MOSCOW, May 8. /TASS/. Around 60,000 Soviet citizens, mostly prisoners of war, were shipped out of Crimea by the Nazis after the Red Army broke through German defenses at Perekop in the spring of 1944, as follows from declassified archive documents released by the Federal Security Service (FSB).

As part of the No Limitations Period project, the FSB department for Crimea and Sevastopol declassified archival documents about the Great Patriotic War (the Eastern Front during WWII where the former Soviet Union fought against Nazi Germany), including reports, reconnaissance data, protocols of interrogations of German captives.

"After the Russians broke through German fortifications at Perekop on April 9, 1943, all Russian prisoners of war, prison inmates, and Turkish battalions formed from among Russian POWs were urgently shipped to Constanta (in Romania - TASS). Apart from that, some civilians who voluntarily agreed to leave were also taken there. As far as I remember, around 60,000 people, mostly Crimean work crews formed from POWs, were interned to Constanta," Wehrmacht Colonel General Erwin Jaenecke, who was arrested by Soviet troops in June 1945 in the German state of Niedersachsen, said during an interrogation at a Sevastopol prison.

The Germans also took museum exhibits, karakul sheep, cotton and tobacco from the peninsula.

The German general also spoke out about the German command’s campaigns against Crimean guerillas. "Groups of guerillas and civilians have been finding shelter in quarries near Kerch. In the winter, the General Staff assembled a special team of bomb specialists to eliminate them. <…> They first tried to get inside the caves and blow up the entries to them, but these efforts failed. Then, it was decided to use an explosive gas acting as a toxic agent to kill the people staying inside. This attempt also failed because our specialists could not reach the concentration needed for an explosion," Jaenecke recalled, adding that in the long run, the quarries were totally blocked to leave the people inside with no food and water.

As a result, in his words, around 350 people came out and 40 of them were shot to death. "I have no idea what happened to the rest of them," he said.