Category Archives: Soviet War Crimes

The Other Concentration Camps

One might be forgiven for thinking the photograph above is of a Nazi train deporting victims to the East. However, that is not the case—it is an image of deported Polish families to Siberia as part of the Soviet Union’s relocation plan in 1941.

I believe that the USSR, particularly Russia) received too much credit for their part as the Allied troops. People seem to have forgotten that between 1 September 1939 and 22 June 1941, the Soviets were fighting with the Nazis, and there laid the foundation for the Holocaust together with the Nazis.

The USSR also murdered en mass—not only their enemies but also their people. Citizens who were not in line with the Soviet communist view would end up in Gulags. Just as with the Nazis, it didn’t take a lot for the Soviets to find an excuse to put people away.

The Gulags were Soviet labour camps and accompanying detention and transit camps and prisons from the 1920s to the mid-1950s. The word GULAG was born as an acronym. It stood for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei (which translates into English as Main Camp Administration). 

Two factors drove Stalin to expand the Gulag prisons at a merciless pace. The first was the Soviet Union’s desperate need to industrialize. The other force at work was Stalin’s Great Purge, sometimes called the Great Terror. It was a crackdown on all forms of dissent (real and imagined) across the Soviet Union. After the invasion by Nazi Germany of Poland, which marked the start of World War II in Europe, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed eastern parts of the Second Polish Republic. In 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia (now the Republic of Moldova) and Bukovina. According to some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens and inhabitants of the other annexed lands, regardless of their ethnic origin, were arrested and sent to the Gulag camps.

The dead bodies of political prisoners, murdered by the secret police, lie inside a prison camp.
Tarnopil, Ukraine. July 10, 1941.

By 1936, the Gulag held a total of 5,000,000 prisoners, a number that probably was equal to or exceeded every subsequent year until Stalin died in 1953.

Prisoners in the Gulag could survive for many years with a constant stream of prisoners released. However, in terms of numbers, far more people suffered in the Gulag than in the Nazi camps. The types of suffering were different, although women, housed in separate barracks, were often mistreated worse than male prisoners.

They were often the victims of rape and violence at the hands of both inmates and guards. Many reported the most effective survival strategy was to take a “prison husband” someone who would exchange protection or rations for sexual favours.

If a woman had children, she would have to divide her rations to feed them, often as little as 140 grams of bread per day.

However, for some of the female prisoners, simply being allowed to keep their children was a blessing; many of the children in gulags were shipped off to distant orphanages. Often these mothers could never find their children after leaving the camps.

Sometimes, the Gulag authorities released pregnant women and women with young children in special amnesties.

Men at work on the Koylma Highway.

The route would come to be known as the “Road of Bones” because the skeletons of the men who died building it were used in its foundation.

Fast forward to 2024, and although with a different name, the Gulags are still in Siberia

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Sources:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/soviet-gulag-photos#31

https://academic.oup.com/book/28410/chapter-abstract/228833821?redirectedFrom=fulltext

https://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag

https://miamioh.edu/cas/centers-institutes/havighurst-center/additional-resources/havighurst-special-programming/the-gulag/index.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/607546/gulag-stories-russia

https://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/women.php.html#:~:text=Women%20suffered%20greatly%20in%20the,pregnant%20while%20in%20the%20Gulag.

https://gulag.online/articles/historie-gulagu?locale=en

The Demmin Mass Suicide— A Final Desperate Act

(Originally posted on 1 May 2016)

On 1 May 1945, hundreds of people committed mass suicide in the town of Demmin, in the Province of Pomerania (now in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), Germany. The suicides occurred during a mass panic provoked by atrocities committed by soldiers of the Soviet Red Army, who had sacked the town the day before. Although death toll estimates vary, it is acknowledged to be the largest mass suicide ever recorded in Germany. It was part of a mass suicide wave among the population of Nazi Germany.

For years, people indoctrinated by German propaganda as to what was bound to happen should the Soviet troops set foot on German soil responded with suicide.

For years, people indoctrinated by German propaganda as to what was bound to happen should the Soviet troops set foot on German soil responded with suicide. Three Soviet negotiators were shot prior to the Soviet advance into Demmin. The Hitler Youth, amongst others, fired upon Soviet soldiers once they were inside the town. The retreating Wehrmacht had blown up the bridges over the Peene and Tollense rivers, which enclosed the town to the North, West and South, thus blocking the Red Army advance and trapping the remaining civilians. The Soviet units looted and burned down the town, and committed rapes and executions.

Karl Schlösser spent his childhood in Demmin and witnessed the mass suicide of about 1000 residents and refugees in the spring of 1945. He was only ten years old.

Schlösser recalled how his mother clutched a razor in her hands ready to kill him, his brother, and his grandfather rather than be captured by the Stalin Red Army—and die in reprisals

“As parts of the town burned we fled into the woods and later made camp in a nearby field. One morning after nearly a week I woke up to see corpses floating in the river. Later I saw people hanging from trees. They had killed themselves rather than be taken by the Russians,” Schlösser remembered.

Karl Schlösser died on 21 March 2018 at age 83.

Manfred Schuster was another survivor. He was only ten years old when he witnessed women tying children to their bodies with rope or clotheslines and jumping into a river North of Berlin as Soviet forces entered the town.

He remembered seeing around 50 women with up to four children jumping into the river Peene in the small town of Demmin.

Speaking to the Times, Schuster, said, “I shall never forget the cries of ‘mum, mum’.”

“The most horrible part was when a couple of children broke free and made it back to the bank, from where they looked on helplessly, screaming back at the water where their mothers and siblings had drowned,” he said. “In absolute horror, we dropped our bag of sugar, which exploded in a cloud of white dust, and we ran home as fast as we could.”

For three days, The Soviet soldiers were allowed to loot the town. They committed mass rapes of local women, according to eyewitnesses, regardless of age, and shot German men who spoke up against this practice.

Demmin chronicler Gisela Zimmer, then 14 years old, recalls:

“My mother was also raped. And then, together with us and with neighbours, she hurried towards the Tollense River, resolutely prepared to jump into it. My siblings realized only much later that I had held her back, that I had pulled her out of what may be called a state of trance, to prevent her from jumping into the water. There were people. There was screaming. The people were prepared to die. Children were told, ‘Do you want to live on? The town is burning. These and those are dead already. No, we do not want to live any more.’ And so, people went mostly into the rivers. That made the Russians feel creepy, too. There are examples where Russians, too, tried to pull people out or hinder them. But these hundreds of people, they were unable to withhold. And the population here was extremely panicked.”

The mass suicide came just eight days before German General Jodl signed the unconditional surrender document in Reims, France, which formally ended the Second World War in Europe.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3074624/How-thousands-Germans-committed-mass-suicide-Allies-approached-final-days-WWII.html

https://www.lukasverlag.com/programm/belletristik/titel/454-vertreibung-aus-dem-paradies.html

https://thewire.in/books/promise-me-youll-shoot-yourself-nazi-germanys-suicide-wave

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/tragedy-demmin-900-died-mass-5134001

https://dbpedia.org/page/Mass_suicide_in_Demmin

Fântâna Albă Massacre—Soviet War Crime

Of all the atrocities Nazis committed prior to and during World War II, one could not forget that the USSR also committed awful crimes. In fact, between 23 August 1939 and 22 June 1941, Germany and the USSR were partners via the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

A German and a Soviet officer shaking hands.

After signing the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939, the USSR occupied Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertza region in 1940. Thus, overnight, approximately three million displaced Romanians found themselves in foreign territory; where their traditions, origins, culture, and religion they practised, were not accepted.

Many arrested Romanians from Bukovina were killed or deported; churches were closed; properties confiscated; and many families began to cross the new border and went to Romania.

In January 1941, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) issued rumours that people would be allowed to cross the border. As a result of this information, on 1 April 1941, on Easter day, a large group of people from several villages in the Siret Valley headed to the Soviet-Romanian border carrying a white flag and religious insignia (icons, church flags, and crosses).

Approximately 2,000 to 3,000 unarmed civilians walked together towards the new Soviet-Romanian border. The Soviet border guards attempted to turn back the group several times, issuing a final verbal warning and firing shots in the air when the people arrived at Varnystia, near the border.[12] After the convoy pressed on, the border guards began to shoot, reportedly after a few members fired. According to the Soviet official report, casualty figures amounted to 44 people (17 from Pătrăuții de Jos, 12 from Trestiana, five each from Cupca and Suceveni, three from Pătrăuții de Sus, two from Oprișeni), and although the numbers were reportedly higher according to survivor testimonies. Partial listings of victims later identified some of them. Most of them were cut by bullets and thrown into mass graves, some buried alive. The pursued were re-captured, tortured, and then deported. Today, Fântâna Albă (now Stary Vovchynets or Bila Krinicya) location is in the territory of Ukraine.

sources

80th anniversary of the Fântâna Albă Massacre
What was the Fantana Alba Massacre (1941)?
75 years since ‘the Romanian Katyn’ massacre at Fântâna Albă – 3,000 Romanians killed
Masacrul de la Fântâna Albă: Preţul pe care l-au plătit românii care au vrut să treacă graniţa în 1941, în ziua de Paşte. ”A fost un genocid”

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Nemmersdorf massacre-Murder of civilians

No one can deny that the Nazis committed unspeakable atrocities during World War 2,against civilians. But the Nazis were not the only ones.

On October 21, 1944, the Soviet Red Army was steamrolling the German army on the Eastern Front, reaching the town of Nemmersdorf, at the time it was a German rural town in East Prussia, though today the town finds is part of Russia and is called Mayakovskoye.

The 2nd Battalion, 25th Guards Tank Brigade, belonging to the 2nd Guards Tank Corps of the 11th Guards Army, crossed the Angerapp bridge and established a bridgehead on the western bank of the Rominte river on 21 October 1944. The German forces tried to retake the bridge, but several attacks were repelled by the Soviet tanks and the supporting infantry. During an air attack, a number of Soviet soldiers took shelter in an improvised bunker that was already occupied by 14 local men and women. According to the testimony of a seriously-injured woman, Gerda Meczulat, when a Soviet officer arrived and ordered everybody out, the Soviets shot and killed the German civilians at close range. During the night, the Soviet 25th Tank Brigade was ordered to retreat back across the river and take defensive positions along the Rominte. The Wehrmacht regained control of Nemmersdorf and discovered the massacre.

A Soviet officer had ordered the civilians to be killed. There were some conflicting reports in relation to the age and gender of the victims , as well as the number of victims, with both sides trying to spin the incident to their respective advantage.

Nazi German authorities organized an international commission to investigate, headed by the Estonian Hjalmar Mäe and other representatives of neutral countries, such as Francoist Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. It heard the report from a medical commission, which reported that all of the dead females had been raped (they ranged in age from 8 to 84). The Nazi Propaganda Ministry (separately) used the Völkischer Beobachter and the cinema news series Wochenschau to accuse the Soviet Army of having killed dozens of civilians at Nemmersdorf and having summarily executed about 50 French and Belgian noncombatant prisoners-of-war, who had been ordered to take care of thoroughbred horses but had been blocked by the bridge.

After the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, new sources became available and the dominant view among scholars became that the massacre had been embellished and actually exploited by Goebbels in an attempt to stir up civilian resistance to the advancing Soviet Army.

The former chief of staff of the German Fourth Army, Major General Erich Dethleffsen, testified on 5 July 1946 before an American tribunal in Neu-Ulm:

“When in October, 1944, Russian units temporarily entered Nemmersdorf, they tortured the civilians, specifically they nailed them to barn doors, and then shot them. A large number of women were raped and then shot. During this massacre, the Russian soldiers also shot some fifty French prisoners of war. Within forty-eight hours the Germans re-occupied the area.”

Karl Potrek of Königsberg, the leader of a Volkssturm company present when the German Army took back the village, testified in a 1953 report:

“In the farmyard stood a cart, to which more naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position … Near a large inn, the ‘Roter Krug’, stood a barn and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands, in a crucified posture…. In the dwellings we found a total of 72 women, including children, and one old man, 74, all dead…. Some babies had their heads bashed in.”

While the Germans claimed that most of the 653 residents of Nemmersdorf were killed, Soviet records showed only 20 to 30 killed. It was generally believed that the Germans had inflated the number of deaths, grouped evidence of other isolated atrocities to embellish the size of this massacre, and might even had created the situations where civilians would be killed by the Soviets (for example, some accused the German military of using civilians to shield one of the attacks on the Angrapa bridge). The Soviet claim of only 20 to 30 killed was equally fantastic, as the Soviet Union was also known to take great liberties with numbers even with its official state records. The actual number of deaths was likely somewhere in-between.

Regardless what the numbers were, it was nonetheless a massacre on civilians which never should have happened.

sources

https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=198

https://www.bridgemanimages.com/it/noartistknown/wwii-nemmersdorf-massacre-1944/nomedium/asset/2497462

Nemmersdorf massacre
byu/MaxRavenclaw inAskHistorians
One More Reason the USSR was Bad! (Nemmersdorf Massacre)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemmersdorf_massacre

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/45432/were-the-events-in-nemmersdorf-a-pr-stunt-of-the-nazi-propaganda

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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Przyszowice massacre

1024px-przyszowice_-_tablica_na_zbiorowej_mogile_pomordowanych_przez_zolnierzy_sowieckich_4_nemo5576

The Przyszowice massacre  was a massacre perpetrated by the Red Army against civilian inhabitants of the Polish village of Przyszowice in Upper Silesia during the period January 26 to January 28, 1945. Sources vary on the number of victims, which range from 54 to over 60 and possibly as many as 69.Polish Institute of National Remembrance, which carried out research into these events, has declared that the Przyszowice massacre was a crime against humanity.

After the start of the Soviet January offensive in early 1945, the Red Army broke through from the line of the Vistula River well into German-held territory in occupied Poland.

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By late January, the scattered forces of the Wehrmacht were withdrawn to the line of the Oder River, which was on the pre-war territory of the Third Reich. However, several German units were ordered to prepare tactical counter-attacks, notably in the region of Upper Silesia, on the Polish-German borderland. On January 23, Soviet forces seized the town of Gleiwitz (Gliwice), one of the major industrial centres of the area. On the following day, the Germans counter-attacked, precipitating a three-day-long battle for the area. Eventually victorious, on January 26 the Russians entered the village of Przyszowice, the last Polish village before the Polish-German border.

During the following two days, a massacre of local inhabitants ensued. The Soviet soldiers set several dozen houses on fire and began shooting at the civilians trying to extinguish the flames. It is believed that over 60 civilians lost their lives, Polish newspapers gave the high-end number of 69.Men, women and children aged between 10 days and 78 years were killed, although most of the victims were adult males. Among the victims were four former prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp who had escaped from a death march the previous day.

women-marching-out-of-birkenau

Except for two of the escapees who were Italian and Hungarian, the rest of the victims were Polish civilians – including two former soldiers of the Polish Army, who had recently been freed by the Soviets from a prisoner of war camp. According to Polish media, in addition to the mass murder of civilians, the Soviet forces looted the village and raped an unknown number of women.

The reason for the massacre remains unknown. Some authors believe that the Soviet soldiers wanted to take revenge for the losses suffered by the Red Army during the recent skirmishes with the Wehrmacht in the area. During the fighting for Przyszowice, the Soviets suffered 101 casualties and lost roughly 40 tanks. It is also likely that the Soviet soldiers did not know they were still on Polish soil and instead believed they had finally entered the territories of Nazi Germany; Przyszowice was one of the western-most villages of the Second Polish Republic, on the pre-war border between Poland and Germany.

Following the massacre, the victims were buried in a mass grave in a local cemetery. Polish newspapers also note that two more civilians were killed in the summer of that year, after the end of the war, when Red Army troops were returning from Germany. A man was strafed by a Soviet plane in June, and a woman killed in July by a group of Soviet soldiers stealing a cow. During the years of Communist rule in Poland (which lasted until 1989), factual knowledge of these events was censored by the communist government, and the mass grave was kept anonymous. It was not until the 60th anniversary of the event in 2005 that a memorial stone was erected at the cemetery. The commemorative ceremony was performed by the bishop of Legnica, Stefan Cichy, who was personally an eye-witness to the events, as well as a relative of one of the victims.

20090820124418cichy_stefan

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Janowska concentration camp and Lvov

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Awful atrocities were carried out at the Janowska concentration camp and surrounding Lvov(aka Lwow and Lviv) by the Nazis, Soviet troops and Ukrainian nationalists. To an extend it reminds me of the current situation in Aleppo where the population is being subjected by violence from all sides.

In September 1941, the Germans set up a factory on Janowska Street in the northwestern suburbs of Lvov, in southeastern Poland(today Lviv in Ukraine). This factory became part of a network of factories, the German Armament Works, owned and operated by the SS. Jews were used as forced laborers, mainly in carpentry and metalwork. In October 1941, the Germans established a camp housing the forced laborers next to the factory.

After the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War II, the city of Lwów in the Second Polish Republic(now Lviv, Ukraine) was occupied in September 1939 by the Soviet Union under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.

molotov_with_ribbentrop

At that time, there were over 330,000 Jews residing in Lwów, including over 90,000 Jewish children and infants. Over 150,000 of them were refugees from the German-occupied western part of the Poland. In June 1941, the German Army took over Lvov in the course of the initially successful attack on the Soviet positions in eastern Poland, known as Operation Barbarossa. Almost no Jews of Lvov were alive at the end of the war, many being horrifically tormented and tortured before they were murdered.

The retreating Soviets killed about 7,000 Polish and Ukrainian civilians in June during the NKVD prisoner massacres in Lvov.

victims_of_soviet_nkvd_in_lvov_june_1941

The invading Germans blamed the NKVD massacre on the Soviet Jews in the NKVD ranks, and used the atrocity as propaganda tool to incite the first pogrom in which over 4,000 Polish Jews were killed between 30 June and 2 July 1941 by Ukrainian nationalists.

lviv_pogrom_june_-_july_1941

The arrival of the Nazis let loose a wave of antisemitic feelings. Encouraged by German forces, local Ukrainian nationalists murdered additional 5,500 Jews during the second Lviv pogrom in 25–27 July 1941. It was known as the “Petliura Days”, named for the nationalist leader Symon Petliura. For three straight days, Ukrainian militants went on a murderous rampage through the Jewish districts of Lwów. Groups of Jews were herded out to the Jewish cemetery and to the prison on Łąckiego street where they were killed. More than 2,000 Jews died and thousands more were injured.

In early November 1941, the Nazis closed-off northern portions of the city of Lwów thus forming a ghetto.German police shot and killed thousands of elderly and sick Jews as they crossed under the rail bridge on Pełtewna Street (which was called bridge of death by Jews), while they were on their way to the ghetto. In March 1942, the Nazis began to deport Jews from the ghetto to the Belzec extermination camp. By August 1942, more than 65,000 Jews had been deported from Lwów and killed. In early June 1943, the Germans destroyed and liquidated the ghetto

In addition to the Lwów ghetto, in September 1941, the Germans set up a D.A.W. (Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke – the German Armament Works) workshop in prewar Steinhaus’ mill machines factory on 134 Janowska Street, in northwestern suburbs of Lwów (at that time in German-occupied southeastern Poland, now in western Ukraine). This factory became a part of a network of factories, owned and operated by the SS. The commandant of the camp was SS-Haupsturmführer Fritz Gebauer. Jews who worked at this factory were used as forced laborers, mainly working in carpentry and metalwork.

In October 1941, the Nazis established a concentration camp beside the factory, which housed the forced laborers along with the rest of the prisoners. Thousands of Jews from the Lwów ghetto were forced to work as slave laborers in this camp. When the Lwów ghetto was liquidated by the Nazis, the ghetto’s inhabitants who were fit for work were sent to the Janowska camp; the rest were deported to the Belzec for extermination. The concentration camp was guarded by a Sonderdienst battalion of the SS-trained Hiwi police guards known as “Trawniki men”.

karl_streibel_kl_trawniki

In addition to being a forced-labor camp for Jews, Janowska was a transit camp during the mass deportations of Polish Jews to the killing centers in 1942. Jews underwent a selection process in Janowska camp similar to that used at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek extermination camps. Those classified as fit to work remained at Janowska for forced labor. The majority, rejected as unfit for work, were deported to Belzec and killed, or else were shot at the Piaski ravine, located just north of the camp. In the summer and fall of 1942, thousands of Jews (mainly from the Lwów ghetto) were deported to Janowska and killed in the Piaski ravine.

The Nazis occasionally allowed small groups of Jews to go to town for daylong leaves of absence. They would use this temporary freedom to dig up Torahs that had been hidden in Lwów’s Jewish cemetery.The Torahs were then cut into pieces which were hidden under their clothes and smuggled back into the camp. After the war the various pieces were assembled into a single scroll, the Yanov torah, which is currently in California.

1024px-yanovtorah

Ahead of the Soviet advance, in November 1943 the new camp commandant SS-Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Warzok was put in charge of the evacuation of the Janowska inmates to Przemyśl.

crowds-outside-the-old-synagogue-in-przemysl

The Germans attempted to destroy the traces of mass murder during Sonderaktion 1005.

members_of_a_sonderkommando_1005_unit_pose_next_to_a_bone_crushing_machine_in_the_janowska_concentration_camp

Prisoners were forced to open the mass graves in Lesienicki forest and burn the bodies. On November 19, 1943, the Sonderkommando inmates staged a revolt against the Nazis and attempted a mass escape. A few succeeded, but most were recaptured and killed. The SS and their local auxiliaries murdered at least 6,000 Jews who had survived the uprising killings at Janowska, as well as Jews in other forced labor camps in Galicia, at the time of the camps’ liquidation.

map_of_the_kingdom_of_galicia_1914

One of the inmates and a survivor of the Janowska Concentration camp was Simon Wiesenthal.

simon_wiesenthal_1982

In late 1941, Wiesenthal and his wife were transferred to Janowska concentration camp and forced to work at the Eastern Railway Repair Works. He painted swastikas and other inscriptions on captured Soviet railway engines, and Cyla was put to work polishing the brass and nickel. In exchange for providing details about the railways, Wiesenthal obtained false identity papers for his wife from a member of the Armia Krajowa, a Polish underground organisation.

She travelled to Warsaw, where she was put to work in a German radio factory. She spent time in two different labour camps as well. Conditions were harsh and her health was permanently damaged, but she survived the war. The couple was reunited in 1945, and their daughter Paulinka was born the following year.