MOSCOW, February 21. /TASS/. The FSB has made public declassified documents on Nazi atrocities committed in the Kursk Region during the Great Patriotic War.
According to the FSB’s public relations center, the documents, kept in the archive of the Kursk Region’ FSB office, testify to the atrocities committed against civilians by soldiers of the 596th Grenadier Regiment of the 327th Infantry Division of Nazi Germany under Colonel Friedrich-August Weinknecht.
The documents include the indictment of prisoner of war Weinknecht, dated April 9, 1949, a report of his interrogation, his photograph, a report of the interrogation of prisoner of war Sergeant Major Schacher, an extract from a report of the interrogation of prisoner of war Sergeant Sedlacek, a memorandum of the Sudzha district executive committee of the Kursk Region about the atrocities committed by the Nazi invaders on the farm cooperatives of the Ivanitsky village council.
Nazi massacres
According to newly-released documents, after the defeat of the German troops in the Battle of Stalingrad, Weinknecht's regiment was transferred from the Mediterranean theater of military operations to the Eastern Front. In February 1943 it disembarked from a train at the station Sudzha, the Kursk Region and took up defensive positions 20 km east of Sudzha. On February 27, 1943 the regiment was stationed in the settlements of Ivnitsa, Isakovka, Generalovka and Mashkino of the Sudzha district. On the night of February 28, 1943 the reconnaissance of the Red Army’s advanced units destroyed the personnel of the logistics unit of the German regiment’s howitzer battery in the village of Ivnitsa. On the afternoon of February 28, on Weinknecht's orders, his subordinate soldiers "carried out a brutal massacre of Soviet civilians in retaliation for German soldiers killed."
"I also know about the shooting of 300 people - Soviet civilians - in revenge for an attack by guerillas on the battery’s headquarters, which with the division was attached to the 596th regiment. This shooting of Soviet civilians took place at the end of February 1943 in a village, the name of which I do not know, 2-3 kilometers south of the village of Mashkino. The shooting of 300 Soviet civilians, including women and children, was ordered by the commander of the regiment, Colonel Weinknecht," reads the testimony of Sergeant Johann Stefan Sedlacek, who served in the headquarters company of the 596th Grenadier Regiment. In addition, 48 people, including women, children and old men and women from the Voroshilov farm cooperative, were shot by the regiment's personnel on the premises of the village council. After the shooting, the Nazis burned the building together with the bodies of those killed.
Many residents of the Voroshilov and Red Plowman farm cooperatives, fleeing from the Nazi brutalities, hid in cellars. German soldiers pelted their hiding places with grenades, and those who tried to escape were shot with machine guns. On the same day, February 28, 1943, the Germans gathered all the men from the Isakovka, Generalovka and Ivnitsa villages in the building of the farm cooperative office in Generalovka. They were taken out in groups of 6 people and shot. Each subsequent group of civilians was forced to dump the bodies of those shot into the water. A total of 60 men were put to death in this way.
On March 1, 1943 the personnel of the 3rd battalion of the 596th regiment shot the residents of the village of Mashkino. In the afternoon, German soldiers detained 12 men in homes on the outskirts of the village and then shot them. On the night of March 2, 1943, soldiers of the 3rd Battalion gathered 14 women and children from their homes, locked them in a barn and burned them alive. According to the investigation, as a result of punitive operations by the personnel of the 596th Grenadier Regiment under Weinknecht, 183 civilians were shot and burned between February 28 and March 1, 1943, among them 106 men, 46 women and 31 children.
In the first days of March 1943 the regiment retreated through Korenevo and took defense positions on the right bank of the Seim River in the villages of Yurasovo, Vysokoye, Nizhny Mordok and Rzhava of the Glushkovka district. Weinknecht gave the order to evict the inhabitants. During the eviction people were forbidden to use transportation, take food or property. Those who resisted were shot. In mid-March 1943, on Weinknecht's order, his subordinates raided civilians hiding in the forests between the front line and the village of Vysokoye. Some of those detained were used for defense works or taken to hard labor in Germany. Most were executed.
"With regard to Soviet citizens who evaded being taken to areas away from the frontline and to German penal servitude, there was an order coming from the commander of the 596th Infantry Regiment, Colonel Weinknecht, that all of them should be shot without inquest or trial," Sedlacek's testimony reads. Faced with the charges, Weinknecht partially confessed to the crimes committed. "As I have previously testified, <...> it is true that the personnel of my regiment carried out shootings of civilians. Also, civilians were compelled to do defense work. I also consider it possible that soldiers of my regiment robbed the civilian population in the villages of Vysokoye, Yurasovo and Artyushkovo. I confirm that during the retreat the personnel of the regiment stole cattle belonging to the civilian population," Weinknecht said when interrogated in 1949.
As a result of such raids, 89 inhabitants of the villages of Yurasovo, Nizhny Mordok and Vysokoye were shot. Along with the shooting of civilians, the soldiers of the regiment burned 110 houses in the village of Mashkino, all public buildings of the farm cooperative Novaya Zhizn (New Life). In all 270 peasant houses with outbuildings were burned in Ivnitsky village council. In addition, on Weinknecht’s orders, during the entirety of their retreat from the Sudzha and Glushkovka districts of the Kursk Region German soldiers engaged in looting, taking livestock, poultry and valuables from civilians. What could not be taken away was destroyed.
On August 29, 1944, Weinknecht, who by that time had been promoted to lieutenant-general, was taken prisoner by the Red Army during the Jassy-Kishinev operation. On the basis of Article 1 of the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of April 19, 1943 entitled "On measures of punishment for the Nazi villains guilty of murder and torture of Soviet civilians and captured Red Army soldiers, for spies, traitors of the Motherland and for their accomplices", in accordance with Art. 2 of the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of May 26, 1947 entitled On the abolition of the death penalty Weinknecht was sentenced to 25 years in a correctional labor camp. In 1955 he was released and repatriated.
Inevitable retribution
Now these same areas of the Kursk Region are under attack by Ukrainian militants. When Russian troops liberated settlements in this region, numerous instances of crimes committed by Ukrainian troops against unarmed civilians were exposed. "All those responsible for the atrocities will be identified and brought to criminal responsibility - precisely the way the Soviet Union’s state security agencies during and after the Great Patriotic War tracked down and brought to justice for committing similar crimes in the temporarily occupied territories of the USSR the war criminals of Nazi Germany - the ideological predecessors of the modern Ukraine’s neo-Nazis," the FSB stressed.