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“The Germans Had Set the Goal to Destroy Everyone”

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“The Germans Had Set the Goal to Destroy Everyone” “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 2 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. 3 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. 4 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. 5 measures’ against Belarusians who were unable to work.12 Christoph Rass also viewed the Ozarichi camps as an extension of the evacuations.
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