WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (21 page)

PINSK MASSACRE

At the beginning of German occupation in July 1941, Pinsk was occupied by approximately 26,000 Jews. Before World War II the Jews lived peacefully side by side with the Soviet people, but under the so-called ‘cleansing’ programmes, it wasn’t long before they became the persecuted race. Helped by their Polish accomplices, members of the SS murder squads started to round up between 7,000 and 8,000 male Jews in the area. All of them were executed. The remaining 18,287, including 6,400 women and children, were held in a newly established ghetto and forced to work for the occupying forces.

The ghetto covered an area of 23 streets, with 240 houses, with as many as ten people per room. The whole area was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and it was here they lived in appalling conditions under the watchful eye of the military. On 27 October, 1942, all the occupants of the ghetto were ordered to gather near the Jewish cemetery at Karlin, which was about 4 km (2H miles) outside of the town. Each person was deprived of their money and valuables before being led to their site of execution. Left behind at the ghetto were around 1,200 people who were not well enough to make the journey. None of them survived – they were simply shot. In the three days of killing, as many as 11,000 Jews were murdered.

When Pinsk was liberated by the Red Army, they only found 17 half-starved Jews who had managed to hide for over 620 days and nights. Unfortunately, the majority of the Gentile population of Pinsk did little to help their Jewish neighbours. Instead, they waited for the opportunity to steal their possessions and move into their houses, and today, only about 500 Jews are left living in Pinsk.

UKRAINE

Ukraine had already suffered untold hardships before World War II, when Stalin engineered a famine in 1933 to destroy the
kulaks
and crush Ukraine’s growing spirit of nationalism. All roads in and out of the Ukraine were blocked, which meant that the farmers were deprived of seed stocks, grain and animals, and it wasn’t long before the farmers started dying of cold, hunger and disease. In an attempt to stay alive, they resorted to eating their pets, their boots, in fact anything they could get their hands on. It is estimated that as many as seven million, one-quarter of Ukraine’s population, starved to death.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, after the German invasion, the Ukraines were to suffer even more. Stalin put into action his ‘scorched earth’ policy, which called for the wholesale evacuation of industries, factories, machinery, skilled workers and livestock. From the capital city of Kiev, alone, some 197 major industrial plants were evacuated east to Russia in a period of two months. Anything that could not be physically moved was destroyed and burnt.

Two years later, when Hitler’s army started its retreat from the Ukraine, orders were given to loot and take back to Germany any works of art, rare books, engravings, libraries, sculptures and museum collections, adding up to hundreds of thousands valuable items.

The Ukraine was stripped of all its cultural wealth, and 151 museums, 62 theatres, 19,200 libraries and 600 cinemas were destroyed by the retreating Germans. In addition, approximately 28,000 villages and 714 towns were razed to the ground leaving over ten million people without any form of shelter. Whatever the Soviets failed to destroy in their retreat was destroyed by the Germans when they finally left the Ukraine.

By the end of the war, the Ukraine lay in ruins. The population had been decreased by 25 per cent. It is believed that as many as 6.8 million died of hunger or disease, while the remainder either evacuated or were deported as political prisoners and ended up as slave workers in Hitler’s Germany.

UNTOLD
 MASSACRE
S
 IN 
UKRAINE

The treatment of the Ukraine civilian population during World War II was ruthless, something that the rest of the world was never really aware of. On

23 September, 1942, SS execution squads aided by local pro-German Ukrainian police, burnt to the ground the village of Kortelisy, killing all of its 2,892 population of men, women and children. In fact, all over the Ukraine a total of 459 villages were completely destroyed, with all or a portion of their population executed by the German army. The Nazis set up around 160 concentration camps in the Ukraine to hold the tens of thousands of prisoners, while others were sent to Auschwitz and other so-called death camps in Poland.

ILJA
 
ATROCITY

Ilja was a small town in western Russia, where a number of Jews were sent to work on a small farm. They managed to escape into the nearby forest and joined up with a group of partisans who had set up their headquarters there. The following day, two prominent Jews also fled into the forest to join the group of partisans, and the revenge was appalling. All the old or sick Jews living in Ilja were rounded up and shot in the streets or in their own homes. A further 900 were locked inside a building, which was then torched, causing all those inside to be burnt alive.

MASSACRE
 
AT
 
DUBNO

Another horrifying massacre of the Jewish people took place in the western Ukraine town of Dubno. The SS and Ukrainian troops had dug deep pits near the town’s airstrip, each one measuring approximately 30 m (98 ft) long and 3 m (10 ft) deep. Over the next few days the troops rounded up all the Jewish men, women and children, took them to the execution site and shot them to death. It is estimated that as many as 1,500 people were killed each day, until over 5,000 helpless civilians had been massacred. The bodies in the pits were piled up, row upon row, and then only crudely covered with earth.

The massacres were witnessed by an officer in the elite 9th Infantry Regiment, Capt Axel von dem Bussche, who was so nauseated by what he had seen that he offered to assassinate Hitler personally. In February 1944, dem Bussche agreed to blow up Hitler and himself while he demonstrated a new army winter uniform to the Führer. However, fate intervened that day when a British air raid destroyed the uniforms, forcing the assassination attempt to be cancelled.

MASSACRES
 
IN
 
VOLHYNIA

Volhynia was an area in north-west Ukraine, where a number of local Ukrainian nationalists formed themselves into a resistance army, the Ukrainian Uprising Army (UPA). Their primary aim was to fight the Nazi occupiers, but unfortunately their anger was diverted towards the local Polish minority, some 346,000 people. In an effort to drive all the Poles out of the Ukraine, with the aim of creating an independent Ukrainian state after the war, the UPA started their own programme of ethnic cleansing. They went from village to village, killing anyone of Polish nationality and leaving behind them a trail of death and destruction. These massacres continued for more than a year in all the rural areas, until either all the Polish residents had been killed or were forced to leave their homes.

The German occupation forces simply turned a blind eye to the atrocities and, although the exact figure has never really been assessed, it is believed to be as high 60,000. Today there are more than 600 mass graves in the Volhynia area, containing the bodies of the murdered Polish civilians.

KOVNO MASSACRE

Lithuanian mercenaries, with the help of the German police, put to death 136,421 Jews in 1941. Of these, 55,556 were women and 34,464 were children, all shot to death in a deep pit just outside Kovno.The Jews were marched in groups of about 200 to their place of execution, stripped of all their clothes despite the freezing conditions and told to stand on the edge of the pits to await their fate. One by one, they were gunned to death. To cover up what they had done, the mercenaries forced 72 men and women from the ghettos to dig up the bodies and set fire to them. The prisoners were all chained together to prevent them from running away, and at the end of their ordeal they were killed and their ghetto completely destroyed.

Kovno was not an isolated incident, and there are records of Jews being eradicated throughout Lithuania. Prior to the Germans invading, around 240,000 Jews lived in Lithuania, but it is estimated that only 6,000 or 7,000 survived the holocaust.

ATROCITY
 
AT
 
FEODOSIA

The port of Feodosia stands on the shores of the Black Sea, and in December 1941 it was occupied by German forces. To prepare for the attack on Sevastopol, the majority of the soldiers had left Feodosia, leaving behind a small detachment of troops and wounded soldiers, who were convalescing in the city’s hospitals. On 29 December, the city was bombarded by the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, which managed to land and take occupation of the port.

On 18 January, 1942, the Germans returned and retook Feodosia, only to find that the majority of the German personnel had been brutally murdered. Wounded German soldiers had literally been thrown out of hospital windows to make room for Russian casualties. Buckets of water had been thrown over the bodies and they were left to freeze to death. Many other badly mutilated bodies were found on the beach, having been thrown from a wall. Their bodies were floating in the surf covered by thin sheets of ice. There were only 12 survivors, who had hidden in cellars when the Russian troops arrived, and they managed to tell the tale of what had taken place.

CHILDREN DIE IN CHARTSYSK

Retreating Soviet soldiers passed a small ravine between the the Chartsysk and Snizhy stations about 60 km (37 miles) from the city of Stalino. Although they were used to the sight of death, what they saw that day made them sick to their stomachs. They found the the bodies of 370 slain children, aged between 14 and 16 years, in the ravine. They were all dressed in the black uniform of the FSU Trade and Craft School in Stalino. It was later discovered that the children were being evacuated from the school ahead of the advancing German troops. After walking the 60 km (37 miles), they had become exhausted and hungry and had begged for transport to take them the rest of the way. Their guardians told them to sit down and promised to send trucks. However, instead of the transport they expected, a detachment of Russian political police from the NKVD arrived, carrying machine guns. Far from helping the desperate children, they simply killed them in cold blood and threw their bodies into the ravine.

SLAUGHTER AT BABI YAR

Huge explosions rocked the city of Kiev following the German takeover in September 1941. A number of buildings that housed the German administration and army were destroyed, and in retaliation, the military governor, Major General Friedrich George Eberhardt, decided to condemn to death all Jews living in the city. On 29 September, every single Jew living in Kiev was marched to a picturesque ravine, Babi Yar, situated in the Syret suburb, and the systematic slaughter of 33,771 civilians began. The killings took two days and two nights, and the naked bodies being thrown into the ravine. Only a thin layer of sand was used to cover the corpses, before the next lot of hapless victims were brought in.

In the months that followed, the Einsatzgruppen shot a further 160,000 Jews, 20,000 gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war at Babi Yar. It has been alleged that because the executioners were running out of time, they made two people stand side by side with their heads together so that one bullet would kill two people. Others were hit with shovels, and it is believed that many, including children, were buried alive.

By the middle of 1943, the Germans started to retreat and thought it best to try and destroy the evidence of their mass killings. Jews from the nearby Syretsk concentration camp were brought to Babi Yar to do their dirty work for them. They were made to dig up all the bodies, while the SS flirted with the local women, and then all the bodies were burnt in enormous funeral pyres on gravestones removed from the local cemetery. As more and more bodies were exhumed, evidence showed that many had died a slow and painful death, some desperately holding each other while others held their hands in prayer.

After the bodies had been dragged from the ravine, they were lined up between stacks of logs on top of the gravestones, in effect forming enormous ovens. They were placed with their heads facing outwards and then liberally doused with petrol. With their hair and bodies thoroughly soaked, as soon as a torch was lit they immediately burst into flame. It is estimated that as many as 5,000 bodies a day were burnt in this way. As the fire did not burn some of the larger pieces of bone, the Nazis arranged for them to be crushed into a fine powder, so that nothing was left to incriminate them. No one was ever brought to trial for this atrocity.

COUNTLESS ATROCITIES

The amount of atrocities that took place in the Soviet Union during World War II are too numerous to list, but it is fair to say that, second only to the ‘cleansing’ of the Jewish population, the massacre of Russian prisoners of war must rank as one of the greatest atrocities. During the first seven months of the war, it is estimated that over four million Soviet soldiers were captured, but by the end of February 1942, just over one million remained alive. Many died from the severe weather conditions they had to face when they were forced to march in the open day and night. They fell by the roadside in their thousands. When they did eventually reach the prisoner of war enclosures, sometimes as far away as 400 km (250 miles), they simply collapsed and died before they could even have their first meal. Held in inhumane cages, the prisoners often resorted to cannibalism after they had eaten everything else available to them, even down to the last blade of grass. For example, a dead dog, which was thrown over the wire fence, was quickly pounced upon by the prisoners and torn to pieces with their bare hands in their desperation to eat.