What will you do on vacation? What to do at home on vacation. Is it worth going to the sea with a child?

I apologize if you encounter factual errors in today's material.

Instead of a preface:

"When there were no gas chambers, we shot on Wednesdays and Fridays. The children tried to hide on these days. Now the crematorium ovens work day and night and the children no longer hide. The children are used to it.

This is the first eastern subgroup.

How are you doing, children?

How are you living, children?

We live well, our health is good. Come.

I don’t need to go to the gas station, I can still give blood.

The rats ate my rations, so I didn’t bleed.

I'm assigned to load coal into the crematorium tomorrow.

And I can donate blood.

They don't know what it is?

They forgot.

Eat, children! Eat!

Why didn't you take it?

Wait, I'll take it.

Maybe you won't get it.

Lie down, it doesn't hurt, it's like falling asleep. Get down!

What's wrong with them?

Why did they lie down?

The children probably thought they were given poison..."

A group of Soviet prisoners of war behind barbed wire

Majdanek. Poland

The girl is a prisoner of the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac

KZ Mauthausen, jugendliche

Children of Buchenwald

Joseph Mengele and child

Photo taken by me from Nuremberg materials

Children of Buchenwald

Mauthausen children show numbers etched into their hands

Treblinka

Two sources. One says that this is Majdanek, the other says Auschwitz

Some creatures use this photo as “proof” of hunger in Ukraine. It is not surprising that it is from Nazi crimes that they draw “inspiration” for their “revelations”

These are the children released in Salaspils

“Since the fall of 1942, masses of women, old people, and children from the occupied regions of the USSR: Leningrad, Kalinin, Vitebsk, Latgale were forcibly brought to the Salaspils concentration camp. Children from infancy to 12 years old were forcibly taken away from their mothers and kept in 9 barracks of which the so-called 3 sick leaves, 2 for crippled children and 4 barracks for healthy children.

The permanent population of children in Salaspils was more than 1,000 people during 1943 and 1944. Their systematic extermination took place there by:

A) organizing a blood factory for the needs German army, blood was taken from both adults and healthy children, including babies, until they fainted, after which the sick children were taken to the so-called hospital, where they died;

B) gave children poisoned coffee;

C) children with measles were bathed, from which they died;

D) they injected children with child, female and even horse urine. Many children's eyes festered and leaked;

D) all children suffered from dysenteric diarrhea and dystrophy;

E) naked children in winter time they were driven to a bathhouse through the snow at a distance of 500-800 meters and kept in barracks naked for 4 days;

3) children who were crippled or injured were taken away to be shot.

Mortality among children from the above causes averaged 300-400 per month during 1943/44. to the month of June.

According to preliminary data, over 500 children were exterminated in the Salaspils concentration camp in 1942, and in 1943/44. more than 6,000 people.

During 1943/44 More than 3,000 people who survived and endured torture were taken from the concentration camp. For this purpose, a children's market was organized in Riga at 5 Gertrudes Street, where they were sold into slavery for 45 marks per summer period.

Some of the children were placed in children's camps organized for this purpose after May 1, 1943 - in Dubulti, Bulduri, Saulkrasti. After this, the German fascists continued to supply the kulaks of Latvia with slaves of Russian children from the above-mentioned camps and export them directly to the volosts of the Latvian counties, selling them for 45 Reichsmarks over the summer period.

Most of these children who were taken out and given away to be raised died because... were easily susceptible to all kinds of diseases after losing blood in the Salaspils camp.

On the eve of the expulsion of the German fascists from Riga, on October 4-6, they loaded infants and toddlers under the age of 4 from the Riga orphanage and the Major orphanage, where the children of executed parents, who came from the dungeons of the Gestapo, prefectures, and prisons, were loaded onto the ship "Menden" and partly from the Salaspils camp and exterminated 289 small children on that ship.

They were driven away by the Germans to Libau, an orphanage for infants located there. Children from Baldonsky and Grivsky orphanages; nothing is known about their fate yet.

Not stopping at these atrocities, the German fascists in 1944 sold low-quality products in Riga stores only using children's cards, in particular milk with some kind of powder. Why did small children die in droves? More than 400 children died in the Riga Children's Hospital alone in 9 months of 1944, including 71 children in September.

In these orphanages, the methods of raising and maintaining children were police and under the supervision of the commandant of the Salaspils concentration camp, Krause, and another German, Schaefer, who went to the children's camps and houses where the children were kept for “inspection.”

It was also established that in the Dubulti camp, children were put in a punishment cell. To do this, the former head of the Benoit camp resorted to the assistance of the German SS police.

Senior NKVD operative officer, security captain /Murman/

Children were brought from the eastern lands occupied by the Germans: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine. Children ended up in Latvia with their mothers, where they were then forcibly separated. Mothers were used as free labor. Older children were also used for various kinds of auxiliary work.

According to the People's Commissariat of Education of the LSSR, which investigated the facts of the abduction of civilians into German slavery, as of April 3, 1945, it is known that 2,802 children were distributed from the Salaspils concentration camp during the German occupation:

1) on kulak farms - 1,564 people.

2) to children's camps - 636 people.

3) taken into care by individual citizens - 602 people.

The list is compiled on the basis of data from the card index of the Social Department of Internal Affairs of the Latvian General Directorate “Ostland”. Based on the same file, it was revealed that children were forced to work from the age of five.

IN last days During their stay in Riga in October 1944, the Germans broke into orphanages, into the homes of infants, into apartments, grabbed children, drove them into Riga port, where they were loaded like cattle into the coal mines of steamships.

Through mass executions in the vicinity of Riga alone, the Germans killed about 10,000 children, whose corpses were burned. 17,765 children were killed in mass shootings.

Based on the investigation materials for other cities and counties of the LSSR, the following number of exterminated children was established:

Abrensky district - 497
Ludza County - 732
Rezekne County and Rezekne - 2,045, incl. through Rezekne prison more than 1,200
Madona County - 373
Daugavpils - 3,960, incl. through Daugavpils prison 2,000
Daugavpils district - 1,058
Valmiera County - 315
Jelgava - 697
Ilukstsky district - 190
Bauska County - 399
Valka County - 22
Cesis County - 32
Jekabpils County - 645
Total - 10,965 people.

In Riga, dead children were buried in the Pokrovskoye, Tornakalnskoye and Ivanovskoye cemeteries, as well as in the forest near the Salaspils camp."

In the ditch

The bodies of two child prisoners before the funeral. Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. 04/17/1945

Children behind the wire

Soviet child prisoners of the 6th Finnish concentration camp in Petrozavodsk

“The girl who is second from the post on the right in the photo - Klavdia Nyuppieva - published her memoirs many years later.

“I remember how people fainted from the heat in the so-called bathhouse, and then they were doused with cold water. I remember the disinfection of the barracks, after which there was a noise in the ears and many had nosebleeds, and that steam room where all our rags were processed with great “diligence.” One day the steam room burned down, depriving many people of their last clothes.”

The Finns shot prisoners in front of children and administered corporal punishment to women, children and the elderly, regardless of age. She also said that the Finns shot young guys before leaving Petrozavodsk and that her sister was saved simply by a miracle. According to available Finnish documents, only seven men were shot for attempting to escape or other crimes. During the conversation, it turned out that the Sobolev family was one of those who were taken from Zaonezhye. It was difficult for Soboleva’s mother and her six children. Claudia said that their cow was taken away from them, they were deprived of the right to receive food for a month, then, in the summer of 1942, they were transported on a barge to Petrozavodsk and assigned to concentration camp number 6, in the 125th barrack. The mother was immediately taken to the hospital. Claudia recalled with horror the disinfection carried out by the Finns. People burned out in the so-called bathhouse, and then they were doused with cold water. The food was bad, the food was spoiled, the clothes were unusable.

Only at the end of June 1944 were they able to leave the barbed wire of the camp. There were six Sobolev sisters: 16-year-old Maria, 14-year-old Antonina, 12-year-old Raisa, nine-year-old Claudia, six-year-old Evgenia and very little Zoya, she was not yet three years old.

Worker Ivan Morekhodov spoke about the attitude of the Finns towards the prisoners: “There was little food, and it was bad. The baths were terrible. The Finns showed no pity.”

In a Finnish concentration camp

Auschwitz (Auschwitz)

Photos of 14-year-old Czeslava Kvoka

The photographs of 14-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka, on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, were taken by Wilhelm Brasse, who worked as a photographer at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where about 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, died from repression during World War II. In December 1942, Polish Catholic Czeslawa, originally from the town of Wolka Zlojecka, was sent to Auschwitz along with her mother. Three months later they both died. In 2005, photographer (and fellow prisoner) Brasset described how he photographed Czeslava: “She was so young and so scared. The girl did not understand why she was here and did not understand what was being said to her. And then the kapo (prison guard) took a stick and hit her in the face. This German woman simply took out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful, young and innocent creature. She cried, but could not do anything. Before being photographed, the girl wiped tears and blood from her broken lip. Frankly, I felt as if I had been beaten, but I could not intervene. It would have ended fatally for me."

January 27, 2015, 15:30

On January 27, the world celebrates 70 years since liberation Soviet army Nazi concentration camp "Auschwitz-Birkenau" (Auschwitz), where from 1941 to 1945, according to official data, 1.4 million people died, of which about 1.1 million were Jews. The photographs below, published by Photochronograph, show the life and martyrdom of prisoners at Auschwitz and other concentration death camps established in territory controlled by Nazi Germany.

Some of these photos can be emotionally traumatizing. Therefore, we ask children and people with unstable mental health to refrain from viewing these photographs.

Sending Slovak Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Arrival of a train with new prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Arrival of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The prisoners gather centrally on the platform.

Arrival of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. First stage of selection. It was necessary to divide the prisoners into two columns, separating men from women and children.

Arrival of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The guards form a column of prisoners.

Rabbis in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Train tracks leading to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Registration photographs of children prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Prisoners of the Auschwitz-Monowitz concentration camp at the construction of a chemical plant of the German concern I.G. Farbenindustrie AG

The liberation by Soviet soldiers of the surviving prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Soviet soldiers examine children's clothing found in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

A group of children liberated from the Auschwitz concentration camp. In total, about 7,500 people, including children, were released from the camp. The Germans managed to transport about 50 thousand prisoners from Auschwitz to other camps before the approach of the Red Army.

Liberated children, prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz), show camp numbers tattooed on their arms.

Liberated children from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Portrait of prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp after its liberation by Soviet troops.

Aerial photograph of the northwestern part of the Auschwitz concentration camp with the main objects of the camp marked: the railway station and the Auschwitz I camp.

Liberated prisoners of an Austrian concentration camp in an American military hospital.

Clothes of concentration camp prisoners abandoned after liberation in April 1945.

American soldiers inspect the site of the mass execution of 250 Polish and French prisoners at a concentration camp near Leipzig on April 19, 1945.

A Ukrainian girl released from a concentration camp in Salzburg (Austria) cooks food on a small stove.

Prisoners of the Flossenburg concentration camp after liberation by the 97th Infantry Division of the US Army in May 1945. The emaciated prisoner in the center - a 23-year-old Czech - is sick with dysentery. Camp Flossenburg was located in Bavaria near city ​​of the same name on the border with the Czech Republic. It was created in May 1938. During the existence of the camp, about 96 thousand prisoners passed through it, more than 30 thousand of them died in the camp.

Prisoners of the Ampfing concentration camp after liberation.

View of the Grini concentration camp in Norway.

Soviet prisoners in the Lamsdorf concentration camp (Stalag VIII-B, now the Polish village of Lambinowice).

The bodies of shot SS guards observation tower"B" Dachau concentration camp.

Dachau is one of the first concentration camps in Germany. Founded by the Nazis in March 1933. The camp was in southern Germany 16 kilometers northwest of Munich. The number of prisoners held at Dachau from 1933 to 1945 exceeds 188,000. The death toll in the main camp and in the subcamps from January 1940 to May 1945 was at least 28 thousand people.

View of the barracks of the Dachau concentration camp.

Soldiers of the 45th American Infantry Division show teenagers from the Hitler Youth the bodies of prisoners in a carriage at the Dachau concentration camp.

View of the Buchenwald barracks after the liberation of the camp.

American generals George Patton, Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower in the Ohrdruf concentration camp near the fire where the Germans burned the bodies of prisoners.

Soviet prisoners of war in the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

The prison camp "Stalag XVIII" was located near the city of Wolfsberg (Austria). The camp held approximately 30 thousand people: 10 thousand British and 20 thousand Soviet prisoners. Soviet prisoners were isolated in a separate zone and did not intersect with other prisoners. In the English part, only half were ethnic English, about 40 percent were Australians, the rest were Canadians, New Zealanders (including 320 Maori aborigines) and other natives of the colonies. Of the other nations in the camp, there were French and downed American pilots. A special feature of the camp was the liberal attitude of the administration towards the presence of cameras among the British (this did not apply to the Soviets). Thanks to this, an impressive archive of photographs of life in the camp, taken from the inside, that is, by the people who sat in it, has survived to this day.

Soviet prisoners of war eat at the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Soviet prisoners of war near the barbed wire of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Soviet prisoners of war near the barracks of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

British prisoners of war on the stage of the theater of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Captured British corporal Eric Evans with three comrades on the territory of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Burnt bodies of prisoners of the Ohrdruf concentration camp. The Ohrdruf concentration camp was established in November 1944. During the war, about 11,700 people died in the camp. Ohrdruf became the first concentration camp liberated by the US Army.

The bodies of prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Buchenwald is one of the largest concentration camps in Germany, located near Weimar in Thuringia. From July 1937 to April 1945, about 250 thousand people were imprisoned in the camp. The number of camp victims is estimated at approximately 56 thousand prisoners.

Women from the SS guards of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp unload the corpses of prisoners for burial in a mass grave. They were attracted to this work by the allies who liberated the camp. Around the ditch is a convoy of English soldiers. As a punishment, former guards are prohibited from wearing gloves to expose them to the risk of contracting typhus.

Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi concentration camp located in the province of Hanover (now Lower Saxony) a mile from the village of Belsen and a few miles southwest of the city of Bergen. There were no gas chambers in the camp. But between 1943 and 1945, about 50 thousand prisoners died here, over 35 thousand of them from typhus a few months before the liberation of the camp. The total number of victims is about 70 thousand prisoners.

Six British prisoners on the territory of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Soviet prisoners talk with a German officer in the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Soviet prisoners of war change clothes in the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Group photo of Allied prisoners (British, Australians and New Zealanders) at the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

An orchestra of Allied prisoners (Australians, British and New Zealanders) on the territory of the Stalag XVIII concentration camp.

Captured Allied soldiers play the game Two Up for cigarettes on the territory of the Stalag 383 concentration camp.

Two British prisoners near the wall of the barracks of the Stalag 383 concentration camp.

A German soldier guard at the market of the Stalag 383 concentration camp, surrounded by Allied prisoners.

Group photo of Allied prisoners at the Stalag 383 concentration camp on Christmas Day 1943.

Barracks of the Vollan concentration camp in the Norwegian city of Trondheim after liberation.

A group of Soviet prisoners of war outside the gates of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad after liberation. Falstad was a Nazi concentration camp in Norway, located in the village of Ekne near Levanger. Created in September 1941. The number of dead prisoners is more than 200 people.

SS Oberscharführer Erich Weber on vacation in the commandant's quarters of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad.

The commandant of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad, SS Hauptscharführer Karl Denk (left) and SS Oberscharführer Erich Weber (right) in the commandant's room.

Five liberated prisoners of the Falstad concentration camp at the gate.

Prisoners of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad on vacation during a break between working in the fields.

An employee of the Falstad concentration camp, SS Oberscharführer Erich Weber.

SS non-commissioned officers K. Denk, E. Weber and Luftwaffe sergeant major R. Weber with two women in the commandant's room of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad.

An employee of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad, SS Obersturmführer Erich Weber, in the kitchen of the commandant's house.

Soviet, Norwegian and Yugoslav prisoners of the Falstad concentration camp on vacation at a logging site.

The head of the women's block of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad, Maria Robbe, with policemen at the gates of the camp.

A group of Soviet prisoners of war on the territory of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad after liberation.

Seven guards of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad (Falstad) at the main gate.

Panorama of the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad after liberation.

Black French prisoners in the Frontstalag 155 camp in the village of Lonvik.

Black French prisoners wash clothes in the Frontstalag 155 camp in the village of Lonvik.

Participants of the Warsaw Uprising from the Home Army in a concentration camp barracks near the German village of Oberlangen.

The body of a shot SS guard in a canal near the Dachau concentration camp.

Two American soldiers and a former prisoner retrieve the body of a shot SS guard from a canal near the Dachau concentration camp.

A column of prisoners from the Norwegian concentration camp Falstad passes in the courtyard of the main building.

An exhausted Hungarian prisoner freed from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

A released prisoner of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp who fell ill with typhus in one of the camp barracks.

Prisoners demonstrate the process of destroying corpses in the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp.

Captured Red Army soldiers who died from hunger and cold. The prisoner of war camp was located in the village of Bolshaya Rossoshka near Stalingrad.

The body of a guard at the Ohrdruf concentration camp, killed by prisoners or American soldiers.

Prisoners in a barracks at the Ebensee concentration camp.

Irma Grese and Josef Kramer in the prison yard German city Celle. The head of the labor service of the women's block of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - Irma Grese and his commandant SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Josef Kramer under British escort in the courtyard of the prison in Celle, Germany.

A girl prisoner of the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac.

Soviet prisoners of war carrying building elements for the barracks of the Stalag 304 Zeithain camp.

Surrendered SS Untersturmführer Heinrich Wicker (later shot by American soldiers) near the carriage with the bodies of prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp. In the photo, second from left is Red Cross representative Victor Myrer.

A man in civilian clothes stands near the bodies of prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
In the background, Christmas wreaths hang near the windows.

The British and Americans released from captivity stand on the territory of the Dulag-Luft prisoner of war camp in Wetzlar, Germany.

Liberated prisoners of the Nordhausen death camp sit on the porch.

Prisoners of the Gardelegen concentration camp, killed by guards shortly before the liberation of the camp.

In the back of the trailer are the corpses of prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp, prepared for burning in the crematorium.

American generals (from right to left) Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George Patton watch a demonstration of one of the methods of torture at the Gotha concentration camp.

Mountains of clothes of prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp.

A released seven-year-old prisoner of the Buchenwald concentration camp in line before being sent to Switzerland.

Prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in formation.

The Sachsenhausen camp was located near the city of Oranienburg in Germany. Created in July 1936. Number of prisoners in different years reached 60 thousand people. On the territory of Sachsenhausen, according to some sources, over 100 thousand prisoners died in various ways.

Soviet prisoner of war liberated from the Saltfjellet concentration camp in Norway.

Soviet prisoners of war in a barracks after liberation from the Saltfjellet concentration camp in Norway.

A Soviet prisoner of war leaves a barracks in the Saltfjellet concentration camp in Norway.

Women liberated by the Red Army from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, located 90 kilometers north of Berlin. Ravensbrück was a concentration camp of the Third Reich, located in northeastern Germany, 90 kilometers north of Berlin. Existed from May 1939 until the end of April 1945. The largest Nazi concentration camp for women. The number of registered prisoners during its entire existence amounted to more than 130 thousand people. According to official data, 90 thousand prisoners died here.

German officers and civilians walk past a group of Soviet prisoners during an inspection of a concentration camp.

Soviet prisoners of war in the camp in formation during verification.

Captured Soviet soldiers in a camp at the beginning of the war.

Captured Red Army soldiers enter the camp barracks.

Four Polish prisoners of the Oberlangen concentration camp (Oberlangen, Stalag VI C) after liberation. Women were among the Warsaw rebels who capitulated.

The orchestra of prisoners of the Janowska concentration camp performs "Tango of Death". On the eve of the liberation of Lviv by units of the Red Army, the Germans lined up a circle of 40 people from the orchestra. The camp guard surrounded the musicians in a tight ring and ordered them to play. First, the orchestra conductor Mund was executed, then, by order of the commandant, each orchestra member went to the center of the circle, put his instrument on the ground and stripped naked, after which he was shot in the head.

The Ustaše execute prisoners in the Jasenovac concentration camp. Jasenovac is a system of death camps created by the Ustaše (Croatian Nazis) in August 1941. It was located on the territory of the Independent Croatian State, which collaborated with Nazi Germany, 60 kilometers from Zagreb. There is no consensus on the number of victims of Jasenovac. While the official Yugoslav authorities during the existence of this state supported the version of 840 thousand victims, according to the calculations of the Croatian historian Vladimir Zherjavic, their number was 83 thousand, and the Serbian historian Bogolyub Kocovic - 70 thousand. Memorial Museum in Jasenovac contains information about 75,159 victims, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum says between 56-97 thousand victims.

Soviet child prisoners of the 6th Finnish concentration camp in Petrozavodsk. During the occupation of Soviet Karelia by the Finns, six concentration camps were created in Petrozavodsk to house local Russian-speaking residents. Camp No. 6 was located in the Transshipment Exchange area and housed 7,000 people.

A Jewish woman with her daughter after being released from a German forced labor camp.

The corpses of Soviet citizens discovered on the territory of Hitler's concentration camp in Darnitsa. Kyiv area, November 1943.

General Eisenhower and other American officers look at the executed prisoners of the Ohrdruf concentration camp.

Dead prisoners of the Ohrdruf concentration camp.

Representatives of the prosecutor's office Estonian SSR near the bodies of the dead prisoners of the Klooga concentration camp. The Klooga concentration camp was located in Harju County, Keila Volost (35 kilometers from Tallinn).

A Soviet child next to his murdered mother. Concentration camp for civilians "Ozarichi". Belarus, town of Ozarichi, Domanovichi district, Polesie region.

Soldiers from the 157th American Infantry Regiment shoot SS guards at the German Dachau concentration camp.

A prisoner at the Webbelin concentration camp burst into tears after learning that he was not included in the first group of prisoners sent to hospital after liberation.

Residents of the German city of Weimar in the Buchenwald concentration camp near the bodies of dead prisoners. The Americans brought residents of Weimar, which was located near Buchenwald, to the camp, most of whom stated that they knew nothing about this camp.

An unknown guard at the Buchenwald concentration camp, beaten and hanged by prisoners.

Guards of the Buchenwald concentration camp beaten by prisoners in a punishment cell on their knees.

An unknown guard at the Buchenwald concentration camp was beaten by prisoners.

Soldiers of the medical service of the 20th Corps of the US Third Army near a trailer with the corpses of prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

The bodies of prisoners who died on the train on the way to the Dachau concentration camp.

Released prisoners in one of the barracks at Camp Ebensee, two days after the arrival of the advance elements of the US 80th Infantry Division.

One of the emaciated prisoners at the Ebensee camp basks in the sun. The Ebensee concentration camp was located 40 kilometers from Salzburg (Austria). The camp existed from November 1943 to May 6, 1945. Over the course of 18 months, thousands of prisoners passed through it, many of whom died here. The names of 7,113 people who died in inhumane conditions are known. The total number of victims is more than 8,200 people.

Soviet prisoners of war liberated from the Ezelheide camp rock an American soldier in their arms.
About 30 thousand Soviet prisoners of war died in camp No. 326 Ezelheide; in April 1945, the surviving Red Army soldiers were liberated by units of the 9th US Army.

French Jews in the Drancy transit camp, before their onward transfer to German concentration camps.

Guards at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp load the corpses of dead prisoners into a truck escorted by British soldiers.

Odilo Globocnik (far right) visits the Sobibor extermination camp, which operated from May 15, 1942 to October 15, 1943. About 250 thousand Jews were killed here.

The corpse of a prisoner of the Dachau concentration camp, found by Allied soldiers in a railway carriage near the camp.

Human remains in the oven of the crematorium of the Stutthof concentration camp. Filming location: surroundings of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland).

Hungarian actress Livia Nador, liberated from the Gusen concentration camp by soldiers of the US 11th Armored Division near Linz, Austria.

A German boy walks along a dirt road, on the side of which lie the corpses of hundreds of prisoners who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

Arrest of the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen Joseph Kramer by British troops. He was subsequently sentenced to death penalty and on December 13th he was hanged in Hameln prison.

Children behind barbed wire in the Buchenwald concentration camp after its liberation.

Soviet prisoners of war undergo disinfection in the German prisoner of war camp Zeithain.

Prisoners during roll call at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Polish Jews await execution under the guard of German soldiers in a ravine. Presumably from the Belzec or Sobibor camp.

A surviving Buchenwald prisoner drinks water in front of the concentration camp barracks.

British soldiers inspect the crematorium oven at the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Liberated child prisoners of Buchenwald leave the camp gates.

German prisoners of war are led through the Majdanek concentration camp. In front of the prisoners on the ground lie the remains of death camp prisoners, and the crematorium ovens are also visible. The Majdanek death camp was located on the outskirts of the Polish city of Lublin. In total, about 150 thousand prisoners were here, about 80 thousand were killed, of which 60 thousand were Jews. The mass extermination of people in gas chambers in the camp began in 1942. Carbon monoxide (carbon monoxide) was first used as a poisonous gas, and since April 1942, Zyklon B. Majdanek was one of two death camps of the Third Reich where this gas was used (the other was Auschwitz).

Soviet prisoners of war in the Zeithain camp undergo disinfection before being sent to Belgium.

Mauthausen prisoners look at an SS officer.

Death march from Dachau concentration camp.

Prisoners in forced labor. Weiner Graben quarry at Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria.

Representatives of the Prosecutor's Office of the Estonian SSR near the bodies of the dead prisoners of the Klooga concentration camp.

The arrested commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Joseph Kramer, in shackles and guarded by an English guard. Nicknamed the “Beast of Belsen,” Kramer was convicted by an English court of war crimes and hanged in Hameln prison in December 1945.

Bones of murdered prisoners of the Majdanek concentration camp (Lublin, Poland).

Oven of the crematorium of the Majdanek concentration camp (Lublin, Poland). On the left is Lieutenant A.A. Guivik.

Lieutenant A.A. Huivik holds in his hands the remains of prisoners of the Majdanek concentration camp.

A column of prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp on the march in the suburbs of Munich.

A young man liberated from the Mauthausen camp.

The corpse of a prisoner of the Leipzig-Thekla concentration camp on barbed wire.

The remains of prisoners in the crematorium of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar.

One of 150 victims from among the prisoners who died in the Gardelegen concentration camp.

In April 1945, at the Gardelegen concentration camp, the SS forced about 1,100 prisoners into a barn and set them on fire. Some of the victims tried to escape but were shot by guards.

Meeting of the Americans - liberators of the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Residents of the city of Ludwigslust walk past the bodies of prisoners of the concentration camp of the same name for prisoners of war. The bodies of the victims were found by soldiers of the American 82nd Airborne Division. The corpses were found in pits in the camp yard and interior. By order of the Americans, the civilian population of the area was obliged to come to the camp to familiarize themselves with the results of the Nazi crimes.

Workers at the Dora-Mittelbau camp killed by the Nazis. Dora-Mittelbau (other names: Dora, Nordhausen) is a Nazi concentration camp, founded on August 28, 1943, 5 kilometers from the city of Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany, as a subdivision of the already existing Buchenwald camp. During the 18 months of its existence, 60 thousand prisoners of 21 nationalities passed through the camp, approximately 20 thousand died in custody.

American generals Patton, Bradley, Eisenhower in the Ohrdruf concentration camp near the fire where the Germans burned the bodies of prisoners.

Soviet prisoners of war liberated by the Americans from a camp near the French town of Sarreguemines, bordering Germany.

The victim's hand has a deep burn from phosphorus. The experiment consisted of setting fire to a mixture of phosphorus and rubber on the skin of a living person.

Liberated prisoners of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Liberated prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

A Soviet prisoner of war, after the complete liberation of the Buchenwald camp by American troops, points to a former guard who brutally beat prisoners.

SS soldiers lined up on the parade ground of the Plaszow concentration camp.

Former guard of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp F. Herzog sorts through a pile of corpses of prisoners.

Soviet prisoners of war liberated by the Americans from the camp in Ezelheide.

A pile of corpses of prisoners in the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp.

A pile of corpses of prisoners in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Corpses of prisoners of the Lambach concentration camp in the forest before burial.

A French prisoner of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp on the floor of a barracks among his dead comrades.

Soldiers from the American 42nd Infantry Division near a carriage with the bodies of prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp.

Prisoners of the Ebensee concentration camp.

Corpses of prisoners in the courtyard of the Dora-Mittelbau camp.

Prisoners of the German concentration camp Webbelin waiting medical care.

A prisoner at the Dora-Mittelbau (Nordhausen) camp shows an American soldier the camp crematorium.

Journalists from the Channel 24 website decided to talk about the most terrible concentration camps of Nazi Germany, in which almost a third of the entire Jewish population of the planet was exterminated.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz)

This is one of the largest concentration camps of World War II. The camp consisted of a network of 48 locations that were subordinate to Auschwitz. It was to Auschwitz that the first political prisoners were sent in 1940.

And already in 1942, mass extermination of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and those whom the Nazis considered “dirty people” began there. About 20 thousand people could be killed there in a day.

The main method of killing was gas chambers, but people also died en masse from overwork, malnutrition, poor living conditions and infectious diseases.

According to statistics, this camp claimed the lives of 1.1 million people, 90% of whom were Jews

Treblinka

One of the most scary camps Nazis. Most of the camps from the very beginning were not built specifically for torture and extermination. However, Treblinka was a so-called “death camp” - it was designed specifically for killings.

The weak and infirm, as well as women and children, that is, “second-class” people who were not able to work hard, were sent there from all over the country.

In total, about 900 thousand Jews and two thousand Gypsies died in Treblinka

Belzec

The Nazis founded this camp exclusively for Gypsies in 1940, but already in 1942 Jews began to be massacred there. Subsequently, Poles who opposed Hitler's Nazi regime were tortured there.

In total, 500-600 thousand Jews died in the camp. However, to this figure it is worth adding the dead Roma, Poles and Ukrainians

Jews in Belzec were used as slaves in preparation for a military invasion of the Soviet Union. The camp was located in an area close to the border with Ukraine, so many Ukrainians who lived in the area died in prison.

Majdanek

This concentration camp was built to hold prisoners of war during the German invasion of the USSR. The prisoners were used as cheap labor and no one was intentionally killed.

But later the camp was “reformatted” - everyone began to be sent there en masse. The number of prisoners increased and the Nazis simply could not cope with everyone. Gradual and massive destruction began.

About 360 thousand people died in Majdanek. Among whom were “dirty” Germans

Chelmno

In addition to Jews, ordinary Poles from the Lodz ghetto were also deported en masse to this camp, continuing the process of Germanization of Poland. There were no trains to the prison, so prisoners were transported there by truck or had to walk. Many died along the way.

According to statistics, approximately 340 thousand people died in Chelmno, almost all of them were Jews

In addition to mass killings, medical experiments were also carried out in the “death camp,” in particular chemical weapons tests.

Sobibor

This camp was built in 1942 as an additional building for the Belzec camp. At first, only Jews who were deported from the Lublin ghetto were detained and killed in Sobibor.

It was in Sobibor that the first gas chambers were tested. And also for the first time they began to classify people into “suitable” and “unsuitable”. The latter were killed immediately, the rest worked until they were completely exhausted.

According to statistics, about 250 thousand prisoners died there.

In 1943, there was a riot in the camp, during which about 50 prisoners escaped. Everyone who remained died, and the camp itself was soon destroyed.

Dachau

The camp was built near Munich in 1933. At first, all opponents of the Nazi regime and ordinary prisoners were sent there.

However, later everyone ended up in this prison: there were even Soviet officers there who were awaiting execution.

Jews began to be sent there in 1940. In order to gather more people, about 100 other camps were built in southern Germany and Austria, which were under the control of Dachau. That is why this camp is considered the largest.

The Nazis killed over 243 thousand people in this camp

After the war, these camps were used as temporary housing for displaced Germans.

Mauthausen-Gusen

This camp was the first where people began to be killed en masse and the last one to be liberated from the Nazis.

Unlike many other concentration camps, which were intended for all segments of the population, Mauthausen exterminated only the intelligentsia - educated people and members of the higher social classes in the occupied countries.

It is not known exactly how many people were tortured in this camp, but the figure ranges from 122 to 320 thousand people.

Bergen-Belsen

This camp in Germany was built as a prison for prisoners of war. About 95 thousand foreign prisoners were kept there.

There were Jews there too - they were exchanged for some outstanding German prisoners. Therefore, it is obvious that this camp was not intended for extermination. No one was killed or tortured there on purpose.

At least 50 thousand people died in Bergen-Belsen

However, due to a lack of food and medicine, as well as unsanitary conditions, many in the camp died due to starvation and disease. After the prison was liberated, about 13 thousand corpses were found there, just lying around everywhere.

Buchenwald

This was the first camp to be liberated during World War II. Although this is not surprising, because from the very beginning this prison was created for communists.

Freemasons, gypsies, homosexuals and common criminals were also sent to the concentration camp. All prisoners were used as free labor for the production of weapons. However, later they began to conduct various medical experiments on prisoners there.

In 1944 the camp came under fire Soviet aviation. Then about 400 prisoners died, and about two thousand more were injured.

According to estimates, almost 34 thousand prisoners died in the camp from torture, starvation and experiments.

This essay is dedicated to the children's concentration camps that existed in Latvia during the German occupation in 1941-1944, the places of children's burials and the acts of extermination of minor prisoners. I recommend that especially impressionable people refrain from reading.

Somehow it happened that, remembering the horrors of the Great Patriotic War, we talk about killed soldiers, prisoners of war, extermination and humiliation of civilians. But meanwhile, this so-called The category of civilians can be somewhat expanded. One more category of innocent victims can be identified - children. For some reason, it is not customary for us to talk about these victims; they are simply lost against the background of the overall horrific death toll. Personally, I have not yet come across detailed research on the topic of extermination of children on the territory of Latvia. However, often these little prisoners, having barely learned to pronounce individual words in their lives and were still unsteady on their feet, were kept without proper care and supervision, they were also killed, they were also mocked, their conditions of detention in the camps were no different from the conditions of detention adults...

To begin with, I will say a few words about the source of information. The information presented below is collected on the basis of materials from the investigation of the atrocities of the German fascists by the State Extraordinary Commission. The most extensive information on children’s camps is provided by the archival file entitled “Children’s camps and burials” (LVVA P-132, ap. 30, l. 27.), but quite a lot of fragmentary information is scattered throughout the P-132 fund, dedicated to reports and certificates commissions. Part of the information was gleaned from the file dedicated to “Acts and protocols of forensic examination” (LVVA P-132, ap. 30, l. 26.), there is some information about children’s camps in the file where “Certificates about those killed in Salaspils” are collected ( LVVA P-132, ap. 30, l. 38.), some of the data can be found in the file “On the victims of the Nazis in the LSSR” (LVVA P-132, ap. 30, l. 5.). All the information presented is the testimony of eyewitnesses, witnesses, participants in the events, both the prisoners themselves, and from interrogations of the accused guards and police officers.

According to the data of the Extraordinary Commission for the Investigation of Crimes of the Nazi Invaders, the number of exterminated children on the territory of Latvia reaches 35,000 people. In the materials of the Riga trial of war criminals in 1946, the number of exterminated children in the camps on the territory of Riga is stated as 6,700, in addition, more than 8,000 who died in the ghetto should be added to this figure. One of the largest graves of children in Latvia is in Salaspils - 7,000 children, another is in the Dreilini forest in Riga, where about 2,000 children are buried.

Children's camps in Latvia

Riga:

E.Birznieka-Upisha street 4 (orphanage)

Gertrudes street 5 (organization "People's Aid")

Krasta St. 73 (Old Believers Community)

126 Kr. Barona St. (nunnery)

Kapselyu street (orphanage)

In Latvia:

Orphanage in Bulduri

Orphanage in Dubulti

Orphanage in Maiori

Orphanage in Saulkrasti

Orphanage in Strenci

Orphanage in Baldone

Orphanage in Igat

Orphanage in Griva

Orphanage in Liepaja

In addition, children were kept in separate barracks in the Salaspils concentration camp, in cells of the Riga conscript prison, Riga Central Prison, as well as in other prisons in Latvian cities, children were kept in the SD department at 1 Reimersa Street, in the prefecture at 7 Aspazijas Blvd. and others places.

Hitler's leadership, with stupid pedantry, exterminated the civilian population throughout the occupied territory of the Soviet Union. The masses of murdered children, before their painful death, were used in barbaric ways as living experimental material for inhumane experiments of “Aryan medicine.” The Germans organized a children's blood factory for the needs of the German army; a slave market was formed, where children were sold into slavery to local owners.

According to a special directive from the chief of police, SS Obergruppenführer F. Eckeln, under the pretext of fighting banditry in the temporarily occupied regions of Belarus, Leningrad, Kalinin, and Latgale bordering the LSSR during 1942-44. The local population was systematically driven into special camps in the cities of Riga, Daugavpils, Rezekne and other places in the LSSR. Civilians, called “evacuees,” were herded into concentration camps in inhumane conditions. In the camps, the Germans used a specially developed and thought-out system for the methodical extermination of tens of thousands of people.

Salaspils

In the photo: Liberated children of Salaspils in 1944.

Usually, before the eviction of a village, a punitive detachment burst into it, they burned houses, stole livestock, and plundered property. Many residents were killed on the spot or burned in their homes. Women and children were collected at railway stations, loaded into wagons, nailed up tightly and taken to camps. A week later they were taken to one of the camps or prison.

Witness Molotkovich L.V. from the village of Borodulino, Drissensky district, says: “A German punitive detachment descended on our village of Borodulino and began to burn our houses. Then, in the same order, the children, the eldest of whom was not yet 12 years old, were driven to another barracks, where they were kept in the cold for 5-6 days.”

In the photo: A punitive squad burns a village

The terrible hour for children and mothers in the concentration camp came when the Nazis, having lined up mothers with children in the middle of the camp, forcibly tore the babies away from the unfortunate mothers. Witness M.G. Brinkmane, who was held in the Salaspils concentration camp, says: “In Salaspils, a tragedy of mothers and children unheard of in the history of mankind took place. Tables were placed in front of the commandant's office, all the mothers and children were called, and the smug, well-fed commandants, who knew no boundaries in their cruelty, lined up at the table. They forcibly snatched children from their mothers' hands. The air was filled with the heartbreaking cries of mothers and the cries of children.”

Children, starting from infancy, were kept by the Germans separately and strictly isolated. The children in a separate barracks were in the state of small animals, deprived of even primitive care. 5-7 year old girls looked after the infants. Every day, German guards carried out the frozen corpses of dead children from the children's barracks in large baskets. They were dumped into cesspools, burned outside the camp fence, and partially buried in the forest near the camp.

Mass continuous mortality of children was caused by experiments for which juvenile prisoners of Salaspils were used as laboratory animals. German killer doctors injected sick children with various liquids, injected urine into the rectum, and forced them to take various drugs internally. After all these techniques, the children invariably died. The children were fed poisoned porridge, from which they died a painful death. All these experiments were supervised by the German doctor Meisner.

The forensic medical commission, having examined the territory of the garrison cemetery in Salaspils, found that part of the cemetery with an area of ​​2,500 square meters was completely covered with mounds at intervals of 0.2 to 0.5 meters. When only one-fifth of this territory was excavated, 632 child corpses aged 5 to 9 years were discovered in 54 graves; in most graves, the corpses were located in two or three layers. At a distance of 150 m from the cemetery towards railway the commission discovered an area measuring 25x27 meters, the soil of which was saturated with an oily substance and ash and containing parts of unburnt human bones, including many bones of children 5-9 years old, teeth, articular heads of femurs, humerus, ribs and other bones.

The commission divided these 632 children's corpses into age groups:

A) infants - 114

B) children from 1 to 3 years old - 106

C) children from 3 to 5 years old - 91

D) children from 5 to 8 years old - 117

D) children from 8 to 10 years old - 160

E) children over 10 years old - 44

Based on investigation materials, witness testimony, and exhumation data, it was established that during the three years of the existence of the Salaspils camp, the Germans killed at least 7,000 children, some who were burned and some who were buried in the garrison cemetery.

Witnesses Laugulaitis, Elterman, Viba and others say: “Selected children under the age of 5 were placed in a separate barracks, where they contracted measles and died in droves. Sick children were taken to the camp hospital, where they were bathed in cold water, from which they died within a day or two. In this way, in the Salaspils camp, the Germans killed more than 3,000 children under the age of 5 in one year.”

From the materials on the accused F. Eckeln, witness Saleyuma Emilia, born in 1886: “While imprisoned in the Salaspils camp since August 21, 1944, I saw that in a separate barrack No. 10B there were more than 100 Soviet children under the age of 10 years . At the beginning of September 1944, the Germans took all these children away and shot them. ... In January 1942, I personally saw how the German fascists at the Shkirotava station loaded 30-40 people at a time from the transported trains of children into green hermetically sealed vehicles. The car doors were tightly locked, then the children were taken away. After 30 minutes the cars returned. I know that the Germans exterminated children with gases in such cars. I can’t say how many children were gassed, but it was a lot.”

From a statement by citizen Viba Evelina Yanovna, born in 1897: “The Germans placed the selected children in a special camp barracks, and they died there in dozens. In March 1942 alone, 500 children died, those caring for the children told me about this. The dead children were buried in the cemetery, where the dead in the camp were buried, along the same road where they were led to execution, only to the left. Thus, I know that more than 3,000 children died and the same number were taken somewhere.”

Ten-year-old Natalya Lemeshonok (all five brothers and sisters - Natalya, Shura, Zhenya, Galya, Borya - were sent to the Salaspils concentration camp) talks about the lawlessness and truly brutal treatment: “We lived in a barracks, they didn’t let us go outside. Little Anya constantly cried and asked for bread, but I had nothing to give her. A few days later, we were taken to the hospital along with other children. There was a German doctor there, in the middle of the room there was a table with different instruments. Then they lined us up and said that a doctor would examine us. It was not clear what he was doing, but then one girl screamed very loudly. The doctor began stamping his foot and shouting at her. Coming closer, you could see how the doctor injected a needle into this girl, and blood flowed from her arm into a small bottle. When it was my turn, the doctor snatched Anya from me and laid me on the table. He held a needle and injected it into my arm. Then he approached his younger sister and did the same to her. We all cried. The doctor said that there was no point in crying, since we would all die anyway, otherwise we would be useful... A few days later, they took our blood again. Anya died." Natalya and Borya survived in the camp.

According to the testimony of witnesses, former prisoners of the Salaspils concentration camp, more than 12,000 children passed through this camp alone from the end of 1942 to the spring of 1944.

The direct exterminators of children in the Salaspils concentration camp were commandants Nikel and Krause, and their assistants Hepper, Berger, Teckemeyer.

To quickly get rid of the children, cars with armed SS men drove to different camps and took children away from their parents. Children were torn from their arms, thrown into cars and taken away to be exterminated. Cases have been established of parents poisoning their own children to save them from a terrible death. The Nazis also threw dying children into the back and took them away.

Witness Ritov Ya.D. The commission showed: “There were about 400 children in the concentration camp in Riga in 1944. An order came from Berlin for the complete extermination of these children. The said order ordered that all children from the concentration camp be taken away to be killed. An SS truck arrived at the camp, containing about 40 children gathered from other camps. They were guarded by 10 SS men armed with machine guns. Corporal Schiffmacher gave the order to hand over all 12 children who were in the camp to the SS convoy. Parents hid their children... under the threat of shooting all the parents along with their children, and taking 25 hostages for one child, the children were collected. 4 mothers managed to poison their children. These children were also thrown into the truck in their dying state by the SS. There were incredible scenes of parents saying goodbye to their children. One eight-year-old girl, standing at the side of the truck, said to her sobbing mother: “Don’t cry, mom, this is my destiny.”

Witness Epshtein-Dagarov T.I. shows: “As I later established... cars with children arrived at the Mezaparks concentration camp on the same day. There they picked up a new batch of children from the concentration camp and moved on. I learned from the drivers that the car with the children went to the Shkirotava station, where the children were poisoned.”

Thus, at the last moment of their retreat from Riga, the Germans destroyed up to 700 children. These acts of violence were led by: General Commissioner Drexler, his employees Ziegenbein, Windgassen, Krebs.

Based on data from the Riga OAGS, as well as numerous testimonies, 3,311 children, mainly infants, died during the period of occupation, including during the year and a half of 1941-43. - 2,205, and for 9 months of 1944 - 1,106 children.

Prisons

The extermination of children also took place in the Gestapo and prisons. The dirty and smelly prison cells were never ventilated or heated, even in the most severe frosts. On dirty, cold floors, infested with various insects, unhappy mothers were forced to watch the gradual decline of their children. 100 grams of bread and half a liter of water - that’s all their meager ration for the day. There was no medical assistance provided.

During the bloody massacres of prisoners in prisons, where the Germans shot up to several hundred people, no exceptions were made for children. They died just like adults. Sometimes they “forgot” to shoot the children and they continued to drag out their miserable existence alone until the next execution.

During interrogation, the former warden of the Riga Central Prison testified that in the fourth building of the prison alone (there were six such buildings in total), where she worked for four months, at least 100 small children were kept and shot, and 4 children died of starvation.

The accused Veske V.Yu., born in 1915, a former prisoner of the Riga urgent prison, testifies that at the beginning of 1942, 150 children were shot in the urgent prison.

From the interrogation protocol of the accused Veske V.Yu., from November 1943 to June 1944, she worked as a nurse in the Salaspils concentration camp: “In the hospital in Salaspils there were children evacuated from Russia, there were 120 children’s beds in the hospital, 180 adults. Children mostly suffered from measles , dysentery, adults - typhus, pneumonia. At least 5 children died every day from 120 places. Children died from exhaustion, lack of medical care and deliberate murder.” The court file indicates that Veske Velta personally administered lethal injections to sick children.

Pregnant women languishing in the dungeons of the Gestapo were subjected to severe beatings during interrogations along with other prisoners. Zhukovskaya I.V. testified to the commission that she personally saw atrocities against pregnant women and babies while escorting groups of prisoners through the streets of Riga: “I will never forget one fact of German atrocities that occurred in my presence. The Germans were chasing a group of people, beating them with sticks. Suddenly one pregnant woman stopped and screamed wildly - she was having labor pains. The German fascist guard began to beat her with a stick, and she immediately gave birth. The German immediately killed the woman and the newborn, smashing their heads with a stick.”

Lawyer K.G. Munkevich, who was held in the Central Prison for more than a year, told the commission: “Since July 1, 1941, the Central Prison began to be filled with prisoners along with their young children. Children were kept together with adults under the same conditions of diet and nutrition. Children shared the fate of their parents and died the same death as their parents. Many women were imprisoned while pregnant. Many pregnant women were shot, many gave birth right there in prison, and then were taken to the forest and shot along with their babies. If you imagine the period from 1941 to 1943, while I was kept in prison, about 3,000-3,500 children were taken away from there and shot or otherwise killed. Of course, this number is approximate, but I think it is lower than the actual number.”

According to the investigation, the commission found that the Germans killed about 3,500 children in Riga prisons and Gestapo dungeons. In the same way, the Germans committed atrocities against children in other cities of Latvia. For example, 2,000 children were exterminated in Daugavpils, 1,200 in Rezekne. Thus, 6,700 children were exterminated in Riga in prisons and by the Gestapo during the period of German occupation. The organizers of the extermination of children in prisons were the German administration represented by Birkhan, Viya, Matels, Egel, Tabord, Albert.

In the spring of 1943, retreating German troops took with them the entire population from the occupied regions of the USSR. At this time, the flow of children into camps and prisons in Latvia increased, and therefore Latvian prisons were no longer able to accommodate prisoners. They begin to be destroyed en masse.

Children's camps in Riga

In Riga, special distribution points for the sale of children were created, offering live goods from 5 to 12 years of age. Here are some of the addresses of these points: in the courtyard of “People's Help” on Gertrudes street 5, in the Grebenshchikovsky community on Krasta street 73, in the orphanage on the street. Jumaras 4 (Birznieka-Upisa street) and in many others. Children who could not be used for work, aged from one to five years, were taken to a convent at 126 Kr. Barona Street. Children's camps were also located in Dubulti, Saulkrasti, Igat, Strenci.

In the photo: Former orphanage on E.Birznieka-Upisa street 4

Witness Richard Matisovich Murnieks, born in 1896, says: “In June 1944, I entered the Riga Orphanage for Infants, where I stayed until the day the Germans left Riga. There were many Russian children under the age of 3 in the house. Children came to the orphanage from the Salaspils concentration camp and the Riga prison. The German command had not previously raised questions about the evacuation of children, but in October 1944, before the German troops left Riga, our children’s home was taken to a ship. The cars with the children were accompanied by German soldiers. In total, 150 babies were taken from the orphanage. Since the children were brought from Salaspils and the Riga prison, I believe that the children were taken onto the ship for the purpose of exterminating them.”

In April 1943, covered German military vehicles approached the convent in Riga at 126 Kr. Barona Street. They are accompanied by German soldiers under the command of an officer. A terrible picture was revealed to the eyes of eyewitnesses: not a sound was heard from the closed bodies, children's voices were not heard. When the tarpaulin is pulled back, dozens of tortured, sick and exhausted children are revealed. They are huddled and shivering from the cold. The rags barely cover the small bodies covered with abscesses, lichens and scabs. Children are barefoot, without hats. From under the dirty rags that barely cover the unfortunates, cardboard boxes hanging on a rope can be seen on their chests. The signs have the following inscriptions: last name, first name, age. A number of tags contain one word: "Unbekanter" (unknown). The children huddle together and are silent. The children's barracks in the camp, eternal fear and threats, torture and terror of sadists weaned the little sufferers from speaking. The car follows the car. The Nazis brought 579 children aged from one to five years to the monastery. The transport is led by a German officer from the SD Schiffer.

On the picture: Convent on Kr. Barona street 126

Witness Skoldinova L.P. shows: “When I saw the first car, the body of which was full of children from one to five years old, sitting motionless, huddled from the cold, because... They were dressed in some rags, and a chill went down my skin. There were tears in everyone’s eyes, even the men.”

Witness Grabovskaya S.A. says: “The children looked old. They were thin and extremely sickly, and the main thing that struck them was the lack of childish gaiety, talkativeness and playfulness. They could stand for hours with their arms folded if you don’t sit them down, and if you sit them down, they sit just as quietly with their arms folded.”

Witness Osokina V.Ya. said: “A truck covered with a tarpaulin appeared. He drove into the yard and stopped. It seemed to everyone that it arrived empty, because... There was no sound coming from it, no crying, no childish cry. And the most characteristic thing in these pale, emaciated faces of the boys was the expression of extraordinary neglect and fear, and in some, the expression of complete indifference and dullness. The children did not speak at all for 2-3 days. Afterwards they explained this by saying that the Germans in the camp forbade them to cry and talk under pain of being shot.”

The Social Department, subordinate to the fascist authorities, headed by director Silis, and the German organization “People's Aid,” acting on the instructions of the commander of the German SD police of Latvia, Strauch, distributed children from collection points to rural farms as farm laborers. In the spring of 1943, advertisements appeared in newspapers about the distribution of labor.

Newspaper “Tēvija” of March 10, 1943, page 3: “Shepherds and auxiliary workers are distributed. A large number of teenagers from the border regions of Russia would like to be shepherds and auxiliary workers in the village. “People's Aid” took over the distribution of these teenagers. Agriculture may submit their petitions for shepherds and auxiliary workers to the address Raina Blvd. 27.”

The Germans deliver Soviet children aged 4 to 12 years to the “People's Aid” yard in Riga at 5 Gertrudes Street. The children are kept in the yard under the guard of German soldiers. The Germans here organize a bargaining, selling children for agricultural work as farm laborers. Each such slave brought the slave trader from 9 to 15 German marks per month. For this money, the new owners tried to squeeze everything possible out of the kids.

Galina Kukharenok, born in 1933, says: “The Germans took me, my brother Zhorzhik and Verochka to Ogre, to the same owner. I worked in his field, harvested rye, hay, harrowed, got up early for work, it was still dark, and finished work in the evening, when it became dark. My sister tended two cows, three calves and 14 sheep with this owner. Verochka was 4 years old.”

The children's registration point in Riga on October 2, 1943, in relation No. 315, reported to the Social Department: “Young children of Russian refugees ... without rest, from early morning until late at night in rags, without shoes, with very little food, often for several days without food, the sick, without medical care, working for their owners in jobs that are inappropriate for their age. With their ruthlessness, their owners have gone so far that they beat the unfortunate people who are unable to work from hunger... they are robbed, taking away the last remnants of their things... when they cannot work due to illness, they are given absolutely no food, they sleep in the kitchens on dirty floors.”

The same document tells about a little girl Galina, who is in the Rembat parish, Mucenieki manor, with the owner Zarins, that due to unbearable conditions she wants to commit suicide.

The commandant of Salaspils, Krause, toured farms where children worked and checked the condition of the slaves. After such trips, arriving at the camp, he announced to everyone that the children were living well.

A thorough examination of the files of the Ostland Social Department revealed that at least 2,200 children aged 4 years and older were sold to Latvian farms as slaves. However, according to the data established by the commission, in fact for 1943 and 1944. The Germans distributed up to 5,000 children to local owners, of which about 4,000 were subsequently deported to Germany.

Children's camps in Latvia

The abduction of children is accompanied by robberies of orphanages and civilians. This is what the employees of the orphanage in Maiori showed: Shirante T.K., Purmalit M., Chishmakova F.K., Schneider E.M.: “On October 4, 1944, the Germans arrived on five buses and forcibly took 133 children to Riga from an orphanage aged 2 to 5 years, who were taken to be loaded onto a ship. The German fascists robbed the orphanage, took all the food, broke into all the cabinets.”

Witnesses Krastins M.M., Purviskis R.M., Kazakevich M.G., employees of the 1st Riga House, testified that shortly before the liberation of Riga, on the eve of the retreat, the Germans arrived at the Riga Orphanage. First, they plundered the property of the orphanage, then they took 160 babies, took them to the port and loaded them into the hold of a ship for coal in the cold. Some of the children were sick and they were also taken away.

Parents Yurevich A.A., Klementyeva V.P., Oberts G.S., Borovskaya A.M. informed the commission that the German fascists, retreating from Riga, broke into apartments at night and took children away from their parents. Witness Yurevich A.A. stated: “The Germans began to hastily drive away civilians from here and take away children. Everyone was herded to the port, loaded onto ships... I saw the following tragic pictures: parents escorted their children away under guard. Children screamed, clung to their mothers, and became hysterical. At the same time, they clung to their mothers so much that they tore their dresses. The Germans mercilessly tore the children from the hands of the women and loaded them onto the ship like cattle. The picture was terrible."

The investigation established that during approximately a year of the existence of the Dubulti children's camp, out of a total number of 450 small children who passed through it, at least 300 children were sold into slavery. Similar circumstances have been established in children's camps in Saulkrasti, Strenci, Igata and in the Riga orphanage at 4 Jumaras Street.

Extract from the protocol of interrogation of witness Agafya Afanasyevna Dudareva, born in 1910, worked as a cook in the Dubulti children's camp.

Question: Tell us how the children were kept in the camp in Dubulti and Bulduri?

Answer: In Dubulti Kid `s camp was organized in June 1943, by which time I had just arrived there, and by the winter of 1943, around December, I was transferred to Bulduri. In Dubulti we were kept under lock and key. The children were kept separately. There were up to 20 of us female parents who served the children. In order to hide their atrocities of exterminating Russian children, the German fascists and their accomplices raised a whole howl, shouted that they were saving Russian children from the horrors of the Bolsheviks, called the occupied Soviet territories places liberated from the Bolsheviks, began to baptize children and march them to church. , there they were kept for a long time during the service, so that the exhausted children, who had survived the horrors of the Salaspils concentration camp, who had lost the blood that the German fascists forcibly took from them for their needs, fainted, and small children urinated on themselves in the church, but this was not kept some zealous German servants and they continued to torture the children. I emphasize Russian children because... there were no other children here. In both Dubulti and Bulduri churches, priests prayed for the victory of German weapons, pointing out that the Germans liberated the Soviet Union from the Bolsheviks. Priests from Riga, Dubulti and Bulduri came to the children in the camp, where they preached that the Germans had liberated them.

While this camp was in Dubulti, there were two German protege teachers there in 1943. One is Uncle Alik, the second is Lev Vladimirovich, I don’t know their last names. The first was Armenian, the second Russian, they drilled the children in the German spirit, drove them in formation, beat them with whips, put them in a punishment cell, a dark closet, giving them bread and water. When I stood up for the children after such abuse, this uncle Alik hit me with a whip. I ran to the head of Benois, Olga Alekseevna, who attacked me, asking why I was interfering in something that was not my own business and interfering with raising children. When I pointed out that they should not be tortured, because... they were all exhausted after the Salaspils concentration camp, and they continued to be bullied, then Benoit, after consulting with Uncle Alik, they told me to take the children with me and took me to the second floor, where they locked me with my three sons Victor, Mikhail and Vladimir, and my daughter Lida they made me work for me. At the same time, Benoit told me that the children would be taken away from me and I would be sent to Salaspils, she started calling Salaspils. The children ran under the window and shouted to me that Uncle Alik was calling to send me to Salaspils. I don’t remember what happened to me. The children who were with me later told me that I wanted to throw little Volodya out the window, and Victor grabbed him from me, that I was tearing my hair out, and I don’t remember when they let me out. Then Benoit came up to me and repeated: “you will know how to meddle in your own business, you need to obey.” This Alik and Lev Vladimirovich taught children to shout “Heil Hitler.” Then this Alik left for Germany, around December 1943, and Lev Vladimirovich was in Riga, they say that he is still in Riga.

During the German occupation, the nutrition of children in this camp was very poor; children were given 200 grams of bread per day. They gave very little cereal and butter on the ration cards, and Benoit put what she received on her table. Before the liberation of Bulduri from the Germans, children lived from hand to mouth, the food was poor, children were put in a corner for misdeeds, and left without lunch. The boys did not want to go to church, so they were left without lunch. German SS officers came to see the head of Benoit, and she treated them with children's rations. The former head, Olga Kachalova, was a completely different person and did not pursue German-fascist policies, but Benoit did. Before the retreat, the Germans ordered everyone to be loaded onto the trains with their children, but the trains could no longer run, because... the paths were cut off. Benoit’s manager told him not to load, but to hide everything in the cellar; the Germans, seeing that there was no one there, calmed down. In the morning, leaving the cellar, we saw that the cars intended for loading were on fire. In this way we were saved from death. If we had boarded the carriages, the Germans would have burned us along with the children. I would call this children's institution a children's camp for Russian children. When I called it an orphanage, I said that I would be responsible for it; it should be called a camp. More than 500 children passed through this camp; from the camp, many children were sent to shepherds, who were kept disgustingly. After the kulaks had brought the child to exhaustion in their household, they brought back these dirty, sick and ragged children to the camp.”

Ghetto

In the terrible overcrowding of the Riga ghetto, in which 35,000 people were subjected to sophisticated abuse of the human person, about 8,000 children under the age of 12 languished. All of them were destroyed by the German fascists and their local collaborators in a massacre between November 29 and December 9, 1941.

When the columns of those doomed to death, escorted by policemen and SS men, were driven to slaughter in the Rumbula forest, the executioners were impatient. Right there on the streets of the city, the executioners amused themselves by using special sticks to catch mothers and children from the suicide column, drag them to the edge and immediately kill them at point-blank range.

The two-story building of the ghetto hospital at that time was overcrowded with sick children. The Germans threw sick children through the windows, aiming to hit the trucks parked near the hospital.

Krunkin B.E. talks about the atrocities of the fascists against children imprisoned in the ghetto: “... almost all Jewish children died in the ghetto during mass executions. But even before that, the executioners Cukurs and Dantzkop often came to the ghetto. Having caught the first child they came across, one of them threw the child into the air, and the other shot at him. In addition, Cukurs and Dantzkop grabbed the children by the legs, swung them and banged their heads against the wall. I saw it personally. There were many such cases. In addition, I remember this incident: the ghetto commandant Krause met a Jewish girl about 4 years old and affectionately asked her if she wanted some candy. When the child answered, not knowing what awaited him, Krause ordered her to open her mouth, when she did this, he pointed the gun and shot her in the mouth.”

Dr. Press told the commission: “At the gates of the ghetto, where the guards lived, the police threw a child into the air and, in the presence of the mother, amused themselves by picking up this child at bayonets.”

Witness Saliums K.K. testified to the commission: “Women with children were sent to be shot; there were a lot of children. Other mothers had two or three children. Many children walked in columns under heavy German police protection. Around the end of December 1941, in the morning at about 8 o'clock, the Germans drove three large groups of school-age children to extermination. Each party consisted of at least 200 people. The children cried terribly, screamed and called their mothers, screaming for help. All these children were exterminated in Rumbula. The children were not shot, but killed with blows from machine guns and pistol grips to the head and dumped directly into a pit. When they buried the grave, not everyone was dead yet and the earth was shaking from the bodies of the buried children.”

In the photo: Civilians shot by the Germans in Liepaja in December 1941.

Witness Ritov Ya.D. testified to the commission: “I first encountered murdered children on November 29, 1941 under the following circumstances: I was called to the “Jewish Committee” and instructed to organize the removal of corpses that were lying on Ludzas and Liksnas streets in the ghetto. These were the corpses of the inhabitants of the ghetto in Rumbula who were driven away on November 29th. I managed to get 20 sleds with transport workers and volunteers of about 100 people. On the morning of November 29, 1941, at about 8 o’clock, I went out to Ludzas Street with a group of transport workers. Columns of people being driven to be shot continued to move through the streets. Individual columns consisted of approximately 1,500 people. At the front of the column were two German police officers, and on the sides and behind the column were approximately 50 local armed police. Using specially adapted sticks, the police caught women with children and old people by the legs or necks from the columns. At the same time, women and children fell, they were immediately shot at point-blank range from rifles at the edge of the column, putting the muzzle close to the head. The victims' heads were smashed into pieces. In my presence, the columns moved along Ludzas Street for about two hours and during all this time, about 350-400 people were killed in the mentioned way, who remained lying on the pavement. Among these corpses, a third were children. When the next columns passed, we began to clean up the corpses remaining on the pavement after November 29 and 30, 1941. Our team removed at least 100 corpses, but in total there were at least 700-800 corpses on the streets. About a third of them were children. We transported the corpses to the Jewish cemetery, first we laid them out, then we began to dump them randomly. I observed the following scene there: at the gates of the cemetery stood a group of children, about 15 people, aged from 2 to 12 years. There were two old women with them. This batch of victims was pulled out of the column. There were police officers standing next to this group. Children and old women stood at attention - they were forbidden to move. When I was leaving the cemetery with the sled, I turned around and saw how the police were driving this group of children and both old women into the cemetery. Immediately, a second later, shots rang out - this group was shot. That day, November 30th, I worked only until lunch, because... My nerves couldn't stand it anymore. The two-story building of the ghetto children's hospital was overcrowded with sick children. The SS threw sick children out of the window, aiming to hit the trucks parked near the hospital. The children’s brains were scattered in all directions.”

Dreylini

Truck after truck goes into the Dreilini forest. According to eyewitness K.K. Liepins, who worked as a farm laborer at the Sheiman estate throughout the entire period of the German occupation, the Germans set up a death conveyor at the edge of the forest: “Hearing shots in the forest, I went to the place of execution to see what the Germans were doing with their victims. I managed to get to a distance of 100 meters, and then I saw the following picture: a car was approaching, a German military man climbed in, threw those sitting there to the ground, and another German immediately stunned the victim with a stick, apparently an iron one, to the head. The stunned man was dragged further, undressed, then dragged to a pile dead bodies, where he was shot in the back of the head. After this, the naked person was thrown onto a pile of dead bodies, which were then burned. A special conveyor belt of death was set up with German pedantry. The children were thrown to the ground, grabbed by the legs and arms, and immediately shot.”

Witness E.V. Denisevich says: “I know that during the period of the German occupation of Riga, they committed terrible crimes and shot innocent civilian Soviet citizens, including women and children. Personally, I was an eyewitness to the following Nazi atrocities: Around August or September 1944, I went to the Sheimansky forest to pick mushrooms. When I was walking through the forest, from behind the trees I saw several cars covered in black drive into the forest. These cars stopped on a mountain in the forest and armed German soldiers with dogs first got out of them, and then they began to unload women and children from the cars and immediately shoot them. Moreover, two cars were with women and children, and one car was with boys. Women and children, whom the Germans shot, screamed for salvation and cried. From these screams I realized that the women and children brought were Russian, since they screamed in Russian. I was very frightened by this picture and started running.”

Based on the testimony of eyewitnesses Liepins, Karklints, Silins, Unfericht, Walter, Denisevich and others, it was established that in August 1944, at least 2,000 children were brought to the Dreylinsky forest by the Germans in 67 cars and shot in the forest.

REFERENCE

On the extermination of children in the city of Riga and its surroundings

From the first days of the Nazi occupation of Riga, women along with their children were arrested here and placed in emergency and Riga central prisons. From where part of it was exterminated, and part was sent to the Riga Orphanage for Infants, the Major Orphanage, to the orphanages of Riga - on Kapselu St., Yumaras St., in Igata, Baldone of Riga County, Libava, etc.

These orphanages received children from the Gestapo and the Riga Prefecture, and later, in 42/43, from the Salaspils concentration camp.

It has been established that at least 2,000 children were constantly kept in the Riga Central Prison in 1941-43, some of whom were taken along with adults to be executed in Bikernieki. By 07/21/1943 alone, more than 2,000 children were shot from Riga prisons, including from the Riga urgent prison only at the beginning of 1942, 150 children were taken immediately to be shot.

Since the fall of 1942, masses of women, old people, and children from the occupied regions of the USSR: Leningrad, Kalinin, Vitebsk, and Latgale were forcibly brought to the Salaspils concentration camp. Children from infancy to 12 years old were forcibly taken away from their mothers and kept in 9 barracks, of which 3 were so-called hospital barracks, 2 for crippled children and 4 barracks for healthy children.

The permanent population of children in Salaspils was more than 1,000 people during 1943 and 1944. Their systematic extermination took place there by:

According to preliminary data, over 500 children were exterminated in the Salaspils concentration camp in 1942, and in 1943/44. more than 6,000 people.

During 1943/44 More than 3,000 people who survived and endured torture were taken from the concentration camp. For this purpose, a children's market was organized in Riga at 5 Gertrudes Street, where they were sold into slavery for 45 marks per summer period.

Some of the children were placed in children's camps organized for this purpose after May 1, 1943 - in Dubulti, Bulduri, Saulkrasti. After this, the German fascists continued to supply the kulaks of Latvia with slaves of Russian children from the above-mentioned camps and export them directly to the volosts of the Latvian counties, selling them for 45 Reichsmarks over the summer period.

Most of these children who were taken out and given away to be raised died because... were easily susceptible to all kinds of diseases after losing blood in the Salaspils camp.

On the eve of the expulsion of the German fascists from Riga, on October 4-6, they loaded infants and toddlers under the age of 4 from the Riga orphanage and the Major orphanage, where the children of executed parents, who came from the dungeons of the Gestapo, prefectures, and prisons, were loaded onto the ship "Menden" and partly from the Salaspils camp and exterminated 289 small children on that ship.

They were driven away by the Germans to Libau, an orphanage for infants located there. Children from Baldonsky and Grivsky orphanages; nothing is known about their fate yet.

Not stopping at these atrocities, the German fascists in 1944 sold low-quality products in Riga stores only using children's cards, in particular milk with some kind of powder. Why did small children die in droves? More than 400 children died in the Riga Children's Hospital alone in 9 months of 1944, including 71 children in September.

In these orphanages, the methods of raising and maintaining children were police and under the supervision of the commandant of the Salaspils concentration camp, Krause, and another German, Schaefer, who went to the children's camps and houses where the children were kept for “inspection.”

It was also established that in the Dubulti camp, children were put in a punishment cell. To do this, the former head of the Benoit camp resorted to the assistance of the German SS police.

Senior NKVD operative officer, security captain /Murman/

Children were brought from the eastern lands occupied by the Germans: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine. Children ended up in Latvia with their mothers, where they were then forcibly separated. Mothers were used as free labor. Older children were also used for various kinds of auxiliary work.

According to the People's Commissariat of Education of the LSSR, which investigated the facts of the abduction of civilians into German slavery, as of April 3, 1945, it is known that 2,802 children were distributed from the Salaspils concentration camp during the German occupation:

1) on kulak farms - 1,564 people.

2) to children's camps - 636 people.

3) taken into care by individual citizens - 602 people.

The list is compiled on the basis of data from the card index of the Social Department of Internal Affairs of the Latvian General Directorate “Ostland”. Based on the same file, it was revealed that children were forced to work from the age of five.

In the last days of their stay in Riga in October 1944, the Germans broke into orphanages, into the homes of infants, into apartments, grabbed children, drove them to the port of Riga, where they were loaded like cattle into the coal mines of steamships.

Valka County - 22

Cesis County - 32

Jekabpils County - 645

Total - 10,965 people.

In Riga, dead children were buried at the Pokrovskoye, Tornakalnskoye and Ivanovskoye cemeteries, as well as in the forest near the Salaspils camp.

Compiled by Vlad Bogov

It’s no secret that in the concentration camps it was much worse than in modern prisons. Of course, there are cruel guards even now. But here you will find information about the 7 most cruel guards of fascist concentration camps.

1. Irma Grese

Irma Grese - (October 7, 1923 - December 13, 1945) - warden of the Nazi death camps Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

Irma's nicknames included "Blonde Devil", "Angel of Death", and "Beautiful Monster". She used emotional and physical methods to torture prisoners, beat women to death, and enjoyed arbitrarily shooting prisoners. She starved her dogs so she could set them on victims, and personally selected hundreds of people to be sent to the gas chambers. Grese wore heavy boots and, in addition to a pistol, she always carried a wicker whip.

The Western post-war press constantly discussed the possible sexual deviations of Irma Grese, her numerous connections with the SS guards, with the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, Joseph Kramer (“The Beast of Belsen”).

On April 17, 1945, she was captured by the British. The Belsen trial, initiated by a British military tribunal, lasted from September 17 to November 17, 1945. Together with Irma Grese, the cases of other camp workers were considered at this trial - commandant Joseph Kramer, warden Juanna Bormann, and nurse Elisabeth Volkenrath. Irma Grese was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

On the last night before her execution, Grese laughed and sang songs with her colleague Elisabeth Volkenrath. Even when a noose was thrown around Irma Grese’s neck, her face remained calm. Her last word was “Faster,” addressed to the English executioner.

2. Ilse Koch

Ilse Koch - (September 22, 1906 - September 1, 1967) - German NSDAP activist, wife of Karl Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps. She is best known by her pseudonym as “Frau Lampshaded.” She received the nickname “The Witch of Buchenwald” for her brutal torture of camp prisoners. Koch was also accused of making souvenirs from human skin (however, no reliable evidence of this was presented at the post-war trial of Ilse Koch).

On June 30, 1945, Koch was arrested by American troops and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947. However, a few years later, American General Lucius Clay, the military commandant of the American occupation zone in Germany, released her, considering the charges of ordering executions and making souvenirs from human skin insufficiently proven.

This decision caused protest from the public, so in 1951 Ilse Koch was arrested in West Germany. A German court again sentenced her to life imprisonment.

On September 1, 1967, Koch committed suicide by hanging herself in her cell in the Bavarian prison of Eibach.

3. Louise Danz

Louise Danz - b. December 11, 1917 - matron of women's concentration camps. She was sentenced to life imprisonment but later released.

She began working in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, then was transferred to Majdanek. Danz later served in Auschwitz and Malchow.

Prisoners later said they were abused by Danz. She beat them and confiscated the clothes they had been given for the winter. In Malchow, where Danz had the position of senior warden, she starved the prisoners, not giving food for 3 days. On April 2, 1945, she killed a minor girl.

Danz was arrested on June 1, 1945 in Lützow. At the trial of the Supreme National Tribunal, which lasted from November 24, 1947 to December 22, 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1956 due to health reasons (!!!). In 1996, she was charged with the aforementioned murder of a child, but it was dropped after doctors said Dantz would be too hard to bear if she was imprisoned again. She lives in Germany. She is now 94 years old.

4. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann - (May 30, 1922 - July 4, 1946) Worked as a fashion model from 1940 to December 1943. In January 1944, she became a guard at the small Stutthof concentration camp, where she became famous for brutally beating female prisoners, some of them to death. She also participated in the selection of women and children for the gas chambers. She was so cruel but also very beautiful that the female prisoners nicknamed her “Beautiful Ghost.”

Jenny fled the camp in 1945 when Soviet troops began to approach the camp. But she was caught and arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave the station in Gdansk. She is said to have flirted with the police officers guarding her and was not particularly worried about her fate. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was found guilty, after which she was given the last word. She stated, "Life is indeed great pleasure, and pleasure is usually short-lived."

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was publicly hanged at Biskupka Gorka near Gdańsk on July 4, 1946. She was only 24 years old. Her body was burned and her ashes were publicly washed away in the latrine of the house where she was born.

5. Hertha Gertrude Bothe

Hertha Gertrude Bothe - (January 8, 1921 - March 16, 2000) - warden of women's concentration camps. She was arrested on charges of war crimes, but later released.

In 1942, she received an invitation to work as a guard at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After four weeks of preliminary training, Bothe was sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp located near the city of Gdansk. In it, Bothe received the nickname "Sadist of Stutthof" due to her cruel treatment of female prisoners.

In July 1944, she was sent by Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost concentration camp. From January 21, 1945, Bothe was a guard during the death march of prisoners from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The march ended on February 20-26, 1945. In Bergen-Belsen, Bothe led a detachment of 60 women engaged in wood production.

After the liberation of the camp she was arrested. At the Belsen court she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Released earlier than stated on December 22, 1951. She died on March 16, 2000 in Huntsville, USA.

6. Maria Mandel

Maria Mandel (1912-1948) - Nazi war criminal. Occupying the post of head of the women's camps of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the period 1942-1944, she was directly responsible for the death of about 500 thousand female prisoners.

Mandel was described by fellow employees as an "extremely intelligent and dedicated" person. Auschwitz prisoners called her a monster among themselves. Mandel personally selected the prisoners, and sent thousands of them to the gas chambers. There are known cases when Mandel personally took several prisoners under her protection for a while, and when she got bored with them, she put them on the list for destruction. Also, it was Mandel who came up with the idea and creation of a women’s camp orchestra, which greeted newly arrived prisoners at the gate with cheerful music. According to the recollections of survivors, Mandel was a music lover and treated the musicians from the orchestra well, personally coming to their barracks with a request to play something.

In 1944, Mandel was transferred to the post of warden of the Muhldorf concentration camp, one of the parts of the Dachau concentration camp, where she served until the end of the war with Germany. In May 1945, she fled to the mountains in her area hometown- Münzkirchen. On August 10, 1945, Mandel was arrested by American troops. In November 1946, she was handed over to the Polish authorities at their request as a war criminal. Mandel was one of the main defendants in the trial of Auschwitz workers, which took place in November-December 1947. The court sentenced her to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948 in a Krakow prison.

7. Hildegard Neumann

Hildegard Neumann (May 4, 1919, Czechoslovakia - ?) - senior warden at the Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt concentration camps, began her service at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in October 1944, immediately becoming chief warden. Due to her good work, she was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp as the head of all the camp guards. Beauty Hildegard, according to the prisoners, was cruel and merciless towards them.

She supervised between 10 and 30 female police officers and over 20,000 female Jewish prisoners. Neumann also facilitated the deportation of more than 40,000 women and children from Theresienstadt to the death camps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Bergen-Belsen, where most of them were killed. Researchers estimate that more than 100,000 Jews were deported from the Theresienstadt camp and were killed or died at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, with another 55,000 dying in Theresienstadt itself.

Neumann left the camp in May 1945 and faced no criminal liability for war crimes. The subsequent fate of Hildegard Neumann is unknown.

 

It might be useful to read:

• How to get on an excursion to Antarctica?;
• Czech Republic Troy Castle. Troja Castle in Prague. Ancient winery and museum;
• Böcklin and his “island of the dead” A cultural phenomenon of its time;
• Air tickets to Crimea Air tickets to Crimea will become cheaper;
• What you can and cannot take with you;
• Open left menu Heviz How to get from Budapest to Lake Heviz;
• Cable car in Nha Trang (Vinpearl) The longest cable car in the world Vietnam;
• Kamenets-Podolsk fortress - a historical monument of Ukraine Life outside the walls of the Kamenets-Podolsk fortress;