The warning order came down the line in the second half of 1942, when the Red Army’s counteroffensive at Stalingrad had already begun to turn the war. Every day at five in the morning, the prisoners in the camp at Aleksandrovka were lined up and driven out to work. They dug trenches, gathered grass from under the snow for the horses, and then dug graves. Those who did not meet the norm, who fell behind the ranks, or who complained of hunger, were beaten with sticks and shot.

Prisoners were killed daily for no reason at all. A staff surgeon named Blumok from the guard company of the 205th Camp tormented the prisoners for sport: he shot at crowds of unarmed people, aiming at the stomach, and watched the suffering of the dying. By the time Soviet troops liberated the village on January 22, 1943, the investigation materials recorded a scene that defied description. All over the camp, in front of the barbed wire and at the entrances of the burrows where the prisoners lived, lay more than 1,500 uncollected corpses.

Many had their bellies ripped open, their limbs severed, their skulls broken. Fifty-nine human heads were found without bodies. The faces of the dead were so disfigured that identification was impossible. Three large pits were found some 5 to 100 meters from the camp; the number of people dumped there exceeded 2,500.

How such a thing became possible begins with the German definition of the front line zone. That zone had no clear designation and was rather arbitrary. The rear of a regiment headquarters or a first-aid post was approximately 5 to 7 kilometers from the front line. The rear of a division was usually 10 to 20 kilometers back.

The rear of an army was about 50 to 70 kilometers. And 150 to 200 kilometers away were the airfields, warehouses, supply centers, and reserves. In other words, the concept of the front line zone was quite extensive, usually referring to a zone stretching along the front at a width of 100 to 200 kilometers. In this war, the organization of rear security was given special importance.

The German Army waged wars of conquest, which meant that until 1944 it operated mainly on foreign territory. The Feldgendarmerie, the field military police, was supposed to protect the German rear. It is often confused with the SS, but in fact the Feldgendarmerie was a separate structure, subordinate to local commandants and quartermaster generals, and it worked closely with the territorial departments of the Gestapo. Moreover, they had more powers than the SS.

The Feldgendarmerie was distinguished by a special metal gorget, attached to the chest with a metal chain. The Wehrmacht also created special security divisions. By 1943, in the German rear on the territory of the USSR alone, 15 such divisions were operating. But that was not all.

In the rear of army groups, special Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos were created, designed to fight saboteurs and partisans and to perform punitive functions against the local population. These groups and detachments were part of the troops of the so-called internal SS, although many of the ordinary Einsatzkommando members were not full-fledged members of the SS order. Their commanders often were. Crimes in the rear and the front line zone were also committed by Waffen SS units, that is, military units directly fighting at the front.

They could also be involved in fighting partisans and in punitive actions. Beginning in 1942, they were supplemented by Schutzmannschaft battalions and auxiliary military police units, sometimes called security battalions, recruited from collaborators. In short, several types of military formations maintained order in the front line zone. And they all raged in the same way.

The ideology of Nazism not only allowed but demanded it. The Aryans considered themselves better than the Untermenschen, the subhumans who inhabited the occupied countries and territories. The police, SS, and security units could treat the local population without any decency. From September 1, 1939, until the end of that year, in Poland alone, 65,500 civilians were killed by SS Einsatzkommandos and Feldgendarmerie detachments.

With the attack on the USSR, the leaders of Nazi Germany sharply increased the number of all police and punitive units. The front line on Soviet territory stretched from north to south for thousands of kilometers, and the zone behind it occupied a huge territory. German, Hungarian, and Romanian punitive forces, together with special squads recruited from local traitors, engaged in outright robbery and often groundless murder of the Soviet population. To intimidate the population and as a warning, the punishers and the troops in the rear liked to arrange public executions.

For these purposes, they drove people from the entire area: from a city or regional center, or from surrounding villages. They staged a bloody show, hanging posters with orders from the German command listing the guilt of those sentenced to execution, guilt that was often far-fetched. Additional public tortures could be arranged before the execution. One tanker, whose family remained in occupied territory, later told the story of what happened to his younger sister.

While robbing the house under the guise of a search, the Germans discovered a photograph of an officer, evidently taken before the war. The Nazis grabbed the tanker’s younger sister and began to torture her. Where is the officer? How could a ten-year-old girl know where her older brother was fighting?

Neither did her mother know. The Germans tortured the child with a hot iron. Then, in front of the mother, who was going mad, they tied the girl’s legs to the ends of two bent trees and abruptly released them. The Germans combined the extermination of the population with economic benefit.

Chief Lieutenant Meller described the bloody deeds of his unit in a report to the leadership. “The operation to clear the village was successful,” he wrote. “The destruction of the residents was well organized and went without complications. ” Of the 809 residents driven to the outskirts of the village, 705 people were shot with a machine gun: 130 children, 372 women, 203 men.

Four residents managed to prove their loyalty to the Reich, and their lives were spared. At the same time, the report indicated the number of spent cartridges. Then, with the same German punctuality and pedantry, the exemplary Chief Lieutenant reported: “In the village we managed to collect 45 horses, 250 cows, 65 calves, 450 pigs and piglets, and 300 sheep. ” Further, Meller listed the amount of food, bread, grain, and agricultural equipment seized.

In one report, people are killed for no reason, including children, and then, as if nothing had happened, the report lists cows, sheep, and equipment. The Nazis killed and robbed not only to replenish the army’s supplies but also for their own selfish interests. They turned murder into entertainment. First among these entertainments was the satisfaction of sexual needs, including unhealthy ones.

In one village, a Sonderkommando with the help of policemen gathered and took more than 200 schoolchildren to the collective farm field to gather crops for German needs. Of course, after work the boys were shot in cold blood. The girls were raped, some of them taken to the local brothel for the officers. Violence was an integral part of the occupation, especially in the front zone, where the military and police had absolute power.

Everyone was involved: Wehrmacht units passing through a village or town, local garrisons, the Security Police, and of course SS units. Fascist soldiers made bets on who would rape more girls and women. They usually played cards or dice for the girl they liked, and the winner had the right to be first. They could do it in the middle of the village, right on the street, without being embarrassed or afraid of anyone.

In November 1942, the German authorities rounded up girls from surrounding villages, aged 15 to 30, in the village of Troitsa, to be sent to Germany. The girls were locked in a barn at night. Late in the evening, a German military unit passed through the village. The soldiers broke into the barn and raped all the girls.

Some were dragged out of the barn and raped in the street, in carts. Robbery and murder became a game. One of the entertainments was hunting. The Nazis hunted not only animals but also people.

They allowed a local resident accused of something to move some distance away, and then gave chase on motorcycles or in a car, driving the victim to the point of exhaustion. Or they forced residents to run races; the winner could be given a glass of vodka or moonshine, which, by the way, had just been confiscated from the villagers. Between soldiers and rear occupation units, bets were made on the number of women raped: who would have more. Bets were also made on the speed of plundering a residence or farms, or on who would carry out the most valuables in a certain time.

Women were as expendable for the German occupiers as prisoners of war. In relation to the local population, the word “impossible” did not exist. From reports of November 1942: fire destroyed 450 collective farmers’ houses, a school, a hospital, a dairy farm, and other public buildings. The Germans tortured and shot dozens of village residents.

A nineteen-year-old collective farmer was raped by Hitler’s men, and then they cut out her breasts, cut off her ears, and shot her. The local hospital doctor, Alexandra Alekseevna Malinova, was burned alive by the bandits. Radio broadcasts and newspaper editorials were filled with such reports. Meanwhile, the Germans entertained themselves with sports competitions.

In Minsk, the capital of Belarus, they staged the so-called international athletic competitions, in which the satellite countries of Hitler’s Germany participated. German propaganda tried to present matters as if the Germans were bringing culture to the lands captured in the East. But only a few people believed Nazi propaganda. In fact, the Nazis had other competitions: the shooting of civilians, violence against adults and children, rape of women and girls, robbery and looting.

Often all of this was done for completely immoral bets. As they retreated, the Nazis committed their atrocities with even greater ferocity, taking revenge on civilians and prisoners of war for their defeats at the front. The act of investigation into the crimes of the Sonderkommandos on the territory of the Kirovograd region of Ukraine, dated January 3, 1944, recorded what happened in the villages of Leninski, Diaki, and the Davin farms. On October 19, 1943, the Germans burned to the ground 276 houses with all buildings and property of the collective farmers.

The Germans threw Anna Simonenko and her six-year-old son Andrei alive into a well. But the Germans did not achieve their goals. They wanted to intimidate people and make them submissive. On the contrary, the effect was the opposite.

More and more residents of the occupied lands joined the partisans. Even children went to avenge their parents. And they knew no mercy.