German Brutality During WW2: Part 2: Russia

A word of caution. This article has a few images that may seem distressing. But we still carry them as we feel shrinking from our past hardly seems sensible.

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.

Witnesses at a Soviet Inquiry held after the war said children were torn apart in front of their mothers....

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 Babi Yar hundreds of thousands of Russians were killed and buried

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.

Some of the pictures in which the Germans appear totally inhuman were in fact fakes fabricated by the Russians. This is one such picture.

This is the real picture

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Brutal Germans During WW2 :Part 1