How the Nazis abused children in the Salaspils concentration camp. Atrocities of fascism: murders of children, fascist child killers - history in photographs - LiveJournal Russians killed the children of fascists

How the Nazis abused children in the Salaspils concentration camp. Atrocities of fascism: murders of children, fascist child killers - history in photographs - LiveJournal Russians killed the children of fascists

15.09.2024 Landscape design

The Great Patriotic War left an indelible mark on the history and destinies of people. Many lost loved ones who were killed or tortured. In the article we will look at the Nazi concentration camps and the atrocities that happened on their territories.

What is a concentration camp?

A concentration camp or concentration camp is a special place intended for the detention of persons of the following categories:

political prisoners (opponents of the dictatorial regime);
prisoners of war (captured soldiers and civilians).

Nazi concentration camps became notorious for their inhuman cruelty to prisoners and impossible conditions of detention. These places of detention began to appear even before Hitler came to power, and even then they were divided into women's, men's and children's. Mainly Jews and opponents of the Nazi system were kept there.

Life in the camp

Humiliation and abuse for prisoners began from the moment of transportation. People were transported in freight cars, where there was not even running water or a fenced-off latrine. Prisoners had to relieve themselves publicly, in a tank standing in the middle of the carriage.

But this was only the beginning; a lot of abuse and torture were prepared for the concentration camps of fascists who were undesirable to the Nazi regime. Torture of women and children, medical experiments, aimless exhausting work - this is not the whole list.

The conditions of detention can be judged from the prisoners’ letters: “they lived in hellish conditions, ragged, barefoot, hungry... I was constantly and severely beaten, deprived of food and water, tortured...”, “They shot me, flogged me, poisoned me with dogs, drowned me in water, beat me to death.” with sticks and starvation. They were infected with tuberculosis... suffocated by a cyclone. Poisoned with chlorine. They burned..."

The corpses were skinned and hair cut off - all this was then used in the German textile industry. The doctor Mengele became famous for his terrifying experiments on prisoners, at whose hands thousands of people died. He studied mental and physical exhaustion of the body. He conducted experiments on twins, during which they received organ transplants from each other, blood transfusions, and sisters were forced to give birth to children from their own brothers. Performed sex reassignment surgery.

All fascist concentration camps became famous for such abuses; we will look at the names and conditions of detention in the main ones below.

Camp diet

Typically, the daily ration in the camp was as follows:

bread - 130 gr;
fat - 20 g;
meat - 30 g;
cereal - 120 gr;
sugar - 27 gr.

Bread was handed out, and the rest of the products were used for cooking, which consisted of soup (issued 1 or 2 times a day) and porridge (150 - 200 grams). It should be noted that such a diet was intended only for working people. Those who, for some reason, remained unemployed received even less. Usually their portion consisted of only half a portion of bread.

List of concentration camps in different countries

Fascist concentration camps were created in the territories of Germany, allied and occupied countries. There are a lot of them, but let’s name the main ones:

In Germany - Halle, Buchenwald, Cottbus, Dusseldorf, Schlieben, Ravensbrück, Esse, Spremberg;
Austria - Mauthausen, Amstetten;
France - Nancy, Reims, Mulhouse;
Poland - Majdanek, Krasnik, Radom, Auschwitz, Przemysl;
Lithuania - Dimitravas, Alytus, Kaunas;
Czechoslovakia - Kunta Gora, Natra, Hlinsko;
Estonia - Pirkul, Pärnu, Klooga;
Belarus - Minsk, Baranovichi;
Latvia - Salaspils.

And this is not a complete list of all concentration camps that were built by Nazi Germany in the pre-war and war years.

Salaspils

Salaspils, one might say, is the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because in addition to prisoners of war and Jews, children were also kept there. It was located on the territory of occupied Latvia and was the central eastern camp. It was located near Riga and operated from 1941 (September) to 1944 (summer).

Children in this camp were not only kept separately from adults and exterminated en masse, but were used as blood donors for German soldiers. Every day, about half a liter of blood was taken from all children, which led to the rapid death of donors.

Salaspils was not like Auschwitz or Majdanek (extermination camps), where people were herded into gas chambers and then their corpses were burned. It was used for medical research that killed more than 100,000 people. Salaspils was not like other Nazi concentration camps. Torture of children was a routine activity here, carried out according to a schedule with the results carefully recorded.

Experiments on children

Testimony of witnesses and results of investigations revealed the following methods of extermination of people in the Salaspils camp: beating, starvation, arsenic poisoning, injection of dangerous substances (most often to children), surgical operations without painkillers, pumping out blood (only from children), executions, torture, useless heavy labor (carrying stones from place to place), gas chambers, burying alive. In order to save ammunition, the camp charter prescribed that children should be killed only with rifle butts. The atrocities of the Nazis in the concentration camps surpassed everything that humanity had seen in modern times. Such an attitude towards people cannot be justified, because it violates all conceivable and inconceivable moral commandments.

Children did not stay with their mothers for long and were usually quickly taken away and distributed. Thus, children under six years of age were kept in a special barracks where they were infected with measles. But they did not treat it, but aggravated the disease, for example, by bathing, which is why the children died within 3-4 days. The Germans killed more than 3,000 people in one year in this way. The bodies of the dead were partly burned and partly buried on the camp grounds.

The Act of the Nuremberg Trials “on the extermination of children” provided the following numbers: during the excavation of only a fifth of the concentration camp territory, 633 bodies of children aged 5 to 9 years, arranged in layers, were discovered; an area soaked in an oily substance was also found, where the remains of unburned children’s bones (teeth, ribs, joints, etc.) were found.

Salaspils is truly the most terrible Nazi concentration camp, because the atrocities described above are not all the tortures that the prisoners were subjected to. Thus, in winter, children brought in were driven barefoot and naked to a barracks for half a kilometer, where they had to wash themselves in icy water. After this, the children were driven in the same way to the next building, where they were kept in the cold for 5-6 days. Moreover, the age of the eldest child did not even reach 12 years. Everyone who survived this procedure was also subjected to arsenic poisoning.

Infants were kept separately and given injections, from which the child died in agony within a few days. They gave us coffee and poisoned cereals. About 150 children died from experiments per day. The bodies of the dead were carried out in large baskets and burned, dumped in cesspools, or buried near the camp.

Ravensbrück

If we start listing Nazi women's concentration camps, Ravensbrück will come first. This was the only camp of this type in Germany. It could accommodate thirty thousand prisoners, but by the end of the war it was overcrowded by fifteen thousand. Mostly Russian and Polish women were detained; Jews numbered approximately 15 percent. There were no prescribed instructions regarding torture and torment; the supervisors chose the line of behavior themselves.

Arriving women were undressed, shaved, washed, given a robe and assigned a number. Race was also indicated on clothing. People turned into impersonal cattle. In small barracks (in the post-war years, 2-3 refugee families lived in them) there were approximately three hundred prisoners, who were housed on three-story bunks. When the camp was overcrowded, up to a thousand people were herded into these cells, all of whom had to sleep on the same bunks. The barracks had several toilets and a washbasin, but there were so few of them that after a few days the floors were littered with excrement. Almost all Nazi concentration camps presented this picture (the photos presented here are only a small fraction of all the horrors).

But not all women ended up in the concentration camp; a selection was made beforehand. The strong and resilient, fit for work, were left behind, and the rest were destroyed. Prisoners worked at construction sites and sewing workshops.

Gradually, Ravensbrück was equipped with a crematorium, like all Nazi concentration camps. Gas chambers (nicknamed gas chambers by prisoners) appeared towards the end of the war. Ashes from crematoria were sent to nearby fields as fertilizer.

Experiments were also carried out in Ravensbrück. In a special barracks called the “infirmary,” German scientists tested new drugs, first infecting or crippling experimental subjects. There were few survivors, but even those suffered from what they had endured until the end of their lives. Experiments were also conducted with irradiating women with X-rays, which caused hair loss, skin pigmentation, and death. Excisions of the genital organs were carried out, after which few survived, and even those quickly aged, and at the age of 18 they looked like old women. Similar experiments were carried out in all Nazi concentration camps; torture of women and children was the main crime of Nazi Germany against humanity.

At the time of the liberation of the concentration camp by the Allies, five thousand women remained there; the rest were killed or transported to other places of detention. The Soviet troops who arrived in April 1945 adapted the camp barracks to accommodate refugees. Ravensbrück later became a base for Soviet military units.

Nazi concentration camps: Buchenwald

Construction of the camp began in 1933, near the town of Weimar. Soon, Soviet prisoners of war began to arrive, becoming the first prisoners, and they completed the construction of the “hellish” concentration camp.

The structure of all structures was strictly thought out. Immediately behind the gate began the “Appelplat” (parallel ground), specially designed for the formation of prisoners. Its capacity was twenty thousand people. Not far from the gate there was a punishment cell for interrogations, and opposite there was an office where the camp fuehrer and the officer on duty - the camp authorities - lived. Deeper down were the barracks for prisoners. All barracks were numbered, there were 52 of them. At the same time, 43 were intended for housing, and workshops were set up in the rest.

The Nazi concentration camps left behind a terrible memory; their names still evoke fear and shock in many, but the most terrifying of them is Buchenwald. The crematorium was considered the most terrible place. People were invited there under the pretext of a medical examination. When the prisoner undressed, he was shot and the body was sent to the oven.

Only men were held at Buchenwald. Upon arrival at the camp, they were assigned a number in German, which they had to learn within the first 24 hours. The prisoners worked at the Gustlovsky weapons factory, which was located a few kilometers from the camp.

Continuing to describe the Nazi concentration camps, let us turn to the so-called “small camp” of Buchenwald.

Small camp of Buchenwald

The “small camp” was the name given to the quarantine zone. The living conditions here were, even compared to the main camp, simply hellish. In 1944, when German troops began to retreat, prisoners from Auschwitz and the Compiegne camp were brought to this camp; they were mainly Soviet citizens, Poles and Czechs, and later Jews. There was not enough space for everyone, so some of the prisoners (six thousand people) were housed in tents. The closer 1945 got, the more prisoners were transported. Meanwhile, the “small camp” included 12 barracks measuring 40 x 50 meters. Torture in Nazi concentration camps was not only specially planned or for scientific purposes, life itself in such a place was torture. 750 people lived in the barracks; their daily ration consisted of a small piece of bread; those who were not working were no longer entitled to it.

Relations among prisoners were tough; cases of cannibalism and murder for someone else's portion of bread were documented. A common practice was to store the bodies of the dead in barracks in order to receive their rations. The dead man's clothes were divided among his cellmates, and they often fought over them. Due to such conditions, infectious diseases were common in the camp. Vaccinations only worsened the situation, since injection syringes were not changed.

Photos simply cannot convey all the inhumanity and horror of the Nazi concentration camp. The stories of witnesses are not intended for the faint of heart. In each camp, not excluding Buchenwald, there were medical groups of doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners. It should be noted that the data they obtained allowed German medicine to step far forward - no other country in the world had such a number of experimental people. Another question is whether it was worth the millions of tortured children and women, the inhuman suffering that these innocent people endured.

Prisoners were irradiated, healthy limbs were amputated, organs were removed, and they were sterilized and castrated. They tested how long a person could withstand extreme cold or heat. They were specially infected with diseases and introduced experimental drugs. Thus, an anti-typhoid vaccine was developed in Buchenwald. In addition to typhus, prisoners were infected with smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, and paratyphoid.

Since 1939, the camp was run by Karl Koch. His wife, Ilse, was nicknamed the “Witch of Buchenwald” for her love of sadism and inhumane abuse of prisoners. They feared her more than her husband (Karl Koch) and Nazi doctors. She was later nicknamed "Frau Lampshaded". The woman owed this nickname to the fact that she made various decorative things from the skin of killed prisoners, in particular, lampshades, which she was very proud of. Most of all, she liked to use the skin of Russian prisoners with tattoos on their backs and chests, as well as the skin of gypsies. Things made of such material seemed to her the most elegant.

The liberation of Buchenwald took place on April 11, 1945, at the hands of the prisoners themselves. Having learned about the approach of the allied troops, they disarmed the guards, captured the camp leadership and controlled the camp for two days until American soldiers approached.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau)

When listing Nazi concentration camps, it is impossible to ignore Auschwitz. It was one of the largest concentration camps, in which, according to various sources, from one and a half to four million people died. The exact details of the dead remain unclear. The victims were mainly Jewish prisoners of war, who were exterminated immediately upon arrival in gas chambers.

The concentration camp complex itself was called Auschwitz-Birkenau and was located on the outskirts of the Polish city of Auschwitz, whose name became a household name. The following words were engraved above the camp gate: “Work sets you free.”

This huge complex, built in 1940, consisted of three camps:

Auschwitz I or the main camp - the administration was located here;
Auschwitz II or "Birkenau" - was called a death camp;
Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz.

Initially, the camp was small and intended for political prisoners. But gradually more and more prisoners arrived at the camp, 70% of whom were destroyed immediately. Many tortures in Nazi concentration camps were borrowed from Auschwitz. Thus, the first gas chamber began to function in 1941. The gas used was Cyclone B. The terrible invention was first tested on Soviet and Polish prisoners totaling about nine hundred people.

Auschwitz II began its operation on March 1, 1942. Its territory included four crematoria and two gas chambers. In the same year, medical experiments on sterilization and castration began on women and men.

Small camps gradually formed around Birkenau, where prisoners working in factories and mines were kept. One of these camps gradually grew and became known as Auschwitz III or Buna Monowitz. Approximately ten thousand prisoners were held here.

Like any Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz was well guarded. Contacts with the outside world were prohibited, the territory was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and guard posts were set up around the camp at a distance of a kilometer.

Five crematoria operated continuously on the territory of Auschwitz, which, according to experts, had a monthly capacity of approximately 270 thousand corpses.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. By that time, approximately seven thousand prisoners remained alive. Such a small number of survivors is due to the fact that about a year earlier, mass murders in gas chambers (gas chambers) began in the concentration camp.

Since 1947, a museum and memorial complex dedicated to the memory of all those who died at the hands of Nazi Germany began to function on the territory of the former concentration camp.

Conclusion

During the entire war, according to statistics, approximately four and a half million Soviet citizens were captured. These were mostly civilians from the occupied territories. It’s hard to even imagine what these people went through. But it was not only the bullying of the Nazis in the concentration camps that they were destined to endure. Thanks to Stalin, after their liberation, returning home, they received the stigma of “traitors.” The Gulag awaited them at home, and their families were subjected to serious repression. One captivity gave way to another for them. In fear for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they changed their last names and tried in every possible way to hide their experiences.

Until recently, information about the fate of prisoners after release was not advertised and kept silent. But people who have experienced this simply should not be forgotten.

It is no secret that Germany launched massive actions to exterminate prisoners of war and the population on the territory of occupied countries. The count went on for millions of lives. But what is striking is not even the scale of the tragedy, but the fact that it was essentially a single plant, the workshops of which were scattered over a vast territory. The enterprise had its own directors, shop managers, accountants, workers and shock workers of National Socialist labor. there were even technical schools where they trained specialists in the “slaughter of human cattle.” Even now it is impossible to read archival documents without shuddering.

SPEECH OF THE ASSISTANT CHIEF PROSECUTOR FROM THE USSR L. N. SMIRNOV

{TsGAOR USSR, f 7445, op. 1, units storage 26.}

At the mass graves where the bodies of Soviet people were killed by “typical German methods” (I will further present to the Court evidence of these methods and their certain frequency), at the gallows on which the bodies of teenagers swung, at the ovens of giant crematoria where those killed in extermination camps were burned , from the corpses of women and girls who became victims of the sadistic tendencies of fascist bandits, from the dead bodies of children torn in half, the Soviet people suffered a chain of atrocities stretching, as rightly said in the speech of the Chief Prosecutor from the USSR, “from the hands of executioners to ministerial chairs.” These monstrous atrocities had their own specific criminal system. Uniformity of killing methods: the same design of gas chambers, mass stamping of round cans with the toxic substance “Cyclone A” or “Cyclone B”, crematoria ovens built according to the same standard designs, the same layout of “extermination camps”, standard design of fetid “death machines”, which the Germans called “gassenwagens”, and our people called “gas chambers”, the technical development of designs for mobile mills for grinding human bones - all this pointed to a single evil will uniting individual killers and executioners. It became clear that the rationalization of mass murders, on the instructions of the Hitler government and the leadership of the German military forces, was carried out by German heating engineers and chemists, architects and toxicologists, mechanics and doctors. ...

From the evidence that I will present below, you will see that the burial places of German victims were opened by Soviet forensic doctors in the north and south of the country, the graves were separated from one another by thousands of kilometers, and it was obvious that these atrocities were committed by various individuals. But the methods of committing crimes were the same. The wounds were equally localized. Giant pit graves disguised as anti-tank ditches or trenches were prepared in the same way. The killers, in almost identical terms, ordered the unarmed and defenseless people brought to the place of execution to undress and lie face down in pre-prepared pits. The first layer of those shot, whether it was in the swamps of Belarus or in the foothills of the Caucasus, was equally sprinkled with bleach, and the killers again forced the doomed defenseless people to lie down on the first row of dead men, covered with a caustic mass mixed with blood. This testified not only to the unity of instructions and orders received from above. The methods of murder were so similar that it became clear how cadres of killers were trained in special schools, how everything was planned in advance, from the order to undress before execution to the actual killing. These assumptions, based on an analysis of the facts, were subsequently fully confirmed by documents captured by the Red Army and the testimony of prisoners.

The fascist system of educating killers also knew other forms of training, specifically devoted, in particular, to the technique of destroying traces of a crime. The court has already been presented as evidence with a document registered under the number USSR-6v/8. This document is one of the appendices to the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on the atrocities of the Germans in the Lviv region. This is the testimony of witness Manusevich, interrogated on special instructions by the Extraordinary State Commission by the senior assistant prosecutor of the Lvov region. The interrogation protocol was properly drawn up in accordance with the procedural law of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Manusevich was imprisoned by the Germans in the Yanovsky camp, where he worked in a team of prisoners engaged in burning the corpses of murdered Soviet people. After the burning of 40 thousand corpses killed in the Yanovsky camp, the team was sent for similar purposes to a camp located in the Lisenice forest. I quote the interrogation report: “In this camp at the death factory, special 10-day courses on burning corpses were organized, in which 12 people were trained. People were sent to the courses from the camps of Lublin, Warsaw and other camps, from which I can’t remember. I don’t know the names of the cadets, but they were not privates, but officers. The teacher of the courses was the commandant of the burning, Colonel Shallock, who, at the place where the corpses were dug up and burned, told how to practically do this, explained the structure of the machine for grinding bones. Then Shallok explained how to level the hole, sift and plant trees in this place, where to scatter and hide the ashes of human corpses. Such courses have been available for a long time. During my stay, that is, during five and a half months of work in the Yanovsky and Lisenitsky camps, ten batches of cadets were missed.”

The commandant of the Janow camp, Obersturmführer Wilhaus, for the sake of sport and the pleasure of his wife and daughter, systematically fired from a machine gun from the balcony of the camp office at prisoners working in the workshops, then handed the machine gun to his wife, and she also shot. Sometimes, to please his nine-year-old daughter, Vilgauz forced two to four-year-old children to be thrown into the air and shot at them. The daughter applauded and shouted: “Dad, more, dad, more!” - and he shot.

The court has already been presented with the document number USSR-29 “Communiqué of the Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission for the Investigation of German Atrocities Committed in the Extermination Camp at Majdanek in the City of Lublin.” ... “I saw personally,” says witness Baran Edward, “how small children were taken from mothers and killed before their eyes: they grabbed one leg with their hand, stood on the other with their foot, and thus tore the child apart.”

The next part of the note is devoted to the mass crimes of the Germans, the so-called “actions”, in particular the “actions” in Kyiv. I am forced to draw the Court's attention to the fact that the number of those killed at Babi Yar, which is given in the note, is less than in reality. After the liberation of Kyiv, it was established that the volume of atrocities of the Nazi invaders exceeded the crimes of the Germans, which were known from the initial information. From the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the city of Kyiv presented to the Court further, it is clear that in Babi Yar during this monstrous so-called “mass action” the Germans shot not 52 thousand, but 100 thousand people.

Upon the arrival of the Red Army in Kerch, in January 1942, when examining the Vagerovsky ditch, it was discovered that for a kilometer in length, 4 meters wide, 2 meters deep, it was filled with the corpses of women, children, old people and teenagers. There were frozen pools of blood near the ditch. There were also children's hats, toys, ribbons, torn buttons, gloves, bottles with nipples, boots, galoshes along with stumps of arms and legs and other parts of the body. It was all splattered with blood and brains. Fascist scoundrels shot the defenseless population with explosive bullets. A young woman lay tortured on the edge. In her arms was a baby, neatly wrapped in a white lace blanket. Next to this woman lay an eight-year-old girl and a boy of about five, shot through with explosive bullets. Their hands clutched their mother's dress."

The circumstances of the execution are confirmed by the testimony of numerous witnesses who were lucky enough to escape unharmed from the ditch of death. I will give two of these testimonies: “Twenty-year-old Anatoly Ignatievich Bondarenko, now a Red Army fighter, testified: “When we were taken to the anti-tank ditch and lined up near this terrible grave, we still thought that we were brought here in order to force us to fill the ditch with earth or dig new trenches. We did not believe that we were brought to be shot. But when the first shots rang out from the machine guns aimed at us, I realized that they were shooting us. I immediately rushed into the hole and hid between two corpses. So I lay unharmed in a semi-fainting state almost until the evening. Lying in the pit, I heard some of the wounded shouting to the gendarmes who were shooting them: “Finish me off, you scoundrel,” “Oh, you didn’t hit me, you scoundrel, hit me again!” Then, when the Germans left for lunch, one of our fellow villagers shouted from the pit: “Get up, whoever is alive.” I stood up, and the two of us began to scatter the corpses and pull out the living. I was covered in blood. Above the ditch there was a light fog and steam from the cooling pile of bodies, blood and the last breath of the dying. We pulled out Fedor Naumenko and my father, but my father was killed outright with an explosive bullet in the heart. Late at night I reached my friends in the village of Bagerovo and there I waited for the arrival of the Red Army.” Witness Kamenev A. testified: “Behind the airfield, the driver stopped the car, and we saw that the Germans were shooting people near the ditch. They took us out of the car and ten people at a time began to drive us towards the ditch. My son and I were in the top ten. We reached the ditch. We were placed facing the pit, and the Germans began to prepare to shoot us in the back of the head. My son turned around and shouted to them: “Why are you shooting civilians?” But shots rang out, and the son immediately fell into a hole. I rushed after him. The corpses of people began to fall into the pit on me. About three o'clock in the afternoon, an 11-year-old boy rose from a pile of corpses and began shouting: “Guys, whoever is alive, get up, the Germans are gone.” I was afraid to get up because I thought the boy was shouting on the orders of the policeman. The boy began to scream a second time, and my son responded to this scream. He stood up and asked: “Dad, are you alive?” I couldn't say anything and just shook my head. My son and boy pulled me out from under the corpses. We saw people still alive who shouted: “Save!” Some of them were injured. The whole time I was lying in the hole, under the corpses, I could hear the screams and cries of children and women. It was after us that the Germans shot old people, women and children.”

Children were poisoned with carbon monoxide in German gas chambers. In confirmation of this, I refer to the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on the atrocities of the Nazi invaders in the Stavropol Territory, already presented to the Court under the number USSR-1: “It was established that in December 1942, by order of the head of the Gestapo of the city of Mikoyan-Shahar, Lieutenant Otto Weber, An exceptionally cruel killing of Soviet children suffering from bone tuberculosis who were being treated in the sanatoriums of the Teberda resort was organized. Eyewitnesses of this crime, employees of children's sanatoriums, nurse Ivanova S.E. and nurse Polupanova M.I. reported: “On December 22, 1942, a German car drove up to the entrance of the sanatorium of the first department. Seven German soldiers who arrived with this car pulled out 54 seriously ill children aged three years and older from the sanatorium, laid them in stacks in several tiers in the car - these were children who could not move, and therefore they were not driven into the car, but stacked in tiers - then they slammed the door, let in the gas (carbon monoxide) and left the sanatorium. An hour later the car returned to the village of Teberda. All the children died, they were killed by the Germans and thrown into the Teberd Gorge near Gunachgir.” Children were drowned in the open sea. In confirmation of this, I refer to document number USSR-63 - “Act on German atrocities in Sevastopol.”

Former prisoner Gordon Yakov, a doctor from the city of Vilnius, testified: “At the beginning of 1943, 164 boys were selected from the Birkenau camp and taken to the hospital, where they were all killed using carbolic acid injections into the heart.”

In the Bikernek Forest, located on the outskirts of the city of Riga, the Nazis shot 46,500 civilians. Witness Stabulnek M., who lives near this forest, said: “On Friday and Saturday before Easter 1942, buses with people ran from the city to the forest around the clock. I counted 41 buses passing by my house between morning and noon on Friday. On the first day of Easter, many residents, including myself, went into the forest to the place of execution. There we saw one large open pit in which there were shot women and children, naked and in their underwear. The corpses of women and children showed signs of torture and abuse - many had blood stains on their faces, abrasions on their heads, some had their hands and fingers cut off, their eyes gouged out, their stomachs ripped open...”

In confirmation of the fact that during mass executions, so-called “actions”, German criminals buried living people in the ground, I present to the Court under the number USSR-37 the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission dated June 24, 1943: “When excavating a hole at a depth of one meter 71 corpses of executed residents of the city of Kupyansk and the Kupyansky district were discovered, among them there were 62 male corpses, 8 female corpses and the corpse of an infant. All those shot were without shoes, and some without clothes... The commission notes that many of the wounds were not fatal, and it is obvious that these people were thrown into the pit (and buried alive. This is also confirmed by citizens who passed near the pit shortly after the executions, who saw, how the earth stirred over the hole and a dull groan was heard from the grave ... "

“On November 3, 1943, 18,400 people were shot in the camp. 8,400 people were taken from the camp itself, and 10 thousand people were brought from the city and from other camps... The execution began in the morning and ended late in the evening. The SS men, stripped naked, took them in groups of 50 and 100 people to the ditches, laid them face down on the bottom of the ditch and shot them with machine guns. A new batch of living people were placed on top of the corpses, and they were also shot. And until the ditches were filled..."

I ask the distinguished judges to turn to the album of documents on the Kloga camp. You will find there a typical type of this kind of brutal shooting techniques. To confirm this, I turn to document number USSR-39: “On September 19, 1944, the Germans began to liquidate the Kloga camp. The Unterscharführer of the Schwarze camp and the head of the concentration camp, Hauptscharführer Max Dahlmann, selected 300 people from the prisoners and forced them to carry firewood to a forest clearing; the other 700 people were forced to make fires. When the fires were ready, the German executioners began mass execution of prisoners. The firewood bearers and bonfire organizers were shot first, and then the rest. The execution took place like this: on a prepared bonfire site, Germans from the SD police teams forced the prisoners to lie down face down by force of arms and shot them with machine guns and pistols. Those executed were burned at the stake. About two thousand people were killed in the Kloga camp on September 19, 1944.”

The mass execution point in the town of Ponary was organized in July 1941 and operated until July 1944: “In December 1943,” said witness Matvey Fedorovich Zaidel, “we were forced to dig up and burn corpses. Thus, we placed about 3 thousand corpses on each fire, doused them with oil, placed incendiary bombs on four sides and set them on fire.” The burning of corpses continued from the end of 1943 until June 1944. During this time, at least 100 thousand corpses were removed from nine pits with a total volume of 21,179 cubic meters and burned at the stake.

In a number of cases, for the mass killing of civilians in the Soviet Union, the German fascists resorted to methods full of cruel deceit. To confirm these methods, I refer to the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Stavropol Territory, which I have already presented to the Court under the number USSR-1: “It was established that before the retreat from the city of Georgievsk on January 9 and 10 this year. On the orders of the head of the German hospitals, chief physician Baron von Heimann, in order to poison the Soviet people, German soldiers sold alcohol and baking soda at the city market, and the alcohol turned out to be methyl alcohol, and the “soda” was oxalic acid. There was a mass poisoning of city residents..."

I turn to the presentation of evidence related to the use by Nazi criminals of special machines to kill people with gasoline exhaust fumes - “sonder machines”, “gas vans”, or “gas vans”, as the Soviet people correctly called them. The very fact of using these machines for the mass killing of people is a grave indictment of the leaders of German fascism. Special devices for the mass extermination of people in closed hermetic vehicles, the exhaust pipes of the engines of which were connected to the bodies using special movable hoses, were used by the Nazis for the first time in the USSR in 1942. I remind the respected Court that we find the first mention of “gas chambers” in the act I presented to the Tribunal about the atrocities of the Nazi 166 invaders in the city of Kerch (document numbered USSR-63); this dates back to the spring of 1942. I remind the Tribunal of the excerpt included in the act from the testimony of witness Daria Demchenko, who saw how from two “gas chambers” German soldiers in Kerch threw the corpses of those killed into an anti-tank ditch. However, it is indisputably obvious that the mass killing of people in “gas chambers” was first established by the Extraordinary State Commission in the Stavropol Territory. This can be seen from document number USSR-1. The investigation into the atrocities of the German fascists in the Stavropol Territory took place under the leadership of the late outstanding Russian writer, member of the Extraordinary State Commission, academician Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy. A very thorough investigation was organized with the involvement of major specialists and forensic doctors, because human thinking, which sets certain logical limits to crimes, then had difficulty accepting the existence of these machines. However, as a result of the investigation and eyewitness testimony about the “gas chambers”, the mass painful murders of civilians committed by the German fascists with their help were fully confirmed.

The Report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Stavropol Territory contains the first detailed description of the construction of “gas chambers”: “The Germans established the mass extermination of the civilian Soviet population by poisoning with carbon monoxide in specially equipped vehicles, “gas chambers.” Prisoner of war E.M. Fenichel said: “Working as a car mechanic, I had the opportunity to become familiar in detail with the design of vehicles specially adapted for suffocation - killing people with exhaust gases. There were several such cars in the city of Stavropol under the Gestapo. Its structure was as follows: the body was approximately 5 meters long, 2.5 meters wide, and the body height was also approximately 2.5 meters. The body had the shape of a carriage, without windows, the inside was upholstered with galvanized iron, and on the floor, also upholstered with iron, there were wooden gratings; The body door was lined with rubber and closed tightly with an automatic lock. On the floor of the car, under the grille, there were two metal pipes... These pipes were connected to each other by a transverse pipe of the same diameter... These pipes had frequent half-centimeter holes; A rubber hose extends from the transverse pipe down through a hole in the galvanized floor, at the end of which there is a hex nut with a thread corresponding to the thread on the end of the engine exhaust pipe. This hose is screwed onto the exhaust pipe, and when the engine is running, all exhaust gases go into the body of this hermetically sealed car. As a result of the accumulation of gases, the person in the back died after a short time. The car body can accommodate 70-80 people. The engine on this car is of the Sauer brand...”

In the Stavropol Territory, a gas chamber was used to kill 660 sick people in a local hospital. Next, I draw the attention of the respected Court to the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on the atrocities of Nazi criminals in Krasnodar. I present this document to the Court under number USSR-42. It also states the facts of mass murders of people with the help of “gas chambers”. I present to the Court under number USSR-65 the verdict of the military tribunal of the North Caucasus Front. From this verdict, in order to shorten the time, I will give a short quotation: “The judicial investigation also established facts of systematic torture and burning by Hitlerite robbers of many arrested Soviet citizens who were in the basements of the Gestapo, and extermination by poisoning with carbon monoxide gases in specially equipped vehicles - “gas chambers” around 7 thousand innocent Soviet people, including over 700 sick people who were in medical institutions in the city of Krasnodar and the Krasnodar Territory, of which 42 were children aged 5 to 16 years.” I then present to the Court the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on the atrocities of the Nazi invaders in the city of Kharkov and the Kharkov region. Document number USSR-43. I turn to the verdict of the military tribunal of the 4th Ukrainian Front, which is presented under the number USSR-32. “For the massacres of Soviet citizens, the Nazi invaders used the so-called “gas vans” - large closed vehicles, which are known among the Russians as “gas chambers”. The Nazi invaders drove Soviet citizens into these “gas vans” and killed them by releasing a special lethal gas - carbon monoxide. In order to hide the traces of the monstrous atrocities committed and the mass extermination of Soviet people by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide in gas cars, the Nazi criminals burned the corpses of their victims.” To prove that “gas chambers” were used not only in those points that I spoke about, I refer to the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission, presented to the Court under number USSR-9, about the atrocities of the Germans in Kyiv. The court will find there evidence of the use of gas chambers in Kyiv. I will focus on data on the widespread use of “gas chambers” in the territory of temporarily occupied areas of the USSR, that is, on the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the city of Rivne and the Rivne region. “...3. The extermination of civilians and prisoners of war in the city of Rivne was carried out through mass executions from machine guns and machine guns, killing with carbon monoxide in gas vans,” and in some cases people were thrown into graves and covered alive. Some of the people shot, in particular in the quarries near the village of Vydumka, were burned on pre-prepared and adapted sites." In confirmation of this, I refer to the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission for Minsk: "At the hands of German executioners, thousands of Soviet citizens died in concentration camps." I turn to testimony of the witness Moisievich. He says: “I was an eyewitness to how the Germans exterminated people in the gas chambers. They forcibly pushed from 70 to 80 people into each gas chamber and took them away to an unknown direction. In Minsk, the murderers used the principle of the gas chamber.” used for the construction of stationary gas chambers, which were set up by criminals in ordinary baths. This is also stated in this Report of the Extraordinary Commission.

From the report of the Polish government it is clear that the Sobibur camp was founded during the first and second periods of the liquidation of the Jewish ghettos. But the main wave of atrocities took place in this camp at the beginning of 1943. In the same report we can find a mention that the camp in Belcica was set up in 1940, but it was in 1942 that special electrical devices were installed here for the mass killing of people. Under the pretext that they were being taken to bathe, the doomed were forced to undress, then they were taken to a building where the floor was specially electrified, and there they were killed.

In addition, mobile crematoriums were created. Their existence is evidenced by SS man Paul Waldmann, who took part in one of the atrocities of the German fascists - the simultaneous destruction of many thousands of Russian prisoners of war in Sachsenhausen. Documents on this camp have already been presented to the court under number USSR-52. I quote that passage from the testimony of SS man Waldmann, which speaks of the mass execution in Sachsenhausen: “The prisoners of war killed in this way were burned in four mobile crematoria, which were transported on a car trailer...”

I refer, further, to the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the city of Minsk: “In the Blagovshchina tract, 34 pit graves were discovered, disguised by coniferous branches. Some graves reach a length of 50 meters. When five graves were partially opened, charred corpses and a layer of ash ranging from half to one meter thick were found at a depth of three meters. Near the pits, the Commission found many small human bones, hair, dentures and a lot of various small personal items. The investigation established that the Nazis exterminated up to 150 thousand people here. 450 meters from the former farm of Petrashkevichi, 8 pit graves measuring 21 meters long, 4 meters wide and 5 meters deep were discovered. In front of each pit-grave there are huge deposits of ash left over from the burning of corpses.”

Mockery of the corpses of victims was characteristic of all extermination camps. I remind the respected Court that the unburned bones of the dead were sold by the German fascists to the Strem company. The hair of the murdered women was cut off, packed into bales, pressed and sent to Germany. Among these same crimes are those about which I am presenting evidence now. I have pointed out several times before that the main method of destroying traces was burning corpses, but the same vile rationalization SS technical thought that created gas chambers and “gas chambers” began to work to create methods for the complete destruction of human corpses in which the destruction traces of crimes would be combined with the receipt of a certain fabrication. At the Danzig Anatomical Institute, experiments have already been carried out on a semi-industrial scale in obtaining soap from human bodies and tanning human skin for industrial purposes. I present to the Court, under number USSR-197, the testimony of one of the direct participants in the production of soap from human fat, a preparator at the Anatomical Institute in Danzig, Sigmund Mazur:

Question: Tell us how soap was made from human fat at the Anatomical Institute of Danzig.

Answer: Next to the anatomical institute, in the depths of the courtyard, in the summer of 1943, a stone one-story building with three rooms was built. This building was built for processing corpses and boiling bones. This was officially announced by Professor Spanner. This laboratory was called a laboratory for making human skeletons and burning meat and unnecessary bones. But already in the winter of 1943/44, Professor Spanner ordered that human fat be collected and not thrown away. This order was given to Reichert and Borkman. In February 1944, Professor Spanner gave me a recipe for making soap from human fat. This recipe called for taking 5 kilograms of human fat and boiling it for 2-3 hours in 10 liters of water with 500 grams or one kilogram of caustic soda, then let it cool. The soap floats to the top, and the residue and water remain at the bottom in the buckets. Table salt (a handful) and soda were also added to the mixture. Then fresh water was added and the mixture was cooked again for 2 - 3 hours. After cooling, the finished soap was poured into molds."

I now present to the Court these “ditch molds into which the boiled soap was poured. Next I present evidence that a semi-finished product of this human soap was actually seized in Danzig.

“The soap turned out to have an unpleasant smell. In order to destroy this unpleasant odor, benzaldehyde was added. Fat was collected from human corpses by Borkman and Reichert. I made soap from the corpses of men and women. One industrial boiling took several days - from 3 to 7. Of the two boilings known to me, in which I was directly involved, more than 25 kilograms of finished soap came out, and for these cookings 70-80 kilograms of human fat were collected from about 40 corpses . The finished soap was delivered to Professor Spanner, who kept it personally. As far as I know, Hitler’s government was also interested in the production of soap from human corpses. The Minister of Education Rust, the Minister of Health Conti, the Gauleiter of Danzig Albert Forster, as well as many professors from other medical institutes came to the anatomical institute. I myself personally used this soap made from human fat for my needs - for the toilet and washing. For myself personally, I took 4 kilograms of this soap... For myself, Reichert, Borkmann, von Bargen and our boss Professor Spanner also took soap... Just like human fat, Professor Spanner ordered the collection of human skin, which, after degreasing, was treated with certain chemicals substances. The production of human skin was carried out by the senior preparator von Bargen and Professor Spanner himself. The produced leather was put into boxes and used for special purposes, but I don’t know what.”

I am now presenting, under number USSR-196, a copy of the recipe for soap made from the bodies of the dead. It is basically identical to the one set out in the interrogation protocol of Mazur. To confirm that everything stated in the interrogation protocol of Mazur is true, I will cite the protocols accepted by the Court for the interrogation of British prisoners of war, in particular John G. Witton, private of the Royal Sussex Regiment. The document is presented to the Court under number USSR-264. I quote one small passage from this protocol: “The corpses arrived in numbers from 7 to 8 per day. They were all beheaded and stripped naked. Sometimes they were delivered in Red Cross vehicles in wooden boxes holding 5-6 corpses, sometimes 3-4 corpses were delivered in small trucks. The corpses were usually unloaded with utmost speed and carried into the cellar, into which a side door led from the foyer at the main entrance to the institute. Due to the fact that the corpses were previously soaked in some kind of liquid, the tissue was very easily separated from the bones. All the fabric was then placed in a boiling tank the size of a small kitchen table. After boiling, the resulting liquid was poured into white vessels approximately the size of a double sheet of ordinary writing paper and 3 centimeters deep. Usually the machine produced 3-4 such vessels a day.”

I submit, further, to the Court under number USSR-272 the written testimony of a British subject - Corporal of the Royal Signals Corps William Andersen Neely. “The corpses were delivered in quantities of 2-3 per day. All of them were completely naked, and most were beheaded. The construction of the soap making machine was completed in March-April 1944. The construction of the building in which it was supposed to be placed was completed in June 1942. This machine was assembled by the Danzig company Aird, which is not associated with military production. As far as I remember, this machine consisted of a tank heated by electricity, in which the bones of corpses were dissolved by adding some acids. The dissolution process took about 24 hours. The fatty parts of the corpses, especially female ones, were placed in large enamel vats, heated by the fire of two gasoline burners. Some acids were also used for this procedure. I assume that caustic soda was used as an acid. When the boiling was completed, the resulting mixture was allowed to cool and then placed in special molds... I cannot accurately determine the amount of the substance obtained, but I saw it used in Danzig to clean the tables on which autopsies were performed. People who have used it have assured me that it is the best soap for this purpose.”

FROM THE INTERROGATION OF WITNESS S. SHMAGLEVSKAYA (TsGAOR USSR, f. 7445, op. 1, storage unit 38.)

Shmaglevskaya: And doctors. During this selection, the youngest and healthiest Jewish women entered the camps in very small numbers. Those women who carried children in their arms or in strollers, or who had older children, were sent to the crematorium along with these children. The children were separated from their parents in front of the crematorium and taken separately to the gas chamber. At a time when most Jews were being exterminated in the gas chambers, an order was issued that children would be thrown into the crematorium ovens without first being gassed to death.

Smirnov: How should you understand: were they thrown into the fire alive or were they killed in other ways before burning?

Shmaglevskaya: The children were abandoned alive. The scream of these children could be heard throughout the entire camp. It is difficult to say how many of these children there were.

Smirnov: Why was this done anyway?

Shmaglevskaya: This is difficult to answer. I don’t know whether it was because they wanted to save gas, or because there was no room in the gas chambers. I would also like to say that it is impossible to determine the number of these children, for example the number of Jews, since they were taken directly to the crematorium. They were not registered, were not tattooed, very often they were not even counted. We, the prisoners, who wanted to know the number of people who died in the gas chambers, could only be guided by the fact that we learned about the number of child deaths from the number of strollers that were sent to the stores. Sometimes there were hundreds of strollers, sometimes thousands. ...

Smirnov: Tell me, do you confirm your testimony by the fact that sometimes the number of strollers left in the camp after the killing of children reached up to a thousand per day?

Shmaglevskaya: Yes, there were such days.

Smirnov: Mr. Chairman, I have no more questions for the witness.

Chairman: Do any of the other Chief Prosecutors want to ask questions of the witness? Does any defense lawyer want to ask questions of the witness? (Silence) In this case, the witness can consider himself free.

You can forget everything you were told about the Nazis as a child. Compared to the Russians, the Nazis are little kids. In terms of the number of war crimes, the Russian army has long surpassed all the armies of the world combined.

The Russian army is the most terrible army in the world. And this is not propaganda or exaggeration. If you don't believe me, look at the world map. Do you really think that more than 100 peoples VOLUNTARILY became part of Russia?

If you believe this, it is very bad. Because the truth is that only a wild and merciless horde can conquer such territory. Russia conquered such territory by committing the most terrible war crimes and genocide against peoples.

During the Caucasian War they massacred a million Circassians. A whole people was slaughtered. Even Hitler could not do this, whom they declared a terrible monster only to hide their even more terrible war crimes. When the Circassians had already capitulated, they were offered transportation for permanent residence to Turkey. The Circassians believed the Russians and agreed. No one made it to Turkey. They were taken to the open sea and drowned there.

The most amazing thing is that the Circassians were slaughtered in order to help the Georgians. Now Georgians are being slaughtered to help the Ossetians. Russians are always killing someone.

What is the strength of the Russian army? The fact is that she does not spare either herself or the enemy. The value of life for Russians is negligible. That is why no one wants to fight with them. Even the Chinese. Only madmen like Hitler or brave Chechens fight the Russians.

Don't believe the lies that the Russians never fought with the Ukrainians. We fought many times. Everyone remembers the massacre carried out by Peter the Great. But we won't go that far into the past. The last war was in 1918, when more than a million Red Army soldiers entered Ukraine, committed a terrible massacre here and established Soviet power at the cost of enormous blood. Then this Soviet government organized an even more terrible Holodomor.

Now the same horde is coming here to build another bright future, called the “Russian world.” For the sake of this bright future, they are ready to kill as many Ukrainians as necessary.

Already now they are slaughtering and killing Ukrainians just because they wear a flag or speak Ukrainian. In Kharkov, two people were stabbed to death for flying the Ukrainian flag, and three in Donetsk. And this was before the start of the war. When a serious war begins, the number of dead will be tens of thousands. They will simply beat you to death for speaking Ukrainian. These are non-humans.

You are in vain to think that if you are half or entirely Russian and speak Russian, this will save you. There were also many Russians in Grozny, but this did not save them from carpet bombing and grenades, which the Russian Ivans threw into the basements in which Chechen and Russian women and children were hiding.

Russians do not know how to fight at all, because they prefer drunkenness to learning the art of war. Therefore, they are fighting with terrible casualties both among their own and among the civilian population. They still consider Zhukov, who sent them with shovel handles instead of guns and bricks instead of grenades to attack German machine guns, a great commander and a brilliant strategist.

If you think that protests by the mothers of killed soldiers will be able to stop the massacre, you are mistaken. They can't. The life of a soldier means nothing to the Russian leadership. Don't believe me? Remember Nord-Ost and Beslan. They don't even spare children. And a soldier returning from war is considered something of a miracle in Russia. Those who served in the Soviet army remember that the officers did not hesitate to tell the soldiers how many minutes they would live after the start of the war.

If you have female children over the age of 13, it is better to take them out of the occupation zone. Russian soldiers are rapists. They usually rape women and children when they are drunk and in a crowd, then kill or intimidate them. You won't get the truth.

You can read more about the exploits of the “Hero of Russia” Colonel Budanov. The Chechens killed him precisely for the rape and murder of Chechen girls. Russian politicians declared him a hero. Anywhere, but take the girls out and hide them.

There were hundreds of such Budanovs in Chechnya. He simply became a symbol of violence and murder of Chechen girls.

As a child, we were told a lot about the Nazis who burned entire villages for collaborating with the partisans. The Russian army is doing the same. If rebels appear in your locality, there will be a purge during which everyone will be killed indiscriminately, even pregnant women and infants.

If you are interested in how the Russian army carries out purge operations, watch films on You Tube at the request of Samashki. What you see makes your hair stand on end, but unfortunately it’s true. The Chechen genocide was crazy. Entire villages were slaughtered.

It was after one of these purges that Shamil Basayev made his famous raid on Budyonnovsk. He simply showed the Russians what their army was doing in Chechnya.

Russian human rights activists who write the truth about the war crimes of the Russian army are being killed. The latest high-profile murders are Anna Politkovskaya and Natalya Estemirova.

These are very famous people not only in Russia, but also abroad. They were killed with demonstrative cruelty, so that there was no doubt why. And Putin gave an ambiguous comment about both murders, so that everyone would understand that he is not at all against reprisals against these women.

Another danger that awaits people who fall under Russian occupation is death squads. These squadrons make the Russian occupiers more terrible than the Nazis. The Germans have never had anything like this; the Russians practice it in all occupied territories. When they left Chechen villages, they found entire mass graves in the plantings.

Death squads appear in occupied territories immediately after the entry of Russian troops. First, people who are disloyal to the occupiers disappear, therefore potentially disloyal, and then those who were denounced or who looked askance at the occupier, or, in other words, everything in a row, disappear.

In order to avoid the hell called the “Russian world,” you need to fight and help the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian resistance fight. Life under Russian occupation is walking through a minefield.

Any day a misfortune can happen to a person. You may be shot by a drunken Russian soldier or officer (and they are never sober), some bad person may write a denunciation against you, you may be targeted for a purge, turn out to be a relative of a rebel, or simply not show due respect to the occupier.

One of the goals of the endless celebration of Russia's victory over fascism is to hide its war crimes. The cruel truth is that the Soviet (read Russian) army during the Second World War committed many more war crimes than the Nazis.

The German army never took part in punitive operations. Also, the German army did not participate in the genocide of the Jews. This was done by special Nazi units. And the Russian army killed 2 million German women in 1945. And this was only during 3 months of occupation. The Germans never committed such atrocities in the occupied territories.