Ostashkov special camp

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The special camp Ostaschkow ( Russian Осташковский спецлагерь - Ostaschkowski Spezlager ) was an internment camp for Polish prisoners of war operated by the Soviet secret police NKVD from the end of September 1939 to July 1940 in the former Nilow monastery on an island in Lake Seliger in the north-west of the small town of Ostashkow . Around 6,300 prisoners from Ostashkov, mostly police officers, were shot at the same time as the massacres in Katyn and Kharkov in April and May 1940 in Kalinin and then in a forest near the villageMednoye buried. While the Katyn massacre became known around the world as early as 1943 after the discovery of the mass graves, the public did not find out about the fate of Ostashkov's prisoners until 1990, during perestroika in the Soviet Union.

prehistory

The Nilow Monastery, built in the 16th century, was expropriated after the Bolsheviks came to power in the " October Revolution ". In 1927 it was converted into a labor camp for underage criminals, and in 1928 the last monks had to leave the building complex.

POW camp

On September 19, 1939, the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrenti Beria , the head of the newly established "Administration for Prisoners of War and Internees" of the NKVD (UPWI), Piotr Soprunenko , ordered a total of eight camps to be set up for Polish prisoners of war who have been since the Reds' invasion Army in eastern Poland was in Soviet hands on September 17 as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact . Three camps were declared special camps, in which a total of around 15,000 officers and ensigns of the Polish armed forces, judicial and police officers as well as landowners from eastern Poland were to be carefully examined as "politically dangerous persons": Koselsk , Starobelsk and Ostashkov. The Soviet authorities informed the International Red Cross of the establishment of the camps, but the NKVD refused to allow inspections.

The first prisoners arrived in the three special camps at the end of September 1939. Since there was not enough sleeping space, some of them had to spend the night on the floor. Shifts were slept in several houses. Baths and laundries were not operational. There was a lack of crockery and cutlery in the kitchens, and the water supply was poor. When eating, the prescribed amounts per head were never reached. In a report to Beria about an internal inspection in Ostashkov, chaos, corruption, crime and serious supply shortages were criticized. The prisoners had to pull a two-and-a-half meter high fence that was reinforced with barbed wire at the places where the site of the former monastery was not surrounded by a wall. They also had to use sandbags to reinforce the dam over which the road led from the camp to the mainland.

By the spring of 1940, a total of almost 16,000 Polish prisoners of war passed through the special camp. The mortality rate was low compared to other Soviet camps: by the end of May 1940, 41 Polish prisoners of war had died in the camp district. The prisoners were allowed to write letters once a month and had to give “ Gorki- Erholungsheim, PO Box 37” as the address . In all three camps, the prisoners organized language courses, with Russian being particularly popular, as well as evening lectures in which the scientists among them reported from their specialist areas. The entertainment and training programs of the Politruks of the NKVD, which also showed Soviet feature films and documentaries , took up a lot of space .

The NKVD tried to gain informants when questioning the prisoners. Soprunenko reported to Beria that 103 of the Poles in Ostashkov had agreed to report on their comrades. As part of their training, students from the NKVD Academy took part in the surveys.

Execution of the Poles

Wassili Blochin (1895–1955)

On March 5, 1940, the Politburo under Stalin accepted a proposal from Beria, in which Beria recommended the shooting of the Polish "counter-revolutionaries". This affected around 6,300 of the Ostashkov camp inmates. 112 people were brought to the Juchnow camp around 150 kilometers southwest of Moscow for further questioning and thus escaped execution. An NKVD dossier dated April 1, 1940 listed all prisoners according to occupation and rank, including: a .: 48 officers and 72 NCOs as well as soldiers of the Polish armed forces; 240 officers, 775 NCOs and 4924 simple officers of the police and gendarmerie; 189 prison guards; 9 scouts and provocateurs (sic!), 5 clergy.

The vast majority, for whom the execution was planned, were brought to Kalinin in a total of 23 transports from April 5 to May 14 in groups of mostly 200 to 300 people on a prison train and shot there in the basement of the NKVD headquarters. The local NKVD commander, Major Dmitri Tokarev , was responsible for the organization of the transport and the removal of the bodies . The executions were carried out by a command specially traveled from Moscow under the orders of NKVD major Vasily Blochin .

The bodies were buried in mass graves in a forest not far from the village of Mednoye, 30 kilometers northwest . For this purpose Blochin had bulldozers and bulldozers temporarily confiscated from local businesses; their drivers had come with him from Moscow.

35 of the NKVD officers and soldiers who were involved in the preparation and implementation of the execution of the Poles from Ostashkov in Kalinin received monetary bonuses and medals for “performing extraordinary tasks”.

Further use

On June 9, 1940, the camp administration informed the NKVD headquarters in Moscow that up to 8,000 new prisoners could be admitted. After the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 (" Operation Barbarossa "), the building complex housed a Red Army hospital. German prisoners of war have also been interned here in the meantime.

In autumn 1944 the camp was given number 45 and was now reserved for interned officers of the anti-Soviet Polish underground army AK . A total of around 3,300 Poles, including around 300 women, were held there until the end of the war.

From 1945 to 1960 there was again a camp for criminal minors and an orphanage in the former monastery. From 1960 to 1971 it was a retirement home. In 1971 a state tourism agency was given control of the building and set up a "tourist base" there. In 1990 they were returned to the Russian Orthodox Church .

enlightenment

The search for the Polish officers and ensigns, police officers and officers interned in the Koselsk, Ostaschkow and Starobelsk special camps occupied the Polish government- in- exile in London, ever since it was informed from occupied Poland that the correspondence between the prisoners and their relatives was in the Canceled in spring 1940. While the Germans announced the discovery of the mass graves in Katyn in April 1943, there was clarity about the whereabouts of the prisoners from Koselsk, the fate of the inmates of Ostashkov and Starobelsk remained unresolved. The Soviet propaganda tried to give the impression by incorrect numbers that they had also been shot in the Katyn forest by the Germans in late summer 1941.

On July 20, 1957, a sensational report in the German magazine "7 Tage" claimed that the location of the graves of the missing Poles had been determined: From the documentation of an NKVD officer named Tartakow, which the Germans captured in the war and which were then taken into their hands The American had advised that the victims from the Starobelsk camp in Dergatschi near Kharkov ( see Pjatychatky ) and those from Ostashkow near Bologoje were buried 180 kilometers northwest of Kalinin. The Tartakow report, which also entered the Katyn literature as a genuine document, was called a forgery by experts from Polish emigration, including the writer Józef Mackiewicz .

The censorship authority of the People's Republic of Poland decreed that the prisoners of the three camps are called "internees" who were shot by the "Hitlerists" in the Katyn forest in 1941.

The fact that the mass graves of prisoners in the Ostashkov special camp are located near Mednoye only became known through research by the Russian human rights organization “ Memorial ”. In 1989, following information from the population, “Memorial” employees secretly carried out test excavations in the forest that belonged to a cordoned-off area of ​​the KGB , and in 1990 published reports about it. The victims are listed on the official Polish "List of Katyn" ( Lista Katyńska ), which also includes the Polish officers from the Starobelsk special camp who were shot near Charkow.

On April 13, 1990, the Soviet news agency TASS published a communiqué according to which Beria and his deputy Merkulov were responsible for the "crimes" ( злодеяния ) committed against the inmates of the special camps in Koselsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk . The content of the communiqué had previously been approved by KP General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev . It was not until October 14, 1992 that an emissary of Russian President Boris Yeltsin presented his host Lech Wałęsa with a facsimile of documents on the fate of the Polish prisoners from the three special camps, including Beria's submission dated March 5, 1940, signed by Stalin, before his state visit to Warsaw and other members of the Politburo .

From March 14 to 20, 1991, the Soviet Chief Military Prosecutor asked Dmitri Tokarjew, the former NKVD commander of Kalinin, about the transport and execution of prisoners from Ostashkov. Tokarev, who was only questioned as a witness, said he was not involved in the executions. The minutes of the interviews appeared in 1994 in Polish translation.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Blagovest nad Seligerom gudok.ru , December 3, 2012.
  2. ^ Wording of the order: Prikas No. 308, September 19, 1939 alexanderyakovlev.org , website of the Alexander Yakovlev Foundation.
  3. ↑ Claudia Weber : War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, pp. 34–38.
  4. ↑ Katyń. Documentary zbrodni. T. 1. Wyd. A. Giesztor / R. Pichoja. Warsaw 1995, pp. 435-437.
  5. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 34.
  6. ↑ Natal'ja Lebedeva: Katyn - čelovečestva Prestuplenie protiv. Moskva 1994, p. 84.
  7. ↑ Pamiętniki Znalezione w Katyniu . Red. A. Stepek. Warsaw 1990, p. 118.
  8. ↑ Katyn '. Plenniki neob-javlennoj vojny. Pod red. R. Pichoi. Moscow 1999, p. 31.
  9. ↑ John Casimir Zawodny: Katyn. Lublin / Paris 1989. pp. 110-111.
  10. ↑ The figures for the victims of Ostashkov who were shot in Kalinin range between 6,287 and 6,311 in the NKVD materials and in the Polish and Russian scientific analyzes. Katyn. Documentary zbrodni. T. 2. Zagłada. Ed. A. Giesztor / R. Pichoja. Warsaw 1998, p. 344; Nikita Pietrow : Poczet katów katyńskich. Warsaw 2015, p. 35.
  11. ↑ Katyń. Documentary zbrodni. T. 2. Zagłada. Ed. A. Giesztor / R. Pichoja. Warsaw 1998, p. 344.
  12. ^ Andrzej Przewoźnik / Julia Adamska: Katyń. Zbrodnia prawda pamięć. Warsaw 2010, pp. 131–132.
  13. ^ Andrzej Przewoźnik / Julia Adamska: Katyń. Zbrodnia prawda pamięć. Warsaw 2010, p. 142.
  14. ↑ Nikita Pietrow : Poczet Katow katyńskich. Warsaw 2015, pp. 46–53.
  15. ↑ Katyń. Documentary zbrodni. T. 2. Wyd. A. Giesztor / R. Pichoja. Warsaw 1998, pp. 444-456.
  16. ↑ Nikita Pietrow: Poczet Katow katyńskich. Warsaw 2015, p. 159.
  17. ↑ Katyń. Documentary zbrodni. T. 2. Zagłada. Ed. A. Giesztor / R. Pichoja. Warsaw 1998, p. 366.
  18. ↑ Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia Lebedewa, Wojciech Materski: Katyn: A crime without punishmen. New Haven 2007, p. 81.
  19. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 34.
  20. ↑ Tadeusz Żenczykowski: Polska Lubelska 1944. Warsaw 1990, p 90th
  21. ↑ Monastyr´ v XX veke website of the Nilow monastery
  22. ↑ Józef Czapski : Na nieludzkiej ziemi. Warsaw 1990, pp. 150-166.
  23. ↑ Jacek Trznadel, Katyń a źródła as well asckie, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie , 1.1990, p. 117.
  24. ↑ z. B. Louis Fitz Gibbon : Unpited and Unknown. Katyn ... Bologoye ... Dergachi. London 1975.
  25. ^ Wojciech Materski: Murder Katyński. Siedemdziesiąt lat drogi do prawdy. Warsaw 2010, pp. 50–51.
  26. ↑ Czarna księga cenzury PRL. T. 1. London 1977, p. 63.
  27. ^ Andrzej Przewoźnik / Julia Adamska: Katyń. Zbrodnia prawda pamięć. Warsaw 2010, pp. 456–458.
  28. ↑ Lista Katyńska ( Memento of the original from August 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.katedrapolowa.pl
  29. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 431.
  30. ↑ Gerd Kaiser: Katyn. The state crime - the state secret. Berlin 2002, pp. 377-378.
  31. ↑ Zeznania Tokariewa. Red. Mark Tarczyński. Warsaw 1994 ( Zeszyty Katyńskie , 3.1994).

literature

  • Katyń, Starobielsk, Ostaszkow, Kozielsk. Ed. Janusz Bielecki et al. Komitet Katyński w Warszawie / Ed. Dembinski w Paryżu. Warsaw / Paris 1990.
  • Miednoje. Księga Cmentarna Polskiego Cmentarza Wojennego . Praca zbiorowa. Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm, Warsaw 1990.
  • Jędrzej Tucholski: Kozielsk, Ostaszków, Starobielsk: Lista ofiar. Pax, Warsaw 1991.
  • Natal'ja Lebedeva: Prestuplenie protiv čelovečestva. Progress, Moscow 1994, pp. 125-150.
  • Anatoly Golovkin: Doroga v Mednoe. Alfa-Pljus, Tver 2001.
  • Charków - Katyń - Tver - Bykownia. W 70. rocznicę zbrodni katyńskiej. Zbiór studiów. Ed. A. Kola and J. Sziling. Toruń 2011.
  • Thomas Urban : Katyn 1940. History of a crime. Beck, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-67366-5 , pp. 27-38.

Web links

Coordinates: 57 ° 14 '5 "  N , 33 ° 3' 49"  E