“The Germans Had Set the Goal to Destroy Everyone”

Home , 9th Army (Wehrmacht), Army Group Centre, Hunger Plan, Khatyn massacre, Marching into Darkness

“the Germans had set the goal to destroy everyone”

Ozarichi in German-occupied Belarus through the eyes of survivors

University of Amsterdam Master thesis in History, German Studies

Anne-Lise Bobeldijk [email protected] March 2016

Supervisor: dr. K.C. Berkhoff Second reader: dr. M.J. Föllmer

Contents

Introduction 3

1. Towards an oral history of the Ozarichi camps 9

2. The round-ups 20 2.1 The cities of Bobruisk and Zhlobin 20 2.2 Villages and hamlets 24

3. Transport to the camps as virtual death marches 28 3.1 Deportation methods 28 3.2 Arbitrariness, torment and violence 33

4. The transit camps 39 4.1 The numerous transit camps 39 4.2 Treatment in the camps and social interaction 45

5. The Ozarichi camps 51 5.1 Ozarichi, Dert and Semonovich 51 5.2 Liberation and aftermath 53

Conclusion 56

Bibliography 61

Appendix I 64

Appendix II 65

Appendix III 73

Acknowledgements 74

Introduction

‘The regime in the camps – a regime of hunger, cold, illness and the immense insults of the Soviet people – gave me the firm belief that the Germans had set the goal to destroy everyone; all children, elderly people, women, disabled people and inmates.’1 This quote from Vasilli Murashkin seems to refer to one of the well-known national socialist concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, Dachau or Majdanek. However, he refers to the Ozarichi camps in Belarus, near the villages Ozarichi, Dert and Semonovich. Murashkin was one of the approximately 40,000 people who ended up in these camps because they were seen as “useless eaters”.2 After the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler ordered that nothing useful was to fall into the hands of the Soviets. This meant that villages were burned down, livestock was taken away and civilians were forcibly evacuated to the Reich, among other things, to serve as forced labourers. In early 1944, the groups of evacuees became too large to handle for the Wehrmacht. On top of that, a typhus epidemic among the evacuees threatened to infect the troops of the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht’s solution for this problem was as follows. The people who were able to work would be, as planned, evacuated to the West, in particular to Germany, to work in the war industry as so-called Ostarbeiter. Another large group of refugees in the region was unable to work. Because the troops in the surroundings of Bobruisk, Zhlobin and Ozarichi wanted to withdraw without any being slowed down by weakened and ill civilians, the Wehrmacht needed to find a purpose and place for them. These evacuees were sent to the newly created Ozarichi camps. From March 12, 1944 onwards, the people from the Bobruisk region were moved into the three camps near the village of Ozarichi without any form of shelter, heating, food and water, and without knowing whether they would survive the arbitrariness of the guards. Five days later, the Wehrmacht retreated and abandoned the prisoners. On March 19, 1944, the Red Army started liberating the camps. At that time approximately 8,000 to 9,000 people had

1 V.T. Murashkin, in: G.I. Barkun, ed., Zalozhniki vermakhta (Ozarichi-lager smerti): dokumenty i materialy/Geiseln der Wehrmacht (Osaritschi-das Todeslager): Dokumente und Belege (Minsk, 1999), 74-75. 2 C. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland, 1941-1944 (Hamburg, 1999), 1099; N. Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population, 1942-1944: Forced labor, hunger, and population displacement on the Eastern front’ (Ph.D. diss, London 2005), 250; C. Rass, ‘Ozarichi 1944: Entscheidung- und Handlungsebenen eines Kriegsverbrechens’, in: T.C. Richter, K.J. Arnold, Krieg und Verbrechen: Situation und Fallbeispiele (München, 2006), 197.

already died in the Ozarichi camps, as well as about another 800 people during their journey to the camps. As expressed in Murashkin’s quote, for the people in the camps it felt as if the sole goal of the Ozarichi camps was to destroy them. The Ozarichi camps were quite distinct. They did not form part of the official camp structure, were built on an improvisatory base and the prisoners were “ordinary” Soviet civilians. Scholars have used the remaining documents of the Wehrmacht to research these camps and have focussed mainly on the military history. This thesis will focus on the experience of the civilian deportees. What do the eyewitness accounts of the survivors of the Ozarichi camps contribute to the historiography of the camps? Although in Belarus the Ozarichi camps are one of the most well known sites of Nazi crimes, they are relatively unknown in the West. This is mainly because Wehrmacht divisions, and not the SS, were the main perpetrators of these crimes. The myth about the Wehrmacht not taking part in genocidal events during the war, which was carefully built after the end of the Second World War, dissipated only in the 1990s. Two photo exhibitions in Germany at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s dismissed the idea of the ‘saubere Wehrmacht’, a clean and innocent Wehrmacht, and instigated new interest in research on the Wehrmacht and the crimes that they committed in the east. This development in discourse is also visible in the historiography of the Ozarichi camps. Before the 1990s, the Ozarichi camps were only highlighted in studies originating from the Warsaw Pact countries. Shortly after the liberation of the Ozarichi camps, there appeared a page-long article in the leading Soviet newspaper Pravda with the report of the examination of the camps by the Extraordinary State Commission (Chrezvychanaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia)3. The article named, ‘The destruction of the Soviet people by the Nazis by infection with typhus’, described the entire duration of the camps, from March 9 until the liberation on March 19 based on the testimonies of survivors. The article was accompanied by two large photos of the corpses of elderly, women and children in the camps.4 In 1946, this same report was published in ‘Collected reports of the Extraordinary

3 The commission was officially called the ‘Extraordinary State Commission for ascertaining and investigating crimes perpetrated by the German-Fascist invaders and their accomplices, and the damage inflicted by them on citizens, collective farms, social organisations, State Enterprises and institutions of the U.S.S.R.’, and was established on November 2, 1942 by a degree of issued by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. (Soviet Government Statements on Nazi atrocities (London, 1946), 55.) 4 ‘Istreblenie gitlerovcami sovetskikh liudei putem zarazheniia sypnym tifom’, Pravda, April 30 1944, 2.; In the article there are two pictures that seem to be part of a set of photos taken by the Extraordinary State Commission that researched the camps after the liberation. The photos also appear in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, photo 3 and photo 13.

State Commission on the atrocities of the German-fascist invaders’.5 In addition, in April 1944 a letter to ‘Father Stalin’ thanked Stalin and the Red Army for liberating the inmates from the ‘death camp Ozarichi’ and described the situation in the camps in great detail, almost exactly as the report of the Extraordinary State Commission.6 For example, it demonstrated that people were forced to hand over the last of their possessions such as money, rings and later even clothes and shoes. In the commemoration and the historiography of the Second World War in Belarus, Ozarichi plays a large role as one of the three key events subjected to commemoration. According to Nicholas Terry, the Ozarichi camps are mentioned in almost every Soviet- and post-Soviet work on the war in Belarus.7 For example, in 1962, the Polish writer Kiryl Sosnowski wrote about the Ozarichi camps in the context of the misery of children during the war in the book The tragedy of children under Nazi rule.8 He accused the Wehrmacht of involvement in genocidal crimes and also for shaping the myth of the ‘saubere Wehrmacht’. About a decade later, Norbert Müller in East Germany briefly mentioned the camps in his work on the Wehrmacht: Wehrmacht and Occupation 1941-1944. On the role of the Wehrmacht and their management structures in the occupation regime of fascist German imperialism on Soviet territory.9 In the West, Christian Gerlach described the Ozarichi camps in his 1999 monograph on the Nazi policies of economics and destruction in Belarus. He used cases such as Ozarichi to show the destructive policies of the Nazis in Belarus.10 Yet, Gerlach was ambiguous about the crimes. On the one hand, the Ozarichi camps were ‘scheinbar unerklärlichen Verbrechen’, seemingly inexplicable crimes.11 On the other hand he described the crimes as not unique at all but an extreme continuation of earlier forced evacuations and other ‘criminal

5 ‘Istreblenie gitlerovcami sovetskikh liudei putem zarazheniia sypnym tifom’, in: Sbornik soobscenii Chrezvychainoi Gosudarstvennoi Komissii o Zlodeianiakh Nemetsko-Fashistskikh Zakhvatchikov, (Moscow, 1946), 183-193. The report also appeared in English: ‘Report on the extermination of Soviet people by infecting them with disease’, Soviet government statements, 153-159. 6 ‘Iz pisma byvshikh uznikov Ozarichkikh lagerei I.V. Stalinu’, in: M.I. Bogdan and A.N. Ges, eds., Ozarichi – lager smerti. Dokumenty i materialy (Minsk, 1997), 48-50. 7 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 16f. 8 K. Sosnowski, The Tragedy of children under Nazi rule (Warsaw, 1962). 9 N. Müller, Wehrmacht und Okkupation 1941-1944. Zur Rolle der Wehrmacht und ihrer Führungsorgane im Okkupationsregime des faschistischen deutschen Imperialismus aus sowjetischem Territorium (Berlin, 1971). 10 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1097-1099. 11 Ibidem, 1097.

measures’ against Belarusians who were unable to work.12 Christoph Rass also viewed the Ozarichi camps as an extension of the evacuations. His primarily descriptive research focused on determining which people from what rank within the Wehrmacht were responsible for the various facets of the deportations of civilians. He also reconstructed the eight days that the Ozarichi camps existed from a military history perspective.13 Dieter Pohl has supported this perspective, but added that the Ozarichi camps seem to be a unique case, despite the fact that there were more cases in which people who were unable to work were interned in camps.14 He stated the following about the camps: ‘Indeed was this a blatantly individual criminal case, but after this there were again camps created for those unable to work.’15 The three above-mentioned scholars all view the Ozarichi camps as a fairly unique case of the Rückzugverbrechen, crimes of the Wehrmacht during its retreat from the Soviet Union. However, some aspects raise doubt about the concept. First, the term focuses on the military aspects of the crime and mainly reflects the perspective of the perpetrator. As a result, the perspective of the victim is easily overlooked. Second, the term Rückzugverbrechen emphasizes the idea that it happened at the end of the war – not earlier. Other scholars have disputed that the Ozarichi camps were mostly unique in the context of the Second World War in Eastern Europe. Alexander Dalhouski views the camps mostly in the context of the recruitment of Ostarbeiter and other forced labourers.16 Nicholas Terry, who also argues that the Ozarichi camps resulted from the forced evacuations and of the economic policies concerning food supply17, also believes that the term Rückzugverbrechen does not accurately describe the situation. The Ozarichi camps, he writes, were created ‘during a prolonged phase of relatively successful defensive combat lasting nine months’.18 In addition, he underlines that the camps are very similar to other wartime events, such as aspects of the ‘Nazi “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”; selections; train

12 C. Gerlach, ‘Verbrechen deutscher Fronttruppen in Weißrußland 1941-1944’ in: K.H. Pohl, ed., Wehrmacht und Vernichtungspolitik: Militär im nationalsozialistischen System (Göttingen, 1999), 103; Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1099. 13 C. Rass, “Menschenmaterial”: Deutsche Soldaten an der Ostfront; Innenansichten einer Infanteriedivision 1939-1945 (Paderborn, 2003), 386-402; Rass, ‘Ozarichi 1944’,197-206. 14 D. Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht; Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941-1944 (Frankfurt am Main, 2011), 328-329. 15 Ibidem, 329. 16 A. Dalhouski, ‘Belarusian forced labourers’, in: A. von Plato and A. Leh, eds., Hitler’s slaves (New York, 2010), 218. 17 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 15-16. 18 N. Terry, ‘»Do not burden one’s own army and its hinterland with unneeded mouths!« The Fate of the Soviet Civilian Population Behind the »Panther Line« in Eastern Belorussia, October 1943-June 1944’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, bd. 30 (Göttingen, 2015), 186.

transports; death marches; the involvement of the SS; and barbed wire camps’.19 Hans- Heinrich Nolte argues that the Ozarichi camps matched the overall character of the war of Nazi-Germany in the Soviet Union; as this history shows similarities to the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), Jews and partisans.20 The similarity between all these studies is that the scholars base their research primarily on German military sources and offer most of all from the perspective of the German army. Thus, some details are overlooked as they simply cannot be found in these sources. Rass, Pohl and Gerlach did use some eyewitness accounts to show the intensity and cruelty of the operation, and concluded that the journey was a ‘Todesmarsch’ (death march) or an odyssey.21 In addition, even though the prisoners spent often more time in transit camps to the Ozarichi camps, than in the actual final Ozarichi camps, the former are not really elaborated upon in the literature. Therefore, it is important to analyse the Ozarichi camps as a process and not only as a specific location. Here, again, eyewitness accounts are crucial. They can provide a more in-depth insight into the entire process of the camps. As I will argue, they demonstrate the similarity with other events during the war; the camps were far from singular or atypical. This thesis aims to shine a new light on the Ozarichi camps by using eyewitness accounts as more than merely illustrations. The aim is to complement the existing literature by analysing the testimonies of survivors and by describing the history of the Ozarichi camps from the perspective of the survivor. A total of 108 eyewitness accounts were analysed. The accounts were recorded in various periods and can be divided into three groups. They also differ in size, in origin and in type of source (script, audio and video). The variety of testimonies stemming from different periods of time creates a favourable situation and provides for a more balanced image of what may have happened. Chapter 1 describes the Second World War in Belarus and clarifies the context in which it was possible for the crimes of Ozarichi to take place. In addition, the Ozarichi camps will be briefly described, according to the existing literature. Furthermore, I will describe the type of eyewitness accounts that have been used in this study.

19 Ibidem, 187. 20 H. Nolte, ‘Ozariči 1944’, in: G.R. Überschär, ed., Orte des Grauens: Verbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Darmstadt, 2003), 192. 21 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 399; Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1098; Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 328.

Chapters 2 to 5 offer an analysis of the eyewitness accounts. Each chapter marks a different part of the entire process endured by the people who ultimately ended up in the Ozarichi camps. Chapter 2 contains a description of the start of the journey. This is the moment when people were rounded up from their villages and their journey to the camps began. Chapter 3 and 4 show various aspects of the journey to the Ozarichi camps and discuss the entire process of deportation to the Ozarichi camps not in chronological order, but thematically. Chapter 3 comprises an analysis of the journey from the period after the rounding up to the moment of internment in the three Ozarichi camps, in literature known as Endlager, ‘final camps’. This includes ways of transport and the treatment of the prisoners during the marches. Chapter 4 deals with the ‘transit camps’, where people spent the night during the virtual death marches to the Ozarichi camps. Chapter 5 will focus on the three final camps that are regarded as the ‘Ozarichi camps’.

Chapter 1 – Towards an oral history of Ozarichi

In 1941 Belarus was invaded by Nazi Germany. The territory of the Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic, which also included the territory of former eastern Poland that was seized by the Red Army in 1939, was divided into three parts. The western part of Belarus was included into Reichskommissariat Ostland, in Generalkommissariat Weißruthenien, that was not an integral part of the Third Reich but lay outside it. It was under the control of the Zivilverwaltung, a civil administration, which existed mostly of Germans.22 The south was included in Reichskommissariat Ostland and the eastern part of Belarus was under the control of the military administration and was part of rückwartiges Heeresgebiet Mitte, Army Group Rear Centre. Ozarichi lay within this area that was under control of the Wehrmacht. (Image 1)

22 P.R. Magocsi, The historical atlas of Central Europe (Washington, 1993), 180.

The fact that the Ozarichi camps became this famous was not inevitable. There have been a lot of cases in which Belarusians, in particular Jews, fell victim to the crimes of the Nazis; between one and two million people were killed and around three million people became homeless.23 The reason for the high number of these crimes is that Belarus suffered from the combination of Nazi genocidal policies and economic exploitation.24 More than one subgroup in society fell victim to the maltreatment by the Nazis. Jews, Soviet POWS, partisans and ordinary citizens were all targeted by the Nazis as a possible risk for the Nazi race, ideology and strategic expanding plans. Before the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22 1941, a logistic plan was created to feed the Wehrmacht troops. During the last war on the territory of what was then still the Russian empire, one of the big problems was to supply the armed forces with food and gear. The solution to this problem was found in the so-called ‘Hunger plan’ or the ‘Backe-plan’, named after the State Secretary of Food and Agriculture Herbert Backe, who was responsible for this plan. The idea was that the Wehrmacht from the third year of the war would completely “live off the land” of the Soviet Union. The consequence of the plan was that approximately three million Belarusian citizens would die of starvation because their food would be seized.25 The policies concerning food were part of this economic plan. The rationing of food from 1941 onwards caused that many civilians were short on food and were, in particular in the larger cities, starving. For example, in the city of Bobruisk, where some of the Ozarichi camp prisoners came from, people could only receive a maximum of 200 grams of bread a day during the winter of 1942.26 Later during the war, food rationings started to depend on the fact whether one was able to work or not. People who were capable of working received more food with the exception of Jews, who received, regardless whether they worked or not, the same ration as children.27 Belarusians were not just affected by the shortage of food, but also by the anti-partisan warfare of the Nazis. Shortly after the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, there were not a lot of partisan groups in Belarus, mostly due to strict Soviet policies. In 1939, when the Soviets occupied the eastern part of Poland and incorporated it with the Belarusian Soviet

23 L. Rein, ‘Local collaboration in the execution of the “Final Solution” in Nazi-occupied Belorussia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 20, no. 3 (2006), 382. 24 For example, W.W. Beorn, Marching into darkness (Cambridge, 2014), 50-51; Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 19. 25 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 46. 26 Ibidem, 302. 27 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 162.

Socialist Republic (BSSR), the Belarussian state became even more multi-ethnic than it already was. In order to keep society together and not to allow partisan groups against the Soviet state to be organised, the state created strict rules for the ‘disciplining of society’28. Therefore, after the invasion by the Nazis there were almost no partisan groups to fight the new aggressor. It would take one or two years before strong partisan groups were created. However, from the beginning of the occupation the Nazis did not hesitate to counteract against the, at that point, almost non-existing enemy. From early 1942 onwards the Nazis started their fight against the partisans. The measures taken against partisans were brutal, in particular because they often affected ordinary citizens. For example, partisans or people who seemed to be partisans could be shot or hanged on the spot. Furthermore, citizens were often deprived of their houses if there was some suspicion that there had lived a Red Army soldier, or the houses were burned down when it seemed that partisans were inside.29 In addition, as one of the harshest measures against partisans, many villages were completely burned down, sometimes including its entire population. In Belarus, the most infamous, and also most commemorated, case was the village of Khatyn that was completely burned down in March 1943 as reprisal for an attack by partisans on a German convoy.30 Labour and the exploitation of the land were closely intertwined with each other. Both men and women were coerced to work for Nazi Germany. Some of them worked in Belarus where they, for example, dug anti-tank tranches or worked in the railroad industry. Others were brought to Germany to work there in the war industry, as so-called Ostarbeiter. From mid 1942 onwards the minimum age to perform forced labour was changed from fifteen to ten years old, in order to move entire families to the Reich. The age of the children often determined if a family was to be deported for forced labour. Mothers with very young children were often regarded as unfit to work because their children were too young to bring to a kindergarten or to be brought to the Reich.31 While it was for the parents often vital how old their children were, the fate of the children did not necessarily depend on their parents because also children without parents were to be deported.32 One of the consequences of

28 B. Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weißrußland, 1941- 1944 (Düsseldorf, 1998), 44-45. 29 O. Bartov, The eastern front, 1941-1945, German troops and the barbarisation of warfare (New York, 2001), 120-123. 30 P.A. Rudling, ‘The Khatyn massacre in Belarus: A historical controversy revisited’, Holocaust and genocide studies, 26, no. 1 (2012), 36. 31 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 247. 32 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 475.

using the working population for forced labour was a shortage of workers in the agricultural industry. This caused the already small amount of food for the people in Belarus unable to work, to shrink even more.33 In addition, the situation further worsened because of a growing number of people within Belarus. From quite early in the war civilians from the easternmost Soviet territories had been evacuated by the Nazis towards the West. At first during the spring and summer of 1942 people from areas further in the east were evacuated or had fled to Belarus. Later, from autumn 1943 onwards, Belarusians as well were evacuated to western parts of Belarus.34 This was done because of the ARLZ-measures (Auflockerung, Räumung, Lähmung, Zerstorung), or the tactics of the scorched earth. After the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler ordered that nothing of value could fall into the hands of the Red Army, which meant that the abandoned areas in the East had to be dismantled, evacuated, paralysed and destructed before the Nazi forces were allowed to withdraw.35 The civilians were therefore evacuated and forced to work. According to Sharshei Novikau, ‘one of the most important tasks of the Wehrmacht during their withdrawal from Belarus was to recruit the part of the population that was able to work’36 The consequence of this recruitment was that rückwartiges Heeresgebiet Mitte, as well as Weißruthenien, the part of Belarus that was governed by the Zivilverwaltung, was flooded with forced labourers and other refugees. In the case of Ozarichi, the 9th Army quickly wanted to withdraw from the area, which was positioned in a swamp-like area and therefore a difficult battlefield. To take every civilian with them, would have been disadvantageous and therefore decided Supreme Commander of the 9th Army, General Joseph Harpe to only evacuate the people able to work, and place the civilians unable to work in the Ozarichi camps. Ozarichi (Russian: Oзаричи) was, and is, a small village southeast of Minsk. During the war, Ozarichi was positioned on the territory of the Rückwartiges Heeresgebiet Mitte, the rear area of Army Group Centre. (Image 2) The Ozarichi camps were built, roughly three kilometres outside the village. Most scholars agree on the reason why there was a possibility to build the camps in the first place. The enormous refugee problem because of forced evacuations, along with a food shortage and the pressure of the approaching Red Army

33 Terry, ‘»Do not burden one’s own army and its hinterland with unneeded mouths!«’, 190-191. 34 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 500. 35 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 238-239. 36 S. Novikau, ‘Wirtschaftliche Ausbeutung und Zwangsarbeit in Weißrussland während der deutschen Besatzung von 1941-1944’, in: D. Pohl and T. Sebta, eds., Zwangsarbeit in Hitlers Europe, Besatzung, Arbeit, Folgen (Berlin, 2013), 159.

resulted in that the 9th Army wanted to abandon that part of society that was not capable of working. Or as Ben Shepherd puts it: ‘Mounting desperation lent German conduct a further ruthless edge’37. As a result of an order of mid February 1944, that gave permission to leave the not useful part of society behind, the decision was made to create the Ozarichi camps to ‘deport civilians unfit for work sick, cripples, elderly, mothers with more than two children under ten and other Arbeitsunfähige’ to the enemy’.38 The entire operation, the planning until the liberation of the camps, did not last longer than 12 days.

37 B. Shepherd, War in the wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Cambridge, 2004), 222. 38 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 254.

On March 7, General Friedrich Hoßbach, commanding officer of the LVI Panzer Corps, General Josef Harpe, the commander of the 9th Army and General Lieutenant Hans Krebs, chief of staff of the 9th Army, met to discuss the plan for the so-called unnütze Esser.39 Two days later, on March 9, they met with all corps and division officers to notify them of the plans to deport ‘around 20,000 civilians unfit for work’.40 Four Corpses (LV, XXXV, XXXXI, LVI) were involved in the action, as well as twelve of their Panzer and Infantry Divisions. In addition, Sonderkommando 7a of the Einsatzgruppe B of the SS was active in the last part of the journey: the march from the last station to the three Ozarichi camps. The three so-called Endlager, final camps, were positioned on the terrain of the 35th Infantry Division of the LVI Panzer Corps, in a swamp like area in the middle of the woods. They were part of a small camp system, existing of Zwischenlager, intermediate or transit camps, and three final camps, all specially created for the operation, and identified in this thesis as the “Ozarichi camps”. Image 3 shows a map of the camp system. Image 3 is part of a map of March 28, 1944 and shows the operations area of the four Corpses of the 9th Army.41 It displays the Auffanglager, collecting camp, near the station of Rudobelka and four Zwischenlager, intermediate camps or transit camps. The complete map (Appendix I), including various Einladebahnhofen, loading train stations, shows as well the method of transport, the routes that were used and the divisions responsible. Interestingly, while here the camps are clearly divided into different types, Hans-Heinrich Nolte speaks about seven Konzentrationslager, concentration camps.42 In this regard, he does not qualify the difference between the transit camps and the Ozarichi camps in the Ozarichi area.

39 Rass, ‘Ozarichi 1944’, 197. 40 Terry, ‘»Do not burden one’s own army and its hinterland with unneeded mouths!«’, p. 201. 41 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 392-393. 42 Nolte, ‘Ozariči 1944’, 187.

On March 12, the operation started and people from the Bobruisk area, which was under the command of the four abovementioned Corpses, were rounded up in their villages. This was in most cases done in cooperation with the village heads, interpreters and field gendarmes. The population of the villages and cities was divided into two groups; people able and unable to work. The former were deported to the Reich or set to work for the Wehrmacht in the area. Those unable to work were deported by train, lorry, horse cart or on foot to intermediate camps, and then to the final camps. By March 16 around 40,000 people were brought to the camps, the double of the amount of people, which were initially planned to be deported. On March 17, all of the aforementioned troops withdrew from the camp, leaving the camp, and its inmates, surrounded by barbed wire in a heavily mined area. Two days later, the Red Army liberated the camps and it found 33,480 survivors as well as approximately 8,000 to 9,000 others who had been shot or had perished as a result of the cruel

circumstances.43 Among the inmates were many mothers with young children and even young children on their own. According to the Red Army, they liberated 15,990 children.44 The conditions in the camps were dreadful. The camps consisted often only of barbed wire and watchtowers. There was no form of shelter and because the camps were positioned at the front line, it was forbidden to make fire, not to alarm the Red Army. People were forced to walk the last part of the journey to the final camps. Those people who were not able to keep up with the others were beaten or shot.45 Rass adds that the decision to infect more or less healthy people in the camps with typhus by placing ill people in the camps alongside them made the situation from extremely bad into terrible.46 During the course of the operation, approximately 7,000 people suffering from typhus were brought in from ‘typhus villages’ that were under quarantine.47 Not many people received any food, although officially the people in the camps were provided with food to keep up for three days.48 Gerlach even states that people not just died of the abovementioned causes but that ‘people were daily deported away to be shot’49. Even though the accounts of the German military seem to give a complete view on what happened in the Ozarichi camps, they only show the side of the perpetrator. The eyewitness accounts of the survivors may show some other insights because many of the documents on the meetings regarding the planning and course of the operation were destroyed. To use oral history as a historical source is still a topic of discussion among scholars. There are determined supporters of this type of source in particular when using it for the purpose of reconstructing or understanding genocidal aspects of the war. Omer Bartov pleads for the use of oral history because it can, according to him, not just factually correct official accounts; it also ‘provides the historian with a different vantage point, and thereby introduces a richer and more complex reconstruction of an event as a whole’.50 Karel Berkhoff underlines this as well and encourages the use of eyewitness accounts because ‘the historiography of genocide and mass murder can be greatly enriched by careful comparison of survivors’

43 Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 329. 44 ‘Spravka o kolichestve i dvizhenii naseleniia, osvobozhdennogo Krasnoi Armiei iz nemetskikh kontsentratsionnikh lagerei na territorii Domanovichkogo raiona’, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 40-41. 45 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 399. 46 Ibidem, 390-391. 47 Ibidem, 390. 48 Terry, ‘»Do not burden one’s own army and its hinterland with unneeded mouths!«’, 203. 49 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1098. 50 O. Bartov, ‘Setting the Record Straight’, Past forward (spring 2011), 24.

recollections.’51 Daniel Blatman even states that it would be impossible to understand or reconstruct what happened during genocidal events during the war, such as the death marches, without using survivor testimonies.52 However, not all scholars agree on the use of eyewitness accounts. For example, Gerlach wrote his extensive work on Belarus by using as few testimonies as possible. He was very reluctant in using them because, according to him, the mind can play tricks on us; memories can blur with other events and information that was obtained later can confuse the information on what happened at the time of the event.53 Gerlach’s hesitation is legitimate because there is in fact a risk in using oral history. Both testimonies of events only hours ago or years before can be distorted by emotions, politics or time. The construction of a collective memory on events can also influence the testimonies and make them more coherent and aligned with one another. In addition, testimonies can possibly be remodelled by other sources, such as newspapers, radio or books. In the case of Ozarichi this most likely happened as well. It is often underlined in the commemorations of the camps that the Nazis intented to destroy the Soviet people by placing relatively healthy people in the same camp as people suffering of typhus. This is also apparent in one of the books that was used for this thesis. The book Hostages of the Armed Forces (death camp Ozarichi): documents and materials comprises fragments of interviews that were conducted by the Red Army shortly after the liberation.54 The book is divided into different subjects of which the mistreatment of people suffering of typhus is the largest part. Yet, although the testimonies in the book are arranged in a particular order to demonstrate what the purpose of the camps might have been, this does not mean that the content of the different testimonies is not useful. By reviewing the eyewitness accounts and to look further than this narrative, the testimonies can offer new insights, also beyond the story of people suffering of typhus. Bartov has put this as follows: ‘[..] testimonies gain immensely from being focused on one locality, on a relatively limited span of time, and with a limited cast of characters. Within such a context, one can more easily crosscheck testimonies that recount the same event from

51 K.C. Berkhoff, ‘Dina Pronicheva’s story of surviving the Babi Yar massacre: German, Jewish, Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian records’, The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, (Bloomington, 2008), 294. 52 D. Blatman, The death marches; the final phase of Nazi genocide (Cambridge, 2011), 6. 53 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 30. 54 Barkun, Zalozhniki.

different perspectives, as well as integrate these perspectives into a historical reconstruction that uses all other available kinds of documentation.’55 Although the testimonies of the Ozarichi survivors are quite likely somewhat distorted through time and politics, this does not mean that they are not as valuable as written sources. Donald A. Ritchie has underlined this as well; ‘Contradictory oral testimony has forced interviewers to re-examine the written sources and sometimes alert them to documents they might not have consulted, or that the archives might not have collected.’56 Alesandro Portelli has argued similarly that even though testimonies often say more about the meaning imposed on to an event than about the actual event, ‘this does not imply that oral history has no factual interest; interviews often reveal unknown events or unknown aspects of known events, and they always cast new light on unexplored sides of the daily life of the non- hegemonic classes.’57 It is for these reasons that the Ozarichi –testimonies can shine a new light on the camps, bearing in mind the risks of oral history. To create an as balanced image as possible of what might have happened in the camps and during the marches to the camps, testimonies from three different periods of time were used: from the 1940s, the 1990s and the 2010s. For this thesis, in total 108 testimonies were used. The 97 eyewitness accounts are quite diverse. They were conducted at different moments, by various people and are collected in different forms. All available testimonies have been used if they met two requirements: if the name of the interviewee was available and the date that the interview took place was known. No further selecting took place. Within the published primary sources, there were 42 (short) testimonies that were not included because they did not have a date of recording. Newspaper items reporting on and showing abstracts of interviews with survivors have not been used as testimony. There might be a possibility that there are more testimonies to be found because there is a group of survivors of the Ozarichi camps that regularly gives interviews at universities and schools throughout Europe.58

55 Bartov, ‘Setting the record straight’, 26. 56 D.A. Ritchie, ‘Introduction: The Evolution of Oral History’, Oxford Handbooks Online, April 15 2015, http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195339550.00 1.0001/oxfordhb-9780195339550-e-1. 57 A. Portelli, ‘The pecularities of oral history’, History Workshop, no. 12 (Oxford 1981), 99. 58 For example, on some of these survivors: ’60 let spustia, vstrecha s Germaniei’, in : A.P. Shkuran and M.E. Sinkevich, eds., Tragediia Polecia. Maloizvestnye stranitsy voiny, 1943-1944 gg.: kontslager «Ozarichi» (Minsk 2005), 256-270.

The three groups of testimonies have different origins. The first group contain of testimonies from the 1940s. The eyewitness accounts are written abstracts of the interrogations that were conducted by an extraordinary committee directly after the liberation of the camps.59 The earliest account is from March 25, 1944 and the latest of April 2, 1944. The testimonies are bundled in a German-Russian book on the Ozarichi camps. In some testimonies, the questionnaire is visible. The age of the interviewees is not in all interrogations mentioned. However, it is quite likely that most of them were adults or young adults because they were able to speak in a quite well-balanced way about what happened to them, one week earlier. The second group exists of written accounts of interviews conducted in the late 1990s for the 55th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.60 These accounts were conducted by different interviewers and are bundled in one book. In this case the information on the eyewitnesses is most complete. The age and place of residence of most of the interviewees is mentioned and in general the testimonies are accompanied by a picture of the survivor. The last group of testimonies is the most varied. All interviews were conducted in the early 2010s and late 2000s. Six interviews were conducted for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. The accounts are written and were published in 2014.61 Five interviews are part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Belarusian Witnesses Documentation Project. The interviews are video recorded.62 The last two interviews are audio recordings, conducted during an eyewitness conversation at the German-Russian Museum Berlin Karlshorst in March 2013.63

59 Barkun, Zalozhniki. 60 G.D. Knatko, Uzniki Ozarichskikh lagerei vspomnayut (Minsk 1999). 61 A.P. Shkuran, and F.A. Veras, ed., Kontsentratsionnii lager Ozarichi: zhivie svidetelstva Belarusi (Minsk, 2014). 62 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Belarusian Witnesses Documentation Project, http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn50510, accessed June 2015. 63 See appendix II for a complete list of the used testimonies, including personal information on the eyewitnesses.

Chapter 2 – The round-ups

The first stage of the process of going to the Ozarichi camps were the round-ups of the people from the place where they lived. Although the civilians were still quite far removed from the end camps, the round up was an important part in the process. The first stage of Ozarichi was often actually not the first misery people went through during the war. Most of the people who ended up in Ozarichi had already experienced other type of crimes carried out by the Nazis. For example, some of them had family members had been forced to work at the front or in Germany.64 In addition, numerous people were forced to move because the Nazis burned down their houses.65 One eyewitness, Anna Akhremnik, fled with almost her entire family into the woods before German troops arrived in their village. The people who were still in the village, including her grandmother, were all herded into the school building and were burned alive.66 And not just prior experiences of the civilians made the journey to the Ozarichi camps a struggle; their physical condition was often poor, which indeed made them end up in Ozarichi. This chapter analyses the differences in structure of the raids, the treatment of the people and the involvement of local collaborators. The chapter is divided into two parts; the round-ups in cities and in villages.

2.1 The cities of Bobruisk and Zhlobin Ozarichi was located in the Polessye oblast. The village was positioned in the area that was under the control of the 9th Army of Ruckwartiges Heeresgebiet Mitte. Within the area where the Wehrmacht divisions responsible for the Ozarichi camps were stationed, there were only two cities, Bobruisk and Zhlobin. None of the survivors offering the 108 testimonies had lived in Bobruisk before the start of the operation. However, there were people who were brought to Bobruisk after they were rounded up in their home villages. The city of Bobruisk is roughly eighty kilometres away from the village of Ozarichi. As noted in Chapter 1, the situation in Bobruisk during the war was fairly bad, in particular because of shortage of food for civilians. Because Bobruisk was positioned on the train route to the Ozarichi camps (image 2), some people were brought to the city, where they had to wait in the camp near the Bobruisk train

64 A.S. Lubov, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 8; M.A. Korol, in: ibidem, 75. 65 M.E. Molokovich, in: ibidem, 93; A.S. Lubov, in: ibidem, 7; N.G. Burbo, in: ibidem, 22; A.N. Konstantinovna, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 57. 66 A.G. Akhremchik in: Knatko, Uzniki, 12.

station to be transported further away. (Chapter 4 will elaborate more on the Bobruisk camp because it is also regarded to be a transit camp.) The city of Zhlobin is about eighty kilometres northeast of Ozarichi. In the testimonies, Zhlobin is better represented than Bobruisk. Twenty-four people came from Zhlobin and were from here brought to Ozarichi. Of these people, five started their journey in another settlement than Zhlobin but they were brought to the city prior to the start of the operation. These people came from Veliki Rogi, Chernia Virnia and the hamlet Zhlobin- Podolsk. The inhabitants from the villages in the area of Zhlobin were rounded up from late February 1944 and were brought to Zhlobin, presumably because of the planned evacuation of the area and because of the round-ups of forced labourers. The evacuees arriving in Zhlobin were placed in houses with other families. The consequence was that the city became overcrowded. There was not enough food and there were multiple outbreaks of typhus.67 The problems in Zhlobin increased not just because of the growing number of people, but also because these people were forced to live in a shrinking area of living space. This tactic was already been used by the Nazis in ghettos throughout the Europe, where Jews were forced to live in a shrinking living space, after which the ghettos regularly were liquidated. Here, from the beginning of March 1944, the Nazis started to move people about the city. There are records that people were moved five or six times to different houses in different parts of the city.68 The houses that were left behind were generally burned down or blown up. Varvara Savitskaia had been displaced three times since the autumn of 1943 and came in February 1944 to Zhlobin. She stated that there were rumours that people were burned or blown up in the houses as well.69 Strategic buildings and parts of the infrastructure were also demolished, for example railroad depots and tank stations.70 The rumours about the burning houses and its inhabitants in Zhlobin fit very well into the stories about the countryside, where entire villages were burned down, including its inhabitants. Until now there are no stories about burned civilians of Zhlobin. However, the phenomenon of burning people in their houses is also noted by someone else. Vasili Khodorenko stated about the fact that people were chased out of their houses, that ‘a part of the people still stayed there and when the

67 G.S. Shikorov, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 138-139; N.G. Zhukov in: Knatko, Uzniki, 51-55; E.V. Pekurina in: ibidem, 103-108. 68 L.L. Bykovas, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 49. 69 V.Y. Savitskaia in: ibidem, 107. 70 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 85; M.D. Vlassova, in: ibidem, 89; G.S. Shikorov, in: ibidem, 139; L.L. Bykovas, in: ibidem, 49.

houses were put on fire, the people jumped out. Perhaps there were people burned. I did not see that people were specially burned’.71 Along with the deportation of inhabitants to other parts of the city, people were also rounded up for evacuation, from late February onwards. They were ordered to go to the Kommandantur to get evacuated. Apparently, not many people responded to this order because only a small amount of people was evacuated by trucks to the rear land.72 Yulia Barabanova, who lived in Zhlobin since September 1943, recalled that ‘almost no one went, except policemen (politsii).’73 During the round-ups for evacuation, an unknown part of the inhabitants of Zhlobin was forced to leave their houses already on March 1 and go to the Kommandantur. Gendarmes came by the houses and ordered the people to get their belongings and go to the Kommandantur, where they needed to wait to be evacuated.74 Other people said they were rounded up later in March. They said that gendarmes came by the houses at March 10 or 11 and said that people needed to get their belongings and go to the Kommandantur.75 It is quite likely there were multiple raids in Zhlobin, in particular because the Nazis cleared some parts of the city earlier than others. In addition to the testimonies about the gendarmes who came by the houses, there are also other stories of how people got to know of the raids. The Nazis used the city radio to reach as many people at once. Ivan Romanenko said during his interrogation on April 2 1944 that a message was broadcast several times on the city radio about the upcoming evacuation. He recalls it as follows: ‘To save you from the bolshevist atrocities, we will evacuate you all to the rear land. Bring all belongings, horses, carts and cattle with you. Bring a bowl and a spoon with you because on the way you will be provided with hot food. Obey the German soldiers. Don’t hide and don’t run away. The entire city is surrounded by German soldiers. Everyone trying to hide or escape, will be shot. Go outside and go where to the German soldiers send you.’76 Romanenko’s testimony was used in the report of the Extraordinary State Committee.77 The radio message is described in this as well, but it is not mentioned that Romanenko recalled

71 V.V. Khodorenko, in: ibidem, 137. 72 G.S. Shikorov, in: ibidem, 139; Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 83. 73 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 83. 74 G.S. Shikorov, in: ibidem, 138-139; M.D. Vlassova, in: ibidem, 88-91. 75 M.P. Galkina, in: ibidem, 93; L.L. Bykovas, in: ibidem, 49; M.P. Sarubova, in: ibidem, 97; E.V. Pekurina, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 104. 76 I. O. Romanenko, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 131; Z.P. Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 121. 77 ‘Istreblenie gitlerovsami’, in: Sbornik soobshchenii, 189.

this. In addition, the story of gendarmes going through the city to get everyone from their houses is not mentioned as well in this report.78 During this raid, more people went outside and found their way to the Kommandantur. Many people describe the huge crowds of people being chased trough the streets of Zhlobin towards the Kommandantur.79 Barabanova said about this: ‘I saw that our street was surrounded and secured by German soldiers. Through the street went a stream of residents: women, elderly people, spared youngsters went in the direction of the Kommandantur. Me and my family were in this crowd as well.’80 Some people were already in the building of the Kommandantur. They had spent a number of days there from the moment that the Nazis started to move city residents. After some days there, a gendarme came into the room where they stayed and ordered them to leave the building to join the other people outside.81 The Kommandantur was in a school at Pervomaiskaia Street, near the railroad and the station. Many testimonies described the Kommandantur and its surrounding area as a camp. Survivors speak of an area of about 700 to 800 metres surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, which was guarded by SS personnel and gendarmes.82 Some people call it a lager83, a camp, and one survivor even states that there was an actual sign with the German words Russisch Lager84, Russian camp. Unfortunately, there no pictures of the Kommandantur. The process of sifting people into groups of people able to work and unable to work is less clearly described. It is known that there was a moment of sorting people into these groups; this is also described in the literature on Ozarichi.85 However, when this precisely happened is not entirely clear from the testimonies. Barabanova stated that during the days prior to the rounding up young people were already removed from their houses in order to be brought to Germany.86 Others say that this happened a bit later, during the walk to the Kommandantur or in the Zhlobin camp.

78 Ibidem, 185. 79 G.I. Kovalchuk, in: Shkuran, eds., Kontsentratsionnii lager Ozarichi, 163; L.L. Bykovas, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 49; M.P. Galkina, in: ibidem, 93; Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 83. 80 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 85. 81 M.D. Vlassova, in: ibidem, 91. 82 I.O. Romanenko, in: ibidem, 131; Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 85; M. P. Galkina, in: ibidem, 93; Z.P. Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 121. 83 M. P. Galkina, in: ibidem, 93; Z.P. Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 121; I.O. Romanenko, in: ibidem, 131. 84 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 85. 85 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 255. 86 Y.P. Barabanova, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 85.

According to three eyewitnesses the crowd of people was not divided into two groups but into three. The third group existed of people who were involved with the Nazis. Grigori Shikorov saw on his way to the Kommandantur the mayor of Zhlobin, accompanied by a group of policemen (politseiski), in front of the building. According to Shikorov: While the gendarmes chased us past him, the mayor chose the families of policemen, people who were working for the German army and families of whom close relatives were working in Germany, and they were brought inside the yard of the Kommandantur. The other group was sent to the field surrounded by barbed wire next to the Kommandantur.87 Other eyewitnesses told similar stories. However, they say that this process happened inside camp Zhlobin and do not mention the mayor. They added to Shikorov’s story that in the camp the people with relatives collaborating with the Germans needed to stand at one side of the camp, after being called from a list. Through the radio it was explained that these people would get evacuated as well but separately from the others and that they would have better life conditions.88 The remaining inhabitants of Zhlobin, who were not involved with the Nazis, were separated into those capable of working and those unfit to work. The process of separating the nonworking population from the people who were able to work produced dreadful scenes of families being separated, husbands being taken away and fourteen year old children left behind to do forced labour without their family.89 Zinaida Gavrilchik, a woman who lived in Zhlobin and was brought to Ozarichi, described the following: ‘I saw that gendarmes took babies away from their mothers. The babies were thrown into the mud and the mothers were taken away to do forced labour.’90 The group unable to work was soon brought to the railway station of Zhlobin and was put into trains that very same day, March 12. People speak of various trains, with about 50 wagons each, in which there were about 50 people. After the wagons were filled, the doors were closed and secured with barbed wire.

2.2 Villages and hamlets The round up in villages and hamlets are more difficult to describe individually because there exist testimonies such forty-one different villages. The consequence is that in some cases it harder to generalise how the raids proceeded. However, it is clear that there were major differences between the raids in villages and those in Zhlobin.

87 G.S. Shikorov, in: ibidem, 141. 88 Z.P. Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 121; I.O. Romanenko, in: ibidem, 131. 89 M.D. Vlassova, in: ibidem, 89. 90 Z.P. Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 121.

The biggest difference between the city of Zhlobin and the villages is that the round up in Zhlobin was well organised. There were preparations before the operation had started and the entire round up took place over a number of days. Even though the process might have been quite well organised, eyewitnesses described it as disruptive, upsetting and chaotic for the people who underwent this. People spoke about drunken German soldiers who went by the houses, soldiers beating at windows in the middle of the night and of course the entire uncertainty and arbitrariness of the process.91 However, in the 23 testimonies on Zhlobin there is virtual no comment on direct physical violence against the civilians in this initial part of the journey to Ozarichi. Only during the last part of the rounding up, during the sorting of people, there was some violence involved. The overall image of the rounding up in the villages after analysing the testimonies is that although it might have been a well-structured process, that the inhabitants perceived it as chaotic and very violent. Numerous testimonies mention people being chased onto the street from their houses by German soldiers with sticks, whereby there who did not want to leave or were not quick enough were beaten. Astafeva Lubov lived in the town of Ukli. She described the rounding up: ‘Early in the morning Germans arrived in the village with large amount of cars, armed with dogs and chased the people out of their houses and huts (khaty). They did not let the people dress themselves if they were indoors and the people who were late were beaten with whips.’92 This typifies also what happened in villages such as, Zabolot, Knishevich, Gorduny, Ala, Kovchits and Novaia Dubrova. The inhabitants of the villages were often badly prepared for the journey. Some people were not allowed to bring anything because they were expected to leave the moment the German soldiers started the raid.93 Others managed to bring some things with them, but these belongings were often taken away from them later. In some villages, the German soldiers or the village elders told the people that they would move away to a neighbouring village where there was more food and better life conditions.94 Unfortunately, these villages were a farce and represented the Ozarichi camps they actually were sent to. The shifting of people in the villages does seem to have been more chaotic than in Zhlobin and Bobruisk. Not in all villages was the population immediately separated into different groups. In some cases, the entire population was first sent to another village, where they were sorted together with the inhabitants of the other villages. Most people understood

91 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 85; L.L. Bukova, in: ibidem, 49. 92 A.S. Lubov, in: Knatko, Uzniki Ozarichkikh lagerei, 8. 93 N.A. Konstantinovna, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 57. 94 A.P. Viashovets, in: ibidem, 61; U.K. Belenkoi, in: ibidem, 81.

that some people would have to work in Germany. Therefore, there were people who tried to prevent that they would be sent elsewhere without their family. Maria Kazeko came from the village of Ala. She and her cousin Vera hid in the haystack at the house of her uncle at the moment everyone was rounded up. They stayed there a little while but feared that the Germans would set the entire village on fire. Therefore they came out and caught up with the others in the neighbouring village of Vizhari where many people from the entire region were brought. They were not sent to Germany but ended up in the Ozarichi camps.95 Others did not go as far as Kazeko and her cousin but also managed to evade deportation to Germany. Liudviga Dubasova was rounded up together with her mother and her four siblings. She noticed that people of a certain age were all rounded up to work elsewhere. She managed to stay with her family because she was carrying the baby of the neighbours.96 However, carrying a child did not necessarily mean that one would be relieved of labour duty. Nina Burbo came from the village of Stalka. When the village was rounded up she was placed in the row of people that had to go work in Germany, even though she had a four-year-old daughter. She stated later about the whole episode: ‘The fascists took my daughter away and threw her on the ground because they did not believe that she was my daughter. (I was back then 22 years old and my daughter was four) But my mother and daughter saved me. My mother explained to my daughter: “They say uncle will arrest mama and mama cannot stay with you then. If we start shouting and running she will stay with us.” Then my daughter started to run, cry and shout, and I ran towards them. At that moment a woman said that she was really my daughter. Others acknowledged that as well.’97 The foregoing examples show that some people resisted the round-ups. Most people, however, were not in a physical state to resist this. People suffering from typhus or other diseases, were more than occasionally rounded up at another moment during the raids. They were left in the villages to be deported later on or they were brought to villages where only still ill people lived. This was not just the case for the villages, but this happened as well in Zhlobin where the people suffering from typhus were all brought to houses at the border of the city.98 It seems that there was more involvement of ‘locals’ or ‘volunteers’ in the villages. As is also known from the literature on Ozarichi that village elders, as well as interpreters, were

95 M.I. Kazeko, in: Knatko, Uzniki Ozarichkikh lagerei, 60. 96 L.V. Dubasova, in: ibidem, 49. 97 N.G. Burbo, in: ibidem, 23. 98 D.G. Vdovenko, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 119.

often involved in the round-ups. 99 However, their involvement in the raids was not always seen as complicity. Some testimonies underline the effort of village elders to save the inhabitants of the village is underlined. Anna Gertsova was eleven when she and her family were rounded up in the village of Knishevich. The village elder spoke German because he had been in German captivity and had prevented twice that Anna’s father would be rounded up and would get shot. However, this did not prevent them from being rounded up at all in the end.100

The testimonies underline that the round-ups for Ozarichi were an integral part of the ‘recruitment’ of forced labourers. According to Alexander Dalhouski, ‘during this operation, thousands of civilians were selected for forced labour for or in the Wehrmacht.’101 The various examples from the testimonies show that this recruitment took place in the cities, as well as in smaller hamlets. However, the practical execution of the round-ups varied depending on the location. The use of violence, both nature and scale of it, differed between the settlements. This seem to relate to the German control there was over the round-ups. In Zhlobin, the round-ups were carried out in a very structured way, making sure that really all people were deported. In the villages this was often more chaotic. This was a result of the significant difference in scale of the operation in cities and in small hamlets, which caused that the civilians were treated differently as well. Further research is needed into the reason for this difference, which might be caused by the presence or absence of higher military personnel, or some external factors. In the next chapter the transport from the starting villages to the Ozarichi camps is described. It will become clear that the initial differences in conditions diminished during the journey itself: everyone ended up in the same type of transport, with the same harsh conditions.

99 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 395. 100 A.P. Gertsova, in: Knatko, Uzniki Ozarichkikh lagerei, 31. 101 A. Dalhouski, ‘Belarusian forced labourers’, 218.

Chapter 3 - Transport to the camps as virtual death marches

The round-ups which took place prior to imprisonment in the camps demonstrate that the Ozarichi camps are better described as a process (rather than camps alone). The round-ups and the subsequent journey resulted in that the prisoners were severely weakened at the time they arrived in the Ozarichi camps. In particular, the journey to the camps took a heavy toll on people. People had to walk for days without knowing where they were heading and they did not receive sufficient food or water. They were not allowed to bring along any of their possessions. If they were allowed to do so, their possessions would be taken away from them halfway during the journey. Good shoes were seized and the former owners had to continue barefoot. People who were too ill to continue, would walk too slow or tried to escape were beaten or shot by the guarding Wehrmacht soldiers and SS personnel. The characteristics of the journey to the Ozarichi camps as set out above show great similarity to the death marches, which took place at the end of the Second World War. The death marches are often viewed in relation to the evacuation of concentration camps; they are described as the chaotic unforeseen process of evacuating prisoners of the larger concentration camps in order to keep them out of the hands and sight of the approaching Allied forces. However, some scholars argue that the death marches already took place earlier in the war. For example, Daniel Goldhagen regards the death marches as an integral part of the Holocaust and states that in particular Jewish prisoners were targeted in these marches.102 Other scholars broadened the concept of death marches by also applying it to the mistreatment of Soviet POWs in 1941 and 1942.103 After the start of Operation Barbarossa, many Soviet POWS were captured and interned into the concentration camp system. These POWS were harshly mistreated and were often transported to the Reich in order to work or transported elsewhere. Approximately two to three million Soviet POWs died as a result of maltreatment by the Wehrmacht and the SS.104 Even though these types of marches took place at different moments throughout the war, they show remarkably similar features: in both cases the victims were guarded by the Wehrmacht and by Einsatzgruppen. Soviet POWs and concentration camp prisoners had to march for hundreds of kilometres

102 D.J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s willing executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996), 327. 103 K.C. Berkhoff, ‘The "Russian" Prisoners of War in Nazi-Ruled Ukraine as Victims of Genocidal Massacre’, Holocaust and Genocide studies, 15, no. 1 (2001), 6. 104 C. Streit, Keine Kameraden, Die Wehmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945 (Bonn, 1991), 25.

without knowing where to go, barely receiving any food or water, wearing clothes that were not suitable for such a journey and with the omnipresent danger of getting shot by the guards when people where incapable of walking any further.105 In this chapter, the transport to the Ozarichi camps will be described and analysed. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that the deportations of the civilians to the Ozarichi camps bears nearly the same features as the death marches. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part provides an analysis of the different types of transport and the second part elaborates on the treatment during the marches.

3.1 Deportation methods The transport to the Ozarichi camps was well organised. It has been described in literature that people from certain parts of the region were transported by train or truck, while others were brought by car or were forced to walk.106 Daniel Blatman, who researched the death marches extensively, has emphasised that this was also the case during the death marches at the end of the war. On the evacuations from concentration camps, which were equal to the death marches, Blatman states: ‘The means of the evacuations were varied: some prisoners were transported by rail, by truck, or on horse-drawn wagons, others proceeded on foot, and most marches were combinations of two or three methods. The motorized or pedestrian convoys joined up with other evacuation marches that set out from nearby camps, split up, dispersed, and met up again with others, all this in accordance with the conditions that prevailed along the routes.’107 The features of the marches that Blatman describes are almost identically to those of the Ozarichi marches. In many cases, the people who were rounded up left the village on the same day or the day after. From this point on, there was the possibility that they were moved by train, truck, horse cart or on foot. There was a connection between the place of origin of the civilians and the way in which people were transported. Rass has demonstrated that different Wehrmacht divisions were responsible for different areas and had also different types of transport measures within their reach.108 The circumstances during the transport differed, depending on the type of transport. The train and the cattle cart are often regarded as one of the key characteristics of Nazi genocidal operations and as a symbol of the transports of people from the West to the

105 Bartov, The eastern front, 111-112; Berkhoff, ‘The “Russian” Prisoners of war’, 6; Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 207-208. 106 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 391. 107 Blatman, The death marches, 11. 108 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 391.

concentration camps in the East. The train was not only a way of transport, but could also be regarded as a tool to carry out the Nazi genocidal policies. Many people died during the transports to the concentration camps because they were deprived of water or food and were crammed into the trains. This was also the case for certain transportations methods to the Ozarichi camps. In the Ozarichi case, trains were mostly used during the start of the journey towards the camps. After the rounding up, people would be directly moved by train or were first brought to a station to be deported afterwards. For example, people coming from the villages Novoselki, Telusha or Krasnyi Bereg were all first transported by train to the Rudobelka train station or to another transit camp closer to Ozarichi. Other people, for example from the villages Kovrin, were first brought to Krasnyi Bereg by truck before they went on a train. Appendix III shows the various routes that were used to bring people from their residential area to the Ozarichi camps, as well as the different routes between the intermediate transit camps and the Ozarichi camps. The trains that were used for the transport of people from their place of residence to transit camps were indeed similar to the trains used at other moments in the war. The trains consisted of 50 to 60 cattle cars that were filled with approximately 50 people per wagon.109 People were not provided with any water or food, the amount of people in a single wagon often made it impossible to sit down and there were no toilet facilities.110 Lidia Bykovas was fifteen years old during her imprisonment. In her testimony she described the situation in the wagons as follows: ‘Everyone, whether they were ill or not, were crammed into the wagon. It was impossible to move, there were constant sounds of moaning and crying. The Germans closed the doors of the wagon and secured it with barbed wire. In the car there was an incredible smell; it was difficult to breathe… That is how we drove for over twelve hours.’111 A train ride of more than twelve hours was no exception and some testimonies even describe train rides of two days.112 However, there are also testimonies which describe that the train paused for a short while and the doors were opened. Maria Galkina was in the train that departed from the train station of Zhlobin. With regard to the journey she stated: ‘Only at one station they opened the wagons for about five to ten minutes. The cars were at a place where

109 V.R. Svistunova, in: Barkun, Zalohzknikhi vermakhta, 135; A.P. Gaichukova, in: ibidem, 93. 110 A.S. Tsukanov, in ibidem, 77. 111 L.L. Bykovas, in: ibidem, 49. 112 E.N. Kharchenko, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 124.

you could not get any water and we were not let too far away from the wagon. After that, the wagons were closed again and we were brought further away[…].’113 Despite the fact that the train wagons were cattle cars with closed doors and windows, people were nevertheless able to describe the view from the train. In this respect, Zinaida Gavrilchik stated:‘When we drove through the stations of Telusha and Krasnyi Bereg, there were trains there as well in which prisoners were loaded by the Germans. On the highways I also saw many trucks loaded with prisoners.’114 Moreover, some people were able to communicate during the train travel with people outside, other than the German soldiers guarding the trains. Galkina, who had been let out of the wagon for a short while, described how the train stopped at a station that was unfamiliar to the people in the cattle car. They managed to speak through the windows with railway workers who told them that they had arrived at Rudobelka station.115 Another woman, Evdokia Kharchenko, claimed to have met Soviet POWs who told them that they were being deported to Ozarichi, that they needed to remain calm and that the Red Army would liberate them.116 These examples demonstrate that at the time of the transport to the Ozarichi camps there were still other people present who witnessed the entire proceedings. Although it is clear that there were bystanders who saw the deportation and even communicated with the deportees, historians to date have not described these bystanders and their role. The trains in the Ozarichi case were only used for those who needed to be deported from a location far away from the camps. Trucks and horse carts were used in a different manner. For the first part of the journey, trucks were used to deport people to a village with a train station. In such cases, all the civilians from a certain village were deported by truck. In contrast with the use of trains, trucks were used during the entire journey and not just at the start. At a later stage of the journey, when more people were gathered together in transit camps, the trucks were only used to move ill people, children and elderly people who would slow down the marches to the final camps. In many cases, children were transported alone or with their siblings in the trucks or horse carts.117 This usually meant that families were separated, without knowing as to whether

113 M.P. Galkina, in: Barkun, Zalozhnikhi vermakhta, 95. 114 Z.P Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 121. 115 M.P. Galkina, in: ibidem, 95. 116 E.N. Kharchenko, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 124. 117 M.E. Molokovich, in: ibidem, 93.

they would ever see each other again. Mila Korol was deported from the village of Gat, together with her entire family. She described the start of the transport to the Ozarichi camps: While the Germans chased everyone to the middle of the street, a truck arrived. The children were put on the trucks. When the mothers started to cry, the Germans beat them up. The elderly people and the other children were put on five other horse carts. The people left behind were chased on foot. We were chased to the village of Grabio. We already became ill. The weather was bad, wet. Those who could not walk were beaten with sticks by the Germans. When we approached the camp, we had to walk through a lot of mud. Then there were fortunately the trucks and cars at the side of the road.118 In addition to children and the elderly, people with diseases were generally moved by truck or horse cart. In some cases, this meant that people suffering from typhus were transported using a completely different route than the prisoners who were free of diseases. For example, Nadezhda Konstantinovna suffered from typhus when her entire village was rounded up. She and others with a disease were deported later than the other people. German soldiers took her and approximately 300 other people away from the village of Kovchits: After three days about 20 to 25 German soldiers arrived in the village. At their command, all the ill people were loaded onto trucks during which it was forbidden to bring any belongings. People who ignored the orders got beaten with sticks by the soldiers. Also people who could not climb onto the trucks were beaten and were thrown on the trucks. This also happened to me, my nineteen-year-old sister, my mother and my aunt.119 She spent various days in villages with other people suffering from typhus. From Konstantinovna’s statements it can be derived that the village was deserted. The group of people with diseases was later brought to the other group of ‘healthy’ people at the camp near Mikul-Gorodok. A significant amount of the transport was on foot. The conditions during these marches were often even worse than the conditions of the train and truck transports. As described in the previous chapter, people were hardly (or not at all) prepared because they were chased away from the villages, which often meant that they did not wear appropriate clothing for such a march and in some cases people did not even wear shoes. Anna Akhremchik described how she, her mother and her little sister, had to walk to the camps: ‘We were chased further, on foot. We walked day and night. It was the three of us: me, my mother and my little sister, whom we carried on our shoulders because she was barefooted.

118 M.A. Korol, in: ibidem, 76. 119 N.A. Konstantinovna, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 57.

We walked through the mud, many of us were exhausted and the Germans shot at us. That is how they chased us to Ozarichi.’120 This example shows that not all children were brought to the camps by trucks or horse carts. Some of them had to walk as well. Likewise, Fedor Lomako was 11 years old during the march. He stated the following: ‘We were chased off the lorries. We proceeded on foot. Whoever was able to walk walked, and those who were incapable of walking were beaten with sticks, beaten to death. I told my mother that I could not walk any further. She answered: “Walk my son, otherwise they will beat you to death.”’121 In her testimony, Valentina Basukova also emphasised that the marches involved walking for several days without any rest. Her little brother was four years old at the time of the march, but he was too heavy to carry. He got tired and started to cry. A German was about to shoot her little brother, but hesitated and let him go.122 As these examples demonstrate, the foot marches were generally characterised by increasing German violence and worsening physical conditions.

3.2 Arbitrariness, torment and violence As set out above, there were three types of deportation methods. The testimonies also show that all forms were perceived as terrible. However, the type determine the fate of the person that was being transported; a day of transportation in a truck instead of being forced to walk could mean an extra day to live for the prisoner concerned. At the beginning of the journey, the transportation method for each prisoner was already decided upon. The method that would be chosen often depended on the Wehrmacht division. Not all divisions had the same type of transport at their disposal. Later on during the marches, it seemed as if there was no longer a clear procedure on how to decide who was forced to walk and who was taken by truck.123 The procedure to be transported by truck seemed in a lot of cases to have depended on individual decisions of Wehrmacht personnel. For example, there are numerous cases of families that were split up during the march. This was because children were put on trucks or horse carts to be brought to the next camp, while the mothers and other relatives were forced to walk.124 Agafa Viashonvets was forced to leave the village Gorduny together with her daughter Kristina and the latter’s four children. At a certain point during the journey, the

120 A.G. Akhremchik, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 12-13. 121 F.S. Lomako, in: ibidem, 91-92. 122 V.A. Barsukova, in: ibidem, 15. 123 As Ozarichi did not have a train station, transportation by train was no longer an option later on during the marches. People were transported by trains to the transit camps and from thereon out they were transported either by truck or on foot. Chapter 4 addresses this in further detail. 124 M.E. Molokovich, in: ibidem, 94; M.A Korol, in: ibidem, 76.

family was seperated; Kristina and her four children were placed on a truck and Agafa was forced to walk. Kristina begged the soldier who was in charge of loading the truck to place her mother on the truck as well, so that they would not lose each other in the chaos. The soldier responded to Kristina’s request by hitting her with a stick in her neck, after which she fell of the truck. The children were also thrown of the truck and the entire family was forced to continue the march on foot.125 This seems to demonstrate that individual soldiers had the possibility to decide whom they would help. They could decide whether families would be separated or whether people had to walk to the camps or went by truck. Anna Yarosh was thirteen years old and was send with her mother to Ozarichi from their home village Ala. Anna was ill, but it was clear to her and her mother that if she would sit down, she would get killed. At a certain point when she was unable to walk any further, a soldier asked her mother in German if she was ill. Her mother confirmed this and the soldier wandered off to a group of other soldiers. They left and came back with three trucks.126 In order to keep the convoy going, other ill people were also placed on a horse cart or they were transported by truck. Khristina Russinovich, a woman from the village of Shkava, was suffering from typhus and was brought to one of the camps by horse cart together with her cousin and two other relatives. Throughout the entire journey she was unconscious and as a result she did not remember how she ended up in the camps.127 There were also ill or disabled people who were forced to walk to the camps. Maria Pevetrueva came from Zhlobin and, together with her disabled husband, Michail, and her three small children, Viacheslav, Larissa and Lidia, was transported to the camps. Because they were exhausted as a result of the walk, they sat down to rest. A German officer told them to move along. Maria managed to get up but her husband did not. The officer gave Maria their four year old son and six year old daughter. He handed Maria’s and Michail’s two-year-old daughter Lidia over to Michail, after which the officer shot both Michail and Lidia.128 The abovementioned three examples of Viashonvets, Yarosh and Pevetrueva show the arbitrariness during the marches. The fate of the people generally depended on the decisions made by the individual Germans who were in charge. Further research may be able to demonstrate if and how the decisions depended on the types of Germans involved. For example, did it make a difference if a German belonged to a (specific) Wehrmacht division or Einsatzkommando 7a.

125 A.P. Viashnovets, in: Barkun, Zalozhnikhi, 61. 126 A.F. Yarosh, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 150. 127 K.T. Russinovich, in: Barkun, Zalozhnikhi, 135. 128 M.Y. Pevetrueva, in: ibidem, 47.

There was also arbitrariness and unpredictability in the selection of deportation routes. Some of the routes seem to have been chosen as a way to torture the people and in the worst- case scenario, to exterminate them. For example, the inhabitants of Ozarichi were all rounded up in the school and were brought by truck to a camp in the village Mikul-Gorodok, from where they were forced to walk over ten kilometres to the Ozarichi camps, while these camps were situated only three kilometres from Ozarichi.129 In this regard the Ozarichi marches showed great similarity to the death marches. According to Blatman, an important reason for why the death marches turned into such dreadful events was that the groups of prisoners had no clear direction of travel, which led to a significant prolongation of the journey.130 Another similarity between the journey to the Ozarichi camps and the death marches was the overall conditions during both journeys. One trait of all the deportations to the Ozarichi camps is that the prisoners were deprived of food and water. In particular the lack of water was a torture for the prisoners. In some cases, the thirst caused people to risk their lives. Ksenia Ivanova lived in the village of Kapustino. She was taken by truck to the station of Telusha. Everyone was let out of the trucks near a small stream. Ivanova described what happened: We, seven girls, took hats and ran to get water. And the fascists with machine guns started to shoot at us. A girl lay in the water and I saw blood in the stream. I got water with blood in it and went back to the group. A fascist hit me in the face – there was not a single tooth left in my mouth, I remember it very well and I will never forget.131 The treatment of the girls is very similar to the treatment of Soviet POWs during their death marches in 1941 and 1942. During these marches, Soviet POWs also often got killed because they took the chance to run to a stream to get some water.132 In addition to the lack of water, many people in the Ozarichi marches often did not have any suitable clothing on them or with them. Moreover, the people who were nevertheless able to bring along some of their belongings, were robbed of their belongings halfway through or at the end of the journey (even though most prisoners had carried them almost the entire journey). Grigori Shikorov was deported by train from Zhlobin to the station of Rudobelka. In Rudobelka policemen and gendarmes told them to leave all their belongings behind. Shikorov stated in his testimony: ‘I wanted to take the two bags with my belongings

129 E.S. Golub, in: ibidem, 63; V.T. Melnikov, Oral history interviews of the Belarusian Witnesses Documentation Project [2011.437], USHMM, http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn50796, accessed July 5, 2015. 130 Blatman, The death marches, 86. 131 K.I. Ivanova, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 56-57. 132 Berkhoff, ‘The "Russian" Prisoners of War’, 7.

with me. A policeman shouted at me: “Old man! You don’t need those needles things. Take only some biscuits with you. That is all you will need.” I left my belongings behind and only took some food with me.’133 The uncertainty during the journey increased as well. Although during the round-ups civilians were informed that everyone was to be evacuated to the rear land or elsewhere, they still did not know where exactly they were heading and for what reason. In most of the testimonies, it is emphasised that everyone was scared because they did not know where they were going. When people enquired about the purpose and duration of the journey, in most cases they did not receive an answer. Zinaida Gavrilchik repeatedly asked where they were going and why they were evacuated. The first time she did not get a response. The second time she understood from what a German soldier said that it was a retribution for the bombing of Berlin by the Red Army. She asked again what was going on: ‘A policeman, Russian, told me that we would only live for another two days. But where they would bring us they did not say. I actually thought that we were going to get shot.’134 Another woman who also asked what was going on and where they were going, got a response from a policeman (politseiski), who said: ‘Nothing will happen, you will all perish!’135 It follows from the abovementioned examples that civilians had already suffered from neglect, deprivation of food or shelter, and sometimes even died as a result of that. However, during the transport prisoners were also actively and intentionally abused and even murdered. In particular during the last stages of the marches, when people were forced to walk to the camps, the violence increased significantly. In almost every testimony the interviewees highlighted violence. They speak about people who were beaten or were killed. Varvara Svistuniva was deported by train from Kovrin to the station of Rudobelka. Together with her 83-year-old mother Maria, she had to walk the last part of the journey to the Ozarichi camps. At a certain point, her mother became exhausted and collapsed. Thereafter, the German guards sent a dog at her mother, which tore her shoulder apart.136 In addition to violence, many of the interviewees witnessed murder during the journey to Ozarichi. The story of Maria Pevetrueva, whose husband Michail and young daughter Larissa were shot during the marches, was no exception. Other people also speak of multiple shots that they heard during the marches and describe that they saw dead women and children who were shot on the route to the camps. Maria Zaburova described that she had to wait until

133 G.S. Shikorov, in: Barkun, Zalozhnikhi, 134 Z.P Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 123. 135 V.R. Svistuniva, in: ibidem, 137. 136 Ibidem, 137.

a part of their group was loaded onto the trucks. A woman put her children on one of the trucks. To do so, she laid her small baby that was wrapped into a blue blanket on the ground. One soldier told Maria to pick up the child. Maria claimed the following: ‘I was afraid to do so. At that moment he asked an officer next to him a question. The officer answered in German and started laughing. Then the soldier shot the child with a rifle and killed it. The body of the baby laid there on the street.’137 These are but two examples showing the extreme ruthlessness of the guards. The high number of testimonies that describe examples of murder during the marches makes it impossible to speak of incidents. Murder during the journey to the Ozarichi camps was of a structural nature. Furthermore, there is one other aspect of violence which to date has not been described by historians about the Ozarichi camps. While it is known that people, including children, were beaten or shot, it was never mentioned that people were sexually abused. It is known that the Red Army, during their march towards Berlin, often used sexual violence against German civilian women. Yet, the use of sexual violence by Nazi forces has not been researched extensively. In the case of Ozarichi this has never been mentioned. However, in the database of the 93 eyewitnesses, there are two people who do speak about sexual abuse. This could indicate that there were at least incidents of sexual violence, both during the journey as well as during the imprisonment in the Ozarichi camps. Zoia Lebedeva has explicitly described an act of sexual violence. She was fifteen years old when she ended up in the Ozarichi camps. She and her family were rounded up in their village of Nadeikovich and were brought to the station of Krasnyi Bereg. Lebedeva stated in her testimony that she and her mother carried some of their belongings with them. She added that ‘father carried my sick sister, she was fourteen years old. She became ill with fright, because the Germans raped her.’138 Yulia Barabanova does not explicitly describe sexual violence, but she does speak of a woman who spent the night in the train wagon of the German soldiers during the transport. At the question of the interrogator of the Red Army, whether she knew the purpose of the Germans to evacuate all civilians to camps, she answered: ‘One woman from our wagon had spent one night with the German soldiers in their division, and when she came back to our wagon she told that she had a conversation with the Germans. They told that they would bring us to

137 M.P. Zarubova, in: ibidem, 97. 138 Z.A. Lebedeva, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 88.

a camp and would take our belongings away from us. Hitler had ordered to destroy all Russians. Later, the women disappeared.’139 This testimony comes from the 1940s, from interrogations led by the Red Army. The document is an abstract of the interrogation and does not show whether the interrogator asked any further question in relation to this matter. While this is not a clear case of sexual violence, it is shows that the woman had spend the night in the car of the German soldiers, while the other prisoners were in their own train wagon.

The transport of the people who ended up in the Ozarichi camps had an enormous impact on them. Their condition worsened as a result of the deprivation of food and water, the harsh circumstances during the marches, the stress caused by uncertainty and the abuse that they had to endure from the guards. The conditions of the journey often depended on the specific soldier(s) in charge and how these soldiers decided to act. During the first stage of the journey, which for many civilians involved a journey by train, many people died or were severely weakened as a result of the conditions in the trains. During the later stages of the journey, the death of prisoners was often caused by murder committed by the guards, who shot or beat the prisoners to death if they were not quick enough. The murders that took place during the journey seem to have been of a structural nature. In short, the journey to the Ozarichi camps shows remarkable similarities to the death marches: the transportation on foot, the lack of food and water, lack of suitable clothing and the treatment by the guards resulted in many deaths during and shortly after the marches.

139 Y.P. Barabanova, in: Barkun, Zalozhnikhi, 85.

Chapter 4 – The transit camps

This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part will address the various transit camps that were on the route to Ozarichi. These camps differed from each other and so did the conditions in the camps. The second part of this chapter contains an analysis of the social interaction in the camps, amongst other things interaction between prisoners and between the prisoners and various guards.

4.1 The numerous transit camps

The testimonies on the Ozarichi camps show that the camp system was created prior to and during the operation consisted of at least eleven transit camps. These camps are the transit camps that were mentioned by name; there is a possibility that there were even more transit camps, as some people were unaware of their whereabouts and could as a result recall and testify in which transit camps they had stayed. Not all the camps are mentioned as often as others, but it is possible, on the basis of these eyewitness accounts, to demonstrate how the camps differed in the way in which and where they were build, in their size, and in how people were treated there. Appendix III shows the various transit camps and how they were used during the journey to Ozarichi. The Wehrmacht map (Image 3) viewed in conjunction with the map shown on Appendix III shows that various routes were followed before ending up in the Ozarichi camps. Image 3 shows that some of the transit camps were interconnected. In addition, it follows from this image that not everybody from the same city necessarily took the same route to the Ozarichi camps. For example, a certain person from Zhlobin could travel via Rudobelka, Poroslishche and end up in Ozarichi, while other people from Zhlobin were taken to the final camp Dert via Gat.

Zhlobin

The gathering camp of Zhlobin (Russian: Жлобин) is one of the camps that was already described in chapter 2. It was based in the city of Zhlobin, near the train station, and was created around the Kommandantur. The area around the building was surrounded by barbed wire and did not have any form of shelter, except for the building of the Kommandantur, which used to be a school. As previously indicated, Yulia Barabanovna stated in her

testimony that there was a sign above the entrance of the camp, which stated in German ‘Russian camp’.140 This camp was used to gather people who would be transported by train to the Ozarichi camps.

Krasnyi Bereg The second train station on route to Ozarichi, coming from the direction of Zhlobin, was Krasnyi Bereg (Russian: Красный Берег). Many people from the area of Zhoblin were taken to Krasnyi Bereg by truck or on foot. Krasnyi Bereg was located directly next to the train station. The camp was used as a gathering place, following which the people would be transported by train, similar to Zhlobin. According to Aleksandra Gaichukova, Krasnyi Bereg was surrounded by barbed wire and had barracks on the terrain.141 People arrived at Krasnyi Bereg throughout the entire day, either by truck, horse cart and on foot.142 According to Gaichukova, during the day the group of people in the camp was split into two groups in order to avoid it from becoming too crowded. There was one group of men and one group of elderly people, children and women. Gaichukova stated that approximately five trucks of men were taken away from the camp.143 In the evening, there was a large group of civilians gathered in the camp that only consisted of elderly people, women and children. Not all eyewitnesses had arrived at the same day at Krasnyi Bereg, nor did they stay there for the same amount of time. However, it seemed that everyone left the camp by train in the night of 12 March 1944.144 On that day long trains with approximately 50 to 80 people in each of the 60 wagons departed from Krasnyi Bereg and headed for Ozarichi.145

Telusha The next train station on route to Ozarichi was Telusha (Russian: Телуша). The trains coming from Krasnyi Bereg and Zhlobin passed this station but no records show that the trains stopped there to pick up extra people. Telusha had a similar purpose as the camps in Zhlobin and Krasnyi Bereg; gather civilians who were to be deported by train. The description of this camp is not as clear as that of the other two aforementioned camps. It is clear that Telusha was surrounded by barbed wire and that there was some kind of shelter on the terrain.

140 Y.P. Barabanova, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 85. 141 A.P. Gaichukova, in: ibidem, 91. 142 V.R. Svistunova, in: ibidem, 135. 143 A.P. Gaichukova, in: ibidem, 93. 144 A.V. Zhivalkovski, in: ibidem, 99; V.R. Svistunova, in: ibidem, 135. 145 A.P. Gaichukova, in: ibidem, 93; V.R. Svistunova, in: ibidem, 135.

However, the type of shelter has been described in different ways. Anna Yarosh stayed in Telusha for three days and pointed out that some people slept in sheds, while most of the people had to stay outside.146 However, she does not indicate that people were forced to go into the sheds. Liudviga Dubasova provided a different description. She stated the following: ‘We were chased into the barn. We stayed there for three nights. Everyone was waiting for it to be burned down. We did not get anything to eat. There was no food; people were collapsing. After that we were chased to the station, like cattle in a wagon.’147 Her testimony seems to indicate that most or all people slept in a barn, rather than the majority having to stay outside. Even though both women stayed at Telusha for three days, they seemed to have experienced their time in the camps differently.

Bobruisk Another camp which functioned as a loading station, was the camp in Bobruisk (Russian: Бобруйск). In this camp some people were loaded onto trains immediately after arrival in the city, while others had to wait in the camp for several nights before they were transported by train.148 Another similarity here was that all the prisoners left the camp at the same time, while they had arrived at different moments. The camp looked similar to the other camps. Maria Karankevich stated that the camp was created at one side of the city and was surrounded by barbed wire. ‘It [the camp] was filthy and cramped, we had to spend the night under the open sky, like cattle in a stable.’149 Another former prisoner of the camp added that in the Bobruisk camp people were divided into groups ofpeople who were either able or unable to work. In addition, everybody’s possessions were taken away and thrown into the mud.150 Prisoners were taken by train from Bobruisk to the Ausladebahnhof, an unloading station, known as Rudobelka.

Rudobelka Rudobelka (Рудобелка) is one of the transit camps that has been described in most detail, because most of the eyewitnesses were imprisoned in the camp near the station of Rudobelka after they arrived there by train. Prior to the prisoners’ entry in the camp, during the unloading of the trains, they were forced to leave their larger possessions behind at the train station.

146 A.F. Yarosh, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 149. 147 L.V. Dubasova, in: ibidem, 49. 148 D.V. Lisenkova, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 70-71; L.S. Pechen, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 109. 149 M.D. Karankevich, in: ibidem, 64. 150 N.N. Drogunova, in: ibidem, 47.

Mikhail Puzenkov described what he and all the others in the train saw through the lattice in the windows: ‘There were piles of clothing with Germans with machine guns around it.’151 People had to walk from the station to the camp. The camp was approximately three kilometres away from the station. On the map of the Wehrmacht Rudobelka is described as an Auffanglager, a gathering camp. The purpose of the camp can also be deducted from the testimonies of eyewitness accounts. Eyewitnesses speak of large numbers of people arriving at the camp, coming from various train stations. This caused that in the end there were approximately 5,000 people in the Rudobelka camp.152 Therefore, it seems that Rudobelka was one of the largest transit camps and was used to gather most prisoners in one place, before they started the last part of the journey to Ozarichi. Rudobelka is the last transit camp on the journey to Ozarichi that has a train station. Rudobelka was positioned in the middle of a swamp; it was surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers with German soldiers with machine guns. There was no form of shelter on the terrain of the camp. Because no one received water, people drank the swamp water they were standing in.153 Most eyewitnesses who stayed there for a couple of days described how the guards threw bread over the fence to the prisoners, as also happened in other camps. In the camp, the remaining possessions of people, such as money and jewellery, were taken away from them. It is believed that the Rudobelka camp has gotten its name from the train station where the prisoners arrived by train. However, after carefully comparing the analysis of the testimonies with the description on the map of the Wehrmacht, it seems that the actual name of the camp was Karpilovksi (Russian: Карпиловски). This name was also mentioned in the testimonies and show very strong similarities with the description of Rudobelka. In particular the description of how bread was brought to the camp and the presence of SS-men, leaves the impression that both camps were one and the same.154 In addition, the map of the Werhmacht shows the camp Karpilovski on the spot where one would actually expect the Rudobelka camp. The name differences in the testimonies are primarily caused by the way in which the eyewitnesses were transported. The people who named the camp Rudobelka arrived at the train station named as such. The other prisoners, who named the camp Karpilovski, did not arrive at the train station but instead came from villages in the area and had walked to the

151 M.G. Puzenkov, in: ibidem, 112. 152 M.P. Galkina, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 93. 153 L.L. Bukovas, in: ibidem, 49. 154 V.G. Gordei, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 45.

camp. Rudobelka seems to be the only camp that had more than one name.

Poroslishche Following their stay at Rudobelka, most people went to the Poroslishche camp (Russian: Порослище). Poroslishche is the camp that is the easiest to differentiate from the other camps because it was built on the place where the village of Poroslishche used to be. The camp was built on the smouldering remains of the village and was surrounded by barbed wire, as some eyewitnesses stated.155 There were prisoners who stayed in this camp for numerous days. The prisoners who had to stay there for a longer period of time, received some food. In an eyewitness account, Agafa Viashnovets stated that they received the following for ten people ‘one bread, of not more than one and half kilos, one cup of grain of not more than 400 grams and no more than 30 small potatoes’.156 This type of nutrition was also handed out in some of the other transit camps. In Poroslishche, people who had typhus were placed amongst the other people in the camp. According to Yulia Barabanova, six trucks of people suffering from typhus and other diseases were brought to the camp. The people were thrown into the snow, barely clothed and barefooted.157 Some eyewitnesses stated that before everyone was forced to leave Poroslishche, the guards gathered some people who were still able to work and took them away by trucks.158 After the prisoners left Poroslishche, they were either taken by truck directly to one of the end camps or they first had to walk to a night camp, where they spent the night, following which they would travel to the Ozarichi camps. Another possibility was that the prisoners were transported from Poroslishche to the camp Gat (Гать) and from there to the Ozarichi camps. Because not many people mentioned Gat in their eyewitness accounts, it is difficult to describe the camp in great detail. Furthermore, it might be possible that the night camp without a name that many eyewitnesses refer to, is actually the camp Gat. However, due to the lack of testimonies describing Gat, it is not possible to ascertain this with any certainty. All of the aforementioned camps, Telusha, Krasnyi Bereg, Zhlobin, Bobruisk, Gat and Poroslishche, had a connection with Rudobelka, as is also shown in Appendix III. However, there were also a number of camps that had no link to the others.

155 V.A. Barsukova, in: ibidem, 15; A.P. Viashovets, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 60-61; Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 87. 156 A.P. Viashovets, in: ibidem, 61; N.M. Dainenko, in: ibidem, 67. 157 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 87. 158 I.S. Reshetko, in: ibidem, 105.

Mikul-Gorodok The camp of Mikul-Gorodok (Russian: Микуль-Городок) is also included in the map of the Wehrmacht (Image 3). The map shows that this campis not connected to train station Rudobelka. The testimonies also do not show that there were people who stayed in both Mikul-Gorodok and Rudobelka. Mikul-Gorodok was built near the village of Mikul-Gorodok. Similar to Rudobelka, it was a gathering camp, albeit without a station. People who ended up in Mikul-Gorodok came from the surrounding areas and were taken there by truck, horse cart or on foot. Interestingly enough, one of the prisoners of this camp, Nadezhda Dainenko, lived in the village of Mikul-Gorodok and saw how a unit of policemen created a camp there at the end of February 1944 The subsequent days people, including people suffering from typhus, started to arrive in the camp and the inhabitants of Mikul-Gorodok were also forced to leave their houses and move into the camp. Dainenko stated that before leaving the camp, everyone was forced through a small gateway to check if everyone had given up their belongings.159 The description of Mikul-Gorodok is very similar to that of Rudobelka, where people also had to hand over their possessions.

Rudnia The village of Rudnia(Russian: Рудня) is not included in the map of the Wehrmacht, but it has been mentioned several times in testimonies of eyewitness accounts. The Rudnia camp seems not to have been more than barbed wire in a swamp-like area, where people had to often stay for more than one night before they were taken to the Ozarichi camps.160 Some of the people who stayed in this camp may have gotten some bread or potatoes. Fedor Kovalenko spent four nights in the Rudnia, together with this mother. At a given moment, Germans arrived with bread and potatoes, which they threw over the fence. Kovalenko was fourteen years old and his mother had sent him close to the barbed wire so that he could catch some bread. However, one German soldier threw the bread in Kovalenko’s face, which got broken and started to bleed. He returned to his mother without any food.161 Kovalenko also added to this story that while throwing people bread in their faces, other soldiers took pictures of this scene.162

159 N.M. Dainenko, in: ibidem, 65. 160 A.A. Pakush, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 96; M.E. Molokovich, in: ibidem, 93. 161 F.M. Kovalenko, in: ibidem, 66. 162 Ibidem, 67.

Iazwinzi The aforementioned camps more or less shared the same features. They were all surrounded by barbed wire and there were guards watching the prisoners. This was not the case at the Iazwinzi camp (Russian: Язвинцы). This camp was not an actual camp but more of a village. The testimonies on Iazwinzi show that the village was used to store the people suffering from typhus. The eyewitnesses speak of big groups of people suffering from typhus who were brought there by soldiers and were left alone for a couple of days. The people who were still able to move sometimes managed to find shelter in houses or sheds.163 This seems to indicate that the village was most likely deserted. Praskova Korol described that she spent the night in Iazwinzi on a threshing floor, because the houses and other forms of shelter were full with other ill people and refugees.164 The way this village was used, was not an exception during the war. It shows great similarities to the Sperrdörfer, so-called blocked villages, which were created in early 1944 by other armies of the Wehrmacht in this area. These villages were used to house groups of people who were not fit to work.165

4.2 Treatment in the camps and social interaction The transit camps seemed to have been the most tightly guarded of all the camps within the Ozarichi operation. The most likely reason is that the Ozarichi camps were completely surrounded by mines, which prevented most prisoners from escaping the camps, while the transit camps were not surrounded by mines. After all, people were supposed to leave the transit camps to go the final camps in the following days. Wehrmacht soldiers, SS-men, policemen or Russian ‘volunteers’ guarded them. It is difficult to differentiate between SS or Wehrmacht soldiers or officers, because in eyewitness accounts they are generally described in more generic terms, such as ‘Germans’. According to German sources, the SS was only involved in the Ozarichi camps, the journey from transit camp Rudobelka and the intermediate transit camps between Rudobelka and Ozarichi.166 However, there are also testimonies that describe the presence of SS-men in the camp in Zhlobin.167 The presence of Russian volunteers has not been described in the historiography on Ozarichi, despite the fact that it is clear that in several transit camps not Germans but these

163 N.K. Andreeva, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 57. 164 P.T. Korol, in: ibidem, 127. 165 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 245. 166 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 397. 167 I.O. Romanenko, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 133

volunteers guarded the civilians. These Russian volunteers appear in numerous testimonies. Prisoners were often able to communicate with these volunteers because they spoke the same language and therefore, in the testimonies it is clear that these volunteers did not spare the prisoners. This is demonstrated by the following example. Alena Dolgaia waited together with her mother in law and her son to be taken away by truck. Her 14-year-old son lied on the ground because he was ill. Alena had put a blanket over him to keep him warm. Two drunken volunteers came by and started beating her mother in law. ‘Then they saw my son lying there. He raised his head and the volunteers shoot him in the head. I ran towards my son but I got beaten by them because of that.’168 The Russian volunteers were not just involved in the abuse of prisoners or even killing them but they also seemed to have taken part in the gathering of possessions. During the time in the Rudobelka, policemen came by who took the remaining possessions of people. Anastacia Kozlovskaia described the following about Rudobelka: ‘There were no Germans in the camp, only the ones with the machine guns [the guards], but there were many policemen who went through the camp and collected rings, earrings and the best clothes.’169 The guards did not just collect possessions of the prisoners but one person also claims that everyone was thoroughly searched for valuables.170 In other camps it is also regularly occurred that possessions were taken away from people, even if they nearly did not have any possessions left. In particular good shoes were often seized by the guards. Grigori Shikorov saw how someone had to hand in her shoes: One guard went through the camp often and took the prisoners’ possessions and money. I saw how he approached a woman who sat on the ground with three children and demanded that she took of her boots and gave them to him. She did not approve. The guard threatened her that he would cut off her foot. Then the woman sat down on the ground and the guard took off her boots. The woman went through the camp barefooted, despite of the cold and the snow.171 Not only physical belongings were taken away from people, but also food that prisoners brought with them was seized from them. Uliana Belenkaia even stated that in one camp the food that was taken away from the prisoners, was burned by policemen.172 However, it seems that there was also a possibility to make use of these possessions. One of the women who was imprisoned in the camps describes that she managed to exchange her rings for two buckets of

168 A.E. Dolgaia, in: ibidem, 83. 169 A.N. Kozlovskaia, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 73. 170 V.T. Murashkin, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 75. 171 G.S. Shikorov, in: ibidem, 141-143. 172 U.K. Belenkaia, in: ibidem, 81.

water. Whether others were also able to conduct similar negotiations is not clear, as no other testimonies reveal such type of trade within the transit camps. The fact that policemen went through the camps does not seem very unique. In Belarus, just as in other occupied countries, groups of Hilfspolizei or Ordnungspolizei, there were groups of policemen which consisted of Belarussian or Russian men that were officially under the command of the SS. The men in these groups had different motives to join the police forces, but the small privileges that came with the job often caused that men became policemen within those organisations.173 However, the Russian or Belarusian men were not seen as equal colleagues and often they did not get any good treatment or equipment, such as proper shoes and clothing.174 In particular this last detail, that the men in the Hilfspolizei also often lacked the right clothing for the situation, may have caused that many eyewitnesses mention that volunteers or policemen seized their possessions. The aforementioned descriptions of the transit camps show that people received food in some of the camps. There were roughly three possible scenarios: (i) people got some food, such as potatoes, some bread or grain; (ii) the guards threw bread over the fence to the crowd of people; and (iii) people did not receive any food at all. Mainly in the camps near the final camps, the situation worsened for the prisoners because there were more prisoners packed into one camp. In these later camps, people had bread thrown at them more often or they did not get any food at all. Getting bread was often a dangerous way to get food for the prisoners. The guards threw bread over the fence and all the people who were able to move started to run towards the barbed wire. This caused that the weaker people who fell over got trampled by the running crowd.175 Furthermore, the bread that was thrown over the fences was often old, hard and frozen. This caused for many people to get injured because they were hit in the face with a piece of bread.176 In addition, in some cases there were guards who shot at the hungry crowd while their colleagues threw the bread over the barbed wire.177 Earlier during the journey people received food in a more civil way. This was not just the case for the camps at the beginning of the journey to Ozarichi, but also in the transit camps nearer to the Ozarichi camps, such as Mikul-Gorodok or Rudobelka. The people who were there at the beginning of the Ozarichi operation received food in safer manner than the people who arrived in these camps at a later date. The prisoners which arrived at a later stage

173 Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 174-175. 174 Ibidem, 176. 175 V.V. Khodorenko, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 139; V.V. Khodorenko, in: ibidem, 139. 176 A.S. Lubov, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 8-9. 177 I.O. Romanenko, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 133

only had bread thrown at them or did not get any food at all. The most likely reason for this is that at the beginning of the operation the amount of people in the camps was still manageable for the guards. Later on, there were often twice as much prisoners in a camp than it was built for.178 The people who received food early in the camps got often potatoes, grains or bread. However, this was often not enough and the prisoners often could not do anything with this food because it was raw or rotten and people were not allowed to make any fire.179 It is not completely clear how the civilians got this food, because it was often a bulk of food for a group of people. Only one testimony provides us with a small insight in how this might have happened. Evgeniia Golub stated that she received bread three times when she stayed in Mikul-Gorodok. One time the bread was thrown over the fence but the two first times the bread was ‘distributed by the village elders [starosti]’.180 The treatment of individuals and the social interaction in the transit camps are quite extendedly described in the testimonies of the survivors. In particular the social interaction and personal ties to people were important during the approximately ten days everyone was on the move. One of the reasons for this was that many people who ended up in the Ozarichi camps were often deported with several of their relatives. Because many of the people were children during their time in the camps, the role of the parent, and in particular mothers, was important. It is known that in the larger concentration camps, such as Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz, where it was sometimes possible for family structures to stay in place, women often kept ‘taking on responsibility for their family’.181 For example, Tamara Bytchok was imprisoned in one of the camps together with her mother and two siblings. It was the vigorous attitude of her mother that saved the children. After numerous days without food, her mother saw the necessity of approaching a guard and briskly told him that if she would not receive any bread, all three of her children would die. Apparently, the guard was flabbergasted by her demeanour that he gave her a piece of bread, which she gave to her children. Tamara and one of her sisters survived the camps but her mother died of the harsh conditions.182 As the foregoing case shows, the very young children often depended completely on the ability of their relatives to take care of them. This is underlined by Yulia Barabanova’s

178 I.O. Romanenko, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 133; A.A. Druzik, in: ibidem, 69. 179 I.O. Romanenko, in: ibidem, 133. 180 E.S. Golub, in: ibidem, 63. 181 F. Pingel, ‘Social life in an unsocial environment; the inmates’ struggle for survivor’, in: J. Caplan and N. Wachsmann, eds., Concentration camps in Nazi Germany; the new histories (New York 2010), 69. 182 T.E. Bytchok, Recordings Eyewitness Meeting German-Russian Museum Berlin Karlshorst, 18 March 2014.

testimony. She stated that in Poroslishche a group of people suffering of typhus arrived: With this group of people there were three girls, of approximately 3 to 5 years old, and they were also thrown into the snow. Four to five hours later they had died, they froze to death. There were no parents; they might have been one of the ill people who were brought to the camp unconscious. I tried to speak to them, but they did not answer and only cried. I saw that the children were healthy but there was no possibility to save them. We did not have any clothing or shelter in the camp.183 It is clear that without any help of parents the children died. Also others were not able to help them. In particular the underling of the fact that there was no shelter or extra clothing in the camps shows that even if someone wanted to help another, it was almost impossible to do so because of lack of suitable equipment. In addition, the situation in the camps seemed to have been that drastic that most people were mostly focused on surviving instead of taking care of others. Zinaida Gavrilchik also underlined this in her testimony in which she stated that once she noticed that there were people suffering of typhus in Rudobelka, she went to the other side of the camp to avoid them.184 The prisoners knew that there were people among them afflicted by typhus. In the literature on Ozarichi, the fact that trucks of ill people were brought to the three final camps in always underlined. However, several eyewitnesses show that at the very start of the operation in the deportations to the transit camps were people suffering of typhus transported along with the healthy people. Aleksandra Gaichukova described that she was one of the people who was gathered in the same houses as people suffering of typhus; she was one of the four crippled persons among a group of 200 people suffering of typhus. Gaichukova was shot in the leg when she ran away from a group of German guards who wanted to deport her to do forced labour. She and all the others were taken by truck to Krasnyi Bereg, where they were put in the camp with other people from the area. The fact that the majority of the group suffered of typhus did not matter because everyone ended up in the same trains towards Rudobelka.185

This chapter has shown that the transit camps differed from each other, in how many people there were, in the presence or absence of shelter. The guards in the camps worsened the situation for the civilians. Furthermore, the eyewitness accounts also show that Russian volunteers among the guards have played a role in the camps, even though they were not mentioned in the other literature on Ozarichi. In addition, it is clear that people depended on

183 Y.P. Barabanova, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 89. 184 Z.P.Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 123. 185 A.P. Gaichukova, in: ibidem, 91.

their relatives to survive the harsh circumstances in the transit camps. Children relied on their parents to stay warm and to receive some food, just as those parents had relied on them not to be transported to Germany or elsewhere to work.

Chapter 5 – The Ozarichi camps

The foregoing chapters have shown how the civilians were deported to Ozarichi. In the literature on Ozarichi, the actual Ozarichi camps are described quite extensively. This literature mainly focuses on the circumstances in the camps, the fact that they were surrounded by barbed wire and that prisoners were shot at from the watch towers. In addition, in particular the fact that trucks with people suffering from typhus were taken to the camps is often emphasised, as it seems to demonstrate the intention to destroy all those who were imprisoned in the camps. The Soviet committee that researched the crimes has also emphasised this. This chapter provides for an analysis of the final camps, generally referred to as the ‘Ozarichi camps’, and the liberation of these camps. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part addresses the camps themselves, what they looked like and what happened in these camps. The second part contains an analysis of the liberation of the camps.

5.1 Ozarichi, Dert and Semonovich The Ozarichi camps comprised three camps; one near the village of Ozarichi, one near Dert (Russian: Дерть) and one near Semonovich (Russian: Семонович). In most testimonies people do not differentiate between which one of the three camps they had stayed in. However, the camp near Dert stands out in the testimonies because this camp was built at two sides of a road. As a result, the camp was split into two and both parts were surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers with guards with machineguns. The final camps and the transit camps showed similarities and also the treatment of prisoners in the camps seemed to have been quite alike. However, the final camps were the largest and the death rates seem to have been the highest there. This might have been caused by the journey that the prisoners had to endure before arriving in the final camps. The journey towards the final camps had generally weakened the (already weak) civilians. In addition, between the withdrawal of the Wehrmacht and the liberation by the Red Army there must have been approximately one or one and a half days. Therefore, the minimal duration of the time in the Ozarichi camps must have been one to one and a half days as well. In the literature on Ozarichi, the most outstanding aspect of the camps was that trucks arrived with people suffering of typhus. This indeed seems have been the case. However, in the last chapter it became clear that there were already people suffering of typhus present in the transit camps. Many of the people suffering of typhus never reached the Ozarichi camps; the transit camps were their final camps. Multiple testimonies describe the arrival of the ill

people in the transit camps. Nadezhda Andreieva described what happened to those people who were too weak to continue the journey: ‘In the camp [Mikul-Gorodok] approximately 100 people, ill people, women, elderly people and children, who could not get up from the ground, stayed behind. After that they were shot by soldiers and policemen.’186 However, besides the people suffering of diseases who were already present during the journey towards the Ozarichi camps, there were also ill people who arrived by truck in the Ozarichi camps without having set foot in the transit camps. Nadezhda Zhuravleva recalled that she stayed three nights in Ozarichi and witnessed how trucks with people suffering of typhus were taken to the camp. She claimed that these people were treated in a barbaric way; the people were not unloaded from the truck but were thrown off the truck onto each other. Zhuraleva stated the following: ‘One of the trucks had a ill girl on it, she looked like she was seventeen or eighteen years old. She was completely naked and really ill, she did not respond to our questions. The girl lied in the snow with nothing but some dreadful rags on her, which some of the women gave to her. After two days she died.’187 For those people suffering of typhus the situation in the camp seemed to have been hopeless. Because many of them arrived the last days prior to the withdrawal of the Wehrmacht, they did not get any food anymore. However, in the Ozarichi camps it seems that the food people received was only old bread, which was thrown over the fences from a truck. It can be derived from the testimonies that people in the state of the girl in the abovementioned history did not receive any food at all in such a situation. In addition, the clothing of the people suffering of typhus was often worse than the clothes of the others because they did not have the chance to get any suitable clothes before they were transported. The abovementioned examples make it very plausible that the camps were full of dead people, as numerous eyewitnesses described. Ivan Romanenko stated about the camp Dert: ‘The death rate was very high in the camp. Every 24 hours approximately 400 to 500 people died. The corpses just lied throughout the camp. All the relatives, who were stil able to do so, buried the deaths in the camp. The death rate was high because of the hunger, the cold and the weakening.’188 Also others described scenes like this. Anna Akhremchik described how the corpses were all put in a trench in the camp. Because no one received any water, people went to get some water out of those same trenches.189 Those people who died in the camps were often the weakest people. Several eyewitnesses stated that new-born babies died because of

186 N.K. Andreieva, in: ibidem, 59. 187 N.K. Zhuravleva, in: ibidem, 125. 188 I.O. Romanenko, in: ibidem, 133. 189 A.G. Akhremchik, in: Knatko, Uzniki

the cold. Nina Burbo described that her neighbour was pregnant during the journey; ‘One time, my neighbour gave birth to a boy who died after about two hours. We buried him under the snow underneath the barbed wire.’190

5.2 Liberation and aftermath Remarkably, the liberation of the camps is the most unclear aspect of the entire operation. There seems to be a relatively obvious explanation for this. The historiography has until now mostly focused on the archives of the Wehrmacht, and for logical reasons, the Wehrmacht did not document the liberation of the camps because they were not involved in this. Therefore, the liberation can only be reconstructed by using testimonies of survivors and by using documents of the Red Army or the NKVD (Narodnii Kommissariat Vnytrennikh Del), the Soviet secret service. The biggest indistinctness is about the moment of the liberation, whether this was on March 18 or March 19, 1944. The testimonies cannot clarify the precise date of the liberation but it can provide some insight in how the camps were liberated. As mentioned before, it was quite difficult to distinguish the three final camps from each other and therefore it is also not possible to differentiate how the three separate camps were liberated. Unfortunately, in the testimonies there is also no indication on what happened to the transit camps, when and how many people were liberated from those camps. The testimonies show various version of the liberation of the camps. Because it is not clear in which of the three Ozarichi camps they were, all versions might be correct. In addition, because there were a lot of people in the camps, not everyone was liberated at the same time, which also can cause a different perception on what have happened in those days. As was already pointed out in the first part of this chapter the surroundings of the final camps were completely mined, as a way of keeping the prisoners in the camps. On March 17 the German troops withdrew and left the camps on themselves without any guards. It could be argued that the camps were never liberated by the Red Army because it was not under control of the Nazis anymore. However, even though none of the official documents show that there were battles over the camps, many people describe that in the last night in the camp there were heavy shootings over the campsite, which caused that a lot of people got injured.191 Because the Red Army was until then not close enough to shoot at, it seems that the troops

190 N.G. Burbo, in: ibidem, 24. 191 M.A Korol, in: G.I. Barkun, Zalozhniki, 76; V.A. Barsukova, in: ibidem, 15.

actually shot at the prisoners.192 The withdrawal of the Wehrmacht seemed to have caused commotion at the group of civilians who were still lively enough to respond. Various people tried to leave the terrain of the camps after the troops left. Nina Burbo escaped the camp with some other people. She described the scene: ‘One morning, a man yelled loudly: “Hurray, those who can pray, pray to God. We are liberated! There are no guards. We are free!” There was no end to our happiness. Everyone was screaming, had tears of joy. It is impossible to describe. Some people started to leave. Mines exploded. People cried and moaned. Someone else shouted: “Everyone, stay where you are. Don’t move! Go to the other side. There are no mines on this road.” So, those who were able to go, went and the ill and deceased people were left behind in the swamp.’193 Not everyone was as lucky as Nina Burbo. Kiril Misiul staed that before the troops left, soldiers showed where the storage of bread for the camps was, which existed out of five barrels of bread in total. After the troops left, people went outside the camp to go to the storage place but when they got there, the storage was completely mined and injured and killed most of the people who wanted to get some bread.194 Some people did not find out by themselves that the Wehrmacht had withdraw because they were warned about this by scouts of the Red Army. In several testimonies people state that during the night of the shootings over the campsite, men in white clothing crept into the camp who told everyone to stay calm and to stay in the camp because the Red Army would liberate them the following day.195 Nina Burbo had stated that they walked into the white clothed Russian official who said that they knew about the entire situation and that they came to liberate everyone.196 Others saw their liberators in the camp in the morning after the shootings.197 The officials warned everyone to stay on one small track because of the mines. Unfortunately, also after the liberation, still a lot of people got injured because of these mines. Fedor Lomako saw how his aunt lost her legs when escaping the camps with the Red Army.198 Varvara Savitska injured one of her legs when she passed the former barracks of the German troops, which were mined as well, to gather some straw to make a bed for her child.199

192 Terry, ‘»Do not burden one’s own army and its hinterland with unneeded mouths!«’, 203. 193 N.G. Burbo, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 24. 194 K.V. Misiul, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 47. 195 V.A. Barsukova, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 15. 196 N.G. Burbo, in: ibidem, 24. 197 N.F. Archipova, in: ibidem, 6; F.S. Lomako, in: ibidem, 92. 198 F.S. Lomako, in: ibidem, 92. 199 V.E. Savitska, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 109.

The people who were unable to leave the camps on their ownbecause they were too ill to walk had to wait before they were liberated. Polina Gasak had to stay in the camp for a couple of days before she could leave. Both her legs got frozen so she had to be carried by others in order to leave. In a field hospital she was told that she had fourth degree frostbite, which eventually caused her to lose both legs shortly after the liberation.200 Polina was no exception in the case of Ozarichi. Many people lost limps because of frostbite and gangrene or because they stepped on mines. In addition, many people were completely alone after the liberation because their parents, children or siblings had died in the camps.

This last chapter has shown that the Ozarichi camps often pushed people over the edge. The already worn out civilians came to the camps at the peak of their weakness. The journey had cost its toll on them and last hurdle of numerous days in the open air, without any shelter or chance to warm themselves was often too high. In particular the people who suffering from typhus were in a desperate situation because they often lacked suitable clothing. Once people had managed to survive these conditions, there was even a change that they could die during the liberation of the camps.

200 P.E. Gasak, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 30.

Conclusion

The Ozarichi camps comprised of three camps near the village of Ozarichi that were created by several divisions of the 9th Army of Heeresgruppe Mitte of the Wehrmacht. The camps only existed for approximately ten days. However, within this relatively short timeframe people severely suffered as a result of the harsh circumstances, the treatment by the guards and because the prisoners in the Ozarichi camps consisted of people from the weakest parts of society. The foregoing was already clear prior to examining the testimonies of survivors of the Ozarichi camps. The documents of the Wehrmacht provided insight in the decision making process at the German side and what happened in general during the operation. These German sources, which formed the basis of the existing literature, have functioned as a historical and factual framework for this thesis. This thesis is based on 93 testimonies, which differ in size, origin and type of source. These testimonies are used to write an oral history of Ozarichi. The main purpose of this thesis is to answer the question whether the testimonies of survivors of the Ozarichi camps contribute new insights into the historiography of the camps. This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 deals with the historiography and the history of the Ozarichi camps and the place of the camps within the history of the Second World War in Belarus. Chapters 2 until 5 consists of analyses of the testimonies, which set out the different aspects of the entire process of the Ozarichi camps: the round-ups, the transport, the transit camps and the Ozarichi camps. These four chapters together set out the entire journey towards the Ozarichi camps and attempts to describe the time in the camps through the eyes of the survivors. Chapter 2, which provides for an analysis of the round-ups of the civilians, demonstrates that there is a difference between the round-ups in the villages and in the city of Zhlobin. The larger round-ups were carried out in a more systematic manner and seemed to have been planned more carefully prior to the operation. In contrast, the round-ups in the smaller villages involved more violence and were less structured, which often resulted in people having less time to gather their belongings. As it is known which Wehrmacht divisions were active in which particular areas, it would be interesting to conduct further research into whether there was a connection between the Wehrmacht division in charge and the amount of violence and chaos associated with the round-ups. Chapter 3 consists of an analysis of the different transportation methods which were used to transport civilians to the various transit and final camps. The testimonies of survivors

have shown that the journey towards the camps resembled the death marches that took place during the end of the Second World War. These eyewitness accounts from survivors demonstrate that the people in the marches to the Ozarichi camps were treated in a similar manner as the prisoners during the death marches and the marches that Soviet POWs had to endure; they did not know where they were taken to, they had to walk for days and those unable to walk any further were shot or beaten by guards. It is clear that the decisions made by individual German soldiers or officers had a direct influence on the fate of the prisoners. The testimonies demonstrate that the violence which took place during the marches increased during the progress of the journey. In addition, the significant number of examples demonstrating this violence against the prisoners leads to the conclusion that the violence during the marches was of a structural nature. Chapter 4 describes the various transit camps and contains an analysis of the personal interaction in the camps on the basis of eyewitness testimonies. It seems to follow from various testimonies that the number of transit camps exceeds the number of transit camps described in the sources of the Wehrmacht. In addition, the circumstances and conditions in these camps differed and, moreover, they were dependent on the specific moment that someone was interned in the camp. The analysis on the human interaction in the camps demonstrates that people relied on the support of their relatives in order to survive in these camps. However, receiving support from relatives did not necessarily mean that someone would have a bigger chance to survive the camp. The way in which prisoners were treated by guards, prisoners were often robbed of their belongings and even their clothes by the guards, worsened the situation in the camps. The arbitrariness in the treatment by the guards made it very difficult to predict whether a prisoner would survive the camp. Chapter 5 demonstrates that the final Ozarichi camps were the largest camps within the camp structure that was part of the Ozarichi operation. These three final camps seem to have been the hardest to survive in. The prisoners who ended up in these camps were generally already severely weakened, as they had at that time already spent a fair amount of time in the transit camps and had to endure the marches to the camps. In addition, the final camps were crowded and the number of people imprisoned there rapidly increased. Even the liberation of the Ozarichi camps provided no guarantee for the prisoners’ safety, as many of them were injured during the liberation as a result of the mines which surrounded the camps. The testimonies of survivors of the Ozarichi camps provided new insights. Firstly, it follows from these testimonies that for most people the journey to the camps severely influenced the overall situation during the operation. In particular the harshness of the

deportations and the treatment in the transit camps caused people to be at their weakest when they arrived in the Ozarichi camps. Secondly, violence and other forms of abuse throughout the journey to the final camps rapidly increased. The image that can be derived from the testimonies is that during the start of the operation, at the time of the round-ups, in certain places the operation was still being carried out in an organised manner. However, later on during the marches, the situation worsened because a large number of people were gathered in one place, while at the same time the size of the group of guards increased. Analysis of the situation during the marches has shown that the violence during the marches was of a structural nature. Moreover, it seems that the goal of these types of transport was not solely to bring the civilians to the final camps, but also to eliminate them. In this regard, the marches to Ozarichi show a significant number of similarities to other death marches. The analysis of the transit camps demonstrates that there were more of these types of camps than was previously known from Wehrmacht sources. The network of the transit camps shows that the operation took place in a large area and that it must have been an intensive operation for the twelve involved Wehrmacht divisions. As only some of the transit camps were created before the start of the operation, it would be interesting to further research whether and at what time other transit camps were built and who was responsible for that process. Further researching the relevant Wehrmacht documents might provide additional insight in this respect. It seems that in the Ozarichi camps volunteers and policemen played a more prominent role in the treatment of the prisoners than was previously believed to be the case. In particular, the presence of Russian volunteers in the Ozarichi camps has not yet been described in much detail. It follows from eyewitness accounts that many of the Russian volunteers were often even more ruthless than the German soldiers guarding the camps. However, it is possible that this view is caused by the fact that the civilians were generally better able to communicate those volunteers and consequently remembered these volunteers more vividly. In addition, in larger concentration camps it was often the case that the prisoners did not see any SS-personnel at all because the latter did not want ‘any direct contact with the vast numbers of undernourished and disease-infected inmates’.201 This may also have been the case in the Ozarichi camps because one of the reasons for creating the camps was to confine the typhus epidemic amongst the prisoners. Interaction with people suffering from typhus could have spread the disease amongst Wehrmacht troops and for that

201 Pingel, ‘Social life in an unsocial environment’, 62.

reason interaction by Russian volunteers could have been preferred. Then again, there are also good grounds to argue that the volunteers may have acted more ruthlessness because they also had to maintain themselves in a hostile environment. Most research on Belarus and the collaboration of locals focuses on the Holocaust. Further research into the involvement of these volunteers in the Ozarichi operation is likely to contribute to the historiography on these crimes as well. In the literature on the Ozarichi camps, it is generally assumed that the people suffering from typhus were taken directly by truck to one of the three final camps. The outcome of analyses of the testimonies shows that ill people, including the larger groups of people suffering from typhus, joined the group of healthy civilians earlier on their way towards Ozarichi. Several eyewitnesses claimed that in transit camps, such as Rudobelka and Mikul-Gorodok, there were people everywhere in the camp that looked like they came directly from a hospital, as they were only wearing nightgowns. After having carefully analysed eyewitness accounts of survivors of the Ozarichi camps, the overall view of the Ozarichi camps in the historiography, which has been to only regard these camps as Rückzugverbrechen, seems to be too limited. The camps can indeed be regarded as Rückzugverbrechen from a military historical point of view, but, the testimonies have also demonstrated that the entire Ozarichi operation shows similarities to other crimes committed during the Second World War, such as the death marches, but also to the overall treatment in concentration camps. It would be interesting for further research purposes to take a closer look at other Rückzugverbrechen, for example during the forced evacuations from 1943 onwards or even the death marches in 1945, and assess whether Ozarichi was an exception. Further analysis might not only provide new insight in these specific cases, but can possibly also contribute to the historiography of the Second World War and even the Holocaust in its entirety. The opening quote of this thesis from Vasili Murashkin proofs to be, at least in part, an accurate description of the actual purpose of the Ozarichi camps; ‘The regime in the camps – a regime of hunger, cold, illness and the immense insults of the Soviet people – gave me the firm belief that the Germans had set the goal to destroy everyone; all children, elderly people, women, disabled people and inmates.’202 The absence of food, water and shelter, the treatment by the guards, the mix between healthy people and people suffering from typhus, and in particular the use of violence, all demonstrate that the aim of the camps was not to let

202 V.T. Murashkin, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 75.

the prisoners survive. Even though it cannot be said for sure that it was the aim to destroy all the people imprisoned in the Ozarichi camps, the testimonies do show that the death of the prisoners was at least seen as an additional benefit for the Wehrmacht and the others in charge of the prisoners.

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Appendix I

Map with deportation routes to the Ozarichi end camps. (BA MA RH 20 9 197, Erfahrungsbericht über Abschub nichtarbeitsfähiger Zivilisten vom 28.03.1944, in: Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 392-393.)

Appendix II - Testimonies

Place of Age residence during before intern- Date of testimonies Name internment ment Source Akhremchik Anna Zabolot 17 18 July 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 12-13; Grigorevna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 113-11. Akola Maria Belitsa 9 2 November United States Holocaust 2011 Memorial Museum’s (F) Belarusian Witnesses Documentation Project, http://collections.ushmm.org /search/catalog/irn73517, accessed June 2015. Akulich Valentina Ala 18 18 July 1947 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Romanovna lager, 105. Andreeva Nadezhda Kovchits -2 ? 31 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 56-61; Konstantinovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 106-108. Arkhipova Nina Fokovna Zhlobin 17 18 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 5-6; (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 108. Astafeva Liubov Ugli 13 24 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 7-11; Sergeevna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 108-110. Atroshkevich Lidiia Kholma 12 2011; Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Sergeevna (F) lager, 110-113.; United 2 November States Holocaust Memorial 2013 Museum’s Belarusian Witnesses Documentation Project, http://collections.ushmm.org /search/catalog/irn73518, accessed June 2015. Barabanova Yulia Zhlobin ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 82-89; Petrovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager,116-119. Barsukova Valentina Novoselki 11 19 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 14-16; Arsentevna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 119-120.

Belenka Uliana Zabolot 11 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 78-81. Konstantinovna (F) Beliaeva Nadezhda Mikul-Gorodok 15 2 July 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 17-21; Minovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 120-122. Bezzubov Anatolii Zhlobin 8 2000 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Ivanovich lager, 124. Burbo Nina Grigorevna Shikhov 20 28 November Knatko, Uzniki, 22-25; (F) 1997 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 123-124. Bykova Lidiia Laventevna Zhlobin 15 27 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 48-49; (F) Bogdan, Ozarichi, 26-27. Bytchok Tamara ? 9 18 March 2014 Recordings Podiumgespräch Evgenevna (F) ‘Rückzugverbrechen der Wehrmacht; Das Beispiel Osaritschi, Belarus’, German-Russian Museum Berlin Karlshorst, 18 March 2014. Charnushina Olga Zabolot 14 17 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 126-128; Petrovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 242. Chikilev Petr Semenovich Zhlobin-Podolsk 19 12 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 129-130; (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 243. Daineko Nadezhda Mikul-Gorodok ? 31 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 64-67; Minovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 146-147. Dainenko Iakim Susoev Soleiki ? March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 80-83, (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 147-148. Dolgaia Alena Vezhin ? March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 82-83. Emelianovna (F) Drogunova Nadezhda Tikhinichi 18 16 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 46-48; Nikolaevna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 148-150. Druzik Arkhip Anikeevich Ivanshevich ? 31 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 66-69; (M) Bogdan, Ozarichi, 24-25. Dubasova Liudviga Ala 18 27 August Knatko, Uzniki, 49-50; Vladimirovna (F) 1997 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 150-151.

Dudko (Matskevich) ? 12 1993 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Sofiia Vikentevna lager, 148. Fesko Boris Fedorovich Zabolot 11 17 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 117-121; (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 235-238. Gaichukova Aleksandra ? ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 90-93; Petrovna (F) Bogdan, Ozarichi, 22. Galkina Mariia Zhlobin ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 92-95. Prokofevna (F) Gancharevich Iadviga Medukhov 20 24 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 26-28; Ivanovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 136. Garbar Arkadii Ustinovich Nestanovichi 7 1990 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 135-136. Gasak Polina Evmenovna Visokii Polk 13 27 February Knatko, Uzniki, 29-30; (F) 1990 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager,137. Gavrilchik Zinaida Zhlobin ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 118- Petrovna (F) 123; Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 133-135. Gertsova Anna Pavlovna Knishevich 10 10 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 31-33; (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 137-138. Girilovich Mikhail Chernaia Virnia 10 28 July 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 34-43; Pavlovich (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager,138-143. Golub Evgeniia Sidorovna Orsichi ? 31 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 62-63. (F) Gordei Vasilii Grigorevich Zabolot 11 24 August Knatko, Uzniki, 44-45; (M) 1997 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 143-144. Griko (Nikiforova) Mariia Rukovets ? 1995 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Mikhailovna lager, 144. Ianochkina Anna Petrovna Liski 33 20 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 137-140; (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 252-253. Iarosh Anna Fedorovna Ala 12 2 August 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 149-150; (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii

lager, 257-258. Iaroslavova Mariia ? 30 18 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 141-142; Afansevna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 253-254. Iaroslavova Mariia ? 13 3 July 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 143-148; Tikhonovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 254-257. Iukovski Vasilii Ivanovich Lomovich ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 110- (M) 111. Ivanova Ksenia Isaevna Kapustino 16 12 July 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 56-58; (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager,153-154. Karankevich Mariia Rukovets 19 16 July 1997 Knatko, Uzniki 63-65; Davidovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 157-158. Kazeko Mariia Ala 17 17 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 59-62; Illarionovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager,154-156. Kharchenko Evdokiia Vizhari 25 21 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 122-125; Nikolaevna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 240-241. Khlapkov Aleksandr Zabruche 6 1997 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Vasilevich (M) lager, 241. Khodorenko Maia Bolshe Rogi 13 2011 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Ivanovna (F) lager, 241. Khodorenko Vasilii Velikie Rogi ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 136- Vasilevich (M) 139. Kobsareva Nadezhda (F) ? 12 18 March 2014 Recordings Podiumgespräch ‘Rückzugverbrechen der Wehrmacht; Das Beispiel Osaritschi, Belarus’, German-Russian Museum Berlin Karlshorst, 18 March 2014. Korol Mila Gat 13 24 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 75-76; Aleksandrovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 170-171. Korol Praskova Kruki ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 124- Timofeevna (F) 127. Kostiukevich Evgeniia Porech ? 31 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 68-71; Fedorovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii

lager,171-172. Kostiukevich Nina Porech 16 18 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 77-78; Mikhailovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 172-173. Kostko Irini Alekseevni Vilenka 38 19 July 1947 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 171. Kovalchuk Georgii Zhlobin 9 2008 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Ivanovich (M) lager, 161-167. Kovalenko Fedor Dolgi Les 14 16 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 66-67; Mikhailovich (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 160-161. Kozlov Fedor Pavlovich Pogachev 14 17 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 68-71; (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 167-169. Kozlovskaia Anastaciia Filipkovich 14 24 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 72-74; Nikolaevna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 169-170. Kuleshova Nadezhda Tikhinichi 26 24 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 81-82; Avgustinovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 173-174. Kushnerova Nadezhda Ala 38 17 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 83-85; Ilinicha (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 177-178. Lagutina Dina Stepanovna Kovrin 11 5 August 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 86-87; (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 178-179. Lasebnikova Natalia Pristoi ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 126- Borisovna (F) 127. Lebeveda Zoia Arkadevna Nadeikovichi 15 12 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 88-90; (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 180-181. Liskov Aleksei Stalka 3 1996 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Martunovich lager, 181. Lomako Fedor Savelevich Knishevich 10 9 July 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 91-92; (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 181-182. Lysenkova Domna Parkhimovskaia ? 31 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 70-71. Vasilevna (F) Sloboda Manko Uliana ? ? March 1944 Bogdan, Ozarichi, 27-28. Mikhailovna

Mazkevich Nadezhda Zhlobin ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 128- Pavlovna (F) 129. Milshevskaia Inna Zhlobin 7 2009 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Vasilevich (F) lager, 188. Miranovich Ekaterina Khoromtsi ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 102- Afansevna (F) 105; Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 189-190. Miranovich Mariia Khoromtsi ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 100- Dmitrievna (F) 103. Misiul Kiril Vasilevich (M) Ala ? 25 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 44-47. Mitrakhovich Praskova Novaia Belitsa ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 128- Evmenovna (F) 129. Molokovich Mariia Kolki 24 16 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 93-94; Efimovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 190. Murashkin Vasilii ? ? 31 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 74-75; Trofimovich (M) Bogdan, Ozarichi, 23. Napreenko (Kostiukevich) ? ? 1992 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Nina Savelianovna lager, 190-191. Narkevich (Vasilchenko) Zhlobin 7 1998 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Larisa Ivanovna (F) lager, 190. Novitskii Evgenii ? 12 2013 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Zakhorovich (F) lager, 191-205. Pakush Aksiniia Lomovich 28 10 July 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 95-98; Afansevna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager,206-208. Pakush Vasilii Esipovich Lomovich 14 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 104- (M) 105,114-115. Pankova Olga Zhlobin 13 24 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 99-102; Lavrentevna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 208-209. Pechen Lukeria Viazovka 13 25 July 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 109-110; Samuilovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 213-214. Pekurina Emiliia Zhlobin 11 16 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 103-108; Vladimirovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 210-213. Pevetrueva Maria Zhlobin ? 26 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 46-47; Iakovlevna (F) Bogdan, Ozarichi, 21.

Puzenkov Mikhail Varchitsi 12 17 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 111-114; Grigorevich (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 215-216. Rechenkov Ivan Petrovich ? 6 2012 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii (M) lager, 217-221. Reshetko Ivan Liuban ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 104- Semenovich (M) 107; Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 221-222. Romanenko Ivan Zhlobin ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 130- Ostapovich (M) 133. Rusinovich Khristina Shkava ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 134- Titovna (F) 135. Samoilik Evkhimiia Slobodka ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 108- Mikhailovna (F) 111; Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 226. Sarubova Mariia Velikie Rogi ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 94-99. Prokofevna (F) Savitska Varvara Zhlobin 43 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 106- Evmenovna (F) 109, 116-117. Shevchenko Aleksandra ? ? March 1944 Bogdan, Ozarichi, 20. Mikhailovna (F) Shinkorenko Nikolai Zhukovichi 13 13 August Knatko, Uzniki, 131-133; Vasilevich (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 244-245. Shirokov Grigorii Zhlobin ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 138- Stepanovich (M) 143; Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 245-246. Shkuran Arkadii Petrovich Poroslishche 9 2014 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii (M) lager, 246-250. Shpak Pelageia Ivanishchevich 16 19 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 134-136; Semenovna (F) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 251-252. Svistunova Varvara Kovrin ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 134- Romanovna (F) 137. Tkachev Mikhail Lesna 15 18 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 115-116; Nikolaevich (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 235.

Trefadavich Melnikov Ozarichi 9 23 August United States Holocaust Vladimir (M) 2012 Memorial Museum’s Belarusian Witnesses Documentation Project, http://collections.ushmm.org /search/catalog/irn50796, accessed June 2015. Tsukanov Andrei ? ? 31 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 74-79. Sergeevich (M) Vdovenko Dorofeii Zhlobin ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 118- Grigorevich (M) 119. Viashnovets Agafa Gorduni ? 31 March 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 60-63. Prokhorovna (F) Vlasova Mariia Zhlobin ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 88-91. Dementevna (F) Zhivalkovski Adam Solotin ? 1 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 98-101. Vasilevich (M) Zhukov Nikolai Zhlobin 12 24 June 1997 Knatko, Uzniki, 51-55; Grogrevich (M) Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii lager, 151-153. Zhuravleva Nadezhda Khomutovka ? 2 April 1944 Barkun, Zalozhniki, 122- Konstantinovna (F) 125. Zueva (Koshelevskaia) ? 5 1993 Shkuran, Kontsentratsionnii Nella Ivanovna lager, 153.

Appendix III

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Karel Berkhoff, for his enthusiasm, encouragement and useful remarks. Furthermore, I would like to thank Christoph Rass for providing me with his documentary on Ozarichi and Helen Mokh for providing me with the book of A.P. Shkuran, and F.A. Veras, Kontsentratsionnii lager Ozarichi: zhivie svidetelstva Belarusi (Minsk, 2014). In addition, I would like to thank my fellow students and colleagues, in particular those of the EHRI Summer School for Holocaust Studies and of the 20th Workshop zur Geschichte und Gedächtnisgeschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: “Besatzung, Zwangsarbeit, Vernichtung", for their advice and our interesting conversations on the topic. Lastly, thanks to my friends and family for their support, in particular Yolanda Bobeldijk and Nikolai de Koning for proofreading my thesis.