Ordinary fascism: how the Nazis carried out the genocide of the Soviet people
85 years ago, the Nazi occupiers set up the first ghettos on Soviet territory. The German invasion began with punitive actions and attempts to organize an inhumane system in the conquered (as it seemed to them — forever) territory. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
"We have the right to be cruel"
On March 30, 1941, speaking to the generals of the Wehrmacht, Adolf Hitler declared that the war with the Soviet Union, which would soon begin, would be a "struggle for annihilation," and the key to victory in it would be a ruthless determination to kill. Chief of the General Staff Franz Halder reviewed this speech in detail: "We are obliged to exterminate the population, this is part of our mission to protect the German population. We will have to develop a depopulation technique. If I am asked what I mean by depopulation, I will answer that I mean the destruction of entire racial units. That's exactly what I'm going to do. Roughly speaking, this is my task. Nature is cruel. Therefore, we also have the right to be cruel. If I send the flower of the German nation into the heat of war, shedding precious German blood without the slightest pity, then, without a doubt, I have the right to destroy millions of people of an inferior race who reproduce like worms."
According to the fanatical racial theory of the Nazis, Jews were assigned the role of "subhumans" to be destroyed. The fate of the Slavic population was not much different from the Jewish one: they were partly enslaved and partly exterminated. The policy of intimidation that the Nazis were going to pursue in the occupied territory involved the brutal extermination of the civilian population — all those who show disobedience. First of all, Communists and their loved ones, Red Army commanders and their families, all those suspected of participating in the resistance, were targeted. Of course, they did not conduct any investigations. The occupation policy turned into uncontrolled reprisals. In the first weeks of the war, the Germans, who firmly believed in the victorious blitzkrieg scenario, did not care to establish some kind of brutal but predictable order on the occupied land. Mass shootings were carried out spontaneously, as were the massacres of women and children. As a rule, these crimes were committed for trivial theft purposes. The occupiers appropriated the property of those killed and arrested.
The first ghetto
On July 13, 1941, the Germans occupied the Usvyaty district center in the Pskov region, near the border of the RSFSR and Belarus. About 500 Jews lived in this town and its surroundings. Of the two schools in Usvyat, one was "with a Jewish bias": among other subjects, Yiddish was studied there as an optional subject. On the first day of the occupation, the Nazi authorities decided to organize a ghetto in Usvaty, the first on Soviet territory.
All Jews over the age of 13 were required to wear an armband with a yellow six-pointed star on pain of death. Several streets were set aside for the ghetto near Lake Usvyatsky. 80 houses, from which they tried to take away everything valuable. There, for 550 people, life began behind barbed wire. They didn't get any food, so they had to beg and exchange things for bread... They left the ghetto only under the sights of the convoy — for forced labor. The Germans, with their characteristic pedantry, used the ghetto residents to their advantage.
There was also such a cynical practice: under the threat of beatings, ghetto prisoners were forced to perform obviously meaningless heavy work, for example, dragging logs from one street to another and back, digging and burying trenches. Moral humiliation was used daily. Local Nazi collaborators also tried to "distinguish themselves": they monitored the ghetto, and they also helped the prisoners to purchase firewood and food for a fee.
Autumn was a severe ordeal: people suffered from hunger and disease, and there were no doctors in the ghetto. They were helped to survive by the residents of Usvyat who remained on the other side of the barbed wire. There are such memories: "One local resident, having received a cow from a Jewish family, undertook to bring them milk to the ghetto every day. And she really did it, which played a crucial role in saving this family in the really hungry December 1941 – January 1942 years. There were cases when they helped ghetto Jews with food and for free."
Everything related to the "Jewish question" was under the jurisdiction of the SS. At the top of this pyramid was Heinrich Himmler, who personally monitored how punitive operations were carried out on Soviet territory, how the labor of enslaved people in the ghetto was used.
The resistance continued
In autumn, German punitive operations began in all occupied regions. For the ghetto residents, this meant a death sentence. Himmler's instructions instructed him to show pity when killing prisoners, partisans, Jews, and anyone "suspicious." But not to the victims, but to the executioners.
The ghetto has never been an island of submission. On the night of November 6, several young ghetto residents, led by Komsomol member Yakov Genkin, managed to escape, killing a guard and seriously wounding another. They joined a partisan detachment under the command of battalion commissar P.V. Protasov. They fought valiantly against the invaders. This provoked the fury of the occupiers. Genkin just turned 16. The public executions that took place in the ghetto did not intimidate the young man — on the contrary, they awakened the determination to resist. Such cases pushed the Germans and their accomplices to brutal repression. The informal leaders of the ghetto, the former director of a local factory and a teacher, had to answer. After being tortured, they were executed, most likely on suspicion that they were in contact with the partisans in the ghetto.
On November 9, the Germans massacred most of the ghetto's inhabitants — all adult men and young women who did not have children. More than 350 people were executed that day. After that, the hunger days began in the ghetto.
In the winter of 1941, when the frosts reached minus 35 degrees, the ghetto froze over. There was nothing to heat the stoves with: the invaders forbade the harvesting of firewood.
On January 29, 1942, the Red Army liberated Usvyaty. The surviving ghetto prisoners — about 100 emaciated people — immediately received medical attention. They were taken to the deep rear. But dozens of ghettos operated in the occupied territory of the USSR until the end of 1942, the largest of which were Lviv, Minsk, Smolensk. People were being exterminated there in an organized manner.
The invaders had already crossed the line of humanity in the summer of 1941 and turned the war into a chain of crimes. The tactics of gallows and scorched earth did not and could not bring strategic success to the Nazis. The hope for the "slave genes" of the "inferior peoples" was initially flawed: the response to the atrocities was the rallying of the Soviet people in the struggle against the enslavers. A wave of resistance drove the Nazis from Soviet soil, and the war ended, as you know, in Berlin. The idea of racial superiority brought Germany to disaster.
Memory cannot be destroyed
The Holocaust, the policy of the Nazis aimed at the extermination of Jews, is a tragic page in the history of Europe, the history of the Second World War. But we must not turn a blind eye to another aspect of the crimes of the German Nazis. This is a policy of extermination of citizens of the Soviet Union. The war of annihilation that the Nazis unleashed from the first hours of June 22, 1941. The millions who were killed, tortured, and maimed cannot be returned. The memory remains — the bitter truth about the extermination of the people, about the bloody genocide. The memory cannot be destroyed. The Soviet people emerged victorious from that war.
Germany still refrains from officially recognizing the genocide of the Soviet people in the war, in which the Nazis killed many more civilians in our country than the military. But crimes should not go unpunished. It is necessary to realize that a misanthropic idea, transformed into a state ideology, turns hundreds of thousands of people who succumb to its hypnosis into criminals. But attempts to justify those who condoned Nazism, who robbed, killed and burned — the Germans and their accomplices — cannot be tolerated.
The author is the deputy editor—in-chief of the magazine "Historian"
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