Overall Report on Investigation Visit n° 4 to Russia
Smolensk and Pskov Areas
May 21st – June 3rd, 2011
Team members:
Alexei KOSAREVSKYI, Team Leader
Kateryna DOUZENKO, Interpreter
Viktoria GITINA, Interpreter
Jim PALFI, Interpreter
Hugo RODRIGUES, Assistant
Mikhail STROUTINSKI, Ballistics Expert
Natalia KEKOUKH, Investigator
Oscar BLANCO, Cameraman
Miguel MALDONADO, Photographer
Investigated towns and villages:
Dukhovshchina, Sytshovka, Viazma, Ielnia, Glinka, Demidov, Pochinok, Velij, Usviaty, Sebej, Pustoshka, Nevel, Velikie Luki.
Over two weeks of investigations in Russia, the Yahad In Unum team has carried out researches in thirteen towns and villages of the areas of Smolensk and Pskov. This was the third such investigation visit, with the aims to complete Yahad’s inquiries in the Smolensk area and to start work in the Pskov area.
Yahad In Unum researches in these areas are characterized by:
- The rarity of Soviet and German archives in the investigated territories.
- The fact that the war front was close and kept moving, so that the dates of German occupation vary from one place to another.
- The multiplicity of the categories of the victims targeted by our investigation: Jews; Gipsies, Soviet war prisoners and partisans.
The scarcity of documented sources in this part of Russia means that the testimonies collected by Yahad In Unum are the main information resource to grasp the specificities of the war in those areas.
Closeness to the front and the changing shooting procedures
In these parts of Russia next to Belorussia, the Jewish population was important before the war and this is still remembered today. The witnesses interviewed by the Yahad In Unum team recall the last and first names, the habits and traditions of Jews. Grigori Ch. (born 1926) said: “Before the war the population of Nevel was 90% Jewish. It was said to be the district’s Jewish capital!”
The German army reached these territories only several months after the war broke out. This allowed some population categories to be evacuated, and also the formation of a partisan movement in the region. The Wehrmacht’s progress eastward was slowing down, the front no longer moved forward as quickly as it used to, and as soon as the Germans had gained ground, fighting would begin with the partisans.
Three factors: the front drawing closer or farther away, the counterattacks of the Soviet army, and the strong presence of partisan groups, all seem to have weighed upon the operating methods employed by the Nazis to shoot Jews; Gipsies or war prisoners. All this also increased the cruelty and hatred against Russian civilians: whole villages were burned down, and civilians were shot in the same way as Jews or Gipsies.
According to Soviet and German archives and also to the interviewed witnesses, as soon as the Germans arrived, the Jewish population was registered and received distinctive marks. Jewish men were often shot. This was the case at Velij, where the Germans selected 150 Jewish men and boys and shot them just outside the town. The main road to the east, followed by German truck bringing soldiers to the front, was not far from the execution site, so that the executioners started smoke devices between the road and the anti-tank ditch where the shooting was taking place in order to conceal what was going on. Aleksander B (born 1928) said: “In spite of the smoke, I could see a German raise his hand holding a pistol, and aim at a victim who then sank into the ditch. People kept showing up and falling out of sight in front of this German. You could not hear the shots because of the noise made by the trucks.”
[Caption] Aleksander B. points to the place where the smoke devices were ignited not far from the execution site.
Our team found that after this there were two possibilities for the Jew: depending on whether or not the front was getting closer or moving on, ghettoes were created where they could stay in houses. In the towns and villages far from the fighting, the Jews were allowed to keep their houses and had to register every day at the Kommandantur. In Pustoshka, Ludmilla O. (born 1935) could see this daily: “As soon as the Germans arrived, the Jews had to gather on the town’s central square every day. A Kommandantur official walked out with a list and called their names one by one.” On the opposite, in the towns and villages where the front was threatening to draw closer, the Jews were parked in ghettoes most of which were “open” and which they could leave to look for food. In both cases, they were forced to physical labour. As soon as the fighting drew closer, they were shot.
Our investigations suggest that the Germans, when they shot people, practically did so under the pressure of emergency. As they were afraid of partisan raids or Soviet army attacks, the firing squads acted hastily. In their hurry they used existing natural hollows like careers, ravines, bomb craters or anti-tank ditches. Such methods spared the trouble of digging up large holes or recruiting from the local people, who were obviously not trusted. In the haste to kill, it was exceptional to strip the Jews naked before shooting them. They were often shot in disorganized groups and had not been carefully lined up on the edge of the mass graves. In Dukhovshchina, Tatiana M. (born 1925) remembers: “Before they were shot, the Jews were like a small disorderly crowd on the edge of the career’s hollow. Apparently, the Germans were in a hurry, because they feared the partisans might show up.”
Another change in the procedures of Jewish extermination in the East is significant of the obsession with carrying out the job: it is the fact that the Germans sometimes finished off the ghetto a mere thirty minutes before the Soviet army came back. At the same time, early in 1942, when the Soviet troops were liberating the town of Velij, the Germans were setting up machine guns all around the Jewish ghetto, setting the wooden buildings where the Jews were detained on fire and shooting them when they tried to run away. Liubov Ou. (born 1928) said to our team: “The ghetto was burning. The Jews who tried to jump over the barbed wire to escape were shot, and their bodies remained hanging from the fences.” A few minutes later on the site of the burned down ghetto, Soviet soldiers started fighting the German troops. Given the haste during the shooting of the Jews, the question must be raised: was it the Wehrmacht which finished off the ghetto just before returning to war?
It also happened that the Germans were caught by surprise when the partisans attacked and had no time to finish off the ghetto. The local Jews were then spared. This was the case in Usviaty, where Mikhail K. (born 1923) told our team: “Our village was liberated at the end of January 1942. The Germans had to retreat precipitately and the Jews of the ghetto were left alive – I mean, those who had not been killed by some disease or starved to death.”
The war prisoners’ camps
The Yahad In Unum investigation in these areas has confirmed the existence of a war prisoners’ camp in virtually every town. Those camps were of different sizes and functions: there were small and large dulags and stalags. However, the prisoners’ lot was the same everywhere: they succumbed to fatal illnesses, or starved or froze to death (in temperatures reaching minus 40° Celsius), as most of the camps were in open air in fields or ravines.
During this investigation, our team studied a large dulag (n° 184), located in the town of Wiazma. Of the more than 80,000 war prisoners detained there, approximately 30,000 died. This transit camp included a three-storey brick building which had been designed as a factory, but most of it was roofless. When the war prisoners were brought in, the Germans took all the warm clothing they had. On the front wall it was written in Russian: “Animals are to be treated like animals, and humans like humans.” Collaboration was encouraged, and those who accepted were treated “like humans,” while the others were buried in mass graves inside the camp.
According to both the testimonies and the archives, the war prisoners were sorted out as soon as they arrived: the ones in good health were sent to Germany for hard labour; the weaker ones were left to die in the camp, and the others just waited until the fighting drew closer. During the transfers, the columns of prisoners were guarded by the Sonderkommandos.
Lyudmila E. (born 1933) went with her mother to ask for her father at the camp. They could not find him, but she could see the atrocities committed by the Germans: “They threw away loaves from the top of a watchtower, and when the hungry war prisoners rushed to grab the bread, they shot them for the fun of it! Then they forced other prisoners to bury the corpses in a ditch along the barbed wire fence.”
[Caption] Luydmila E. speaking of the war prisoner’s lot in the camp of Wiazma.
Camps for Soviet civilians and burned villages
When in 1943 Dulag n° 184 had no more war prisoners, the Germans turned it into an Ilag (Internierunslager für Zivilpersonen – an internment camp for civilians), where Russians civilians were detained in the same conditions as the war prisoners before, until they were sent West.
Because the front was so close, when they suspected that there were partisans in a village, the Germans spared no one and exterminated the whole local population. Nina T. (born 1928) is one of the three survivors of her village of Liakhovo, where the Germans killed virtually every one. She accepted to share those painful recollections of the mass murder of the population. She will never forget that April 14, 1942. The Germans herded all the inhabitants into the main street, and then sent them to a few houses. Nina T. remembers: “I was separated from my mother. The Germans pushed us into one room of the house. I bumped on something and fell down. The shooting started immediately from behind and a bullet brushed just past my head. I lost consciousness. When I came round, the body of my dead little sister was lying on top of me. I smelled gasoline. The Germans were talking in the corridor. One girl started screaming. A German came back and said, “Russische Schweine!” and he began shooting at everybody.” Nina T. survived by jumping out of the window as the house was burning, but her whole family perished that day.
[Caption] Nina T. is one of three survivors of a village that was entirely burned down by the Nazis.
In the course of this investigation mission, the Yahad In Unum team has recorded 22 mass graves, nearly 50% of which have no memorial and are therefore totally ignored, and interviewed 55 witnesses.