On January 17, 1946, in the Kiev House of Red Army Officers, a meeting of the military tribunal of the Kiev Military District began, dedicated to the atrocities and atrocities of the German fascist invaders on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. As you know, it was the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus that suffered the most from the war crimes of Nazi Germany. When the Red Army liberated Kiev on November 6, 1943, the soldiers and officers were amazed at the devastation, the horrors that appeared before their eyes. Tens of thousands of civilians in Kiev were killed, thousands were taken into German captivity.
Now in Ukraine there are popular tales that Hitler's Germany almost brought the Ukrainian people liberation from the "horrors of Bolshevism." But then, back in 1946, all the actions of the "liberators" stood before the eyes of people who survived the horrors of the occupation. The defendants told about what awaited Ukraine - 15 war criminals from among the officers and non-commissioned officers of the Hitlerite police and special services were brought before the tribunal of the Kiev military district.
Before the start of the Great Patriotic War, about 910 thousand people lived in Kiev. As in many other Ukrainian cities, a significant part of the city's population was made up of Jews - their number in percentage terms exceeded 25% of the total population of the city. After the outbreak of the war, 200 thousand Kievites were mobilized to the front - almost all able-bodied men. Another 35 thousand people went to the militia. Approximately 300,000 people were evacuated. The worst was for those who remained at the time of the capture of the city by the Germans. Hitler's troops entered Kiev on September 19, 1941 and ruled in it for more than two years - until November 1943. Soon after the capture of the city, massacres began against the civilian population. On September 29-30, 1941, in Babi Yar, Hitler's executioners killed 33,771 Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality.
In just two years, about 150 thousand Soviet citizens were killed in Babi Yar - not only Jews, but also Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Gypsies, and people of other nationalities. But after all, the Nazis were engaged in the mass destruction of Soviet citizens not only in Babi Yar. So, in Darnitsa alone, 68 thousand Soviet citizens were killed, including civilians and prisoners of war. All in all, in Kiev, about 200 thousand Soviet citizens were shot or killed in other ways. The scale of the massacre of the civilian population, and not only of the Jews, indicated that this was a real genocide. The Nazis were not going to keep most of the population of Ukraine alive.
The liberation of Ukraine not only saved most of its population from the prospect of complete destruction, but also brought closer the long-awaited retribution to the executioners. The trial of the executioners of Kiev took place after the war.
Here is a list of the people who appeared before the tribunal:
1. Police Lieutenant General Sheer Paul Albertovich - former head of the security police and gendarmerie of the Kiev and Poltava regions;
2. Police Lieutenant General Burkhardt Karl - former commandant of the rear of the 6th Hitlerite army, which operated on the territory of the Dnepropetrovsk and Stalin (Donetsk) regions of the Ukrainian SSR;
3. Major General von Chammer und Osten Eckardt Hans - Former Commander of the 213rd Security Division, Former Commandant of the Main Field Command No. 392;
4. Lieutenant Colonel Georg Trukkenbrod - former military commandant of Pervomaisk, Korosten, Korostyshev and a number of other cities of the Ukrainian SSR;
5. Captain Wallizer Oskar - former Ortskomandant of Borodyanskaya Interdistrict Commandant's Office of Kiev Region;
6. Ober-lieutenant Yogshat Emil Friedrich - commander of the field gendarmerie unit;
7. SS Ober-Sturmführer Heinisch Georg - Former District Commissioner of the Melitopol District;
8. Lieutenant Emil Knol - former commander of the field gendarmerie of the 44th Infantry Division, commandant of the camps for Soviet prisoners of war;
9. SS Ober-Scharführer Gellerfort Wilhelm - former head of the SD of the Dneprodzerzhinsky district of the Dnepropetrovsk region;
10. SS Sonderfuehrer Beckenhof Fritz - former agricultural commandant of the Borodyansky district of the Kiev region;
11. Police sergeant Drachenfels-Kaljuveri Boris Ernst Oleg - former deputy company commander of the Ostland police battalion;
12. Non-commissioned officer Mayer Willie - former company commander of the 323rd Independent Security Battalion;
13. Ober-corporal Shadel August - former head of the chancellery of the Borodyansky interdistrict commander's office of the Kiev region;
14. Chief Corporal Isenman Hans - a former soldier of the SS Viking Division;
15. Chief Corporal Lauer Johann Paul - a soldier of the 73rd separate battalion of the 1st German tank army.
The main defendant in the trial was undoubtedly Police Lieutenant General Paul Scheer. From October 15, 1941 to March 1943, Lieutenant General Scheer led the security police and gendarmerie in the Kiev and Poltava regions, being the direct executor of the criminal orders of the Nazi leadership on the genocide of the inhabitants of Ukraine. Under the direct command of Scheer, punitive operations were carried out to destroy thousands of Soviet citizens, thousands of Soviet citizens were hijacked to Germany, and a struggle was waged against the partisan movement and the underground. It was he who gave the most interesting testimonies - not only about the circumstances of the extermination of Soviet citizens on the territory of Ukraine, but also about what awaited Ukraine as a whole - if Hitler had won a victory over the Soviet Union.
Prosecutor: How did Himmler raise the question of the fate of the Ukrainian population?
Scheer: He said that here, in Ukraine, a place must be cleared for the Germans. The Ukrainian population must be exterminated.
It was the meeting with the chief SS man that prompted Scheer, according to him, to begin a more brutal extermination of not only the Jewish and Gypsy, but also the Slavic population in the lands of the Kiev and Poltava regions.
In fact, the plans of the "German peace" (because we are talking not only about the politics of Hitlerite Germany, but also about the earlier aspirations of Austria-Hungary) long ago included the establishment of control over the vast and rich lands of Ukraine. The idea of separating Ukraine from Russia was fostered precisely in Austria-Hungary, since the Habsburg empire owned Galicia and hoped, relying on the Russophobic part of the Galician nationalists, to gain control over Ukraine sooner or later. At the same time, the Austro-Hungarian leadership was not going to include all of Ukraine in the empire - it was counting on the creation of an independent Ukraine under the control of Vienna. Such a quasi-state would be a buffer between Austria-Hungary and Russia. But these plans did not succeed in becoming a reality - in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had lost the First World War, disintegrated.
Unlike the Austro-Hungarian leadership, the Nazis viewed Ukraine not even as a buffer country for political games against Russia, but as a "living space" for the German people. It was to the east that the sphere of vital interests of the Germans was to expand. It should be noted that there was no unity among the representatives of the political elite of Hitlerite Germany on the question of the future of Ukraine. Two points of view prevailed - “traditional” and “extremist”.
The "traditional" point of view was shared by the official ideologue of Hitlerite Germany, Alfred Rosenberg. He saw in Kiev and Ukraine a counterbalance to Moscow and Russian civilization and insisted on the creation of a semi-independent Ukrainian state under German control. This Ukrainian state was supposed to be absolutely hostile to Russia. Naturally, the task of creating such a state required, firstly, the physical destruction of all “non-Ukrainian” and “unreliable” peoples on the territory of Ukraine - Russians, Jews, Roma, partly Poles, and secondly, the support of Galician nationalists with their anti-Russian ideas and slogans …
The leader of the SS Heinrich Himmler adhered to the "extremist" point of view, and it was to her, in the end, that the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler himself inclined. It consisted of treating Ukraine as a "living space" for the German nation. The Slavic population was to be partially destroyed, and partially - turned into slaves for the German colonists, who were to settle the lands of Ukraine. To realize this goal, Hitler also chose a suitable candidate for the post of Reichskommissar - the governor of Ukraine - they were appointed Honorary SS Obergruppenfuehrer Erich Koch. Erich Koch, 45, from a working-class family and himself a simple railway employee in the past, was a rude and cruel man. On the sidelines, fellow party members called him "our Stalin."
Alfred Rosenberg wanted to see Koch as Reichskommissar of Russia, since it was planned to establish a tougher regime in Russia than in Ukraine, but Adolf Hitler decided to appoint Koch to Ukraine. Indeed, for the implementation of the task of "freeing up living space", it was difficult to come up with a more suitable candidate than Erich Koch. Under the direct leadership of Erich Koch, incredible atrocities were committed on the territory of occupied Ukraine. During the two years of occupation, the Nazis killed more than 4 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine. Over 2.5 million people, again on behalf of Koch, were taken into slavery in Germany.
“Some people are extremely naive about Germanization. They think that we need Russians, Ukrainians and Poles, whom we would force to speak German. But we don't need Russians, Ukrainians or Poles. We need fertile lands”, - these words of Erich Koch perfectly characterize the position of the Reichskommissar of Ukraine regarding the future that awaited the Slavic population.
Subordinates of Koch, the very generals, colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants and non-commissioned officers of the German punitive services, regularly implemented this position of their chief in practice. We wrote about the testimony of Lieutenant General Scheer above. Lieutenant General Burckhardt also confirmed that the mass destruction of civilians on the territory of occupied Ukraine was explained by the fact that the German command believed that the more people were killed, the easier it would be to subsequently pursue a colonial policy to develop a "new living space." When the tribunal of the Kiev Military District interrogated Captain Oskar Wallizer, the former Ortskomandant of the Borodyanskaya Interdistrict Commandant's office, when asked why it was necessary to brutally kill civilians, he replied that as a German officer “he had to destroy the Soviet population to provide the Germans with a wider living space ".
On January 29, 1946, a death sentence was carried out on Khreshchatyk by the main defendant by the tribunal of the Kiev military district. Twelve German officers and non-commissioned officers were hanged on Khreshchatyk. But Erich Koch managed to avoid the death penalty. He went into hiding in the British zone of occupation, where he lived under an assumed name. Koch took up agriculture, worked the garden and, perhaps, could have escaped punishment. But the former high-ranking official unwittingly contributed to his exposure - he began to actively speak at meetings of refugees. He was identified and soon Koch was detained by the British occupation authorities. In 1949, the British extradited Koch to the Soviet administration, and the latter handed him over to the Poles - after all, under Koch's leadership, atrocities were committed on Polish territory. Koch spent ten years awaiting sentencing, until May 9, 1959, was sentenced to death. However, given the state of health, the former Reichskommissar of Ukraine was not executed, but the death penalty was replaced with life imprisonment. Koch lived in prison for almost thirty years and died only in 1986 at the age of 90.
The history of atrocities on the territory of Ukraine is clear evidence that the Nazis were not going to create some kind of independent Ukrainian state. The Slavic population was "superfluous" for the ideologists and leaders of Nazism on these fertile lands. Unfortunately, today, not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia, many people - both young people and even the middle generation - are not quite aware of what would await the Soviet country in the event of the victory of Hitler's Germany.
