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NKVD prisoner massacres

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NKVD prisoner massacres
Victims of Soviet NKVD
Victims of Soviet NKVD in Lvov (modern Lviv), June 1941
DateJune–July 1941
LocationOccupied Poland, Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, the Baltic states, Bessarabia
Extrajudical executions
Prisoner victimsIn excess of 100,000

The NKVD prisoner massacres were a series of mass executions committed by the Soviet NKVD secret police against prisoners in Eastern Europe during World War II, primarily Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and other parts of the Soviet Union from which the Red Army was withdrawing ahead of the German invasion in 1941 (see Operation Barbarossa). Estimates on the death toll vary between locations leading to a total of 100,000 or more,[1] from nearly 9,000 in the Ukrainian SSR,[2] to 20,000–30,000 in occupied eastern Poland,[3] now Western Ukraine, to all Tartar prisoners in Crimea among other places.[4] Not all prisoner victims (150,000 of them in total)[3] were murdered; some were transported into the interior, others were abandoned or managed to escape because the retreating Soviet executioners logistically could not pay attention to all of them.[5]

Process

With the invasion of Russia by German forces, the NKVD was responsible for evacuating prisons in the occupied regions. More than 140,000 prisoners were successfully evacuated by the NKVD. More than 9,800 were reportedly executed in the prisons, 1,443 were executed in the process of evacuation, 59 were killed for attempting to escape, 23 were killed by German bombs, and 1057 died from other causes.[6]

The massacres

The NKVD and the Red Army killed prisoners in many places from Poland (e.g. Białystok) to Crimea.[7] Immediately after the start of the German invasion of the USSR, the NKVD commenced the execution of large numbers of prisoners in most of their prisons, while the remainder were to be evacuated in death marches.[8][9] Most of them were political prisoners, imprisoned and executed without a trial. The massacres were documented by German authorities and used in anti-Soviet and anti-Jewish propaganda.[10][11][12] With few exceptions, the huge group of prisoners of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine was either marched eastwards or executed.[8] After the war and in recent years, the authorities of Germany, Poland, Belarus, and Israel identified no fewer than 25 prisons whose prisoners were killed—and a much larger number of mass execution sites.[8] Among the notable cases of such mass execution of prisoners were the following:

Memorials
Entrance to memorial in Piatykhatky
Katyn-Kharkiv memorial
Katyn-Kharkiv memorial

Belarus

  • Hrodna (Grodno): on June 22, the NKVD executed several dozen people at the local prison. The mass execution of the remaining 1,700 prisoners was not possible due to the advance of the German army and hurried retreat of the NKVD crew.[13]
  • Berezwecz, near Vitebsk:[9] on June 24, the NKVD executed approximately 800 prisoners, most of them Polish citizens. Several thousands more perished during a death march to Nikolaevo near Ulla.[14]
  • Chervyen, near Minsk: in late June, the NKVD started the evacuation of all prisons in Minsk. Between June 24 and June 27, several thousand people were killed in Cherven and during the death marches.[15]
  • Vileyka (Wilejka): several dozen people, mostly political prisoners, sick and wounded, were executed prior to the departure of the Soviet guards on June 24.[16]

Estonia

  • Tartu: on July 9, 1941, almost 250 detainees were shot in Tartu prison and the Gray House courtyard; their bodies were dumped in makeshift graves and in the prison well.[17]
  • Kautla massacre: on July 24, 1941 the Red Army killed more than 20 civilians and burnt their farms.

Latvia

  • Litene: On June 14, 1941, 120 Latvian Army officers were driven to the woods in the belief they were on a training mission. On arrival they were disarmed, tied up and executed by the NKVD.[18]

Lithuania

  • Vilnius: after the German invasion, the NKVD murdered a large number of prisoners of the infamous Lukiškės Prison.[19]
  • Rainiai near Telšiai: up to 79 political prisoners were killed in what is called the Rainiai massacre, on June 24 and the following day.
  • Pravieniškės prison, near Kaunas: in June 1941, the NKVD murdered 260 political prisoners and all Lithuanian working personnel in the prison.

Poland

See also: Katyn massacre

By 1941, a large part of the ethnically Polish population, subject to Soviet rule for two years already, had already been deported off the border regions to remote areas of the Soviet Union. Others, including a large number of Polish civilians of other ethnicities (mostly Belarusians and Ukrainians), were kept in provisional prisons in the towns of the region, where they awaited deportation either to NKVD prisons in Moscow or to the Gulag. It is estimated that out of 13 million people living in the pre-war Eastern Poland, roughly half a million of people were arrested, more than 90% of them being males. Thus approximately every tenth adult male was imprisoned at the time of the German offensive.[8] Many died in prisons from torture or neglect.[8] Methods of torture included scalding victims in boiling water and cutting off ears, noses and fingers.[20] Timothy Snyder estimates that the NKVD shot some 9,817 imprisoned Polish citizens following the German invasion of the USSR in 1941.[21]

Ukraine

File:Lviv during the war 1941.jpg
Victims on street of Lviv
Ethnic Germans murdered at a Ternopil GPU prison, as German troops approached are being identified by their relatives on July 10, 1941
  • Berezhany (Brzeżany) near Ternopil (Tarnopol): between June 22 and July 1 the crew of the local NKVD prison has executed without a trial approximately 300 Polish citizens, among them a large number of Ukrainians.[13]
  • Donetsk Rutchenkovo Field
  • Dubno: All the prisoners, including women and children, were executed in Dubno's three-story prison.[1]
  • Ivano-Frankivsk (Stanislawow): Dem'ianiv Laz
  • Kharkiv 8,000 NKVD inmates along with interned Polish officers were executed on the outskirts of Kharkiv in the area of Piatykhatky, Kharkiv Oblast and buried on the grounds of a NKVD summer hostel.
  • Lutsk (Łuck): After the prison was hit by German bombs, the Soviet authorities promised amnesty to all political prisoners, in order to prevent escapes. As they lined up outside they were machine-gunned by Soviet tanks. They were told: "Those still alive get up." Some 370 stood up and were forced to bury the dead, after which they were murdered as well. The Nazi foreign ministry claimed 1500 Ukrainians were killed while the SS and Nazi military intelligence claimed 4000.[2]
  • Lviv (Lwów): the massacres in this city began immediately after German attack, on June 22 and continued until June 28. The NKVD executed several thousand inmates in a number of provisional prisons. Among the common methods of extermination were shooting the prisoners in their cells, killing them with grenades thrown into the cells or starving them to death in the cellars. Some were simply bayoneted to death.[1] It is estimated that over 4000 people were murdered that way, while the number of survivors is estimated at ca. 270.[13] The slaughter was briefly terminated when local Ukrainian uprising forced the NKVD to retreat, but then it returned.[22]
  • Sambir (Sambor): 570 killed[23]
  • Vinnitsa: over 9,000 executed.[4]
  • Simferopol: on October 31, the NKVD shot a number of people in the NKVD building and in the city prison. In Yalta, on November 4, the NKVD shot all the prisoners in the city prisons.[7]

Russia

See also

Notes and references

  1. ^ a b c Robert Gellately. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf, 2007 ISBN 1-4000-4005-1 p. 391
  2. ^ a b Berkhoff, Karel Cornelis (2004). Harvest of Despair. Harvard University Press via Google Books. p. 14. ISBN 0674020782. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  3. ^ a b Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1998). Poland's Holocaust (Google Books preview). Jefferson: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3. McFarland, 2007 reprint, (Google Books search inside). ISBN 0786429135. {{cite book}}: External link in |quote= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  4. ^ a b Richard Rhodes (2002). Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40900-9. Barbarossa surprised the NKVD, whose jails and prisons in the annexed territories (despite earlier deportations) were crowded with political prisoners. Rather than releasing their prisoners as they hurriedly retreated during the first week of the war, the Soviet secret police killed most of them execution style. In the first week of Barbarossa NKVD prisoner executions totaled some ten thousand in western Ukraine and more than nine thousand in Vinnytsia, eastward toward Kiev. Comparable numbers of prisoners were executed in eastern Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Soviet areas had already sustained losses numbering in the hundreds of thousands from the Stalinist purges of 1937-38. “It was not only the numbers of the executed,” historian Yuri Boshyk writes of the evacuation murders, “but also the manner in which they died that shocked the populace. When the families of the arrested rushed to the prisons after the Soviet evacuation, they were aghast to find bodies so badly mutilated that many could not be identified. It was evident that many of the prisoners had also been tortured before death; others were killed en masse.”
  5. ^ Nagorski, Andrew. The Greatest Battle. Google Books. p. 84. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  6. ^ "Никита Васильевич Петров. История империи "Гулаг"". Pseudology.org. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  7. ^ a b Edige Kirimal, "Complete Destruction of National Groups as Groups - The Crimean Turks", from Genocide in the USSR: Studies in Group Destruction (1958), published by the Institute for the Study of the USSR in Munich.
  8. ^ a b c d e Template:En icon Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt (corporate author) (1997). Bernd Wegner (ed.). From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939-1941. Berghahn Books. pp. 47–79. ISBN 1-57181-882-0. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  9. ^ a b Template:Pl icon Encyklopedia PWN, Zbrodnie Sowickie W Polsce'':After the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, in June 1941, thousands of prisoners have been murdered in mass executions in prisons (among others in Lviv and Berezwecz) and during the evacuation (so-called death marches)
  10. ^ "Blutige Ouvertüre". Zeit.de. June 21, 2001. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  11. ^ "German Soldiers Write from the Soviet Union". Calvin.edu. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  12. ^ "During World War II and Afterwards". JewishGen.org. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  13. ^ a b c Template:Pl icon Anna Gałkiewicz (2001) Informacja o śledztwach prowadzonych w OKŚZpNP w Łodzi w sprawach o zbrodnie popełnione przez funkcjonariuszy sowieckiego aparatu terroru; Biuletyn IPN, Vol. 7 - August 2001
  14. ^ Template:Pl icon Encyklopedia PWN, BEREZWECZ
  15. ^ Template:Pl icon Joanna Januszczak Żalbiny w Czerwieni k. Mińska in: Wspólnota Polska monthly
  16. ^ Template:Pl icon Julian Siedlecki (1990). Losy Polaków w ZSRR w latach 1939-1986. Edward Raczyński (3 ed.). London: Gryf Publications. p. 59. as cited in: Tadeusz Krahel. "Zginęli w końcu czerwca 1941 roku". Czas Miłosierdzia. Retrieved 2006-06-02.
  17. ^ Steenie Harvey, "The Dark Side of Tartu", at ExpatExchange.com
  18. ^ Lumans, Valdis O. (2006). Latvia in World War II. Fordham Univ Press. p. 133. ISBN 978-0-8232-2627-6.
  19. ^ Template:Pl icon Bolesław Paszkowski (2005): Golgota Wschodu
  20. ^ Paul, Allen. Katyn: Stalin's Massacre and the Seeds of Polish Resurrection. Naval Institute Press, 1996. ISBN 1-55750-670-1 p. 155
  21. ^ Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010. ISBN 0-465-00239-0 p. 194
  22. ^ Nagorski, Andrew. The Greatest Battle. Google Books. p. 83. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  23. ^ Template:Pl icon Helena Kowalik (November 2004). "Jaki znak twój?". Przegląd. 47/2004 (2004–11–15).

Further reading

  • Bogdan Musical Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen. Die Brutalisierung des deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges im Sommer 1941 Berlin Propyläen Verlag 349 S. 2000 ISBN 3-549-07126-4 Template:De icon
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