Khatyn: the story of the tragedy of a Belarusian village. Who burned Khatyn

“Flirting with nationalists (and this is what we are seeing today in Kiev) almost always ends in one thing - tragedy. And when liberals extend a not always firm, sometimes trembling hand to them in the hope of acquiring new allies, then from that time on the path to disaster begins. Nationalists , the Nazis are not those who prefer the subtle play of liberal political undertones and complex diplomatic intrigues. Their hands do not tremble, the smell of blood is intoxicating. The track record is replenished with new and new victims. They are fanatically blindly confident that the enemies they killed 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 civilians into a barn, half of whom were children, and burned them - everyone in Belarus knows. But for many years no one ever allowed themselves to say out loud who the 118th Special Police Battalion was formed from.

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 who profess fascist ideology are capable of.

Until the spring of 1986, I, like most residents of the Soviet Union, believed that Khatyn was destroyed by the Germans - the punitive forces of a 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 at that time. Here’s how Belarusian journalist Vasily Zdanyuk talked about it: “At that time, dozens of similar cases were considered. And suddenly a few journalists, among whom was the author of these lines, were asked to leave. The process was declared closed. Still, something leaked out. Rumors spread that Khatyn was “hanged” by the police. Vasily Meleshko is one of her executioners. And soon new news came from behind the tightly closed door of the tribunal: several former punishers were found, including a certain Grigory Vasyura, a murderer of murderers...”

As soon as it became known that Ukrainian police 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, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, specifically addressed 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 of 1943, the tragedy of Khatyn has been reconstructed almost minute by minute.

On the morning of March 22, 1943, at the intersection of the roads Pleschenitsy - Logoisk - Kozyri - Khatyn, partisans of the Avenger detachment fired at a passenger car in which the commander of one of the companies of the 118th security police battalion, Hauptmann Hans Welke, was traveling. Yes, yes, the same Welke, Hitler’s favorite, champion of the 1936 Olympic Games. Several other Ukrainian police officers were killed along with him. The partisans who set up the ambush retreated. The police called the special battalion of Sturmbannführer Oskar Dirlewanger for help. While the Germans were traveling from Logoisk, a group of local lumberjacks was arrested and, after some time, shot. By the evening of March 22, the punitive forces, following in the footsteps of the partisans, reached the village of Khatyn, which they burned along with all its inhabitants. One of those who commanded the massacre of the civilian population was a 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, this is exactly the 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, the order came down the line to take people out of their houses and escort them to the outskirts of the village to the barn. Both the SS men and our police did this work. All residents, including old people and children, were pushed into a barn and covered with straw. A heavy machine gun was installed in front of the locked gate, behind which, I remember well, Katryuk was lying. They set fire to the roof of the barn, as well as the straw, Lukovich and some German. A few minutes later, the door collapsed under the pressure of people, and they began to run out of the barn. The command sounded: “Fire!” Everyone who was in the cordon fired: both ours and the SS men. I also shot at the barn.”

Question: How many Germans took part 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. They, together with the police, set fire to houses and outbuildings.”

From the testimony of Timofey Topchiy: “There were 6 or 7 covered cars and several motorcycles standing there. Then they told me that these were SS men from the Dirlewanger battalion. There were about a company of them. When we reached Khatyn, we saw some people running away from the village. Our machine gun crew was given the command to shoot at those running away. The first number of Shcherban's crew opened fire, but the sight was placed incorrectly and the bullets did not reach the fugitives. Meleshko pushed him aside and lay down behind the machine gun...”

From the testimony of Ivan Petrichuk: “My post was 50 meters from the barn, which was guarded by our platoon and Germans with machine guns. I clearly saw a boy about six years old run out of the fire, his clothes were 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 shot 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 charred 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 killed people is usually lower than the actual ones. For example, the report of the Gebietskommissar of the city of Borisov on the destruction of the village of Khatyn states that 90 residents were destroyed along with the village. In fact, there were 149 of them, all identified by name.

118th policeman

This battalion was formed in 1942 in Kyiv mainly from Ukrainian nationalists, residents of the western regions, who agreed to cooperate with the occupiers, underwent special training in various schools in Germany, put on a Nazi uniform and took a military oath of allegiance to Hitler. In Kyiv, the battalion became famous for exterminating Jews with particular cruelty at Babi Yar. Bloody work became the best characteristic for sending punitive forces to Belarus in December 1942. In addition to the German commander, at the head of each police unit there was a “chief” - a German officer who oversaw the activities of his charges. The “chief” of the 118th police battalion was Sturmbannführer Erich Kerner, and the “chief” of one of the companies was the same Hauptmann Hans Welke. The battalion was formally headed by a German officer, Erich Kerner, who was 56 years old. But in fact, Grigory Vasyura was in charge of all matters and enjoyed Kerner’s boundless trust 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, old people, and children. By the decision of the military tribunal of the Belarusian Military District, he was found guilty and sentenced to death.

I saw black and white photographs from that process. I read the conclusion of a psychiatric examination that Vasyura G.N. in the period 1941-1944. did not suffer from any mental illness. In one of the photographs, a frightened seventy-year-old man in a winter coat is in the dock. This is Grigory Vasyura.

The atrocities in Khatyn were not the only ones in the record of the battalion, formed mainly from Ukrainian nationalists who hated Soviet power. On May 13, Grigory Vasyura led the fighting against the partisans in the area of the village of Dalkovichi. On May 27, the battalion carried out a punitive operation in the village of Osovy, where 78 people were shot. Next, Operation Cottbus in the Minsk and Vitebsk regions - the massacre of the residents of the village of Vileyki, the extermination of the residents of the villages of Makovye and Uborok, the execution of 50 Jews near the village of Kaminskaya Sloboda. For these “merits,” the Nazis awarded Vasyura the rank of lieutenant and awarded him two medals. After Belarus, Grigory Vasyura continued to serve in the 76th Infantry Regiment, which was defeated already on French territory.

At the end of the war, Vasyura managed to cover his tracks in the filtration camp. Only in 1952, for cooperation with the occupiers, the tribunal of the Kyiv 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 the Decree “On the amnesty of Soviet citizens who collaborated with the occupiers during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945,” and Grigory Vasyura was released. He returned to his home in the Cherkasy region.

When KGB officers found and arrested the criminal again, he was already working as 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 9th. He loved speaking to schoolchildren in the guise of a real war veteran, a front-line signalman, and was even named an honorary cadet of the Kyiv Higher Military Engineering Twice Red Banner School of Communications named after M.I. Kalinin - the one 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. One must assume that it is precisely those who lay siege to Orthodox churches, set fire to the houses of their political opponents, and shout “get away!” everyone who doesn’t like Bandera’s freedom. Already loudly heard from right-wing radical nationalists - kill a communist, a Jew, a Muscovite...

Apparently, philosophical views do not allow that these tough guys on the Maidan, the glorious great-grandsons and followers of the leader of Ukrainian nationalists in the 1940s and 50s, Stepan Bandera, are ready to make history with the help of weapons. And they are hardly inclined towards philosophical debates. The philosophy of extreme nationalism everywhere and at all times was the same crude and radical - force, money, power. The cult of self-superiority. The punitive forces demonstrated this to the residents of the Belarusian village of Khatyn in March 1943.

In the Khatyn memorial, where there are only burnt chimneys with metronomes on the site of former houses, there is a monument: the only surviving blacksmith Joseph Kaminsky with his dead son in his arms...

In Belarus it is still considered humanly impossible to say out loud who burned Khatyn. In Ukraine we are our brothers, Slavs, neighbors... Every nation has scumbags. However, there was a special police battalion formed from Ukrainian traitors..."

The bitter truth: Who burned Khatyn?

One of the most pressing issues of recent times is an attempt to reconcile veterans of the Great Patriotic War and soldiers from the OUN-UPA. In discussions on this topic, what should come first is not emotions, but facts and only facts. Many people have written about the “Roland” and “Nachtigal” battalions, the SS division “Galicia”, but not many people know about the actions of the 118th police battalion of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), created to fight partisans.

Having lost the battle of Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943, the German government changed its policy towards the inhabitants of the occupied countries, and after the creation of two Latvian and one Estonian divisions, on April 28, 1943, the Ukrainian SS division “Galicia” was formed.

According to the order of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler dated July 14, 1943, it was forbidden to call it Ukrainian, but only “Galician division.” The full name of the formation is “114th SS Volunteer Infantry Division “Galicia”.

The units of "Galicia" performed mainly police functions. The initiators of the creation of the division abandoned the word “police” for political and psychological reasons. However, the division's soldiers had to take part in battles with regular units of the Soviet army. In the very first battle near Brody, during the Lvov-Sandomierz operation of the Soviet troops, the Galicia division was completely defeated. Some of its formations later took part in a number of police operations in Eastern and Central Europe.

A year before the formation of the SS Galicia division, in June 1942, the 118th security police battalion was formed in Kyiv from among former members of the Kyiv and Bukovina kurens of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). True, almost all of them were previously prisoners of war officers or privates of the Red Army, who, apparently, were captured in the first months of the war. This is evident from the fact that at the time when the 118th police battalion was formed in Kyiv, most of these prisoners of war had already agreed to serve the Nazis and undergo military training in Germany. Vasyura was appointed chief of staff of this battalion, who almost single-handedly led the battalion and its actions.

67 years ago, a terrible tragedy occurred in the Belarusian village of Khatyn. On March 22, 1943, the 118th security police battalion entered the village of Khatyn and surrounded it.

The entire population of Khatyn, young and old - old people, women, children - were kicked out of their homes and driven into a collective farm barn. The butts of machine guns were used to lift the sick and old people out of bed; they did not spare women with small and infant children. When all the people were gathered in the barn, the punishers locked the doors, lined the barn with straw, doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. The wooden barn quickly caught fire. Under the pressure of dozens of human bodies, the doors could not stand it and collapsed. In burning clothes, gripped by horror, gasping for breath, people rushed to run, but those who escaped from the flames were shot from machine guns. 149 village residents burned in the fire, including 75 children under 16 years of age. The village itself was completely destroyed.

Of the adult residents of the village, only 56-year-old village blacksmith Joseph Kaminsky survived. Burnt and wounded, he regained consciousness only late at night, when the punitive squads left the village. He had to endure another severe blow: among the corpses of his fellow villagers, he found his son. The boy was fatally wounded in the stomach and received severe burns. He died in his father's arms.

The author of the article was in Khatyn. Then we examined the entire Memorial architectural and sculptural complex, which occupies an area of about 50 hectares. In the center of the memorial composition is a six-meter bronze sculpture “The Unconquered Man” with a murdered child in his arms. Nearby are closed granite slabs, symbolizing the roof of the barn in which the villagers were burned. On the white marble mass grave there is a Crown of Memory.

The former village street is lined with gray, ash-colored reinforced concrete slabs. In those places where houses once stood, 26 obelisks were erected, reminiscent of chimneys scorched by fire, and the same number of symbolic log buildings made of concrete. On the chimney-obelisks there are bronze plaques with the names of those who were born and lived here. And above are sad ringing bells. On the territory of the memorial there is also an eternal flame in memory of the victims of Nazi crimes.

When, having visited the scene of the tragedy, you imagine yourself as a participant in these events, I admit, it becomes creepy! Sadness on the faces of excursionists, guests and foreign tourists, deathly silence, in many places there are fresh flowers.

Executioners of Khatyn - who are they?

Every nation is proud of the victories achieved in the struggle for the freedom and independence of their homeland, and sacredly respects the memory of the losses suffered in the name of these victories. The French have Oradour, the Czechs have Lidice. The symbol of the immortal trials of the Belarusians is Khatyn, representing 628 Belarusian villages destroyed during the war along with their inhabitants.

“...The bloody tragedy of this forest settlement of 26 households took place on March 22, 1943. 149 people, 76 of them children, remained forever in this hellish grave. All except one - Yosif Yosifovich Kaminsky, who accidentally escaped from a burning barn crowded with people and now appeared in bronze with his dead son in outstretched arms. Everything is in his hands - despair, tragedy, and the endless will to live, which gave the Belarusians the opportunity to survive and win...” wrote Vasily Bykov in the article “The Bells of Khatyn” in 1972.

What do we know about the tragedy of the destroyed Belarusian village? Any schoolchild here can say that Khatyn was burned by German punitive forces... They were considered to be responsible for the tragedy.

Indeed, in the text of the photo album “Khatyn” (Minsk, 1979), the punishers are called “the Nazis, overwhelmed by the manic idea of the “exclusiveness” of the Aryan race, their imaginary “superhumanity.”

The idea of the Khatyn tragedy is also distorted in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, where we read: “Khatyn is a memorial architectural and cultural complex on the site of the former. village of Khatyn (Minsk region of the BSSR). Opened on July 5, 1969 in memory of the Belarusian residents. villages and villages completely destroyed by the Nazis. occupiers" (BSE, M., 1978, T.28, P.217).

What really happened?

In the newspaper “Soviet Youth” No. 34 for March 22, 1991, which was published in Latvia, the article “Khatyn was burned by policemen” (The case of Grigory Nikitovich Vasyura, a native of the Cherkasy region) was published.

It turns out that the village of Khatyn in Belarus was destroyed along with all its inhabitants not by the Germans, but by a special Sonderkommando (118th police battalion), which consisted overwhelmingly of Ukrainian policemen. Yes, yes, Ukrainians!

The chief of staff of this battalion was Grigory Vasyura, who almost single-handedly led the battalion and its actions.

Now let's move on to finding out the reasons and circumstances that ultimately led to the destruction of the Belarusian village of Khatyn.

After its formation, the 118th police battalion initially established itself “well” in the eyes of the occupiers, taking an active part in mass executions in Kyiv, at the notorious Babi Yar. After this, the battalion was redeployed to the territory of Belarus to fight the partisans. This is where the terrible tragedy occurred, as a result of which Khatyn was destroyed.

The fact is that the position of quartermaster in each of the subsections of this battalion was necessarily occupied by a German officer, who was thus an unofficial supervisor-supervisor of the activities of the police of his subsection. Of course, such rear service was much safer and more attractive than being at the front. Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the German officers in a similar position was Adolf Hitler’s favorite, Hauptmann Hans Welke.

The Fuhrer's love for him was not accidental, since it was he, Hans Welke, who was the first German to win a gold medal in the shot put at the 1936 Olympic Games in Munich, which thoroughly strengthened the Fuhrer's thesis about the primacy of the Aryan race. And it was Hauptmann Hans Welke who, while in ambush, was killed by Soviet partisans who had stopped the night before in the village of Khatyn.

Of course, the murder of the Fuhrer’s favorite made all the policemen greatly worry about the safety of their own skins, and therefore the need for “worthy retribution to the bandits” became a “matter of honor” for them. Unable to find and capture the partisans, the police followed in their footsteps to the village of Khatyn, surrounded it and began executions of the local population in revenge for the murdered Hauptmann.

On May 13, Vasyura leads the fighting against the partisans in the area of the village. Dalkovichi. On May 27, he carried out a punitive operation in the village. Osovy, where 78 people were shot. Next - the punitive operation "Cottbus" on the territory of the Minsk and Vitebsk regions - reprisals against the residents of the village of Vileika; extermination of the inhabitants of the village of Makovye and shooting near the village of Uborok. Kaminskaya Sloboda 50 Jews. For these “merits” the Nazis awarded Vasyura the rank of lieutenant and two medals.

When his battalion was defeated, Vasyura continued to serve in the 14th SS Grenadier Division "Galicia", already at the very end of the war - in the 76th infantry regiment, which was defeated already in France.

After the war in the filtration camp, he managed to cover his tracks. Only in 1952, for collaboration with the Nazis during the war, the tribunal of the Kyiv 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 the Decree “On amnesty for Soviet citizens who collaborated with the occupiers during the war of 1941-1945,” and Vasyura was released. He returned to his native Cherkasy region.

The KGB officers nevertheless found and arrested the criminal again. By that time, he was, no less than, the deputy director of one of the large state farms in the Kiev region, he loved to speak to the pioneers in the guise of a war veteran, a front-line signalman, and was even called an honorary cadet in one of the military schools in Kyiv.

Just imagine this: an honorary cadet - the chief executioner of Khatyn and the murderer of Babi Yar was a model of heroism and devotion to the homeland for our future soldiers and officers?

A natural question arises why at that time the case and the trial of the main executioner of Khatyn did not receive proper publicity in the media. It turns out, according to one of the researchers of this topic, journalist Glazkov, the top party leaders of Belarus and Ukraine “had a hand” in classifying this case. The leaders of the Soviet republics cared about the inviolability of the international unity of the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples (!).

The first secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, was especially active in ensuring the non-disclosure of materials from the Vasyura case. As a result of this pressure, correspondents were only selectively allowed into the process, and subsequently none of the materials prepared by them were ever published.

Dossier:

Vasyura Grigory Nikitovich, born in 1915, Ukrainian, native of the Cherkasy region, from peasant background. A career military man, he graduated from the Communications School in 1937. In 1941, with the rank of senior lieutenant, he served in the Kiev fortified area. As the head of communications for a fortified area of a rifle division, this native of the Cherkasy region was captured in the first days of the war and voluntarily went into service with the Nazis. He graduated from the school of propagandists at the so-called Eastern Ministry of Germany. In 1942 he was sent to the police of occupied Kyiv. Having proven himself to be a zealous servant, he soon became the chief of staff of the 118th police battalion. This unit was distinguished by its particular cruelty in exterminating people at Babi Yar. In December 1942, a punitive battalion was sent to Belarus to fight the partisans.

This was Gregory’s life before and during the war. She looked no less “interesting” afterwards. The description of the deputy director for economic affairs of the Velikodymersky state farm in the Brovary district of the Kyiv region reports that before his retirement and after that, Grigory Vasyura worked conscientiously. In April 1984, he was awarded the Veteran of Labor medal, whom the pioneers congratulated every year on May 9, and the Kiev Military School of Communications even enrolled him as an honorary cadet! This was the case until 1986.

In November - December 1986, the trial of Grigory Vasyura took place in Minsk. 14 volumes of case No. 104 reflected many specific facts of the bloody activities of the fascist punisher. By the decision of the military tribunal of the Belarusian Military District, Vasyura was found guilty of crimes and sentenced to capital punishment - execution. During the trial, it was established that he personally killed more than 360 civilian women, old people, and children.

On the issue of Ukrainian participants in the Khatyn action. (

Photo gid-minsk.by

On March 22, 1943, the residents of a small forest village with three streets and twenty-six courtyards, who had suffered from the occupation, could not even imagine that they had only a few hours left to live...

Today we will talk about the tragedy, citing eyewitness accounts and archival documents.

Guerrilla trail

What did we know about Khatyn from Soviet textbook sources? They knew that on March 22, 1943, the Nazis broke into the village and surrounded it. All residents were herded into a collective farm barn and burned alive. Those who tried to get out of the flames were shot. In Soviet times, it was not mentioned that before the Nazis arrived, partisans spent the night in Khatyn. According to the instructions of the center, the people's avengers were not supposed to stop in villages so as not to endanger civilians. But this group, consisting of young guys, violated the order.

From the testimony of Khatyn resident Alexander Zhelobkovich (13 years old in 1943):

“The day before, March 21, in the evening, partisans came to Khatyn. Three of them stopped for the night in our house, and in the morning they went to the highway for an operation. I accompanied them to the gravel road Pleshchenitsy - Logoisk. He returned home and went to bed. When the partisans returned, they talked about blowing up one passenger car and two trucks with the Nazis.”

From the combat log of the partisan detachment “Avenger”:

“03/22/43. The first and third companies in ambush destroyed a passenger car, two gendarmerie officers were killed, and several policemen were wounded. After leaving the ambush site, the companies settled in the village of Khatyn, Pleschenichsky district, where they were surrounded by Germans and police. When leaving the encirclement, 3 people were killed and four were wounded. After the battle, the Nazis burned the village of Khatyn.

Detachment commander A. Morozov, chief of staff S. Prochko.”

What happened on the highway? In the morning, on the road, the partisans of the Avenger detachment cut the telephone wire and began to wait for the Germans to come to restore communication. But the car in which Hauptmann Hans Welke, Hitler’s favorite, Olympic champion in shot put at the 1936 Games, was traveling to Minsk on his vacation, was ambushed by the chief of one of the companies of the 118th security police battalion.

Several policemen were killed along with him. The partisans left for Khatyn, and the police called the same 118th battalion from Logoisk for help. On the way, the police shot a group of local residents - lumberjacks from the village of Kozyri. A few hours later, following deep tracks in the forest left by the partisans, punitive forces arrived in Khatyn.

This is evidenced by the report of the commander of the 118th security police battalion, Major E. Kerner, to the head of the SS and police of the Borisov district dated April 12, 1943, preserved in the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus. It says, in particular: “At this time, the enemy retreated to the pro-bandit village of Khatyn, known to you. A countermeasure was taken. The village was surrounded and attacked from all sides. At the same time, the enemy offered the most stubborn resistance from all the houses in the village, so that they even had to use heavy weapons, such as anti-tank guns and heavy mortars. During the battle, many residents were killed along with 34 bandits. Some of them died in the fire.

Schutzpolice Major E. Kerner.”

Survivors

All village residents were herded into a collective farm barn. They forced them to raise the sick and take small children with them (the youngest of those who died in Khatyn was 7 weeks old). The police shot everyone who tried to hide or escape.

However, the name of the policeman who left Vladimir and Sofya Yaskevich alive - children hidden in a potato pile - is still unknown; the policeman only barked to sit quietly. Among the village residents there were large families: the Baranovsky family had 9 children, the Novitsky family - seven. The barn was locked, lined with straw and set on fire. 149 village residents died in the fire, 75 of them were children. Five survived the fiery hell.

From the memoirs of Viktor Zhelobkovich (7 years old in 1943):

“The whole family hid in the cellar. After some time, the punishers knocked down the door in the cellar and ordered us to go outside. We went out and saw that people were also being kicked out of other huts. We were taken to the collective farm barn. My mother and I found ourselves right at the door, which was then locked from the outside. I saw through the cracks how they brought straw and then set it on fire. When the roof collapsed and clothes began to catch fire, everyone rushed to the gate and broke it down.

The punitive forces standing in a semicircle began shooting at the people rushing into the gap from all sides. We ran about five meters away from the gate, my mother pushed me hard, and we fell to the ground. I wanted to get up, but she pressed my head: “Don’t move, son, lie down quietly.” Something hit me hard in the arm and blood began to flow. I told my mother about this, but she did not answer - she was already dead. How long I lay like that, I don’t know. Everything around me was burning, even the hat I was wearing began to smolder. Then the shooting stopped, I realized that the punishers had left, I waited a little longer and stood up. The barn was burning down. Charred corpses lay around. Before my eyes, the Khatyn people died one after another, someone asked for a drink, I brought water in my hat, but everyone was already silent...”

Together with Viktor Zhelobkovich, Anton Baranovsky, Joseph Kaminsky, Yulia Klimovich, Maria Fedorovich survived. The burned, half-dead girls were taken to the village of Khvorosteni to relatives who nursed them out. But in August of the same year, punitive forces descended on Khvorosten. Maria was killed and thrown into a well, and Yulia was burned in the hut along with other residents. Anton, wounded in both legs, was treated in a partisan detachment. After the war, he went to the virgin lands and died there tragically during a fire. Joseph Kaminsky became a living symbol of the dead village - the prototype of the monumental sculpture “The Unconquered Man”, which opens the world-famous Khatyn memorial.

The National Archives preserved the very first document about the Khatyn tragedy: “Act of the residents of the village of Selishche, Kamensky village council, Pleschenitsky district, Minsk region, on the burning of the village of Khatyn and its population,” dated March 25, 1943. Seven people from the village of Selishche compiled it in the presence of partisans that “On March 22 of the above year, German monsters attacked the neighboring town of Khatyn and burned all the buildings. Residents of the village of Khatyn, numbering 150 people, were brutally tortured and burned.”

There is another archival document that talks about the reaction of the partisans. From the minutes of a meeting of the command staff of the partisan brigade “Uncle Vasya” dated March 29, 1943: “Major Voronyansky: Stop spending the night and stopping partisans in villages, even if they are single, because this entails the enemy’s barbaric abuse of our population.”

The remains of the Khatyn residents were buried by residents of surrounding villages on the third day after the tragedy. Three crosses were installed on the grave, which after the war were replaced by a modest obelisk, and then by a plaster monument “Grieving Mother”. In January 1966, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the BSSR decided to create the Khatyn memorial complex in the Logoisk region.

Punishers

The fact that most of the punitive forces who burned Khatyn were immigrants from the USSR was said in a low voice back in Soviet times. But only in a low voice: it was officially recognized that the village was burned by the Nazi invaders.

In the mid-1970s, the first cases of traitors from the 118th police battalion - Vasily Meleshko, Ostap Knap, Ivan Lozinsky - were revealed. Their testimony in court left no doubt: the village of Khatyn was destroyed by a unit of the battalion, which mostly consisted of policemen - Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Tatars and representatives of other nationalities. The chief of staff was Grigory Vasyura, a former career officer of the Red Army, who almost single-handedly led the battalion and its actions.

From the testimony of Ostap Knap:

“After we surrounded the village, through the interpreter Lukovich, an order came down the line to take people out of their houses and escort them to the outskirts of the village to the barn. Both the SS men and our police did this work. All residents, including old people and children, were pushed into a barn and covered with straw. A heavy machine gun was installed in front of the locked gate, behind which, I remember well, Katryuk was lying. I clearly saw how Lukovich set fire to the barn, or rather its thatched roof, with a torch. People in the barn began to scream and cry.

The screams of the burning people were terrible. A few minutes later, the door collapsed under the pressure of people, and they began to run out of the barn. The command sounded: “Fire!” Mostly they fired at the barn from a heavy machine gun standing opposite its gate and from Vasyur, Meleshko, Lakusta, Slizhuk, Filippov, Pasechnikov, Pankov, Ilchuk, Katryuk machine guns. I also shot at the barn.”

From the testimony of Ivan Petrichuk:

“My post was about 50 meters from the barn. I clearly saw a boy about six years old run out of the fire, his clothes were 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 shot 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 charred corpses, large and small, were smoking. This picture was terrible. We robbed the village together with the Germans. I remember that 15 cows were brought from Khatyn to the battalion.”

All the traitors called Grigory Vasyura the leader of the action. But he managed to hide from retribution for quite a long time. After the war, he rose to the rank of deputy director of one of the large state farms in the Kiev region. He loved to speak to the pioneers in the guise of a war veteran, a front-line signalman... The murderer appeared before the military tribunal of the Belarusian Military District in December 1986. You should have seen Vasyura’s gaze. Decades later, people literally froze in front of him. The surviving victims of the tragedy were afraid to testify, although a frail old man in a winter coat sat in the dock.

26 former punishers - participants in the destruction of Khatyn - were summoned to trial. They were no longer afraid of anything - they spent many long years in prison, under prison regime. They told in detail, they named the names of those who, together with Vasyura, killed defenseless women, children, and old people: Varlamov, Khrenov, Egorov, Subbotin, Iskanderov, Khachaturyan - all from the 118th battalion. By the decision of the tribunal, Vasyura was found guilty of mass executions of civilians and sentenced to death.

Despite all the attempts of the party leadership to reduce the resonance that this case caused, it was impossible to hide the truth; it refuted the official historiography that had been worked out for decades. All the testimony of the executioners confirmed the fact: the Belarusian village, which became a symbol of the atrocities of the fascists, was actually burned by traitors who went over to the side of the fascists.

Fascism, like terrorism today, has no nationality. This is a long-established fact, confirmed by time and, unfortunately, by millions of ruined lives.

“I hid under potatoes and covered myself with an old coat.” How the last witnesses of Khatyn managed to survive

Published 03/23/2018 09:25

Pages from an interesting and important book by the Belarusian writer Elena Kobets-Filimonova (1932-2013), where Khatyn Jews are also mentioned

The village of Khatyn, 50 kilometers north of Minsk, was completely wiped off the face of the earth on March 22, 1943. For helping the partisans, all 149 village residents, including 75 children, were burned alive. On May 5, 1969, on the site of the former village, the Khatyn memorial complex was opened, which to this day is a terrible reminder of the massacres of civilians during the Second World War.

Khatyn and Bandera: history

Absolutely everyone in Belarus knows the tragedy of this village, but until recently, few dared to say out loud about who exactly burned Khatyn - it was believed that it was destroyed by the Nazis. In fact, the punitive operation in Khatyn was carried out by the 118th special police battalion (118 Schutzmannschaft battalion), formed in Kiev in July 1942, mostly from nationalists, residents of the western regions of Ukraine, who agreed to cooperate with the Nazi regime and underwent special training in various camps on the territory of Germany. Even before his transfer to Belarus, he managed to “become famous” in Kyiv - he brutally exterminated Jews at Babi Yar.

Babi Yar, Kyiv

Khatyn in Belarus

Who burned Khatyn became known in the spring of 1986, when a closed military tribunal trial was taking place in Belarus in the case of a certain Vasily Meleshko. Based on meager scraps of information from this trial, it turned out that Vasily Meleshko was a former Nazi policeman from the 118th battalion, who was directly involved in the punitive operation in Khatyn. A little later, information appeared that besides him, they also managed to find several other former punishers, including the “famous” Grigory Vasyura, a follower of Stepan Bandera and one of the most brutal Ukrainian nationalists of that time, who went over to the side of the German army in the very first days of the war.

Grigory Vasyura: punisher and war veteran

Grigory Vasyura

During the trial, it was established that Vasyura personally killed more than 360 old people, women and children. “Case No. 104” in fourteen volumes contained a large number of irrefutable facts of his bloody “activities”. So, on May 13, Grigory Vasyura commanded an operation against Soviet partisans near the village of Dalkovichi, on May 27, under his leadership, the battalion carried out a punitive operation in the village of Osovi, then 78 people were shot. In Operation Cottbus in the Minsk and Vitebsk regions, 50 Jews were shot in the village of Kaminskaya Sloboda, and reprisals were carried out against civilians in the villages of Vileyki, Uborok and Makovye (175 people). For such active work, Vasyura received from the Nazis a promotion to lieutenant and 2 medals.

After the Belarusian “exploits”, Grirory Vasyura continued to serve the Nazis in the 76th Infantry Regiment, which was subsequently liquidated only on French territory. After the war, he managed to cover his tracks, but in 1952 he was still sentenced to 25 years in prison for collaborating with the Nazis - at that time no one knew about his involvement in the activities of the Schutzmannschaft battalion. In 1955, Vasyura was released under an amnesty and returned “home” to the Cherkasy region, then moved to the Kyiv region, where he eventually became deputy director of one of the local state farms. He somehow managed to obtain a certificate stating that he was convicted only for being captured, and not under his real article, and this gave him the opportunity to officially receive the status of a “WWII veteran”, and all the privileges due in such a case . In 1984, he was awarded the “Veteran of Labor” medal, schoolchildren congratulated him on Victory Day every year, he loved to perform in front of them as a real front-line signalman, and was even among the honorary cadets of the Kyiv Military School. Kalinin, which he graduated from before the war.

Vasyura at the trial. Photo by Yuri Ivanov.

They found Vasyura on a “tip” from Meleshko during his trial - they continued to keep in touch with each other by mail. As a result of this process, Grigory Vasyura was sentenced to death.

Vladimir Shcherbitsky, in those years the secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, appealed to the Central Committee of the party with a request to classify information about the participation of his compatriots in brutal punitive operations, and the request was treated “with understanding” - it is unlikely that anyone would have perceived such a story adequately.

It is believed that the 118th Ukrainian police battalion was directly involved in more than 12 similar punitive operations on the territory of Ukraine and Belarus, and some of its members are still at large. For example, recently discovered in Canada, Vladimir Katryuk, who, together with his wife, raises bees and sells honey on a small farm of his own in Ormstown, just a few hours from Montreal.

Vladimir Katryuk in Canada

He managed to emigrate to Canada in 1951, and upon receiving citizenship he stated that he had nothing to do with the Nazis, but in 1999 it became known about his involvement in Nazi punitive operations and he was deprived of Canadian citizenship. In 2007, this decision was reviewed and his citizenship was returned due to “insufficient evidence.” Currently, Katryuk ranks fourth on the list of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization searching for Nazi criminals around the world.

Cemetery of Belarusian villages in Khatyn, Belarus

Khatyn: chronicle of events

Today, the chronology of the events taking place in Khatyn on March 22, 1943 has been restored very accurately, almost minute by minute.

In the morning, near the village of Khatyn, teenage partisans from the “Avenger” detachment shot at a car in which one of the company commanders of the 118th Schutzmanschaft battalion, Hauptmann Hans Welke, Hitler’s favorite and shot put champion of the 1936 Olympic Games, was traveling. During this shelling, two were wounded, and three more Ukrainian policemen were killed, including Welke himself.

Immediately after this, the Germans called for help - the Dirlewanger battalion, and while he was getting to the place from nearby Logoisk, the Nazis found and arrested, and then shot for suspicion of helping the partisans a group of 23 local residents - lumberjacks. By evening, following in the footsteps of the retreating partisan detachment, the Nazis reached the small village of Khatyn, which they burned to the ground along with its inhabitants. The operation was commanded by the former senior lieutenant of the Red Army, chief of staff of that same 118th “Ukrainian” police special battalion, Grigory Vasyura.

Monument "Unconquered Man", Khatyn, Belarus

Only one person managed to survive then - Joseph Kaminsky, a local blacksmith: “I and my 15-year-old son Adam found ourselves near the wall, dead citizens fell on me, people still alive rushed about in the general crowd like waves, blood flowed from the wounded and dead. The burning roof collapsed, the terrible, wild howl of people intensified. Beneath it, the people burning alive were screaming and tossing and turning so much that the roof was actually spinning. I managed to get out from under the corpses and burning people and crawl to the door. Immediately the punisher, a Ukrainian by nationality, standing at the door of the barn, fired at me from a machine gun, as a result I was wounded in the left shoulder. My son Adam, who had been burned before, somehow jumped out of the barn, but 10 meters from the barn, after the shots, he fell. I, being wounded, so that the punisher would not shoot at me anymore, lay motionless, pretending to be dead, but part of the burning roof fell on my feet and my clothes caught fire. After that, I began to crawl out of the barn, raised my head a little, and saw that the punishers were no longer at the door. Near the barn lay many dead and burnt people. The wounded Etka Albin Feliksovich was also lying there, blood was pouring from his side. Hearing the words of the dying man, Etka Albin, the punisher came up from somewhere, without saying anything, picked me up by the legs and threw me, although I was half-conscious, I did not toss and turn. Then this punisher hit me in the face with his butt and left. The back of my body and arms were burned. I was lying there completely barefoot, as I had taken off my burning felt boots when I crawled out of the barn. Soon I heard a signal for the departure of the punitive forces, and when they drove away a little, my son Adam, who was lying not far from me, about three meters away, called me to his side to pull him out of the puddle. I crawled over and lifted him up, but saw that he had been cut in half by bullets. My son Adam still managed to ask: “Is mom alive?”, and then died.”

In the Khatyn memorial complex, a monument was erected to Joseph Kaminsky in the form of a six-meter bronze sculpture “The Unconquered Man” with a dead child in his arms, created by Sergei Selikhanov. It is he who “meets” visitors to the memorial.

Monument to Joseph Kaminsky "Unconquered Man" in the village of Khatyn, Belarus

Next to the sculpture is a stylized marble roof of the barn in which the inhabitants of Khatyn were burned.

Roof of the death barn in Khatyn

From the testimony of direct participants in the execution in Khatyn

Ostap Knap

- After we surrounded the village, through the interpreter Lukovich, an order came down the chain to take people out of their houses and escort them to the outskirts of the village to the barn. Both the SS men and our police did this work. All residents, including old people and children, were pushed into a barn and covered with straw. A heavy machine gun was installed in front of the locked gate, behind which, I remember well, Katryuk was lying. They set fire to the roof of the barn, as well as the straw, Lukovich and some German. A few minutes later, the door collapsed under the pressure of people, and they began to run out of the barn. The command sounded: “Fire!” Everyone who was in the cordon fired: both ours and the SS men. I also shot at the barn.

How many Germans took part in this action?

In addition to our battalion, there were about 100 SS men in Khatyn who came from Logoisk in covered cars and motorcycles. They, together with the police, set fire to houses and outbuildings.

Timofey Topchy

- When we reached Khatyn, we saw some people running away from the village. Our machine gun crew was given the command to shoot at those running away. The first number of Shcherban's crew opened fire, but the aim was placed incorrectly, and the bullets did not reach the fugitives. Meleshko pushed him aside and lay down behind the machine gun. I don’t know if he killed anyone; we didn’t check. There were 6 or 7 covered cars and several motorcycles standing there. Then they told me that these were SS men from the Dirlewanger battalion. There were about a company of them. All the houses in the village were looted before they were burned: more or less valuable things, food and livestock were taken. They dragged everything - both us and the Germans.

Ivan Petrichuk

- My post was about 50 meters from the barn, which was guarded by our platoon and Germans with machine guns. I clearly saw a boy about six years old run out of the fire, his clothes were 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 shot 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 charred corpses, large and small, were smoking... This picture was terrible. I remember that 15 cows were brought to the battalion from Khatyn.

... and twenty-three more punishers who survived and had already served their sentences by that time.

Khatyn Memorial: photo

In the village of Khatyn at the time of the punitive operation there were 26 houses and several sheds. Monuments were erected on the site of each of the residential buildings.

The monuments are the lower crowns of a log house and an obelisk in the form of a chimney, ending with a small bell.

Obelisk on the site of a burned house in the village of Khatyn, Belarus

On each “pipe” there is a memorial plaque with a list of the names and surnames of the people who lived in this house.

Commemorative plaque in Khatyn, Belarus

A small obelisk also marks the wells, of which there were four in the village.

Obelisk on the site of a burned house in the village of Khatyn, Belarus

And symbolic open “gates” in front of each yard.

Obelisk on the site of a burned house in the village of Khatyn, Belarus

All obelisks have bells that ring every 30 seconds. Their sound really makes your heart skip a beat and it’s impossible to get used to this ringing - you shudder every time.

Next to the monument “Unconquered Man” there is a mass grave in which the remains of residents of the village of Khatyn were buried.

Mass grave Khatyn, Belarus

In a large field in the center there is a “cemetery of villages”: 186 villages were completely wiped off the face of the earth by fascist troops.

And nearby are the “trees of life”, on the branches of which are the names of 433 Belarusian villages destroyed by the Nazis, but rebuilt after the war.

Memorial complex Khatyn in Belarus

"Trees of Life" in Khatyn, Belarus

In the Great Patriotic War, 2,230,000 residents of Belarus died - one in four. In memory of them, a granite slab was installed, in the corners of which there are three birch trees, and instead of the fourth - an “eternal flame” in memory of every fourth resident of Belarus who died. Sometimes there is a version that not every fourth, but every third resident of this country died.

Eternal flame in Khatyn in Belarus

“Wall of Memory”, on which there are plaques with the names of more than 260 death camps located on the territory of Belarus during the war and the number of Belarusians who died in each of them.

Khatyn: “Wall of Memory”

There are not many tourists here, and this only enhances the impression. Besides us, there were several other people, and only a couple of cars were seen in the large parking lot in front of the main entrance to the Khatyn memorial. The piercing ringing of bells in almost deathly silence makes you shudder every time and with each new blow “drives” into the brain the awareness of the atrocities that our country had to face during the Great Patriotic War. At night, almost all the monuments of the memorial are illuminated with a muted blood-red light, and being there at this time really becomes scary...

“Flirting with nationalists (and this is what we are seeing today in Kyiv) almost always ends in one thing - tragedy. And when liberals extend a not always firm, sometimes trembling hand to them in the hope of acquiring new allies, then from that time on the path to disaster begins. Nationalists and Nazis are not those who prefer the subtle play of liberal political undertones and complex diplomatic intrigues. Their hands do not tremble, the smell of blood is intoxicating. The track record is replenished with new and new victims. They are fanatically blindly confident that the enemies they have killed, and these are “Muscovites, Jews, damned Russians,” should be more, even more. And then the time of Khatyn comes for nationalism.

Closed tribunal

March 1943: chronicle of the tragedy

Today, 71 years after that terrible March day of 1943, the tragedy of Khatyn has been reconstructed almost minute by minute.

Question: How many Germans took part in this action?

118th policeman

Guilty. Shoot

The history of extreme nationalism is always rough

... The famous French publicist Bernard-Henri Levy believes that today the best Europeans are Ukrainians. One must assume that it is precisely those who lay siege to Orthodox churches, set fire to the houses of their political opponents, and shout “get away!” everyone who doesn’t like Bandera’s freedom. Already loudly heard from right-wing radical nationalists - kill a communist, a Jew, a Muscovite...

In Belarus it is still considered humanly impossible to say out loud who burned Khatyn. In Ukraine, our brothers, Slavs, neighbors... Every nation has scumbags. However, there was a special police battalion formed from Ukrainian traitors...”