"Flirting with nationalists (and this is what we see today in Kiev) almost always end in one thing - tragedy. And when liberals stretch out their not always firm, sometimes trembling hand in the hope of acquiring new allies, then the path to disaster begins from this time. , Nazis are not one of those who prefer the subtle play of liberal political undertones and complex diplomatic intrigues. Their hands do not tremble, the smell of blood intoxicates. The track record is replenished with new and new victims. They fanatically blindly believe that the enemies they have killed, and these are "Muscovites , Jews, damned Russians. "There must be more, even more. And then the time of Khatyn comes for nationalism.
Khatyn, a world-famous monument to human tragedy: what the Nazis did there in March 1943 - they drove 149 peaceful people into a barn, half of whom were children, and burned them, everyone in Belarus knows. But for many years no one ever dared to say out loud from whom the 118th special police battalion was formed.
Closed tribunal
I think when Bandera becomes the main ideologist and inspirer on the Kiev Maidan, when the nationalist slogans of the OUN-UPA begin to sound with new fighting force, we also need to remember what people professing fascist ideology are capable of.
Until the spring of 1986, like most of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union, I believed that Khatyn was destroyed by the Germans - the punitive forces of the special SS battalion. But in 1986, scant information appeared that a military tribunal in Minsk tried a former policeman, a certain Vasily Meleshko. A common process for those times. This is how the Belarusian journalist Vasily Zdanyuk told about him: “At that time, dozens of similar cases were considered. And suddenly a few journalists, among whom was the author of these lines, were asked out the door. The process was declared closed. And yet something leaked out. Rumors spread - Khatyn was “hanged” on the policeman. Vasily Meleshko is one of her executioners. And soon there was new news because of the tightly closed door of the tribunal: several former punishers were found, including a certain Grigory Vasyura, a murderer from the murderers ... "
As soon as it became known that Ukrainian policemen committed atrocities in Khatyn, the door to the courtroom was tightly closed, and the journalists were removed. The first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, specially appealed to the Central Committee of the party with a request not to disclose information about the participation of Ukrainian policemen in the brutal murder of civilians in a Belarusian village. The request was then treated with "understanding." But the truth that Khatyn was destroyed by Ukrainian nationalists who went to serve in the 118th special police battalion has already become public. The facts and details of the tragedy turned out to be incredible.
March 1943: chronicle of the tragedy
Today, 71 years after that terrible March day in 1943, the Khatyn tragedy has been restored almost every minute.
On the morning of March 22, 1943, at the intersection of the Pleschenitsy - Logoisk - Kozyri - Khatyn roads, partisans of the Avenger detachment fired at a passenger car in which the commander of one of the companies of the 118th battalion of the security police, Hauptmann Hans Welke, was traveling. Yes, the same Welke, Hitler's favorite, Olympic champion in '36. Together with him, several more Ukrainian police officers were killed. The partisans who set up an ambush retreated. The police summoned the special battalion of Sturmbannführer Oskar Dirlewanger to help. While the Germans were driving from Logoisk, a group of local lumberjack residents was arrested, and after a while they were shot. By the evening of March 22, chastisers in the wake of the partisans went to the village of Khatyn, which they burned together with all its inhabitants. One of those who commanded the massacre of the civilian population was the former senior lieutenant of the Red Army, who was captured and transferred to the service of the Germans, by that time - the chief of staff of the 118th Ukrainian police battalion Grigory Vasyura. Yes, it was the same Vasyura who was tried in Minsk in a closed trial.
From the testimony of Ostap Knap: “After we surrounded the village, through the interpreter Lukovich, an order came along a chain to take people out of their houses and escort them to the outskirts of the village to the barn. This work was carried out by both the SS and our policemen. All residents, including the elderly and children, were pushed into a barn and surrounded by straw. A heavy machine gun was installed in front of the locked gates, behind which, I remember well, Katryuk lay. They set fire to the roof of the barn, as well as the straw Lukovich and some German. A few minutes later, under the pressure of people, the door collapsed, they began to run out of the barn. The command sounded: “Fire!” Everyone who was in the cordon was shooting: both ours and the SS. I shot at the barn too. "
Question: How many Germans participated in this action?
Answer: “In addition to our battalion, there were about 100 SS men in Khatyn who came from Logoisk in covered cars and motorcycles. Together with the police, they set fire to houses and outbuildings ”.
From the testimony of Timofey Topchy: “There were 6 or 7 covered cars and several motorcycles standing there. Then I was told that they were SS men from the Dirlewanger battalion. They were near the company. When we got to Khatyn, we saw that some people were running away from the village. Our machine-gun crew was given the command to shoot at the fleeing. The first number of the calculation Shcherban opened fire, but the sight was set incorrectly and the bullets did not overtake the fugitives. Meleshko pushed him aside and lay down for the machine gun himself ... "
From the testimony of Ivan Petrichuk: “My post was 50 meters from the shed, which was guarded by our platoon and the Germans with machine guns. I clearly saw how a boy of about six ran out of the fire, his clothes on fire. He took only a few steps and fell, struck by a bullet. One of the officers who were standing in a large group on that side was shooting at him. Maybe it was Kerner, or maybe Vasyura. I don't know if there were many children in the barn. When we left the village, it was already burning down, there were no living people in it - only burnt corpses, large and small, were smoking ... This picture was terrible. I remember that 15 cows were brought from Khatyn to the battalion. "
It should be noted that in German reports on punitive operations, the data on the killed people are usually lower than the actual ones. For example, in the report of the Gebitskommissar of the city of Borisov about the destruction of the village of Khatyn, it is said that 90 people were killed along with the village. In fact, there were 149 of them, all established by name.
118th police officer
This battalion was formed in 1942 in Kiev, mainly from Ukrainian nationalists, residents of the western regions, who agreed to cooperate with the invaders, underwent special training in various schools in Germany, donned Nazi uniforms and took a military oath of allegiance to Hitler. In Kiev, the battalion "became famous" for the fact that it exterminated Jews in Babi Yar with particular cruelty. Bloody work became the best characteristic for sending punishers to Belarus in December 1942. In addition to the German commander, each police unit was headed by a "chief" - a German officer who oversaw the activities of his wards. The "chief" of the 118th police battalion was Sturmbannfuehrer Erich Kerner, and the "chief" of one of the companies was the same Hauptmann Hans Welke. The battalion was formally headed by German officer Erich Kerner, who was 56 years old. But in fact, Grigory Vasyura was in charge of all the affairs and enjoyed Kerner's boundless confidence in carrying out punitive operations ...
Guilty. Shoot
14 volumes of case No. 104 reflected many specific facts of the bloody activities of the punisher Vasyura. During the trial, it was established that he personally killed more than 360 women, the elderly, and children. By the decision of the military tribunal of the Belarusian Military District, he was found guilty and sentenced to death.
I've seen black and white photographs from that process. I read the conclusion of a psychiatric examination that G.N. Vasyura. in the period 1941-1944. did not suffer from any mental illness. One of the photographs in the dock shows a frightened seventy-year-old man in a winter coat. This is Grigory Vasyura.
The atrocities in Khatyn were not the only ones in the track record of the battalion, which was formed mainly from Ukrainian nationalists who hated Soviet power. On May 13, Grigory Vasyura led the hostilities against partisans in the area of the village of Dalkovichi. On May 27, the battalion is carrying out a punitive operation in the village of Osovi, where 78 people were shot. Further, the operation "Cottbus" on the territory of the Minsk and Vitebsk regions - the massacre of the residents of the village of Vileyki, the destruction of the inhabitants of the villages of Makovye and Uborki, the execution of 50 Jews near the village of Kaminska Sloboda. For these "merits" the Nazis conferred the rank of lieutenant on Vasyura and awarded him with two medals. After Belarus, Grigory Vasyura continued to serve in the 76th Infantry Regiment, which was defeated already in France.
At the end of the war, Vasyura managed to cover his tracks in the filtration camp. Only in 1952, for cooperation with the invaders, the tribunal of the Kiev military district sentenced him to 25 years in prison. At that time, nothing was known about his punitive activities. On September 17, 1955, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted a decree "On amnesty for Soviet citizens who collaborated with the occupiers during the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945", and Grigory Vasyura was released. He returned to his place in the Cherkasy region.
When the KGB officers found and arrested the criminal again, he was already working as a deputy director of one of the state farms in the Kiev region. In April 1984 he was even awarded the Veteran of Labor medal. Every year the pioneers congratulated him on May 9. He was very fond of performing in front of schoolchildren in the form of a real war veteran, front-line communications officer and was even called an honorary cadet of the Kiev Higher Military Engineering twice Red Banner School of Communications named after M.I. Kalinin - that he graduated from before the war.
The history of extreme nationalism is always rough
The famous French publicist Bernard-Henri Levy believes that today the best Europeans are Ukrainians. Presumably, it is those who are laying siege to Orthodox churches, setting fire to the houses of their political opponents, shouting "Get out!" everyone who does not like Bandera's freedom. Already spreading aloud from the right-wing radical nationalists - kill a communist, a Jew, a Muscovite ...
Apparently, philosophical views do not admit that these tough guys on the Maidan, glorious great-grandchildren and followers of the leader of Ukrainian nationalists in the 1940s and 1950s, Stepan Bandera, are ready to make history with the help of weapons. And they are hardly inclined to philosophical disputes. The philosophy of extreme nationalism was everywhere and at all times the same crude and radical - power, money, power. The cult of their own superiority. In March 1943, they demonstrated this to the inhabitants of the Belarusian village of Khatyn.
In the Khatyn memorial, where only burnt chimneys with metronomes are in place of former houses, there is a monument: the only surviving blacksmith Joseph Kaminsky with a dead son in his arms ...
In Belarus, it is still considered humanly impossible to say out loud who burned Khatyn. In Ukraine, our brothers, Slavs, neighbors ... Every nation has thugs. However, there was such a special police battalion, formed from Ukrainian traitors ... "
In 1936, the Olympic Games were held in Berlin. The first Olympic champion at these games was a German athlete - shot putter Hans Welke... He not only became a champion, and not only set a world record, but also became the first German to win an Olympic gold medal in athletics.
German newspapers glorified Welke in every way and saw in him a symbol of the new, Aryan athletics, in which there would be no place for Negroes, Asians and others, in their opinion, humanoid. The further course of the Olympics showed, however, that it is too early to write off black athletes. The hero of the Olympics was the black American Jesse Owens, who won 4 gold medals in the same ill-fated athletics. More than all German athletes combined.
Seven years later, on the morning of March 22, 1943, in occupied Belarus far from Berlin, at a crossroads Pincers -Logoisk -Kozyri-Khatyn partisans of the detachment Avenger»Fired at a passenger car in which the commander of one of the companies of the 118th police battalion, Hauptmann Hans Welke, was traveling. Together with the former athlete, several more Ukrainian police officers were killed. The partisans who set up an ambush retreated. Policemen of the 118th battalion called for the help of the special battalion of the Sturmbannführer Oskar Dirlewanger. While the special battalion I was driving from Logoisk, policemen arrested, and after a while they shot a group of local residents - lumberjacks. By the evening of March 22, the punishers in the footsteps of the partisans went to the village Khatyn, which was burned along with all its inhabitants. The massacre was commanded by a former career senior lieutenant of the Red Army, and by that time the chief of staff of the 118th police battalion.
For a long time after the war, a lone wooden obelisk with a red star stood on the site where there was once a village of Khatyn, then a modest plaster monument. In the 60s, it was decided to erect a memorial complex on the site of Khatyn. The complex was opened in 1969. The memorial was attended by pioneers and soldiers, foreign diplomats and heads of state. My family and I were in Belarus in 1981, and my parents brought me, still a child, to Khatyn, and, I must admit, the impressions of this visit remained for my whole life.
And all these years, not very far from the Belarusian forests, Grigory Nikitovich Vasyura lived in abundance and honor, without hiding from anyone. He worked as a deputy director of the Velikodymersky state farm in the Brovarsky district of the Kiev region, had a house, was regularly awarded with certificates of honor for various successes, had a reputation in the region as an authoritative boss and a strong business executive. Every year, on May 9, pioneers congratulated the veteran Vasyura, and the Kiev Military School of Communications even enrolled its pre-war graduate as an honorary cadet. There was one spot in Vasyura's biography. He was tried, but for which no one remembered for a long time. And Vasyura was condemned immediately after the war, when he fell into the hands of the competent authorities and told about how he fought with the Germans, how he was heavily shell-shocked, he was taken prisoner, how he could not bear the horrors of a prisoner of war camp and went to serve the Germans. But the former lieutenant kept silent about his acquaintance with the Olympic champion, and about Babi Yar, where he began his career for the good of the Reich, and about Khatyn. Vasyura received his term, but he did not even serve it - he was released under an amnesty (in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Victory).
They got to the bottom of the real merits of the former punisher only in the mid-80s. In 1986, Grigory Vasyura was convicted in Minsk. In 1987 he was shot. There were no publications about the trial in the Soviet press at that time.
As an epilogue:
From the combat log of the partisan detachment "Avenger":
03/22/43 Ambushed on the Logoisk-Pleschenitsy highway, the first and third companies destroyed a passenger car, two gendarme officers were killed, and several police officers were wounded. After withdrawing from the ambush site, the companies settled in the village of Khatyn, Pleshchenitskiy district, where they were surrounded by Germans and police. When leaving the encirclement, three people were killed, and four were wounded. After the battle, the Nazis burned down the village of Khatyn.
Detachment Commander A. Morozov, Chief of Staff S. Prochko:
“To the district chief of the SS and police of the Borisov district. I am reporting the following: 22.03.43 between Pleschenitsy and Logoisk gangs the telephone connection was destroyed. At 9.30 am, 2 platoons of the first company were sent to guard the recovery team and possibly clear the debris on the road. 118th a police battalion under the command of the Hauptmann of the Security Police H. Wölke.
About 600 m beyond the village of Bolshaya Guba, they met workers who were logging. When asked if they had seen the bandits, the latter replied in the negative. When the detachment drove another 300 m, it came under heavy machine-gun and weapon fire from the east. In the ensuing battle, Hauptmann Wölke and three Ukrainian policemen were killed, two more policemen were wounded. After a short but fierce firefight, the enemy withdrew to the east (to Khatyn), taking away the dead and wounded.
After that, the platoon commander stopped the battle, t. to. our own forces were not enough to continue the action. On the way back, the aforementioned loggers were arrested, t. to. the suspicion arose that they were aiding the enemy. Somewhat north of B. Guba, part of the captured workers tried to escape. At the same time, 23 people were killed by our fire. The rest of those arrested were taken for interrogation to the gendarmerie in Pleschenitsy. But t. to. it was not possible to prove their guilt, they were released.
To pursue the retreating enemy, larger forces were sent including units of the SS Battalion Dirlewanger. Meanwhile, the enemy withdrew to the village of Khatyn, known for its friendliness to bandits. The village was surrounded and attacked from all sides. At the same time, the enemy put up stubborn resistance and fired from all houses, so they had to use heavy weapons - anti-tank guns and heavy mortars.
During the hostilities, along with 34 bandits, many residents of the village were killed. Some of them died in the flames. "
04/12/43 g.
From the testimony of Stepan Sakhno:
- I remember that day well. In the morning we received an order to leave in the direction of Logoisk and repair the damage on the telephone line. The commander of the first company, Wölke, together with an orderly and two policemen, was traveling in a passenger car, we - in two trucks. When we were approaching Bolshaya Guba, machine guns and machine guns unexpectedly hit a car that had come off us from the forest. We rushed into the ditch, lay down and fired back. The skirmish lasted only a few minutes, the partisans apparently withdrew immediately. The car was riddled with bullets, Wölke and two police officers were killed, several were wounded. We quickly established communication, reported the incident to our superiors in Pleschenitsy, then called Logoisk, where the SS battalion of Dirlewanger was stationed. We received an order to detain the lumberjacks who worked nearby - allegedly arose a suspicion of their connections with the partisans.
Lakusta with his squad drove them to Pleschenitsy. When cars appeared on the road - the main forces of the battalion were hurrying towards us - people rushed in all directions. They, of course, were not allowed to leave: more than 20 people were killed, many were wounded.
Together with the SS, they combed the forest, found the place of a partisan ambush. There were about a hundred cartridges lying around. Then they moved eastward in a chain, towards Khatyn.
Ostap Knap's testimony:
- After we surrounded the village, through the translator Lukovich, an order came along a chain to take people out of their houses and escort them to the outskirts of the village to the barn. This work was carried out by both the SS and our policemen. All residents, including the elderly and children, were pushed into a barn and surrounded by straw. A heavy machine gun was installed in front of the locked gates, behind which, I remember well, Katryuk lay. They set fire to the roof of the barn, as well as the straw of Lukovic and some German.
A few minutes later, under the pressure of people, the door collapsed, they began to run out of the barn. The command sounded: "Fire!" Everyone who was in the cordon was shooting, both ours and the SS. I shot at the barn too.
Question: How many Germans participated in this action?
Answer: In addition to our battalion, there were about 100 SS men in Khatyn, who came from Logoisk in covered cars and motorcycles. Together with the police, they set fire to houses and outbuildings.
From the testimony of Timofey Topchy:
- At the place of Vyolke's death near Bolshaya Lipa (they say there is now the Partizansky Bor restaurant), a lot of people in long black raincoats caught my eye. There were also 6 or 7 covered cars and several motorcycles. Then I was told that they were SS men from the Dirlewanger battalion. They were near the company.
When we went to Khatyn, they saw that they were fleeing from the village some people. Our machine-gun crew was given the command to shoot at the fleeing. The first number of the crew, Shcherban, opened fire, but the sight was set incorrectly, and the bullets did not overtake the fugitives. Meleshko pushed him aside and lay down at the machine gun himself. I don’t know if he killed anyone, we didn’t check.
All the houses in the village were looted before being burned down: they took more or less valuables, food and livestock. They dragged everything - both we and the Germans.
From the testimony of Ivan Petrichuk:
- My post was about 50 meters from the shed, which was guarded by our platoon and the Germans with machine guns. I clearly saw how a boy of about six ran out of the fire, his clothes on fire. He took only a few steps and fell, struck by a bullet. Shot him somebody of the officers who stood in a large group on that side. Maybe it was Kerner, or maybe Vasyura.
I don't know if there were many children in the barn. When we left the village, it was already burning down, there were no living people in it - only charred corpses, large and small, were smoking. This picture was terrible. I must emphasize that the village was burned down by the Germans who came from Logoisk, and we only helped them. True, we robbed her together. I remember that 15 cows were brought to the battalion from Khatyn.
Khatyn - the former village of the Logoisk district of the Minsk region of Belarus - was destroyed by the Nazis on March 22, 1943.
On the day of the tragedy, not far from Khatyn, partisans fired at a convoy of fascists and a German officer was killed as a result of the attack. In response, the chastisers surrounded the village, drove all the residents into the barn and set it on fire, and those who tried to escape were shot from machine guns and machine guns. 149 people died, including 75 children under the age of 16 years. The village was plundered and burned to the ground.
The tragic fate of Khatyn befell more than one Belarusian village. During the Second World War .
In memory of hundreds of Belarusian villages destroyed by the Nazi invaders, in January 1966 it was decided to create a memorial complex "Khatyn".
In March 1967, a competition was announced to create a memorial project, in which a team of architects won: Yuri Gradov, Valentin Zankovich, Leonid Levin, sculptor - Sergei Selikhanov.
The memorial complex "Khatyn" is included in the state list of the historical and cultural heritage of Belarus.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources
The tragedy in the Belarusian village of Khatyn, which occurred in 1943, is known to everyone. For a long time it was believed that the destruction of civilians was the work of German punishers. As it turned out, not only the Germans were responsible for this crime.
Who is the culprit?
On March 22, 1943, a German punitive detachment, in accordance with the principle of collective punishment for alleged complicity with the partisans, killed 149 residents of the Belarusian village of Khatyn. It was established that the 118th Schutzmannschaft battalion and the special regiment of the SS Grenadier Division "Dirlewanger" took part in this operation.
A special role was assigned to the 118th battalion, a collaborationist unit of the German auxiliary security police, overwhelmingly composed of Ukrainian nationalists. The chief of staff in it was Grigory Vasyura, a native of the Cherkasy region, who played one of the most prominent roles in the punitive action.
Vasyura is a hereditary peasant, a career officer in the Red Army, head of communications for a rifle division. In 1941, during the battles for the Kiev fortified area, he was captured, after which he went over to the side of the Nazis. The German authorities drew attention to the executive and zealous defector, and soon the 118th police battalion was entrusted to him. With him Vasyura showed himself in the notorious Babi Yar near Kiev, where about 150 thousand Jews were shot. Now they decided to throw the policeman to fight the partisans in the forests of Belarus.
Fatal meeting
The day before the Khatyn tragedy, members of the partisan detachment "Uncle Vasya" spent the night in the village, moving the next morning towards the village of Pleshchenitsy. At the same time, a column of German punishers, consisting of the 118th battalion and the 201st security division, was sent to meet them. Among them was Police Captain Hans Wöhlke, Hitler's favorite and sportsman, the first German to win gold at the 1936 Munich Olympics.
On the way, the Germans met women working in the logging industry, who answered in the negative when asked about the presence of partisans nearby. The unsuspecting German convoy moved on and, not having passed even three hundred meters, was ambushed. In the ensuing skirmish, the partisans managed to destroy three Nazis, including the unlucky Wöhlke. The chastisers who turned back found out exactly where the "people's avengers" were hiding the day before. First, they shot 26 people at the logging site, and then headed towards Khatyn.
Tragedy
Policemen of the 118th battalion, under the direct leadership of Vasyura, surrounded the village, and then everyone they could find - the sick, the elderly, women with babies - were herded into the collective farm shed and locked up. The building was covered with straw, doused with gasoline and set on fire. The dilapidated structure quickly went up in flames. People in panic began to lean on the door, which, under the pressure of a dozen bodies, could not stand it and opened. However, those who managed to escape from the fiery hell were waiting for machine-gun bursts. Later, the entire village was burned down.
On this day, 149 residents of the village were killed, of which 75 were children under 16 years old. It is officially believed that only 56-year-old blacksmith Joseph Kaminsky managed to survive. According to one version, the burned and wounded Kaminsky remained unconscious until the police left, according to another, he was returning to the already burning village. Noticing Kaminsky, the chastisers opened fire, but only wounded the fleeing resident. On this day, Kaminsky lost his son, who managed to escape from the barn, but later died in his father's arms.
According to a number of researchers, six residents of Khatyn managed to escape from the burning barn. One of them is called Anton Baranovsky, who was 12 years old at the time of the tragedy. Anton perfectly remembered the events of that day and called the names of the policemen who participated in the action. In 1969, immediately after the opening of the Khatyn memorial complex, Anton Baranovsky died under strange circumstances.
Ukrainian historian Ivan Dereyko does not deny participation in the punitive action of the 118th police battalion, but he tells the story in his own way. He writes that the policemen, attacked by the "People's Avengers" detachment, raided the village, in which, in their opinion, the partisans were entrenched. As a result of the assault, 30 partisans and a number of civilians were killed, another 20 people were taken prisoner. And then, according to Dereiko, the policemen, on the orders of Obergruppenfuehrer Kurt von Gottberg, with the participation of a special SS battalion, burned the village. The Ukrainian historian is diligently silent about the participation in the punitive action of his compatriots.
Forbidden topic
The writer Elena Kobets-Filimonova, while working on a book about Khatyn, turned to the archives of the Institute of Party History under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus. “They immediately warned me not to write that there were partisans in Khatyn,” Filimonova says. - According to the instructions of the center, the partisans were not supposed to stop in the villages, so as not to endanger the civilians. But they stopped in the village and brought trouble to Khatyn. "
However, not only the topic of partisans, but also any information regarding the participation of Ukrainians in the Khatyn tragedy was banned. As soon as it became known that the Ukrainian policemen of the 118th battalion were involved in the mass destruction of civilians, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine Volodymyr Shcherbitsky asked the Politburo not to disclose this information. Moscow responded with understanding to the request of the head of the Ukrainian SSR. However, it was no longer possible to hide this information from the public.
What happened to the main participant in the crime, Grigory Vasyura? At the end of the war, he ended up in a filtration camp, where he managed to mislead the Soviet authorities and cover up the traces of his atrocities. Nevertheless, in 1952, for cooperation with the occupation authorities, the tribunal of the Kiev military district sentenced him to 25 years in prison. On September 17, 1955, the famous Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR "On the amnesty of Soviet citizens who collaborated with the invaders during the war of 1941-1945" was issued, and Vasyura was released.
So he would have worked quietly, peacefully in his native Cherkasy region, if not for new evidence that revealed the facts of his monstrous crimes, including in Khatyn. During November-December 1986, a closed trial took place in Minsk over an already aged veteran of the SS punitive battalion. The investigation established that Vasyura personally killed over 360 civilians - mainly women, old people and children. By the decision of the tribunal of the Belarusian Military District, Grigory Vasyura was sentenced to death by firing squad.
The last cartel of the 118th battalion was Vladimir Katryuk, who lived in Canada. It is curious that in 1999 he was stripped of his Canadian citizenship as soon as the authorities learned about his participation in punitive actions against the civilian population, but in 2010, by a court decision, citizenship was restored. In May 2015, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal case against Katryuk, but Canada refused to extradite the criminal. A month later, he died unexpectedly.
One of the most mournful episodes of the Great Patriotic War was the destruction of the inhabitants of the village of Khatyn in Belarus by fascist punishers. Despite the fact that the memorial was created to the victims of this tragedy back in Soviet times, the whole truth became known to the general public only during the years of perestroika.
Ambush in the forest
The tragic history of the Belarusian village of Khatyn, which by that time had already been in the zone of German occupation for a year and a half, began on March 21, 1943, when the partisan detachment of Vasily Voronyansky spent the night there. The next morning, the partisans left the place of their overnight stay and moved towards the village of Pleschenitsy.
At the same time, a detachment of German punitive forces set out to meet them, heading for the city of Logoisk. Police captain Hans Wölke was traveling with them in the lead car, heading for Minsk. It should be noted that this officer, despite his relatively low rank, was well known to Hitler and enjoyed his special patronage. The fact is that in 1916 he became the winner of the Berlin Olympic Games in shot put competitions. The Fuhrer then noted an outstanding athlete, so he followed his career.
Leaving Pleshenitsy on March 22, punitive officers from the 118th battalion of the 201st security division, fully formed from former Soviet citizens who expressed a desire to serve the invaders, moved on two trucks, in front of which was a passenger car with officers. On their way, they came across a group of women ─ residents of the nearby village of Kozyri, who were engaged in logging. When the Germans asked if they had seen partisans nearby, the women answered in the negative, but literally after 300 meters, the German column was ambushed by the soldiers of Vasily Voronyansky.
The first stage of the tragedy
This partisan attack became the impetus for the entire subsequent tragedy in the history of Khatyn. The punishers resisted the partisans, and they were forced to retreat, but during the skirmish they lost three people killed, among whom was the Fuhrer's favorite, Captain Hans Wöhlke. The commander of the platoon of punitive forces, a former Red Army soldier Vasily Meleshko, decided that the women who worked in the logging had deliberately concealed the presence of partisans in the area from them, and immediately ordered to shoot 25 of them, and send the rest to Pleshchenitsy for further investigation.
Pursuing the attacking fighters, the punishers carefully combed the surrounding forest and went to Khatyn. The war on the territory of occupied Belarus at that time was fought mainly by partisan detachments, which enjoyed the support of the local population, which provided them with temporary shelter and supplied them with food. Knowing this, the chastisers surrounded the village in the evening of the same day.
A gang of traitors to the Motherland
The tragic history of Khatyn is inextricably linked with the 118th battalion of the Schutzmannschaft ─ this is how the Germans called the security police units, formed from volunteers recruited from among the prisoners of the Red Army and residents of the occupied territories. This unit was created in 1942 on the territory of Poland and initially consisted only of former Soviet officers. Then its recruitment was continued in Kiev, including a large number of ethnic Ukrainians, among whom nationalists from the pro-fascist formation “Bukovynsky Kuren”, which had been liquidated by that time, predominated.
This battalion was exclusively engaged in the fight against partisans and punitive operations against the civilian population. He carried out his activities under the leadership of officers from the SS Sonderbatalion "Dirlewanger". The list of persons at the head of the battalion is quite indicative. Its commander was a major of the Polish army, who went over to the side of the Germans, Jerzy Smowski, the chief of staff ─ Grigory Vasyura, a former senior lieutenant of the Soviet army, and the commander of a platoon that shot women in the forest was the aforementioned former senior lieutenant of the Soviet army Vasily Meleshko.
In addition to the punitive operation in the village of Khatyn, the history of the battalion, which was fully staffed from traitors to the Motherland, includes many such crimes. In particular, in May of the same year, his commander Vasyura developed and carried out an operation to destroy a partisan detachment operating in the area of the village of Dalkovichi, and two weeks later brought his punishers to the village of Osovi, where they shot 79 civilians.
Then the battalion was transferred, first to Minsk, and then to Vitebsk region, and everywhere a bloody trail followed them. So, having inflicted reprisals on the inhabitants of the village of Makovye, the punitives killed 85 civilians, and in the village of Uberok they shot 50 Jews hiding there. For the shed blood of his compatriots, Vasyura received the rank of lieutenant from the Nazis and was awarded two medals.
Revenge on the partisans
The punitive actions against the inhabitants of the village of Khatyn became revenge for the destruction by the partisans of three enemy servicemen, among whom was Hitler's favorite, which infuriated the German command. This inhuman act, which will be described below, was carried out in accordance with the principle of collective responsibility, which is a flagrant violation of the rules of war adopted by the international community. Thus, the entire history of the Khatyn tragedy is a blatant example of the violation of international legal norms.
Inhuman action
On the same evening on March 22, 1943, policemen, led by Grigory Vasyura, drove all the villagers into a covered collective farm shed, after which they locked the door from the outside. Those who tried to escape, realizing that inevitable death awaited ahead, were shot right on the move. Among the residents locked up in the barn, there were several large families. For example, the Novitsky spouses, who became the victims of the punishers, had seven children, while Anna and Joseph Boronovsky had nine. In addition to the inhabitants of the village, there were several people from other villages inside the shed, unfortunately, who ended up in Khatyn that day.
Having driven the unfortunate victims inside, the punishers poured gasoline over the barn. When everything was ready, Vasyura gave a sign, and policeman-translator Mikhail Lukovich set him on fire. Dry wooden walls quickly burst into flames, but under the pressure of dozens of bodies, unable to withstand, the doors collapsed. In burning clothes, people burst out from the room engulfed in fire, but then fell, struck down by long machine-gun bursts.
Simultaneously with these punishers, all the houses of the village of Khatyn were set on fire. Documents drawn up as a result of the investigation carried out after the liberation of this region by the troops of the First Belorussian Front indicate that 149 civilians died that day, among whom there were 75 children under 16 years of age.
Survivors of death
Only a few managed to survive then. Among them were two girls ─ Yulia Klimovich and Maria Fedorovich. They miraculously got out of the burning barn and hid in the forest, where the next morning they were picked up by the residents of the neighboring village of Khvorosteni, which, by the way, was also subsequently burned by the invaders.
In the ensuing tragedy, five children managed to avoid death, although they were injured, but survived due to the circumstances and the local blacksmith ─ 57-year-old Joseph Kaminsky. Already in the post-war years, when the State Memorial Complex "Khatyn" was created, he and his son, who died in his arms, served as a prototype for the famous sculptural composition, the photo of which is presented below.
Distortion of historical truth
During the Soviet period, the tragic history of Khatyn was deliberately distorted by military historians. The fact is that soon after the victory over the Nazis, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine V. Shcherbitsky and his colleague, the head of the communists of Belarus N. Slyunkov, turned to the Central Committee of the CPSU with a very dubious initiative. They asked not to disclose the fact of participation in the brutal massacre of the inhabitants of Khatyn, Ukrainians and Russians, who had previously served in the ranks of the Red Army and voluntarily sided with the enemy.
Their initiative was treated "with understanding", since official propaganda tried to present cases of Soviet citizens' transition to the side of the enemy as isolated facts and hushed up the true scale of this phenomenon. As a result, the myth was created and replicated that the village of Khatyn (Belarus) was burned by the Germans, who were conducting a military operation in March 1943 against the partisans operating in that area. The true picture of events was carefully hushed up.
In this regard, it is appropriate to cite the following fact. One of the children who escaped that fateful day, Anton Boronovsky, who was 12 years old at the time of the tragedy, clearly remembered the details of what had happened and after the war talked about the nightmare he had experienced. As it turned out, he knew some of the policemen who participated in the massacre of the villagers and even called them by name. However, his testimony was not given a course, and he himself soon died under unexplained and very strange circumstances ...
The post-war fate of the executioners
After the war, the fate of those who, having joined the ranks of the 118 punitive battalion, voluntarily assumed the role of executioner, developed differently. In particular, the platoon commander Vasily Meleshko, the one who, before the destruction of the inhabitants of Khatyn, ordered the execution of 25 women suspected of assisting the partisans, managed to hide from justice for 30 years. Only in 1975 he was exposed and shot by the verdict of the Supreme Court of the USSR.
The former chief of staff of the 118th battalion, Grigory Vasyura, met the end of the war in the 76th infantry regiment of the Wehrmacht and, once in a filtration camp, managed to hide his past. Only seven years after the victory, he was brought to trial for cooperation with the Germans, but then nothing was known about his involvement in the tragedy that took place in Khatyn. Vasyura was sentenced to 25 years in prison, but after three years he was released under an amnesty.
Only in 1985 did the KGB officers manage to get on the trail of this traitor and executioner. By this time, Vasyura held the position of deputy director of one of the state farms located near Kiev. He was even awarded the medal "For Valiant Labor"! Irony, isn't it? Every year on May 9, as a war veteran, he received congratulations and gifts from the leadership of the district party organization.
He was often invited to schools, where Vasyura spoke to the pioneers in the form of a certain hero-front-line soldier, told them about his heroic past and called on the younger generation to selflessly serve the Motherland. This villain was even awarded the title of "Honorary Cadet of the Kalinin Higher Military School of Communications." In November 1986, the trial of Vasyura took place, during which documents were announced that during the period of service in the 118 punitive battalion, he personally killed 365 civilians ─ women, children and the elderly. The court sentenced him to capital punishment.
Another "hero-front-line soldier" was a private of the punitive battalion Stepan Sakhno. After the war, he settled in Kuibyshev and, like Vasyura, posed as a war veteran. In the 70s, he came to the attention of the investigating authorities and was exposed. The court showed relative leniency to this bastard, and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
Two traitors who voluntarily joined the ranks of the 118 punitive battalion ─ Commander Vasily Meleshko and Private Vladimir Katryuk ─ after the war managed, having changed their names, hide abroad and avoid just retribution. Unfortunately, both of them died a natural death ─ one in the USA, the other in Canada. The remaining members of the battalion were killed during the liberation of Belarus by Soviet troops. Perhaps someone managed to cover their tracks, but nothing is known about this.
Memorial to memory
In 1966, at the government level, it was decided to create a memorial complex at the site of the tragedy that broke out in 1943 in memory of not only the victims of Khatyn, but also the inhabitants of all Belarusian villages burned by the Nazis. A competition for the best project was announced, the winner of which was a group of Belarusian architects headed by the People's Artist of the BSSR ─ S. Selikhanov.
They created a grandiose memorial complex "Khatyn", which covers an area of 50 hectares. Its opening took place in July 1969. The center of the entire architectural composition is a six-meter sculpture depicting the mournful figure of a man with a dead child in his arms. It was said above that its prototype was the surviving resident of the village, Joseph Kaminsky. The former streets of Khatyn were lined with gray concrete slabs resembling ash in color and texture, and symbolic stone log cabins with obelisks were erected in place of the burnt houses.
On the territory of the complex there is a unique cemetery of Belarusian villages destroyed during the war. It includes 186 graves, each of which symbolizes one of the burned, but never revived villages. Many other architectural compositions full of deep meaning were included in the memorial.
For those who wish to visit it, we will tell you how to get to Khatyn from Minsk, since residents of other cities will in any case have to focus on the capital of Belarus. It is not difficult to get to the memorial complex. It is enough to take a fixed-route taxi departing from the station along the route Minsk - Novopolotsk and, having reached Khatyn, join one of the excursions.
Another monument to the events of the war years was the book “Bells of Khatyn” by the Belarusian writer Vasily Bykov, published in 1985. Written in the genre of classical prose, the book, in its own way, reveals the tragic depth of the catastrophe that cost the lives of civilians in the village of Khatyn (1943).
The truth that cannot be hidden
During the years of perestroika and the subsequent period, many documents became public, shedding light on those episodes of Russian history that were previously hidden by the official authorities. The history of Khatyn also received new coverage. Finally, the real names of the executioners of the Belarusian people were publicly announced. In the media of those years, publications often appeared containing testimonies from both the surviving participants in the tragedy and residents of neighboring villages who witnessed the incident.
On the basis of archival materials from which the "Secret" stamp was removed, the directors Alexander Miloslavov and Olga Dykhovichnaya created a documentary film "The Shameful Secret of Khatyn". It was released on the screens of the country in 2009. The filmmakers spoke with all frankness about how the war manifested in people not only the highest patriotism and selflessness, but also a deep moral decline.