buried in the town square. The war continued and only 16 coffins were found, where 40 bodies were deposited. The correct conclusion was not made until August 1943. The FSB has just released this document. “The children died from carbon monoxide” and, according to eyewitness testimony, the massacre took place in 10 to 15 minutes while the car was in motion.

Epilog.

Russian investigators requested materials from Canada on Helmut Oberlander, 96, a possible participant in the massacre of 214 disabled children in the Kuban town of Yeisk in the fall of 1942.
Russian investigators requested materials from Canada on Helmut Oberlander, 96, a possible participant in the massacre of 214 disabled children in the Kuban town of Yeisk in the fall of 1942.No statute of limitations
During the war years, he served in Sonderkommando 10-a, which participated in the destruction of civilians in the occupied territories, including the Krasnodar Territory, where gas chambers were used for the first time – mobile gas chambers.
The reason for the request was the documents of the FSB of Russia declassified last year on the execution of orphanages and the criminal case initiated after this under article 357 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “genocide”. Of course, Oberländer denies his involvement in the crimes of the Nazis, stating that his role was reduced only to “translating the language and cleaning the soldiers’ boots”, however, the Supreme Court of Canada found him guilty and deprived of his citizenship. And recently the process of deporting him began. ( 18 /3/2020)

About massacre of Yeysk

 The atrocities of the Germans seem to have no end, they committed all kinds of crimes in the occupied countries, today we will deal with the kidnapping of children.

It is estimated that there are about 200,000 children kidnapped by Germany, only in the Soviet Union there were about 50,000.

I read in WWII history books that Russian soldiers on their way encountered trains full of children going to Germany.

Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, blond and blue-eyed boys and girls who have drawn their “lucky ticket”. They were not burned in the Auschwitz furnaces, they did not end up in the experimental subjects of Dr. Joseph Mengele, the “angel of death.” They were forced to forget themselves. They had to become true Aryans, citizens of the Greater Reich. To do this, they changed their metrics, parents, nationality …*

*https://www.mk.ru/social/2020/09/06/tragediya-detey-vyvezennykh-v-germaniyu-vo-vremya-vtoroy-mirovoy.html

These children were deprived of their origins, of their family, and in a way they were lucky because they did not kill them by drawing their blood as thousands of other children or went to the death camps.

In 1938, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler declared: “I intend to take German blood where I can.” In the occupied territories, children were openly separated from their parents or kidnapped.

The selection criteria were blue eyes and blond hair, in keeping with Hitler’s ideal of “Aryan.” But, of course, the “kinders” had all the necessary measures taken to confirm their racial purity: they checked the shape and volume of the skull, the width of the nose, the distance between the corners of the chin. By the way, there were even Jewish children among those who passed the selection!

One wonders how the German courts reacted when one of these children claimed nowadays to the German State for the prejudices suffered. We will see that the German state always reacts in favor of criminals.

Here we will see some chilling stories of kidnapped children, now old people who try to find the truth and the cruel response of today’s Germany.* The author is  EKATERINA SAZHNEVA

*https://www.mk.ru/social/2020/09/06/tragediya-detey-vyvezennykh-v-germaniyu-vo-vremya-vtoroy-mirovoy.html

You are not in the world

… On November 26, 2015, Hermann Lüdeking, 78, applied for a one-time grant in accordance with the federal government’s decision on the payment of benefits to victims of Nazi injustice and under the General Consequences Act from the war. As a motive, Herr Lüdeking claimed that he was kidnapped by the SS in Poland in 1942 due to his “Aryan” appearance and was soon adopted by the German Lüdeking couple through the Lebensborn organization. The defendant, represented by the Directorate General of Customs, rejected this request on the grounds that this compensation could only be awarded to persons who were German citizens at the time of the damage. However, according to the plaintiff’s statements, in those years he was Polish …

In his first life, of which he knew nothing at all, Hermann Ludeking was supposedly called Roman Rostakovsky. All he remembered from his early childhood was an unknown bridge over an unknown river. He went through it in his dreams, coming back over and over again, for years.

In 1944, Frau Maria Ludeking, a member of the Union of German Girls, lost her son at the front. She went to Lebensborn, an organization that carried out the forced Germanization of the best representatives of the non-Aryan peoples. She was allowed to pick up a child for herself. Roman was playing in the room with another boy. Maria appreciated both of them and finally took him away.

She for a long time she considered this woman and this man as her relatives.

They are both members of the Nazi Party, her husband is a loyal SS. Considering Herman’s “low” record, they both treated him well.

In Roman-Hermann’s repeated birth certificate, drawn up by Lebensborn himself and issued on March 7, 1944, the date of his birth was considered to be January 20, 1936, the place was a discreet Polish town of Bruckau. It turns out that he was born in … 8 years.

   As a teenager, Herman accidentally unearthed a real birth certificate in the closet, where in place of both parents there was a script. He called Maria for a frank conversation, and she admitted that yes, her biological parents died in the war for the great Führer. Which was not true, they were shot.

  At the age of 16, Herman broke up with his adoptive mother for good, his adoptive father had already died by that time. Perhaps Maria was not so much to blame for the tragedy of the adopted baby, she took care of her and tried to love him instead of loving her deceased child of hers, but he could not forgive her.

Through the Red Cross, Herman-Roman tried his whole life to return to his native Poland, but alas! The applications to the passport offices were returned with the answer that there had never been a person with data like yours. He grew old without finding himself

Deny the claim

Seven decades have passed since the day the all-powerful and mysterious “Lebensborn”, who decided the fate of hundreds of thousands of children, ceased to exist. But, apparently, some orders remain unchanged.

“I preferred to take my son to Russia, I sued in this matter in Germany, and at the same time I decided to find out who was Judge Schommerz, who was in charge of my case, he raised his old judgments and gasped. It was he who at one time rejected Hermann Ludeking’s claim for compensation for moral compensation, just because he was a citizen of Poland in childhood and, in principle, according to the German authorities, did not suffer in any way, on the contrary, you have to thank the Nazis for surviving, ”says Nikolai Erney.

At one point, many of the Lebensborn victims tried to uncover their past and receive monetary reparations, like the Jews for the Holocaust, but to no avail.

Only Herr Ludeking reached the final judgment. As a result, I completely lost … And I still had to!

The Nazis preferred the small age to completely erase the memory. Most of the time, the captives were defined as orphans, and the place of their birth was called “the eastern lands of the Reich”, the children were taught the German language, by the word spoken in their native language, they beat up that they completely forgot that, conditioned reflexes – not remembering that it brings pain.

Today, the German authorities require the plaintiffs to provide the original papers of their birth, the same ones that it is not possible to find, only in these conditions, perhaps they can count on something. “You are not injured, you are saved” are the main reasons for the denial of claims.

“I will meet my father and mother after death”

Geraubte – Stolen Children – Secret Victims, an organization that brings together former Lebensborn children. Unfortunately, each year its members are getting smaller and smaller. This is the natural course of things.

“In fact, I was surprised that the current authorities do not feel any remorse for their predecessors. Yes, in words, it seems, everything is completely different, lush wreaths on the graves of the victims of Nazism, an admission of guilt. But here they are: the real victims of a monstrous experiment who are still alive, help them, ”says Nikolai Erney.

The second old man with whom Nikolai communicated was Alexander Orlov, who was carried by a child to war from the Soviet Union.

He does not know from which region of the USSR he came to Germany and does not like to pronounce his German name. “I don’t need compensation, I just want to know”, this has always been his position. Without finding his roots, at the end of his life he defiantly changed his official name to the original Russian.

“He felt very bad when I contacted him. “Why do I need all this? – repeated the grandfather. “I don’t need anything else. And very soon I will meet my relatives, my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters, in the other world.”

Alexander Orlov has never been married, he has no children. And Hermann Ludeking has eight of them.

“What I don’t understand is why the federal government doesn’t want to recognize these older people as victims and pay. After all, these people are already counting on their fingers. In particular, the compensation is due to homosexuals, victims of euthanasia and those who have been subjected to forced sterilization, but there are no stolen children, regardless of their nationality, in the law … The authorities will wait another five years, and then there will be No one left ”, wonders my interlocutor.

Volker Heinecke, Galina Bukovetski, Zita Sus, Janina Kunstovich …

The last woman, 85, was seriously ill, so her daughter Bettina Grundmann-Horst told German journalists about the fate of her mother.

After World War II, Ioannina’s biological parents were searched with the help of the International Red Cross. But the foster mother hid the girl, now named Johanna Kunzer, and she changed her place of residence to complicate the investigation. It was only in 1989 that Janina Kunstovich, who finally learned the truth, requested to use her real Polish surname. But she then she was denied this.

She “she has not provided compelling reasons that entitle her to issue a new birth certificate. If you are still interested in meeting this request, you must provide unequivocal and indisputable evidence, from which it can be inferred that you are Yanina Kunstovich, ”they officially responded.

“My mother has always been looking for her mother all her life. She suffered terribly from the fact that no one needed her, that she was abandoned, that she did not have a real home, ”her daughter said in an interview with German journalists.

In the summer of 2017, a large-scale German-Polish project took place by Deutsche Welle and the Interia news portal. The journalists visited institutions, archives and foundations, as well as the survivors of forced Germanization. Over several months, more than 40 articles and 24 videos were published. Reporters spoke to people who found out who they were in their eighties.

But even this investigation did not lead to the Lebensborn children being officially recognized as victims of Nazism.

“They forgot about us. Other groups received compensation from Germany, but not us, ”says Hermann Ludecking bitterly.

… In 1945, Lebensborn’s last child was born in the American occupation zone of Germany. In the West, they have long been convinced that it is a peaceful structure that helps single mothers. The truth was revealed by the Nuremberg trials, Lebensborn leaders and employees were charged under three articles at once: a crime against humanity, war crimes and participation in a military organization. However, the head of the organization, Max Solman, was acquitted in the case Lebensborn; he was convicted only as an SS man.

Zolman was sentenced to 2 years and 8 months in prison. According to Wikipedia, he later worked as a journalist at an art publication, headed the department of correspondence and publicity, was manager of the Museum of Ancient Art in Munich, headed the board of a land limited company, headed an accounting firm, and later a glass factory. He died in his bed more than 30 years after the war.

Ah, war, what have you done to us …

After the victory, our repatriation corps began searching for the Soviet children taken out by the Germans. However, few were found, many were intimidated and did not want to confess their past, some did not even remember who they were.

It is believed that no more than 3% of those abducted were returned to the Soviet Union.

Unlike the USSR, the Polish government managed to clarify the fate of more than 30,000 Lebensborn students. They were also sent home. But there they could not be happy. The fascists made fun of them. They were forced to relearn the Polish language, to read Polish books. They were cursed for what the Germans did, because in the eyes of those around them they were Germans.

Many suffered an identity crisis until the end of their lives. Some years later, they searched for their adoptive families, from whom they were also forcibly separated.

… And there will probably be no end to the bridge over which Hermann Ludeking, 84, runs in his dreams.

And on the other side, eight-year-old Roman Rostakovsky is still waiting for him.

A Spanish saying says that a button is enough for a sample, it means that with a button you can give an idea of the entire costume.

The German atrocities have been so many and of such importance that it is painful even to recall them, but the most curious thing is the oblivion that covers them, while the violations committed by the Russian army in Germany are aired and exaggerated ad nauseam, those committed by the Germans against the Russian civilian population they cover themselves with a cloak of silence.

This is all the more incredible in that the deaths in the Russian civilian population far exceed the murders in the Holocaust against the Jews. 4.500.000-10.000.000 civilian  deaths due to military actiosn and crimes against humanity and 8.000.000-9.000.000 civilian deaths due to war related famine and diseases.*

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_deaths_by_country

This surpasses any imagination.

We are going to show a single button of the German atrocities the atrocities committed in the town of Krasnaya Poliana* narrated just after the liberation of the town and in a style typical of the war era. There is little that can be added.

*http://rapsinews.ru/historical_memory_publication/20210616/307140087.html

Fascist atrocities in the village of Krasnaya Polyana. Documentary Chronicle

PLOT: GENOCIDE OF THE SOVIET PEOPLE. DOCUMENTARY CHRONICLE

In order to perpetuate the memory of the civilian population of the Soviet Union, which was expelled and exterminated during the Great Patriotic War, RAPSI studied archival materials * that bear witness to the genocide of citizens of the USSR.

Two-legged beasts

When the Germans stormed the village of Krasnaya Polyana, they arrested all the men in the early hours and locked them in the premises of the district executive committee. They sat there for 8 days until our troops were released, receiving no food. The Germans locked the old women in shelters and cellars, posting sentries on them, and at that time a wild orgy was taking place in the town and nearby towns. Crowds of drunken Hitler scoundrels went from house to house, killing, raping, robbing, burning houses.

On the first day of the arrival of the Germans in Krasnaya Polyana, two fascists appeared to Alexandra Yakovlevna. They saw Demyanova’s daughter Nyura, 14, in the room, a frail girl in frail health. A German officer grabbed the teenager and raped her in front of her mother. On December 10, the doctor at the local gynecological hospital, after examining the girl, declared that this Hitlerian bandit had infected her with syphilis. In a neighboring apartment, fascist cattle raped another 14-year-old girl, Tonya I.

On December 9, the body of a Finnish officer was found in the same town. A “collection” of women’s buttons was found in the victim’s pocket. There were 37 of them. The bloody dog ​​thus followed the trail of his heinous violence. In Krasnaya Polyana, this scoundrel raped 17-year-old Margarita K. and also ripped a button from her blouse. The Red Army bullet took out this filthy bastard, and now his corpse, like carrion, lies around the site of his monstrous crimes.

The Germans brutally mocked the wounded Red Army soldiers captured by them in Krasnaya Polyana. Several wounded soldiers, including an injured nurse, did not receive 4 days of water and 7 days of food, and were then given salt water. The nurse began to agonize. The dying girl was raped by a fascist jackal in front of wounded Red Army soldiers.

Collective Farmers of the Town of White Rast vols. Shcherbakov, Chistov, Sergeev, Klimova and others in an act drawn up by them at the time of the terrified flight of the Germans from this village, declare: In our village, the Germans organized a massive pogrom and looted the property of collective farmers, perpetrated a brutal massacre of the population. A fascist soldier unknown to us by his last name shot the innocent 12-year-old boy Vladimir Tkachev, firing 21 rounds of a machine gun at him. The fascist scoundrels brutally treated the defenseless woman Irina Vasilyevna Mosolova. She was shot point-blank, for no reason, leaving 4 small children orphans: the youngest is 10 months old and the oldest is 11 years old. In Klimova Olga Aleksandrovna, the Nazis shot a 16-year-old son, set the house on fire, killed a cow and looted all property.

The 15-year-old girl Maria Shch., The daughter of a collective farmer from the village of Bely Rast, was stripped naked by the Nazis and taken down the street, entering all the houses where the German soldiers were.

In the same village, one of the German soldiers snatched her two-year-old daughter from the collective farmer Anna Rovinskaya and wanted to throw her into a burning stove. The girl was saved only by a miracle: shots were heard in the street and the cowardly German dog ran out of the hut.

The Germans committed a terrible massacre of the population in the town of Puchki. The fascists who stormed into this village met the collective farmer Ivan Gavrilovich Terekhin and his wife Polina Borisovna, grabbed the young woman, dragged her aside, pushed her into the snow and, in front of her husband, began to rape her time. The woman screamed, resisted with all her might. Then the fascist rapist shot him point-blank. Polina Terekhina stirred in her agony. Her husband escaped the rapists’ hands and ran to the dying woman. But the Germans caught up with him and put 6 bullets in his back …

In any town, in any house visited by the Nazis, the curses of the elderly and women, the tears of the tortured and tormented run after them. They cry out for revenge. We will never forget this to the damn German fascist dogs: for all their atrocities, they will pay in full, they will answer with their vile life, each and every one!

I. GRIBOV. Special correspondent. TASS, December 14, 1941

Brutal executions of children: how the Nazis tried to destroy the future of Russia

© RIA Novosti / RIA NovostiGo to the photo bankThe Great Patriotic War. Hitlerite soldier. Archive photoRead ria.ru atMOSCOW, June 1 – RIA Novosti. During the war years in the occupied territories of the USSR, the Nazis killed hundreds of thousands of Soviet children. The study of regional archives allows us to clarify the scale and circumstances of those crimes. On International Children’s Day, RIA Novosti publishes an interview with Elena Malysheva, the dean of the archival department of the Historical and Archival Institute of the Russian State Humanitarian University , a member of the working group of the No Statute of Limitations project, about what historians have learned about the atrocities of the fascists.

“For the Nazis, it was possible to destroy our state only by destroying its future – children. Children with historical self-identification, remembering their parents, home, country – that was the most dangerous thing for the enemy,” Malysheva emphasizes.How many children died at the hands of the invaders is still unknown.

8 May 2020, 05:57The historian explained why the German generals did not believe in the end of the war“The scientific literature says that more than 216 thousand children were deliberately destroyed in the course of punitive operations on the territory of the USSR . Grigory Krivosheev cites this figure in his research on losses during the Great Patriotic War. In fact, the number of deaths is much higher,” Malysheva notes.

“The children were executed along with their families, with their mothers. And it is no coincidence that the phrase“ including children ”is added when assessing the losses of the civilian population, the historian explains.According to her, the study of regional archives within the framework of the No Statute of Limitations project will help to correct the available data, to establish the circumstances of the crimes.

28 May 2020, 15:53Nazi atrocities near Leningrad: explosives in toys and poison for the sick“For example, in the Bryansk State Archives they found a certificate stating that 4665 children died during the occupation of the Bryansk region in 1941-1943. This is three and a half times more than what was previously reported in scientific research. not even in this certificate – there is a dash in front of them “, – gives the example of Malyshev.

Orphanage Executions and Disease Deaths

One of the monstrous crimes of the invaders is the destruction of the pupils of the Anoshensky orphanage in the Vyazemsky district of the Smolensk region .

“From October 4, 1941 to March 10, 1943, 113 people were shot, tortured, starved to death by the Nazi invaders and their accomplices in the Anoshensky orphanage <…>,” the archival document says. Moreover, in 1942, 42 children died of hunger.

6 May 2020, 03:34The historian told how in Mauthausen they made money on the death of prisonersThe testimony of the pediatrician Baranenko, recorded by him in 1943 after the liberation of Smolensk by the Red Army , also testifies to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against children .

“My heart sank with pain at the sight of these kids suffering from cruel living conditions.According to him, if a laborer received 350 grams of bread per day from the invaders, and dependents – 200, then the children were supposed to only 70 grams. “Emaciated children with diseases died in 60% of cases,” the doctor said.

14 November 2019, 03:03FSB declassified the case of the atrocities of the Estonian punishers near PskovThey especially suffered from infectious diseases, Baranenko recalled, in particular from diphtheria, while the doctors practically did not have diphtheria serum. Many children, especially those under the age of three, died from gastrointestinal diseases.

Children’s blood for the invaders

“The invaders massively used children as a source of donor blood for the treatment of their own wounded, which is recorded in many documents. This is one of the atrocities against childhood, because such a loss of blood resulted in the death of a child,” says Elena Malysheva.The fact that the Nazis took blood from children was reported by the Soviet Information Bureau in a report dated September 24, 1942. In the village of Zakharovka, Kursk Region, the German commandant, with the help of soldiers, drove local residents into the courtyard.

8 February 2020, 08:00Those who fled from hell. Soviet officers who escaped from German concentration camps“German doctors selected 26 people, including Solntsev Peter – 14 years old, Grachev Vera – 11 years old, Dvornikov Ekaterina – nine years old and others, and took large doses of blood from them, regardless of any medical standards. nine people, including five teenagers, “- noted in the summary.

Punishments for “crimes”

In the Kursk region, the occupation authorities issued an order according to which children between the ages of ten and 16 were sent to forced educational camps “for their crimes”.The archives also tell about what “crimes” were discussed.

27 January 2020, 08:00Man-made hell. What did the Red Army soldiers see when they liberated the Auschwitz campThus, in the village of Pogozhee, Timsky District, Kursk Region, minors “were brutally beaten and flogged with ramrods because they did not want to work for the invaders.” And in the Novo-Oskol region, the Nazis shot the family of a collective farmer of six people, including four children, “for the fact that one of the boys released a pigeon during a Soviet air raid.”

Gouged eyes and severed ears

The Nazis killed children with sophisticated brutality. In January 1942, retreating under the blows of the Red Army from the settlement of Kresty, Velizhsky district of the Smolensk region, the occupants tortured the Danilov family: 40-year-old mother Anna and her daughters – 16-year-old Lydia, 12-year-old Sofia, 5-year-old Valentina and 2-year-old Varvara.

“In front of the mother’s eyes, the smallest girl Varvara was slaughtered by the fascist bastards with a knife, cut off her ears, gouged out her eyes, the eldest daughter of the Komsomol member Lida, these same fiends broke her face, cut her nose, cut out her tongue. is stated in the act of this crime.Near the village of Ilyino, Baturinsky District, Smolensk Region, in November 1942, more than 100 civilians were shot – women, children and the elderly. The Nazis hid the bodies under the snow.“When the snow was dug up and the brushwood and hay were removed, we were faced with a terrible picture of the crime, <…> 109 torn corpses were randomly piled on top of each other, explosive bullets disfigured faces, crushed the heads of innocent victims of fascist murderers. Among the shot were women, teenagers, two an old man of 60-65 years old, 17 children aged from five to ten years, six infants, including a two-month-old girl with a smashed head, “the Soviet commission later wrote.

8 April 2020, 03:36Historian explains how Hitler planned the Slavic Holocaust

Among the many unknown facts of WWII is the behavior of the Finns. They were part of Russia until the Bolshevik revolution and their image in the world is of a small country invaded by their great neighbor, we see that not everything is black or white.

We present a brief note of his behavior with the Russian civilian population in WWII:

Extract from an article in the front-line newspaper “Into the Battle for the Motherland”

of February 1, 1944 on the establishment of concentration camps in Karelia

At the earliest 1 February 1944 III

This is what the White Finns are doing on the Karelian land

(from the front newspaper “In battle for the Motherland” dated February 1, 1944, No. 22)

In the city of Petrozavodsk, they carry out daily raids, during which

they take away all warm and valuable things from the population. Russians are prohibited from living

downtown. On the streets, they can only appear with red armbands on

hands. For the slightest offense, they are thrown into concentration camps.

The White Finns created a whole system of concentration camps. In Petrozavodsk

there are four of them. Each camp contains 3-5 thousand Soviet people.

There are about 3,000 people in the Vedlozero camp. There are also such camps

in Sheltozersky, Kondopoga and Prionezhsky districts.

The regime that has been established for Soviet citizens in the camps can hardly be called inhuman and cruel. What Soviet citizens are experiencing behind barbed wire defies description. Hungry, emaciated people are beaten and forced

work 14-16 hours a day.

Yuryev, who escaped from the camp on Kukkovka, says that 40 percent of the prisoners died of starvation and beatings. Even old people and children are driven behind barbed wire,

who are forced to do overwhelming, exhausting work. Prisoners

eat dead dogs, cats and horses.

There are also so-called labor camps in the occupied territory, where

the entire able-bodied population is being driven away and sent to defense work. Here

also mockery and arbitrariness reign. Lagernikov is kept on starvation rations. Except for 200 grams of bread in the morning and rye gourd in the evening, they are not given anything. From hunger

4–5 people die every day.

A local resident describes one such labor camp: “In the camp on the river

Enema – Obzha there are over a thousand Soviet people. The camp leader is Captain Salminen. This is a sadist and a beast. He always walks with a whip, which from beats the workers. “

In their anger and rage, the White Finnish executioners do not spare either the elderly or children. The commandant of the village of Panila IV, Vedlozersky district, Toivo Pasonen, beat him with a rubber duo. There are no appendices in the file.

II The document was signed by the deputy M.I. Baskakova – A.M. Kuznetsov, from July 31, 1943 – People’s Commissar

state security of the KFSSR.

III Dated from the text of the document.

IV So in the document. That’s right: Pannila.

with a bink until she lost consciousness, the collective farmer Petrova Maria for the fact that she, being sick and blind, could not go to defense work. In schools, Finnish “teachers” beat children with whips and rods.

The White Finnish invaders defeated all collective farms in the regions occupied by them.

In Olonetsky, Vedlozersky, Segozersky and other regions, all crops are declared the property of the Finns. The entire crop of 1941, 1942 and 1943 was exported to Finland. Yet

in 1941 all household plots were taken from the population. The population is starving. When the indignant population of the Tolvuy village council came to the local district headquarters and began to demand bread, the Finnish officer cynically replied: “You, Russians,

you will only eat when we deem it necessary to feed you. “

Special message of the acting chief

1st Department of the 4th Directorate of the NKGB USSR Tikhonov People’s Commissar

state security of the USSR V.N. Merkulov on the actions of the Finnish

occupation authorities in the Karelo-Finnish SSR

March 7, 1944

No. 4/8/1752

Special message

People’s Commissar of State Security of the USSR

Comrade MerkulovF

According to the NKGB of the Karelo-Finnish SSR, received from the operational groups operating in the occupied territory of the Karelo-Finnish SSR103, about the measures

the enemy knows the following:

The occupation authorities in the Sheltozero region are campaigning among the population

for the fact that in the event of the retreat of the Finnish troops, the population must burn their houses

and whole villages and go with the Finns to Finland. Otherwise

threaten to be shot. According to the message of the “Girlfriend” agent group dated March 4, 1944.

in the village of Leh-Navolok, Prionezhsky district, 7 kilometers from the city of Petrozavodsk, at school, teachers tell the children that when the Finnish troops retreat alive

from the population no one will be left, but all will be shot.

At the same time, the occupiers are pursuing a policy of flirting with the population. So,

in the Prionezhsky region, where the Russian population lives, according to the agent

“Chizhik” dated February 22, 1944, the Finnish authorities began to treat the population better. This is expressed in the fact that the salaries of the population have been increased, if earlier

the average salary was 800 Finnish marks a month, but now they pay up to 1500 Finnish marks, there are no taxes, except for the share of income received from the livestock available to the population.

Along with this, the invaders in every possible way mock Soviet people in the occupied regions of the Karelo-Finnish SSR.

In the village of Zalesye, Sheltozero District, the Finnish authorities for late payment of taxes was beaten with rods in the presence of all residents of the village Chetverikov Dmitry Maksimovich, 50 years old.

In the village of Sheltozero, twenty-year-old I. was raped by Finnish soldiers.

who was accused of “slandering Finnish soldiers.” She was arrested while holding whether in a cold room and bullied. As a result of bullying I. died. On her the parents’ funeral was not admitted.

Residents of the village of Nizovye, Sheltozersky district Maksimova Maria and Myakisheva

Anna sentenced to 10 years in prison with confiscation of all property for what they gave

bread to one partisan.

In the village of Zalesye, a 10-year-old boy Zherebtsov Zhenya was beaten by a Finn teacher until he lost consciousness.

Mass hijacking continues from the occupied regions of the Karelo-Finnish SSR

Soviet citizens to Finland, especially Russians in concentration camps.

The entire population was taken from Petrozavodsk to Finland.

concentration camps of the city. In the near future, it is planned to take 300 residents from the Voznesenie region to Finland.

In recent days, the Finns have been taking away valuables from the occupied areas.

So, according to the message of the “Girlfriend” group of March 4, 1944, the occupants are taking out

to Finland metal, copper, gold and destroy large brick houses that

also taken away from Petrozavodsk and Solomenny.

A census of livestock is being urgently carried out in all villages in the occupied regions.

For the head [chief] of the 1st section of the 4th Directorate of the NKGB of the USSR Tikhonov

Resolution I

: Send to: Merkulov, Kobulov, Fedotov. Head [head] of the 4th Directorate of the NKGB of the USSR Sudoplatov.

An act drawn up by representatives of the political department of the 7th Army,

newspapers “To the Glory of the Motherland” and former prisoners

Ilyinsky camp number 8, on the conditions of detention in the camp

After the Finnish troops captured the villages and villages of the Olonets region

Karelo-Finnish SSR, they created in the area adjacent to the Ilyinsky Sawmill

3 concentration camps, where more than two thousand Soviet citizens were imprisoned,

Russians by nationality 104. The Finnish military authorities called these camps resettlement camps, but in reality they were concentration camps in which there was

a barbaric regime is established. Civilians – women, children and the elderly – were here in the position of prisoners of war. These are the rules that were established in the camp.

state farm number 8. The whole camp was surrounded by barbed wire, and the sentries had an order

open fire on anyone who tries to leave the camp. Walking on

the camp was only allowed until 9 o’clock in the evening.

At the time of the liberation of the territory by Soviet troops, there were 471 people in the camp, including 64 men, 208 women, and infants

up to 16 years – 199. All prisoners in the camp were in extremely difficult conditions. The ration given to the prisoners consisted of 150-300 g of dry black biscuits,

baked from oatmeal and other garbage, from a portion of liquid soup – gruel. Sometimes the so-called “sausage” was issued, made from meat, mainly horse

garbage mixed with cereals. The sausage was always delivered moldy, with signs of rotting, with worms. And no matter how hungry the prisoners were, they often

threw this sausage in the trash. The prisoners were exhausted by backbreaking work – according to

12-14 hours [aces] per day on logging. The Finns made children work. Fourteen-year-old girls Zina Avkudinova, Asya Starchenko, Lida Degtyareva – 15 years old

and many others were forcibly sent into the forest and had to cut

three kb.I

 for a couple. For almost three years, the Finnish authorities did not give any prisoner a pair of boots or any kind of clothing, but required that in any weather

the prisoners went to work every day. This led to massive cases of frostbite. Soviet teacher L.G. Pozik in the winter of 1942, together with 19 prisoners, was sent into the forest to build a road. They weren’t given any tools

and they had to trample the path with their feet. Posik froze her arms and legs and asked permission to leave work an hour earlier. She was released, and on the same day in the evening she was summoned to the camp commandant’s office, stripped, knocked to the floor and struck 24 times.

with a rubber truncheon.

In the commandant’s office there was a whole set of different whips: from thick square rubber and round ones filled with sand. Beatings were common. Cruel

Male prisoners were beaten to a pulp if they spoke to a female prisoner in the street. E.K. Zaretskaya 43 years old, mother of three children received 30 lashes

by order of the commandant Matti, for the fact that her daughter found bread on the road, dropped

from a Finnish car. The victim says: “They put me on a bench, lifted my skirt and began to beat me. Two soldiers held their heads and legs while Matti beat. As a result of the beating, I temporarily lost my sight. “

In addition to individual flogging, mass flogging was carried out. In September 1943 the group

women went from the camp to the village of Tuksa to search for the remains of

potatoes. On their return to the camp, 24 women were beaten with whips in the commandant’s office by order of Junior Sergeant Kashimyaki Toko. They beat them like this: they ordered

take off their outerwear, lie down on the bench and beat me. So they were beaten: Tatiana

Denisevich, Evdokia Potasheva, Tatiana Mukhina – 17 years old, Alexandra Mukhina – 15 years old,

pregnant Sergeantova Anastasia and others. Heartbreaking screams spread throughout the camp. The bodies of the tortured were covered in black bruises.

After the beating, they were deprived of half of their weekly rations. The inmates were subjected to other bullying as well. In March 1944, the Finns came up with a new punishment. For failure to fulfill unbearable tasks or as the Finnish executioners put it

“For poor work” were shaved baldly: A. Potasheva, T. Korzk, O. Tumanova, A. Voronin and the girls L. Sazhinov, V. Nikiforova, A. Smirnova and others. The Finnish authorities did not

took care of sanitary conditions – for all the time the prisoners received 150 g of soap.

As a result of systematic malnutrition, grueling labor, beatings in the camp

died up to 25% of prisoners. Finnish executioners kept a register of all produced

executions with the indication of the name of the punished, the number of blows, but before retreating, all these materials were burned. All of these crimes are directly guilty of:

Corporal Määlepää II, soldier Edward Julimannila, junior sergeant Matti Juli-Luoma

Junior Sergeant Chuko Kasimyaki, Lieutenant of Torma Kerry I

, soldier Lauri Lehtinen,

Alexey Ipatti, sergeant major Mikko Lohikoski.

This act was drawn up on July 1, 1944.

Former prisoners of the camp of state farm No. 8: E.I. Basina, M.I. Kutova, E.G. Bone,

A.N. Fedorova, E.P. Basin.

Major of the political department of the army (signature)

Representative of the newspaper “To the Glory of the Motherland” captain (signature)

 WWII was a disaster for Russia, let us remember that 27 million of its inhabitants died in it, about 10 millions soldiers the rest normal citizens, among them millions of children and many were orphaned, the effort of the Russians to take care of them in the midst of this maelstrom and with scarce financial resources is commendable . 

In addition, the Germans in the rear  treated the children with all cruelty. “… Often, due to entertainment, a group of Germans on vacation would organize a détente: they would throw a piece of bread, children would run towards it, and machine-gun fire would follow. How many children died because of such amusements of the Germans throughout the country! Bloated with hunger, the children were able to take something, without understanding, edible from the German, and then there was a line from the machine gun. And the boy ate forever! (Solokhina N.Ya., Kaluga region, Lyudinovo, from the article “We do not come from childhood”, “World of News”, No. 27, 2010, p. 26).

Therefore, Red Army units passing through these places were sensitive to these guys and often carried them with them and after to the orphanages.

Here we will cite some small examples of their great effort.*

*https://www.archive-nnov.ru/?id=7633

The sudden outbreak of the Great Patriotic War found many children during their summer vacations in pioneer camps, sanatoriums and dachas. From its earliest days, the country’s government and local leaders had to urgently deal with the evacuation of children from the frontline and from inland frontline areas, including the Gorky region.

Already on August 27, 1941, 125,600 evacuees arrived in the Gorky region, including 70,000 children, of whom 3,500 had no parents. From the Union Republics of Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Karelo-Finland, Moscow, Murmansk and other cities, 13 kindergartens, 9 pioneer camps and sanatoriums, 10 orphanages were evacuated.

During the war years, the network of orphanages steadily increased, as the number of orphaned and lost children grew. On January 1, 1941, there were 28 local orphanages in the Gorky region with a contingent of 2,267 people. As of January 1, 1942, the number of orphanages increased to 76 (of which 32 were local) with a total of 8,783 children. On January 1, 1943, there were 117 orphanages with 11,739 students.

Since 1943, orphanages, maintained at the expense of collective farms, as well as nurseries for children, were organized. As of January 1, 1944, there were 121 orphanages in total, including 27 collective farms and 2 nursery orphanages.

The leaders of the region needed not only to resettle so many new arrivals, but also to take care of their safety, household arrangements, food, education, providing them with clothes and shoes, which was especially difficult in times of war. The children were sent to the rural areas of the Gorky region, where it was easier to do so.

One of the main problems was the inadequacy of the premises in which the orphanages were located. There was not enough fuel, there were no toilets or laundries, there were difficulties with the supply of water, electricity, there were no kerosene lamps, the children had to sit in the dark. The situation was especially bad with furniture, inventory, utensils; there was a great shortage of beds and underwear, warm clothes and shoes.

Children of different ages came to the Gorky region, from kindergarten to school. In October 1942, 86 children’s institutions with a total of 8,634 people were evicted, of which 30 were preschools (2,734 children), 52 schools (6,246 children) and 4 mixed (245 children and adolescents). In 1943, taking into account collective and local farm orphanages, the majority of pupils were school children – 10,489 people (the remaining 2,299 children were preschool children). The highest percentage fell on children subject to general education (8-12 years). Everything was done to ensure that they attended school and received an education. The progress of pupils in orphanages and boarding schools in 1943 was greater than the general progress in the schools of the region. According to the results of the 3rd quarter of 1943, it amounted to 96.7% against 89.6% in the schools of the region.

In the summer of 1943, questions about the preparation of schools for the new academic year were raised at the meetings of the sessions of the district and village soviets. Teachers, students and bosses jointly restored textbooks, teaching aids and books, and also created new visual materials. In the Pyshchugsky district, students and teachers renovated 17 of 25 schools, saving 23,000 rubles of public funds. The chiefs gave great assistance in repairing the school buildings for the 1943/44 school year and in delivering fuel. Machine Building Plant No. 92 im. IV Stalin completely overhauled the building of school No. 68 of the Kaganovichi district, aircraft plant No. 21 is named after it. S. Ordzhonikidze – the building of the school number 66. Automobile factory. V. M. Molotov helped to fully restore school buildings that were damaged during enemy air raids in June 1943. The students themselves did a lot to prepare schools for winter. The boys sawed and cut firewood, worked on the school plots and had a good harvest. He would prepare hot breakfasts for them in school canteens and buffets. The Arzamas schoolchildren planted special beds for hospitals on their plots. They harvested 16 tons of potatoes, 350 kg of cucumbers, 1,500 kg of carrots and the same number of tomatoes.

There was a constant shortage of writing materials: notebooks, pencils, pens, ballpoint pens, ink, chalk, etc. In preparing for the new academic year, parents, company administrations and collective farms provided significant support to schools.

During the war years, much health work was carried out with children. Every effort was made to get them to out-of-town summer homes, pioneer camps, and sanitariums. Industrial enterprises, collective farms, trade union organizations and the Komsomol regional committee allocated funds for the opening and maintenance of health improvement institutions. In the summer of 1942, 50 pioneer camps were opened with a total coverage of 18,500 children; In the summer of 1943, 74 pioneer camps and 77 health improvement centers were already organized, where 42,140 pioneers and schoolchildren rested. For 3,000 children of front-line soldiers and orphans, vouchers were purchased at the expense of the Gorky Komsomol.

The fight against homelessness and child abandonment was carried out in different ways. The police, along with representatives of the Komsomol and other public figures, carried out raids on evacuation centers, train stations, river docks and markets. From August 1942 to 1943, the Komsomol organizations of the city of Gorky and the region, together with the rono and the police, carried out 91 raids to remove homeless children from the streets. During the “weekly”, held from June 7 to 14, 1943, 862 people were detained in the city of Gorky, of which 140 were homeless children.

Door-to-door visits were made to identify homeless children, unemployed children and adolescents, who were then sent to police nurseries, created children’s homes. The commissions were dedicated to the arrangement of children who had lost their parents. Children under the age of 14 were sent to orphanages, given up for adoption, under guardianship. In 1943 alone, 432 children were adopted through district and regional health departments, and 1,186 were taken under guardianship and 1,176 under sponsorship.

Orphanage students were entitled to 5 grams of sugar, 10 /grams of butter, 13 grams of noodles per day. A few more grams of cereal, but in old documents the exact figure can no longer be considered. These products were allocated from the state fund. But basically they lived at the expense of subsidiary agriculture and the help of collective farms. I found a report from the director of the orphanage from 1942, where he lamented that the potatoes were not born and that the children needed to be fed something. Then the collective farmers helped them: they gave them unpeeled rye.*

*https://nn.aif.ru/society/persona/tragediya_voyny_kak_zhili_detdomovcy_vdali_ot_linii_fronta

The children foraged for berries and mushrooms, while there were no summer shoes – rags and grass were tied around their feet. It is also documented: there were only 80 felt boots for 130 students during the war years. There were simply no gloves. When I was already living in an orphanage, we would sew them out of old blankets and sweaters. And the winters were fierce then, not like they are now!

Sad histories.

Here is Galya Kozyreva, whom I have already mentioned. She was six years old when the blockade of Leningrad began. My father died on the front in the first months of the war. Mom once went grocery shopping on the cards and didn’t come back; she died under the bombardment. Galya, her little brother Valya and her mother’s younger sister Anya, 16, were left alone. Valya cried all the time and asked for bread. Soon the baby died of exhaustion. Anya carried her little body on a sled to a mass grave. Everyone in besieged Leningrad was buried like this … To save Galya from death, Aunt Anya gave her to the Sestroretsk orphanage. She herself went to the hospital exhausted. The Sestroretsk orphanage was evacuated to the Vetluzhsky district, then Galya was transferred to the Vetluzhsky orphanage.

Here is the Belyantsev family from the village of Undal, Tonkin region. six children. Father was brought to the front. His mother died of typhus in 1943. They wanted to let my father go to the front with the children, but the day before his departure he died while crossing the Dnieper. The orphans lived for a short time with their grandmother and were then sent to an orphanage. As a result, four sisters and two brothers of the Belyantsevs also ended up in the Vetluzhsky orphanage.

I found the passport of our orphanage from 1955. In it, out of 95 people, 73 are considered complete orphans, these are the children of dead soldiers and partisans. They, born in the war, were brought to the orphanage from all over the country. Many had no first or last name, much less information about their parents. Each of those stories is a tragedy of war.

The neighbors took the children and the locals adopted them. But, for example, the older brother of the Belyantsevs, when they were taken to foster homes, did not allow them to adopt his sisters and brothers. He remembered that his father, before leaving for the front, bequeathed him to take care of his family.

Behind these figures there is a multitude of human dramas, countless sad stories, but the effort of the Russian people to improve the conditions of these poor children is commendable. A very little known aspect of WWII in Russia.

 An article of Red Voltaire* very interesting.Among other topics such as the glad collaboration of the Latvians with the German Nazis, it shows that the Germans extracted blood from prisoners until their death for their wounded soldiers.

* https://www.voltairenet.org/article217384.html

The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) has declassified and published on its website the interrogation records of Latvian Nazi collaborators.

These revelations come as the actions of the Banderites in Ukraine are largely glossed over and as those of the Latvian collaborators are also greatly underestimated.

These documents reveal that, contrary to what is generally believed, in Latvia the mass murder of Jews and Roma by the Nazi regime began in July 1941, well ahead of the Wansee conference of 20 January 1942. They also indicate that the massacres of Jews and political opponents reached far greater proportions than is generally acknowledged. Finally, they attest that the Nazi leaders themselves were shocked by the cruelty of the Latvian volunteers.

In December 1941, the 30,000 Jews in the Riga ghetto were all exterminated. The Latvian Sonderkommando Arājs unit guarding the Salaspils concentration camp executed 30,000 prisoners. It set up a “blood factory” in which prisoners, mainly children, were bled every two days until they died from exhaustion for the needs of the Wehrmacht. 46,000 civilians, including 12,000 Jews, were brought to Latvia from Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia to be killed in Biķernieki Forest. 105,000 people out of 120,000 were murdered by Latvians in the Minsk ghetto (now Belarus). The Red Army discovered mass graves in Latvia containing more than 300,000 bodies.

The Latvian parliament (Saeimā) has just passed a law ordering the dismantling of all monuments honoring the Red Army no later than 15 November 2022. The Latvian government continues to pay tribute to Nazi collaborators in Latvia and Ukraine.

More information

http://www.fsb.ru/fsb/history/archival_material/Arays.htm