The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation has launched the project "Cannot Be Forgotten".
A special section on the agency's website contains documents exposing the crimes of the Nazis against prisoners of war and civilians during the Great Patriotic War: acts, investigation materials, special messages from law enforcement agencies, political reports and other evidence of the atrocities of the Nazi invaders.
"There were babies and old people here"
The section contains extensive documentary data on crimes committed against prisoners of concentration camps.
So, the testimonies of military doctors of the Red Army taken prisoner contain descriptions of the inhuman conditions in which Soviet prisoners of war were in a camp created in the fall of 1941 at the former hay point of the city of Demyansk (today it is the territory of the Novgorod region).
For several months, 13 thousand people were kept in the open air.
Later they were "settled" in dugouts, into each of which they drove 70-80 people.
“In these conditions, there was nowhere not only to lie, but also to sit, and therefore most of the prisoners of war had to sleep while standing,” reads the released documents.
The prisoners of the camp were involved in grueling works for 12 hours a day - building roads and felling forests.
At the same time, they were not fed for several days, and then in small groups they were taken to vegetable gardens to collect potatoes, which they had to eat raw along with the skin.
The Nazis killed prisoners for any reason, for example, because a person left the dugout for natural needs.
By May 1942, out of 13 thousand prisoners held in the camp, only about 700 survived.
“The attitude towards Soviet prisoners of war was determined by the criminal ideology of racial superiority.
The Nazi war captivity had nothing to do with the customs of war and international law, having turned into an instrument of genocide of the population of the USSR, "Dmitry Surzhik, associate professor of the State Academic University of the Humanities, said in a conversation with RT.
The declassified materials of the 1944 investigation by the Soviet military prosecutor's office posted on the website of the Ministry of Defense contain evidence of Nazi crimes in the camps in the Treblinka station of the Warsaw Voivodeship.
In the report of the military prosecutor, the camps and the contingent of prisoners contained in them are described in detail.
One of the camps was called by military prosecutors an "international death complex."
“Every day 3-4 echelons of 6-8 thousand people in each arrived at the camp.
Echelons came from various occupied European countries: the occupied regions of the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, as well as the territory of Germany itself, ”the document says.
The number of people taken to the camp from July 1942 to August 1943 is estimated at about 3 million.
“There were babies and old people here.
There were many women here, ”the report says.
Act on the beast in the camp at Alekseevka
© Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
Future prisoners were herded 100-200 people into freight cars.
On the way, they were not given any food, and the guards exchanged a small amount of water for watches, jewelry and other valuables.
Those who did not die on the way, after being delivered to the death camp, were sent to the "locker rooms" and then to the gas chambers.
At the same time, the Nazis developed a special scheme for robbing their victims: before they were sent to the camp, people were convinced that they were being resettled, and they took with them as many valuable things as possible for settling in a new place.
Subsequently, the values of the killed were seized, sorted and sent to Germany.
During the year, hundreds of wagons with the belongings of the victims of the death camp left Treblinka for the west.
Those prisoners, whom the Nazis did not kill immediately, were sent to hard work: to sand pits, to repair the railway track, to carry the corpses of the dead.
The people included in the work team were given 200 grams of bread a day and soup from unpeeled potatoes.
The sick were shot.
For their own entertainment, the Nazis tortured the surviving people: for example, on pain of execution they forced them to stand for hours with heavy stones in their hands.
In addition to gas chambers and executions, the Nazis also practiced other forms of murder.
"He brutally flogged people who were naked with a whip, snatched babies from their mothers' hands, ... took an infant by the legs and banged his head against the wall," the documents describe the crimes of one of the Nazi executioners.
The Ministry of Defense also published the materials of the investigation by the military prosecutor's office of the crimes of the Nazis in the Suchobry camps in the Warsaw Voivodeship, liberated by the Red Army in 1944.
The construction of the camps began in the spring of 1941.
Already on June 23, about a hundred Soviet prisoners of war entered them.
By the end of the year, the number of prisoners reached 120 thousand.
The very conditions of detention in the Suchozhebras camps were aimed at exterminating people.
"The main method of extermination of prisoners was hunger," - says the documents of the military prosecutor's office.
Every day up to 35 carts with corpses were taken out of the camps - 5-7 bodies on each.
In August 1941, a group of Soviet prisoners of war "in despair, shouting" Hurray! "
rushed to the camp wire fence. "
All the Red Army soldiers were shot by the Nazis.
The documents declassified by the Ministry of Defense also contain information about Auschwitz: maps, testimonies of prisoners and servicemen who participated in the liberation of the camp.
"Monstrous Atrocities"
Within the framework of the project, numerous testimonies of the atrocities of the Nazis against the civilian population of the occupied territories, committed outside the concentration camps, have also been posted.
A significant part of the victims of the Nazis are small children.
In the materials collected from the results of excavations at the site of the mass execution of residents of the city of Sokal, Lviv region, there are photographs of exhumed children's bodies, including the body of a two-year-old child with a broken skull.
The act on the atrocities committed by the Germans against Soviet citizens during the occupation of the Vilnius region contains evidence of the murder of civilians in a place called "Base" - in the area of the Ponary railway station.
People were driven here under the pretext of changing their place of residence and work.
For three years, about 200 thousand civilians and prisoners of the Red Army - Jews, Poles, Belarusians, Lithuanians and Russians - were killed here.
In the act of August 15, 1944 "On the atrocities of the German-fascist scoundrels in the regional center of Domachevo, Brest region", there is a talk about the murder of the children in an orphanage by the Nazis.
The document contains a list of 100 children who were brought up in an orphanage.
54 children were shot immediately, 15 were sent to the ghetto and killed there, 27 were rescued by local residents, three were killed on the very first day of the war, the fate of another child has not been established.
Act on the beast in the camp at Alekseevka
© Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
The political report of the political department of the 1st Belorussian Front to the head of the Main Directorate of the Red Army presented on the website of the Ministry of Defense contains data on the fate of a part of the two thousand children who were in the camp in the village of Skobrovka, Pukhovichi district, Minsk region.
The Nazis forced teenagers to become saboteurs.
The rest of the children were pumped out of blood for the wounded Nazi officers, and often in such quantities that the child had no chance of survival.
The section also displays copies of numbers of army newspapers containing evidence of Hitler's crimes: descriptions of their atrocities on the territory of Kiev and the Lviv region, copies of the directives of the Nazi command for the destruction of Soviet citizens.
Published on the website of the Ministry of Defense and letters of children stolen by the Nazi occupiers for forced labor in Germany.
Photos from the album trophies_08.07.1944
© Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
Within the framework of the project, trophy documents are also presented: photographs from German albums containing scenes of executions of civilians and bragging about looting by German soldiers.
“The war was originally conceived by the Nazi leadership as criminal actions against the entire people at once, a way to get territories freed from the population, which the Nazis considered“ superfluous ”.
It was planned to destroy or expel from their homes about 70% of Soviet citizens, and turn the rest into humiliated semi-literate slaves deprived of their national identity.
Moreover, the responsibility for the destruction of millions of civilians lay not only on the political leadership of Germany and the SS, but also on the Wehrmacht, "Dmitry Surzhik emphasized.
According to Andrei Koshkin, a full member of the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation, the activities of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation to perpetuate the memory of the victims of the Nazis and to expose Hitler's crimes are relevant and extremely important.
Photos from the album trophies_08.07.1944
© Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
“The documents described are monstrous atrocities.
Nowadays, some unscrupulous persons make calls to "forgive" the Nazis, there are attempts to shift the responsibility onto the victims of aggression themselves, to prove that whole categories of fascist criminals were allegedly not guilty of anything or acted compulsorily.
In this context, it is very important to make public the evidence of what the Nazis really did as widely as possible.
This cannot be kept silent, it must not be forgotten, it cannot be forgiven.
True evidence of Hitler's crimes is the best vaccine against the revival of Nazism, ”summed up Andrei Koshkin.