Chatyn
Coordinates: 54 ° 20 ′ 4 ″ N , 27 ° 56 ′ 37 ″ E
Chatyn ( Belarusian / Russian Хатынь ) is a former village in Belarus in the Minskaya Woblasz . Its population was murdered by members of the German SS in response to partisan attacks in the area in 1943 when the village burned down. Khatyn was not rebuilt after 1945. The Soviet leadership had the memorial of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic built there in 1969 for all Belarusian villages destroyed by Germans in the German-Soviet war . The place name therefore also refers to the SS massacre of 1943 and the commemoration of this and other Nazi crimes in Belarus.
SS massacre
On the morning of March 22, 1943, partisans fired at a motorcade of 1st Company of Schutzmannschafts Battalion 118 on the road from Minsk to Vitebsk near the village of Kosyri (Козыри), a few kilometers west of Khatyn. The company commander, Captain Hans, was attacked Woellke and three Ukrainian members of the protection team were killed. The battalion initially followed the partisans who were retreating in the direction of Khatyn, but broke off the pursuit for lack of strength and requested support by radio. On the march back, the police officers murdered 20 to 25 forest workers for allegedly supporting the partisans. The 1st company of the SS special unit Dirlewanger arrived in the afternoon to reinforce it . Together with the police, they surrounded and occupied Chatyn in the afternoon, then plundered the villagers' property and drove them into a barn. They also raped a young woman and then brought her to the barn with the others, set them on fire and shot at the people trapped in it who were trying to save themselves from the fire. According to the Khatyn State Memorial, 149 people, including 75 children under the age of 16, were killed. In some cases, the number of victims is also put at 152 people, including 76 children.
Only a few villagers survived the massacre: four children - the two boys Anton Baranowskij and Viktor Schelobkowitsch and two girls - were able to save themselves from the burning barn; the two girls fell victim to a later massacre in the destruction of the village of Khwaraszjani. Three other children, the siblings Wolodja and Sonja Jaskewitsch and Sascha Schelobkowitsch, were able to hide in time and remained undetected. The then 56-year-old village blacksmith Josif Kaminsky survived the fire and discovered his dying son Adam among the victims after the perpetrators had left the place. The villagers, Stefan Rudak, were taken along by the perpetrators as a coachman to transport the stolen property.
Work-up
memorial
The National Memorial of the Republic of Belarus was opened in Khatyn in 1969, commemorating the destruction of 5295 Belarusian villages during the Second World War and the victims of National Socialist war crimes. It is sometimes speculated that Khatyn could have been chosen as the location for the memorial because of the similarity of the place name to the place name Katyn , which in Poland stands for the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the NKVD in 1940. In 1974, then US President Richard Nixon visited the Khatyn Memorial.
Prosecution
In Germany no one was ever prosecuted for this mass murder . At the end of 1975, the Itzehoe public prosecutor , to which the Federal Court of Justice had handed over the case, closed a preliminary investigation. The trial of the commander of the protection team battalion, the Ukrainian Hryhorij N. Wasjura, took place in 1986.
Artistic processing
The history of several such villages is described by eyewitness accounts that were compiled by Ales Adamowitsch and Janka Bryl into a book, which under the Russian title I am from a burned village (Russian: Я из огненной деревни , Belarus .: Я з вогненнай вёскі… ) got known. The Khatyn massacre was also dealt with by Adamowitsch in his novel Хатынская аповесць ( Eng .: The story of Khatyn ), which was first published in Russian in 1972 and also in Belarusian in 1976 , which later served as the basis for the screenplay for the film Come and See ( Russian Иди́ и смотри́ / Idi i smotri ) served.
See also
Places with similar names are:
- Katyn , Smolensk Oblast, Russia (site of the 1940 Soviet Katyn massacre )
- Chotyn , Bessarabia, Ukraine
- Chotin , Ukraine
literature
- Bernd Boll : Chatyn 1943. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Hrsg.): Places of horror. Crimes in World War II. Primus-Verlag, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-89678-232-0 , pp. 19-29.
- Chatyn '. Tragedija i pamjat '. Documenty i materialy. NARB, Minsk 2009, ISBN 978-985-6372-62-2 .
- Jochen Fuchs, Janine Lüdtke, Maria Schastnaya: Places of remembrance in Belarus: Chatyn and Maly Trostinec. Part 1: Chatyn. In: memorials circular. No. 138, 2007, ZDB -ID 1195828-5 , pp. 3-10.
- Christian Ganzer: Memory of War and Occupation in Belarus'. The “Brest Heroes Fortress” and “Chatyn '” memorials. In: Babette Quinkert, Jörg Morré (ed.): German occupation in the Soviet Union 1941–1944. War of extermination. Reactions, memories. Paderborn 2014, pp. 318–334 ( text online ).
- Natallja V. Kirylava: Chatyn. Belarus', Minsk 2005, ISBN 985-010564-X .
- Per Anders Rudling: The Khatyn Massacre in Belorussia: A Historical Controversy Revisited. In: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26: 1 (2012), pp. 29–58.
- Astrid Sahm: Under the spell of war. Memorial sites and culture of remembrance in Belarus. In: Eastern Europe. Volume 58, No. 6/8, 2008, ISSN 0030-6428 , pp. 229–245.
Web links
- Khatyn Memorial website (Russian, Belarusian, German, English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ André Böhm, Maryna Rakhlei: Belarus . Trescher Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-89794-271-4 , pp. 153 .
- ↑ Bernd Boll: Chatyn 1943. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Hrsg.): Places of horror. Darmstadt 2003, pp. 22-25; Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Belarus: The Khatyn Tragedy (2005)
- ^ Dietrich Beyrau : The Long Shadow of the Revolution. Violence in War and Peace in the Soviet Union. In: Jochen Böhler et al. (Ed.): Legacies of Violence. Eastern Europe's First World War. Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, p. 314.
- ^ New York Times, July 2, 1974: Nixon Sees Khatyn, A Soviet Memorial, Not Katyn Forest