Minotauros wrote:Hi Roberto !
Would you mind if I asked to you to precise to me what Alexander Werth wrote (excerpts from his book "Russia at War" will be very welcome !) about Kharkov, when he visited this town just after its first liberation by the Soviet troops on 16 February 1943 ?
Was there any Soviet civilians in the city during the tough fights which lasted from 11 to 15 March 1943 during its recapture by the SS-Panzerkorps ? What was their fate ? How were they treated by the Waffen-SS ? (George Nipe Jr. wrotes unfortunately nothing about it in his book "Last Victory in Russia"...)
Marshal Ivan Stiepanovitch Koniev wrote in his diaries ("Notes of a Front Commander 1943-1945", a very boring book !) that the Waffen-SS soldiers massacred over 450 wounded Soviet soldiers in the city. Some other source states that the number of victims was above 700... Did this massacre really happen ?
Thanks !
Hi Minotaurus,
What I have on file about Kharkov from Werth's book (2000 Caroll & Graf Publishers New York, pages 607/608) is the following:
There had been 900.000 people in Kharkov before the war, but when the war spread to Ukraine, and the refugees started pouring in from the west, this figure swelled to 1,200,000 to 1,300,000. Later, in October 1941, with the Germans approaching, the evacuation of Kharkov began in real earnest. Most of the larger plants were more or less successfully evacuated, among them the great Tractor Plant, with nearly all its workers. By the time the Germans came, some 700,000 people had left the city. Now there were only 350,000. What had happened to the rest?
According to the Russian authorities, the disappearance of half the population of October 1941 is accounted for as follows: it has been established that 120,000 people, mostly young people, had been deported as slaves to Germany; some 70,000 or 80,000 had died of hunger, cold and privation, especially during the terrible winter of 1941-2; some 30,000 had been killed by the Germans, among them some 16,000 Jews (men, women and children) who had remained behind in Kharkov; the rest had fled to the villages. Various checks I made in the next days suggested that the figure for deaths from hunger, et cetera, was slightly, but not greatly, exaggerated; so too was the figure for non-Jews shot, but the figure for the Jews was correct. On the other hand, the figure for slave-labor deportations was, if anything, an underestimate.
I'll see if I find something about the massacre in the book, which I don't have with me right now.
I have here, however, the German translation of the protocol of a Soviet investigation commission dated 7 September 1943. It reads as follows (my translation):
[…]After the second occupation of the city of Kharkov in March 1943 the fascist German conquerors committed a horrible crime against wounded soldiers and offices of the Red Army who were in the 1st Army Selection Hospital at Trinkler Street 5. More than 400 wounded were shot and about 300 people burned alive in one of the hospital’s buildings.
These horrible atrocities, committed against wounded Soviet military personnel, are confirmed by eyewitness testimonials, the report of forensic medicine and other documentary material. Employees of the hospital – professor Katkov Jevegenij Ssevostjanovich, the nurses Juknho Anna Ignatjevna and Dmitrijeva Jelisjaveta Antonovna – testified that on the morning of 13 March 1943 an officer of the SS division “Adolf Hitler” by the name of Schulz had come into the hospital and told the medical employees that the former 1st Army Hospital was to be used as a “hospital for Russian prisoners of war”. Schulz ordered the medical personnel to stay at their posts. The wounded from the cellars and from hospital no. 3 (clinical settlement) were to be taken to building no. 8. Thus 300 wounded were gathered at one place.
At about 15 hourse – on 13 March 1943 – German soldiers entered the hospital, blocked the entrance doors of the building and set it on fire.
The hospital’s surgeon, Dshintshwiladse Georgij Sakharovich, who at this time was in this building with wounded soldiers, declared:
“I was in the operation hall on the second floor of the building preparing myself for the operation of wounded. At about 15 hours I heard a dull crash on the first floor and ran out to the corridor to see what had happened. The nurses told me that the Germans had set the house on fire and nailed the entrance doors shut. I tried to lead out the nurses and the wounded who could walk and had gathered around me through the door on the north side of the building, but this had also been blocked. I ordered all to climb up to the second floor and to stay on the stairs and in the toilet. Soon the second floor also started burning, and the stairs were wrapped in smoke. The flames were approaching us. Suddenly the shooting on the street stopped and through the window we saw the Germans getting into their cars and driving away from the hospital. Through a window in the second floor wee jumped out of the burning building. After some minutes that roofs of the burning building caved in, and the wounded still inside burned to death. Next to the house there were 30 wounded, who had jumped out of the windows and been shot by the Germans.”
The shooting of the wounded who had tried to get out of the burning building was also described by other eyewitnesses, the hospital employees Jukhno A.I., Dmitrijeva E.A., Katkov E.S., Ssokolovskaja W.A. and others.
The wounded who after the burning of building no. 8 were still left in the other buildings were shot by the Germans on 14, 15, 16 and 17 March 1943 in the halls of the hospital. In these four days more then 400 people were shot.
The nurse Jukhno A.I. reported that in the morning of 14 March 1943 four soldiers had come into the officer section of the hospital and begun to shoot the wounded one after the other. In her presence 8 people had been shot.
The inhabitant of the city of Kharkov, Mrs. Koslova Marija Alexandrovna, whose husband Sher Mikhail Borissovich was in the hospital, testified as follows: “On 15 March 1943 I brought my husband something into the hospital. In hall 1 of the 4th building I saw his corpse. My husband had been shot in his bed, through the right eye. The other ten wounded who were with him in the hall had also been shot. Their corpses lay in the beds.”
The following was stated by nurse Dmitrijeva Jelisjaveta Antonovna: “On 14 March 1943 at about 9 in the morning four German soldiers came into the officer section, two stayed at the entrance, and two went up to the second floor and started shooting the wounded. They were there for about 10 minutes, then they came down to the first floor and also started shooting the wounded in the halls here. I was in a hall situated at the end of the corridor, and the soldiers went there after they had shot all wounded in the neighboring halls. In this hall there were 7 wounded military persons of a Czech unit in the USSR and two Russians. Eight of these people were shot by the Germans, the Czech Freschel Erik was stabbed to death with a dagger. When I came into this room the following day I saw the corpses of the Czechs: Foltan Franz – sergeant major; Gorovskij Mikhail – sergeant; Freschel Erik – sergeant; and the soldiers: Fridrich Karl, Scharf Bedrich, Kenig Iossif and Korngauser Albert.
The corpses of those shot were buried in the yard of the hospital. […]
The German translation from the Russian original is printed in Ernst Klee / Willi Dreßen,
”Gott mit uns”: Der deutsche Vernichtungskrieg im Osten 1939-1945, 1989 S. Fischer Verlag Frankfurt a.M., pages 155 to 157. It was taken from the file of a criminal investigation carried out by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Frankfurt am Main under the cipher Js 4/65.
Cheers,
Roberto
