The Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation published archival documents of the crimes of the Nazis in the Volokolamsk district of the Moscow region in 1941. The documents were made public on the occasion of the 81st anniversary of the start of the Soviet counter-offensive near Moscow on December 5.
The collected information about war crimes was later used to prosecute the main criminals at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
“About 600 captured Red Army soldiers were put by the Germans in Volokolamsk in a four-story house, where they were tortured and abused for several days. After that, the Germans set fire to the house where the captured Red Army soldiers were, and they shot all those who tried to jump out the window, ”based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, the head of the Special Department of the NKVD (military counterintelligence) of the 16th Army reported in a memo dated December 23, 1941 Major of State Security Vasily Shilin.
According to him, in the very first days of the capture of this city by German troops, the Fritz captured eight partisans, after which they hanged them and did not remove them from the gallows for two months. Shilin wrote that they were removed only with the arrival of Soviet units.
“On December 9 of this year, in the village of Novo-Rozhdestvennoye, Novo-Petrovsky District, fascist monsters shot the collective farmer Anton Ivanov just because the latter refused to take off his felt boots and give them to the Germans. On December 11 of this year, in the village of Delkovo of the same region, the Germans arrested the collective farm activist Travnikova Evdokia Alekseevna, 55 years old, and after brutal bullying, undressed and undressed her, drove her naked 10 km in the cold, after which they shot her, ”says a special report dated December 27, 1941 year of the head of the Special Department of the NKVD of the 20th Army, Major of State Security Philip Ageenkov
The counterintelligence officer added that “the brutalized fascists, feeling their powerlessness in the fight against the partisans and fearing them,” on December 12, 1941, in the village of Tiliktino, Novo-Petrovsky district, 16 civilians were arrested and hanged in the square.
“As can be seen from the documents, the construction by the Germans of the “new order” on the territory of the Soviet Union liberated from the “Bolshevik shackles” resulted in the genocide of the Soviet people, the commission of massacres, violence and robberies,” the FSB said.
In total, the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders and Their Accomplices examined and studied 54,000 acts and over 250,000 protocols of interviews of witnesses and statements.
Earlier, on November 29, the FSB declassified archival documents detailing the criminal activities of the “Home Army” in Ukraine, related to the massacres of unarmed people and provocations during the Great Patriotic War. Thus, the purpose of the bloody terror against civilians was “liberation from the Ukrainian population of the territory”, which the Polish nationalists hoped to get as a result of the Second World War.