Vinnytsia massacre (1937/1938)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Examination of the bodies

The Vinnytsia massacre is a series of mass shootings in the years 1937/38 by forces of the Soviet secret service NKVD in the Ukrainian (then Soviet) city of Vinnytsia , in Russian Vinnitsa, in which at least 9,432 people were killed.

The "Great Terror" in the Soviet Union

At the end of 1934, in anticipation of a war of aggression against the Soviet Union, the Central Committee of the CPSU decided to increase security in the border areas by relocating compact Polish and German settlements inland. The concept was based on a general suspicion of national minorities who did not have a republic within the Soviet Union in which they would have constituted the titular nation and were perceived as a potential “ fifth column ”. These measures, which should also be directed against "anti-Soviet elements", also affected the Vinnytsia region. From the spring of 1935 to the beginning of 1936, tens of thousands of Poles and Germans were resettled on the basis of these resolutions.

After Nikolai Yezhov became head of the NKVD in 1936 and Stalin announced the intensification of the class struggle at the February-March plenum of the WKP Central Committee (b) the following year, the Soviet secret service covered the entire Soviet Union with countless numbers in 1937/38 Arrests and executions. These so-called purges were directed against all population groups. However, members of the CPSU were particularly affected: In the Ukraine, around 37% of party members, around 170,000 people, fell victim to the "purges" because the party and state apparatus were to be "renewed". The first thing hit was the leadership of the Ukrainian communists. After Yezhov took office, 25 members and candidates of the Central Committee of the CP (b) U who had been accused of Trotskyism, Zinovevism and Ukrainian nationalism were expelled and arrested; a second wave hit those who remained in February 1937. In August 1937, 16 members of the Oblkom of the CP (b ) U arrested in Vinnytsia. At the end of the year the former 1st Secretary of the Party's Oblkom, V. Chernyavskyi, was executed - the repression had reached the local level.

The victims of the terror included communists, members of the opposition, or persons who had previously worked in opposition organizations or who fought against the Bolsheviks in the civil wars. Furthermore, the repression was directed against members and former members of the "exploiting classes" - former landowners, kulaks, members of the bourgeoisie. In the Ukraine, suspects of Ukrainian nationalism have also been targeted by the authorities.

The decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the WKP (b) "on anti-Soviet elements" of July 2, 1937 represented a significant turning point and the actual beginning of the great terror . This NKVD order No. 00447 saw the formation of so-called Trojki (Russian: Trojka , plural Trojki - about "group of three"), which had to function as substitute courts . The most hostile “anti-Soviet elements” were to be tried and executed immediately by these Trojki, and the less active were to be exiled for many years. The executive organs were given five days to form the Trojki and to send figures to Moscow on those who were likely to be shot and deported. This short period led to a certain hectic rush in the apparatus; as early as July 23, 1937, the WKP Central Committee (b) confirmed the composition of the Trojka in the Vinnytsia region, consisting of the head of the party’s obkom, V. Chernyavskyj of the NKVD of the Oblast, N. Timofeev, and the Chief Prosecutor of the Oblast, A. Yaroshevskyi. On July 31, 1937, the Politburo in Moscow gave the order that operations begin on August 5 and cease after four months. The murderous dynamic was accelerated further by the decision of the WKP Central Committee (b) on September 11, 1937 to further simplify the proceedings before the Trojki. The quotas set on the basis of the figures reported to Moscow provided for 259,450 arrests for the entire Soviet Union, of which 72,950 were to be shot. The limit has been increased several times.

The "Great Terror" in the Vinnytsia region

For the Vinnytsia Oblast the numbers were initially 6,300 arrested, 2,200 of whom were to be shot. The social composition of the 5,502 arrested up to November 7, of which 1,592 belonged to “Category I” (shoot), indicates the mass character of the repression: collective farm workers (1,465) and people without permanent employment (2,133) made up the majority, but there were also 59 members of the state apparatus among them.

This first wave of arrests was followed by others, each specifically directed against certain population groups. Poland, former soldiers and prisoners of war, members of the PPS , political refugees and people accused of being counter-revolutionaries have been targeted several times . By mid-February 1938, more than 3,000 Poles were killed in this way. In the second half of 1937 and at the beginning of 1938, the Central Committee of the WKP (b) issued various orders and circulars that specifically named the groups to be followed. These were “Zionists” (as the clauses used when talking about Jews), Greeks, Chinese, Ukrainian nationalists, Iranians, Afghans and the like. a.

In an annual report, the NKVD announced that it had made 18,048 arrests in Vinnytsia Oblast from July 1, 1937 to February 10, 1938. 12,884 of these people were sentenced, 6,376 to death and 6,508 to exile. According to the NKVD categories, these people included Polish counter-revolutionaries and spies (6,930), Ukrainian nationalists (3,101), Romanian spies (1,110), counter-revolutionaries from churches and sects (1,167) and others.

A total of 20,001 people were arrested in the Vinnytsia Oblast during the great terror of 1937/38, of whom 13,475 were executed. In addition to the secret trials and shootings, there were also show trials designed to convince the public of the existence of widespread sabotage in order to divert attention from the mistakes of the political leadership in economic areas.

End of terror, beginning of terror

The Central Committee of the WKP (b) ended the terror after the first criticisms expressed during the February plenary session in 1938, through directives of November 15 and 17, 1938, which proclaimed the abolition of the Trojki and the prohibition of mass actions for arrests and deportations.

Shortly afterwards, on November 25, 1938, Yezhov was replaced by Beria , and the state security organs began to be purged. From late 1939 to early 1940, members of the NKVD were held accountable in trials at the oblast level for violations of the law and unfounded arrests.

In Vinnytsia, these trials concerned the deposed NKVD Oblast chief I. Korablev and his subordinates. Korabljow was sentenced to death in a trial that lasted from April 26 to May 6, 1941, but was later pardoned to ten years of forced labor. The lower ranks got away with much lighter penalties.

Reports from investigative commissions

In the Nazi propaganda, the NKVD murders were portrayed as a Jewish communist crime against Ukrainians. The person depicted on the propaganda poster from 1943 wears, in addition to the red star, the characteristics of "Jews" that were common in propaganda at the time: hooked nose, large ears, "Asian" facial features, devious posture.

The murder commission sent by the SS from Berlin registered 9,432 corpses, including 169 women, from mass graves in three locations, an orchard, the Russian Orthodox cemetery, and in the public “Gorky Park” near the stadium during a public exhumation. With one exception, all male victims were handcuffed and most were killed by small-caliber gunshots in the head. 395 had been struck by blunt objects. 679 of the dead could be identified. The victims were accused of being so-called " enemies of the people ". Most of them were workers from agricultural collectives and priests.

The National Socialist authorities invited forensics experts from an international commission of forensic doctors from eleven states allied, occupied or neutral with Germany, as well as journalists from many countries, to observe the exhumations in the hope of drawing international attention in a similar way to " Jewish Bolshevism " of the Soviet Union as it had done a few months earlier after the Katyn massacre of more than 4,000 Polish officers was discovered. This forensic medical commission came to the conclusion that the victims were murdered by the NKVD in 1937/38. It included the Hungarian Ferenc Orsós and the Romanian Alexandru Birkle , who had already been members of the Katyn International Medical Commission in April 1943 .

After several months of investigations, a forensic medical commission from thirteen German universities under the direction of Gerhard Schrader ( University of Halle ), the chairman of the German Society for Forensic Medicine, produced a report that was published in 1944 under the title Official Material on the Mass Murder of Winniza .

The massacre was also confirmed by the interrogation of Ukrainian witnesses who had fled to the United States as part of an investigation by the Committee on Un-American Activities against Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 and material from the partially opened Soviet archives after 1990.

Discursive significance of the NKVD murders in Vinnytsia

The fact that the SS had the victims of the massacre publicly exhumed by the NKVD while the mass graves of the Jewish population of Vinnytsia, which they had brutally exterminated a few months earlier, were located a few kilometers away, was rated as “unprecedented audacity” (see Vinnytsia ).

The murders in Vinnytsia were often instrumentalized for political purposes from the start. Only rarely was it about the scientific processing or the honest memory of the dead. The latter took place exclusively in private in Vinnytsia itself, the crime was not recognized as a Soviet crime, there were no monuments and the memorial site, which the honorary cemetery established in 1943 represented, had been leveled. Only glasnost and perestroika as well as the Ukrainian independence in 1991 opened the way for a public commemoration on site.

Vinnytsia as a means of propaganda

The finds from Vinnytsia (similar to those from Katyn ) were used by the German government for propaganda against the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union accused the German Reich of being responsible for the murders. During the Cold War in 1959, hearings were held in the United States in front of the Committee on Un-American Activities on the events of Vinnytsia in order to incriminate the Soviet state and party leader Nikita Khrushchev , who since 1938 as chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine de facto ruler the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. It was not until 1988 that the first article appeared in a Soviet magazine that made the NKVD responsible for the mass murders. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine's independence, the massacre was also portrayed as part of Stalin's policy of annihilation towards Ukraine.

Commemoration

Shortly after the liberation of the city by Soviet troops, a memorial “for the victims of fascism” was erected on the cemetery, which was laid out in 1943 and where the dead from the three sites were reburied . In this way the memory of the NKVD crime was to be erased. During the thaw period , the memorial was removed without any official declaration; this part of the cemetery now remained without any reference to those buried there. In the early 1970s, a building for funeral ceremonies was erected on part of the graves.

In 1989, the Memorial Society asked for the mass murders to be investigated and obtained an investigation by the public prosecutor's office. At their instigation, excavations were carried out on the cemetery grounds, which unearthed corpses that had the characteristics described in the German investigation report of 1943, such as arms tied behind the back and gunshot wounds to the back of the head. After the exhumations and source studies, the public prosecutor came to the conclusion that the buried were the victims of extra-legal executions by the NKVD. After this official confirmation, a memorial was erected on the building from the 1970s in the same year, commemorating the “victims of the communist-totalitarian regime”. A year later, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church took over the building, added a tower with a dome and consecrated it as a church. In the absence of another memorial site, gatherings that are not directly connected to the NKVD murders of 1937/38 take place at this memorial, for example the memorial event on the nationwide day of mourning on the last Saturday of November in honor of the victims of the famine of 1932/33 .

The son of a Ukrainian-German victim of the NKVD had a memorial erected for his father, August Erich Lauterbach, behind the church around 2000. It is the only monument in Vinnytsia that names the NKVD victims.

Memorial to the NKVD victims at the point where the mass graves were found in Gorky Park in 1943

Further monuments can be found at the earlier sites of the mass graves. In Gorky Park, two remember the victims. In the lower front of the newer, inaugurated in June 2005, the years 1937 and 1938 are chiseled out, the board in the upper area depicts the letter Omega ; this is divided into two halves by a cross in a somewhat incomprehensible symbolic language. On the marble plaque, which is attached to the back of the monument surrounded by a circular path, it is written: “The victims of the totalitarian regime who suffered innocently.” A second monument in the form of a simple cross made of iron pipe is located directly opposite the cinema and the “Raduga” concert hall. On it is a plaque with the inscription “The Victims of the Stalinist Repressions 1936-1941, 1944”.

Monument near the "Old Cemetery", where mass graves were also discovered

Also in June 2005, a monument depicting three crosses was erected opposite the park in front of the Church of the Holy Resurrection on Khmelnytskyi Street. The inscription in the flat, round base can hardly be deciphered due to its design. It reads: “Let us remember those who were innocently killed, 1937/1938.” This memorial stone is not located exactly at the location of the earlier mass graves that were found in the old cemetery on the rear side of the church. The cemetery has not existed for a long time, nothing here reminds of the tragedy of the 1930s. About 20 years ago, a multi-storey house was built on a section of the former cemetery where some of the mass graves were located.

At the location of the orchard where the first corpses were found in 1943 (today on the corner of Chmelnyzkyj-Chaussee and 40 Years of Victory Street), nothing reminds of the events of the 1930s. Part of the site is built on, partly with very new houses. Even on the former NKVD building complex, in whose garage area the shootings were carried out, nothing reminds of the bloody past. Since the complex now houses the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), taking photos of the garages that still exist is strictly forbidden.

The administration of the oblast has provided funds for the publication of extensive documentation and has put together a commission of historians, archivists and others. The first volume of the ten-volume work was published in 2006. It contains articles on the topic and a large number of sources. The other volumes, the first of which should appear in 2008, are planned as a necrology . In them all victims of the Stalinist repression from the Vinnytsia Oblast should be honored with a short biography.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 41.
  2. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 42f.
  3. ↑ Subtelny, S. 420th
  4. ↑ Subtelny, S. 420th
  5. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 44.
  6. ^ Area Committee.
  7. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 45.
  8. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 43.
  9. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 45.
  10. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 46.
  11. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 48.
  12. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 47.
  13. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 47f.
  14. ↑ It was apparently not possible for the editors of the study and the source volume on the Vinnytsia region to compile complete and comprehensive statistics from the documents in the NKVD archives. Therefore, only “interim results” can be shown at this point.
  15. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 48f.
  16. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 51.
  17. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 53.
  18. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 55.
  19. ↑ Reabilitovani ..., p. 56.
  20. ↑ a b Richard Rhodes: The German murderers. The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Holocaust , Bergisch Gladbach 2004, ISBN 3-7857-2183-8 , p. 230
  21. ↑ Andrzej Przewoźnik / Jolanta Adamska: Katyń. Zbrodnia prawda pamięć. Warsaw 2010, p. 290.
  22. ^ Official material on the mass murder of Vinnitsa, Zentralverlag der NSDAP. Franz Eher Nachf. GmbH. Berlin 1944 [1] download
  23. ^ Molod Ukrainy, September 21, 1988.
  24. ↑ "Interview with an Eyewitness in August 1987. By Ihor Kamenetsky." In: Kamenetsky, pp. 60-62.
  25. ↑ Interviews, conducted by Christian Ganzer , with Lyudmila Rostislawowna Karoevaja, former memorial activist and current director of the Vinnytsia Oblast Museum of Local History, on November 23 and 26, 2007.
  26. ↑ Reabilitowani ..., p. 8.
  27. ↑ Some of the monuments are not shown in the city's street atlas, some with the wrong name: Vinnytsia. Atlas do koshnoho budynku. Scale 1: 10,000. Kiev 2007, p. 23f. The information about the monuments is based on his own observations in autumn 2007 - Christian Ganzer.
  28. ↑ Reabilitowani ...
  29. ↑ Interview, conducted by Christian Ganzer , with Lyudmila Rostislawowna Karoevaja, former memorial activist and current director of the Vinnytsia Oblast Museum of Local History, on November 23, 2007.
  30. ↑ The book is accused of one-sidedness in a review in Review Vol. 51 No. 4 (1992), p. 812f .