NKVD prisoner massacres

Before the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviets were holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in NKVD prisons across their occupied territories in Eastern Europe.[1] Right after the invasion began, the NKVD was ordered to kill or evacuate 140,000 prisoners from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland.[1]

Events

Further information: Chervyen massacre

The order was carried out in chaos.[1] Two-thirds of the said prisoners were killed by the NKVD.[1] Among the prisoners killed by the NKVD, at least 9,800 were reportedly executed in prisons and 1,443 executed during evacuation.[1]

Geographically, 20,000–30,000 of them died in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, and 9,000 in the Ukrainian SSR,[1] which had just gone through the Holodomor and Great Purge-related massacres in the 1930s.[2][3] They were targeted for mass murder over their Polish or Ukrainian identity.[1][3] Many historians classify the NKVD prisoner massacres as crimes against humanity.[1][3]

Medical students who came across the victim bodies of one of such massacres in Lviv described the scene:[4]

From the courtyard, doors led to a large space, filled from top to bottom with corpses [...] Among them were many women. On the left wall, three men were crucified, barely covered by clothing from their shoulders, with severed male organs. Underneath them on the floor in half-sitting, leaning positions – two nuns with those organs in their mouths [...] most were stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. Some were naked or almost naked, others in decent street clothes. One man was in a tie, mostly likely just arrested.

Academic views

Historian Yury Boshyk wrote:[2]

It was not only the numbers of the executed, but also the manner in which they died that shocked the populace. When the families of the arrested rushed to the prisons after the Soviet evacuation, they were aghast to find bodies so badly mutilated that many could not be identified. It was evident that many of the prisoners had also been tortured before death; others were killed en masse.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7
    • Berkhoff, Karel Cornelis (2004). Harvest of Despair. p. 14. ISBN 0674020782. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
    • Motyl, Alexander; Kiebuzinski, Ksenya (2017). The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 (PDF). Amsterdam University Press. Retrieved April 6, 2025. ISBN: 9789048526826, 9789089648341
    • Viola, Lynne (August 13, 2018). "New sources on Soviet perpetrators of mass repression: a research note". Revue Canadienne des Slavistes (Canadian Slavonic Papers). 60 (3‒4): 592‒604. doi:10.1080/00085006.2018.1497393. Retrieved April 6, 2025.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Richard Rhodes (2002). Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40900-9. Rather than releasing their prisoners as they hurriedly retreated during the first week of the war, the Soviet secret police killed most of them. In the first week of the invasion, the NKVD prisoner executions totaled some 10,000 in western Ukraine and more than 9,000 in Vinnytsia, eastward toward Kyiv. Comparable numbers of prisoners were executed in eastern Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Soviet areas had already sustained hundreds of thousands of executions during the 1937–1938 Great Purge.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Valery Vasiliev, Yuriy Shapoval, "Stages of «Great Terror»: The Vinnytsia Tragedy", Zerkalo Nedeli, No. 31 (406), August 17–23, 2002, (in Russian Archived 2007-11-28 at the Wayback Machine, in Ukrainian Archived 2009-05-18 at the Wayback Machine)
  4. ↑ "Lviv museum recounts Soviet massacres" Archived 2019-01-15 at the Wayback Machine, Natalia A. Feduschak. CDVR. 2010. Retrieved 6 feb 2017


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