German Atrocities During WW2: Part 2: Russia

Killing had become a science in Nazi Germany with German chemists, architects and toxicologists, mechanics and doctors. putting their joint effort for 'best' results.....

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SOME FIGURES (Number of soviet people killed by Germans during WW2)

* The Cambridge History of Russia by Dominic C. B. Lieven, Maureen Perrie, Ronald Grigor Suny, p.226
o Premature deaths under German occupation: 13.7M, including
+ "killed in hot or cold blood": 7.4M, incl.
+ "taken to Germany and worked to death": 2.2M
+ "died of overwork, hunger and disease": 4.1M

Source

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Nazi killers were taught in schools and giving training on how to efficiently kill millions....

THE UKRAINIAN MASSACRES (September 2, 1942)

Due to partisan activity around the village Kortelisy in Ukraine, its entire population of 2,892 men, women and children were put to death by SS and SD execution squads helped by local pro-German Ukrainian police. The village was then razed and burned to the ground, the fires of which blazed for four days. All over Ukraine around 459 villages were destroyed with all or part of their population massacred. In the Volhynia province, villages suffered the same fate and in the Zhitomir province 32 villages were destroyed. There were at least 27 villages, in which every man, woman and child was killed and their houses completely destroyed. Most of the SS and SD units operating in the Ukraine consisted of locally recruited pro-German Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians and White Russians. In all of central Russia there were only two regiments of German security police. The village of Bajki, in Belarus, whose inhabitants had originally welcomed the German troops as liberators from communist oppression, was burned to the ground when the Nazis retreated on January 22, 1944. Of the 1,011 inhabitants of the village, 987 were shot and the 120 houses of the village set on fire. (About one and a quarter million Jews perished in Ukraine during the Nazi occupation)

Janowski camp commandant, Obersturmfiihrer Vilgauz, for sport and the pleasure of his wife and daughter fired a machine gun from the balcony of the Office of the camp on inmates who worked in shops, then handed the machine gun to his wife, and she also fired. Sometimes, to please his nine-year daughter Vilgauz had two - four year olds thrown up into the air and shot at them. The daughter applauded and shouted: "Daddy, more!" - And he fired......

THE BALTIC EXECUTIONS

Within two weeks of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on August 1, 1940, almost the entire intelligentsia of these countries had been liquidated. The German attack on these provinces forced the withdrawal of the Soviet troops and paved the way for Hitler's Einsatzgruppen to start their roundup of all resident Jews. About 3,000 had already fled with the retreating Red Army but the 57,000 left behind in Vilna, faced a terrifying future. Einsatzgruppen 'A' operated in the Baltic Provinces under the command of SS Major General Stahlecker who, after five months, reported to Himmler (Document 2273-PS) that 229,052 Jews had been shot. Thousands more were housed in ghettos as they were urgently needed for slave labour. In Duenaburg, on November 9, 1941, a total of 11,034 Jews were executed. At Libau, two weeks later, another 2,350 fell victim to SS bullets. In Lithuania, under the Nazi's, 136,421 Jews were put to death in numerous single actions by Lithuanian mercenaries with the help of the German police squads. In this total were 55,556 women and 34,464 children all shot to death in a deep moat surrounding the 19th century Tsarist Ninth Fort outside Kovno. In the White Russian Settlement Area, around 41,000 executions had taken place. In Vilna, around 32,000 Jews were murdered during the first six months of German occupation. When Vilna was liberated by the Red Army on July 13, 1944, a few hundred Jews who had been hiding in the surrounding forests suddenly appeared in the city square. Altogether, between three and four thousand Jews out of the original 57,000, survived in the concentration camps in Germany. (The Einsatzgruppen, which followed behind the four German armies, consisted of 3,000 men. Their orders were to hunt down and kill Russia's five million Jews. The Wehrmacht could not intervene as these murderers were under the control of Himmler. By the end of the 1941-42 winter the SS had reported that 481,887 Jews had been liquidated in Russia) Pre-war Vilnius had 105 Synagogues and houses of prayer. Today, only one survives, it was used by the SS as a medical store. Ninety percent of Vilnuis Jews were murdered, only 24,000 survived. 

BABI YAR (September 29-31, 1941)

A picturesque ravine situated in the Syrets suburb of the city of Kiev (Kyiv). It was about three kilometres long, over fifty metres deep and separated from the residential area by the local Jewish cemetery and a civilian prison. Soon after the German takeover a series of horrific explosions rocked the city demolishing a number of buildings that housed the German administration and the army hierarchy. On September 26, the military governor, Major General Friedrich Georg Eberhardt, decided that in retaliation for the atrocity all the Jews in Kiev were to be put to death. There, on September 29, the SS Einsatzgruppe C, with the help of the Ukrainian police, herded the whole Jewish population of Kiev and the surrounding area into the ravine and systematically began to slaughter the entire 33,771 souls. The killings took two whole days and nights the victims being machine-gunned and their bodies hurled into the ravine. A layer of sand then covered the corpses before the next batch of naked victims were brought in.

In the months that followed, thousands of Gypsies and Russian POWs were slaughtered here. In August, 1943, as the Soviet Army began its march westwards the decision was taken to erase all evidence of the mass killings, in fact to efface it from history. Russian prisoners and 327 men, including 100 Jews, from the nearby slave camp at Syretsk began the task of digging up the bodies and cremating them. The remains were then burned in pyres, built on slab gravestones taken from the Jewish cemetery, each pyre containing around 2,000 corpses. This gruesome task ended on September 19, 1943. Only fourteen of the 327 slave labourers survived by escaping from Babi Yar. Later, the SS brought in excavators and bulldozers and the ravine was again filled in. In early October, Moscow informed the outside world of the discovery of the mass graves. The West, mistrustful of the Russians, dismissed the news as 'products of the Slavic imagination'. During the 778 days of the German occupation of Kiev, many thousands of Russian POWs, Ukrainians, Gypsies and other nationalities, were murdered at Babi Yar. Of a total population of around 900,000, only 180,000 were living in Kiev at the end of the German occupation. Nobody was ever brought to trial specifically for this atrocity. In 1976, a 15 metre high bronze memorial 'To the victims of Fascism' was unveiled on the site to commemorate the Russian POWs and the 'People of Kiev' who were killed there. However, no reference is made to the Jews or number of Jewish dead.


Source

At Kerch in 1942, the Russians Army discovered a kilometer in length, 4 meters wide, 2 meters deep, which was filled with the corpses of women, children, elderly and adolescents. Near the moat were frozen puddles of blood. They were also littered with children's hats, toys, ribbons, cut off the buttons, gloves, bottle nipples, boots, galoshes with stumps of arms and legs and other body parts. All this was spattered with blood and brains. The killers shot a defenseless population with explosive bullets.

A WITNESS AT BABI YAR

When we were brought to the antitank ditch and lined up, we still thought that we were brought here in order to get to sleep there or for digging new trenches. We did not believe that we were brought to be executed. . But when the first shot came at us from the automatic rifles, I realized that they were going to shoot us. I immediately rushed into the pit and crouched between the two corpses. . Unscathed I lay faint and dizzy almost until the evening. Lying in a pit, I heard some of the wounded screaming and the Germans shooting them: . Then, when the Germans went for lunch, one of our fellow villager from the pit shouted: "Get up, who are alive." I got up, and we both began to spread the dead, pull out survivors. I was covered in blood. Above the moat was a light mist and steam from the cooling pile of bodies, blood, and the last breath of dying. We pulled Naumenko Theodore and my father, but his father had been killed instantly by an explosive bullet in the heart. Late at night I got to my friends in the village Bagerovo and there waited for the arrival of the Red Army.

Russian children were poisoned by carbon monoxide in German cars - "gas chambers".

In December 1942 on the orders of the Gestapo chief of Mikoyan-Shahar lieutenant Otto Weber was organized the killing of patients with bone tuberculosis; Soviet children who were undergoing treatment in sanatorium at Teberda. Witnesses said: "On December 22, 1942 the first squad drove a German car into the resort. German soldiers pulled out of the sanatorium critically ill children aged three years, put them in piles into the car - these were kids who could not move, so they were not forced into the car, but stacked in tiers, then the door was shut and the gas (carbon monoxide) released into it, and left the resort.All of the children died, they were killed by the Germans and thrown into the gorge near Teberdskoe Gunachgira".

A doctor from the city of Vilnius, testified: "In early 1943, from the camp at Birkenau were selected 164 boys and taken to a hospital, where with carbolic acid injections into the heart, all of them were killed."

In Bikernekskom woods on the outskirts of Riga, the Germans shot 46 500 civilians.

Eyewitness Stabulnek M., who lives near the forest, said: "On Friday and Saturday before Easter in 1942 buses with people carried all day and night people from the city to the woods. I counted 41 buses on Friday morning before noon near my house. Many residents, including myself, went into the woods to the place of executions. We saw there a large open pit, where women and children were shot. Some were naked some in underwear. The corpses of women and children had signs of torture and abuse - blood stains on their faces, bruises on their heads, some severed hands, fingers, eyes knocked out ... "

Many people were buried alive.......

MASSACRE AT KUPYANSKA

"November 3, 1943.18,400 people WERE MURDERED IN THE CAMP. From the camp 8,400 people were taken and 10,000 people were driven from the city and from other camps ... The shooting began in the morning and ended late at night. The people were stripped naked. The SS men made groups of 50 and 100 people, took them to the trenches, laid them on the bottom of the ditch, face down and shot them with automatic weapons. More were shot on the corpses And this went on till the trenches were not filled ... "

Said the witness Matthew F. Seidel - we were forced to dig up and burn the corpses. Thus, at each fire, we laid about 3 thousands of corpses, sprinkled them with oil, put firebombs and torched them. Burning of corpses continued from late 1943 until June 1944. During this period 100,000 dead people were burned.

At the Danzig Anatomical Institute trials were done of semi-industrial scale experiments for making soap from human bodies and how the tanning industry could use human skin

RUSSIAN P.O.W. MASSACRES

Second only to the extermination of the Jews, the massacre of Russian prisoners of war must rank as the greatest of tragedies of World War II. During the first seven months of the Russian campaign, over three million Soviet soldiers were captured. By February, 1942, only 1,020,531 were still alive.

Some two million had died of starvation and cold during their forced march to the rear (up to 400 kilometres). Out in the open, day and night, they fell by the wayside in their thousands. When finally they reached their POW enclosures and given their first real meal, they 'simply collapsed and lay dead on the floor'. Starved to death in their POW cages, they died in the open, having eaten the last blade of grass. Many were reduced to a state of cannibalism after begging for a scrap of food or a cigarette. In one camp a German guard was killed and eaten and a dead dog, thrown over the wire fence, was pounced upon and torn to shreds with their bare hands, so desperate were the prisoners for food.

Thousands were tortured and then shot in concentration camps, or, as slave labourers, worked till they dropped in quarries and in factories. Of the 9,000 prisoners sent to the Buchenwald camp only 800 were alive when US troops liberated the camp in 1945. In the notorious Dachau camp, of the 10,000 Russian POWs who arrived there in 1941, only 150 were alive by mid-1942. By 1944, it is estimated that around 3,299,000 Russian prisoners of war were disposed of in this way. At the end of May, 1944, there were a total of 5,160,000 Soviet soldiers in German custody. Of these, only 1,053,000 survived the war.

This is the real picture

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German Atrocities During WW2: Part 1

The following images are not merely of the Nazi brutality in the concentration camps, but the series of articles cover the excessive bestiality of the Germans in Russia when they occupied the country during WW2

 German soldiers shoot Polish citizens at Brochnia on December 18, 1939

WAS THE WEHRMACHT INVOLVED IN THE KILLINGS?

That evening, regimental officers were told of certain 'special orders' affecting the conflict ahead. They included 'collective measures of force against villages' in areas where partisans were active. Soviet political officers, Jews and partisans were to be handed over to the SS or the Secret Field Police. Most staff officers, and certainly all intelligence officers, were told of Field Marshal von Brauchitsch's order of 28 April, stressing on what the relations between army commanders and the SS Sonderkommando and security police would be.

Finally, a 'Jurisdiction Order' clearly said that Russian civilians would have no right to appeal and no German soldiers would be held guilty for crimes committed against them, whether murder, rape or looting. The order signed by Field Marshal Keitel on 13 May was thus justified, 'that the downfall of 1918, the German people's period of suffering which followed and the struggle against National Socialism - with the many blood sacrifices endured by the movement - can be traced to Bolshevik influence. No German should forget this.'

A number of commanders refused to acknowledge or pass on such instructions. They were  those who were brought up in the best traditions of the German army and disliked the Nazis. Many, but not all, were from military families, the numbers were rapidly falling. The generals were the ones who had the least excuse. Over 200 senior officers had attended Hitler's address, in which he said the conflict ahead was to be a 'battle between two opposing world views', a 'battle of annihilation' against 'bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia'.

The idea of Rassenkampf, or 'race war', gave the Russian campaign its unprecedented character. Many historians now argue that Nazi propaganda had so effectively dehumanized the Soviet enemy in the eyes of the Wehrmacht that German soldiers hardly felt that Russians were human. This is borne out by  the almost negligible opposition within the Wehrmacht to the mass execution of Jews, which was deliberately confused with the idea of security measures against partisans.

Many officers resented  the Wehrmacht's abandonment of international law on the Ostfront, but only  a few expressed disgust at the massacres. The ignorance claimed after the war by many officers, especially those on the staff, is rather hard to believe when we see the evidence that  emerged from their own files. Sixth Army headquarters, for example, cooperated with SS Sonderkommando 4a, which followed the Army all the way from Ukraine to Stalingrad. Not only were staff officers well aware of its activities, they even gave troops to help in the round-up of Jews in Kiev and transport them to the ravines of BabiYar.

 It is hard to swallow that the German officers did not understand the essence of the directive of 23 May, which called for the German armies in the east to seize whatever they needed, and also to send at least seven million tons of grain a year back to Germany. The  orders were to live off the land. Nazi leaders very well knew what would happen to the civilians deprived of the Ukraine's resources. 'Many tens of millions will starve,' predicted Martin Bormann. Goering bragged that the population would have to eat Cossack saddles.

When the inhuman orders were prepared, in March 1941, it was General Franz Haider, the chief of staff, who bore the main responsibility for the army's acceptance of the harsh treatment of  civilians. 

Although a few army commanders were reluctant to distribute the instructions, several others issued orders to their troops which might have come straight from Goebbels's office. The most notorious order of all came from the commander of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal von Reichenau. General Hermann Hoth, who was to command the Fourth Panzer Army in the Stalingrad campaign, declared: 'The annihilation of those same Jews who support Bolshevism and its organization for murder, the partisans, is a measure of self-preservation.' General Erich von Manstein, a Prussian guards officer admired as the most brilliant strategist of the whole of the Second World War, and who privately admitted to being partly Jewish, issued an order shortly after taking over command of the Eleventh Army in which he declared: 'The jewish- bolshevik system must be rooted out once and for all.' He even went on to justify 'the necessity of harsh measures against Jewry.' There was little mention of this in his post-war memoirs, Lost Victories. The acceptance of Nazi symbols on uniform and the personal oath of allegiance to Hitler had ended any pretence that the army remained independent from politics. 'The generals followed Hitler in these circumstances', Field Marshal Paulus acknowledged many years later in Soviet captivity, 'and as a result they became completely involved in the consequences of his policies and conduct of the war.'

From Stalingrad, A Fateful Siege by ANTONY BEEVOR

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KILLINGS IN POLAND

A drunken Polish peasant picked a quarrel with a German soldier and in the resulting brawl wounded him with a knife. The Germans seized this opportunity to carry out a real orgy of indiscriminate murder in alleged reprisal for the outrage. Altogether 122 people were killed. As, however, the inhabitants of this village, for some reason or other, apparently fell short of the pre-determined quota of victims, the Germans stopped a train to Warsaw at the local railway station (normally it did not call there at all), dragged out several passengers, absolutely innocent of any knowledge of what had happened, and executed them on the spot without any formalities. Three of them were left hanging with their heads down for four days at the local railway station. A huge board placed over the hideous scene told the story of the victims and threatened that a similar fate was in store for every locality where a German was killed or wounded

This image perhaps encapsulates neatly how the Germans under Hitler's influence felt about Jews

Germans killing Russian Jews in Russia

BRUTAL WAR IN RUSSIA

As an aside. The Russians were no less brutal. And not only towards the German soldiers. During the Battle for Moscow, Stalin had 8000 Russians killed for cowardice. The soldiers were told to hold their positions come what may. At minus 40 degree temperature. There were 'blocking detachments' in the Moscow front line. Their job? To shoot all deserters. Partisans in the countryside were given a free hand to kill anyone who was considered disloyal. The partisans misused these sweeping powers they had to exploit the common Russian people. Also in the fray were the partisans of other ethnic nationalities who exploited the people. In short, for a common Russian, life was hell.

 Removing shrivelled bodies in a concentration camp

 A resident of Weimar a town near Buchenwald concentration camp watches a pile of corpses after the Americans liberated the camp. The residents said they knew nothing.

Corpses of tortured inmates of Goosen concentration camp near Linz in Austria

 American generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton watch a pile of burned bodies at Ohrdruf camp

 A Jewish family is shot at Ivangorod in Ukraine

 Eisenhower watches the dead inmates of Ohrdruf camp after the Americans liberated it. As the Americans approached the guards shot the remaining inmates

 A German boy walks past a pile of corpses of inmates of Bergen Belsen concentration camp

 These Russian people were captured and shot dead by German forces at Memino near Leningrad

 The dead bodies of people who died of starvation at Dora-Mittlebau (Nordhausen) camp

 A Soviet partisan hanged by the Germans.  Photo found in the personal belongings of Hans Elman, a soldier of 10th company of 686th regiment of the German 294nd Infantry Division

 Two Ukrainian SS men watch a pile of bodies of women and children who were killed during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

 Dead Russians in the prison yard at Rostov after the Germans left

Picture taken on 26/10/1941.  Location: Minsk, Belarus, USSR. Men and women of the Russian underground being hung for helping wounded Russian soldiers to escape.

Minsk. Belarus. October 1941. A young Russian girl about to be hanged.

Same place. While one of the teenage girl has been hanged, another is being readied.

The Germans used the Lenin monument in Occupied Voronezh as  gallows.

 October 1941. Kiev. Ukraine. Jews walk as dead bodies lie strewn on the streets.

Gatchina in Russia. The Nazi Germans looted much of the Gatchina palace collections of art, while occupying the palace for almost three years. The Gatchina Palace and park was severely burnt, vandalized and destroyed by the retreating Germans. The extent of devastation was extraordinary, and initially was considered an irreparable damage.

 October 1941. Kiev. Ukraine. Old women hurry past dead bodies of Russian POW. Eyewitnesses recall that while the prisoners were being driven on the streets of Kiev, the guards shot those who could not walk. The picture was taken 10 days after the fall of Kiev. German war photographer Johannes Hele, who served in 637th company of propaganda was part of the 6th German army that captured the capital of Ukraine.

 Russian partisans being prepared for hanging. 1941

After the work was done. 1941

 The body of Russian heroine Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya who was brutally killed by the Germans

THE STORY OF ZOYA

Zoya Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya, alternatively Romanised as Kosmodem'yanskaya  (September 13, 1923 – November 29, 1941) was a Soviet partisan, and a Hero of the Soviet Union (awarded posthumously). She is one of the most revered martyrs of the Soviet Union.

Kosmodemyanskaya joined the Komsomol in 1938. In October 1941, still a high school student in Moscow, she volunteered for a partisan unit. To her mother, who tried to talk her from doing this, she answered "What can I do when the enemy is so close? If they came here I would not be able to continue living." Zoya was assigned to the partisan unit 9903 (Staff of the Western Front). Of the one thousand people who joined the unit in October 1941 only half survived the war. At the village of Obukhovo near Naro-Fominsk, Kosmodemyanskaya and other partisans crossed the front line and entered territory occupied by the Germans. They mined roads and cut communication lines. On November 27, 1941 Zoya received an assignment to burn the village of Petrischevo, where a German cavalry regiment was stationed.

In Petrischevo Zoya managed to set fire to horse stables and a couple of houses. However, one Russian collaborationist had noticed her and informed his masters. The Germans caught Zoya as she started to torch another house. She was tortured and interrogated throughout the night but refused to give up any information. The following morning she was marched to the center of the town with a board around her neck bearing the inscription 'Houseburner' and hanged.

Her final words were purported to be "Comrades! Why are you so gloomy? I am not afraid to die! I am happy to die for my people!" and to the Germans, "You'll hang me now, but I am not alone. There are two hundred million of us. You can't hang us all."

The Germans left Zoya's

Zoya after she was hung

Zoya has become a legend in Russian history

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