NKVD prisoner massacres

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The massacre of prisoners refers to a series of mass executions committed by Soviet NKVD against prisoners in Poland and parts of the Soviet Union from which the Red Army was withdrawing after the German invasion in 1941 (see Operation Barbarossa). The overall death toll is estimated at 30,000-40,000, including more than 10,000 in Western Ukraine.[1]

By the beginning of the war most of the ethnically Polish population, subject to Soviet rule for two years now, have already been deported off the border regions to remote areas of the Soviet Union. Others, including a large number of Polish civilians of other nationalities (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 Polish areas, 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[2]. Many died in prisons from torture or neglect[2].

Immediately after the start of the invasion, the NKVD started to execute a large number of prisoners in most of their prisons, while the remainder was to be evacuated in death marches[2][3]. Most of them were political prisoners, imprisoned and executed without a trial. With few exceptions, the huge group of prisoners of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine was either marched eastwards, executed or both[2]. After the war and in recent years, the authorities of Germany, Poland, Belarus and Israel identified no less than 25 prisons whose prisoners were killed - and a much larger number of mass execution sites[2]. Among the notable cases of such mass execution of prisoners were:

  • Lwów: between June 23 and June 28, the NKVD executed several thousand of 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. It is estimated that over 4000 people were murdered that way, while the number of survivors is estimated at ca. 270[4]
  • Brzeżany near 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[4].
  • Grodno: on June 22 the NKVD executed several dozen people in the local prison. The mass execution of the remaining 1700 prisoners was ended when the approach of the German army prompted the evacuation of the NKVD crew[4]
  • Berezwecz near Vitebsk[3]: on June 24 the NKVD executed approximately 800 prisoners, most of them Polish citizens. Several thousands more perished during a death march to Taklinovo near Ulla[5].
  • Oryol: In Sepetember over 150 political prisoners (among them Christian Rakovsky, Maria Spiridonova and Olga Kameneva) were executed in Medvedevsky Forest near Oryol.
  • Wilno: after the German aggression the NKVD murdered a large number of prisoners of the infamous Łukiszki prison[6]
  • Cherven near Minsk: in late June the NKVD started an evacuation of all prisons in Minsk. Between June 24 and June 27 several thousand people were killed in Cherven and during the death marches[7]
  • Vinnitsa: more than 9,000 executed[1].
  • Lutsk: hundreds executed,
  • Rainiai near Telšiai, Lithuania: Up to 79 political prisoners killed in what is called the Rainiai massacre on June 24 and the following day
  • Tartu, Estonia: Almost 250 detainees shot in the Gray House courtyard and Tartu prison on July 9, 1941 [1].
  • Wilejka: several dozen people, mostly political prisoners, sick and wounded, were executed prior to the departure of the Soviet guards on June 24[8]

[edit] Reference

  1. ^ a b (English) 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.  | quote = Despite the deportations, Barbarossa surprised the NKVD, whose jails and prisons in the invaded western territories were crowded with political prisoners. Rather than releasing their prisoners as they hurried to retreat during the first week of the war, the Soviet secret police simply killed them. NKVD prisoner executions in the first week after Barbarossa totaled some ten thousand in the western Ukraine and more than nine thousand in Vinnitsa, 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 Yury 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 been tortured before death; others were killed en masse.”
  2. ^ a b c d e (English) Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt (corporate author); Gottfried Schramm, Jan T. Gross, Manfred Zeidler et al. (1997). in Bernd Wegner: From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939-1941. Berghahn Books, 47-79. ISBN 1-57181-882-0. 
  3. ^ a b (Polish) Encyklopedia PWN, ZBRODNIE SOWIECKIE W POLSCE'':After the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, in June of 1941, thousands of prisoners have been murdered in mass executions in prisons (among others in Lwów and Berezwecz) and during the evacuation (so-called death marches)
  4. ^ a b c (Polish) 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
  5. ^ (Polish) Encyklopedia PWN, BEREZWECZ
  6. ^ (Polish) Bolesław Paszkowski (2005): Golgota Wschodu
  7. ^ (Polish) Joanna Januszczak Żalbiny w Czerwieni k. Mińska in: Wspólnota Polska monthly
  8. ^ (Polish) Julian Siedlecki (1990). Losy Polaków w ZSRR w latach 1939-1986, Edward Raczyński, 3, London: Gryf Publications, 59.  as cited in: Tadeusz Krahel. "Zginęli w końcu czerwca 1941 roku". Czas Miłosierdzia. Retrieved on 2006-06-02. 

[edit] See also

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