On the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Russian FSB published a copy of a certificate signed by the head of the 4th Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR, Pavel Sudoplatov, about Nazi atrocities in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union against the Jewish population. The document covers in detail the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis in the first years of the Great Patriotic War.

"Nazi Policy"

The Nazis began persecuting Jews based on their nationality almost immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. This policy was based on Nazi racial theory, the idea of ​​the superiority of “Aryans” over “inferior races,” and the idea of ​​Jews as “the main enemies of the German nation.”

In the 1930s, discriminatory laws were introduced against the Jews of Germany, and a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms swept across the country. After the outbreak of World War II and the occupation of the territories of a number of European states by the Third Reich, local Jews began to be driven into ghettos, where inhuman living conditions were created for them.

After the 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union, the Nazis' persecution of Jews on ethnic grounds reached a new level: with the support of collaborators, they moved on to mass torture and murder of the Jewish population of the occupied territories.

IVI RAS graduate student Maxim Sinitsyn noted in a conversation with RT that the mass extermination of Jews on the territory of the USSR was part of the policy of genocide against the Soviet people as a whole.

“This was Nazi policy towards the entire Soviet population. This is the peculiarity of the tragedy of the Soviet Union, which bore the main hardships of the war against Nazism,” Sinitsyn noted.

In January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, Nazi leaders approved the "Final Solution" program. Prisoners of Jewish ghettos were either killed in the populated areas where they were located or sent to death camps, most of which were located in Poland. Millions of Jews became victims of these crimes against humanity. They were shot, killed in gas chambers, and savage medical experiments were performed on them.

  • Certificate signed by Pavel Sudoplatov

  • © FSB of the Russian Federation

“Germany conquered living space for itself at the expense of other peoples. And its leaders believed that the destruction of the Jews would contribute to the safety of the “Aryans” from the conquered people. Jews were seen as potential instigators of resistance. And, of course, the Nazis were intoxicated with their racial theory. They considered Soviet Jews the most dangerous, since, in their opinion, it was in the USSR that international Jewry allegedly found its “base,” historian Yegor Yakovlev noted in an interview with RT.

From the first days of the Great Patriotic War, Soviet state security agencies were charged with documenting evidence of Nazi atrocities against civilians and Soviet prisoners of war in the temporarily occupied territory of the Soviet Union. Such data came from the Special Departments of the NKVD of the USSR of units and formations of the active Red Army, from the front-line groups of the 4th Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR and 4 departments of the territorial state security agencies, from partisan detachments. The sources of information were conversations with local residents, interrogations of German prisoners of war and accomplices of the occupiers, and the study of captured documents.

The front-line operational groups of the 4th Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR operated throughout the territory temporarily occupied by the enemy from the Baltic states to the Crimea. Their reports made it possible to create a holistic picture of what was happening in the areas occupied by the Nazis.

"Suffered from bestial bloodthirstiness"

On December 6, 1942, the NKVD of the USSR sent to the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (NKID) of the USSR a certificate “On the facts of German atrocities against the Jewish population in the territory of the USSR temporarily occupied by the enemy,” compiled by the 4th Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR and signed by the head of the department, Pavel Sudoplatov. This document provides numerous evidence of crimes committed by the occupiers against civilian Soviet citizens.

“The execution of Jews in Feodosia was accompanied by unprecedented bullying and torture. In the field where the Jews were taken to be shot, they were all undressed, including infants, and so naked they waited in the cold, during a snowstorm, for their turn to be killed. The Jews were forced to lie down at the bottom of the ditch, then they were shot at with machine guns, covered with a layer of earth, on which a new row of living, naked, distraught with horror people was laid, and they were shot at again,” Soviet intelligence officers described the atrocities of the Nazis in occupied German troops Crimea.

The certificate also details the crimes in which members of the so-called auxiliary police, formed by the Nazis in the occupied territories from local nationalists, participated.

“On August 26-27, 1942, in many settlements of Western Ukraine, the Gestapo, with the active participation of Ukrainian nationalists, organized mass terror, as a result of which almost the entire Jewish population was destroyed. Moreover, it is documented that before the start of this bloody massacre, the corresponding preparatory “work” was carried out... On the eve of these events, the policeman’s salary was increased: the rate of a family (person. -

RT

) was increased to 1600 and a bachelor to 800 karbovanets per month,” notes the certificate

The document described in detail the crimes committed in various regions of the Nazi-occupied part of the USSR.

“Immediately after the occupation of Latvia by German troops, in July 1941 in the mountains. In Riga, 60 thousand of the Jewish population were shot... Entire families were shot, regardless of age. Children were torn from the hands of their mothers and immediately killed before their eyes or thrown alive into pre-prepared pits... In the mountains. Ludza (Lucino) all the Jews were shot. There are only six Jews left in the city, who are used by the Germans as specialists in certain crafts. Mass executions of Jews also took place in Libau and other cities of Latvia. The number of people shot here is not recorded. The executions here were carried out by members of the military-fascist organization Aizsargi, and the Germans photographed these acts as “acts of retribution of the Latvian people,” says the document signed by Sudoplatov.

  • Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov - Lieutenant General of the NKVD of the USSR

  • © mil.ru

The compilers of the certificate indicate that ordinary local residents were amazed and outraged by the atrocities of the invaders.

“The population hates the Germans for such atrocities. There were many cases in Minsk when people turned gray and went crazy after seeing the Germans’ treatment of Jews and our prisoners, whom they shot in large numbers right on the streets,” the document emphasizes.

Soviet intelligence officers note that the Nazis tried to drive a wedge between Jews and residents of the occupied territories of other nationalities. For example, after the explosion of the German commandant's office in September 1941, fires started in Kyiv. The German administration placed responsibility for this on the Jews.

  • The Jewish ghetto burned by the Nazis during the retreat in Vilijampole (Kaunas region)

  • RIA News

  • © Nikolay Popov

“After the fire, the Germans began to spread rumors and officially announced in the newspaper that the culprits of the explosions and fires were Jews. On September 28, 1941, notices were posted around the city about the appearance of the entire Jewish population at the Lukyanovskoe cemetery on September 29 at 8 o’clock in the morning... The entire Jewish population, the overwhelming majority of old people, women and children, came to the indicated gathering place, where everyone was shot... Thus in Kyiv, up to 30 thousand Jews were shot.”

In the Minsk ghetto, not only Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality were exterminated, but also Jews from foreign countries.

“According to data on March 27, 1942, in the city. In Minsk they drove a column of Jews to work, some dressed in foreign clothes, others in rags. Their appearance was terrible. Among them were many young teenage girls and old men, dragging their feet, falling from weakness. The security kicked them up. All had yellow six-pointed stars with the words “Judas” sewn on their chests and backs. According to local residents, these were Jews from Hamburg, who were brought to Minsk in the amount of 75 thousand people, and that now fifteen thousand of them are alive, since during this time there were already three pogroms organized by the German-Lithuanian-Russian police ", the certificate said.

On December 19, 1942, on the front page of the Pravda newspaper, the NKID Information Bureau published an article entitled “Implementation by the Hitlerite authorities of the plan for the extermination of the Jewish population of Europe,” in the preparation of which materials provided by the NKVD of the USSR were used.

“Relatively to its small numbers, the Jewish minority of the Soviet population, united with all the nationalities of the Soviet Union by their ardent love for their homeland, suffered especially hard from the bestial bloodthirstiness of Hitler’s degenerates,” the publication said.

  • An article in the newspaper Pravda about the extermination of Jews by the Nazis

  • © FSB of the Russian Federation

Data received from the front-line groups of the 4th Directorate of the NKVD-NKGB of the USSR about the atrocities of the occupiers served as the basis for the subsequent search for Nazi war criminals and their accomplices both during the Great Patriotic War and in the post-war period.

According to Yegor Yakovlev, from the point of view of international law, what the Nazis did was, without a doubt, genocide.

“They planned the total murder of Jews both in the USSR and abroad. However, in the Soviet Union, Jews were not the only large contingent that the Nazis intended to exterminate en masse. According to Nazi plans, tens of millions of Slavs were subject to destruction. And the NKVD authorities were investigating all crimes committed in the occupied territories. However, at the same time, Soviet intelligence officers were well aware that the Nazis considered Jews as a separate category for extermination. In general, the contribution of the USSR and Soviet law enforcement agencies to the investigation of these crimes and confirmation of the fact of the Holocaust itself is certainly enormous,” summed up Yegor Yakovlev.