MOSCOW, December 9. /TASS/. Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), on the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of Genocide, has for the first time published records of the interrogation of a German police officer who participated in the mass executions of Jews near Rovno and Berdichev in Ukraine in November 1941.
Interrogated in early November 1945, Walter Schwarze, 33, a baker from Halle, had volunteered to join the police in 1940. From the beginning of 1941, he was with the German police in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in Zamosc, Poland, and then in Lvov and Stanislav (Ivano-Frankovsk). From November 1941 to February 1944, he served in the 314th Police Battalion stationed in Zhitomir.
Shootings near Rovno
On November 20, 1941, his battalion was sent to Rovno.
"On the northeastern outskirts of the city of Rivne, we got off the vehicles. I saw several high-ranking SS officers. From what they were telling our officers, it became clear that we had come to shoot Jews. <...> We went on foot to a pasture, which was fenced with a hedge. On the field, there were about 4,000-5,000 Jews - men, women, and children of various ages. <...> More groups of Jews were being brought from the city all the time," he said.
The police were placed in two lines along a wide country road. The people were lined up in columns of 12-15 persons in a row. They walked along the cordoned-off road over the hill into a nearby wood where the shootings took place.
"The shootings continued for two and a half days. They started at dawn and ended at nightfall," Schwarze confessed. In that area, 20,000 people were shot.
Executions near Berdichev
On November 27-28, 1941, Schwarze’s battalion, along with 11 SD (Reichsfuehrer SS Security Service) officers and 25 Ukrainian police led by SD Hauptsturmfuehrer Mueller, took part in executions near Berdichev.
"In Berdichev, we stopped on the outskirts of the city near a church or Jewish synagogue - I don't remember exactly - inside a brick fence. A large number of Jews were kept in the yard. They were guarded by Ukrainian policemen," Schwarze testified during the interrogation. The Ukrainian police ordered the Jews to line up in a column of eight in a row and, under the protection of German police, led them northeast of the town to a gully. Two pits had already been dug 200-300 meters away.
"We cordoned off the grave and made a corridor of two chains of policemen from where the column was stopped to the graves. <...> On Mueller's orders, the people to be executed, while still in the column, stripped down to their underwear and 10 persons at a time approached the grave. <...> They were forced to kneel on the edge of the grave and <...> shot at point-blank range. The SD men used handguns and the police their rifles. After the shooting, they would give a command to send 10 more. In the meantime, the Ukrainian police stacked the corpses so that they took up less space in the grave," Schwarze recalled.
Initially, the shootings were carried out by SD personnel. Later, on Mueller's orders, both German police battalion soldiers and Ukrainian policemen joined in. Schwarze took part in the shooting of 70 people. Personally, he shot about 20, including five women. "Then I felt sick and went back to the guards. The shooting continued from 8 am to 5 pm. <...> At the end of the operation, Berdichev’s Ukrainian police officers began to fill the graves," he said. He later learned that about 3,000 people were shot then, including women and children of all ages.
The Tribunal's verdict
Schwarze was detained on October 12, 1945, in Berlin, where he worked as a docker in the eastern port. The FSB’s Public Relations center published a photocopy of the sentence handed down to him on January 15, 1946, by the Berlin garrison military tribunal. For "participation in the brutal extermination of Soviet citizens on the territory of Ukraine and Belarus," as well as in operations to exterminate guerrillas near the town of Ovruch in December 1942, where 44 villages were burned down, and in the area of Olevsk in January 1943, where 30 villages were burned, on the basis of the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (Soviet parliament - TASS) of April 19, 1943, he was subjected to the highest penalty - execution by firing squad and the confiscation of all his personally owned property, without the right to appeal.