The change in the headline is mine alone.
[ColonelCassad] The FSB has published documents detailing Nazi atrocities in the Leningrad Region. More than a dozen documents have been released detailing atrocities committed by Nazi invaders and their collaborators in the occupied territories of what are now the Leningrad and Novgorod Regions from 1941 to 1943. This was reported by the press service of the FSB Directorate for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.
Most of the published sources are special reports from Pyotr Kubatkin, head of the NKVD Directorate for the Leningrad Region and Leningrad, addressed to officials in the NKVD leadership and the Leningrad Front. For example, in Gatchina, by the end of November 1941, the Nazis established a camp for prisoners of war and civilians, housing up to 1,500 people. Prisoners were kept on a starvation diet in the Red Barracks on the outskirts of the city, sleeping and eating on the floor and outside. There was no drinking water or toilets, and no medical care for the sick.
Meanwhile, people were forced to work various jobs every day for up to 14 hours. "Finns and Estonians supervise the work in the fields and forests. The treatment of prisoners is brutal; for the slightest offense, they are beaten to death (falling behind the line, leaving the barracks at the wrong time, etc.). <…>
Up to 30 people die in the camp daily; on November 25th, seven bodies were carried out of the barracks in the morning alone," according to a special report by Pyotr Kubatkin dated December 3, 1941.
Around the same time, in November-December 1941, in the village of Verkhoviny in the Volkhov district, the collective farmer Anisimova was shot "for refusing to give a saw to German soldiers for cutting firewood."
And in the village of Terebonizhye, German officers herded all the men and children into the forest for a hunt, forcing them to "bark like dogs, intending to drive hares out of the forest and onto the road."
Another document, dated April 1942, reports on established instances of Nazi atrocities and violence in the recently liberated Tikhvin district. "The famous Tikhvin Monastery was converted by the German invaders into a medieval torture chamber, where Gestapo agents executed and shot captured Red Army soldiers and Soviet citizens.
After the Germans were expelled from the region, the half-dead Red Army soldiers Gromov and Takashev, and railroad workers Mikhailov and Stepanov, were found in one of the monastery's cells. The Nazis stripped them of all their outer clothing, dragged them around the city on sleds, then threw them into a cold monastery cell and kept them there for six days without food.
In another cell, the mutilated body of a 15-year-old girl, Lydia Kolodetskaya, was found, having been raped and tortured," the special report stated.
In October 2022, the Leningrad Regional Court recognized the crimes committed by the Nazi invaders and their collaborators in the region during the Great Patriotic War as genocide.
Note that the Germans did not have the manpower for all the atrocities committed against the local populace without the help of local civilians, forced or not.
| So it was, pretty much everywhere they conquered. Anne Frank’s location was betrayed to the Nazis by someone Dutch. |