NKVD prisoner massacres (original) (raw)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1941 mass executions of Soviet political prisoners

NKVD prisoner massacres

Victims of Soviet NKVD in Lviv, June 1941
Date June 1941 (1941-06) – November 1941 (1941-11)
Location Occupied Poland, Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, the Baltic states, Bessarabia
Type Summary execution, mass murder, politicide, mass shooting
Participants NKVD and NKGB (united 20 July 1941)
Deaths 100,000

The NKVD prisoner massacres were a series of mass executions of political prisoners carried out by the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, across Eastern Europe, primarily in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states and Bessarabia. After the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, NKVD troops were supposed to evacuate political prisoners to the interior of the Soviet Union, but the hasty retreat of the Red Army, a lack of transportation and other supplies, and general disregard for legal procedures often led to prisoners being simply executed.

Estimates of the death toll vary by location; nearly 9,000 in the Ukrainian SSR,[1] 20,000–30,000 in eastern Poland (now part of Western Ukraine),[2] with the total number reaching approximately 100,000 extrajudicial executions in the span of a few weeks.

Operation Barbarossa surprised the NKVD, whose jails and prisons in territories annexed by the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact were crowded with political prisoners. In occupied eastern Poland, the NKVD was given responsibility for liquidating or evacuating over 140,000 prisoners (NKVD evacuation order No. 00803). In Ukraine and Western Belorussia, 60,000 people were forced to evacuate on foot. The official Soviet count had more than 9,800 reportedly executed in prisons, 1,443 executed in the process of evacuation, 59 killed for attempting to escape, 23 killed by German bombs and 1,057 deaths from other causes.[4]

"It was not only the numbers of the executed", wrote historian Yury Boshyk, who was quoted by Orest Subtelny, of the 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]

Approximately two thirds of the 150,000 prisoners[2] were murdered; most of the rest were transported into the interior of the Soviet Union, but some were abandoned in the prisons if there was no time to execute them, and others managed to escape.[6]

The NKVD killed prisoners in many places from Poland to Crimea.[7] Immediately after the start of the German invasion, the NKVD started to execute large numbers of prisoners in most of their prisons, and it evacuated the remainder in death marches.[8][9] Most of them were political prisoners, who were imprisoned and executed without a trial. The massacres were later documented by the occupying German authorities and were used in anti-Soviet and anti-Jewish propaganda.[10][11] 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]

Victims of NKVD in Tartu, Estonia, July 1941

Entrance to memorial in Piatykhatky

Katyn-Kharkiv memorial

By 1941, much of the ethnically Polish population living under Soviet rule in the eastern half of Poland had already been deported to remote areas of the USSR. Others, including a large number of Polish civilians of other ethnicities (mostly Belarusians and Ukrainians), were held in provisional prisons in 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 eastern Poland, roughly half a million were jailed, and more than 90% of those were men. Thus approximately 10% of adult males were imprisoned at the time of the German offensive.[8] Many died in prisons from torture or neglect.[8] Methods of torture included scalding victims and cutting off their ears, noses and fingers.[21] Timothy Snyder estimates that the NKVD shot some 9,817 imprisoned Polish citizens following the German invasion of the USSR in 1941.[22]

Ethnic Germans murdered at a Ternopil GPU prison as German troops approached are being identified by their relatives on July 10, 1941

In Soviet-occupied western Ukraine, under the threat of German invasion NKVD committed various mass murders of prison inmates, including:

"From the courtyard, doors led to a large space, filled from top to bottom with corpses...Among them were many women. On the left wall, three men were crucified, barely covered by clothing from their shoulders, with severed male organs. Underneath them on the floor in half-sitting, leaning positions – two nuns with those organs in their mouths...most were stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. Some were naked or almost naked, others in decent street clothes. One man was in a tie, mostly likely just arrested."[30]

These massacres were followed by the Lviv pogroms, committed by the German military and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists after the German takeover of the city. Jewish residents of the city were targeted by German soldiers, OUN members, and local citizens. In some instances, the pogroms and violence against Jewish residents was framed as justified revenge for the murders committed by the NKVD.[_citation needed_]

Soviet statistics for 78 Ukrainian prisons:[35]

  1. ^ a b Berkhoff, Karel Cornelis (2004). Harvest of Despair. Harvard University Press. p. 14. ISBN 0-674-02078-2. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  2. ^ a b Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1998). Poland's Holocaust. Jefferson: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3.
  3. ^ Никита Васильевич Петров. Глава 9. История империи "Гулаг" (in Russian). Pseudology. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  4. ^ 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. Rather than releasing their prisoners as they hurriedly retreated during the first week of the war, the Soviet secret police killed most of them. In the first week of the invasion, the NKVD prisoner executions totaled some 10,000 in western Ukraine and more than 9,000 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 hundreds of thousands of executions during the 1937–1938 Great Purge.
  5. ^ Nagorski, Andrew (18 September 2007). The Greatest Battle. Simon & Schuster. p. 84. ISBN 978-1-4165-4573-6. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ a b c d Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt; Gottfried Schramm; Jan T. Gross; Manfred Zeidler; et al. (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.
  8. ^ (in Polish) Encyklopedia PWN, Zbrodnie Sowickie W Polsce Archived 2006-05-21 at the Wayback Machine: 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)
  9. ^ "Blutige Ouvertüre". www.zeit.de. June 21, 2001. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  10. ^ "German Soldiers Write from the Soviet Union". www.calvin.edu. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  11. ^ Mikoda 1997, p. 84-92.
  12. ^ Kalbarczyk, Sławomir (2011-06-21). "Tysiąc ofiar z Berezwecza" [One thousand victims from Berezwecz]. Rzeczpospolita (in Polish). 144/2011: 4–5. ISSN 0208-9130.
  13. ^ "Politinių kalinių žudynės Červenėje" (PDF). Atmintinos datos (in Lithuanian). Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras. 17 June 2011. Retrieved 19 August 2018.
  14. ^ a b c Gałkiewicz, Anna (2001). "Informacja o śledztwach prowadzonych w OKŚZpNP w Łodzi w sprawach o zbrodnie popełnione przez funkcjonariuszy sowieckiego aparatu terroru". Biuletyn Instytut Pamięci Narodowej / IPN (in Polish) (7 - August 2001). pp. 20ff. Retrieved 1 August 2016.
  15. ^ Mikoda 1997, p. 76, 95–98.
  16. ^ Mikoda 1997, p. 98–99.
  17. ^ Alexander Statiev (2010). The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands. Cambridge University Press. p. 56. ISBN 978-0521768337. Retrieved January 3, 2024.
  18. ^ M. Laar (1992). War in the Woods: Estonia's Struggle for Survival, 1944-1956. Howells House. ISBN 0929590082. Retrieved January 3, 2024.
  19. ^ Bolesław Paszkowski (2005), Golgota Wschodu (The Eastern Golgotha). Archived 2006-05-27 at the Wayback Machine (in Polish)
  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 (2010), Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, p. 194, ISBN 978-0-465-00239-9
  22. ^ Węgierski 1991, p. 278.
  23. ^ Popiński, Kokurin & Gurjanow 1995, p. 98, 102.
  24. ^ Mikoda 1997, p. 133–134.
  25. ^ Musiał 2001, p. 117–118.
  26. ^ Popiński, Kokurin & Gurjanow 1995, p. 90, 97.
  27. ^ Mikoda 1997, p. 111–116.
  28. ^ Nagorski, Andrew (18 September 2007). The Greatest Battle. Simon & Schuster. p. 83. ISBN 978-1-4165-4573-6. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  29. ^ "Lviv museum recounts Soviet massacres" Archived 2019-01-15 at the Wayback Machine, Natalia A. Feduschak. CDVR. 2010. Retrieved 6 feb 2017
  30. ^ Musiał 2001, p. 111–112.
  31. ^ Mikoda 1997, p. 128–130.
  32. ^ Musiał 2001, p. 116.
  33. ^ Mikoda 1997, p. 134–136.
  34. ^ Тимофеев В. Г. Уголовно-исполнительная система России: цифры, факты и события. Учебное пособие. — Чебоксары, 1999

Media related to NKVD prisoner massacres at Wikimedia Commons