What did the Nazis do with the captured women. How the Nazis abused children in the Salaspils concentration camp |
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| 23.12.2021 |
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From
time immemorial, war has been the domain of men. However, the Great
Patriotic War refuted this stereotype: thousands of Soviet patriots
went to the front and, along with the stronger sex, fought for the
freedom of the Fatherland. For the first time, the Nazis encountered so
many women in the units of the active Red Army, so they did not
immediately recognize them as military personnel. Almost throughout the
war, there was an order according to which the Red Army women were
equated with partisans and were to be shot. But many Soviet women and
girls were destined for an equally tragic fate - to survive German
captivity, torture and abuse.The horrific fate of female health workers in German captivity |
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Tens
of thousands of female health workers were mobilized into the Red Army.
Many, after completing a course of study, volunteered to go to the
front or to the people's militia. Despite the humanity of the medical
profession, the Germans treated the captured nurses, nurses and medical
instructors with the same cruelty as the rest of the prisoners of war.
There are many testimonies of atrocities committed against Soviet female medical workers. A captured nurse or nurse could be raped by a whole company of soldiers. Eyewitnesses told how in winter they found shot Russian nurses on the roads - naked, with obscene inscriptions on their bodies. Somehow, Soviet soldiers found the stiff corpse of a nineteen-year-old nurse girl, impaled, her eyes gouged out, her chest cut off and her hair turned gray. And those who ended up in the concentration camp were expected to do hard work, inhuman conditions of detention, bullying and violence from the guards. What awaited a female sniper in German captivity |
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| Not a single army in the world could boast of such a number of snipers as it was during the years of the Great Patriotic War in the Red Army. Only from the middle of the summer of 1943 until the end of the war, the Central Women's Sniper Training School produced over a thousand snipers and more than 400 instructors. Female shooters inflicted no less damage on enemy manpower than male snipers. The Nazis were afraid and fiercely hated the brave Red Army women and dubbed them "invisible horror." So, Hero of the Soviet Union Tatyana Baramzina, covering the retreat of her comrades, was seriously wounded, fell into the hands of the Nazis and was subjected to severe torture. Her body was found with her eyes gouged out and her head pierced by an anti-tank rifle. |
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| Sniper Maria Golyshkina said that her partner Anna Sokolova was captured and, after sophisticated torture, was hanged. The Nazis tried to recruit female shooters who ended up in a concentration camp, but there is no evidence that any of them agreed to cooperate. The female snipers who passed the concentration camps preferred not to go into the details of being in fascist captivity, not wanting to remember the horrors of the past. The tragic story of women scouts who were captured by the Germans |
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| History knows many feats accomplished by young Soviet intelligence officers. The symbol of heroism and selflessness was the name of the Komsomol member Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a fighter of the reconnaissance and sabotage unit of the headquarters of the Western Front. Yesterday's schoolgirl went to the front as a volunteer. In November 1941, while fulfilling the assignment of the command - to commit arson in several settlements of the Moscow region - fell into the hands of the Germans. |
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| Soviet women not only showed miracles of heroism at the fronts. During their stay in captivity, they amazed the Nazis with their moral qualities. Upon admission to the concentration camp, all women were examined by a gynecologist in order to identify venereal diseases. German doctors were surprised to state that more than 90% of unmarried Russian women under the age of 21 retained their virginity. This figure was strikingly different from similar data for Western Europe. Soviet girls demonstrated high morality even in war, where a woman was constantly among the opposite sex and was the object of their close attention. Below are excerpts from various books (I don’t remember the names, alas)
Then there was Allenstein and there was more fire and more death. Near the post office, he (Kopelev) met a woman with a bandaged head, who tightly held the hand of a young girl with blond pigtails, she was crying, the child's legs were stained with blood ... "The soldiers kicked us out of the house," she told the Russian officer, " they beat and raped us, my daughter was only 13, she was raped by two, and everyone else raped me" She asked him to help her find her little son. Another woman asked him to shoot her. “There is no way to say that the Major is raping me,” she writes. “Why am I doing this? For bacon, sugar, candles, canned meat? major, and the less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person." Many of her neighbors made similar deals with the winners of defeated Berlin. “Suddenly, tanks appeared on our street, bodies of Russian and German soldiers lay everywhere,” she recalls. “I remember the terrifying twang of falling Russian bombs. We called them Stalinorgels (“Stalin’s organs”).” One day, between bombings, Ingeborg climbed out of the basement and ran upstairs for a rope, which she adapted for a lamp wick. “Suddenly, I saw two Russians pointing guns at me,” she says. “One of them forced me to undress and raped me. Then they switched places and another raped me. I thought I was going to die, that they would kill me.” I want to note that it's scary, but it was. And women have always been war trophies, they have always paid for the war, wherever it takes place - and the winners are not judged. There are bastards in any country, on any side of the barricades. There are, were and will be. Like good people, I hope. Women medical workers of the Red Army, taken prisoner near Kiev, were collected for transfer to the POW camp, August 1941: The uniform of many girls is semi-military-semi-civilian, which is typical for the initial stage of the war, when the Red Army had difficulties in providing women's uniforms and uniform shoes of small sizes. On the left - a dull captured artillery lieutenant, maybe a "stage commander". How many female soldiers of the Red Army ended up in German captivity is unknown. However, the Germans did not recognize women as military personnel and regarded them as partisans. Therefore, according to the German private Bruno Schneider, before sending his company to Russia, their commander, Lieutenant Prince, familiarized the soldiers with the order: “Shoot all women who serve in the Red Army.” Numerous facts testify that this order was applied throughout the war. In August 1941, on the orders of Emil Knol, commander of the field gendarmerie of the 44th Infantry Division, a prisoner of war - a military doctor - was shot. In the city of Mglinsk, Bryansk region, in 1941, the Germans captured two girls from the medical unit and shot them. After the defeat of the Red Army in the Crimea in May 1942, an unknown girl in military uniform was hiding in the house of a resident of Buryachenko in the Mayak fishing village near Kerch. On May 28, 1942, the Germans discovered her during a search. The girl resisted the Nazis, shouting: “Shoot, bastards! I am dying for the Soviet people, for Stalin, and you, fiends, will be dog's death! The girl was shot in the yard. At the end of August 1942, a group of sailors was shot in the village of Krymskaya in the Krasnodar Territory, among them there were several girls in military uniform. In the village of Starotitarovskaya, Krasnodar Territory, among the executed prisoners of war, the corpse of a girl in a Red Army uniform was found. She had a passport with her in the name of Mikhailova Tatyana Alexandrovna, 1923. She was born in the village of Novo-Romanovka. In the village of Vorontsovo-Dashkovskoye, Krasnodar Territory, in September 1942, captured military assistants Glubokov and Yachmenev were brutally tortured. On January 5, 1943, 8 Red Army soldiers were captured near the Severny farm. Among them is a nurse named Lyuba. After prolonged torture and humiliation, all those captured were shot. |
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| It seems that the "Hans" do not look evil ... Although - who knows? In war, completely ordinary people often do such outrageous abominations that they would never have done in "another life" ... The girl is dressed in a full set of field uniforms of the Red Army, model 1935 - male, and in good "commander" boots in size. A similar photo, probably summer or early autumn 1941. The convoy is a German non-commissioned officer, a female prisoner of war in a commander's cap, but without insignia: |
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| Divisional intelligence translator P. Rafes recalls that in the village of Smagleevka, liberated in 1943, 10 km from Kantemirovka, residents told how in 1941 “a wounded lieutenant girl was dragged naked onto the road, her face, hands were cut, her breasts were cut off ... » Knowing what awaits them in the event of captivity, female soldiers, as a rule, fought to the last. Often captured women were raped before they died. Hans Rudhoff, a soldier from the 11th Panzer Division, testifies that in the winter of 1942, “... Russian nurses lay on the roads. They were shot and thrown on the road. They lay naked... On these dead bodies... obscene inscriptions were written. In Rostov in July 1942, German motorcyclists broke into the yard, where there were nurses from the hospital. They were going to change into civilian clothes, but did not have time. So, in military uniform, they dragged them into a barn and raped them. However, they were not killed. Women prisoners of war who ended up in camps were also subjected to violence and abuse. Former prisoner of war K.A. Shenipov said that in the camp in Drogobych there was a beautiful captive girl named Lyuda. “Captain Stroher, the camp commandant, tried to rape her, but she resisted, after which the German soldiers, called by the captain, tied Lyuda to a bunk, and in this position Stroher raped her and then shot her.” In Stalag 346 in Kremenchug at the beginning of 1942, the German camp doctor Orlyand gathered 50 women doctors, paramedics, nurses, undressed them and “ordered our doctors to examine them from the genitals - if they were sick with venereal diseases. He carried out the inspection himself. I chose 3 young girls from them, took them to my place to “serve”. German soldiers and officers came for women examined by doctors. Few of these women escaped rape. |
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| Judging by their emaciated faces, they had to go through a lot even before being taken prisoner. |
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| Here the "Hans" are clearly mocking and posing - so that they themselves will quickly experience all the "joys" of captivity !! And the unfortunate girl, who, it seems, has already drunk dashingly to the full extent at the front, has no illusions about her prospects in captivity ... |
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| On the left photo (September 1941, again near Kyiv -?), on the contrary, the girls (one of whom even managed to keep a watch on her hand in captivity; an unprecedented thing, a watch is the optimal camp currency!) Do not look desperate or exhausted. Captured Red Army soldiers are smiling... Is it a staged photo, or was a relatively humane camp commandant really caught, who ensured a tolerable existence? The Millerovo POW camp also contained female prisoners. The commandant of the women's barracks was a German from the Volga region. The fate of the girls languishing in this barrack was terrible: “Police often looked into this barracks. Every day, for half a liter, the commandant gave any girl to choose from for two hours. The policeman could take her to his barracks. They lived two in a room. During these two hours, he could use her as a thing, abuse, mock, do whatever he pleases. Once, during the evening verification, the chief of police himself came, they gave him a girl for the whole night, a German woman complained to him that these “bastards” were reluctant to go to your policemen. He advised with a grin: “For those who do not want to go, arrange a“ red fireman ”. The girl was stripped naked, crucified, tied with ropes on the floor. Then they took a large red hot pepper, turned it inside out and inserted it into the girl's vagina. Left in this position for half an hour. Shouting was forbidden. Many girls' lips were bitten - they held back the cry, and after such a punishment they could not move for a long time. The commandant, behind her back they called her a cannibal, enjoyed unlimited rights over the captive girls and came up with other sophisticated mockeries. For example, "self-punishment". There is a special stake, which is made crosswise with a height of 60 centimeters. The girl should strip naked, insert a stake into the anus, hold on to the cross with her hands, and put her legs on a stool and hold on for three minutes. Who could not stand it, had to repeat from the beginning. We learned about what was happening in the women's camp from the girls themselves, who came out of the barracks to sit for about ten minutes on a bench. Also, the policemen boastfully talked about their exploits and the resourceful German woman. |
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| There may also be a German field hospital in the front line - in the background is visible part of the body of a car equipped to transport the wounded, and one of the German soldiers in the photo has a bandaged hand. |
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| In the foreground is a non-commissioned officer of the German field gendarmerie with a characteristic badge on his chest. In the fall of 1941, K. Kromiadi, a member of the commission for the distribution of labor, who visited the Sedlice camp, talked with the captured women. One of them, a female military doctor, admitted: “... everything is bearable, except for the lack of linen and water, which does not allow us to change clothes or wash ourselves.” A group of female health workers taken prisoner in the Kiev pocket in September 1941 was kept in Vladimir-Volynsk - Camp Oflag No. 365 "Nord". Nurses Olga Lenkovskaya and Taisiya Shubina were captured in October 1941 in the Vyazemsky encirclement. At first, women were kept in a camp in Gzhatsk, then in Vyazma. In March, when the Red Army approached, the Germans transferred the captured women to Smolensk in Dulag No. 126. There were few prisoners in the camp. They were kept in a separate barracks, communication with men was forbidden. From April to July 1942, the Germans released all women with the "condition of a free settlement in Smolensk." |
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| Most likely - not a doctor: her hands are clean, in a recent battle she did not bandage the wounded. On the way, the captured men were dropped off at different stations, and on February 23, 1943, the women were brought to the city of Zoes. Lined up and announced that they would work in military factories. Evgenia Lazarevna Klemm was also in the group of prisoners. Jewish. History teacher at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute, posing as a Serb. She enjoyed special prestige among women prisoners of war. E.L. Klemm, on behalf of everyone, said in German: “We are prisoners of war and will not work at military factories.” In response, they began to beat everyone, and then drove them into a small hall, in which, because of the crowding, it was impossible to sit down or move. It stayed that way for almost a day. And then the rebellious were sent to Ravensbrück. This women's camp was established in 1939. The first prisoners of Ravensbrück were prisoners from Germany, and then from European countries occupied by the Germans. All the prisoners were shaved bald, dressed in striped (blue and gray striped) dresses and unlined jackets. Underwear - shirt and shorts. There were no bras or belts. In October, a pair of old stockings was given out for half a year, but not everyone managed to walk in them until spring. Shoes, as in most concentration camps, are wooden blocks. The barrack was divided into two parts, connected by a corridor: a day room, in which there were tables, stools and small wall cabinets, and a sleeping room - three-tiered plank beds with a narrow passage between them. For two prisoners, one cotton blanket was issued. In a separate room lived block - senior barracks. There was a washroom in the corridor. A group of Soviet women prisoners of war arrived at Stalag 370, Simferopol (summer or early autumn 1942): |
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| The prisoners carry all their meager possessions; under the hot Crimean sun, many of them "like a woman" tied their heads with handkerchiefs and took off their heavy boots. |
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Prisoners
worked mainly in the camp's sewing factories. In Ravensbrück, 80%
of all uniforms for the SS troops were made, as well as camp clothing
for both men and women. The first Soviet women prisoners of war - 536 people - arrived at the camp on February 28, 1943. At first, everyone was sent to a bathhouse, and then they were given striped camp clothes with a red triangle with the inscription: "SU" - Sowjet Union. Even before the arrival of the Soviet women, the SS spread a rumor around the camp that a gang of female murderers would be brought from Russia. Therefore, they were placed in a special block, fenced with barbed wire. Every day, the prisoners got up at 4 in the morning for verification, sometimes lasting several hours. Then they worked for 12-13 hours in sewing workshops or in the camp infirmary. Breakfast consisted of ersatz coffee, which the women used mainly to wash their hair, as there was no warm water. For this purpose, coffee was collected and washed in turn. Women whose hair survived began to use combs, which they themselves made. Frenchwoman Micheline Morel recalls that “Russian girls, using factory machines, cut wooden planks or metal plates and polished them so that they became quite acceptable combs. For a wooden scallop they gave half a portion of bread, for a metal one - a whole portion. For lunch, the prisoners received half a liter of gruel and 2-3 boiled potatoes. In the evening, for five people, they received a small loaf of bread with an admixture of sawdust and again half a liter of gruel. “...on one Sunday in April, we learned that Soviet prisoners refused to comply with some order, referring to the fact that, according to the Geneva Convention of the Red Cross, they should be treated like prisoners of war. For the camp authorities, this was unheard of insolence. The whole first half of the day they were forced to march along Lagerstrasse (the main "street" of the camp. - A. Sh.) and deprived of lunch. But the women from the Red Army bloc (as we called the barracks where they lived) decided to turn this punishment into a demonstration of their strength. I remember someone shouted in our block: “Look, the Red Army is marching!” We ran out of the barracks and rushed to Lagerstrasse. And what did we see? It was unforgettable! Five hundred Soviet women, ten in a row, keeping alignment, walked, as if in a parade, minting a step. Their steps, like a drum roll, beat rhythmically along the Lagerstrasse. The whole column moved as a single unit. Suddenly, a woman on the right flank of the first row gave the command to sing. She counted out: “One, two, three!” And they sang: Rise to the death fight... I had heard them sing this song under their breath in their barracks before. But here it sounded like a call to fight, like faith in a quick victory. Then they sang about Moscow. The Nazis were puzzled: the punishment by marching the humiliated prisoners of war turned into a demonstration of their strength and inflexibility... It was not possible for the SS to leave Soviet women without lunch. Political prisoners took care of food for them in advance. In February 1944, about 60 women prisoners of war from Ravensbrück were transferred to a concentration camp in the city of Barth at the Heinkel aircraft factory. The girls refused to work there. Then they were lined up in two rows and ordered to strip down to their shirts and remove the wooden blocks. For many hours they stood in the cold, every hour the matron came and offered coffee and a bed to anyone who would agree to go to work. Then the three girls were thrown into a punishment cell. Two of them died of pneumonia. Constant bullying, hard labor, hunger led to suicide. In February 1945, the defender of Sevastopol, military doctor Zinaida Aridova, threw herself on the wire. Nevertheless, the prisoners believed in liberation, and this belief sounded in a song composed by an unknown author: Above your head, be bold! We don't have long to endure. The nightingale will fly in the spring ... And open the door for us to freedom, Takes the striped dress off her shoulders And heal deep wounds Wipe the tears from swollen eyes. Keep your head up, Russian girls! Be Russian everywhere, everywhere! Not long to wait, not long - And we will be on Russian soil. The former prisoner Germaine Tillon in her memoirs gave a peculiar description of Russian women prisoners of war who ended up in Ravensbrück: “... their solidarity was explained by the fact that they had gone through army school even before being captured. They were young, strong, neat, honest, and also rather rude and uneducated. There were also intellectuals (doctors, teachers) among them - friendly and attentive. In addition, we liked their disobedience, unwillingness to obey the Germans. |
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| Women prisoners of war were also sent to other concentration camps. Prisoner of Auschwitz A. Lebedev recalls that paratroopers Ira Ivannikova, Zhenya Saricheva, Viktorina Nikitina, doctor Nina Kharlamova and nurse Claudia Sokolova were kept in the women's camp. In January 1944, for refusing to sign an agreement to work in Germany and move into the category of civilian workers, more than 50 female prisoners of war from the camp in Chelm were sent to Majdanek. Among them were doctor Anna Nikiforova, military paramedics Efrosinya Tsepennikova and Tonya Leontyeva, infantry lieutenant Vera Matyutskaya. Navigator of the air regiment Anna Egorova, whose plane was shot down over Poland, shell-shocked, with a burnt face, was captured and kept in the Kyustrinsky camp. Despite the death reigning in captivity, despite the fact that any connection between male and female prisoners of war was forbidden, where they worked together, most often in camp infirmaries, love was sometimes born that gave new life. As a rule, in such rare cases, the German leadership of the infirmary did not interfere with childbirth. After the birth of the child, the mother-prisoner of war was either transferred to the status of a civilian, released from the camp and released at the place of residence of her relatives in the occupied territory, or returned with the child to the camp. So, from the documents of the Stalag camp infirmary No. 352 in Minsk, it is known that “the nurse Sindeva Alexandra, who arrived at the City Hospital for childbirth on February 23, 1942, left with her child for the Rollbahn prisoner of war camp.” Probably one of the last photographs of Soviet female soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Germans, 1943 or 1944: |
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| Both were awarded medals, the girl on the left - "For Courage" (dark edging on the block), the second may have "BZ". There is an opinion that these are female pilots, but - IMHO - it is unlikely: both have "clean" shoulder straps of privates. On the basis of this order, on April 11, 1944, the head of the Security Service and the SD issued an order to send unreliable female prisoners of war to the nearest concentration camp. After being delivered to a concentration camp, such women were subjected to the so-called "special treatment" - liquidation. This is how Vera Panchenko-Pisanetskaya died - the eldest of a group of seven hundred female prisoners of war who worked at a military factory in the city of Gentin. A lot of marriage was produced at the plant, and during the investigation it turned out that Vera led the sabotage. In August 1944 she was sent to Ravensbrück and hanged there in the autumn of 1944. In the Stutthof concentration camp in 1944, 5 Russian senior officers were killed, including a female major. They were taken to the crematorium - the place of execution. First, the men were brought in and shot one after the other. Then a woman. According to a Pole who worked in the crematorium and understood Russian, the SS man, who spoke Russian, mocked the woman, forcing her to follow his commands: “right, left, around ...” After that, the SS man asked her: “Why did you do this? ” What she did, I never found out. She replied that she did it for the motherland. After that, the SS man slapped him in the face and said: "This is for your homeland." The Russian spat in his eyes and replied: “And this is for your homeland.” There was confusion. Two SS men ran up to the woman and began to push her alive into the furnace for burning corpses. She resisted. Several more SS men ran up. The officer shouted: “Into her furnace!” The oven door was open and the heat set the woman's hair on fire. Despite the fact that the woman vigorously resisted, she was placed on a cart for burning corpses and pushed into the furnace. This was seen by all the prisoners who worked in the crematorium. Unfortunately, the name of this heroine remains unknown.
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Yad Vashem archive. M-33/1190, l. 110. There. M-37/178, l. 17. There. M-33/482, l. sixteen. There. M-33/60, l. 38. There. M-33/303, l 115. There. M-33/309, l. 51. There. M-33/295, l. 5. There. M-33/302, l. 32. P. Rafes. They didn't repent then. From Notes of the Translator of Divisional Intelligence. "Spark". Special issue. M., 2000, No. 70.Archive Yad Vashem. M-33/1182, l. 94-95. Vladislav Smirnov. Rostov nightmare. - "Spark". M., 1998. No. 6. Archive Yad Vashem. M-33/1182, l. eleven. Yad Vashem archive. M-33/230, l. 38.53.94; M-37/1191, l. 26 B. P. Sherman. ... And the earth was horrified. (About the atrocities of the German fascists in the city of Baranovichi and its environs on June 27, 1941 - July 8, 1944). Facts, documents, evidence. Baranovichi. 1990, p. 8-9.S. M. Fischer. Memories. Manuscript. Author's archive. K. Kromiadi. Soviet prisoners of war in Germany... p. 197. T. S. Pershina. Fascist genocide in Ukraine 1941-1944… p. 143. Archive Yad Vashem. M-33/626, l. 50-52. M-33/627, sheet. 62-63. N. Lemeshchuk. I didn't bow my head. (On the activities of the anti-fascist underground in the Nazi camps) Kyiv, 1978, p. 32-33. There. E. L. Klemm, shortly after returning from the camp, after endless calls to the state security agencies, where they sought her confession of betrayal, committed suicide G. S. Zabrodskaya. The will to win. On Sat. "Witnesses for the Prosecution". L. 1990, p. 158; S. Muller. Locksmith team Ravensbrück. Memoirs of a Prisoner No. 10787. M., 1985, p. 7. Women of Ravensbrück. M., 1960, p. 43, 50. G. S. Zabrodskaya. The will to win... p. 160. S. Muller. Locksmith team Ravensbrück ... p. 51-52. Women of Ravensbrück… p.127. G. Vaneev. Heroines of the Sevastopol fortress. Simferopol. 1965, p. 82-83. G. S. Zabrodskaya. The will to win... p. 187. N. Tsvetkova. 900 days in fascist dungeons. In: In Fascist dungeons. Notes. Minsk. 1958, p. 84. A. Lebedev. Soldiers of a small war ... p. 62. A. Nikiforova. This shouldn't happen again. M., 1958, p. 6-11. N. Lemeshchuk. Head not bowed... p. 27. In 1965, A. Egorova was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.Archive Yad Vashem. М-33/438 part II, l. 127. A. Stream. Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefengener… S. 153. A. Nikiforova. This must not happen again... p. 106. A. Stream. Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefengener…. S. 153-154. This name has become a symbol of the brutal attitude of the Nazis towards captured children. During the three years of the existence of the camp (1941-1944) in Salaspils, according to various sources, about a hundred thousand people died, seven thousand of them were children. ________________________________________
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The place from which they did not returnThis camp was built by captured Jews in 1941 on the territory of the former Latvian training ground, 18 kilometers from Riga, near the village of the same name. According to the documents, Salaspils (German: Kurtenhof) was originally called an “educational labor camp”, and not a concentration camp.An impressive area, fenced with barbed wire, was built up with hastily built wooden barracks. Each was designed for 200-300 people, but often in one room there were from 500 to 1000 people. Initially, Jews deported from Germany to Latvia were doomed to death in the camp, but since 1942, "undesirable" Jews from various countries: France, Germany, Austria, and the Soviet Union were sent here. Full donors for the ReichNew prisoners were brought in regularly. They were forced to strip naked and sent to the so-called bathhouse. It was necessary to walk half a kilometer through the mud, and then wash in icy water. After that, the arrivals were placed in barracks, all things were taken away.The children were separated from their parents. If the mothers did not give, the guards took the babies by force. There were terrible screams and screams. Many women went crazy; some of them were placed in the hospital, and some were shot on the spot. Considering that the prisoners were practically not fed: a piece of bread and a gruel from vegetable waste, the number of child deaths was in the hundreds per day. The corpses, like garbage, were taken out in huge baskets and burned in crematorium ovens or dumped into disposal pits. |
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Covering up tracesIn August 1944, before the arrival of the Soviet troops, in an attempt to destroy the traces of atrocities, the Nazis burned down many barracks. The surviving prisoners were taken to the Stutthof concentration camp, and German prisoners of war were kept on the territory of Salaspils until October 1946.One of the most eerie photographs that clearly illustrates the events of that time is the “Salaspils Madonna”, the corpse of a woman who hugs a dead baby. It was found that they were buried alive. |
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The truth pricks the eyesOnly in 1967, the Salaspils memorial complex was erected on the site of the camp, which still exists today. Many famous Russian and Latvian sculptors and architects worked on the ensemble, including Ernst Unknown. The road to Salaspils begins with a massive concrete slab, the inscription on which reads: "The earth groans behind these walls."Further, on a small field, figures-symbols with "speaking" names rise: "Unbroken", "Humiliated", "Oath", "Mother". On either side of the road are barracks with iron bars where people bring flowers, children's toys and sweets, and on the black marble wall, serifs measure the days spent by the innocent in the "death camp". To date, some Latvian historians blasphemously call the Salaspils camp "educational and labor" and "socially useful", refusing to recognize the atrocities that were committed near Riga during the Second World War. In 2015, an exhibition dedicated to the victims of Salaspils was banned in Latvia. Officials considered that such an event would harm the image of the country. As a result, the exposition “Stolen childhood. Victims of the Holocaust through the Eyes of Young Prisoners of the Salaspils Nazi Concentration Camp was held at the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Paris. In 2017, there was also a scandal at the press conference “Salaspils camp, history and memory”. One of the speakers tried to express his original point of view on historical events, but received a harsh rebuff from the participants. “It hurts to hear how you are trying to forget about the past today. We cannot allow such terrible events to happen again. God forbid you experience something like this,” one of the women who managed to survive in Salaspils addressed the speaker. It is also necessary to take into account the fact that after the war thousands of German women were interned in the USSR (as well as representatives of other nationalities who lived in the territories of states that actively helped Hitler and were liberated from fascism by the Red Army) - they worked in the Gulag camps on a par with Soviet prisoners. The diaries of a Soviet military officer who took part in the storming of Berlin, Vladimir Gelfand (a war veteran, died in the early 80s in Dnepropetrovsk), have long been published. Twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Gelfand, as a direct participant in the hostilities, described such an incident that occurred on the Oder front in the early spring of 1945. The Soviet troops utterly defeated the women's battalion that attacked them - "avengers for the husbands who died at the front." Ordinary Red Army soldiers wanted to stab the captured German women in a “perverse way”, but in the end, the “sorted” submachine gunners were divided into 3 categories. The first included ... Russians (!), The second - the wives of officers and simply relatives of the Nazi warriors, who proudly announced this, the third category - girls. The last ones were sorted “by their beds” (their further fate is not reported), and the rest (Russians in the first place) were shot, without torture or bullying. The topic of the conditions of detention of female prisoners of war of the Red Army is by far the most elaborately developed - numerous memoirs speak of the atrocities of the Nazis and their accomplices as in relation to prisoners who did not fall into concentration camps (memoirs of the divisional translator Pavel Rafes, the archive of the Israeli Yad Vashem and others ), and to those who were in the concentration camps of Germany and the countries - allies of the Nazis. Brash explained this attitude of his command towards the prisoners by the fact that by that time the Americans had already seen the horrors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other Nazi camps - newspapers trumpeted about it every day. The Yankees had plenty of food - they simply deliberately did not give them to the prisoners: the Americans fiercely hated the Germans as a nation. |
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