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
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