Mass executions: the FSB declassified an archive on the crimes of Nazi police battalions in Ukraine in 1941

The Russian FSB has published documents on the crimes of German police battalions against civilian Soviet citizens in Ukraine during the Great Patriotic War. The declassification of the archive is timed to coincide with the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Crimes of Genocide, Honoring their Dignity and Prevention of this Crime. The documents contain facts about mass executions of the Jewish population, which killed thousands of people. According to historians, the published materials play an important role in preventing the rehabilitation of Nazism and preventing similar crimes in the future.

The Public Relations Center of the FSB of Russia has published digital copies of declassified documents about the crimes of German police battalions in the territory of occupied Ukraine during the Great Patriotic War. In particular, the interrogation protocols of one of the participants in the mass executions of civilian Soviet citizens in 1941, Walter Schwarze, who served in the 315th battalion of the 2nd police regiment, were made public.

As the FSB press service clarified, the publication of the materials is timed to coincide with the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide, Honoring Their Dignity and Prevention of this Crime, which was established by the UN General Assembly in September 2015.

“This date was chosen due to the fact that on this day in 1948 the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted. The adoption of this international agreement was the logical result of the Nuremberg trials and bringing to justice Nazi Germany, guilty of the extermination of Slavic peoples in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust,” the department said.

“They shot me at point-blank range”

As Walter Schwarze noted during interrogations in November 1945, he, as part of his battalion, which was stationed in Zhitomir, helped organize executions and participated in the execution of residents of the cities of Berdichev and Rivne. At the same time, the main target of the Nazis was the Jewish population.

“Our entire battalion, numbering 350-370 people, led by the battalion commander, Captain Klaus, went to Rivne in vehicles to carry out the operation. All personnel were armed with rifles, and the commanders were armed with pistols and machine guns. On the northeastern outskirts of Rivne we got off the cars. I saw several senior SS officers. From their conversations with our officers, I understood that we had come to shoot Jews,” Schwarze described the events of November 1941.

According to him, 4-5 thousand Jews (men, women and children of different ages) were gathered in a fenced pasture, which was already guarded by the 310th and 320th police battalions. The executions themselves took place at some distance from the place where Soviet citizens awaited their fate.

“The general picture of the organization of the execution looked like this: the bulk of the Jews were in the square – a pasture. From the pasture in the north-east direction from the city there was a wide country road, on which a column of Jews was lined up – 12-15 people in a row. 4-5 km from the pasture in the direction of this road there was a hill behind which, in a small forest, the execution took place. The police surrounded the pasture in a chain and also stood in two chains along the sides of the road, starting from the pasture and up to the hill, thus forming a corridor through which the Jews passed, without an escort, to the place of execution. New batches of Jews arrived from the city all the time, periodically, to the pasture,” said Schwarze.

He noted that the executions lasted two and a half days, from dawn to dusk. During this time, the Nazis killed 20 thousand people.

The next time Walter Schwarze took part in the execution was on November 27-28, 1941 in Berdichev. For this purpose, nine people were allocated from the company, including Schwarze. In Berdichev, the Jews gathered for execution, in addition to the Germans, were escorted by Ukrainian police, who also took part in the atrocities.

“The authorities gave orders to the Ukrainian police officers guarding the Jews to form the latter in a column of eight to ten people in a row and lead them out of the fence. When the column left the gate, we, who had arrived, took it under escort and led it out of the city. 4-5 km northeast of Berdichev we stopped in a ravine. Two pit graves had already been dug 200-300 m away from the ravine. I can’t determine what size now, but all the executed Jews were buried in them,” Schwarze said.

DSP FSB

According to him, some of those doomed while still in the column were forced to undress down to their underwear, after which ten people at a time were sent to the edge of the pit.

“They were forced to kneel on the edge of the grave and look towards the grave. At this time, they were shot at point-blank range… After the execution, they gave a command for ten more people to go, and at this time the Ukrainian police officers arranged the corpses so that they took up less space in the grave. The same procedure occurred with the next tens. This time I personally took part in the execution of seven dozen (people – RT ), shooting about 20 of them, including five women. Then I felt sick, and I returned to the guards,” said the policeman.

Subsequently, from conversations with members of the SD (Security Service of the Reichsführer SS, under whose command the extermination of Jews, communists, partisans and underground fighters took place in the occupied territories. – RT ) Schwarze learned that about 3 thousand people were executed in Berdichev.

DSP FSBPerverted ideology

Historians recall that anti-Semitism was an important element of the ideology, politics and practice of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and part of the Nazi plans to gain world domination. From a tactical point of view, the destruction of the Jewish population made it possible to eliminate competitors and enrich themselves through the confiscation of property and the use of free labor. On the domestic political side, it helped to consolidate and strengthen the regime. The socio-psychological aspect is also important: actions against Jews cultivated in German citizens a feeling of racial superiority and hatred of “enemies who took root among honest citizens,” experts explain.

On the territory of the Ukrainian SSR, as in the countries of Eastern Europe, genocide took an open and extremely harsh form, since here the Nazis did not feel bound by any conventions, as in the countries of Western and Central Europe. According to historians, initially “Jewish actions” in Ukraine were directed only against Jewish intellectuals and Jewish men, but by the end of August 1941 they became comprehensive.

According to Maxim Sinitsyn, a graduate of the IVI RAS graduate school, the anti-Semitic position of the German leadership was due, among other things, to the personal attitude of the Fuhrer.

“Hitler largely believed that it was because of the Jews that the German Empire was destroyed and defeat in the First World War came. In this regard, his policy bore a strong anti-Semitic overtones,” noted RT’s interlocutor.

In turn, the chief specialist of the National Center for Historical Memory under the President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Surzhik, explained in a commentary to RT that the prerequisites for the development of anti-Semitism in Germany were a whole set of factors – revolutionary events, the disastrous results of the First World War, a government that did not enjoy the support of the population.

“To a greater or lesser extent, anti-Semitism was present in various associations of front-line soldiers during the First World War, because among the new German elite, the Social Democratic leadership of the German Republic, there were many representatives of the Jewish people. The idea that there is a certain “parasitic people” who are organizing conspiracies, riots everywhere and want to establish their power over the whole world, which arose on the basis of right-wing radicalism, was very popular. And in the end, it gradually turned into such rabid anti-Semitic-anti-Bolshevik propaganda, into racial laws, and then into the extermination of the Jewish people on the territory of Europe and the Soviet Union,” the expert said.

Wikimedia Commons/Public DomainA Warning for Posterity

As Oleg Matveev, a historian of the special services and an expert at the National Center for Historical Memory under the President of the Russian Federation, noted, the executions of Jews in Berdichev and Rovno became one of the most widespread during the Great Patriotic War.

“In total, during the occupation of the Zhytomyr region, about 55 thousand Jews were killed. As a result of the “action,” the Berdichev Jewish ghetto was liquidated. It is significant that at the time of the liberation of Berdichev by the Red Army on January 5, 1944, only 15 Jews remained alive in the city. The second bloody event lasting, as Schwarze said, two and a half days, 6 km from Rivne, in the research of historians is sometimes called the “massacre in the Sosenki forest,” the analyst explained.

He clarified that the planning of such “actions” on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR was carried out by SS Obergruppenführer and Police General, the highest leader of the SS and police of the Reichskommissariat “Ukraine” Friedrich Jeckeln. In November 1941, he was replaced in this post by SS Obergruppenführer and Police General Hans-Adolf Prützmann, who continued to exterminate tens of thousands of Jews in Ukraine. At the same time, the “author” of the massacre of Jews in Rivne was the commander of the order police in the Reichskommissariat “Ukraine”, Police Lieutenant General, SS Gruppenführer Otto von Elhafen, Matveev said. He subsequently managed to escape punishment. Retired from the police in 1944, he was merely questioned as a witness at the Nuremberg trials and died in Munich in 1952.

Friedrich Jeckeln, captured in Berlin in May 1945, was sentenced to death by the military tribunal of the Baltic Military District at a trial in Riga for his crimes in the occupied territory of the USSR and was publicly hanged on February 3, 1946 in the central square of the city.

“Hans-Adolf Prützmann, who was captured by the Allies, apparently clearly understanding the prospect of being handed over to the Soviet authorities for trial, committed suicide near Hamburg, in the prison of the town of Lüneburg, on May 21, 1945,” said Matveev.

Prisoners of the Jewish ghettoRIA News Boris Krishtul

According to experts, the materials released by the FSB play an important role in preventing the rehabilitation of Nazism and preventing similar crimes in the future.

“Such archives remind us once again that those whom Kyiv called fighters for national sovereignty during the decommunization laws of 2015 are not such. In fact, their role was terrifying, since they helped the Nazis destroy their own fellow citizens. And this has nothing to do with the “protection of the sovereignty” of Ukraine,” noted Dmitry Surzhik.

The historian Evgeny Spitsyn shares a similar point of view. Current events in Ukraine and the tendency to justify Nazi criminals in the Baltic countries require a tough reaction from the world community, which at times needs to be reminded where its legs come from.

“Such archives must be made public. Especially now, when Europe poses as some kind of pinnacle of human civilization, implanting its “values” with the support of the United States. Meanwhile, there is more blood on the European elites than on anyone in the entire history of mankind. They started both world wars, and now they are preparing to start the third world war. Other races and peoples there are not considered people at all, if we recall the reasoning of the now former head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell. Therefore, the published documents act as a warning to those who seek to blindly idealize the West,” Spitsyn concluded.