Nazi Occupiers Killed Almost 16 Million Soviet Citizens

Neuordnung, the New German Order

People living in the occupied territories were taken hostage and deprived of their right to justice and protection. The German troops and occupation administrations enjoyed total impunity, and the life of a Soviet citizen was worth absolutely nothing. Perhaps this was the reason why the tiny bits of humanity occasionally shown by the Germans were etched into the memory of the victims. But stories about a chocolate bar given to a child, group photos with sociable soldiers and the like are no excuse for the main issue – Soviet citizens were entirely at the mercy of the invaders. The latter could do anything to any of them at any time, for no reason whatsoever.

The Einsatzgruppen (lit. “deployment groups”; also “task forces” – ed. note) of the Sicherheitspolizei (English: Security Police), often abbreviated as SiPo, and the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS) or simply SD, were particularly violent. In total, four Einsatzgruppen operated in the USSR from the beginning of the war to the end of the occupation, and three additional Einsatzkommandos (a sub-group of the Einsatzgruppen, special demolition commandos) were formed. They were the ones that organised the mass killing of civilians. In addition to them, there were the SS and Gestapo forces, counterintelligence, and military commandants' offices in the local communities. In rural areas, the occupiers set up police with Nazi collaborators under German control, while in towns and cities the “New Order” was supported by SS units and security forces under the command of the Wehrmacht.

The German-appointed burgomasters (city mayors), their subordinates in city administrations, and village chiefs, as well as atamans in Cossack regions, were often involved in crimes. However, some of them cooperated with the anti-fascist underground. For example, the former collective farm chairman in the village of Dolskaya in Trubchevsky District in Oryol Oblast, Morozov, on instructions from the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), pretended to be a collaborator and became a village head. After killing the deputy mayor of Trubchevsk, Pavlov, he organised and led a partisan unit. Having the consent of the partisans, a certain Kalashnikov became burgomaster of the Dyatkovsky District in Oryol Oblast. The Soviet authorities used his help to identify German agents.

The CHGK documents report mass murders of people in “mobile gas chambers”, special vehicles where people were poisoned with exhaust fumes. This practice was first described at the Krasnodar Trial in 1943. Later, the use of these “gas chambers” was reported in Kiev, Kharkov, Minsk, Stavropol, Simferopol, and other cities in the Soviet Union. This practice, like other Nazi atrocities, caused some German soldiers and officers to side with the Red Army. For example, Karl Kosch, an engineer in a company in the 79th German Infantry Division, did so on the Taman Peninsula in July 1943.

...and then shot dead

The Nazis, first and foremost, slaughtered Jews and Gypsies on a massive scale. Often the massacres were carried out with horrific violence. According to an interrogation report by Ivan Blinov, chief of the occupation police in the Monastyrshchinsky District in Smolensk Oblast, people were ordered to undress at prepared ditches. Then they were shot. The next group was forced to lie down on the dead bodies, and the wounded were buried alive along with the dead. 

The non-Jewish population was also subjected to brutal persecution. In the villages of Ovsyanniki and Kurovyatino in Smolensk Oblast, the Germans, infuriated by partisan attacks, massacred local residents and then destroyed both settlements. The Nazis evicted 150 people, including women, elderly people, children, sicced the dogs on them, and then shot them dead.

The Nazis could beat or kill a person for breaking curfew, on suspicion of petty theft, or because he or she refused to give his or her belongings to German soldiers, and could sometimes even kill without any reason. In September 1942, Ivan Petrutsky, a resident of Elista, whom they thought was a partisan, was stripped naked, brutally beaten, his ears cut off, dragged through the city and then shot dead. According to witnesses, Petrutsky was absolutely innocent. Corpses of civilians were found with lips, bellies, breasts, tongues cut out, eyes poked out, and ears cut off.

The raping of women was a common crime in occupied territories. In Stalingrad, two female bodies with stab and gunshot wounds were found near a German earth and timber bunker. Both victims had been raped and their bodies were disfigured to such an extent that it was impossible to identify them. Many survivors of rape did not report the crime to the commission because they considered it a shame and were afraid of being exposed to hostile treatment. Girls were forced to work in brothels for Wehrmacht soldiers and officers and were promised soldiers' rations, while those infected with STDs were isolated and often shot.

Following the Nazi ideology of exterminating “inferior peoples”, the occupiers purposefully killed mental patients and the disabled. In the rural locality of Nizhne-Chirskaya in Stalingrad Oblast, an orphanage for mentally handicapped children was looted. 47 out of 85 children were moved out by deception and then some were shot and others buried alive. In the village of Sapogovo in Kursk Oblast, mental patients were shot, while in the village of Indom in Leningrad Oblast, at least 70 residents of a nursing home were shot and their bodies dumped directly into a lake. The same tragedy happened to 140 disabled people at the Svoboda nursing home in the village of Mogutovo in Leningrad Oblast. Another 50 people with disabilities died of hunger; the occupation government stopped supplying them with food. 

“Total War” Against Villages

Often villages and townships were burned down on a single suspicion of having links to the partisans, and even as a preventive measure to deprive the partisan units of bases and support from the local population. Settlements and their residents were partially or completely wiped out (for example, the villages of Toporschino, Golovanovo, Podgorye, and Lanovo Gora in Pskov Oblast, as well as Paporotnovo, Perstovo, Pochinok, Bychkovo, and Shushelovo in Novgorod Oblast). This practise became particularly widespread when in February 1943, after the defeat of the German Army near Stalingrad, Germany's Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels delivered a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast and put forward the thesis of “Total War”.

The Nazis and their collaborators burned inhabitants alive along with their villages. Everyone knows the story of the Belarusian village called Khatyn. But such examples are numerous in Russia, to name just the villages of Novyny and Garnikovo in Leningrad Oblast, the village of Mikhizeyeva Polyana in Krasnodar Krai, and the villages of Stila, Ulu-Sala, and Avdzhi-koi in Crimea.

The largest punitive action by number of victims during World War II took place in Chernigov Oblast in the Ukrainian SSR. In the first days of March 1943, SS units, local police, and soldiers of the Hungarian SS Division killed (mostly burned to death) 6,700 residents of the village of Koryukovka for having links with partisans.

Children’s Lips Were Smeared with Poison

One of the darkest points of the occupation was the killing of children. They were killed in mass executions and the destruction of settlements. But sometimes they were murdered for fun in front of their parents, as happened to 10-year-old Vitya, a prisoner at a Finnish concentration camp in Petrozavodsk.

“While he was in the bathhouse, he wanted to go to the restroom and asked me, 'Mum, ask the commandant for permission. <...> He grabbed Vitya by the hand, led him to a pot with boiling water and poured it over him. And then my son rushed up to me in great pain and said: 'Mommy, it really hurts'. Then I started begging to let me take him home. But the soldier <...> took me away and ordered me to be whipped. <...> They would lash me, pour salt water over the wounds to burn, and start all over again. <...> I was thrown into a cold barn, and when I came to my senses, remembered about my son Vitya. I went to the soldier, but he told me that my son had already been drowned in the lake”, Anastasia Demoyeva, a resident of Leningrad Oblast, testified.

Ilya Detinichev, a resident of the village of Peredovaya, Otradnensky District, Krasnodar Krai, described how children were shot and poisoned with hydrogen cyanide right in front of their parents' burial sites: “There were over a hundred children who had their lips covered in poison, and those who did not die immediately were shot with submachine guns”.

At the Averin farmstead in Stalingrad Oblast, 17 children aged 7 to 14 accused by a German officer of stealing a packet of cigarettes were kept without food for three days, and beaten with batons and twisted telephone wires. After interrogation and torture, the children were put in a car, taken to a compost pit, and ten of them were shot dead.

In October 1942, the occupation administration disbanded the Yeysk orphanage. Over 150 children were taken out of the city, brutally thrown into trucks, and then killed. This was not the only case. In the Oredezhsky District in Leningrad Oblast, during their retreat, the Germans set fire to a house for war orphans; 20 children perished in the fire, and six were found frozen in the street.

The Nazis never considered it shameful to kill “racially inferior” children, yet they didn't mind taking blood from them for their wounded. Most children died when they had their blood taken, and it is enough to recall the prisoners of a concentration camp in the village of Krasny Bereg in the Gomel region and other camps.

“Misunderstood Humanity”

According to the plan for Operation Barbarossa, the occupied regions of the USSR were to be drained of all their resources. The Nazis did not care about civilians, which is why people were dying of hunger on a massive scale. This suited the occupation authorities – sick and dying people did not resist the invaders. Rare attempts by German officers to provide food for prisoners of war and civilians were called “misunderstood humanity” by their superiors.

The death rate from famine was particularly high in concentration camps, where not only prisoners of war, but also civilians were held. In the city of Gatchina, Leningrad Oblast, at least 15,000 people were under arrest during the occupation, including at least 3,500 who died from malnutrition, unbearable labour, and typhus, and at least 300 were tortured to death. In the territory of Karelia occupied by Finnish troops, special forced labour camps for “civilian prisoners of war” (Kutizma, Vilga, and Kindosov) were established, where people were systematically beaten and kept undernourished.

Slave labour was another way to exploit the occupied territories. Residents of frontline areas were forced to build defensive structures, work at production facilities, and repair roads. Refusal to work or suspicion of sabotage could have cost a person their life. In 1942, when Germany was experiencing a shortage of manpower after its military defeats, the Reich's leadership, under the Ost Plan, ordered the forced relocation of slave workers from the territory of the USSR. They were called the Ostarbeiters (lit. “Eastern workers”). The vast majority of them were forcibly abducted and, in fact, enslaved.

Before leaving the occupied territories, the German invaders sought to destroy settlements and transport as much of the population as possible into the rear. Poisoned products were sometimes distributed to local residents to cause massive loss of life, as was the case in the town of Georgiyevsk in Stavropol Krai. During the "evacuation" to the German rear, enormously many lives were lost.

Special detachments set up by the German command, including separate special demolition commandos, covered up the crimes that had been committed, destroying the sites of mass graves and the bodies of the victims, before retreating.

Most historians today, using, among other things, CHGK materials, believe that more than 15.9 million civilians died in the occupied territories. Many details of the Nazi crimes were not recorded, as there was no one left to testify about them. 

By Daniil Sidorov

---

“The German fascist invaders totally or partially destroyed and burned 1,710 towns and more than 70,000 villages and hamlets. They burned and destroyed more than 6 million buildings and rendered some 25 million persons homeless. <...> They destroyed or ransacked 40,000 hospitals and other medical institutions, 84,000 schools, colleges, higher education institutions, research institutes and 43,000 libraries”.

CHGK report of 12 September 1945.