Of all the murders committed by the Germans, a veritable army of murderers, the murders of children are the most painful.
The Germans murdered children in all the zones and countries they occupied, France, Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, etc, we are going to relate what they did with the unfortunate children they caught at the limit of their advance in the USSR in the Caucasus.
In the resort town of Teberda in the KCR, in the 1940s, there was a sanatorium for children with bone tuberculosis. Patients of the Crimean sanatorium were also evacuated there. By this time, the peninsula was already occupied by the Germans.
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| Teberda |
The enemy was approaching the Caucasus. The medical staff of the sanatorium decided to evacuate children who could walk on crutches from the sanatorium to the Transcaucasus. A group of children, accompanied by adults, in December 1942, under the cold rain and snow, crossed the Klukhorsky pass and were rescued.
Meanwhile, Teberda was occupied by the Nazis. The bedridden children remained in the sanatorium. On December 22, 1942, a truck drove up to the building. The soldiers pushed 54 sick children into it. The youngest of them was three years old. Having closed the doors of the car, the Nazis turned on the gas. After that, the car drove out of the sanatorium. The bodies of the dead children were dumped in the Gunachgira gorge. Today, in Karachai, near Lysaya Gora, there is a monument to these innocent victims of the war.
The Nazis also cruelly dealt with the children of Kislovodsk. Not far from the resort town, near the Ring Mountain, a pit was discovered in which there were children's remains. Children between the ages of two and 12 were thrown there alive.
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| Kislovodsk |
In North Ossetia, the Nazis also committed atrocities against children. The Otaraev family lived in the village of Nizhnyaya Saniba. The grandmother and 11 children were hiding in the basement. The Nazis, having learned about this, threw hand grenades there. The Otaraevs had no chance to survive.
In the village of Ardonskaya, a Nazi pierced a baby with a bayonet only because he was crying loudly. A three-year-old boy was killed by the Nazis for humming a Soviet song. The mother rushed to protect the baby, they killed her too. There were a lot of such examples of the atrocities of the fascists in the Caucasus.
Orphanage by the sea
The resort town of Yeysk is located on the estuary of the Sea of Azov. Narrow streets, neat old houses with openwork facades, cobbled sidewalks - this is the city today and this is the way it was in the spring of 1942, when more than a hundred children from the orphanage were evacuated here from Simferopol. The boys were urgently taken to the Kuban, as the Nazis were trying to reach the Crimea via Perekop.
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| Yeysk |
"At first they wanted to send them to Goryachy Klyuch, but as the enemy kept attacking the Caucasus and the city would inevitably be on the way, they were taken to the small tourist town of Yeisk," says the deputy director of Yeisk. Museum of History and Local Customs. V.V. Samsonova Marina Sidorenko. - There were several reasons for this decision. Firstly, the children suffered from bone tuberculosis and could cure their health by the sea, and secondly, no one expected the Germans to get there.
The children were housed in an orphanage building on the outskirts, in the gardens. Children with mental retardation are raised in this institution: bedridden patients lived in two buildings and those able to work lived in the third. It was an ordinary life: every day the children went to classes in a new secondary school No. 1, located near Pushkin Street, performed in a musical ensemble, drew, played chess. And in August, enemy vehicles rumbled through the streets.
"On behalf of the victims"
The Yeisk Museum contains a manuscript of a documentary story written by Leonid Dvornikov, a former orphanage who miraculously escaped death in a gas chamber. Twelve notebooks are carefully stitched, the yellowed pages are covered with uniform calligraphy.
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| Yeysk Orphanage |
Leonid Vasilievich lost both legs as a child. After the death of his parents, he ended up in an orphanage in Crimea, which was evacuated to Yeisk. An accident, one might say, snatched him from the hands of death; During the raid, a German grabbed him and dragged him to the rear of the car, when the cry of a boy who was furiously resisting was heard from behind. The Gestapo man, believing that Lenya wouldn't run far with her prosthesis, dropped the sleeve of her sweater and rushed to help. Seizing the moment, he hid in a nearby courtyard.
"After the war, Leonid Dvornikov graduated from the Krasnodar Pedagogical Institute, became a philologist and subsequently compiled a file on the tragic events at the orphanage to testify in the trials against members of the SS Sonderkommando 10-a", explains Marina. Sidorenko. -In 1963 he sent his story to the Krasnodar Book Publishing House. They returned it with the words: "In principle, the manuscript is ready for publication, but why is it necessary?" The country was recovering from the devastation of war and few people wanted to remember the horrors of it. He then he donated the notebooks to the museum. I came across them by accident after his death in 2010. The work is written in plain language, but difficult to read. And the idea to reprint it came up. Then three years ago a book appeared.
Death machine
The chronicle of those days is reflected in the testimony (about 50 people survived) ... On October 9, 1942, a car with a padded iron body, without a single window, stopped on the porch. The orphans took to the streets without even suspecting that they were facing a real instrument of death. Less than five minutes later, the Nazis began dragging reluctant boys and girls into the open doors of the body, paying no attention to their physical ailments. The SS men answered questions from staff where they were going to take the children, through translators, with satisfied smiles: "for treatment in Krasnodar," "carry seeds," or "to the bathhouse."
In the museum room you can see the only surviving photograph of a student from the orphanage: Vasya Druzhinin. In the car itself, he managed to put on a pioneering tie - the Gestapo tried to rip him off, but failed. His arms are short. "We were born once, and once we will die!" he screamed at the hated face of the enemy. So he died with a pioneer tie around his neck ...
The car could not accommodate all the children, so the Germans returned for them in the morning of the next day, October 10.
14 children died, they were thrown into an anti-tank ditch a few kilometers from the city and covered with dirt. I suppose some were still showing signs of life, so they fell asleep. After all, when the Germans carried out the execution, they put people in front of the well, shot and left, the historian continues.
From the information disclosed, it is now known that the victims included children of different nationalities (from 4 to 17 years old): Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, Tatars, Czechs and even two Germans. But they all had a group of disabled people, and these people were mercilessly exterminated by the Nazis as part of their T-4 sterilization program.
The first exhumation of the bodies took place on April 15, 1943, but the military field doctors present were unable to determine the exact cause of death. "The death of the children was due to suffocation (strangulation)", as a close examination revealed no gunshot wounds or mutilations on the bodies. Some of the remains were later buried in the town square. The war continued and only 16 coffins were found, where 40 bodies were deposited. The correct conclusion was not made until August 1943. The FSB has just released this document. "The children died from carbon monoxide" and, according to eyewitness testimony, the massacre took place in 10 to 15 minutes while the car was in motion.
Epilog.
Russian investigators requested materials from Canada on Helmut Oberlander, 96, a possible participant in the massacre of 214 disabled children in the Kuban town of Yeisk in the fall of 1942.
Russian investigators requested materials from Canada on Helmut Oberlander, 96, a possible participant in the massacre of 214 disabled children in the Kuban town of Yeisk in the fall of 1942.
No statute of limitations
During the war years, he served in Sonderkommando 10-a, which participated in the destruction of civilians in the occupied territories, including the Krasnodar Territory, where gas chambers were used for the first time - mobile gas chambers.
The reason for the request was the documents of the FSB of Russia declassified last year on the execution of orphanages and the criminal case initiated after this under article 357 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation "genocide". Of course, Oberländer denies his involvement in the crimes of the Nazis, stating that his role was reduced only to "translating the language and cleaning the soldiers' boots", however, the Supreme Court of Canada found him guilty and deprived of his citizenship. And recently the process of deporting him began. ( 18 /3/2020)
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