When the SS begged for their lives – but the Soviets had no more pity
An officer was kneeling in the mud, hands clasped. He cries and implores in German. Don’t shoot, I begs you. The man who holds him jou is a Soviet sergeant. Its entire family was massacred by the SS in Karkov. His sister was 12, April 1945. Yesterday’s executioners have become today’s supplicants.
These same SS who executed 2 million civilians Soviet beggars now for their life. [music] But the Soviets remember. Villages burned with their inhabitants, false filled children, babies thrown alive into holes. 100,000 SS were executed without trial, without pity, exactly as he had done when. The Soviets [music] forced them to dig their own graves.
An officer Russian told them “You taught us this method. We are good students.” What happened in the Eastern Pru forests [music] in 1945 remains one of the chapters darkest of war. When the Nazi terror machine turned upside down against its creators, when the victims became executioners [music] to their turn, tell me where you look in comments and [music] subscribe to discover the truth the most disturbing of the war.
Now here is the chilling story of Soviet revenge. April 28, 1945, the Albe forest, 50 km southeast of Berlin. The 9th Army German is surrounded. 80,000 men desperately trying to break through Soviet lines to reach Berlin or surrender to the Americans more the west. Among them, entire units of Vaffen SS, the same [music] men who three years earlier paraded triumphant across Ukraine and Belarus, leaving behind villages in ashes and fakes communities.
The Strumban fury, Kurt Wagner commands what remains of the second battalion of the Asraich SS division. years decorated with the Iron Cross, he participated in Operation Barbarossa since day one. Between 1941 and 1943, his unit became part of the Anzad Grupen, its mobile commandos from Tuy which followed the regular army. Their mission? exterminate the Jews, political petty commissioners, the supporters and all elements undesirables of the Soviet Union.
The report from his unit entered after the war is chilling. civilians executed, 42 villages razed, hundreds of women and children burned alive in barns. Today, Wagner crawls in the mud. His uniform once impeccable black is torn, soiled. The skull on his cap, symbol of terror for 4 years, is now a target.
He knows what he waits if captured. The Soviets threw leaflets [music] above the German lines. Is this some dead? No neighborhood, no prisoner. The encircling Red Army Albe [music] is no longer that of 1941, disorganized and in disarray. It’s a relentless, thirsty war machine of revenge. Every Soviet soldier has an aconistory, a massacred family, a destroyed village, [music] a sister raped and killed.
Sergeant Michael Kovalenko is part of the third shock army. Originally from Karkov, he [music] lost his entire family during of the passage of the SS in 1943. Parents, brothers, sisters, nephews, 14 members of his family executed in one single day in his diary. Discovered in military archives from Moscow and declassified in 1992, Kovalenko writes “We found a group of SS hidden in a barn abandoned. 15 men.
They had thrown their uniforms, but we saw the tattoos under their arms, the group blood that all the SS do tattoo.” When they understood that we had identified them, their leader, a great guy with scars [music] duel on the cheek, literally thrown to his knees. He cried like a child, hands clasped repeating [music]: “Nicht chissen, nht chissen !” Don’t shoot, that was pathetic.
This which hits Soviet soldiers, it is the complete transformation of these men. The SS were the elite self-proclaimed Reich, indoctrinated to despise weakness, trained [music] to kill without emotion. They considered supermen, Viking warriors, modern. Here they are now who are sobbing, [music] beg, promise anything to save their skin.
The lieutenant Ivan Petrov, commander of a company of riflemen, will testify in 1975 in a recording kept at archives of the Military Academy of Moscow. I saw a fury auberchtetourm SS, a man of around thirty years old with all his decorations still pinned on his jacket crawled towards me on the stomach crying. [music] He showed photos of his children, repeated that he had a family, that he had only obeyed orders.
I have looked at his insignia, division of Asraich, the same one who had massacred my village. I recognized the badge, it was exactly the same one that wore the officer who ordered the hanging my little sister Katia. [music] She was 12 years old. They hung him on a telephone pole because she had spat on a German soldier.
The Soviet archives reveal the extent of what is happening in these days of April 1945. Thousands of SS desperately trying [music] to pass themselves off as verrsmartes regular. They tear themselves away from their badges, burn their papers, try to erase or mutilate their tattoo. Some people shoot themselves in the aell left to destroy the brand revealing.
Others use razor blades, battery acid, anything to make it disappear these few letters which signify their death sentence. But the Soviets learned to recognize them not only [music] by the tattoos, the arrogance transformed into terror, the look, the way to stand, even in defeat and especially the denunciations.
Because now that the end is near, the soldiers of Vermarthe no longer hesitate to point [music] at the SS hidden among them, four years of contempt and brutality of the [music] from the elite warriors towards army regular. This fart hides. This one is an SS, [music] your soldiers whisper to the Soviet.
A sentence worth immediate death sentence. January 1945, even before the Red Army crosses the borders of the Reich, Stalin set the tone. The neveized order in 16 of the NKVD declassified only in 1993 is self-explanatory. The members of the SS formations are criminals of war. They do not benefit from any protection under the Geneva Convention.
Their fate is left to the discretion of commanders on the ground. In the soviet coded language, it means one thing: extermination. The marshal Rokosovski, commander of the second front biorussian, adds its own instructions. For each village Soviet burned, for every child massacred, justice will be done.
The SS sowed the wind. They will harvest the storm. [music] These men understand the message perfectly. The revenge is not only allowed, she is encouraged. The methods Soviets to identify the SS become more and more sophisticated. Doctor Natalia Volkova, military doctor attached to the 8th Guards Army, keeps a diary details of its procedures.
Sound testimony, published only after the fall of the USSR reveals the extent of this hunt. Every day we are brought dozens of Germans suspected of being SS. We had to examine their armpits, look for scars, recent burns, mutilations. Some arrived with third degree burns, the flesh raw. It was because he was poured boiling oil under the arm.
Others had in hand to cut out whole pieces of skin with blades razor. The pain must have been excruciating, but the terror was stronger than pain. In Eastern Prus, the SS Tottenkopf division, the heads of dead is surrounded near Kiksberg. 2400 men surrender to the general Shernakovski on February 15, 1945.
The official report, a laconic line, SS unit neutralized, no prisoners. The bodies are thrown into false common, without identification, without burial. The same fakes as the SESS had made them dig victim for 4 years. Hans Müller made part of the rare SS survivors who will testify decades later. Captured in March 1945, he survived hiding his identity in an interview given in 1987 to a German historian, he says “We were 200 SS of the Deutschland regiment captured near Brestlao.
The Russians made us put in a row. A Soviet officer spoke perfect German. He has us said “You will now suffer what you have done to our people. They started calling us one by one. The first were taken behind a building. We heard the shots of fire. The man next to me, unm fury who had served in Ukraine, started to cry.
He begged, said that he had three children. Russian him replied: “The children of Babillard also had work took him away. The most symbolic case remains that of the Catine forest. This forest near Smolensk where the NKVD had executed 22,000 Polish officers in 1940 became the scene of an irony in 1945 macabre.
The Soviets brought there groups of captured SS officers. A witness Vermart, Corporal Friedrich Schmidth, who witnessed the scene before to be released, says the Russians forced around fifty SS officers to kneel at the edge of the pits, exactly where the Poles had [music] been killed 5 years earlier. A Soviet political commissar gave them said in German “You accused us of this massacre.
You used Catine for your propaganda. Now you go join the Poles. The SS cried, some defiled themselves. These men who boasted of having killed thousands of unflinching Jews were terrified of their own dead. The fate of SS women is still more disturbing. The camp guards of concentration, the female SS undergo special treatment brutal.
[music] Irma Grè, 21 years old, nicknamed the angel of death of Aschwitz and Bergen Belsen and captured by the Soviets in April 1945 [music] before being transferred to the British. Testimonies about what happened during his Soviet detention were censored for 40 years. The rapes systematic before execution were common currency.
Sergeant Victor Sokolov in published memoirs clandestinely in its date in the 1970s writes “We had captured a unit SS women’s auxiliary of women who could have participated in the massacre which had selected the children for gas chambers. [music] My men have gone crazy. What happened that night? I can’t describe.
In the morning, there was no more living prisoner. The exact numbers will never be known. The archives Soviet remains fragmentary. A lot documents were destroyed, but the historians’ estimates converge. Between 80,000 and 100,000 members of the Waffen SS were summarily executed between January and May 1945. [music] No trial, no court, just expeditious and brutal justice.
For every SS killed, the Soviets remembered a Ukrainian village in flame, of a false commune in Belarus, children massacred in Leningrad. The transformation of Soviets as implacable executioners did not come from nowhere. Between 1941 and 1944, the Einsats Groupen SS and their local auxiliaries methodically exterminate 2 million civilians Soviets.
The methods were side of unimaginable cruelty. At Bulletin Board, near kyiv, 3371 Jews were massacred in two days. Babies thrown alive into the ravine, pregnant and pregnant women, [music] children used as shooting training target. The lieutenant colonel Pavel Artemiev, Soviet intelligence officer, documented SS atrocities [music] throughout the war.
In his final report kept in the archives of the FSB in Moscow, he writes “We have identified 627 Belarusian villages completely destroyed with their population. [music] The method was always the same. Bring together all the inhabitants in one barn where the church, barricade them doors, set fire. Those who tried to flee were shot dead Catine.
149 people including 75 children were burned alive. The youngest had 7 [music] weeks. These memories every Soviet soldier who advances towards Berlin. Soldier Ivan Gorchakov tells in his memoirs liberating Ukraine, “We found my hometown of Paul Tava, gutted. Later we discovered the false. My mother, my two sisters, my grandmother, all in the same fake.
When I captured my first SS in East Prussia, I haven’t seen one man. I saw the murderer of my family, the captured SS. discover now their own method returned against them. In Silesia, a group of SS of the division of arrange, unit composed of common criminals known for his extreme barbarity [music] is captured by the first army Polish integrated into the forces Soviets.
The Poles remember of the Warsaw massacre where Dirle Vangueur and his men killed 40,000 civilians in a week. Violent, torturing, burning alive, women and children. Witness Ian Kowalski, Private Polish, will tell desait if made in Warsaw. We have them locked in an abandoned factory and we set it on fire. Those who were trying to get out were [music] slaughtered. They were screaming, begging.
One of them shouted that he had children. Our sergeant replied: “The children of Warsaw also had [music] parents. We are stayed there listening to their cry until let the silence return. I don’t have felt no pity.” None. The case the most documented remains that of the camp Nemersdorf in East Prussia. The Soviets discovered the bodies of 74 Soviet and Polish civilians used as forced laborers, all executed by the SS before their retirement.
Among them, 23 children. The Soviet reaction is immediate and terrible. [music] SS captured in the region are lined up in front of the bodies of civilians. We [music] force to dig graves for the victims, then their own falls. The execution lasts 3 hours. The Major Alexander Solgenitzin, future Nobel Prize in Literature, then artillery officer, attends some of his executions.
He will write later in the gulag archipelago. [music] We had become what we fighting by killing without judgment. We We had lost our humanity. I saw some Soviet soldiers torturing SS exactly like the SS tortured our supporters. Same method, same sadism. Evil begets evil in a endless cycle. But all Soviets are not participating in this vengeful frenzy.
Captain Lev Copelève interpreter in the Red Army tries to prevent executions summary and rape. He saves several SS prisoners of one death certain. By money they can gain valuable information to these acts of compassion towards the enemy. He will be arrested, convicted of propaganda anti-Soviet and will spend 10 years in gulag.
In his memoirs To be preserved forever, published in the West, Copelev writes: “I saw a young SS man, he must not have been 18.” Begged one Soviet sergeant. [music] The kid showed a photo of his mother. The sergeant took the photo, looked at it then tore it into pieces before to shoot the boy in the face head. I tried to intervene.
They got me said “You didn’t see what they did to our children.” It was true, but to kill executioners without trial is to become yourself an executioner. The last days of the Reich sees the apotheosis of this violence. In Berlin, the SS defend fanatically Hitler’s bunker. When they are finally submerged, none neighborhood is not granted.
The soldiers Soviets received the order from Jukov. No SS prisoners in Berlin. The fighting in the basements of the chancery are incredibly brutal. The wounded SS are finished off at the bayonet. Some are burned alive flamethrower. The same weapon they used to clean the getos. The circle of violence closes. The yesterday’s executioners die like theirs victim.
Without trial, without pity, [music] in terror and pain. Justice, revenge. In the chaos from 1945, the border disappeared. But 1945, the war in Europe is officially finished. In the camps of Soviet prisoners, the last Captured SS await their fate. The NKVD begins compiling files. to identify war criminals. But for many, it is already too late.
Of the thousand SS captured by the army red during the war, less than 6 mil will arrive alive in the camps Siberia. Colonel Vladimir Bogdanov, liaison officer between the army and the NKVD, records in its memoirs published after the fall of the USSR, I attended the interrogation of a Standard and furur SS captured in Prague.
The man led a commando einsat in Ukraine, responsible for the deaths of 20,000 people. He confessed everything in the smallest [music] details, hoping save his life. How he killed them babies to save bullets? How he forced mothers to choose which of their children would die in first. After three hours, the NKVD officer stood up, said “Thank you for your cooperation” and he shot in the head.
I was shocked. not by execution but by my own indifference. Some testimonies reveal the extent of the moral dilemma. Sergeant Nicolai Maslov, decorated hero of the Union Soviet, says: “I captured a Hunter Charureur SS near Brelot, a 19 year old kid. He was crying, showed a letter from his fiancée. I was going to beat her when I saw that he had the same religious medal as my mother gave me, [music] a cross orthodox.
Her grandmother was Russian, emigrated after the revolution, he spoke a few words of Russian. I looked at him in the eyes and I saw my little brother killed by the SS at Stalingrad. I went down my weapon. I couldn’t. My political commissar snatched the gun and did the job himself. The archives also reveal acts of resistance to this spiral of violence.
Major Dimitri [music] Petrov, commander of a rifle battalion, refuses to execute 50 prisoners [music] SS. It requires a proper trial and form. His report to command found in military archives is eloquent. These men are criminals certainly, but we are not not SS. If we kill them without judgment, we validate their ideology who says that might trumps right.
Our victory must be moral as much than military. Petrov will be relieved of his command and sent to a battalion disciplinary. He will survive the war but will never be rehabilitated. In a interview given in 1989, shortly before his death, he maintains “I do not regret nothing.” We were fighting for free humanity from fascism.
If we adopted fascist methods, to what good our victory? The testimonies of rare surviving SS men are chilling. Herbert Müller, former member of the Lip Standard division, Adolf Hitler, captured in Hungary and sent to the mines of Kolima, says “We knew what awaited us. We had done the same thing, gets worse.
It was a primitive justice, an eye for an eye. In the train to Siberia, an old guard Russian told me: “You have [music] the lucky, if it was my unit that got you captured, you would be dead. My son was at Auschwitz. I understood that my survival was a coincidence, not a right. But the revenge has a price! Thousands of Soviet soldiers remain [music] tempted by what they did.
” Serge Andreev, veteran of the battle of Berlin, testifies in 1995. I executed 14 disarmed SS men. [music] I lined them up against a wall and fired. They begged, cried. one of them was not 18 years old. [music] Today, 50 years later, I see them still in my nightmares. Not like the monsters they were, but like men terrified of death.
The Vengeance brought me no peace. [music] She just added their ghosts to those of my massacred family. Soviet psychologists in secret reports declassified in 1990s note [music] an epidemic of disorder of post-traumatic stress among veterans. Doctor Boris Levinson [music] written in 1947 soldiers who participated in SS mass executions show the same symptoms as survivors of Nazi camps.
nightmare, alcoholism, domestic violence, inability to reintegrate into civilian life. They are became what they were fighting and this realization destroys them from the inside. British historian Anthony Bivor analyzing his events [music] concludes “L’S had conné created a dehumanization machine so effective that it even contaminated their enemies by transforming murder in administrative routine.
They have normalized the unthinkable. [music] The Soviets by adopting the same methods, have proven that evil has no of nationality. It infects everyone who are exposed to it for too long. Maria Ivanova, survivor of the massacre Bulletin board, perhaps offers reflection the most poignant. Interviewed in 2000, she says “The SS killed my family whole, 42 people.
When I learned that they were executed without trial, I first felt joy. Then I realized that the Russian soldiers who killed them became [music] like them. The war has destroyed us all. The dead, the living, the executioners, the victims. Nobody came out intact. The final figures will never be known with certainty. The Soviet archives, partially opened in the 1990s then closed, give estimates variables.
Marshal Dukov in his memoirs censored then published in full version in 1992 evokes 100,000 SS [music] executed between January and May 1945. Other sources speak of 80,000. This What is certain is that only 10% of SS captured by the Soviets survived captivity. Those who have escaped the summary executions of first days were sent in the gulag camps.
Kolima, Vorkuta, Magadan. Names that [music] still chills the blood. On the 6000 SS arrived alive in Siberia, less than 1000 will return to Germany, the last in 1956. Conditions in these camps exceeded in horror everything that the mind can conceive. Forced labor in uranium mines 18 hours a day by 50°gr with 800 calories of food daily.
Klaus Barbie, one of rare SS to have testified after his return tells [music] in 1958 we were dying like flies. Scurvy, tuberculosis, exhaustion. The guards told us: “You wanted the living space in the east, you have it.” Six feet underground in permafrost Siberian, [music] an SS from Mabaraque, former guard at Tréblinca, became crazy.
He screamed [music] at night names of the Jewish children he had killed. The Russians let him scream until that he commits suicide by throwing himself into a mine. The psychological impact on the Soviet society is deep and durable. An entire generation has grown up with this thirst for revenge, this violence as the only response to violence.
Professor Yuri Alexyevity from Moscow analysis in 1995 we defeated fascism, but what price? We adopted these methods: [music] execution without trial, dehumanization of the enemy, collective revenge. These practices have contaminated our society for decades. The gulag existed before the war, but after 1945 it became our Auschwitz.
German families executed SS men never knew what what had happened to their loved ones. For decades, women have waited for a husband who would not return never. Children grew up without father, without even a grave on which collect oneself. Ingrid Wagner, daughter of Sturmban Fureur, Kurt Wagner, testifies in 2010.
I was 5 years old when my father [music] gone. My mother waited until his death in 1987. She thought he might be still living somewhere in Siberia. It is only after the opening of the archives that I learned that it [music] had been executed on May 2, 1945, 4 days before I was born. I understand why. I know what he did, but he remains my father.
The attempts to reconciliation are rare and difficult. In 1990, a meeting is organized between Soviet veterans and families former SS. It turns into a disaster. Victor Petrof, former supporter whose family was massacred by the SS in front of the widow of a furious Auber Stourmban. She tells me asks to forgive.
How to forgive the unforgivable? Her husband burned alive my 3 year old son and she wants me forgives her because she suffered from his absence. Yet some voices rises to break the cycle. Alexander Sol Génitin in his speech reception of the Nobel Prize declares: “The dividing line between good and evil does not separate states or classes, nor the parts, but crosses the heart of every man.
The SS were monsters. Yes, but when we have them killed without trial, we became monsters too. This is the lesson terrible of this war. Evil is contagious. In 2015, sox years after the end of the war, a ceremony of reconciliation takes place in Berlin. Of Russian veterans and children of veterans SS meet.
Michael Kovalenko, 92 [music] years old, the sergeant who participated in the executions of Alb, serves the hand of Hans Wagner, son of an SS executed. Kovalenko simply says: “Your father killed my family. I killed your father. Now we are all the two orphans of this war. He It’s time for this to stop. The forests from Eastern Prus, Silesia, Ukraine [music] still hide thousands of false unmarked.
SS summarily executed on one side, victim of the SS on the other. Tragic mirror of a war which transformed ordinary men into executioners then transformed the liberators in turn executioner. Later, the last witnesses disappear. With them the living memory of these events. Rest this nagging question. Revenge was it justice or justice would it have been to prove by fair trials than even the worst criminals remain men subject to law and not revenge.
In the frozen steps of Siberia, in the forgotten forests of Eastern Europe, the bones of the executioners and their victims mix in the earth. Silent testimony only in war total, in the infernal cycle of violence and revenge, there is no [music] ultimately only the vanquished. Even victory has the bitter taste of souls lost in hatred.
Maybe it’s the most terrible lesson of 1945. We evil did not come by becoming evil.
