The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

First Day: Tuesday, 20th November, 1945
(Part 6 of 10)


In the Jewish ghetto from 7th September, 1941, to 6th July, 1943, over 133,000 persons were tortured and shot.

Mass shooting of the population occurred in the suburbs of the city and in the Livenitz forest.

In the Ganov camp 200,000 citizens were exterminated. The most refined methods of cruelty were employed in this extermination, such as disembowelling and the freezing of human beings in tubs of water. Mass shooting took place to the accompaniment of the music of an orchestra recruited from the persons interned.

Beginning with June, 1943, the Germans carried out measures to hide the evidence of their crimes. They exhumed and burned corpses, and they crushed the bones with machines and used them for fertiliser.

At the beginning of 1944, in the Ozarichi region of the Bielorussian S.S.R., before liberation by the Red Army, the Germans established three concentration camps without shelters, to which they committed tens of thousands of persons from the neighbouring territories. They intentionally brought many people to these camps from typhus hospitals, for the purpose of infecting the other persons interned and for spreading the disease in territories from which the Germans were driven by the Red Army. In these camps there were many murders and crimes.

In the Esthonian S.S.R. they shot tens of thousands of persons and in one day alone, 19th September, 1944, in Camp Kloga, the Germans shot 2,000 peaceful citizens. They burned the bodies on bonfires.

In the Lithuanian S.S.R. there were mass killings of Soviet citizens, namely in Panerai at least 1,000,000; in Kaunas more than 70,000; in Alitus about 60,000, at Prenai more than 3,000; in Villiampol about 8,000; in Mariampol about 7,000; in Trakai and neighbouring towns 37,640.

In the Latvian S.S.R. 577,000 persons were murdered.

As a result of the whole system of internal order maintained in all camps, the interned persons were doomed to die.

In a secret instruction entitled "the internal regime in concentration camps," signed personally by Himmler in 1941, severe measures or punishment were set forth for the internees. Masses of prisoners of war were shot, or died from the cold and torture.

Murders and ill-treatments at places in the Eastern Countries and in the Soviet Union, other than in the camps referred to in (a) above, included, on various dates during the occupation by the German armed forces:

The destruction in the Smolensk region of over 135,000 Soviet citizens.

Among these, near the village of Kholmetz of the Sychev region, when the military authorities were required to remove the mines from an area, on the order of the Commander of the 101st German Infantry Division, Major-General Fizler, the German soldiers gathered the inhabitants of the village of Kholmetz and forced them to remove mines from the road. All of these people lost their lives as a result of exploding mines.

In the Leningrad region there were shot and tortured over 172,000 persons, including over 20,000 persons who were killed in the city of Leningrad by the barbarous artillery barrage and the bombings.

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In the Stavropol region in an anti-tank trench close to the station of Mineralny Vody, and in other cities, tens of thousands of persons were exterminated.

In Pyatigorsk many were subjected to torture and criminal treatment, including suspension from the ceiling and other methods. Many of the victims of these tortures were then shot.

In Krasnodar some 6,000 civilians were murdered by poison gas in gas vans, or were shot and tortured.

In the Stalingrad region more than 40,000 persons were killed and tortured. After the Germans were expelled from Stalingrad, more than a thousand mutilated bodies of local inhabitants were found with marks of torture. One hundred and thirty-nine women had their arms painfully bent backward and held by wires. From some their breasts had been cut off, and their ears, fingers and toes had been amputated, The bodies bore the marks of burns. On the bodies of the men the five-pointed star was burned with an iron or cut with a knife. Some were disembowelled.

In Orel over 5,000 persons were murdered.

In Novgorod and in the Novgorod region many thousands of Soviet citizens were killed by shooting, starvation and torture. In Minsk tens of thousands of citizens were similarly killed.

In the Crimea peaceful citizens were gathered on barges, taken out to sea and drowned, over 144,000 persons being exterminated in this manner.

In the Soviet Ukraine there were monstrous criminal acts of the Nazi conspirators. In Babi Yar, near Kiev, they shot over 100,00 men, women, children and old people. In this city in January, 1941, after the explosion in German headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Street the Germans arrested as hostages 1,250 - persons old men, minors, women with nursing infants. In Kiev they killed over 195,000 persons.

In Rovno and the Rovno region they killed and tortured over 100,000 peaceful citizens.

In Dnepropetrovsk, near the Transport Institute, they shot or threw alive into a great ravine 11,000 women, old men and children.

In the Kamenetz-Podolsk region 31,000 Jews were shot and exterminated, including 13,000 persons brought there from Hungary.

In the Odessa region at least 200,000 Soviet citizens were killed.

In Kharkov about 195,000 persons were either tortured to death, shot or gassed in gas vans.

In Gomel the Germans rounded up the population in prison, and tortured and tormented them, and then took them to the centre of the city and shot them in public.

In the city of Lyda in the Grodnen region on 8th May, 1942, 5,670 persons were completely undressed, driven into pens in groups of 100 and then shot by machine guns. Many were thrown in the graves while they were still alive.

Along with adults the Nazi conspirators mercilessly destroyed even children. They killed them with their parents, in groups and alone. They killed them in children's homes and hospitals, burying the living in the graves, throwing them into flames, stabbing them with bayonets, poisoning them, conducting experiments upon them, extracting their blood for the use of the German Army, throwing them into prison and Gestapo torture chambers and concentration camps, where the children died from hunger, torture, and epidemic diseases.

From 6th September to 24th November, 1942, in the region of Brest, Pinsk, Kobryn, Dyvina, Maloryta and Bereza-Kartuzka about 400 children were shot by German punitive units.

In the Yanov camp in the city of Lwow the Germans killed 8,000 children in two months.

In the resort of Tiberda the Germans annihilated 500 children suffering fromtuberculosis of the bone, who were in the sanatorium for the cure.

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On the territory of the Latvian S.S.R. the German usurpers killed thousands of children, whom they had brought there with their parents from the Byelo-Russian S.S.R., and from the Kalinin, Kaluga and other regions of the R.S.F.S.R.

In Czechoslovakia, as a result of torture, beating, hanging, and shooting, there were annihilated in Gestapo prisons in Brno, Seim and other places over 20,000 persons. Moreover many thousands of internees were subjected to criminal treatment, beatings and torture.

Both before the war, as well as during the war, thousands of Czech patriots, in particular Catholics and Protestants, lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc., were arrested as hostages and imprisoned. A large number of these hostages were killed by the Germans.

In Greece in October, 1941, the male populations between 16 and 60 years of age of the Greek villages Amelofito, Kliston, Kizonia Mesevunos, Selli, Ano-Kerzillon and Kato- Kerzilion were shot-in all 416 persons.

In Yugoslavia many thousands of civilians were murdered. Other examples are given under paragraph (D), "Killing of Hostages," below.

THE PRESIDENT: Paragraph (B) on page 16 was read by the Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic. Paragraph 2 on page 17 was omitted by him. So had you better not go on at paragraph 2 at page 17?

CAPTAIN KUCHIN:

2. From the Eastern Countries

The German occupying authorities deported from the Soviet Union to slavery about 4,978,000 Soviet citizens.

750,000 Czechoslovakian citizens were taken away for forced labour outside the Czechoslovak frontiers in the interior of the German war machine.

On 4th June, 1941, in the city of Zagreb (Yugoslavia) a meeting of German representatives was called with the Councillor Von Troll presiding. The purpose was to set up the means of deporting the Yugoslav population from Slovenia. Tens of thousands of persons were deported in carrying out this plan.

(C) MURDER AND ILL-TREATMENT OF PRISONERS OF WAR

THE PRESIDENT: Will you read paragraph 2 at page 18?

CAPTAIN KUCHIN:

2. In. the Eastern Countries: At Orel prisoners of war were exterminated by starvation, shooting, exposure, and poisoning.

Soviet prisoners of war were murdered en masse on orders from the High Command and the Headquarters of the SIPO and SD. Tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were tortured and murdered at the "Cross Lazaret" at Slavuta.

In addition, many thousands of the persons referred to in paragraph VIII (A)2, above, were Soviet prisoners of war.

Prisoners of war who escaped and were recaptured were handed over to SIPO and SD for shooting.

Frenchmen fighting with the Soviet Army who were captured were handed over to the Vichy Government for "proceedings."

In March, 1944, fifty R.A.F. officers who escaped from Stalag Luft III at Sagan, were murdered when captured.

In September, 1941, 11,000 Polish officers, who were prisoners of war were killed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.

In Yugoslavia the German Command and the occupying authorities in the person of the chief officials of the Police, the SS troops (Police Lieutenant General Rosener) and the Divisional Group Command (General Kubler and others) in the period 1941-43 ordered the shooting of prisoners of war.

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THE PRESIDENT: Now paragraph 2 of (D).

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL J. A. OZOL (continuing the reading of the indictment):

2. In the Eastern Countries:

At Kragnevatz in Yugoslavia 2,300 hostages were shot in October, 1941.

At Kraljevo in Yugoslavia 5,000 hostages were shot.

THE PRESIDENT: Will you turn now to (E), paragraph 2, page 21?

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL OZOL:

2. Eastern Countries: During the occupation of the Eastern Countries the German Government and the German High Command carried out, as a systematic policy, a continuous course of plunder and destruction including:

On the territory of the Soviet Union the Nazi conspirators destroyed or severely damaged 1,710 cities and more than 70,000 villages and hamlets, more than 6,000,000 buildings and rendered homeless about 25,000,000 persons.

Among the cities which suffered most destruction are Stalingrad, Sevastopol, Kiev, Minsk, Odessa, Smolensk, Novgorod, Pskov, Orel, Kharkov, Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don, Stalino and Leningrad.

As is evident from an official memorandum of the German Command, the Nazi conspirators planned the complete annihilation of entire Soviet cities. In a completely secret order of the Chief of the Naval Staff (Staff 1A No. 1601/41, dated 29.IX.1941) addressed only to staff officers, it was said:

"The Fuehrer has decided to erase St. Petersburg from the face of the earth. The existence of this large city will have no further interest after Soviet Russia is destroyed. Finland has also said that the existence of this city on her new border is not desirable from her point of view. The original request of the Navy that docks, harbour, etc., necessary for the fleet be preserved - is known to the Supreme Commander of the Military Forces but the basic principles of carrying out operations against St. Petersburg do not make it possible to satisfy this request.

It is proposed to approach near to the city and to destroy it with the aid of an artillery barrage from weapons of different calibres and with long air attacks ...

The problem of the lives of the population and of their provisioning is a problem which cannot and must not be decided by us.

In this war ... we are not interested in preserving even a part of the population of this large city."

The Germans destroyed 427 museums, among them the wealthy museums of Leningrad, Smolensk, Stalingrad, Novgorod, Poltava and others.

In Pyatigorsk the art objects brought there from the Rostov museum were seized.

The losses suffered by the coal mining industry alone in the Stalin region amount to 2,000,000,000 roubles. There was colossal destruction of industrial establishments in Malerevka, Carlovka, Yeliakievo, Monstantinovka, Kariupol, from which most of the machinery and factories were removed.

Stealing of huge dimensions and the destruction of industrial, cultural and other property was typified in Kiev. More than 4,000,000 books, magazines and manuscripts (many of which were very valuable and even unique) and a large number of artistic productions and divers valuables were stolen and carried away.

Many valuable art productions were taken away from Riga.

The extent of the plunder of cultural valuables is evidenced by the fact that 100,000 valuable volumes and seventy cases of ancient periodicals and precious monographs were carried away by Rosenberg's staff alone.

Among further examples of these crimes are:

Wanton devastation of the city of Novgorod and of many historical and artistic monuments there. Wanton devastation and plunder of the city of Rovno and of

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its province. The destruction of the industrial, cultural and other property in Odessa. The destruction of cities and villages in Soviet Karelia. The destruction in Esthonia of cultural, industrial and other buildings.

The destruction of medical and prophylactic institutes, the destruction of agriculture and industry in Lithuania, the destruction of cities in Latvia.

The Germans approached monuments of culture, dear to the Soviet people, with special hatred. They broke up the estate of the poet Pushkin in Mikhailova-koye, desecrated his grave, and destroyed the neighbouring villages and the Svyatogor monastery.

They destroyed the estate and museum of Leo Tolstoi, "Yasnaya Polyana" and desecrated the grave of the great writer. They destroyed, in Klin, the museum of Tchaikovsky and, in Penaty, the museum of the painter Repin and many others.

The Nazi conspirators destroyed 1,670 Greek Orthodox Churches, 237 Roman Catholic Churches, 67 Chapels, 532 Synagogues, etc.

They also broke up, desecrated and senselessly destroyed the most valuable monuments of the Christian Church, such as the Kievo-Pecherskaya Lavra, Novy Jerusalem in the Istrin region, and the most ancient monasteries and churches.

Destruction in Esthonia of cultural, industrial and other premises; burning down of many thousands of residential buildings; removal of 10,000 works of art; destruction of medical and prophylactic institutions. Plunder and removal to Germany of immense quantities of agricultural stock including horses, cows, pigs, poultry, beehives and agricultural machines of all kinds.

Destruction of agriculture, enslavement of peasants and looting of stock and produce in Lithuania.


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