“the Germans had set the goal to
destroy everyone”
Ozarichi in German-occupied Belarus
through the eyes of survivors
University of Amsterdam
Master thesis in History, German Studies
Anne-Lise Bobeldijk
a.c.bobeldijk@gmail.com
March 2016
Supervisor: dr. K.C. Berkhoff
Second reader: dr. M.J. Föllmer
Contents
Introduction 3
1. Towards an oral history of the Ozarichi camps 9
2. The round-ups 20
2.1 The cities of Bobruisk and Zhlobin 20
2.2 Villages and hamlets 24
3. Transport to the camps as virtual death marches 28
3.1 Deportation methods 28
3.2 Arbitrariness, torment and violence 33
4. The transit camps 39
4.1 The numerous transit camps 39
4.2 Treatment in the camps and social interaction 45
5. The Ozarichi camps 51
5.1 Ozarichi, Dert and Semonovich 51
5.2 Liberation and aftermath 53
Conclusion 56 Bibliography 61 Appendix I 64 Appendix II 65 Appendix III 73 Acknowledgements 74
Introduction
‘The regime in the camps – a regime of hunger, cold, illness and the immense insults of the Soviet people – gave me the firm belief that the Germans had set the goal to destroy
everyone; all children, elderly people, women, disabled people and inmates.’1 This quote from Vasilli Murashkin seems to refer to one of the well-known national socialist concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, Dachau or Majdanek. However, he refers to the Ozarichi camps in Belarus, near the villages Ozarichi, Dert and Semonovich. Murashkin was one of the
approximately 40,000 people who ended up in these camps because they were seen as “useless eaters”.2
After the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler ordered that nothing useful was to fall into the hands of the Soviets. This meant that villages were burned down, livestock was taken away and civilians were forcibly evacuated to the Reich, among other things, to serve as forced labourers. In early 1944, the groups of evacuees became too large to handle for the
Wehrmacht. On top of that, a typhus epidemic among the evacuees threatened to infect the troops of the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht’s solution for this problem was as follows. The people who were able to work would be, as planned, evacuated to the West, in particular to Germany, to work in the war industry as so-called Ostarbeiter. Another large group of refugees in the region was unable to work. Because the troops in the surroundings of Bobruisk, Zhlobin and Ozarichi wanted to withdraw without any being slowed down by weakened and ill civilians, the Wehrmacht needed to find a purpose and place for them. These evacuees were sent to the newly created Ozarichi camps.
From March 12, 1944 onwards, the people from the Bobruisk region were moved into the three camps near the village of Ozarichi without any form of shelter, heating, food and water, and without knowing whether they would survive the arbitrariness of the guards. Five days later, the Wehrmacht retreated and abandoned the prisoners. On March 19, 1944, the Red Army started liberating the camps. At that time approximately 8,000 to 9,000 people had
1 V.T. Murashkin, in: G.I. Barkun, ed., Zalozhniki vermakhta (Ozarichi-lager smerti): dokumenty i
materialy/Geiseln der Wehrmacht (Osaritschi-das Todeslager): Dokumente und Belege (Minsk,
1999), 74-75.
2 C. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland,
1941-1944 (Hamburg, 1999), 1099; N. Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet
civilian population, 1942-1944: Forced labor, hunger, and population displacement on the Eastern front’ (Ph.D. diss, London 2005), 250; C. Rass, ‘Ozarichi 1944: Entscheidung- und Handlungsebenen eines Kriegsverbrechens’, in: T.C. Richter, K.J. Arnold, Krieg und Verbrechen: Situation und
already died in the Ozarichi camps, as well as about another 800 people during their journey to the camps. As expressed in Murashkin’s quote, for the people in the camps it felt as if the sole goal of the Ozarichi camps was to destroy them.
The Ozarichi camps were quite distinct. They did not form part of the official camp structure, were built on an improvisatory base and the prisoners were “ordinary” Soviet civilians. Scholars have used the remaining documents of the Wehrmacht to research these camps and have focussed mainly on the military history. This thesis will focus on the
experience of the civilian deportees. What do the eyewitness accounts of the survivors of the Ozarichi camps contribute to the historiography of the camps?
Although in Belarus the Ozarichi camps are one of the most well known sites of Nazi crimes, they are relatively unknown in the West. This is mainly because Wehrmacht
divisions, and not the SS, were the main perpetrators of these crimes. The myth about the Wehrmacht not taking part in genocidal events during the war, which was carefully built after the end of the Second World War, dissipated only in the 1990s. Two photo exhibitions in Germany at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s dismissed the idea of the ‘saubere
Wehrmacht’, a clean and innocent Wehrmacht, and instigated new interest in research on the
Wehrmacht and the crimes that they committed in the east.
This development in discourse is also visible in the historiography of the Ozarichi camps. Before the 1990s, the Ozarichi camps were only highlighted in studies originating from the Warsaw Pact countries. Shortly after the liberation of the Ozarichi camps, there appeared a page-long article in the leading Soviet newspaper Pravda with the report of the examination of the camps by the Extraordinary State Commission (Chrezvychanaia
gosudarstvennaia komissiia)3. The article named, ‘The destruction of the Soviet people by the Nazis by infection with typhus’, described the entire duration of the camps, from March 9 until the liberation on March 19 based on the testimonies of survivors. The article was accompanied by two large photos of the corpses of elderly, women and children in the camps.4 In 1946, this same report was published in ‘Collected reports of the Extraordinary
3 The commission was officially called the ‘Extraordinary State Commission for ascertaining and investigating crimes perpetrated by the German-Fascist invaders and their accomplices, and the damage inflicted by them on citizens, collective farms, social organisations, State Enterprises and institutions of the U.S.S.R.’, and was established on November 2, 1942 by a degree of issued by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. (Soviet Government Statements on Nazi atrocities (London, 1946), 55.) 4 ‘Istreblenie gitlerovcami sovetskikh liudei putem zarazheniia sypnym tifom’, Pravda, April 30 1944, 2.; In the article there are two pictures that seem to be part of a set of photos taken by the
Extraordinary State Commission that researched the camps after the liberation. The photos also appear in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, photo 3 and photo 13.
State Commission on the atrocities of the German-fascist invaders’.5 In addition, in April
1944 a letter to ‘Father Stalin’ thanked Stalin and the Red Army for liberating the inmates from the ‘death camp Ozarichi’ and described the situation in the camps in great detail, almost exactly as the report of the Extraordinary State Commission.6 For example, it demonstrated that people were forced to hand over the last of their possessions such as money, rings and later even clothes and shoes.
In the commemoration and the historiography of the Second World War in Belarus, Ozarichi plays a large role as one of the three key events subjected to commemoration. According to Nicholas Terry, the Ozarichi camps are mentioned in almost every Soviet- and post-Soviet work on the war in Belarus.7 For example, in 1962, the Polish writer Kiryl
Sosnowski wrote about the Ozarichi camps in the context of the misery of children during the war in the book The tragedy of children under Nazi rule.8 He accused the Wehrmacht of involvement in genocidal crimes and also for shaping the myth of the ‘saubere Wehrmacht’. About a decade later, Norbert Müller in East Germany briefly mentioned the camps in his work on the Wehrmacht: Wehrmacht and Occupation 1941-1944. On the role of the
Wehrmacht and their management structures in the occupation regime of fascist German imperialism on Soviet territory.9
In the West, Christian Gerlach described the Ozarichi camps in his 1999 monograph on the Nazi policies of economics and destruction in Belarus. He used cases such as Ozarichi to show the destructive policies of the Nazis in Belarus.10 Yet, Gerlach was ambiguous about
the crimes. On the one hand, the Ozarichi camps were ‘scheinbar unerklärlichen
Verbrechen’, seemingly inexplicable crimes.11 On the other hand he described the crimes as
not unique at all but an extreme continuation of earlier forced evacuations and other ‘criminal
5 ‘Istreblenie gitlerovcami sovetskikh liudei putem zarazheniia sypnym tifom’, in: Sbornik soobscenii
Chrezvychainoi Gosudarstvennoi Komissii o Zlodeianiakh Nemetsko-Fashistskikh Zakhvatchikov,
(Moscow, 1946), 183-193. The report also appeared in English: ‘Report on the extermination of Soviet people by infecting them with disease’, Soviet government statements, 153-159.
6 ‘Iz pisma byvshikh uznikov Ozarichkikh lagerei I.V. Stalinu’, in: M.I. Bogdan and A.N. Ges, eds.,
Ozarichi – lager smerti. Dokumenty i materialy (Minsk, 1997), 48-50.
7 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 16f. 8 K. Sosnowski, The Tragedy of children under Nazi rule (Warsaw, 1962).
9 N. Müller, Wehrmacht und Okkupation 1941-1944. Zur Rolle der Wehrmacht und ihrer
Führungsorgane im Okkupationsregime des faschistischen deutschen Imperialismus aus sowjetischem Territorium (Berlin, 1971).
10 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1097-1099. 11 Ibidem, 1097.
measures’ against Belarusians who were unable to work.12 Christoph Rass also viewed the
Ozarichi camps as an extension of the evacuations. His primarily descriptive research focused on determining which people from what rank within the Wehrmacht were responsible for the various facets of the deportations of civilians. He also reconstructed the eight days that the Ozarichi camps existed from a military history perspective.13 Dieter Pohl has supported this perspective, but added that the Ozarichi camps seem to be a unique case, despite the fact that there were more cases in which people who were unable to work were interned in camps.14 He stated the following about the camps: ‘Indeed was this a blatantly individual criminal case, but after this there were again camps created for those unable to work.’15
The three above-mentioned scholars all view the Ozarichi camps as a fairly unique case of the Rückzugverbrechen, crimes of the Wehrmacht during its retreat from the Soviet Union. However, some aspects raise doubt about the concept. First, the term focuses on the military aspects of the crime and mainly reflects the perspective of the perpetrator. As a result, the perspective of the victim is easily overlooked. Second, the term Rückzugverbrechen emphasizes the idea that it happened at the end of the war – not earlier.
Other scholars have disputed that the Ozarichi camps were mostly unique in the context of the Second World War in Eastern Europe. Alexander Dalhouski views the camps mostly in the context of the recruitment of Ostarbeiter and other forced labourers.16 Nicholas Terry, who also argues that the Ozarichi camps resulted from the forced evacuations and of the economic policies concerning food supply17, also believes that the term
Rückzugverbrechen does not accurately describe the situation. The Ozarichi camps, he writes,
were created ‘during a prolonged phase of relatively successful defensive combat lasting nine months’.18 In addition, he underlines that the camps are very similar to other wartime events, such as aspects of the ‘Nazi “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”; selections; train
12 C. Gerlach, ‘Verbrechen deutscher Fronttruppen in Weißrußland 1941-1944’ in: K.H. Pohl, ed.,
Wehrmacht und Vernichtungspolitik: Militär im nationalsozialistischen System (Göttingen, 1999),
103; Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1099.
13 C. Rass, “Menschenmaterial”: Deutsche Soldaten an der Ostfront; Innenansichten einer
Infanteriedivision 1939-1945 (Paderborn, 2003), 386-402; Rass, ‘Ozarichi 1944’,197-206.
14 D. Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht; Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung
in der Sowjetunion 1941-1944 (Frankfurt am Main, 2011), 328-329.
15 Ibidem, 329.
16 A. Dalhouski, ‘Belarusian forced labourers’, in: A. von Plato and A. Leh, eds., Hitler’s slaves (New York, 2010), 218.
17 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 15-16.
18 N. Terry, ‘»Do not burden one’s own army and its hinterland with unneeded mouths!« The Fate of the Soviet Civilian Population Behind the »Panther Line« in Eastern Belorussia, October 1943-June 1944’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, bd. 30 (Göttingen, 2015), 186.
transports; death marches; the involvement of the SS; and barbed wire camps’.19
Hans-Heinrich Nolte argues that the Ozarichi camps matched the overall character of the war of Nazi-Germany in the Soviet Union; as this history shows similarities to the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), Jews and partisans.20
The similarity between all these studies is that the scholars base their research primarily on German military sources and offer most of all from the perspective of the German army. Thus, some details are overlooked as they simply cannot be found in these sources. Rass, Pohl and Gerlach did use some eyewitness accounts to show the intensity and cruelty of the operation, and concluded that the journey was a ‘Todesmarsch’ (death march) or an odyssey.21
In addition, even though the prisoners spent often more time in transit camps to the Ozarichi camps, than in the actual final Ozarichi camps, the former are not really elaborated upon in the literature. Therefore, it is important to analyse the Ozarichi camps as a process and not only as a specific location. Here, again, eyewitness accounts are crucial. They can provide a more in-depth insight into the entire process of the camps. As I will argue, they demonstrate the similarity with other events during the war; the camps were far from singular or atypical.
This thesis aims to shine a new light on the Ozarichi camps by using eyewitness accounts as more than merely illustrations. The aim is to complement the existing literature by analysing the testimonies of survivors and by describing the history of the Ozarichi camps from the perspective of the survivor.
A total of 108 eyewitness accounts were analysed. The accounts were recorded in various periods and can be divided into three groups. They also differ in size, in origin and in type of source (script, audio and video). The variety of testimonies stemming from different periods of time creates a favourable situation and provides for a more balanced image of what may have happened.
Chapter 1 describes the Second World War in Belarus and clarifies the context in which it was possible for the crimes of Ozarichi to take place. In addition, the Ozarichi camps will be briefly described, according to the existing literature. Furthermore, I will describe the type of eyewitness accounts that have been used in this study.
19 Ibidem, 187.
20 H. Nolte, ‘Ozariči 1944’, in: G.R. Überschär, ed., Orte des Grauens: Verbrechen im Zweiten
Weltkrieg (Darmstadt, 2003), 192.
21 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 399; Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1098; Pohl, Die Herrschaft der
Chapters 2 to 5 offer an analysis of the eyewitness accounts. Each chapter marks a different part of the entire process endured by the people who ultimately ended up in the Ozarichi camps. Chapter 2 contains a description of the start of the journey. This is the moment when people were rounded up from their villages and their journey to the camps began. Chapter 3 and 4 show various aspects of the journey to the Ozarichi camps and discuss the entire process of deportation to the Ozarichi camps not in chronological order, but
thematically. Chapter 3 comprises an analysis of the journey from the period after the rounding up to the moment of internment in the three Ozarichi camps, in literature known as
Endlager, ‘final camps’. This includes ways of transport and the treatment of the prisoners
during the marches. Chapter 4 deals with the ‘transit camps’, where people spent the night during the virtual death marches to the Ozarichi camps. Chapter 5 will focus on the three final camps that are regarded as the ‘Ozarichi camps’.
Chapter 1 – Towards an oral history of Ozarichi
In 1941 Belarus was invaded by Nazi Germany. The territory of the Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic, which also included the territory of former eastern Poland that was seized by the Red Army in 1939, was divided into three parts. The western part of Belarus was included into Reichskommissariat Ostland, in Generalkommissariat Weißruthenien, that was not an integral part of the Third Reich but lay outside it. It was under the control of the
Zivilverwaltung, a civil administration, which existed mostly of Germans.22 The south was included in Reichskommissariat Ostland and the eastern part of Belarus was under the control of the military administration and was part of rückwartiges Heeresgebiet Mitte, Army Group Rear Centre. Ozarichi lay within this area that was under control of the Wehrmacht. (Image 1)
The fact that the Ozarichi camps became this famous was not inevitable. There have been a lot of cases in which Belarusians, in particular Jews, fell victim to the crimes of the Nazis; between one and two million people were killed and around three million people became homeless.23 The reason for the high number of these crimes is that Belarus suffered from the combination of Nazi genocidal policies and economic exploitation.24 More than one subgroup in society fell victim to the maltreatment by the Nazis. Jews, Soviet POWS,
partisans and ordinary citizens were all targeted by the Nazis as a possible risk for the Nazi race, ideology and strategic expanding plans.
Before the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22 1941, a logistic plan was created to feed the Wehrmacht troops. During the last war on the territory of what was then still the Russian empire, one of the big problems was to supply the armed forces with food and gear. The solution to this problem was found in the so-called ‘Hunger plan’ or the ‘Backe-plan’, named after the State Secretary of Food and Agriculture Herbert Backe, who was responsible for this plan. The idea was that the Wehrmacht from the third year of the war would
completely “live off the land” of the Soviet Union. The consequence of the plan was that approximately three million Belarusian citizens would die of starvation because their food would be seized.25
The policies concerning food were part of this economic plan. The rationing of food from 1941 onwards caused that many civilians were short on food and were, in particular in the larger cities, starving. For example, in the city of Bobruisk, where some of the Ozarichi camp prisoners came from, people could only receive a maximum of 200 grams of bread a day during the winter of 1942.26 Later during the war, food rationings started to depend on the
fact whether one was able to work or not. People who were capable of working received more food with the exception of Jews, who received, regardless whether they worked or not, the same ration as children.27
Belarusians were not just affected by the shortage of food, but also by the anti-partisan warfare of the Nazis. Shortly after the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, there were not a lot of partisan groups in Belarus, mostly due to strict Soviet policies. In 1939, when the Soviets occupied the eastern part of Poland and incorporated it with the Belarusian Soviet
23 L. Rein, ‘Local collaboration in the execution of the “Final Solution” in Nazi-occupied Belorussia’,
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 20, no. 3 (2006), 382.
24 For example, W.W. Beorn, Marching into darkness (Cambridge, 2014), 50-51; Gerlach, Kalkulierte
Morde, 19.
25 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 46. 26 Ibidem, 302.
Socialist Republic (BSSR), the Belarussian state became even more multi-ethnic than it already was. In order to keep society together and not to allow partisan groups against the Soviet state to be organised, the state created strict rules for the ‘disciplining of society’28. Therefore, after the invasion by the Nazis there were almost no partisan groups to fight the new aggressor. It would take one or two years before strong partisan groups were created. However, from the beginning of the occupation the Nazis did not hesitate to counteract against the, at that point, almost non-existing enemy.
From early 1942 onwards the Nazis started their fight against the partisans. The measures taken against partisans were brutal, in particular because they often affected ordinary citizens. For example, partisans or people who seemed to be partisans could be shot or hanged on the spot. Furthermore, citizens were often deprived of their houses if there was some suspicion that there had lived a Red Army soldier, or the houses were burned down when it seemed that partisans were inside.29 In addition, as one of the harshest measures against partisans, many villages were completely burned down, sometimes including its entire population. In Belarus, the most infamous, and also most commemorated, case was the village of Khatyn that was completely burned down in March 1943 as reprisal for an attack by
partisans on a German convoy.30
Labour and the exploitation of the land were closely intertwined with each other. Both men and women were coerced to work for Nazi Germany. Some of them worked in Belarus where they, for example, dug anti-tank tranches or worked in the railroad industry. Others were brought to Germany to work there in the war industry, as so-called Ostarbeiter. From mid 1942 onwards the minimum age to perform forced labour was changed from fifteen to ten years old, in order to move entire families to the Reich. The age of the children often
determined if a family was to be deported for forced labour. Mothers with very young children were often regarded as unfit to work because their children were too young to bring to a kindergarten or to be brought to the Reich.31 While it was for the parents often vital how
old their children were, the fate of the children did not necessarily depend on their parents because also children without parents were to be deported.32 One of the consequences of
28 B. Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weißrußland,
1941-1944 (Düsseldorf, 1998), 44-45.
29 O. Bartov, The eastern front, 1941-1945, German troops and the barbarisation of warfare (New York, 2001), 120-123.
30 P.A. Rudling, ‘The Khatyn massacre in Belarus: A historical controversy revisited’, Holocaust and
genocide studies, 26, no. 1 (2012), 36.
31 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 247. 32 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 475.
using the working population for forced labour was a shortage of workers in the agricultural industry. This caused the already small amount of food for the people in Belarus unable to work, to shrink even more.33
In addition, the situation further worsened because of a growing number of people within Belarus. From quite early in the war civilians from the easternmost Soviet territories had been evacuated by the Nazis towards the West. At first during the spring and summer of 1942 people from areas further in the east were evacuated or had fled to Belarus. Later, from autumn 1943 onwards, Belarusians as well were evacuated to western parts of Belarus.34 This was done because of the ARLZ-measures (Auflockerung, Räumung, Lähmung, Zerstorung), or the tactics of the scorched earth. After the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler ordered that nothing of value could fall into the hands of the Red Army, which meant that the abandoned areas in the East had to be dismantled, evacuated, paralysed and destructed before the Nazi forces were allowed to withdraw.35
The civilians were therefore evacuated and forced to work. According to Sharshei Novikau, ‘one of the most important tasks of the Wehrmacht during their withdrawal from Belarus was to recruit the part of the population that was able to work’36 The consequence of this recruitment was that rückwartiges Heeresgebiet Mitte, as well as Weißruthenien, the part of Belarus that was governed by the Zivilverwaltung, was flooded with forced labourers and other refugees. In the case of Ozarichi, the 9th Army quickly wanted to withdraw from the area, which was positioned in a swamp-like area and therefore a difficult battlefield. To take every civilian with them, would have been disadvantageous and therefore decided Supreme Commander of the 9th Army, General Joseph Harpe to only evacuate the people able to work,
and place the civilians unable to work in the Ozarichi camps.
Ozarichi (Russian: Oзаричи) was, and is, a small village southeast of Minsk. During the war, Ozarichi was positioned on the territory of the Rückwartiges Heeresgebiet Mitte, the rear area of Army Group Centre. (Image 2) The Ozarichi camps were built, roughly three kilometres outside the village. Most scholars agree on the reason why there was a possibility to build the camps in the first place. The enormous refugee problem because of forced evacuations, along with a food shortage and the pressure of the approaching Red Army
33 Terry, ‘»Do not burden one’s own army and its hinterland with unneeded mouths!«’, 190-191. 34 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 500.
35 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 238-239.
36 S. Novikau, ‘Wirtschaftliche Ausbeutung und Zwangsarbeit in Weißrussland während der deutschen Besatzung von 1941-1944’, in: D. Pohl and T. Sebta, eds., Zwangsarbeit in Hitlers Europe, Besatzung,
resulted in that the 9th Army wanted to abandon that part of society that was not capable of
working. Or as Ben Shepherd puts it: ‘Mounting desperation lent German conduct a further ruthless edge’37. As a result of an order of mid February 1944, that gave permission to leave the not useful part of society behind, the decision was made to create the Ozarichi camps to ‘deport civilians unfit for work sick, cripples, elderly, mothers with more than two children under ten and other Arbeitsunfähige’ to the enemy’.38 The entire operation, the planning until the liberation of the camps, did not last longer than 12 days.
37 B. Shepherd, War in the wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Cambridge, 2004), 222.
On March 7, General Friedrich Hoßbach, commanding officer of the LVI Panzer Corps, General Josef Harpe, the commander of the 9th Army and General Lieutenant Hans
Krebs, chief of staff of the 9th Army, met to discuss the plan for the so-called unnütze Esser.39 Two days later, on March 9, they met with all corps and division officers to notify them of the plans to deport ‘around 20,000 civilians unfit for work’.40 Four Corpses (LV, XXXV,
XXXXI, LVI) were involved in the action, as well as twelve of their Panzer and Infantry Divisions. In addition, Sonderkommando 7a of the Einsatzgruppe B of the SS was active in the last part of the journey: the march from the last station to the three Ozarichi camps. The three so-called Endlager, final camps, were positioned on the terrain of the 35th Infantry Division of the LVI Panzer Corps, in a swamp like area in the middle of the woods. They were part of a small camp system, existing of Zwischenlager, intermediate or transit camps, and three final camps, all specially created for the operation, and identified in this thesis as the “Ozarichi camps”.
Image 3 shows a map of the camp system. Image 3 is part of a map of March 28, 1944 and shows the operations area of the four Corpses of the 9th Army.41 It displays the
Auffanglager, collecting camp, near the station of Rudobelka and four Zwischenlager,
intermediate camps or transit camps. The complete map (Appendix I), including various
Einladebahnhofen, loading train stations, shows as well the method of transport, the routes
that were used and the divisions responsible. Interestingly, while here the camps are clearly divided into different types, Hans-Heinrich Nolte speaks about seven Konzentrationslager, concentration camps.42 In this regard, he does not qualify the difference between the transit
camps and the Ozarichi camps in the Ozarichi area.
39 Rass, ‘Ozarichi 1944’, 197.
40 Terry, ‘»Do not burden one’s own army and its hinterland with unneeded mouths!«’, p. 201. 41 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 392-393.
On March 12, the operation started and people from the Bobruisk area, which was under the command of the four abovementioned Corpses, were rounded up in their villages. This was in most cases done in cooperation with the village heads, interpreters and field gendarmes. The population of the villages and cities was divided into two groups; people able and unable to work. The former were deported to the Reich or set to work for the Wehrmacht in the area. Those unable to work were deported by train, lorry, horse cart or on foot to intermediate camps, and then to the final camps. By March 16 around 40,000 people were brought to the camps, the double of the amount of people, which were initially planned to be deported. On March 17, all of the aforementioned troops withdrew from the camp, leaving the camp, and its inmates, surrounded by barbed wire in a heavily mined area. Two days later, the Red Army liberated the camps and it found 33,480 survivors as well as approximately 8,000 to 9,000 others who had been shot or had perished as a result of the cruel
circumstances.43 Among the inmates were many mothers with young children and even young
children on their own. According to the Red Army, they liberated 15,990 children.44
The conditions in the camps were dreadful. The camps consisted often only of barbed wire and watchtowers. There was no form of shelter and because the camps were positioned at the front line, it was forbidden to make fire, not to alarm the Red Army. People were forced to walk the last part of the journey to the final camps. Those people who were not able to keep up with the others were beaten or shot.45 Rass adds that the decision to infect more or less healthy people in the camps with typhus by placing ill people in the camps alongside them made the situation from extremely bad into terrible.46 During the course of the operation, approximately 7,000 people suffering from typhus were brought in from ‘typhus villages’ that were under quarantine.47 Not many people received any food, although officially the people in the camps were provided with food to keep up for three days.48 Gerlach even states that people not just died of the abovementioned causes but that ‘people were daily deported away to be shot’49.
Even though the accounts of the German military seem to give a complete view on what happened in the Ozarichi camps, they only show the side of the perpetrator. The eyewitness accounts of the survivors may show some other insights because many of the documents on the meetings regarding the planning and course of the operation were destroyed.
To use oral history as a historical source is still a topic of discussion among scholars. There are determined supporters of this type of source in particular when using it for the purpose of reconstructing or understanding genocidal aspects of the war. Omer Bartov pleads for the use of oral history because it can, according to him, not just factually correct official accounts; it also ‘provides the historian with a different vantage point, and thereby introduces a richer and more complex reconstruction of an event as a whole’.50
Karel Berkhoff underlines this as well and encourages the use of eyewitness accounts because ‘the historiography of genocide and mass murder can be greatly enriched by careful comparison of survivors’
43 Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 329.
44 ‘Spravka o kolichestve i dvizhenii naseleniia, osvobozhdennogo Krasnoi Armiei iz nemetskikh kontsentratsionnikh lagerei na territorii Domanovichkogo raiona’, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 40-41. 45 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 399.
46 Ibidem, 390-391. 47 Ibidem, 390.
48 Terry, ‘»Do not burden one’s own army and its hinterland with unneeded mouths!«’, 203. 49 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1098.
recollections.’51 Daniel Blatman even states that it would be impossible to understand or
reconstruct what happened during genocidal events during the war, such as the death marches, without using survivor testimonies.52
However, not all scholars agree on the use of eyewitness accounts. For example, Gerlach wrote his extensive work on Belarus by using as few testimonies as possible. He was very reluctant in using them because, according to him, the mind can play tricks on us; memories can blur with other events and information that was obtained later can confuse the information on what happened at the time of the event.53 Gerlach’s hesitation is legitimate because there is in fact a risk in using oral history. Both testimonies of events only hours ago or years before can be distorted by emotions, politics or time. The construction of a collective memory on events can also influence the testimonies and make them more coherent and aligned with one another. In addition, testimonies can possibly be remodelled by other sources, such as newspapers, radio or books.
In the case of Ozarichi this most likely happened as well. It is often underlined in the commemorations of the camps that the Nazis intented to destroy the Soviet people by placing relatively healthy people in the same camp as people suffering of typhus. This is also apparent in one of the books that was used for this thesis. The book Hostages of the Armed Forces
(death camp Ozarichi): documents and materials comprises fragments of interviews that were
conducted by the Red Army shortly after the liberation.54 The book is divided into different subjects of which the mistreatment of people suffering of typhus is the largest part. Yet, although the testimonies in the book are arranged in a particular order to demonstrate what the purpose of the camps might have been, this does not mean that the content of the different testimonies is not useful. By reviewing the eyewitness accounts and to look further than this narrative, the testimonies can offer new insights, also beyond the story of people suffering of typhus. Bartov has put this as follows: ‘[..] testimonies gain immensely from being focused on one locality, on a relatively limited span of time, and with a limited cast of characters. Within such a context, one can more easily crosscheck testimonies that recount the same event from
51 K.C. Berkhoff, ‘Dina Pronicheva’s story of surviving the Babi Yar massacre: German, Jewish, Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian records’, The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, (Bloomington, 2008), 294.
52 D. Blatman, The death marches; the final phase of Nazi genocide (Cambridge, 2011), 6. 53 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 30.
different perspectives, as well as integrate these perspectives into a historical re- construction that uses all other available kinds of documentation.’55
Although the testimonies of the Ozarichi survivors are quite likely somewhat distorted through time and politics, this does not mean that they are not as valuable as written sources. Donald A. Ritchie has underlined this as well; ‘Contradictory oral testimony has forced interviewers to re-examine the written sources and sometimes alert them to documents they might not have consulted, or that the archives might not have collected.’56 Alesandro Portelli has argued similarly that even though testimonies often say more about the meaning imposed on to an event than about the actual event, ‘this does not imply that oral history has no factual interest; interviews often reveal unknown events or unknown aspects of known events, and they always cast new light on unexplored sides of the daily life of the non- hegemonic classes.’57 It is for these reasons that the Ozarichi –testimonies can shine a new light on the camps, bearing in mind the risks of oral history.
To create an as balanced image as possible of what might have happened in the camps and during the marches to the camps, testimonies from three different periods of time were used: from the 1940s, the 1990s and the 2010s. For this thesis, in total 108 testimonies were used. The 97 eyewitness accounts are quite diverse. They were conducted at different moments, by various people and are collected in different forms. All available testimonies have been used if they met two requirements: if the name of the interviewee was available and the date that the interview took place was known. No further selecting took place. Within the published primary sources, there were 42 (short) testimonies that were not included because they did not have a date of recording. Newspaper items reporting on and showing abstracts of interviews with survivors have not been used as testimony. There might be a possibility that there are more testimonies to be found because there is a group of survivors of the Ozarichi camps that regularly gives interviews at universities and schools throughout Europe.58
55 Bartov, ‘Setting the record straight’, 26.
56 D.A. Ritchie, ‘Introduction: The Evolution of Oral History’, Oxford Handbooks Online, April 15 2015,
http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195339550.00 1.0001/oxfordhb-9780195339550-e-1.
57 A. Portelli, ‘The pecularities of oral history’, History Workshop, no. 12 (Oxford 1981), 99. 58 For example, on some of these survivors: ’60 let spustia, vstrecha s Germaniei’, in : A.P. Shkuran and M.E. Sinkevich, eds., Tragediia Polecia. Maloizvestnye stranitsy voiny, 1943-1944 gg.:
kontslager «Ozarichi» (Minsk 2005), 256-270.
The three groups of testimonies have different origins. The first group contain of testimonies from the 1940s. The eyewitness accounts are written abstracts of the
interrogations that were conducted by an extraordinary committee directly after the liberation of the camps.59 The earliest account is from March 25, 1944 and the latest of April 2, 1944. The testimonies are bundled in a German-Russian book on the Ozarichi camps. In some testimonies, the questionnaire is visible. The age of the interviewees is not in all
interrogations mentioned. However, it is quite likely that most of them were adults or young adults because they were able to speak in a quite well-balanced way about what happened to them, one week earlier.
The second group exists of written accounts of interviews conducted in the late 1990s for the 55th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.60 These accounts were conducted by different interviewers and are bundled in one book. In this case the information on the eyewitnesses is most complete. The age and place of residence of most of the interviewees is mentioned and in general the testimonies are accompanied by a picture of the survivor.
The last group of testimonies is the most varied. All interviews were conducted in the early 2010s and late 2000s. Six interviews were conducted for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. The accounts are written and were published in 2014.61 Five
interviews are part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Belarusian Witnesses Documentation Project. The interviews are video recorded.62 The last two interviews are audio recordings, conducted during an eyewitness conversation at the German-Russian Museum Berlin Karlshorst in March 2013.63
59 Barkun, Zalozhniki.
60 G.D. Knatko, Uzniki Ozarichskikh lagerei vspomnayut (Minsk 1999).
61 A.P. Shkuran, and F.A. Veras, ed., Kontsentratsionnii lager Ozarichi: zhivie svidetelstva Belarusi (Minsk, 2014).
62 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Belarusian Witnesses Documentation Project,
http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn50510, accessed June 2015.
63 See appendix II for a complete list of the used testimonies, including personal information on the eyewitnesses.
Chapter 2 – The round-ups
The first stage of the process of going to the Ozarichi camps were the round-ups of the people from the place where they lived. Although the civilians were still quite far removed from the end camps, the round up was an important part in the process. The first stage of Ozarichi was often actually not the first misery people went through during the war. Most of the people who ended up in Ozarichi had already experienced other type of crimes carried out by the Nazis. For example, some of them had family members had been forced to work at the front or in Germany.64 In addition, numerous people were forced to move because the Nazis burned down their houses.65 One eyewitness, Anna Akhremnik, fled with almost her entire family into the woods before German troops arrived in their village. The people who were still in the village, including her grandmother, were all herded into the school building and were burned alive.66 And not just prior experiences of the civilians made the journey to the Ozarichi camps a struggle; their physical condition was often poor, which indeed made them end up in
Ozarichi.
This chapter analyses the differences in structure of the raids, the treatment of the people and the involvement of local collaborators. The chapter is divided into two parts; the round-ups in cities and in villages.
2.1 The cities of Bobruisk and Zhlobin
Ozarichi was located in the Polessye oblast. The village was positioned in the area that was under the control of the 9th Army of Ruckwartiges Heeresgebiet Mitte. Within the area where the Wehrmacht divisions responsible for the Ozarichi camps were stationed, there were only two cities, Bobruisk and Zhlobin. None of the survivors offering the 108 testimonies had lived in Bobruisk before the start of the operation. However, there were people who were brought to Bobruisk after they were rounded up in their home villages. The city of Bobruisk is roughly eighty kilometres away from the village of Ozarichi. As noted in Chapter 1, the situation in Bobruisk during the war was fairly bad, in particular because of shortage of food for civilians. Because Bobruisk was positioned on the train route to the Ozarichi camps (image 2), some people were brought to the city, where they had to wait in the camp near the Bobruisk train
64 A.S. Lubov, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 8; M.A. Korol, in: ibidem, 75.
65 M.E. Molokovich, in: ibidem, 93; A.S. Lubov, in: ibidem, 7; N.G. Burbo, in: ibidem, 22; A.N. Konstantinovna, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 57.
station to be transported further away. (Chapter 4 will elaborate more on the Bobruisk camp because it is also regarded to be a transit camp.)
The city of Zhlobin is about eighty kilometres northeast of Ozarichi. In the testimonies, Zhlobin is better represented than Bobruisk. Twenty-four people came from Zhlobin and were from here brought to Ozarichi. Of these people, five started their journey in another settlement than Zhlobin but they were brought to the city prior to the start of the operation. These people came from Veliki Rogi, Chernia Virnia and the hamlet Zhlobin-Podolsk. The inhabitants from the villages in the area of Zhlobin were rounded up from late February 1944 and were brought to Zhlobin, presumably because of the planned evacuation of the area and because of the round-ups of forced labourers. The evacuees arriving in Zhlobin were placed in houses with other families. The consequence was that the city became overcrowded. There was not enough food and there were multiple outbreaks of typhus.67
The problems in Zhlobin increased not just because of the growing number of people, but also because these people were forced to live in a shrinking area of living space. This tactic was already been used by the Nazis in ghettos throughout the Europe, where Jews were forced to live in a shrinking living space, after which the ghettos regularly were liquidated. Here, from the beginning of March 1944, the Nazis started to move people about the city. There are records that people were moved five or six times to different houses in different parts of the city.68 The houses that were left behind were generally burned down or blown up. Varvara Savitskaia had been displaced three times since the autumn of 1943 and came in February 1944 to Zhlobin. She stated that there were rumours that people were burned or blown up in the houses as well.69 Strategic buildings and parts of the infrastructure were also
demolished, for example railroad depots and tank stations.70 The rumours about the burning houses and its inhabitants in Zhlobin fit very well into the stories about the countryside, where entire villages were burned down, including its inhabitants. Until now there are no stories about burned civilians of Zhlobin. However, the phenomenon of burning people in their houses is also noted by someone else. Vasili Khodorenko stated about the fact that people were chased out of their houses, that ‘a part of the people still stayed there and when the
67 G.S. Shikorov, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 138-139; N.G. Zhukov in: Knatko, Uzniki, 51-55; E.V. Pekurina in: ibidem, 103-108.
68 L.L. Bykovas, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 49. 69 V.Y. Savitskaia in: ibidem, 107.
70 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 85; M.D. Vlassova, in: ibidem, 89; G.S. Shikorov, in: ibidem, 139; L.L. Bykovas, in: ibidem, 49.
houses were put on fire, the people jumped out. Perhaps there were people burned. I did not see that people were specially burned’.71
Along with the deportation of inhabitants to other parts of the city, people were also rounded up for evacuation, from late February onwards. They were ordered to go to the
Kommandantur to get evacuated. Apparently, not many people responded to this order
because only a small amount of people was evacuated by trucks to the rear land.72 Yulia Barabanova, who lived in Zhlobin since September 1943, recalled that ‘almost no one went, except policemen (politsii).’73 During the round-ups for evacuation, an unknown part of the inhabitants of Zhlobin was forced to leave their houses already on March 1 and go to the
Kommandantur. Gendarmes came by the houses and ordered the people to get their
belongings and go to the Kommandantur, where they needed to wait to be evacuated.74 Other people said they were rounded up later in March. They said that gendarmes came by the houses at March 10 or 11 and said that people needed to get their belongings and go to the Kommandantur.75 It is quite likely there were multiple raids in Zhlobin, in particular because the Nazis cleared some parts of the city earlier than others.
In addition to the testimonies about the gendarmes who came by the houses, there are also other stories of how people got to know of the raids. The Nazis used the city radio to reach as many people at once. Ivan Romanenko said during his interrogation on April 2 1944 that a message was broadcast several times on the city radio about the upcoming evacuation. He recalls it as follows:
‘To save you from the bolshevist atrocities, we will evacuate you all to the rear land. Bring all belongings, horses, carts and cattle with you. Bring a bowl and a spoon with you because on the way you will be provided with hot food. Obey the German soldiers. Don’t hide and don’t run away. The entire city is surrounded by German soldiers. Everyone trying to hide or escape, will be shot. Go outside and go where to the German soldiers send you.’76
Romanenko’s testimony was used in the report of the Extraordinary State Committee.77 The radio message is described in this as well, but it is not mentioned that Romanenko recalled
71 V.V. Khodorenko, in: ibidem, 137.
72 G.S. Shikorov, in: ibidem, 139; Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 83. 73 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 83.
74 G.S. Shikorov, in: ibidem, 138-139; M.D. Vlassova, in: ibidem, 88-91.
75 M.P. Galkina, in: ibidem, 93; L.L. Bykovas, in: ibidem, 49; M.P. Sarubova, in: ibidem, 97; E.V. Pekurina, in: Knatko, Uzniki, 104.
76 I. O. Romanenko, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 131; Z.P. Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 121. 77 ‘Istreblenie gitlerovsami’, in: Sbornik soobshchenii, 189.
this. In addition, the story of gendarmes going through the city to get everyone from their houses is not mentioned as well in this report.78
During this raid, more people went outside and found their way to the Kommandantur. Many people describe the huge crowds of people being chased trough the streets of Zhlobin towards the Kommandantur.79 Barabanova said about this: ‘I saw that our street was
surrounded and secured by German soldiers. Through the street went a stream of residents: women, elderly people, spared youngsters went in the direction of the Kommandantur. Me and my family were in this crowd as well.’80 Some people were already in the building of the Kommandantur. They had spent a number of days there from the moment that the Nazis started to move city residents. After some days there, a gendarme came into the room where they stayed and ordered them to leave the building to join the other people outside.81
The Kommandantur was in a school at Pervomaiskaia Street, near the railroad and the station. Many testimonies described the Kommandantur and its surrounding area as a camp. Survivors speak of an area of about 700 to 800 metres surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, which was guarded by SS personnel and gendarmes.82 Some people call it a
lager83, a camp, and one survivor even states that there was an actual sign with the German words Russisch Lager84, Russian camp. Unfortunately, there no pictures of the
Kommandantur.
The process of sifting people into groups of people able to work and unable to work is less clearly described. It is known that there was a moment of sorting people into these groups; this is also described in the literature on Ozarichi.85 However, when this precisely
happened is not entirely clear from the testimonies. Barabanova stated that during the days prior to the rounding up young people were already removed from their houses in order to be brought to Germany.86 Others say that this happened a bit later, during the walk to the
Kommandantur or in the Zhlobin camp.
78 Ibidem, 185.
79 G.I. Kovalchuk, in: Shkuran, eds., Kontsentratsionnii lager Ozarichi, 163; L.L. Bykovas, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 49; M.P. Galkina, in: ibidem, 93; Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 83.
80 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 85. 81 M.D. Vlassova, in: ibidem, 91.
82 I.O. Romanenko, in: ibidem, 131; Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 85; M. P. Galkina, in: ibidem, 93; Z.P. Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 121.
83 M. P. Galkina, in: ibidem, 93; Z.P. Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 121; I.O. Romanenko, in: ibidem, 131. 84 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 85.
85 Terry, ‘The German Army Group Center and the Soviet civilian population’, 255. 86 Y.P. Barabanova, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 85.
According to three eyewitnesses the crowd of people was not divided into two groups but into three. The third group existed of people who were involved with the Nazis. Grigori Shikorov saw on his way to the Kommandantur the mayor of Zhlobin, accompanied by a group of policemen (politseiski), in front of the building. According to Shikorov:
While the gendarmes chased us past him, the mayor chose the families of policemen, people who were working for the German army and families of whom close relatives were working in Germany, and they were brought inside the yard of the Kommandantur. The other group was sent to the field surrounded by barbed wire next to the Kommandantur.87
Other eyewitnesses told similar stories. However, they say that this process happened inside camp Zhlobin and do not mention the mayor. They added to Shikorov’s story that in the camp the people with relatives collaborating with the Germans needed to stand at one side of the camp, after being called from a list. Through the radio it was explained that these people would get evacuated as well but separately from the others and that they would have better life conditions.88
The remaining inhabitants of Zhlobin, who were not involved with the Nazis, were separated into those capable of working and those unfit to work. The process of separating the nonworking population from the people who were able to work produced dreadful scenes of families being separated, husbands being taken away and fourteen year old children left behind to do forced labour without their family.89 Zinaida Gavrilchik, a woman who lived in Zhlobin and was brought to Ozarichi, described the following: ‘I saw that gendarmes took babies away from their mothers. The babies were thrown into the mud and the mothers were taken away to do forced labour.’90 The group unable to work was soon brought to the railway station of Zhlobin and was put into trains that very same day, March 12. People speak of various trains, with about 50 wagons each, in which there were about 50 people. After the wagons were filled, the doors were closed and secured with barbed wire.
2.2 Villages and hamlets
The round up in villages and hamlets are more difficult to describe individually because there exist testimonies such forty-one different villages. The consequence is that in some cases it harder to generalise how the raids proceeded. However, it is clear that there were major differences between the raids in villages and those in Zhlobin.
87 G.S. Shikorov, in: ibidem, 141.
88 Z.P. Gavrilchik, in: ibidem, 121; I.O. Romanenko, in: ibidem, 131. 89 M.D. Vlassova, in: ibidem, 89.
The biggest difference between the city of Zhlobin and the villages is that the round up in Zhlobin was well organised. There were preparations before the operation had started and the entire round up took place over a number of days. Even though the process might have been quite well organised, eyewitnesses described it as disruptive, upsetting and chaotic for the people who underwent this. People spoke about drunken German soldiers who went by the houses, soldiers beating at windows in the middle of the night and of course the entire uncertainty and arbitrariness of the process.91 However, in the 23 testimonies on Zhlobin there is virtual no comment on direct physical violence against the civilians in this initial part of the journey to Ozarichi. Only during the last part of the rounding up, during the sorting of people, there was some violence involved.
The overall image of the rounding up in the villages after analysing the testimonies is that although it might have been a well-structured process, that the inhabitants perceived it as chaotic and very violent. Numerous testimonies mention people being chased onto the street from their houses by German soldiers with sticks, whereby there who did not want to leave or were not quick enough were beaten. Astafeva Lubov lived in the town of Ukli. She described the rounding up: ‘Early in the morning Germans arrived in the village with large amount of cars, armed with dogs and chased the people out of their houses and huts (khaty). They did not let the people dress themselves if they were indoors and the people who were late were beaten with whips.’92 This typifies also what happened in villages such as, Zabolot,
Knishevich, Gorduny, Ala, Kovchits and Novaia Dubrova.
The inhabitants of the villages were often badly prepared for the journey. Some people were not allowed to bring anything because they were expected to leave the moment the German soldiers started the raid.93 Others managed to bring some things with them, but these belongings were often taken away from them later. In some villages, the German soldiers or the village elders told the people that they would move away to a neighbouring village where there was more food and better life conditions.94 Unfortunately, these villages were a farce and represented the Ozarichi camps they actually were sent to.
The shifting of people in the villages does seem to have been more chaotic than in Zhlobin and Bobruisk. Not in all villages was the population immediately separated into different groups. In some cases, the entire population was first sent to another village, where they were sorted together with the inhabitants of the other villages. Most people understood
91 Y.P. Barabanova, in: ibidem, 85; L.L. Bukova, in: ibidem, 49. 92 A.S. Lubov, in: Knatko, Uzniki Ozarichkikh lagerei, 8. 93 N.A. Konstantinovna, in: Barkun, Zalozhniki, 57.
that some people would have to work in Germany. Therefore, there were people who tried to prevent that they would be sent elsewhere without their family. Maria Kazeko came from the village of Ala. She and her cousin Vera hid in the haystack at the house of her uncle at the moment everyone was rounded up. They stayed there a little while but feared that the
Germans would set the entire village on fire. Therefore they came out and caught up with the others in the neighbouring village of Vizhari where many people from the entire region were brought. They were not sent to Germany but ended up in the Ozarichi camps.95
Others did not go as far as Kazeko and her cousin but also managed to evade deportation to Germany. Liudviga Dubasova was rounded up together with her mother and her four siblings. She noticed that people of a certain age were all rounded up to work elsewhere. She managed to stay with her family because she was carrying the baby of the neighbours.96 However, carrying a child did not necessarily mean that one would be relieved of labour duty. Nina Burbo came from the village of Stalka. When the village was rounded up she was placed in the row of people that had to go work in Germany, even though she had a four-year-old daughter. She stated later about the whole episode:
‘The fascists took my daughter away and threw her on the ground because they did not believe that she was my daughter. (I was back then 22 years old and my daughter was four) But my mother and daughter saved me. My mother explained to my daughter: “They say uncle will arrest mama and mama cannot stay with you then. If we start shouting and running she will stay with us.” Then my daughter started to run, cry and shout, and I ran towards them. At that moment a woman said that she was really my daughter. Others acknowledged that as well.’97
The foregoing examples show that some people resisted the round-ups. Most people, however, were not in a physical state to resist this. People suffering from typhus or other diseases, were more than occasionally rounded up at another moment during the raids. They were left in the villages to be deported later on or they were brought to villages where only still ill people lived. This was not just the case for the villages, but this happened as well in Zhlobin where the people suffering from typhus were all brought to houses at the border of the city.98
It seems that there was more involvement of ‘locals’ or ‘volunteers’ in the villages. As is also known from the literature on Ozarichi that village elders, as well as interpreters, were
95 M.I. Kazeko, in: Knatko, Uzniki Ozarichkikh lagerei, 60. 96 L.V. Dubasova, in: ibidem, 49.
97 N.G. Burbo, in: ibidem, 23.
often involved in the round-ups. 99 However, their involvement in the raids was not always
seen as complicity. Some testimonies underline the effort of village elders to save the inhabitants of the village is underlined. Anna Gertsova was eleven when she and her family were rounded up in the village of Knishevich. The village elder spoke German because he had been in German captivity and had prevented twice that Anna’s father would be rounded up and would get shot. However, this did not prevent them from being rounded up at all in the end.100
The testimonies underline that the round-ups for Ozarichi were an integral part of the
‘recruitment’ of forced labourers. According to Alexander Dalhouski, ‘during this operation, thousands of civilians were selected for forced labour for or in the Wehrmacht.’101 The various examples from the testimonies show that this recruitment took place in the cities, as well as in smaller hamlets. However, the practical execution of the round-ups varied
depending on the location. The use of violence, both nature and scale of it, differed between the settlements. This seem to relate to the German control there was over the round-ups. In Zhlobin, the round-ups were carried out in a very structured way, making sure that really all people were deported. In the villages this was often more chaotic. This was a result of the significant difference in scale of the operation in cities and in small hamlets, which caused that the civilians were treated differently as well. Further research is needed into the reason for this difference, which might be caused by the presence or absence of higher military personnel, or some external factors.
In the next chapter the transport from the starting villages to the Ozarichi camps is described. It will become clear that the initial differences in conditions diminished during the journey itself: everyone ended up in the same type of transport, with the same harsh
conditions.
99 Rass, “Menschenmaterial”, 395.
100 A.P. Gertsova, in: Knatko, Uzniki Ozarichkikh lagerei, 31. 101 A. Dalhouski, ‘Belarusian forced labourers’, 218.
Chapter 3 - Transport to the camps as virtual death marches
The round-ups which took place prior to imprisonment in the camps demonstrate that the Ozarichi camps are better described as a process (rather than camps alone). The round-ups and the subsequent journey resulted in that the prisoners were severely weakened at the time they arrived in the Ozarichi camps. In particular, the journey to the camps took a heavy toll on people. People had to walk for days without knowing where they were heading and they did not receive sufficient food or water. They were not allowed to bring along any of their possessions. If they were allowed to do so, their possessions would be taken away from them halfway during the journey. Good shoes were seized and the former owners had to continue barefoot. People who were too ill to continue, would walk too slow or tried to escape were beaten or shot by the guarding Wehrmacht soldiers and SS personnel. The characteristics of the journey to the Ozarichi camps as set out above show great similarity to the death marches, which took place at the end of the Second World War.
The death marches are often viewed in relation to the evacuation of concentration camps; they are described as the chaotic unforeseen process of evacuating prisoners of the larger concentration camps in order to keep them out of the hands and sight of the
approaching Allied forces. However, some scholars argue that the death marches already took place earlier in the war. For example, Daniel Goldhagen regards the death marches as an integral part of the Holocaust and states that in particular Jewish prisoners were targeted in these marches.102 Other scholars broadened the concept of death marches by also applying it
to the mistreatment of Soviet POWs in 1941 and 1942.103 After the start of Operation Barbarossa, many Soviet POWS were captured and interned into the concentration camp system. These POWS were harshly mistreated and were often transported to the Reich in order to work or transported elsewhere. Approximately two to three million Soviet POWs died as a result of maltreatment by the Wehrmacht and the SS.104 Even though these types of marches took place at different moments throughout the war, they show remarkably similar features: in both cases the victims were guarded by the Wehrmacht and by Einsatzgruppen. Soviet POWs and concentration camp prisoners had to march for hundreds of kilometres
102 D.J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s willing executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996), 327.
103 K.C. Berkhoff, ‘The "Russian" Prisoners of War in Nazi-Ruled Ukraine as Victims of Genocidal Massacre’, Holocaust and Genocide studies, 15, no. 1 (2001), 6.
104 C. Streit, Keine Kameraden, Die Wehmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945 (Bonn, 1991), 25.
