The Baltic countries, artificial countries full of Nazis

 The so-called Baltic countries. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the last 500 years were never independent being part of Germany or Russia most of the time.

Currently, after their independence, they have important Russian minorities within them.

 Estonia with 1,329,000 inhabitants has 500,000 inhabitants of Russian descent, 37.6% of the population.

Latvia with 1.883.000 inhabitants has 37,2% of Russian descent population , and Lithuania with 2.795.000 inhabitants have about 15% of inhabitants of Russian descent.

As we can see, they are important minorities and what a normal person can expect is that minorities be respected for peaceful coexistence, but unfortunately this is not the case.

The behavior of the Baltics towards the Russian-speaking minorities is atrocious, violates all human rights and what is more serious, the European Union and the United Nations Organization turn a blind eye towards this behavior.

As simple examples we can mention that thousands of Russian-speaking inhabitants who were not only born in the Baltic countries, but also their parents and grandparents, lack a passport, citizenship and the right to vote. This violates the most elementary human rights and is an ethnic selection.

Why do the Balts ethnically segregate and pay periodic tributes to Nazi Germans?

let’s see a small sample of some of the rulers of these artificial mini-states, beggining with Lithuania.

Valdas Adamkus. Was President of Lithuania from 1998 to 2003 and from 2004 to 2009.

During the Nazi occupation he served as an assistant to the criminal Antanas Impulevicius, whose detachment, by order of the Nazis, massacred Jews in the Minsk ghetto. However, this did not prevent Western “democrats” from conferring the title of “UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador” on Valdas Adamkus in 2003 and giving him many orders.

In this case, they do not care that during the period of his presidency this “goodwill ambassador” managed to posthumously reward a war criminal, priest Jonas Žvinis, posthumously promote Lithuanian policeman , who distinguished himself during the years of war in operations to exterminate the peaceful population in Belarus.

Dalia Grybauskaitė   

 The Soviet army liberated Kovno on August 1, 1944. Of Kovno’s few Jewish survivors, 500 had survived in forests or in bunkers. Germans evacuated an additional 2,500 to concentration camps in Germany.

Juozas Ambrazevicius

Jewish Protests

Kovno Guetto

The small population and size of these artificial countries would make their survival almost impossible were it not for Western aid to employ them, like Poland, against Russia and as launderers of dirty money for multiple businesses.In addition to violating the human rights of Russian speakers, these artificial countries have become tax havens for criminals and corruption scandals, little known in the West, like everything that happens there, multiply. We will deal with them in other articles.

Lithuanian Gobernmant collaborator of Nazis German

We talked in the previous post about Nazi politicians or with Nazi sympathies in Lithuania, now it’s Latvia’s turn.

As we mentioned, these pseudo countries were never really independent, they were always part of Germany or Russia or other countries, in the last 500 years, but the communist rulers took advantage of the fall of the USSR to create their own garden where they and their relatives and acquaintances ruled and not someone from outside.

In the brief period in which they were independent from the Russian revolution to WWII, from 1920 to 1940, their history could not be more painful, collaborators with the Nazis and willing murderers of the Jews. Curiously now they want all that to be forgotten.

One example : 

The Rumbula massacre* is a collective term for incidents on November 30 and December 8, 1941, in which about 25,000 Jews were murdered in or on the way to Rumbula forest near Riga, Latvia, during the   Holocaust. Except for the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine , this was the biggest two-day Holocaust atrocity until the operation of the death camps  . About 24,000 of the victims were Latvian Jews from the Riga Guetto  and approximately 1,000 were German Jews  transported to the forest by train. The Rumbula massacre was carried out by the Nazi Einsatzgruppe A with the help of local collaborators of the Arajs Kommando , with support from other such Latvian auxiliaries. In charge of the operation

 was Hoherer SS und Plizeifuhrer Friedich Jeckeln, who had previously overseen similar massacres in Ukraine . Rudolf Lange , who later participated in the Wannsee Cogferrence  , also took part in organizing the massacre. Some of the accusations against Latvian Herberts Cukurs are related to the clearing of the Riga Ghetto by the Arajs Kommando. 

* Wikipedia

Latvian Nazi colaborators

There were many others massacresLiepaja Massacres, Daugavpils Ghetto, Jelgava Massacres, Burning of the Riga Synagogues, Dünamünde, etc.

A personal testimony

Professor Vaira Vike-Freiberga plays an essential role in this mechanism. The family of this Canadian, who fled Latvia when the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler fell, was linked to the Nazi agents of NATO’s stay-behind networks through a clandestine association Nazi agents of NATO’s stay-behind networks through a clandestine association

 destined to the Diaspora: the Hawks of Daugava River (Daugavas Vanagi). Meanwhile, the family of her husband, Imants Freibergs, was linked to the MI6 in Germany at the end of World War II. Vike-Freiberga, Psychology professor at the University of Toronto, specialist in the influence of drugs on human behavior, settled in Riga in early 1999 and acquired the Latvian citizenship. Then, in the spring, she was elected President of the Republic, winning a second term four years later. 
The Latvian Legion was created in January 1943 on the orders of Adolf Hitler following a request by Heinrich Himmler , the head of the SS . The initial core of the force was populated by Latvian Police Batallions 

L, which were formed starting in 1941 earlier for security duties and already serving on the Eastern Front under Wehrmacht command. While members of Holocaust collaborator Arajs Kommando  were subsequently joined to the Legion, this was late in the war as the Kommando was demobilized from anti-partisan and anti-Jewish action, with the first former Arajs unit attached to the Legion in December, 1944

 In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal  declared the Waffen-SS to be a criminal organization. The participation of some members of the legion in The Holocaust , including 600 were also members of the Arajs Kommando , and the legion’s inclusion of members of the Latvian fascist movement Perkonkrusts and Holocaust participants, has led to accusations that, under international military law, the legion met the criteria for a criminal organization  and/or that a significant proportion of its members, were directly or indirectly involved in war crimes. It has also been claimed that soldiers of the legion were involved in a massacre of Polish POWs at Podgaje , in 1945.Scholars such as Leanid Kazyrytski have argued that the Latvian Legion does possess all the features of a criminal organisation, as defined by the Tribunal.

Despite all of the above,although it may seem incredible the Latvian governments continue to support the exaltation of war criminals through marches and monuments and violating the rights of the Russian-speaking population in the face of the indiffe

The more you delve into the history of these pseudo countries, the more disgust you feel. Let’s remember that Estonia only has 1,329,000 inhabitants (2021 census) and about a third of its inhabitants are Russian-speaking.

She never was independent, except few years after the Russian Revolution, always was  ruled by the  Teutonic Order, Denmark, Sweden and from XVIII century of the Russian Empire. In other words, since approximately the time the United States has existed, Estonia has been Russian.

In the few periods in which Estonia has been independent, its history is stained with crimes and attacks on human rights. During WWII she collaborated with the German Nazis in the murder of Jewish men, women and children and since 1991 she has constantly violated the human rights of her Russian-speaking population and praised the Nazis in marches and monuments.

The curious thing is that few of these crimes transcend abroad and it intends to present itself as a young nation, clean and dedicated to new technologies.

Even Amnesty International has called, to no avail, for the Estonian government to end discrimination against Russian-speakers.

Discrimination on Russian population

The extermination of Jews in Estonian cities was carried out by SS troops, local political police, security police, and detachments of the Estonian paramilitary organization Omakaitse. The Omakaitse and the political police were led by Colonel Johannes Soodla. Einsatzgruppe A units appeared in Estonia on July 10, 1941. Already in August 1941, all the Jews who remained in Tartu were exterminated – approximately 40-50 people  . In Pärnu, Jewish men were killed in the first days of the occupation, women and children after 6 weeks. Then began the extermination of the Tallinn Jews  .

On September 10, 1941, the commander of SS Standartenführer Einsatzkommando 1A, Martin Sandberger, issued an order according to which the “cleansing” of Estonia of the Jews was entrusted to units from Omakaitse.

As noted in the materials of the International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity [in] under the auspices of the President of Estonia, the Estonian police were directly involved not only in the protection of the Vaivara concentration camps, in Tartu, Jägala, Tallinn, and Soviet POW camps, in which numerous executions of prisoners took place, but also accompanied Vilnius Jews to concentration camps in Estonia, as well as guarding a transfer camp for Jews in Izbica (Poland). ), where a significant number of Jews were murdered, and Jewish ghettos in Lodz, Przemysl, Rzeszów and Tarnopol [18] .

Estonian assassins not only murdered in Estonia

In August 1942, soldiers and officers of the 36th Police Battalion, formed in early 1942 by volunteers on Estonian territory (Tartu, Kuressaare, Hiiumaa, Saaremaa), took part in an action to exterminate the Jewish population near the city of Novogrudok (Belarus).

According to the testimony of former protesters detained after the war, on August 3-4, the entire 36 police battalion was sent to Belarus, where it was unloaded at the Novoelnya station, sent to Novogrudok and placed in barracks on the outskirts of the city. The soldiers of this battalion carried out mass executions in the Novogrudok area, the Novoelnya station and near the village of Dyatlovo, 20-30 kilometers from Novogrudok. At night, the police cordoned off the houses, herded the residents, including women and children, into the square, forced them to lie face down on the ground while they waited for the load, and then, in the morning, trucked them to the places. run in separate batches. The detainees themselves were forced to dig ditches, into which the executed were then thrown. In total, in the Novogrudok area, according to the detainees, about 1,000 people were killed, in the village of Dyatlovo – from 1,000 to 1,500 people. 

Klooga concentration camp

Among the many atrocities committed by Estonians and their German partners is the Klooga concentration camp.

It is estimated that 1,800–2,000 prisoners perished at Klooga from wanton killings, epidemics and working conditions. Most of them were Jews. The entire camp was enclosed by barbed wire. The men’s and women’s camps, which were separated by some 600 yards, had large two-story buildings for housing the prisoners. German SS units and members of the 287th Estonian Police Battalion served as guards. Prisoners were forced to work  in peat harvesting as well as in the camp cement works, sawmills, brickworks, and factory, which manufactured clogs for camp prisoners.

From 19–22 September 1944, with the perimeter of the camp guarded by 60–70 Estonian recruits to the 20th SS Division, a German task force began systematically slaughtering the remaining prisoners in a nearby forest. According to Ruth Bettina Birtn  the execution of 2,000 prisoners was conducted byEstonian soldiers of 20th SS Division  and presumably Schutzmannschaft Battalion under German command.

According to Soviet sources, approximately 2,000 were shot, then their bodies were stacked onto wooden pyres and burned. On 22 September 1944, when Soviet troops reached the Klooga camp, only 85 of the 2,400 prisoners remaining post-evacuation had managed to survive by hiding inside the camp or escaping into the surrounding forests. The liberation forces found numerous pyres of stacked corpses left unburned by the camp’s guards when they fled

  As is often the case in the history of World War II atrocities committed by the Germans and their murderous accomplices like the Estonians, few were punished, many fled, and surprisingly some were protected not only by the West German government but by England that refused to hand over or even punish notorious war criminals such as Ain Mere the German Security Police in Estonia, headed by Mere  to have been actively involved in the arrest and killing of Estonian Jews along with Ralf Gerrets  and Jaan Viik .  Though at the time he was residing in Britain , Mere was sentenced to death for his role during the war. The British government  refused to extradite him, citing a lack of evidence on the part of the Soviet authorities, and he died at the age of 66 in Leiceste. England .

Fortunately his accomplices Ralf Gerrets and Jaan Viik were captured, tried and executed.

Estonian war criminals on trial

And despite this bloody history of which this is just a small piece, Estonians in general, with their government at their head, are not only unrepentant but also extol their Nazi past.

As in the other Baltic countries, this bloody past is intended to be forgotten and Russia is criminalized, without differentiating the Soviet Union from Russia today, which shows that it is not a hatred of communism but a hatred of Russia through generations, and forgetting that the liberators of the concentration camps and the few survivors were the Russians. While the censorship of those who think differently and the oppression of Russian-speakers is growing in the face of the indifference of the European Union.

 Within the multiple tragedies of WWII, what happened in Eastern Europe are among the cruelest and bloodiest. Curiously, today homage is paid to genocidal people such as the Ukrainian Bandera and to Nazis in the artificial Batic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

We are going to remember some drops of the sea of blood that they committed.

From the book 

FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE. “Volyn massacre” 1943-1944. Documents and research

Alexander Dyukov.Alexei Yakovlev

In the spring of 1943, a large-scale ethnic cleansing began in Volyn, occupied by German troops. This criminal action was carried out not by the Nazis, but by the militants of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who sought to “cleanse” the territory of Volhynia from the Polish population. Ukrainian nationalists surrounded Polish villages and colonies and then proceeded to kill. They killed everyone: women, old people, children, babies. The victims were shot, beaten with clubs, hacked down with axes. Then the corpses of the destroyed Poles were buried somewhere in the field, their property was stolen, and finally the houses were burned down. In place of Polish villages, only burnt-out ruins remained.

They also destroyed the Poles who lived in the same villages as the Ukrainians. It was even easier – there was no need to collect large detachments. Groups of multi-person OUN members passed through the sleeping village, entered the houses of the Poles and killed everyone. And then the locals buried the murdered neighbors of the “wrong” nationality.

In this way, several tens of thousands of people were murdered, whose only fault was that they were born Poles and lived on Ukrainian soil.

65 years after these tragic events, they are trying to forget about the victims of Ukrainian nationalists in both Poland and Ukraine. It is understandable why the Volyn tragedy is consigned to oblivion in Ukraine: the OUN-UPA militants, who actively and brutally destroyed the Volyn Poles, were declared “national heroes” by modern Ukrainian authorities and one of the main organizers of the Volyn Massacre. , Roman Shukhevych, received the title of Hero of Ukraine. However, things are not much better in Poland either. The Polish authorities constantly bring claims against Russia in connection with the execution of Polish officers in Katyn, however, the OUN-UPA militants do not seek to recall the much more massive destruction of Polish civilian citizens. On the 65th anniversary of the Volyn massacre, the Polish Sejm rejected a draft resolution prepared by the Polish Peasant Party, in which the OUN and UPA were accused of genocide and massacres of Poles and Ukrainians. Polish President Lech Kaczynski did not participate in the events dedicated to this date, limiting himself to a letter of duty to his participants. In addition, the head of the Polish state generally refused patronage of “Volyn events”.

Completely wild interpretations began to sound; Marshal of the Pole Sejm Bronislaw Komorowski said that the Soviet Union was to blame for the Volyn tragedy. “For me, the attempt to shift the responsibility for the misfortunes of the Polish Kresses to someone other than the Soviets is completely unacceptable. I consider the attempt to establish Kresovyak Day on the anniversary of the Volyn tragedy as an attempt to shift responsibility onto the Ukrainians. I can not agree with this. The Memorial Day of the Kresses is on September 17, that is, the anniversary of the Soviet invasion in 1939. The attempt to transfer responsibility from the Soviets to the Ukrainians makes me wonder if we are dealing here with the long arms of Russia.” . [1]The statement is absolutely absurd, if only because it was the Soviet partisans who defended the Volyn Poles from Bandera attacks, and it was in the Polish villages that the Soviet partisans received full-scale support.

Historical amnesia is a serious disease typical of politicians. However, the prevalence does not make it any less disgusting. The desire to speculate on some of their victims while forgetting about others; the transformation of cruel murderers into national heroes is petty and insulting to all those who died sixty-five years ago.

Interrogation by the Russian army of Ukrainian murderers 

5. From the interrogation protocol of the UPA militant Vladimir Dubinchuk, August 6, 1944

Question: He is accused of the crimes that he committed under art. Art. 54-1 “a” and 54-11 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. Does he plead guilty to the charges against him?

Answer: Yes, in the accusation against me under art. Art. 54-1 “a” and 54-11 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, I plead fully guilty and, on the merits of the case, prove that, living in the German-occupied with. Svichev, Ovadnovsky district, Volyn region, really was in June 1943 a stanitsa in the village. Svichev Tsibulya Dmitry participated in the OUN as a liaison and, on his instructions, for about four months he delivered the OUN correspondence to Gud Andrei and the people. Vladislavovka to Joseph Lupinka.

In the summer of 1943, actually, he was armed with a rifle in town. Svichev from the Ovadnovsky district, together with the OUN bandits, participated in the massacre of Soviet citizens of Polish nationality. It was under the following circumstances: in the summer of 1943, I do not remember the exact date, in the morning the chief Tsibulya Dmitry summoned me to the village council and instructed me to go to the road not far from the church and wait for a cart with OUN bandits who would come from the Vladimir-Volynsky region, and when they arrive, sit in their wagons and point out the houses where Poles live, including the task of pointing out to the bandits the property of Dmitri Ilyashuk.

Pursuant to Dmitry Tsibul’s order, I took a rifle with me and went to the indicated place to wait for the bandits. At approximately 11 p.m. Svichev arrived in a car with five or six OUN gang members, who were armed with rifles. I personally recognized Joseph Lupinka from the village among the bandits. Vladislavovka, Vladimir-Volynsky district and Vasily from the village. Khobolitov, the rest of the bandits were not familiar to me. When I met with the bandits, I sat in a cart with them and drove them to the property of a village resident. Svichev – Il-yashuk Dmitry.

When we reached the Ilyashuk yard, Korchik Ivan and the second, armed with a rifle, I don’t know his last name, who lived in the village at that time, were already there. Svichev, armed with a sawed-off rifle.

Arriving in the courtyard, the bandits from the Ilyashuk estate discovered the Poles Rusetsky and Kryshtov, who were taken to Ilyashuk’s unfinished house and shot there. I personally did not see how they were shot, because I was in the yard near the car, and when they were killed, I went to look at them. Then I learned from the bandits that Ivan Korchik shot Rusetsky, and the bandit Vasily shot Kryshtov. After the execution of these two Poles, Dmitry Ilyashuk came home, who invited all the participants in the pogrom, including me, to the apartment, where he treated me to vodka and dinner. After dinner, all the troublemakers, including me, went to the estate of Savitsky Olesko, who lived next door to Ilyashuk. I don’t remember which of the bandits took Olesko Savitsky, his mother and his sister Bronislava out of the apartment into the courtyard, whom I shot in the courtyard on the orders of the bandit Lupinok.

After the execution of the Savitsky family, all the above-mentioned pogromists, including me, sat in a cart and went to kill Poles in the Yadvigov colony of the Svichevsky village council.

Arriving at the colony, we drove to the estate of the Pole Kishko, where the old man Kishko himself was in the yard, and he was blind. All the bandits were sitting in one cart, I entered the courtyard and shot this old man from the rifle that he had, after which, leaving the corpse in his place, we all went to the house of Anton Soshinsky.

We searched Soshinsky’s house, but did not find anyone. After that, we came to the house of the Pole Pnyak, who lived at the end of the colony. When we began to drive to this estate, we noticed that several Poles ran out of Pnyak’s house in the direction of the forest, we all jumped out of the cart and began to chase the fleeing and opened fire on them. However, at that time we did not manage to kill and catch up with any of the Poles, as they hid in the forest. After that, we searched the property of Pnyak.

When we returned to Svichev, I don’t remember, someone told us that his children were hiding in Anton Soshinsky’s house. Bandit Lupinka gave me the order to kill these children. When the accomplices were near the car, I ran to the house of Anton Soshinsky and shot a boy of about five years old. There were two other children in the room, but the cartridge I had left failed. After that, I left the apartment and reported this to Joseph Lupinka, who gave me two cartridges and an order to kill these children. I entered the room for the second time and shot the second child, about two years old. At that moment, Iosif Lupinka entered the apartment and, in my presence, shot the third child, who was between 6 and 7 years old.

After the execution of the sons of Soshinsky Anton, I, together with the bandits, returned to the village. Svichev, and we immediately went to the estate of the citizen Yarmolinskaya Mayevskaya. Lupinka Iosif Maevskaya and I were found in a neighboring house, after which she was taken to her property, where I personally shot her. We also leave this corpse on the spot and go to the building of the village council. Bandits Lupinka Iosif, Vasily Torchilo, Golumbitsky, I don’t even know the last name went to the Polish cemetery. There, Lupinka and Torchilo killed a Dobrovolskaya citizen, whose corpse was also left on the spot. On her way back, Lupinka entered the priest’s house, took the housekeeper, after which he took her to the neighboring estate and shot her in the same courtyard. After this murder, all the bandits of Vl. – The Volynsky district got into a cart and left in the direction of the Bozhya Volya colony. This was the end of the pogrom of the Poles in the village. Svichev.

Original sources

One of the aspects that surprised me the most about the Second World War is that apparently democratic countries helped the German Nazis and/or committed genocide together with them. Sweden and Finland are examples of this.

  We have seen that the Germans created extermination camps all over Europe, including in Trieste (Italy), but few people know about the concentration camps built and run by the Finns.

These camps were organized by the armed forces supreme commander Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim , by the way former tsarist officer. The camps were intended to hold Russian  detainees for future exchange with theFinnic  population from the rest of Russia. The mortality rate  of civilians in the camps was high due to famine and disease.In 2004-2008, the Finnish National Archives conducted a special research to investigate the history  of people who died in Finnish concentration camps and during the war in 1939-1955. According to the research, 4,279 people died in the concentration camps of Eastern Karelia during the war, meaning a rough mortality rate of 17%.

After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Finns retook the territory lost after the Winter War and occupied eastern Karelia as well. This action made Finland a co-belligerent with Germany against the Soviet Union. During the war, Finland opened between 15 and 20 labor camps in occupied eastern Karelia where Soviet civilians were forced to harvest timber, build roads, and carry out other similar tasks. Children were forced to harvest willow bark, which was used to tan leather.

Significant numbers of Soviet civilians were interned in the camps. These were primarily Russian children and elderly, as almost all of the working age male and female population were either drafted or evacuated by the Soviet government. Only a third of the original population of 470,000 remained in East Karelia when the Finnish army arrived, and half of them were Karelians. About 30 percent (24,000) of the remaining Russian population were confined in camps; six-thousand of them were Soviet refugees captured while they awaited transportation over Lake Onega , and 3,000 were from the southern side of the River Svir. The first of the camps were set up on 24 October 1941 in Petrozavodsk. During the spring and summer of 1942, about 3,500 detainees died of malnutrition. During the second half of 1942, the number of detainees dropped quickly to 15,000 as people were released to their homes or were resettled to the “safe” villages, and only 500 more people died during the last two years of war, as the food shortages were alleviated. During the following years, the Finnish authorities detained several thousand more civilians from areas with reported partisan activity, but as the releases continued the total number of detainees remained at 13,000–14,000. According to the records the total number of deaths among the interned civilians and POWs was 4,361 (earlier estimates varied between 4,000 and 7,000), mostly from hunger during the spring and summer of 1942

An article about the camps:

https://iz.ru/1011186/vladimir-veretennikov/kholodnaia-merzost-chto-tvorili-finny-v-kontclageriakh-vo-vremia-vtoroi-mirovoi

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal case for genocide in the Republic of Karelia during the occupation by Finland in 1941-1944. The Finns established 14 concentration camps, in which at least 8,000 civilians died and more than 7,000 Soviet POWs were murdered in the most barbaric ways. The Finns are trying to deny these allegations, prompting condemnation from the Moscow Human Rights Office. Izvestia is about a page in the history of the war, which our northern neighbors try hard to forget.

Judging by recently released archival documents, there were at least fourteen large concentration camps in Finland and six in occupied Petrozavodsk alone. The Finns also established more than 30 labor camps and more than 40 prisoner of war camps. In total, during the occupation of Karelia from 1941 to 1944, more than 24 thousand people – prisoners of war and members of the civilian population – found themselves behind barbed wire.

The number of victims among civilians is estimated at 8 thousand people, including more than 2 thousand children. More than 7,000 prisoners of war, according to the Commission of Inquiry, “were buried alive, murdered in gas chambers, and shot.” Even now, more than 2,000 former underage prisoners of Finnish concentration camps live in Karelia, direct witnesses of the atrocities committed there.

From the certificate of the People’s Commissar for State Security of the Karelia-Finnish SSR, Mikhail Baskakov, dated July 3, 1943, it appears that at least 24 Finnish servicemen are responsible for organizing the massacres. Among them are the head of the East Karelian military administration (the military administration of the occupied territory), Lieutenant Colonel Kotilainen, his assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Ragnar Nordstrom, the chief of staff of the military administration, Lieutenant Colonel Kuusilu, and the district chiefs, , Vyasyanen and Paloheimo. The commandant of the Petrozavodsk concentration camp Valentin Miks, as well as the assistant to the head of the Svyatozersk concentration camp, junior sergeant Polevoy, were named direct perpetrators of the acts of genocide. As far as is known, most of them escaped punishment for their actions.

The Finnish side is trying to dispute these accusations. The director of the National Archives of Finland, Jussi Nuorteva, called the statement of the Russian Investigative Committee “unexpected and regrettable”, assuring that the Finns did not kill people in gas chambers and did not bury them alive. Furthermore, he denies the figure of 8,000 dead civilians. “In our files the exact figure is given with all the names. There were 4,060 deaths”, says Nuorteva.

The Finnish press also published the opinion of Professor Dmitry Frolov, an employee of the National Archives of Finland. “We have free access to all the data that we share with the Russian side. Therefore, one can only wonder where they get such information from, ”Frolov said. He is referring to a database of dead Soviet prisoners of war and civilians, which is freely available on the Internet, created by the national archive.

“In 2010-2011, we handed over to the Russian side copies of the registration cards of Soviet prisoners of war who died in Finnish camps. According to Finnish data, 1998 Soviet POWs died in the Karelian camps. The total number of prisoners killed in 1941-1944 was about 20,000. In this regard, the figure of 7,000 people in Karelia alone causes some bewilderment. Information about the causes of death and burial places is in the database, ”Frolov assures.

Genocide policy

So where is the truth? Izvestia turned to the director of the Institute of History, Political and Social Sciences of Petrozavodsk State University, Doctor of Historical Sciences Sergei Gennadievich Verigin.

Professor Verigin has long been involved in the issue of Finnish concentration camps in Karelia, and this is what he said: “In the entire territory of Karelia, which at that time was inhabited by only 86 thousand people, the Finns they created more than a hundred places of forced detention of the local population. These are concentration camps for the civilian population, labor camps, concentration camps for prisoners of war, prisons and other places of detention. To be honest, it is even difficult for me Name any other occupied territory where such a high density of camps was created for its inhabitants during World War II.

The scientist emphasizes that people were forcibly placed in camps, where a half-starved existence, forced labor, intimidation, unsanitary conditions and disease awaited them. The prisoners died in large numbers. The Finns did not engage in mass executions or village burnings, as the Nazis practiced. However, the Finnish occupiers did not need mass executions. People died a natural death, due to the conditions in which they were placed. In 1942, the death rate in the Finnish concentration camps was even higher than in the German ones.

Verigin adds that he cannot agree with the position of Finnish historians on a number of issues related to the occupation of Karelia. “They claim that the documents that were transferred to the Karelia National Archives contain the names of some 4,000 people who died in the concentration camps. But, firstly, these are data from February 1942 to June 1944. – and people died in the second half of 1941. Secondly, the lists themselves were sloppy, we see a lot of names crossed out. For the Finns, dead Russians were not a major problem. We still do not know the exact figure – how many civilians died in the concentration camps in the occupied territory of Karelia. The same applies to the number of prisoners of war who died in the Karelian concentration camps.Antti Laine points out that the Finns have created a school and a social network. But he deceives the readers: this network was created only for the Finno-Ugric population of Karelia! When “full-fledged” Karelian and Vepsian children went to school, attended kindergartens, were treated in outpatient clinics and medical centers, Russian children starved to death in concentration camps.

Long range goals

A similar point of view was expressed to Izvestiya by the historian, writer, director of the Military Museum of the Karelian Isthmus, Bair Irincheev, who specializes in the topic of the Soviet-Finnish wars. “In the interpretation of the events of 1941-1944, there are significant differences between the historians of Russia and Finland. But there are facts that neither the Finnish nor the Russian side deny. The Finns hoped that Karelia would become part of their state forever and ever, and they considered that part of its population that did not belong to the Finns as an unnecessary and harmful element. No one can deny this now.

On the other hand, as I understand it, they wanted to leave all the dirty work to the Germans. Why, in fact, did the Finns put the “wrong” population in concentration camps? Because they wanted to wait for the final crushing of the Soviet Union to send the Slavic population of Karelia to the territory of Russia occupied by the Nazis, to the Reichskommissariat “Moscow” or elsewhere. Do what you want with them, they say… In addition, the Finns practiced the exchange of Soviet prisoners of war with the Germans: they say, give us our Finno-Ugric peoples, and in return they take political officials and Jews. The Finns, in the order of such an exchange, handed over to the Germans about two thousand people, who, it seems, were immediately shot,” said the specialist.

According to Irincheev, Finland blames Soviet intelligence groups for about 187 deaths of its civilians, but is silent about the “exploits” of its similar formations. “But in a Petrovsky Pit, 28 Soviet hospital medical staff were killed by Finnish saboteurs!” Irincheev emphasized.

In conclusion, it should be noted that in 2018 the Finnish National Archives began an investigation into the participation of volunteers from this country, who fought in the ranks of the SS, in the murders of the civilian population of the Soviet Union. Not everyone knows that the Finnish military unit of 1408 people operated in 1941-1943 in Ukraine and the Caucasus. It was part of the “Viking” Panzer SS Division, which included volunteers from different European countries.

Based on the results of the study of the diaries of the volunteers, a report was prepared indicating that the Finns who served on the Viking knew about the crimes of the German Nazis and participated in them themselves. Historian Jussi Nuorteva quotes an entry from the diary of SS Unterscharführer Keijo Kayariainen, made on June 23, 1941: “Today we received instructions on the conduct of hostilities: among other things, to shoot all prisoners.”

SS Unterscharführer Jaakko Hintikka described in his diary a battle near the village of Toldzgun in North Ossetia: “Five spies in civilian clothes were captured and finished off. At sunset, they took him to the mountain and shot him. A couple more prisoners were added to them. It was hard work, they kept asking for mercy, but the automaton knows no mercy. The youngest was 17 years old, the next – 20 years old, the rest – bearded grandparents. The youngest was shot last, first he buried his comrades, and then he himself went to the other world. Such evidence in occupant records is abundant.

For to know more

It may be that after learning this, your opinion about the friendly, civilizated and no longer neutral Finns will change

Currently, when Sweden and Finland break with a centuries-old tradition of neutrality, it is interesting if that neutrality has been such throughout history, or is, like so many issues, a legend.

Let us examine the case of Sweden.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Sweden declared itself neutral the 1th September 1939. However, while the war lasted, Sweden carried out various actions that distanced it from neutrality, sometimes in favor of Germany, sometimes in favor of the allies. But the most serious was in favor of the Germans. Aid to the Germans mainly consisted of providing them with various raw materials, especially iron, and allowing the passage of their troops to Finland, which was an ally of Germany in the fight against the Soviet Union and which collaborated in the siege of Leningrad where hundreds of thousands of Russian civilians, elderly, women and children, died because of that siege.

The biggest point concerning Swedish support for the Axis Powers, was the iron ore trade. Germany used this ore in its weapon production, and trade form Sweden to Germany eventually became so large that ten million tons of iron ore per year was to the Third Reich. The government did not interfere with the trade because of its official policy of neutrality. British intelligence had identified German dependency on this production of ore, and estimated that Germany’s preparations for war could end in disaster if there were to be a delay in exports. Of course this iron was for          German weapons.

Another point regarding support for the Axis Powers in WW2 concerns Operation Barbarossa, the German plan to invade the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. The Germans asked the Swedes to allow German armed forces to be transported by train through Swedish land, from Norway to Finland. There was huge controversy surrounding what the government should do, and the political debates around the issue became known as the ‘Midsummer Crisis.’ This was the first point in the war where the Swedish government itself, as opposed to simply the people, was asked to reject its foreign policy of six hundred years.  In the end, permission was granted to Germany, and thus, the Swedish government showed opposition to its country’s long-held foreign policy.

Another point, although of lesser importance, was the contribution of Swedish volunteers to the armies of the Axis that were fighting against the Soviet Union. opposed to its official government policy, when called to fight in Finland, as many as 8,000 Swedes volunteered, and in response to German pleas for volunteers against the Soviet Union, around 180 Swedes joined the German Waffen-SS. It was always the individuals’ choice to enlist; however, the government also helped in ways such as sending food, ammunition, weapons and medicine to Finland during conflict. While the number of Swedish volunteers was comparatively small compared to some other nations, the country’s willingness to help in the war effort surely points to its obvious lack of neutrality. 

The actions in favor of the allies were much smaller, but one stands out for its humanity, which is giving refuge to the Jews who escaped from Denmark and other countries, and the actions of some Swedish diplomats who helped save Jews within the countries occupied by Germany. like Hungary. Diplomats such as Count Folke Bernadotte, who contributed to saving over 15,000 prisoners from concentration camps, Raoul Wallenberg, who saved up to 100,000 Hungarian Jews, and Werner Dankwort, who secretly helped Jewish children to escape to Sweden inside wooden crates, were able to use their statuses to communicate with the German government and pass information back to Sweden.

Count Folke Bernardotte

German telegrams passed through Swedish-leased cables, allowing the Swedes to intercept them, and due to Arne Beurling breaking the cypher code in summer 1940, the messages were understood and the Polish resistance movement conveyed these to the Allies. Another example is when the German battleship Bismarck set off to attack the Atlantic convoys, Swedish intelligence informed the British. In addition, Swedish businessmen, diplomats and emissaries actively spied for the Allies in cities such as Berlin.

On June 13, 1944, a V2 rocket being tested by the Germans crashed in Sweden and they exchanged its wreckage with Britain for Supermarine Spitfires. It seems that rarely did the Swedes act altruistically as Churchill said.

When we think of Finland, we think of a peaceful, historically neutral country, hence the term Finnishization, to denote a neutrality par excellence, with high results in school tests of its educational system and that accepts a large percentage of immigration in relation to its population.

However, now that, together with Sweden, it abandons its historic neutrality and violates the 1954 treaty with Russia to remain neutral, it is convenient to review its behavior in the not so distant Second World War.

Finland was a part of the Russian Empire 1809–1917 and became an autonomic part of Imperial Russia , most of the laws from the time of the Swedish rule remained in force. During the Russian rule, Finland became a special region ,a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, recognizing an autonomous parliament, the DietIn 1917 with the Russian Revolution Finland acceded to independence.

From november 30, 1939 to March 12, 1940, there was a war between Russia and Finland , finished with Russian victory and Finland surrendered a large area of southeastern Finland, including the city of Viipuri (renamed Vyborg), that before was Russian because Zar Alexander I incoporated to Finland en 1854, and leased the peninsula of Hanko to the Soviet Union for 30 years.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and with it began the Second World War, Finland allied with Germany against the USSR, collaborating on the northern front and in the siege of Leningrad where more than a million civilians died of starvation.

The behavior of the Finns with Russian civilians and with captured Soviet soldiers is completely ignored in the West and the testimonies that follow do not correspond to the image of that idyllic country that they want to present to us.

“The Red Army soldier Sergey Pavlovich Terentyev, who escaped from the captivity of the White Finns, spoke about the unbearable suffering of Soviet prisoners of war languishing in a camp near the city of Pitkyaranta. “In this camp,” Terentiev said, “wounded soldiers of the Red Army are kept. They are not provided with any kind of medical attention. … They gave us a cup of flour stew a day. The Finnish executioners devised a terrible torture for us. They girded the prisoner with barbed wire and dragged him along the ground. Every day, the corpses of tortured Soviet soldiers are carried out of the camp.” (From the message of the Soviet Information Office of October 7, 1942)

“The Red Army soldier Lazarenko, who fell into the clutches of the Mannerheims, was subjected to monstrous torture. Finnish executioners shoved cartridges into his nostrils and burned a five-pointed star on his chest with a red-hot ramrod. But even this did not seem enough for the vile sadists. They broke the skull of his victim and stuffed cookies inside. ” (Pravda, July 25, 1944)

“Dear Comrade Editor! Take a look at this photo. It shows the Finnish army lieutenant Olkinuorya. In his hands is the skull of a Red Army soldier tortured and killed by him. According to the prisoners testified, this uniformed beast decided to keep the skull of his victim “as a souvenir” and ordered the soldiers to boil it in a cauldron and clean it. And in the suitcase of the captured Finn Saari we found photographs like this. Saari tortured the prisoners, cutting off their arms and legs and ripping open their stomachs. He even established a system: he first cut off the feet, then the hands, then the shins, the forearms, and only then cut off the head. (From a letter of Senior Lieutenant V. Andreev, published in Komsomolskaya Pravda on August 11, 1944)

“…Many of the corpses found of tortured Soviet officers and soldiers have stab wounds, many had their ears and noses cut off, their eyes gouged out, their joints torn out, strips of skin and five stars were cut off. tips. out of body. Finnish monsters practiced burning people alive at the stake…

… The act and resolution of the military investigator on the corpse of an unknown Red Army soldier found on the shore of Lake Ladoga on June 25, 1944, boiled alive in a large iron barrel, testifies to what vile, sophisticated torture Finnish sadists get…

… A regime was established in the concentration camps, designed for the extinction of prisoners of war by a slow and painful death. They were hungry. The barracks in which the prisoners were placed, as a rule, were not heated all year round. The appallingly unsanitary living conditions of the prisoners of war and the rotten and inedible food were the cause of massive stomach and other illnesses. The most common disease, most often fatal, was general exhaustion …

… There are no isolated cases when the guards of the camps arranged vile and bloody fun, throwing dogs on defenseless people.

Prisoners are used as experimental material in medical experiments. The Swedish newspaper Volksviljan wrote earlier this year: “It is known among Stockholm doctors that in Finland Russian prisoners of war are used as subjects of medical experiments. Finnish doctors use Russian prisoners of war to determine how much air can be injected into a person’s blood. This inflicts terrible torment on the victims during the “investigation”, after which death occurs. In experiments on Russian prisoners, they are also trying to find out how many drugs the human body can withstand. (From the Report on the atrocities of the White Finns in the temporarily occupied territory of the USSR, sent to the head of the GlavPU of the Red Army A.S. Shcherbakov by his deputy I.V. Shikin on July 28, 1944)

In June 2016, Finnish writer Petri Pietiläinen came up with the idea to publish the memoirs of surviving Soviet-Finnish veterans. Of the 70 men who fought in the First Infantry Regiment, only 30 were able to give an interview.

The talks with the military formed the basis of an article published this week on the website of Finnish broadcaster Yle. “30 Finnish veterans finally dare to speak out about the bloody battles of the Continuation War,” the headline read.

Despite being a very sensitive subject, this material is not full of aggression towards the Soviet Union. On the contrary, veterans painfully recall how they were ordered to brutalize soldiers and prisoners, condemn their military leadership and do not hide the fact that chaos and panic reigned in the ranks of the Finnish army during the war.*

*https://histrf.ru/read/articles/zimniaia-voina-panika-i-zhiestokost-finskoi-armii

……………

– Speaking about the horrors of that time, veterans often talked about war crimes against Soviet soldiers and prisoners of war, whom they “killed mercilessly.” “Some were able to take not one, but two prisoners, and then boasted that they ‘killed these filthy Russians’. Although many admit that these memories are very painful. Were the Finnish soldiers really not inferior to the Nazis in cruelty?

– Yes, there are confirmed cases, including documented ones, in particular, the extremely cruel massacre of the wounded during the liquidation of the encirclement of the Red Army in the Lemetti region (this is between Lake Ladoga and Onega). Relatively small garrisons held out there for a long time. When they were pressured, there was simply merciless retaliation, including from the injured. It was such a shameful stain that it remained on the Finnish army from the Winter War.

 Due to the book about the genocide of the Jews in Lithuania, family and friends moved away from Ruta Vanagaitė“

I have fulfilled my duty to the country”

Mindaugas Jackevičius • •

Young illiterate Lithuanians in a sober state killed Jews so diligently that they were brought here to Lithuania for extermination from other countries.Schoolchildren also willingly participated in the murders, and the church observed the Holocaust with indifference, even the murderers were absolved of their sins.For the sake of racial purity and Jewish teeth, some 200,000 Jews were exterminated in Lithuania.These are the conclusions reached by Rūta Vanagaitė, who wrote the book “Mūsiškiai” (“Ours”).An important part of the book is “A Journey with the Enemy”, in which Vanagaitė and the famous Nazi hunter Ephraim Zuroff embark on a journey to the places where Jews were murdered and communicate with surviving eyewitnesses of those events.

“I know Lithuania didn’t expect this book. That’s why I wrote it.” These are her words. Have you already experienced a backlash?
Priest Ričardas Doveika told me that doors were closing in my face.From the beginning, I faced a negative reaction: my relatives said that I was betraying my relatives and that I was Pavlik Morozov.Several of my friends turned their backs on me, saying that the Jews were paying me and that I was betraying my country.It took a lot of courage.I asked my children, who are 20 and 28, if I should write a book like this.They said they supported him 120%.But some of my friends warned me that I would run out of readers who loved me for my books on caring for the elderly and women.I thought, why should I think about trading?I see that no one else will write a book like that.

Why do you think no one else will write? Are you afraid of this topic?
They are so afraid that I face absolute panic, from the authorities to the villagers.In six months, I met only a few people who were not afraid.I even had to meet historians on a park bench … I can’t quote some historians, they don’t want to, one of them said that from now on he would not give lectures on this topic, it’s dangerous.

Where does this fear come from? Lithuania and Israel reconciled, and in 1995 President Algirdas Brazauskas apologized to the Jewish people, even though he was jealously criticized for it.
They made peace with Israel so that it would not raise this issue.In exchange, Lithuania will support Israel at the UN.It’s politics.Even the Israeli ambassador, seeing Zuroff in Lithuania, said to him: “Why are you coming here, will you ruin the mood of the people?”Not even the Jewish community raises this issue, neither Israel nor Lithuania raises it, and there are practically no eyewitnesses to these events.And there is no money for research.Yes, Brazauskas was convicted.I think he later regretted doing it.He promised to identify and name the killers, but this was not done.In 2012, the Lithuanian Center for the Study of Genocide and Resistance compiled a list of 2055 people who could have participated in the genocide.The list was delivered to the government.Where is he now?I went to see the Vice Chancellor of the Government and told him that we had to do something with this list, because he could not lie for 5 years.They told me that no matter what we did, the Jews were not enough.And the list goes on.

Maybe everything has already been researched and evaluated? I have read the books of all Lithuanian historians, and all of them claim that the Holocaust took place in provinces throughout Lithuania.We believe that only in Paneriai, no, the entire province of Lithuania is full of Jewish graves, people have been exterminated.This is a blank spot in our historiography.Why didn’t they investigate it?There are only a few historians who do this: I was told that five people have to work for five years to find out how many Lithuanians participated in the Holocaust.Not five people and 5 years.Zuroff and I drove through Lithuania: the people who saw and remember the Holocaust are now between 5 and 85 years old.How much longer are we going to wait?

It’s no secret that Zuroff is hated in Lithuania and he himself, to put it mildly, does not burn with love for us. How did you manage to convince him to take a “trip” to Lithuania?
In the spring, I was preparing a conference, and all the historians told me not to invite Zuroff: if he did, they refused to participate, because he might cry and start a fight.He interested me a lot.When he came to participate in the neo-Nazi marches, I met him.I asked him if he worked for Putin, and he asked me if he was doing Jewish projects for money.I responded that among my relatives there were people whom I suspected of having participated in the Holocaust. He said that in 25 years he met the first person in Lithuania who recognized this. I said, “You’re attacking Lithuania, so let’s get in my car and drive around Lithuania, talk to people, see who’s right.” Because I do not know.She accepted and the trip lasted three weeks. We agreed to pay for gas equally.

What did you see? How many doors have been closed in your face?

Most people spoke, but did not agree to be photographed or give their names. Others were afraid, they said they would come and kill me. Who is going to kill? Lithuanians! They know that in most cases Jews were escorted, guarded or killed by their neighbors’ parents or grandparents. In this way, they betray their neighbors. But they remember it very well.

In an interview published in the book, Zuroff says that Lithuania is extraordinarily beautiful, but its beautiful forests hide several hundred massacre sites. When you drive around Lithuania you can see signs indicating those places, at least Lithuania has taken care of this.
But if you turn around there, you won’t see anything. There is a sign, and then you can wander through the forest, and that’s it. But there are also places that are not indicated. That’s what I told Zuroff, we’re not rich enough to guard 227 places. He replied that it was necessary to watch when they were shot.Zuroff cried in every place. I had to wait for him to say a prayer. And then I thought, there are thousands of bones underground, and these places are not marked in any way. Then I couldn’t bear to look at the Lithuanian graves. It seemed that everything was given too much importance, everything was so theatrical.

I have read the exhumation reports, many children with skulls intact, so they were buried alive. In the book, there is the testimony of a soldier: the father was lying face down in the well, covering the child. The soldier was asked who was shot first, the father or the child. He replied: “Are we beasts, or what, to shoot a child in front of his father?” “A child doesn’t understand anything.”

In the book, your rhetorical question about how many gold teeth were taken from the murdered Jews, melted down and then used to make the teeth of the inhabitants of Joniškelis, sounds terrible. He was a murderer of Jews who then worked as a dental technician. Did Lithuanians share the gold crowns of the dead?

Not only in Joniškelis, but in many places. I remember that in Soviet times, when teeth were treated, people asked whether the gold would be yours or mine. Where did dental technicians get their gold? Where did all the gold crowns go?

There is an even more interesting point. I inherited an antique bed, a wardrobe and a clock from my grandparents. I read that there were about 50,000 Jewish homes throughout Lithuania, plus synagogues, shops, hospitals. Where did all this go? All of Lithuania became rich.

I read that in Panevėžys, things were given to the Drama Theater, to a nursing home, to a women’s gym, to a hospital and then sold to the residents. What could not be sold was given away. At the time of the murder of the Jews, there were 25,000 inhabitants in Panevėžys, and 80,000 belongings remained after the murder of the Jews, from bedding to cups. They gave themselves away. This means that each resident received several free things.

My grandmother is from Panevėžys, the bed is from Panevėžys. Did she buy it? I don’t know. Did my mother wear any of those clothes? All Lithuanians who have antiques may wonder where they come from. The murderers of Jews were not paid anything, they took what they could, took it to sell or exchanged it for vodka. That was his reward. At night they returned home. Some of them had children, and they didn’t come home from work empty-handed, they brought them clothes or something else.

When you read the book, you get the impression that the killers were simple village boys who volunteered for the Lithuanian army.

They went there on their own because they had nothing to do. At that time, there was a logic: they gave us food and shots. And you can also bring clothes, shoes, Jewish chains, drink. Rimantas Zagreckas conducted a study on the social portrait of the murderer of Jews: half of those killed in the province were illiterate or had completed two degrees. Maybe if the Church had taken a different stance or said that one of God’s commandments had to be obeyed, maybe that would have stopped them. But the Church was silent or did not call.

When you read the memoirs of the murderers of Jews, the conclusion suggests itself that the Germans did not force them to kill – they could have refused.

First of all, these were volunteers – and the white armbands who volunteered. Some claimed that refusal was threatened with execution, but there is only one fact – in Kaunas a soldier who refused to kill was shot in the Mickevicius Valley.

Eight vocational school students, 16-17 years old, served in the special detachment. June came, there was nothing to do, they went to work – they were promised Jewish things. Summer is over, they left the detachment. Is this violence – they came on their own, they left on their own.

In Lithuania they say that they forced people to kill and gave them water. Military officer Liaonas Stonkus said that if they saw that someone’s nerves could not stand it, the officers did not force them to shoot, they were afraid that the weapon would be turned against them. And they didn’t drink – they gave it after, in the evening, or very little – they were afraid that the commanders wouldn’t get shot. We can say that the Jews were killed by young, illiterate and sober Lithuanians.

You will be attacked for inconvenient truths and asked how you know what you are relying on?

In the book I do not rely on any foreign source, only on what is said by the residents of Lithuania and historians. I spent six months in the Special Archive, reading cases and their confessions. Whoever says that our boys were tortured and only after that they testified is nonsense, no one talks about torture. One murderer of Jews complained of pain in his shoulder, they took an x-ray, found out the cause, prescribed a massage and paraffin baths. Apparently he shot too much.

Secondly, the NKVD workers were consistent, accurate, each story of the killer of Jews was confirmed by the testimony of 15 more people, comrades-in-arms. Every detail matches. They all minimized their guilt. When asked how many times they had participated in executions, at first they did not remember, then they remembered one execution, but in fact they participated in 20 or 50.

Everyone minimized their guilt because they did not want to sit. After the war, the NKVD tried many for escorting, and 20-30 years later, when it turned out that they had been shot, they were arrested again.

To what extent, in your opinion, did the official position of the Lithuanian authorities determine the tragedy?

Determined in many ways. Many people say – the Lithuanian Activist Front started, the provisional government continued, and then the Nazi collaborators continued: Kubiljunas, Reivitis and others.

The Lithuanian administration employed 20,000 people: police officers, district police chiefs. Only 3% of them were Germans. There was a planned process carried out by the Lithuanians. Of course, it was not the Lithuanians who planned it, but they were told, they carried it out, they did everything so well that they later brought Jews from Austria and France to Lithuania to shoot.

At Fort IX, 5,000 Jews from Austria and the Czech Republic were shot. They were taken here for vaccination – the Jews went to the pits with their sleeves rolled up in anticipation of vaccination. The Lithuanians worked so well that Antanas Impulevičius’s battalion was taken to Belarus, where 15,000 Jews were killed. The Germans were very pleased.

Where does such diligence come from? Many people say that the Lithuanians suffered, occupation was replaced by occupation, it is not our fault, we suffered, we were taken to Siberia.

Yes, this is true, but no one forced them to shoot people. Volunteers showed up, partly because of widespread anti-Semitism.

So the Lithuanians killed Jews out of hatred? However, it seems that until now the Lithuanians coexisted peacefully with the Jews.

We had quite a lot of Woldemaras supporters, nationalists who were influential army officers. Many murderers of Jews are aviators, comrades of Darius and Girenas.

Under Smetona, it was possible to get along well with the Jews, but when the Germans came, Lithuanian nationalists joined them, and everything became very simple. And anti-Semitism – everything came from Berlin, Goebbels’ hand was felt there, the Lithuanians spread it. The first newspaper of the provisional government of Lithuania “Towards Freedom” wrote, down with the Jews, their corpses are our path to freedom. They talked about it on the radio and wrote in the newspapers. Two months were enough, then structures were created.
Without the approval of the Lithuanian government and without the connivance of Hitler, this would not have happened: we must admit, but we do not want to, that we have streets and schools named after Kazys Škirpa and Juozas Ambrazevičius.

Zuroff admitted that he did not realize that Lithuania at the dawn of independence was unable to come face to face with the past; even France took 50 years to admit its guilt for the pro-Hitler actions of the Vichy regime.

It will take us 90 years. Soon everyone will die, and my children’s generation will be interested, but there will be no more witnesses. That’s why I talked to the witnesses while they were alive. Let no one read this book, maybe it will be read in 10 or 15 years. I have fulfilled my duty to my country, even if she did not ask for it.

How can you know that in the building where the famous Panevėžys confectionery company is now located, there used to be a world-famous yeshiva, a religious school? There is no sign. Students and teachers from all over the world came here.

What do you think Lithuania would have been like if it had not exterminated its inhabitants?

I think we would have more scientists, great doctors. It would be a serious condition. But we wanted racial purity and their teeth.

You mentioned that you were disowned by your relatives. Did your family members participate in the Holocaust?

I don’t know. My grandfather participated in the commission that compiled a list of 10 Jews, and my aunt’s husband was the commander of the White Bracelets, he worked in the security structures in Panevėžys. I know that the entire Panevėžys police, under the influence of the Nazis, participated in this process. I know none of them pulled the trigger, otherwise I wouldn’t have written, it would have been too difficult for me. The Holocaust consists of two crimes. One is the involvement of the administration, making lists, etc., the other is assassination. I think if we all look at our relatives…

Are you prepared for Lithuania’s defamation accusations with the help of Zuroff?

But I have done something good: Zuroff will stop going to Lithuania. He understands that what I have done, what Ričardas Doveika and Tomas Šernas have said, what historians have done, he knows that we are on the right path. He cannot tell us anything new, it is up to the Lithuanians to discover their past.

Zuroff said that he had nothing more to do here: no foreigner could force Lithuania to look at his past.

https://rus.delfi.ee/statja/73518443/iz-za-knigi-o-genocide-evreev-v-litve-ot-ruty-vanagayte-otvernulis-rodnye-i-druzya

 September 23 is Holocaust Remembrance Day in Lithuania. On this day in 1943, the Nazis liquidated the Vilnius Jewish ghetto, and its surviving inhabitants were killed or sent to concentration camps. Despite well-known testimonies and documents confirming the involvement of Lithuanian collaborators in the extermination of Jews, this topic is still hushed up in Lithuania, and anyone who tries to reveal the truth is condemned and persecuted.

Before World War II, Lithuania had the largest number of Jews among all the Baltic countries. At that time, Vilnius was even called the Lithuanian Jerusalem. The years of German occupation turned into a terrible tragedy: 95% of the entire Jewish population – more than 200,<> people – were brutally tortured and killed. And it was not the Germans who committed the massacres, but the Lithuanians themselves – neighbors, colleagues and even friends. Subsequently, for many years, the Lithuanian authorities tried to hush up these facts.

Only two years ago, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, during a ceremony of remembrance of the victims of the genocide of the Jews, acknowledged the participation of Lithuanians in their extermination: “We denied, we were angry, we tried to negotiate with our conscience, counting and comparing what cannot be counted or compared: the suffering and lives of people. It was difficult to admit that the citizens of our state died at the hands of the Lithuanians.”

How was it possible that the Lithuanians went to kill their neighbors?

As early as the 1930s, the nationalist government of Lithuania was preparing for the genocide of the Jews. The archives contain correspondence between members of the Lithuanian Activists Front and agents of the German special services on the issue of obtaining funds for the persecution of the Jewish population. Lithuania’s accession to the Soviet Union postponed this tragedy for some time. But from June 1941, the genocide was started not by the occupying forces, but by local “activists.”

Despite the president’s belated admissions, the tragedy of the Holocaust has not yet been recognized by Lithuanian society. So, a few days ago, on the eve of the memorable date in Vilnius, vandals painted the objects located in the Paneriai Memorial Museum. The Paneriai Massacre was a mass murder of about 100,000 Jews, Poles and Russians by German punishers and Lithuanian collaborators.

Double standards continue to flourish in the country. The Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Center publishes information about alleged “accomplices of the communist regime”, but at the same time refuses to publish information about Lithuanians participating in the genocide of Jews, referring to the legislation on the protection of personal data.

The story of writer, journalist and public figure Ruta Vanagaitė is very illustrative here. In 2015, she learned from Israeli historian Ephraim Zuroff details about the abuse of Jews in Lithuania during the Holocaust. This prompted her to engage in the study of archival documents, which resulted in the publication of the book “Ours” in 2016. It openly speaks of the mass voluntary participation of Lithuanian citizens in the murder of Jews and looting. The author writes that the Jews were quite a rich stratum of society, so it was simply “profitable” to exterminate them, since every murderer enriched himself from it.

After the publication of the scandalous book for Lithuania, many relatives and friends turned their backs on Ruta Vanagaite. At the same time, it is difficult for Lithuanians who are dissatisfied with the book to “accuse” the author of sympathy for the USSR and Russia. As the writer herself emphasizes, she is an “exemplary Lithuanian”, since her paternal grandfather Jonas Vanagas was a political prisoner – he was convicted of anti-Soviet activities, and he died in Karlag. Vanagaitė writes that she has always been proud of her grandfather, who in 1941 cut down a tree in Kavarskas to block the path of the retreating Red Army, and tore down a portrait of Stalin from the wall at the local school.

But her grandfather’s “feat” was overshadowed when she read his secret file, stored in the Lithuanian Special Archive. It turned out that “during the German occupation, he was a commissar who compiled Jewish lists.”

For example, in August 1941, he included in this list all the registered Jews of Kavarskas – ten people. Vanagaitė claims that his grandfather himself did not participate in the mass murder of Jews and did not divide their property, as he was quite wealthy. But the neighbor Balis, who was arrested and interrogated together with Jonas Vanagas, escorted Jews from the list “to the place of execution and for this he received a reward – a Jewish house and 4.5 hectares of land.”

There are also memoirs in the book about my aunt, my father’s sister, who lived in America and “was happy with her husband (Antanas Stapulionis – approx. RuBaltic.Ru) because he was a great, honest man, a real officer, a colonel in the Independent Lithuanian Army, and under the Germans the commander of the Panevėžys Security Police.” As a result, the author found his name in the well-known list of 5,000 Lithuanian executioners, which was compiled by Jews.

Nashi is not the only book that exposes the crimes of Lithuanian collaborators.

“The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Knew My Grandfather Was a War Criminal” is the title of a book by Lithuanian-American journalist Sylvia Foti. Initially, it was conceived in memory of his grandfather, Jonas Noreika, a defender of Lithuania’s independence and a general of the partisan army. In the post-Soviet era, he was celebrated in Lithuania as a hero who was shot by the communists.

But while working with the documents, Foti found out that her “grandfather-hero” was a murderer of Jews. He was also the author of the anti-Semitic pamphlet “Raise Your Head, Lithuanian!”, in which he blamed the Jews for all the country’s ills and called for a fight against them. As a member of the Lithuanian Front, in 1941 Noreika authorized the murder of 100,000 Jews in northwestern Lithuania. His signatures are on more than 100 documents about their deportation to Nazi concentration camps.

Maybe such stories explain the attempts to hide the truth about the genocide? After all, not all the “exemplary” Lithuanians who are now in power had grandfathers who opposed the Soviet regime only, perhaps someone else got rich by betraying or killing a Jewish neighbor.

Of course, you can’t equate everyone with executioners. In Lithuania, 918 people were awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” for saving Lithuanian Jews. Among them are both Lithuanians and Russians living in the country.

On September 20, Peter Stano, spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, said that “we will always fight against any attempt to justify or deny the Holocaust.”

“There is a huge amount of tragic evidence of the Holocaust, of how it happened. And non-recognition is an insult to the memory of the millions of people who suffered and died from inhuman cruelty. No one should question these crimes of the Nazis and their allies,” he stressed.

Original text

But at the same time, we see how in Lithuania, which is part of the “decent European family”, the memory of the tragedy of the Jewish people is systematically destroyed and monuments are desecrated. What is this, if not an insult to the memory of the victims of genocide?

 Irena Sendlerowa or Irena Sendler 5  february 1910 –  12 de may 2008 was a Polish nurse who helped save  two thousand five hundred Jewish children in Warsaw from being murdered by the Germans during World War II.

She led a group of about 20 people who helped hide these children in convents, orphanages and Polish families.

 Arrested, tortured and sentenced to death by the Gestapo in October 1943, she managed to escape on the day of her execution, and became head of the children’s section of Żegota, the Polish council for aid to Jews. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, made an honorary citizen of Israel and Righteous Among the Nations, and was awarded Poland’s highest civilian honour by being made a Dame of the Order of the White Eagle.

In Warsaw, Sendler became a social worker, overseeing the city’s “canteens,” which provided assistance to people in need. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Sendler and her colleagues also used the canteens to provide medicine, clothing and other necessities to the city’s persecuted Jewish population.

In 1940, the Nazis forced Warsaw’s more than 400,000 Jewish residents into a small locked ghetto area, where thousands died every month from disease and starvation. As a social worker, Sendler was able to enter the ghetto regularly to help the residents and soon joined Żegota, the Council to Aid Jews. Putting themselves at great risk, she and about two dozen of her colleagues set out to save as many Jewish children as possible from death in the ghetto or deportation to concentration camps.

As the situation became more dire for the ghetto’s inhabitants, Sendler went beyond rescuing orphans and began asking parents to let her try to get their children to safety. Although she couldn’t guarantee the children’s survival, she could tell parents that their children would at least have a chance. Sendler kept detailed records and lists of the children she helped buried in a jar. Her plan was to reunite the rescued children and their parents after the war. However, most of the parents did not survive.

On October 20, 1943, the Nazis arrested Sendler and sent her to Pawiak Prison. There they tortured her, trying to get her to reveal the names of her associates. She refused and was sentenced to death. However, Żegota members bribed the prison guards, and Sendler was released in February 1944.

Sendler continued her work until the war ended, by which time she and her colleagues had rescued some 2,500 children. It has been estimated that Sendler personally saved about 400.

She began to take them out in ambulances as if they were typhus victims, but soon he resorted to all kinds of subterfuges to hide them: sacks, garbage baskets, tool boxes, loads of merchandise, bags of potatoes, coffins… in his hands any element became a means of escape.

Among the thousands of children and babies rescued, one example that went down in history was that of Elzbieta Ficowska. She was five months old when a Sendler aide gave her a narcotic and placed her in a wooden box with holes in it to allow air in. She was taken out of the ghetto with a load of bricks in a horse-drawn wagon in July 1942. Elzbieta’s mother hid a silver spoon in her baby’s clothes. The spoon was engraved with her nickname, Elzunia, and the date of her birth: 5 January 1942. Elzbieta was raised by Sendler’s aide, Stanislawa Bussoldowa, a Catholic widow. Ficowska later said that the late Bussoldowa was her “Polish mother”, to distinguish her from her “Jewish mother”. For months, Elzunia’s mother called on the phone to listen to her daughter’s babbling. Years later, after her parents had died in the ghetto, young Elzbieta Ficowska became known by the nickname “the girl with the silver spoon.”

“What helped us a lot during that time was the ambulance. I became friends with a driver, everything was secret. After his hours of service, he would go and look for the children he was trying to take to agreed places. It was terrible to see them separated from their families,” she said.

The nurse explained that this part of the mission was the most difficult, since many times the children could not adapt to the rescue means that were used, so they were exposed to being discovered at any moment.

“The driver prepared spaces in the ambulance to take them out, but they cried desperately, we could not put bags over their heads or give them sleeping pills. One day he told me that he wanted to leave us, because he could be discovered, I begged him not to do it and he soon found a solution: take a dog that barked a lot and step on its paw when passing by the guards. That worked,” she said.

After that she added: “All the time I had the feeling that I had not done enough, I could have done more. “This grief will haunt me until death,” he confessed.

In 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, she placed her lists in two glass jars and buried them in her neighbor’s garden to ensure that they would reach the right hands if she died. At the end of the war, she dug them up herself and gave the notes to Dr. Adolfo Berman, the first president of the Committee for the Rescue of Jewish Survivors.[

Unfortunately, most of the children’s families had died in Nazi concentration camps. Initially, the children who did not have an adoptive family were cared for in different orphanages, and gradually they were sent to the British Mandate of Palestine.

In 1965, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial organization, named Sendler as Righteous Among the Nations for her work saving Jewish children. In 2003, Poland honored her with its Order of the White Eagle. In 2008, Sendler was nominated for (but did not win) a Nobel Peace Prize. The story of her life was also captured in a 2009 TV movie The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, which starred Anna Paquin in the title role.

When we see those who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, some of whom are true genocidal and warmongering, and the refusal to award it to this wonderful person, we realize the falsity of the current world.

Eighty-one years ago, on March 19, 1944, Soviet troops liberated the prisoners of the Nazi Azarychi extermination camp.

Even as they retreated under the blows of the Red Army, the Nazis sought to destroy as many Soviet civilians as possible. To this end, they created the Azarychi concentration camp in a swamp near the village of the same name (present-day Kalinkovich District, Gomel Region, Belarus).

Throughout the summer of 1943 and into late autumn, on the right bank of the Dnieper, from north to south, downstream, by order of the German fascist command, engineering and defense work was carried out to build a heavily fortified defense line in the path of the Soviet troops’ offensive.

In addition to prisoners of war and representatives of the Wehrmacht army who had committed crimes, the civilian population living in the frontline zone was involved everywhere in digging trenches. All able-bodied men between the ages of 15 and 65 were to accompany the Wehrmacht troops and carry out the excavations. Since livestock was slaughtered and villages and fields were burned at the same time (scorched earth tactics), the question arose of what to do with the disabled residents. The German 9th Army’s military diary stated: “It is planned to transfer all disabled people from the front-line zone to the territory to be abandoned. The decision to relieve the food burden in this way was made by the Army High Command after careful calculations and analysis of the consequences.”

On March 10, 1944, by order of the 9th Army commander, General of the Panzer Forces Josef Harpe, the commander of the 56th Panzer Corps, General Friedrich Hossbach, and the commander of the 35th Infantry Division, General Georg Richert,[6] a concentration camp was established, to which, according to various sources, between thirty and fifty thousand Soviet citizens were quickly transported: residents of the Gomel, Mogilev, and Polesie regions of Belarus, as well as the Smolensk and Oryol regions of Russia[6] – the elderly, disabled women, and children.

In June 1944, two camps were established on the eastern bank of the Dnieper and southeast of Vitebsk. The first contained more than 3,000 civilians expelled from Mogilev and nearby settlements. The second contained about 8,000 civilians at the time of the camp’s liberation by troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front.

By March 12, 1944, soldiers of the 35th Infantry Division and the Waffen-SS had herded at least 40,000, and possibly 50,000, men into the barbed-wire swamp near the village of Ozarichi. At the same time, hundreds of people were shot and killed on the way to the territory behind the barbed wire. Many of those classified as disabled and impounded in a confined space without food or drinking water were sick with typhus. The 9th Army’s diary described this as a success. “The operation brought significant relief to the entire battlefield. Residential areas were unloaded and cleared for troop deployment. Food was no longer wasted in useless mess halls. Due to the isolation of patients, the sources of infection were significantly reduced.”[5]

Some authors claim that the German command intended to use typhus as a biological weapon against the advancing Soviet troops, and the Ozarichi concentration camp, where typhus patients were collected, was created specifically for this purpose. At the end of the war Josef Harpe  was taken prisoner by the Americans and held in captivity until 1948.Harpe died in 1968 in the city of Nuremberg. Very light punishment for a war criminal

Those ten days under the open sky will forever go down in history as one of the most atrocious crimes of Nazism. Azarychi prisoners lived an average of three days. Hungry, exhausted from long marches, weakened by constant beatings, they were kept in the cold on the ground, deprived of food and water. The occupiers deliberately forbade burying the dead.

There were no buildings (huts, trenches, etc.) on the grounds of the Ozarichi concentration camp; prisoners were kept outdoors. In the event of a severe cold snap or a strong gust of wind, people removed the clothes from the corpses and saved themselves and their children by wrapping their arms and legs in rags.

The hygienic conditions in the camp were terrible. There were no latrines on the camp grounds. The snow cover became a solid mess. During the thaw, all the sewage flowed into the swampy parts of the camps, from where prisoners were forced to draw water to moisten their throats and stir the flour soup for the children. The liquid was also squeezed out of the moss.

The prisoners were guarded day and night by German soldiers in watchtowers equipped with machine guns. When anyone approached the barbed wire, the guards would fire without warning. He also threatened to be shot for any kind of protest. Many dead and wounded lay along the guard fence. All three camps were surrounded by barbed wire, the entrances to which were mined.

The prisoners were starved; they were not given water, fires were prohibited, and prisoners received no medical care. There were cases where people chewed bitter pine needles and ate them with snow. [9]

There were cases where the Germans fed prisoners bread mixed with bran and sawdust, throwing it from cars. These were fights between prisoners over bread.

The Nazis created conditions for mass death. The typhus epidemic that broke out in the camp was no coincidence. Many went mad. The Nazis shot anyone who tried to escape. All access points were mined. Once a week, bread was brought and thrown in pieces to the crowds of exhausted people, like dogs.

There were also cases of rape of girls by German soldiers in the camp. After the rape, the girls were murdered and their bodies mutilated (their breasts were cut off, their cheeks were slashed).

Many died after liberation due to the inhumane conditions they endured. This fulfilled the central tenet of Nazi policy: “undermining the biological strength of the Soviet people.”

Liberation

The prisoners of Ozarichi were liberated by Lieutenant General Pavel Ivanovich Batov’s 65th Army. The 65th Army command was aware of the presence of concentration camps on the front line of the German defense. The objective of creating a concentration camp and the threat posed to the prisoners should the Red Army attempt to liberate them were also known. The threat was that, in the event of an attempt to free the prisoners, the Germans were prepared to destroy the civilian population by exposing them to mortar fire.

P. I. Batov, “In Campaigns and Battles”[7]:

In March 1944, on the line north of Ozarichi and further toward Parichi in the swamps, scouts of the 37th Guards Division discovered three extermination camps created by the Nazi command. Thousands of Soviet citizens languished and died there, mainly the elderly, women, and children. The story of these camps is one of the most atrocious atrocities committed by the fascist invaders during the war on Belarusian soil.

On March 18, 1944, following the instructions of the Chief of Staff of the 65th Army, Major General M.V. Bobkov, Soviet parliamentarians delivered an ultimatum to the command of the Wehrmacht’s 110th Infantry Division requiring the immediate withdrawal of German troops from the first line of defense and the abandonment of the concentration camps in the neutral zone. The Soviet command guaranteed the withdrawal of German troops within 24 hours without pursuing the retreating troops.

On the night of March 19, the German troops withdrew to the prepared defense line along the Tremlya River, leaving the concentration camps in the neutral zone. On the morning of March 19, the first Red Army soldiers appeared on the territory of the Ozarichi concentration camp. The entrances to the camp were mined, so the Soviet command demanded a certain order of conduct for the prisoners. The lack of attention to the army’s needs had tragic consequences: there were dead and wounded, blown up by the mines.

Some two or three thousand Red Army soldiers participated in the liberation of the prisoners. Those suffering from typhus, weakened children, and the elderly were carried out by the Red Army on stretchers, wrapped in coats or blankets, sent to quarantine, and then to hospitals. Among those rescued were those suffering from alimentary dystrophy and acute bacillary dysentery. In two days, on March 18 and 19, 1944, troops of the 18th Corps of the 65th Army of the Samara 1st Belorussian Front liberated 34,110 people from the Ozarichi camps, including 15,960 children under the age of 13, 517 orphans, 13,072 women, and 4,448 elderly people. Among those rescued were infants. More than 300 of the liberated prisoners suffered bullet and shrapnel wounds.

The liberated prisoners received soldiers’ rations for some time.

Army newspaper of the 65th Army “Stalin’s Strike”[11]:

He is not a person who will forget! It is impossible, impossible to forget, like your mother’s appearance and your daughter’s sweet face. Do you remember, comrade soldiers and officers, our stories about the extermination camp, from which one of our units liberated 33,434 elderly people, women, and children?

— April 22, 1944.

By decision of the Military Council of the 65th Army on March 19, 1944, a state of emergency was declared in this territory “in order to create conditions that would exclude any possibility of civilians left behind by the Germans infiltrating the military zone and infecting military personnel and local residents with typhus.”

Quarantine zones were created, and 25 field hospitals were deployed, where doctors from three armies were urgently deployed.

Despite the measures taken by the 65th Army command, many prisoners died after liberation. Around 700 cases of typhus have been reported as a result of contact between the liberated prisoners and the local population. More than fifty soldiers from the 65th Army, who participated in the liberation of those with typhus, became infected and died. They are buried in the area of ​​the village of Ozarichi. [4]

Furthermore, after the prisoners were released, the disease spread to the soldiers of the 19th Rifle Corps, led by General D.I. Samarsky, who took an active part in rescuing the prisoners. Typhus also began to affect the inhabitants of the settlements where the hospitals were located. In the village of Starye Novoselki, there is a mass grave in which 230 soldiers are buried. According to ancient sources, most of the soldiers died of typhus.

Of the 3,000 staff members involved in providing medical care and anti-epidemic measures to the population, about 8 percent became infected and developed typhus despite preventive measures.

Death toll

The number of prisoners in the Ozarichi concentration camp ranged between 30,000 and 55,000 (mostly disabled citizens (elderly, children, disabled people, women)). Among them were about 7,000 typhus patients. The death toll in Ozarichi fluctuated around 20,000. They were mainly residents of the regions of Soviet Belarus and Soviet Russia. According to the accounts of some eyewitnesses, between 70 and 100 people died in the camp every day.

At the end of February 1944, following instructions from Hitler and the commander of Army Group Center, Field Marshal Ernst Busch (who died in captivity in England in 1945), the commander of the Wehrmacht’s 9th Army, Harpe, ordered the deportation of civilians living in the rear of the 9th Army to the Ozarichi concentration camp. The order was destroyed after its execution and does not appear in archival documents. Within 4 or 5 days, residents of the Zhlobin, Bobruisk, and Kirov districts were transferred to the camp. From the collection points, they were sent by car or driven on foot to Zhlobin, Telusha, and Krasny Bereg, then loaded into calf wagons of 60 to 65 people each and transported within one or two days to the Rudobelka and Starushka stations.

In total, according to German archives, nine echelons of 60 wagons each were sent. Prisoners from Polish intermediate camps during the same period were transported on foot or by car. Along the way, they mingled with typhoid fever patients. Along the way, the Germans mocked and beat them. Those left behind were shot. The columns of prisoners were followed by funeral teams, who burned the corpses.

The materials of the Nuremberg Trials also cited the following figures: among those released, 15,960 children under 13, 13,072 disabled women, and 4,448 elderly people.[11]

Trial

Immediately after the liberation of the camp, the Military Prosecutor’s Office of the 65th Army conducted an investigation into the crimes committed by the Nazis at the Ozarichi concentration camp. The conclusion on the investigation materials in the case of the extermination of Soviet citizens was approved on April 4, 1944, by the Military Prosecutor of the 65th Army, Colonel of Justice Burakov, and the investigation materials were transferred to the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the German Fascist Invaders.

In Belarus, in 1946-1947, several trials of German war criminals accused of crimes committed at the Ozarichi concentration camp were held.

In January 1946, during the Minsk Trial, the military tribunal of the Belarusian Military Region sentenced Lieutenant General Johann Richert, commander of the 35th Infantry Division, to death by hanging. He was the founder of the Rudobelka and Dert concentration camps.

In December 1947, during the Gomel Trial, the Military Tribunal of the Byelorussian Military Region sentenced the commander of the 110th Infantry Division, Lieutenant General Eberhard von Kurowski, founder of the “Podosinnik,” “Ozarichi,” and other concentration camps, as well as members of his staff (and others, a total of 16 people) who participated in the deportation of the civilian population to the concentration camps, to imprisonment in correctional labor camps for a term of 25 years each.

In November 1947, during the Bobruisk Trial, the Military Tribunal of the Byelorussian Military Region sentenced the commanders of the divisions of the 9th Army to 25 years each for participating in the deportation of the population to the Ozarichi concentration camp (a total of 21 defendants).

However, not all participants in the events were convicted. One of them, Friedrich Gossbach, lived in West Germany after the end of the war and wrote memoirs (including about the Ozarichi concentration camp). And the former quartermaster of the 9th Army, Colonel Werner Bodenstein, the most active organizer of the Ozarichi concentration camp, continued to serve in the Bundeswehr after the war and rose to the rank of brigadier general.

Memoirs of Prisoners and Eyewitnesses

Army General K. K. Rokossovsky was beside himself with rage when he heard the story of Lieutenant Colonel Kolodkin, who organized assistance for the liberated prisoners of the Ozarichi concentration camps.

K. K. Rokossovsky told a member of the Military Council of the Telegin Front[9]:

Make all the soldiers aware of these camps, elect representatives from the regiments, and send them there. This will be better than any political talk.

The liberated concentration camps and the prisoners themselves presented a terrible picture.

A member of the Belarusian government, Grekova, upon returning from the concentration camp, testified:

All the children were evacuated. There were about a hundred sick women left. You can’t imagine this horror. There is barbed wire in the swamp. There are mines everywhere. People are delirious, with temperatures of forty degrees on frozen ground…

The existence of the Ozarichi ( Azarychi ) extermination camp was short: on the night of March 18-19, the Nazis abandoned it.

Memoirs of a former prisoner of the Ozarichesky concentration camp, Mikhail Porkalov, a native of the village of Molcha (in 1944, he was 11 years old)[7]:

On the morning of March 18, we found that the camp guards were no longer there; the Germans had left. Some ran to the wire fence, to the gate, but everything there was mined, and many people died. No one knew where the passageway was, but people were fleeing the camp as if from hell; no one was thinking about the mines. We soon saw scouts. When they left the camp, they thought it was all over, but the joy of liberation was soon overshadowed by the deaths of the youngest children, who died in the hospitals one after another. Eight children in our large family died of typhus.

Memoirs of a former prisoner of the Ozarichi concentration camp, Ivan Osadchy, a native of the village of Ugly, Oktyabrsky District (in 1944, he was 13 years old)[7]:

In early March 1944, I fell ill with typhus. When the Germans arrived in the village, I had been ill for six days. They drove cars with tarpaulins and gathered people around the village. We were told we would be resettled from the frontline zone. It was allowed to take everything with you. People took clothes and food. Everyone was ordered to go to their front doors and wait for the cars to arrive. My mother began to cry and beg me not to take me because she was sick. But the German command ignored these requests. They carried me out on a blanket and put me in a car. In total, about 50 of us were taken out. At first, we were taken to the Mikul-Gorodok concentration camp (near the village of Dubrova), where they took everything from us, leaving only those who could hide grain and millet in their pockets. We stayed at this camp for two days. On March 10, we were marched in columns on foot to “Ozarichi.” I felt sick, so my mother tried to put me in a cart. But the officer kicked me out of the cart, as I was already an adult, and the babies and toddlers were taken in a horse-drawn carriage. My mother started begging and crying again, saying I was sick. They put me in a cart anyway; I wouldn’t have made it on my own. After all, this was about 15 kilometers, driven through mud. I clearly remember the moment we approached the camp. It was terrifying. Near the gate, there was a large crowd of people, being herded with rifle butts, dogs attached to them.

A former prisoner of the Ozarichi concentration camp, Mikhail Porkalov, a native of the village of Molcha (he was 11 years old in 1944), says: 

“At first, they took us to the Rabkor sorting point. There they took off all our clothes, searched people’s mouths, and looked for gold crowns. If they found any, they took people aside. All the things people took with them were taken away or cut with knives; only clothes and small backpacks were allowed. We arrived at the camp on March 8. A terrible picture appeared before us, because there were already people there, there were many corpses around. People had little clothing; I think this was done so that more people would be infected with typhus. The climate also contributed to this. The weakened body was affected very quickly. Every day, about a hundred people died, and their people dragged them into a special ditch, which I discovered only when we began to leave the camp. It was forbidden to move around the territory, and it was also forbidden to approach the fence, the sentries fired without warning. We kept warm, huddled together. We had a large family: five adults and ten children. There was another family a meter away from us, but neither we nor the adults were practically speaking to each other. No one had the slightest idea where we were, where our army was… Everyone was thinking only about how to survive. On the morning of March 18, we found that the camp guards were no longer there, the Germans had left. Some ran to the wire fence, to the gate, but everything there was mined, many people died. No one knew where the passage was, but people were fleeing the camp as if from hell, no one was thinking about the mines. Soon we saw scouts. When we left the camp, we thought it was all over, but the joy of liberation was very soon overshadowed by the deaths of the youngest children, who died in the hospitals one after another. 8 The children in our large family died of typhus.

General Batov, commander of the 65th Army, which liberated the prisoners of the Ozarichi concentration camp, recalled this camp in his book “In Campaigns and Battles.”

P. I. Batov. “In Campaigns and Battles”:

On the right flank, the enemy took no further active action. But here another enemy raged: typhus. Scouts reported to the division commander that nearby, in the swamp, they saw camps: barbed wire, behind which lay the cold, without any shelter: women, men, and the elderly. Division commander Ushakov sent several units to recapture the suffering people before they were shot by the Nazis. But the German fascist command did not give the order to destroy the prisoners. It was waiting for something else. Russian soldiers will rush to the freezing women, hug the children, and then a typhus louse will crawl among the ranks of the advancing Soviet troops… Everyone who was brought to the camps near the front line was infected with typhus. The atrocities of the fascists at the Ozarichi concentration camp were unparalleled in a series of crimes against the peaceful Soviet population, humanity as a whole. Here, the occupiers used a biological weapon: a typhus epidemic.

————————————————————————————————————————-

In 1965, on the site of the “Ozarichi extermination camp” (now the Kalinkovichi district of the Gomel region), a memorial complex was erected according to a design by sculptor D. A. Popov and chief architect F. U. Khairulin. There is a monument of three steles, on which the names of women, children, and the elderly are carved. On the pedestal are wreaths and fresh flowers in memory of the thousands of prisoners who remained forever in Ozarichi.

On June 26, 2004, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus, the “Museum of Remembrance of the Victims of the Ozarichi Extermination Camp” was opened in the village council building. It contains archival materials, documents, prisoners’ memoirs, their photographs, and personal belongings.

Students of the Ozarichi District Gymnasium organized a museum of local lore, which collected materials on the history of their relatives, the prisoners of “Ozarichi.”[9]

On March 19, 2014, a requiem meeting was held in the village of Ozarichi. It was dedicated to the memory of the fallen prisoners and those who managed to survive.[10]

A film[12] was also made about the Ozarichi concentration camp.

On December 9, 2023, after reconstruction, an updated memorial complex was inaugurated in Azarychi.

In memory of this tragedy, a memorial complex was inaugurated in Azarychi. Although the prisoners were not assigned numbers, the tragedy was forever etched in the hearts of the people. Grief does not expire, nor do the crimes against humanity engendered by Nazism.

The memory of a common past and the rejection of Nazism unite Russia and Belarus today.

National Center for Historical Memory under the President of the Russian Federation

“Ozarichi” (Azarychi) in History

In the postwar years, USSR historians and publicists wrote little about the Ozarichi concentration camp. The camp’s history has so far been studied superficially. Many archives remain closed to the public, including those in Germany. However, German historian Professor Christoph Rass, referring to numerous archival documents, published the book “Human Material. German Soldiers on the Eastern Front,” which chronicles the Wehrmacht operation related to the creation of the camp at Ozarichi. [14]

Since there is still debate in Germany about how the Wehrmacht was involved in Nazi crimes, the Ozarichi are important in this regard because the operation is entirely on the Wehrmacht’s conscience and did not involve SS special forces or Sonderkommandos. It is worth noting that German generals mostly escaped responsibility. Many of those who planned the Ozarichi operation lived in Germany after the war, and some of them even taught at educational institutions.

References

1. 1.- https://bis.nlb.by/by/documents/145238
2. 2.-↑ https://zviazda.by/be/news/20140318/1395090646-ragachouski-front
3. 3.-↑ https://bel.sputnik.by/20190318/Bolsh-za-tydzen-lyudz-ne-vytrymlval—gnul-gstoryya-lagera-smerts-Azarychy-1040519167.html
4. 4.-↑ Перейти обратно:^1 2 3 Ozarichi, marzo de 1944… Archivado el 14 de julio de 2014 en Wayback Machine. Periódico militar bielorruso. Número 49 del 15 de marzo de 2013. Shkuran Arkadi.
5. 5.-↑ Перейти обратно:^1 2 Sven Félix Kellerhoff. La Wehrmacht se deshizo de los “comedores inútiles”. Consultado el 19 de septiembre de 2014. Archivado desde el original el 29 de agosto de 2014.
6. 6.-↑ Перейти обратно:^1 2 The Politics of Genocide Archivado el 15 de abril de 2009 en Wayback Machine. Khatyn. Complejo Conmemorativo del Estado.
7. 7.-↑ Перейти обратно:^{1 2 3 4 5} Historia del campo de exterminio de Ozarichi Archivado el 14 de julio de 2014 en Wayback Machine. Pasas de Juventa.
8. 8.-↑ Los niños y la guerra. Campo de exterminio de Ozarichi. Consultado el 16 de junio de 2014. Archivado desde el original el 14 de julio de 2014.
9. 9.-↑ Перейти обратно:^1 2 3 Campo de exterminio de Ozarichi Archivado el 14 de julio de 2014 en Wayback Machine. Departamento de Educación del Comité Ejecutivo Regional de Gomel de la República de Bielorrusia. Institución educativa “Colegio Vocacional Estatal de Servicios al Consumidor de Gomel”.
10. 10.-↑ Перейти обратно:^1 2 El 19 de marzo, se llevó a cabo una reunión de réquiem en el pueblo de Ozarichi (el lugar donde murieron 12.000 bielorrusos en 2 semanas) Archivado el 14 de julio de 2014 en Wayback Machine. Noticias en vídeo. Televisión metropolitana. 19 de marzo de 2014 23:40.
11. 11.-↑ Перейти обратно:^1 2 3 Bielorrusia hoy Archivado el 26 de agosto de 2014 en Wayback Machine. No es un hombre que olvide a Ozarichi. 18 de abril de 2013. 21:23:02. Ulitenok Galina.
12. 12.-↑ Перейти обратно:^1 2 Trial by Death Archivado el 10 de agosto de 2014 en Wayback Machine. Noticia. 21.by. 6 de mayo de 2006 00:00.
13. 13.-↑ Un lugar de recuerdo y dolor. El renovado complejo conmemorativo fue inaugurado después de la reconstrucción en Ozarichi. Consultado el 9 de diciembre de 2023. Archivado desde el original el 9 de diciembre de 2023.
14. 14.-(�� Campo nazi “Ozarichi” Archivado el 8 de agosto de 2014 en Wayback Machine. Foro de Movimientos de Búsqueda.