On This Day in History

[odanny]

Feel free to make contributions on what happened on this day.

March 2nd. 1864:

On this day, March 2, 1864 during the Civil War, the Battle of Walkerton took place near Richmond, Virginia. On February 28th, US Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick left his encampment at Stevensburg with 4,000 picked men to raid Richmond. Col. Ulric Dahlgren, son of Rear Adm. John Dahlgren, commanded an advance force of 500 men.

While the main body under Kilpatrick rode along the Virginia Central Railroad tearing up track, Dahlgren rode south to the James River, hoping to cross over, penetrate Richmond's defenses from the rear, and release Union prisoners at Belle Isle.

Kilpatrick reached the outskirts of Richmond on March 1st and skirmished before the city's defenses, waiting for Dahlgren to rejoin the main column. Dahlgren, however, was delayed, and Kilpatrick was forced to withdraw with Confederate cavalry in pursuit.

Hampton attacked Kilpatrick near Old Church on the 2nd, but the Federals found refuge with elements of Butler's command at New Kent Court House.

In the meantime, Dahlgren's men, unable to penetrate Richmond's defenses, tried to escape pursuit by riding north of the city. Dahlgren's command became separated, and on March 2 his detachment of about 100 men was ambushed by a detachment of the 9th Virginia Cavalry and Home Guards in King and Queen County near Walkerton.

Dahlgren was killed and most of his men captured. Papers found on Dahlgren's body that ordered him to burn Richmond and assassinate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet caused a political furor.

Southerners accused the North of initiating "a war of extermination." Meade, Kilpatrick, and Lincoln all disavowed any knowledge of the Dahlgren Papers.

Dahlgren affair - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[rightwinger]

Kilpatrick was nicknamed “Kill Cavalry” because of his penchant for senseless Cavalry Charges

He was only interested in his future political career and was looking to pad his resume with a high profile victory.

May be the worst General in the Civil War

 

[Votto]

And there I was surrounded by White Supremacists in a White supremacist country with white...........er.................um................democrats running the country, but only to make it look like they are not really white supremacists..............

 

[odanny]

May be the worst General in the Civil War

Honestly, there are too many to choose from. Custer did the same in the Civil War, but how many did the same?

 

[Silent Warrior]

Honestly, there are too many to choose from. Custer did the same in the Civil War, but how many did the same?

Sadly, that wasn't the only war where sub-standard leaders got people killed.

 

[DudleySmith]

Custer was not 'sub-standard' as a General.

George Armstrong Custer - Essential Civil War Curriculum

Today, George Armstrong Custer is remembered for one day in his life—the day he died in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which has invariably tarnished his entire career. In his time, however, he was a national hero and one of the most popular figures in the country due to his Civil War exploits.

In fact, his incredible accomplishments almost defy belief and are the stuff of which legends are made. He captured the first battle flag taken by the Union army and received the white flag of surrender from the Confederates at Appomattox. In between those notable events he performed a series of intrepid, truly incredible actions. He personally led electrifying cavalry charges that inspired his men and earned their adulation, and captured the fancy of newspaper and magazine writers and their readers.

All Generals make mistakes, Napoleon did, Fredrick the Great did, Eisenhower did, etc. The difference is some mistakes are in circumstances that are much more dangerous and deadly than others. Custer had more balls than most.

 

[lg325]

On the third of March 1845 Florida adopted it's first constitution barring bankers ,clergy or duelist from holding state wide office or being a member of the state assembly.

 

[odanny]

March 3rd, 1887

Anne Sullivan arrived in Alabama to begin work with her new blind and deaf pupil, six year old Helen Keller. If you've never read about the life of Helen Keller, it is a fairly remarkable story. This woman, who traced out words in the palm of her hand at 6 years old, is credited with being the reason why. She stayed with Helen Keller for the rest of her life, if I recall correctly.

Helen Keller - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Rust_Cohle]

Feel free to make contributions on what happened on this day.

March 2nd. 1864:

On this day, March 2, 1864 during the Civil War, the Battle of Walkerton took place near Richmond, Virginia. On February 28th, US Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick left his encampment at Stevensburg with 4,000 picked men to raid Richmond. Col. Ulric Dahlgren, son of Rear Adm. John Dahlgren, commanded an advance force of 500 men.

While the main body under Kilpatrick rode along the Virginia Central Railroad tearing up track, Dahlgren rode south to the James River, hoping to cross over, penetrate Richmond's defenses from the rear, and release Union prisoners at Belle Isle.

Kilpatrick reached the outskirts of Richmond on March 1st and skirmished before the city's defenses, waiting for Dahlgren to rejoin the main column. Dahlgren, however, was delayed, and Kilpatrick was forced to withdraw with Confederate cavalry in pursuit.

Hampton attacked Kilpatrick near Old Church on the 2nd, but the Federals found refuge with elements of Butler's command at New Kent Court House.

In the meantime, Dahlgren's men, unable to penetrate Richmond's defenses, tried to escape pursuit by riding north of the city. Dahlgren's command became separated, and on March 2 his detachment of about 100 men was ambushed by a detachment of the 9th Virginia Cavalry and Home Guards in King and Queen County near Walkerton.

Dahlgren was killed and most of his men captured. Papers found on Dahlgren's body that ordered him to burn Richmond and assassinate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet caused a political furor.

Southerners accused the North of initiating "a war of extermination." Meade, Kilpatrick, and Lincoln all disavowed any knowledge of the Dahlgren Papers.

Dahlgren affair - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

On this day McFib still thinks he served in the military. He's a stolen valor and lying coward

 

[Rust_Cohle]

March 3rd, 1887

Anne Sullivan arrived in Alabama to begin work with her new blind and deaf pupil, six year old Helen Keller. If you've never read about the life of Helen Keller, it is a fairly remarkable story. This woman, who traced out words in the palm of her hand at 6 years old, is credited with being the reason why. She stayed with Helen Keller for the rest of her life, if I recall correctly.

View attachment 762127

Helen Keller - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

How come you're not as active anymore McFib? Got exposed and ran away did you ya liar!

 

[MarathonMike]

Any General from our history would be better than the assortment of Woke losers we have today.

 

[odanny]

Any General from our history would be better than the assortment of Woke losers we have today.

Thanks for your contribution.

 

[Ringo]

On this day in 2005, U.S. National Guardsmen fired on the car of Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian journalist freed from Iraqi captivity. The former hostage was wounded and one of the two Italian intelligence officers (Nicola Calipari) accompanying the journalist died, covering her with his body.

According to the US version (which has officially changed twice), the car was allegedly moving towards the American checkpoint at a speed of 140 km/h and did not respond to warnings to stop, including firing in the air.

In response, Gianfranco Fini, the minister of foreign affairs, appeared before Italian lawmakers on March 8, 2005 and said that there was no roadblock and that there were no signs or warnings from the Americans. The car was traveling at about 40 km/h and was illuminated from inside to "make it easier to drive and to make phone calls. Before the roadblock it was illuminated by a searchlight, the car stopped, after which the American National Guardsmen opened fire on it without warning.

 

[Ringo]

March 8 is International Women's Day of Solidarity for Economic, Social and Political Equality.

 

[odanny]

On this day in history, March 15th in 44 BCE, Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, was stabbed to death in the Roman Senate house by 60 conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. The day of his assassination would later became infamous as the Ides of March through the play "Julius Caesar" by William Shakespeare.

 

[Ringo]

55 years ago. March 16 1968

Vietnamese villagers killed by U.S. soldiers in My Lai Massacre​

Vietnamese villagers killed by U.S. soldiers in My Lai Massacre | March 16, 1968 | HISTORY

On March 16, 1968, a platoon of American soldiers brutally kills as many as 500 unarmed civilians at My Lai, one of a cluster of small villages located near the northern coast of South Vietnam. The crime, which was kept secret for nearly two years, later became known as the My Lai Massacre. In...

www.history.com

"...The massacre of the My Lai community, which angered the entire civilized world, seems not the exception, but an isolated episode in the longest war in American history. What and how did it happen on a hot Saturday morning, March 16, 1968?

A platoon from the 11th Brigade, part of the American Division under Lieutenant William L. Calley, was ordered to conduct a "clearing" of the My lay villages that made up the My Lai community. "Clearing" the guerrillas, the staff briefing said. With full combat gear, the platoon landed at dawn from helicopters near the villages of Mi lay 3 and Mi lay 4. No guerrillas, only civilians: old men, women and [47] very many children. Calley ordered to gather everyone in the center of the village. When a decent crowd was gathered, according to Private P. Midlo, the platoon leader gave the command to shoot the Vietnamese at point-blank range.

After killing the first victims, the soldiers rushed to the huts, killed the Vietnamese on the spot, locked some of them inside, threw hand grenades into the huts and set the houses on fire. Calley staged the killing orgy in a drainage ditch that ran through the village. With blows and kicks, soldiers drove the captured Vietnamese to the ditch, pushed them down, and Calley and the most diligent killers shot them. A Buddhist priest with a child stretched out his arms toward Calley in despair, repeating: "No Vietcong, no Vietcong." Calley silenced him by smashing his mouth with the butt of his rifle, then turned his machine gun around and blew the priest's skull off with a burst. The lieutenant picked up the kid, threw him into a ditch and finished him off with an automatic. Suddenly, remembered the participant of the beating, a tiny boy in a shirt came out of nowhere. He ran up to the killed man and grabbed his hand. The soldier, assuming the statutory position for firing from his knee, struck the child with a single shot. After killing 567 men - old men, women, and children - and putting the village on fire, the victorious platoon disappeared.

Twelve days later Colonel F. Barker, commander of the 11th Brigade, reported in a combat report that the operation was "well planned, well executed, and successful." The commander of the American Division, General S. Koster, received the enviable promotion of being appointed chief of West Point, the notorious forge of American military officers, to educate cadets in the spirit of My Lai. That would have been the end of it, had it not been for a change of guard in the United States. In 1968 the Democratic Party lost the election, the Republicans came to power. The new president R. Nixon was initially eager to score political points. The letter of a soldier returning from Vietnam about My Lai was given a go-ahead. The soldier, R. Riedenhauer, did not take part in the massacre, but in a letter sent in 23 copies to the "upper echelons" of the American capital, he denounced what had happened on the word of his buddies.

R. Nixon's Republican administration narrowed the case, with only Platoon Lieutenant Calley appearing before the military court. In the pursuit of sensationalism, some American journalists did not realize what this meant. The Saigon bureau chief of the weekly Newsweek, K. Buckley went on "Operation Courier Train", conducted in the Mekong Delta from December 1968 to 1969. Together with a correspondent of the magazine A. Shimkin, he traveled to the places of the executor of the operation - the notorious 9th American Infantry Division. They were horrified to see that the division commanders, who boasted that "we kill a hundred Vietcong every day", were rather understating the number of casualties. Even scarier were the numbers - of the estimated 11,000 killed, most were civilians.

К. Buckley later recalled that when he sent the editorial to the United States he declared, "This is not about another My Lai - about American soldiers against infants. We have mass murder in front of us. This is politics." The article, distorted beyond recognition, was printed long overdue. Attempts to interest the magazine with new material on the subject failed. "Going back to those days," Buckley later wrote, "I have the most vivid recollection: the editor treated what was reported not even with indifference, but simply as extremely annoying.

Meanwhile, the Calley case was being heard. The defense attorneys meticulously counted the dead and insisted, as the court agreed, that Calley had personally killed not 109, but "only" 22 Vietnamese at My Lai.
The military justice initially dealt with him harshly, sentencing him to life imprisonment. Mass protests in the United States against the executioner's sentence, with state governors J. Carter and J. Wallace among the outraged. The publishing house Viking immediately announced that it had already paid Colley $100,000 for his memoirs. In the first three days after the murderer's conviction, the enterprising firm sold more than 200,000 records of "Lieutenant Calley's battle hymn." The record began with a touching story about "a little boy who wanted to be a soldier when he grew up and serve his country wherever it sent him. This was followed by an upbeat song, "My name is William Calley, I'm an American soldier, I took an oath to do my duty and to win, but they made me look like a scoundrel. Let them, and we go forward," etc.

In April 1974, on Nixon's orders, the murderer was released from the comfortable hotel that the prison had become for him..."

Not everyone there was a scumbag like Calley. Which in no way exonerates them:

"Not everyone in the company took part in the killings. Many stayed away, one soldier shot himself in the leg to be evacuated by ambulance helicopter. Of the 100 U.S. soldiers who entered the village, 30 participated in the killings. Hugh Thompson, a surveillance helicopter pilot with B Company, 123rd Aviation Battalion, observing the events from the air, landed his OH-23 between a group of Vietnamese peasants hiding in a makeshift bomb shelter and American soldiers intent on killing them. Thompson ordered the gunner and flight engineer to open fire on the American Marines if they tried to kill the Vietnamese. Then Thompson called in helicopters to evacuate the wounded Vietnamese (11 were evacuated, another child was picked up in an irrigation ditch where the dead and dying lay)."

 

[odanny]

March 19-21, 1865
The last major battle of the American Civil War took place at the Battle of Bentonville.


From March 19-21, 1865, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston and what remained of the Confederate army attacked and were defeated by Union General William T. Sherman’s army in the Battle of Bentonville, the last large-scale battle of the Civil War.

How It Ended

Union Victory. After fighting to a standstill on the 19th and skirmishing throughout the 20th, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston decided to stay on the battlefield with what remained of his army. However, by the 21st, elements of Union Bvt. Major General Joseph A. Mower’s division threatened Johnson’s left flank and his route of retreat. After pushing back Mower’s division, Johnston decided to retreat from the field during the night, ending the battle. After his defeat, Johnston and his army moved further into North Carolina and surrendered a month later at Bennett Place.

Bentonville

Our Battle of Bentonville page includes history articles, battle maps, photos, an animated map, helpful web links, and recommended books for this important 1865 Civil War battle in North Carolina.

www.battlefields.org

CONFEDERATE

2,606 soldiers

239 killed
1,694 wounded
673 missing & captured

 

[odanny]

March 20th, 1899

Martha M. Place become the first woman to be executed in the electric chair. Martha’s husband William came home one day and was attacked by Martha, who was weilding an axe. William escaped and called the police, who discovered William's seventeen year old daughter from a previous relationship, Ida, dead by asphyxiation. Acid had also been thrown in Ida's face. Martha was found guilty of the killing and was executed at Sing Sing Prison.

Martha M. Place - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Ringo]

Khatyn was a village in Belarus, destroyed together with its inhabitants on 22 March 1943 by a punitive unit (the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion and the SS Dirlewanger Special Battalion) in revenge for the murder of several German soldiers by nearby partisans: under the principle of collective punishment, 149 Khatyn residents (including 75 children) were burned alive or shot for possibly helping those partisans by villagers.
The beginning of the punitive operation in Khatyn
At night from March 21 to 22, 1943, partisans of the partisan brigade of "Uncle Vasa" (Vasily Voronyansky) spent the night in Khatyn. On the morning of March 22, they left in the direction of Pleshchenits. At the same time a car accompanied by two trucks with punishers from the 118th Battalion of the 201st German Security Division (mostly ethnic Ukrainians served in the battalion) left Pleshchenits in the direction of Logoysk.

The chief commander of the first company, Police Captain Hans Wölke, was riding in the car, on his way to the airfield in Minsk. Along the way, the convoy encountered women from the village of Kozyry, working at a lumber camp; when asked about the presence of guerrillas nearby, the women said they had not seen anyone. The convoy moved on, but before they had driven 300 meters, they hit a partisan ambush set up by the "Avenger" detachment of "Uncle Vasa's" brigade. In the firefight, the punishers lost three men, including Wölke. Vasily Meleshko, commander of the punitive platoon, suspected the women of collaborating with the partisans and called for reinforcements from the Dirlewanger Battalion and returned to the place where they were cutting wood; on his order 26 women were shot, and the rest were sent to Pleschenice.

The Hitlers were infuriated by the death of Hans Wölke, who had become Olympic champion in the shot put in 1936 and had known Hitler personally. They began scouring the forest in search of partisans and on the afternoon of March 22, 1943, surrounded the village of Khatyn

118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion
The backbone of the battalion was formed in Poland in early 1942. Formation of the 118th and 115th Shutsmanshaft Battalions was continued in Kiev mainly from prisoners of the Red Army who were held in Kiev and the surrounding prisoner-of-war camps. One company of the 118th Battalion was formed from soldiers of the 115th Schutzmannschaft Battalion. The operation was led by a special unit of the SS-Sonderregiment Dirlewanger (German: SS-Sonderregiment Dirlewanger). The battalion was commanded by former Polish Major Konstantin Smovsky, the chief of staff by former Red Army Senior Lieutenant Grigory Vasyura, and the platoon commander by former Red Army Lieutenant Vasily Meleshko. The German "chief" of the 118th Auxiliary Battalion was Police Major Erich Körner.

The battalion was also involved in other operations. On 13 May, Vasyura led combat operations against partisans near the village of Dalkovichi. On May 27, the battalion conducted a punitive operation in the village of Osovi, where 78 people were shot. Then followed the punitive operation "Cottbus" in Minsk and Vitebsk regions - the massacre of inhabitants of the villages near Vileika - Makovye and Uborok, the shooting of 50 Jews near Kaminskaya Sloboda. For the successful execution of his tasks, the Nazis promoted Vasyura to the rank of lieutenant and awarded him two medals.

Crime Description
The villagers knew nothing of the morning incident, in response to which the principle of general collective punishment was applied, violating all rules and customs of warfare.

On the orders of Erich Körner and under the direct supervision of Vasyura, the police herded the entire population of Khatyn into the collective farm barn and locked them in it. Those who tried to escape were killed on the spot. There were large families among the villagers: for example, there were nine children in the family of Joseph and Anna Baranowski and seven in the family of Alexander and Aleksandra Novitsky. Anton Kunkevich from the village of Yurkovichi and Kristina Slonskaya from the village of Kameno, who were in Khatyn at the time, were also locked in the barn. The barn was lined with straw, doused with gasoline, and the interpreter-police officer Lukovich set it on fire.

The wooden barn quickly caught fire. Under the pressure of dozens of human bodies, the doors failed and collapsed. In burning clothes, gripped by terror, panting, people rushed to run; but those who escaped from the flames were shot with machine guns, automatic rifles and rifles. The order to open fire was given by Körner, Smovsky, and Vasyura. The shooting stopped only when the screams and groans died down and the roof of the barn collapsed.

149 villagers were burned to death, including 75 children under the age of 16. Two girls managed to escape: Maria Fyodorovich and Yulia Klimovich, who miraculously managed to escape from the burning barn and crawl into the woods, where they were picked up by people from the village of Khvorosteni (later both villages were burnt down by the occupants and both girls died). The village itself was completely destroyed.

Of the children in the barn, seven-year-old Viktor Zhelobkovich and twelve-year-old Anton Baranovsky remained alive. Vitya hid under the body of his mother, who covered her son with herself; the child, wounded in the arm, lay under his mother's corpse until the punishers left the village. Anton Baranowski was wounded in the leg by a bullet, and the SS took him for dead. Burnt, wounded children were picked up and released by residents of neighboring villages. After the war children were brought up in an orphanage. Three more - Volodya Jaskevich, his sister Sonya, and Sasha Zhelobkovich - also managed to escape from the Nazis.

Of the adult villagers, only the 56-year-old village blacksmith Joseph Josephovich Kaminsky (1887-1973) survived. Burnt and wounded, he did not regain consciousness until late at night, when the punitive units left the village. He had to endure another heavy blow: among the corpses of his fellow villagers he found his son Adam. The boy had been mortally wounded in the abdomen and badly burned. He died in his father's arms. Joseph Kaminsky and his son Adam served as prototypes for the famous monument in the memorial complex.

One of the survivors of Khatyn, Anton Baranovsky, was 12 years old on March 22, 1943. He never hid the truth about the events at Khatyn, spoke openly about it, and knew the names of many of the policemen who burned people. In December 1969 - 5 months after the opening of the memorial complex - Anton died under unclear circumstances.
The last witness to the burning of Khatyn, Viktor Zhelobkovich, died in 2020

Fates of the Punishermen
The destruction of Khatyn was mentioned (among other charges) in the 1946 Riga trial.

On 31 January 1946 the defendant Bruno Pavel (in 1943 he was head of the main field commandant's office in Minsk) told the court that he, Pavel, had ordered the burning to the ground of the villages of Khatyn and Loshadinets. At the same court session the act of the Pleschensky district commission "about the burning of the village of Khatyn, where 57 civilians were killed in the fire, which the Germans locked in a barn and burned there alive" was announced. As a result of the Riga trial, Pavel was convicted and hanged in Riga on February 3, 1946.
Interpreter Iosif Lukovich, the squad leader who set fire to the roof of the barn, was riding his motorcycle and blew himself up by a mine in the summer of 1943. He is buried in Slonim.

Ivan Melnichenko, commander of "Dirlewanger" fine battalion company, was hiding in Murmansk region until February 1945, then returned to Ukraine. He was a thief, killed an employee of the Rokytnyansk District Department of the NKVD. In August 1945, he was sent to Chernihiv region. He was shot dead upon arrest on February 26, 1946.

In 1961 Grabarovsky, Stopchenko, Tupiga, Kirienko, Shinkevich, Yalynsky, Radkovsky, Majdanov, Sakhno, Pugachov and Zaivy, who served in Dirlewanger's battalion, were tried and sentenced to death in Minsk. It turned out that privates Umanets and Mironenkov were not directly involved in the massacre of villagers, but they were also executed for other crimes.

Investigative bodies of the KGB in the early 1970s managed to expose private Stepan Sakhno of the 118th Shutsmanschafts batallion, who settled in Kuibyshev after the war and pretended to be a front-line soldier. His testimony after his capture helped us to get on the trail of other punishers from that unit.
Grigory Lakusta was arrested in Donetsk in 1972. When arrested, answering a question about his activities in Belarus, he exhaled deeply: "I've been waiting for you so long...". His wife claimed that when the television showed footage of Nazi atrocities, he would go white and leave the house for hours at a time.
At the beginning of 1974, Stepan Sakhno, Grigory Lakusta, Ostap Knap, Mikhail Kurka, and Ivan Lozinsky stood trial in Grodno. The trial lasted almost a month. About 30 witnesses were interrogated.

Material evidence and documents were examined and expert examinations were conducted. It was proven that it was the defendants, who burned and shot the residents of the village of Khatyn and were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians. Sakhno was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Lakusta was sentenced to death and shot. Kurka, Lozinski and Knap were also sentenced to death, but it was eventually replaced by imprisonment.

The materials of the court case allowed us to expose the battalion's platoon commander Vasily Meleshko. He had previously been tried for collaborationism, but concealed his service in the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion. After his amnesty in 1955 he settled in Rostov region, became chief agronomist of a collective farm. He was arrested in September 1974. He was sentenced by the Grodno court to death. He was executed in 1975.
A photo of Grigory Vasyura from his criminal case

After serving in Belarus, Grigory Vasyura continued his service in the 76th Waffen-Grenadier Regiment. At the end of the war, Vasyura managed to cover his tracks in a filtration camp. Only in 1952, a tribunal of the Kiev military district sentenced him to 25 years in prison for cooperating with the occupiers during the war.
At that time, nothing was known about his punitive activities. On September 17, 1955 the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree "On Amnesty for Soviet citizens who collaborated with the occupants during the war 1941-1945", and Vasyura was released. He returned to his place in Cherkasy.

KGB officers later found and arrested the criminal again. By that time he had worked as a deputy director of a state farm in Kyivschina. In April 1984 he was awarded the medal "Veteran of Labor." Every year the pioneers congratulated him on May 9. He loved to perform before the pioneers in the image of a war veteran, a front-line signalman, and was even called an honorary cadet of the Kiev Higher Military Engineering College named after M. I. Kalinin, which he graduated from before the war.

Prosecutor's question: "Judging by the questionnaires, most of your subordinates had served in the Red Army before, had been through german captivity, there was no need to lead them by the hand?"
Vasyura: "Yes, they served. But it was a gang of bandits, for whom the main thing was to rob and get drunk. Take Meleshka, a cadre of Soviet officers and a sadist, who literally shivered at the smell of blood. Myshak, the cook, was eager to go on all operations to poke fun and plunder. The squad leader Lakusta and the clerk Filippov were not squeamish about anything. Lukovich, an interpreter, tortured people during interrogations, raped women. All of them were scoundrels of scoundrels. I hated them!"

A page from the death sentence of the Khatyn executioner Vasyura
In November-December 1986 the trial of Grigory Vasyura took place in Minsk. During the trial (case No. 104 in 14 volumes) it was found out that he personally slaughtered more than 360 peaceful residents: women, old people and children. By the decision of the military tribunal of the Belarusian Military District Grigory Vasyura was found guilty and sentenced to death.

The commander of the 118th battalion Konstantin Smovsky was active in emigrant organisations after the war, he was not held accountable; he died in Minneapolis, USA. Ivan Slizhuk was an active member of the emigration after the war and died in Lyon in 1994. Iosif Vinnitsky also lived out his life well; he was an activist in the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, and died in Montreal.
As of 2015, the only known surviving member of the 118th Battalion was Vladimir Katruk, who had lived in Canada since 1951. In 1999, Canada stripped him of his citizenship after information exposing his war crimes was uncovered, but in November 2010, a court returned his Canadian citizenship. In May 2015, the Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against Vladimir Katruk under Article 357 of the Russian Criminal Code ("Genocide"), but Canada refused to extradite Katruk to Russia. In the same month, Katruk died in Canada

 

[odanny]

The Dirlewanger SS battalion was nothing more than murderers and rapists freed from prison and unleashed on the resistance in Poland. I read a book about this group and their actions, and at least the Soviets and Poles were able to capture Oskar Dirlewanger after the war, he never made it to the gallows, he was beaten to death before hand.

Come And See was made on the 40th anniversary of the end of WWII and was quite an entertaining film. A different kind of war movie, for sure.