NKVD prisoner massacres
mass murders of political prisoners by Soviet secret police in June 1941 during World War II From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Before the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviets were holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in NKVD prisons across their occupied territories in Eastern Europe.[1] Right after the invasion began, the NKVD was ordered to kill or evacuate 140,000 prisoners from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland.[1]
Events
The order was carried out in chaos.[1] Two-thirds of the said prisoners were killed by the NKVD.[1] Among the prisoners killed by the NKVD, at least 9,800 were reportedly executed in prisons and 1,443 executed during evacuation.[1]
Geographically, 20,000–30,000 of them died in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, and 9,000 in the Ukrainian SSR,[1] which had just gone through the Holodomor and Great Purge-related massacres in the 1930s.[2][3] They were targeted for mass murder over their Polish or Ukrainian identity.[1][3] Many historians classify the NKVD prisoner massacres as crimes against humanity.[1][3]
Medical students who came across the victim bodies of one of such massacres in Lviv described the scene:[4]
From the courtyard, doors led to a large space, filled from top to bottom with corpses [...] Among them were many women. On the left wall, three men were crucified, barely covered by clothing from their shoulders, with severed male organs. Underneath them on the floor in half-sitting, leaning positions – two nuns with those organs in their mouths [...] most were stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. Some were naked or almost naked, others in decent street clothes. One man was in a tie, mostly likely just arrested.
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Academic views
Historian Yury Boshyk wrote:[2]
It was not only the numbers of the executed, but also the manner in which they died that shocked the populace. When the families of the arrested rushed to the prisons after the Soviet evacuation, they were aghast to find bodies so badly mutilated that many could not be identified. It was evident that many of the prisoners had also been tortured before death; others were killed en masse.
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Related pages
References
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