The Germans made bacteriological warfare

Another unknown facts of the WII was committed by the Germans in Belarus when the Soviet Army was advancing.

   They set up camps for civilians, whom deliberately infected with typhus to the Russian soldiers who tried to help were infected by them.

   The details of the account in his book Michael Jomnes Total War. London 2011. Pages 141  to 143.

”  By 17 March over 47.000 civilians were inside the camps. Convoys of vehicles began to draw up outside the fences, ans seriously ill hospital patients were carried out and interspersed amnog the prisoners. Thousands of people bagan to fall ill. The camp surround were mined, and the Werchmat troops wthdrew further west. The waited for their red Army opponents to discover them.

   Advancing Soviet soldiers did so on 19 March. Reconnaisance units from the Sixty- Fifth Army´s 37th Guard Division reporting seeing large concentrations camps in the marshland area of Polesie. ” They are enclosed by barbed wire and in them thousand of civilians are huddled together, without any form of shelter whatsoever “, one Red Army related. ” It´s almost too terrible to look at “. The division´s commander. General Ushakov, inmediately sent several units to overpower the camp guards and release the prisoners.

   Whatever the barbarity of these camps, which were merely pens in which civilians could be left to die of expossure, the reality was worse. The German plan was to infect the inmates with typhus and thus create an epidemic among advancing soldiers and civilians alike. And the plan was working – most of the prisoners were now ill. As Soviet soldiers rushed into the camp to help the weak and sick, they had no inkling that typhus, carried by lice and thriving in unsanitary condictions was now rampant in the camp – and that disease would now be transmitted to them “.

The transfer of civilians from their villages and towns, which were left empty, it was taken with the extreme cruelty common to the  Germans, one of the prisoners told their liberators :

” At night we were driven through knee-deep mud into a camp. On the forced march the German beat us – and anyone who lagged behind was inmediately finished off. One of the women has there small children. The youngest slipped in the mud, and a German soldier inmediately shoot him. When the other two turned round, frozen in terror, the soldier shot tem as well. The mother let out a heart-rending cry – but this was cut short by the final bullet.”

  Filip Ivanovich related : “The Germans brought us into a camp in an area of marshland. There are not shelter, food or water – and any food people was carrying was confiscated by the soldiers, along with coats, boots and warm clothing. It was forbidden make fire. On the first night more that five hundred people died,mostly small childern “

More horrible pictures

A grandmother and her grandchildren unfit for work being conducted without their knowledge to the gas chamber IV. Birkenau. Poland
Yad Vashem Archive, ID Number 31588

 

Women carried by his murderers to be killed in the forest

 

Local collaborators gather Jewish children for execution. Liepaja, Latvia

Yad Vashem Archive 83EO5

Jewish women and children at the time of execution. Liepaja, Latvia, 12.15.1941

Yad Vashem Archive 1878

German atrocities and brutalities ( I )

The extermination of the Jewish children in Kaunas

ACCOu’NT OF MARIA ILINICHNA YARMOVSKAYA

 

The germans built a ghetto that turned into a death camp in Slobodka, beyond the Vilia River. Periodically, executioners would show up there and exterminate several thousand inhabitants. This was called the “cleansing” of the ghetto. So, on 17,1941, more than 10,000 people were removed from the ghetto and shot.

In August 1943, a certain Goecke came to Kaunas; he was already known in Poland as “the butcher in white gloves:’ He had just carried out the liquidation of the Warsaw and Vilnius ghettos. Once in Kaunas, what interested this German beast most of alI wether or not there were many children left in the ghetto.

On October 27, (1943) the Germans collected 3,500 women and children and herded them to the station. There they separated the children from their mothers and poisoned them. The children were dying before their mothers’ eyes. But some of the children were left with their families. Goecke issued a special order for the immediate handing over of all children. It was announced that severe punishment awaited those who evaded out this order. A couple named Zeller was publicly executed for failing to thand over their child to the butchers. The unfortunate parents were beaten, forced to sit on a red hot stove, and had needles shoved under their fingernails. When they lost consciousness, they were carried to the gallows. Holding their victims in the nooses in a way that was calculated not to kill them, the Germans took them down and put off completing the execution until the next day. Then they lashed the father to a stake and lit a fire beneath his feet. They stripped the mother naked and contin orture her.

  That’s how it will go with anyone who puts up resistance to us;’ Goecke announced a megaphone.

 

GARF f.8114. op. 1, d. 953 ll 109- 109 ob. Atypewritter manuscript.

 

From “The Unknown black book” of Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman.Indiana University Press 2008 ( 2010 Paper back edition ).

 

 

The Babi Yar Massacre

 

 

 

Before the chillingly well-organized Babi Yar massacre in Kiev, mentioned earlier, there appeared an anti-Jewish poster on September 28, 1941. Non Jewish-r Ukrainians and Russians recalled later that upon seeing that poster “few considered the possibility of the terrible truth: mass murder” and  that nobody expressed any such thoughts.28 Many, perhaps most believed that the Jews “merely” awaited deportation, and hardly anyone  expressed “regret. “I’ve great news for you !” Anatoli Kutnetsov heard his Russian-speaking Ukrainian grandfather say that day “From tomorrow there won’t be a single Yid left in Kiev.It seems it’s true what they  said about them setting fire to the Khreshchatyk. Thank the Lord for that ! That’ll pay them back for getting rich at our expense, the bastartds. Now they can go off to their blessed Palestine, or at any rate the Germaans’ll deal with’ em. They’re being deported!” The young Anatolii himself ,who had a good Jewish friend, thought that the Ger­mans would send the Jews to Palestine and that this was for the best. Yet Lev Ludin recaIls that hundreds of non-Jews petitioned the authorities to Jews to stay.29

 

All day Monday, September 29, Jews-men, women, and small chil­dren-along with non-Jewish husbands, wives, and other dear ones, walked to the designated street corner in Kiev’s western Lukianivka dis­trict. The Russian middle-aged teacher L. Nartova described in her diary the view from her balcony: “People are moving in an endless row, overflowing the en­tire street and sidewalks. Women and men are walking, young girls, children, old people, and entire families. Many carry their belongings on wheelbarrows, but most of them are carrying things on their backs .They walk in silence, quietly. How awful … It went on like this for very long , the entire day and only in the evening did the crowd become smaller ” She even adds-which other sources do not confirm but which may be true-that Jews also walked the next day “and so it went on for several days.”3o Fedir Pihido was on Lviv Street that Monday, around eleven o’clock, and saw how “many thousands of people, mainly old ones-but middle-aged people were also not lacking-were moving ,ard Babi Yar. And the children-my God, there were so many children ! All this was moving, burdened with luggage and children. Here and there old and sick people who lacked the strength to move by ill selves were being carried, probably by sons or daughters, on carts without any assistance.Some cry, others console. Most were moving in a self  absorbed way, in silence and with a doomed look. It was a terrible sight” .  In  the early morning of the next day, when he “could not yet know a what had happened,” Fedir Bohatyrchuk apparently saw many Jews in the same direction.They had “stony faces, paralyzed with fright. They already instinctively foresaw what was going to happen to them. Only. children did not suspect a thing and walked business-like, with ba” their hands or knapsacks on their shoulders. I remember a group of Jews who carried a gray-haired old man, apparently a rabbi, on a stretcher were singing a sad song.”^3!

 

Another observer, a female factory engineer, generalized later when the Jews walked away, “it was such a weight on the hearts of all “. However true this may have been for her, Nartova, Pihido, and othe no means were all onlookers sad. “Unfortunately and to my shame “ Bohatyrchuk writes, “I have to say that I saw quite a few of my co-religionists watching this exodus with a happy face. These short-sighted people blinded by hatred, simply did not realize what was going on.”³² Walking  on his own toward the Podil district, Kuznetsov found many non-Jews on the streets, “standing in the gateways and porches, some of watching and sighing, others jeering and hurling insults at the Jews. At one point a wicked-looking old woman in a dirty head scarf ran out. the roadway, snatched a case from an elderly Jewess, and rushed ack inside the courtyard. The Jewess screamed at her, but some tough characters stood in the gateway and stopped her getting in. She sorbed and cursed and complained, but nobody would take her side, and the crowd went on its way, with eyes averted. I peeped through a crack and saw a whole pile of stolen things lying in the yard.” He overheard a story that a hired cabby had simply dashed off with the luggage of several families  and later he saw Jews hurry down empty streets to a backdrop of “whistles and shouts from the doorways.” Among the onlookers were also Germans. On Lvov Street, some apparently called out to Jewish girls “Come do some cleaning here!”³³

 

After the Jews and those accompanying them arrived at the designated cr, they continued walking west, down Melnyk Street (present-day Melnykov Street). The seventeen-year-old G. A. Batasheva came there with her family around ten o’clock. Trucks loaded with clothes drove by the other direction, but people kept saying that they would be put on a train because some undistinct people, not Jews, shouted things like, “ Hurry, the trains are waiting!” The point of no return, according to heva, was near the intersection of Melnyk and Puhachov streets, where many non-Jews were told to go home. From there on, German sol­diers and two police battalions edged the people on toward the Jewish and orthodox cemeteries and, behind those, a large ravine that was locally known as Babi Yar. Semiautomatic gunfire resounded from there.³⁴

 

Another survivor, the then thirty-year-old Dina Pronicheva, recalled that just before the entrance to the Jewish cemetery, (Soviet-made) barbed wire and antitank hedgehogs blocked Melnyk Street. “Germans and Ukrainians” guarded the checkpoint. “One could enter freely, but nobody was let out, except for carters.” As the procession passed the cemetery ­it reached on the left Kahatna Street, which had a long fence on the leftand a small Orthodox cemetery on the right. Into this street the people were directed, but Pronicheva walked straight to find out what was happening farther on. “I thought there would be a train standing there, but I saw that the Germans immediately took off and seized fur clothes. They took food and put it in one place, the clothes in another, while the people walked on. The Germans took out a large number of people, stopped those walking for a while, and took people out again. When it was my turn, I wanted first to get out, but they did not let me. I returned to my parents and did not tell them anything, in order not to upset them, and walked with them.”³⁵

The people made a right turn into a wide street that divided the small Orthodox cemetery from the large and also Orthodox Lukianivka Ceme­tery. “Both sides of Dorohozhytska Street were densely planted with young trees,” Batasheva testifies, “and between them stood Hitlerites armed with automatic weapons and sticks. Many had dogs.” After passing ‘the two cemeteries, the terrified people entered a vicious gauntlet of German submachinegunners. “Those who tried to move aside. , . were :beaten severely with sticks and attacked by dogs. People were also beaten without any reason.” It led to a large even ground,³⁶ Pronicheva confirms this:

 

“ If someone fell, a dog was let loose which ripped things and the the body, the person just had to get up and run downward, and fall into the hands of [non-German] policemen, who undressed people completely, and while doing so beat them terribly, wherever and however they could-with their hands, feet, some of the policemen had brass knuckles. The people went to execution covered with blood.”³⁷

 

A German source also confirms the presence of “Ukrainians or politsai-ethnically nondefined if certainly non-German policemen near the ravine: A former member of the principal murder team at Baby Yar,  Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C (enlarged for the occasion with members of police battalions 45 and 303), told German prosecutors years later that the Jews were received, undressed, pushed, and kicked “by the Ukrainians.”³⁸ It is likely that these auxiliaries-as well as the Ukrainians at the checkpoint and the people who shouted about waiting trains-belonged to units created or commanded by Melnykites namely the Bukovinian Battalion and a company of what was then called the”Ukrainian police.”³⁹

 

Batasheva recalls that at the edge of the even ground there were elevations with narrow aisles in them that led into the Yar. The winding ravine stretched for 150 meters and was thirty meters wide and fifteen meters deep.⁴⁰ Pronicheva convinced a policemen in Ukrainian that she was Ukrainian. “Sit down, wait until the evening,” he told her. “When we´ve shot all the Jews, we will let you go.” While waiting, she saw how “people were undressed and beaten, people laughed hysterically, they were visibly going insane, and turned gray within minutes. Babies were from their mothers and thrown upward through some kind of sandy wall. All the naked people were lined up two or three at a time and led to some kind of height, to the wall of sand, which had cuts in it. The people went there and did not return … After getting out of the so-called door, that cut, there was a small ledge on the left. Here all the people were lined up and shot from the other side by machine-guns.”⁴¹ At the end of the day she ended up in the ravine herself, alive. Overcoming great dangers, she lived to testify about the massacre.

 

Ukraine’s other major cities experienced similar massacres in 1941. In Dnipropetrovsk on October 13 and 14,a police battalion assisted by auxiliary policemen shot at least ten thousand Jews and-most likely-nonJewish spouses and children of intermarriages.⁴² Unlike the “reprisal” executions that were meant to intimidate, the perpetrators did not mention these massacres to the population. 

 

 

“ Harvest of Despair.Life and death under nazi rule.” Karel. C. Berkhoff. Harvard University Press. Pages 65 to 69.

German atrocities and brutalities ( II )

It is important to remember that the brutality was the norm in all German performances.

The following is one of many thousands of brutalities, psychiatric patients boarding for their extermination from Holland. (Saul Friedländer. The Years of extermination, pp. 412-413)

 

At the. beginning of 1943 the Germans started rounding up the approx­Imately eight thousand Jewish patients in various hospitals, and among them the psychiatric inmates of Het Apeldoornse Bos. The raid on this largest Jewish mental institution was conducted on the night of January 21 by a Schutzpolizei unit under the personal command of Aus der Funten. The patients were ferociously beaten and pushed into trucks. “I saw them place a row of patients,” an eyewitness declared, “many of them older women, on mattresses at the bottom of one lorry, and then load another load of human bodies on top of them. So crammed were these trucks that the Germans had a hard job to put up the tail-boards.” The trucks carried the patients to the cordoned-off Apeldoorn railway station.

According to the station master’s report, when he tried to activate the ventilation system in the wagons, the Germans closed them. The report then contInued: ¨”I remember the case of a girl of twenty to twenty-five whose arms were pinioned [in a straightjacket] but who was otherwis: stark naked …. Blinded by the light that was flashed in her face, the girl ran, fell on her face and could not, of course, use her arms to break the fall She crashe.d down with a thud …. In general, the loading was done wIthout great violence. The ghastly thing was that when the wagons had to be closed: the patients refused to take their fingers away. They simply would not lIsten to us and in the end the Germans lost patience. The result was a brutal and inhuman spectacle.” Some fifty (Jewish) nurses accompanied the transport.

A Dutch Jew described the arrival of the transport in Auschwitz: “It was one one the most horrible transports from Holland that I saw. Many of the patIents tned to break through the barrier and were shot dead. The remainder were gassed immediately.” There are diverging accounts of the fate of the nurses, none of whom survived Some declare that they were sent to the camp; others that they were gassed; according to another witness “some of them were thrown into a pit, doused with gasoline, and hurned alive.” Aus der Funten had promised them that they could return immediately after the trip or work in the East in a thoroughly modern mental institution.

In early 1943 the Germans established the Vught labor camp, which supposedly would allow Jews to remain as forced laborers in Holland. It was a sophisticated “legal” option to avoid deportation; the council strongly encouraged it, and the obedient Dutch Jews went along. Of course it was one further German scam, and the Vught inmates were sys­tematically transferred to Westerbork or, on several occasions, deported directly to the East.

Between July 1942 and February 1943, fifty-two transports carrying 46,455 Jews left Westerbork for Auschwitz. Some 3,500 able-bodied men were redirected to the hydrogenation plant in Blechhammer (later Auschwitz III-Monowitz and Gross Rosen). Of the workers’ group, 181 men survived the war; of the remaining 42,915 from the 1942 and early 1943 transports, 85 remained alive. 54 The deportations went on.