We all know the word "Katyn". But how many of us know about the Strzałków concentration camp? But many more Soviet citizens were killed there than Poles were shot in Katyn. Russia has recognized the destruction of the Polish military as a crime. But has anyone heard words of repentance from the Poles for the death of our great-grandfathers?Strzałkow was not the only concentration camp where the killing of Soviet soldiers was carried out en masse - there were at least four more camps in Dombier, Pikulice, Wadowice and Tuchola.
The Young Guard of United Russia came to the Polish Embassy demanding access to Polish archives for Russian historians. We have no right to allow Poland to speculate on history. Access to archives is critical so that not only Russian society, but also the Poles themselves know what country they live in. What happened to their homeland less than 100 years ago. What crimes did the Polish state commit at that time?
First of all, of course, an impartial assessment must be given to the atrocities of the Polish regime, which mercilessly destroyed Soviet prisoners of war. According to various estimates, during the Soviet-Polish clashes in 1919-1921, from 140 to 200 thousand Soviet soldiers were captured. About 80 thousand of them died in Poland from hunger, disease, torture, execution and abuse. The Poles put the figure at 85 thousand prisoners and 20 thousand dead, but it does not stand up to criticism, since in the Battle of Warsaw alone the number of Red Army soldiers captured was about 60 thousand people. This crime has no statute of limitations. And Poland has not yet made any apology for a historical atrocity, the scale of which corresponds to the massacres in Buchenwald and Auschwitz.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski claims that the soldiers died of typhus. I just want to look him in the eyes and ask: did all 80 thousand die of typhus? We know from the testimonies of those who were in Polish captivity that our soldiers were starved, kept in barracks in terrible cramped conditions, and were not given medical care. In addition to their use in hard work, torture and executions, all of the above together, of course, could not but lead to the fact that the prisoners died. In fact, the concentration camps where they were kept turned into huge necropolises.
The truth about the atrocities of the Polish authorities, which led to the death of our ancestors, is in the archives of Poland. Obviously, it will become available to researchers sooner or later. And much here will depend on the Polish leadership - either it will provide access to the archives and bring repentance for the actions of its predecessors in the 20s - 30s, or it will fall in line with the chauvinistic Polish regime, which ended its existence in 1939 together with Poland.
By the way, one of the arguments of the defenders of Poland and the Polish version of history, concerning the fact that the Poles destroyed Soviet prisoners of war who invaded Poland, and therefore had the “right,” should be rejected outright. Not only because of inhumanity, but also because of obvious anti-historicism.
Back in March 1917, immediately after the overthrow of Nicholas II, Russia recognized the right of the Polish state to sovereign existence. It was confirmed in 1918 by the Bolsheviks, on the eve of the end of the First World War. But it was the new Polish leadership, led by Józef Pilsudski, guided by the concept of “Intermarium” (restoration of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with the territory before the partitions) that began a war of conquest along the borders of the former Russian Empire, Germany and Austria-Hungary. The details of the atrocities of the Polish military, especially Haller’s army, as well as Stanislav Balachovich’s gang, controlled by Warsaw, are widely known.
During this war, which even unscrupulous historians would not call aggressive on the part of the USSR, the Poles captured from 140 to 200 thousand Soviet soldiers. Only 65 thousand people returned from captivity after the conclusion of the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921. The truth about tens of thousands of victims must be established. Just as the exact number of Red Army soldiers killed in Poland must be established.
The question of Poland’s destruction of the Belarusian education system also awaits its researchers. It is known that from 1920 to 1939 the number of schools where teaching was conducted in the Belarusian language was reduced from 400 to... 0 (in words - to zero). Also, Poland’s practice of carrying out punitive expeditions against Ukrainians, called “pacification,” should also await its researcher. The actions of the Poles against the Ukrainians were so flagrant that in 1932 the League of Nations even adopted a special resolution stating that Poland was oppressing the Ukrainian nation. In turn, in 1934, Warsaw notified the League of Nations of the unilateral termination of the treaty for the protection of national minorities.
The existence in Poland of concentration camps for opponents of the Polish chauvinistic state with its one-party system, uncontrolled punitive bodies, authoritarian central government and Nazi policies towards the non-Polish population should not go unnoticed. Yes Yes. Poland in the 30s was just such an undemocratic state! Yes Yes. Poland in the 30s built concentration camps for dissidents! The most famous is Bereza-Kartuzskaya: five protective rows of barbed wire, a ditch with water, several more rows of energized barbs, watchtowers with machine gunners and guards with German shepherds. The Nazis in Germany had someone to learn from!
Even the most fully outlined issue of Polish anti-Semitism is still waiting for its meticulous researcher. The archives will add much to how the oppression of Jews was carried out at the state level. The shameful "Jewish" benches in universities are only the most obvious signs of Poland's anti-Semitic policy. Much more important is the ban on Jews (as well as Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians) from holding public office. Jews had difficulty accessing credit and were prevented from engaging in commerce. Jews were almost completely excluded from education - for example, in the whole of Poland there were only 11 Jewish professors working at universities. “Days without Jews” were organized for students, when Jews were expelled from universities. Since access to the civil service was closed to Jews, Jews who received a legal education often went to the bar. The Poles solved this problem simply by denying Jews access to the bar in 1937.
At the end of the 1930s, anti-Semitism reached a new level of almost official segregation. In Kalisz, in 1937, the market square was divided into non-Jewish and Jewish parts. In some cities there was a growing social movement for the expulsion of Jews and even for the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, following the example of Germany. The most authoritative researcher on the problem of anti-Semitism in Poland, Doctor of Science at Columbia University Celia Stopnicka-Heller, sadly stated about this: “The Germans have only just finished, and then with the help of the Poles themselves, the work begun by Polish anti-Semites.” It must be said that the researcher knew what she was saying, since she herself was born in Poland in 1927.
Poland's foreign policy cannot be ignored. Who, if not Warsaw, concluded a non-aggression pact with Germany on January 26, 1934? Russian intelligence has every reason to believe that this agreement was also accompanied by the signing of secret protocols or secret agreements directed against the USSR. And, although the Poles deny this in every possible way, it is clear that evidence confirming or refuting the fact of concluding a secret protocol is in the archives of Poland. They are also waiting for their discoverer.
Poland's participation in the partition of Czechoslovakia is a historical fact. Like a jackal that eats scraps, Warsaw licked up the handouts that France, Germany and Britain threw at it as a result of the Munich Agreement of 1938. The only country that was ready to send troops to help Czechoslovakia was the USSR. But Soviet troops were not allowed through their territory...Poland.
The secret activities of the Polish leadership directed against the USSR are also known. Operation Prometheus, which included subversive actions against the Soviet Union, organizing ethnic unrest, sabotage and espionage, is described by Polish intelligence officers themselves, who refer to documents. These documents are again kept in Polish archives, as well as many other evidence of the tragic events of that time.
It is clear why Poland does not give historians access to its archives. Another thing is not clear - why, with such skeletons in your own closet, try to look for a speck in someone else's eye?
Auschwitz is a city that has become a symbol of the mercilessness of the fascist regime; the city where one of the most senseless dramas in human history unfolded; a city where hundreds of thousands of people were brutally murdered. In the concentration camps located here, the Nazis built the most terrible conveyor belts of death, exterminating up to 20 thousand people every day... Today I begin to talk about one of the most terrible places on earth - the concentration camps at Auschwitz. I warn you, the photographs and descriptions left below may leave a heavy mark on the soul. Although I personally believe that every person should touch and let through these terrible pages of our history...
There will be very few of my comments on the photographs in this post - this is too sensitive a topic, on which, it seems to me, I do not have the moral right to express my point of view. I honestly admit that visiting the museum left a heavy scar on my heart that still refuses to heal...
Most of the comments on the photos are based on the guidebook (
The Auschwitz concentration camp was Hitler's largest concentration camp for Poles and prisoners of other nationalities, whom Hitler's fascism doomed to isolation and gradual destruction by hunger, hard work, experimentation, and immediate death through mass and individual executions. Since 1942, the camp has become the largest center for the extermination of European Jews. Most of the Jews deported to Auschwitz died in gas chambers immediately after arrival, without registration or identification with camp numbers. That is why it is very difficult to establish the exact number of those killed - historians agree on a figure of about one and a half million people.
But let's return to the history of the camp. In 1939, Auschwitz and its surroundings became part of the Third Reich. The city was renamed Auschwitz. In the same year, the fascist command came up with the idea of creating a concentration camp. The deserted pre-war barracks near Auschwitz were chosen as the site for the creation of the first camp. The concentration camp is named Auschwitz I.
The education order dates back to April 1940. Rudolf Hoess is appointed camp commandant. On June 14, 1940, the Gestapo sent the first prisoners to Auschwitz I - 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnow.
The gate leading to the camp is with the cynical inscription: “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes you free), through which the prisoners went to work every day and returned ten hours later. In a small square next to the kitchen, the camp orchestra played marches that were supposed to speed up the movement of prisoners and make it easier for the Nazis to count them.
At the time of its founding, the camp consisted of 20 buildings: 14 one-story and 6 two-story. In 1941-1942, with the help of prisoners, one floor was added to all one-story buildings and eight more buildings were built. The total number of multi-story buildings in the camp was 28 (except for the kitchen and utility buildings). The average number of prisoners fluctuated between 13-16 thousand prisoners, and in 1942 reached over 20 thousand. Prisoners were placed in blocks, also using attics and basements for this purpose.
Along with the increase in the number of prisoners, the territorial volume of the camp increased, which gradually turned into a huge plant for exterminating people. Auschwitz I became the base for a whole network of new camps.
In October 1941, after there was no longer enough space for the newly arrived prisoners at Auschwitz I, work began on the construction of another concentration camp, called Auschwitz II (also known as Bireknau and Brzezinka). This camp was destined to become the largest in the system of Nazi death camps. I .
In 1943, in Monowice near Auschwitz, another camp was built on the territory of the IG Ferbenindustrie plant - Auschwitz III. In addition, in 1942-1944, about 40 branches of the Auschwitz camp were built, which were subordinate to Auschwitz III and were located mainly near metallurgical plants, mines and factories that used prisoners as cheap labor.
Arriving prisoners were taken away from their clothes and all personal items, they were cut, disinfected and washed, and then they were given numbers and registered. Initially, each of the prisoners was photographed in three positions. Since 1943, prisoners began to be tattooed - Auschwitz became the only Nazi camp in which prisoners received tattoos with their number.
Depending on the reasons for their arrest, prisoners received triangles of different colors, which, along with their numbers, were sewn onto their camp clothes. Political prisoners were given a red triangle; Jews wore a six-pointed star consisting of a yellow triangle and a triangle of the color that corresponded to the reason for their arrest. Black triangles were given to gypsies and those prisoners whom the Nazis considered antisocial elements. Jehovah's Witnesses received purple triangles, homosexuals received pink triangles, and criminals received green triangles.
The scanty striped camp clothing did not protect the prisoners from the cold. Linen was changed at intervals of several weeks, and sometimes even at monthly intervals, and the prisoners did not have the opportunity to wash it, which led to epidemics of various diseases, especially typhus and typhoid fever, as well as scabies.
The hands of the camp clock mercilessly and monotonously measured the life of the prisoner. From the morning to the evening gong, from one bowl of soup to the next, from the first count until the moment when the prisoner's corpse was counted for the last time.
One of the disasters of camp life was the inspections at which the number of prisoners was checked. They lasted for several, and sometimes over ten hours. Camp authorities very often announced penalty checks, during which prisoners had to squat or kneel. There were also cases when they were ordered to hold their hands up for several hours.
Along with executions and gas chambers, grueling labor was an effective means of exterminating prisoners. Prisoners were employed in various sectors of the economy. At first they worked during the construction of the camp: they built new buildings and barracks, roads and drainage ditches. A little later, the industrial enterprises of the Third Reich began to increasingly use the cheap labor of prisoners. The prisoner was ordered to do the work at a run, without a second of rest. The pace of work, the meager portions of food, as well as constant beatings and abuse increased the mortality rate. During the return of prisoners to the camp, the dead or wounded were dragged or carried on wheelbarrows or carts.
The prisoner's daily caloric intake was 1300-1700 calories. For breakfast, the prisoner received about a liter of “coffee” or a decoction of herbs, for lunch - about 1 liter of lean soup, often made from rotten vegetables. Dinner consisted of 300-350 grams of black clay bread and a small amount of other additives (for example, 30 g of sausage or 30 g of margarine or cheese) and a herbal drink or “coffee.”
At Auschwitz I, most prisoners lived in two-story brick buildings. Living conditions throughout the camp's existence were catastrophic. The prisoners brought in by the first trains slept on straw scattered on the concrete floor. Later, hay bedding was introduced. About 200 prisoners slept in a room that barely accommodated 40-50 people. The three-tier bunks installed later did not improve living conditions at all. Most often there were 2 prisoners on one tier of bunks.
The malarial climate of Auschwitz, poor living conditions, hunger, scanty clothing that was not changed for a long time, unwashed and unprotected from the cold, rats and insects led to mass epidemics that sharply reduced the ranks of prisoners. A large number of patients who came to the hospital were not admitted due to overcrowding. In this regard, SS doctors periodically carried out selections both among patients and among prisoners in other buildings. Those who were weakened and had no hope of a quick recovery were sent to death in gas chambers or killed in a hospital by injecting a dose of phenol directly into their hearts.
That is why the prisoners called the hospital “the threshold of the crematorium.” At Auschwitz, prisoners were subjected to numerous criminal experiments carried out by SS doctors. For example, Professor Karl Clauberg, in order to develop a quick method of biological destruction of the Slavs, conducted criminal sterilization experiments on Jewish women in building No. 10 of the main camp. Dr. Josef Mengele, as part of genetic and anthropological experiments, conducted experiments on twin children and children with physical disabilities.
In addition, various kinds of experiments were carried out in Auschwitz using new drugs and preparations: toxic substances were rubbed into the epithelium of prisoners, skin transplants were carried out... During these experiments, hundreds of prisoners died.
Despite the difficult living conditions, constant terror and danger, the camp prisoners carried out secret underground activities against the Nazis. It took different forms. Establishing contacts with the Polish population living in the area around the camp made possible the illegal transfer of food and medicine. Information was transmitted from the camp about crimes committed by the SS, lists of names of prisoners, SS men and material evidence of crimes. All parcels were hidden in various objects, often specially intended for this purpose, and correspondence between the camp and the centers of the resistance movement was encrypted.
In the camp, work was carried out to provide assistance to prisoners and explanatory work in the field of international solidarity against Hitlerism. Cultural activities were also carried out, which consisted of organizing discussions and meetings at which prisoners recited the best works of Russian literature, as well as secretly holding religious services.
Check area - here the SS men checked the number of prisoners.
Public executions were also carried out here on a portable or common gallows.
In July 1943, the SS hanged 12 Polish prisoners on it because they maintained relations with the civilian population and helped 3 comrades escape.
The yard between buildings No. 10 and No. 11 is fenced with a high wall. Wooden shutters placed on the windows in block No. 10 were supposed to make it impossible to observe the executions carried out here. In front of the “Wall of Death,” the SS shot several thousand prisoners, mostly Poles.
In the dungeons of building No. 11 there was a camp prison. In the halls on the right and left sides of the corridor, prisoners were placed awaiting the verdict of the military court, which came to Auschwitz from Katowice and, during a meeting that lasted 2-3 hours, imposed from several dozen to over a hundred death sentences.
Before execution, everyone had to undress in the washrooms, and if the number of those sentenced to death was too small, the sentence was carried out right there. If the number of those sentenced was sufficient, they were taken out through a small door to be shot at the “Wall of Death.”
The system of punishment that the SS administered in Hitler's concentration camps was part of a well-planned, deliberate extermination of prisoners. A prisoner could be punished for anything: for picking an apple, relieving himself while working, or for pulling out his own tooth to exchange it for bread, even for working too slowly, in the opinion of the SS man.
Prisoners were punished with whips. They were hung by their twisted arms on special poles, placed in the dungeons of a camp prison, forced to perform penalty exercises, stances, or sent to penalty teams.
In September 1941, an attempt was made here to mass exterminate people using the poisonous gas Zyklon B. About 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners from the camp hospital died then.
The cells located in the basements housed prisoners and civilians who were suspected of having connections with prisoners or assisting in escapes, prisoners sentenced to starvation for the escape of a cellmate, and those whom the SS considered guilty of violating camp rules or against whom an investigation was underway. .
All the property that the people deported to the camp brought with them was taken away by the SS. It was sorted and stored in huge barracks in Auszewiec II. These warehouses were called “Canada”. I will tell you more about them in the next report.
The property located in the warehouses of the concentration camps was then transported to the Third Reich for the needs of the Wehrmacht.Gold teeth that were removed from the corpses of murdered people were melted down into ingots and sent to the SS Central Sanitary Administration. The ashes of the burned prisoners were used as manure or they were used to fill nearby ponds and river beds.
Items that previously belonged to people who died in gas chambers were used by SS men who were part of the camp staff. For example, they appealed to the commandant with a request to issue strollers, things for babies and other items. Despite the fact that looted property was constantly being transported by trainloads, the warehouses were overcrowded, and the space between them was often filled with piles of unsorted luggage.
As the Soviet Army approached Auschwitz, the most valuable things were urgently removed from warehouses. A few days before the liberation, the SS men set fire to warehouses, erasing traces of the crime. 30 barracks burned down, and in those that remained, after liberation, many thousands of pairs of shoes, clothes, toothbrushes, shaving brushes, glasses, dentures were found...
While liberating the camp at Auschwitz, the Soviet Army discovered about 7 tons of hair packed in bags in warehouses. These were the remains that the camp authorities did not manage to sell and send to the factories of the Third Reich. The analysis showed that they contain traces of hydrogen cyanide, a special toxic component of drugs called “Cyclone B”. From human hair, German companies, among other products, produced hair tailor's beads. Rolls of beading found in one of the cities, located in a display case, were submitted for analysis, the results of which showed that it was made from human hair, most likely women's hair.
It is very difficult to imagine the tragic scenes that played out every day in the camp. Former prisoners - artists - tried to convey the atmosphere of those days in their work.
Hard work and hunger led to complete exhaustion of the body. From hunger, prisoners fell ill with dystrophy, which very often ended in death. These photographs were taken after liberation; they show adult prisoners weighing from 23 to 35 kg.
In Auschwitz, in addition to adults, there were also children who were sent to the camp along with their parents. First of all, these were the children of Jews, Gypsies, as well as Poles and Russians. Most Jewish children died in gas chambers immediately after arriving at the camp. A few of them, after careful selection, were sent to a camp where they were subject to the same strict rules as adults. Some of the children, such as twins, were subjected to criminal experiments.
One of the most terrible exhibits is a model of one of the crematoria in the Auschwitz II camp. On average, about 3 thousand people were killed and burned in such a building per day...
And this is the crematorium in Auschwitz I. It was located behind the camp fence.
The largest room in the crematorium was the morgue, which was converted into a temporary gas chamber. Here in 1941 and 1942, Soviet prisoners and Jews from the ghetto organized by the Germans in Upper Silesia were killed.
The second part contains two of the three ovens, reconstructed from preserved original metal elements, in which about 350 bodies were burned during the day. Each retort housed 2-3 corpses at a time.
Original taken from pbs990 in THE HORROR OF POLISH DEATH CAMPS. THE GERMAN FASCISTS HAD WORTHY TEACHERS
Dark spots of history: how Russians were tortured and killed in Polish captivity
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Nikolai Malishevsky, “Strategic Culture Foundation”.
In the spring of 2012, the European Court of Human Rights decided that Russia was not guilty of the mass execution of soldiers and officers of the Polish army near Katyn. The Polish side almost completely lost this case. There are surprisingly few reports of this in the media, but the lack of truthful information about the fate of the dead people should not open the way to political speculation that poisons relations between the two peoples. And this applies not only to the fates of thousands of Polish soldiers and officers, but also to the fates of tens of thousands of Russian compatriots who found themselves in Polish captivity after the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921. This article is an attempt to shed light on one of the “dark spots” of Russian, Polish and European history.
As a result of the war launched by Poland against Soviet Russia, the Polish army captured over 150 thousand Red Army soldiers. In total, together with political prisoners and interned civilians, more than 200 thousand Red Army soldiers, civilians, White Guards, and fighters of anti-Bolshevik and nationalist (Ukrainian and Belarusian) formations ended up in Polish captivity and concentration camps.
The Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created a huge “archipelago” of dozens of concentration camps, stations, prisons and fortress casemates. It spread across the territory of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania and included not only dozens of concentration camps, including those openly called “death camps” and so-called in the European press of that time. internment camps (mainly concentration camps built by the Germans and Austrians during the First World War, such as Strzałkowo, Shipturno, Lancut, Tuchole), but also prisons, marshalling concentration stations, concentration points and various military installations such as Modlin and the Brest Fortress, where there were four concentration camps at once - Bug-schuppe, Fort Berg, Graevsky barracks and officers' camp...
The islands and islets of the archipelago were located, among other things, in Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian cities and villages and were called Pikulice, Korosten, Zhitomir, Aleksandrov, Lukov, Ostrov-Lomzhinsky, Rombertov, Zdunska Wola, Torun, Dorogusk, Plock, Radom, Przemysl, Lviv, Friedrichovka, Zvyagel, Dombe, Deblin, Petrokov, Wadowice, Bialystok, Baranovichi, Molodechyno , Vilna, Pinsk, Ruzhany, Bobruisk, Grodno, Luninets, Volkovysk, Minsk, Pulawy, Powonzki, Rivne, Stry, Kovel...
This should also include the so-called. work teams that worked in the district and with surrounding landowners, formed from prisoners, the mortality rate among whom at times exceeded 75%. The most deadly concentration camps for prisoners were those located in Poland - Strzałkowo and Tuchol.
The situation of the prisoners already in the first months of the operation of the concentration camps was so terrible and disastrous that in September 1919, the legislative body (Sejm) of Poland created a special commission to investigate the situation in the concentration camps. The commission completed its work in 1920 just before the start of the Polish offensive on Kyiv. She not only pointed out the poor sanitary conditions in the camps, as well as the prevailing hunger among the prisoners, but also admitted the guilt of the military authorities for the fact that “mortality from typhus was brought to an extreme degree.”
As Russian researchers note, today “the Polish side, despite the indisputable facts of inhumane treatment of captured Red Army soldiers in 1919-1922, does not admit its responsibility for their death in Polish captivity and categorically rejects any accusations in this regard against it. Poles are particularly outraged by attempts to draw parallels between Nazi concentration camps and Polish prisoner of war camps. However, there are grounds for such comparisons... Documents and evidence “allow us to conclude that the local performers were not guided by the correct orders and instructions, but by oral directives from senior Polish leaders.”
V. Shved gives the following explanation for this: “The head of the Polish state, former terrorist fighter Jozef Pilsudski, became famous in tsarist Russia as the organizer of the most successful actions and expropriations. He always ensured maximum secrecy of his plans. The military coup that Pilsudski carried out in May 1926 came as a complete surprise to everyone in Poland. Pilsudski was a master of disguise and diversionary maneuvers. There is no doubt that he used this tactic in the situation with captured Red Army soldiers.” Also, “with a high degree of confidence we can conclude that the predetermination of the death of captured Red Army soldiers in Polish camps was determined by the general anti-Russian mood of Polish society - the more Bolsheviks died, the better. Most politicians and military leaders in Poland at that time shared these sentiments.”
The most pronounced anti-Russian sentiment that reigned in Polish society was formulated by the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland, Jozef Beck: “As for Russia, I do not find enough epithets to characterize the hatred that we feel towards it.” The head of the then Polish state, Józef Pilsudski, expressed himself no less colorfully: “When I take Moscow, I will order to write on the Kremlin wall: “It is forbidden to speak Russian.”
As the Deputy General Commissioner of the Civil Administration of the Eastern Lands, Michal Kossakovsky, noted, killing or torturing a “Bolshevik,” which included civilian Soviet residents, was not considered a sin. One example of what this resulted in in practice: the Red Army cultural worker N.A. Walden (Podolsky), captured in the summer of 1919, later recalled how at stops to the train, where he, stripped by the Poles to “underpants and a shirt, barefoot,” was loaded and in which the prisoners traveled for the first 7-8 days “without any food,” Polish intellectuals came to mock or check personal weapons on the prisoners, as a result of which “we missed many during our trip.”
“Horrors were happening in the Polish camps...” This opinion was shared by representatives of the joint Soviet-Polish commission, and representatives of the Polish and Russian Red Cross, and the French military mission in Poland, and the emigrant press [“Freedom” by B. Savinkov, the Parisian “Common Cause” ", Berlin "Rul"...), and international organizations (among them the American Christian Youth Union under the leadership of Secretary of Prisoner of War Affairs D. O. Wilson (UMSA), American Relief Administration (ARA)].
In fact, the stay of the Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity was not regulated by any legal norms, since the government of J. Pilsudski refused to sign the agreements prepared by delegations of the Red Cross societies of Poland and Russia at the beginning of 1920. In addition, “the political and psychological atmosphere in Poland was not conducive to maintaining generally accepted humane treatment of former combatants.” This is eloquently stated in the documents of the Mixed (Russian, Ukrainian and Polish delegations) commission on the repatriation of prisoners.
For example, the real position of the supreme Polish authorities in relation to the “Bolshevik prisoners” is set out in the minutes of the 11th meeting of the commission dated July 28, 1921. It states: “When the camp command considers it possible... to provide more humane conditions for the existence of prisoners of war, then prohibitions come from the center.” The same protocol formulated a general assessment of the situation in which the captured Red Army soldiers were in the Polish camps. The Polish side was forced to agree with this assessment: “RUD (Russian-Ukrainian delegation) could never allow prisoners to be treated so inhumanely and with such cruelty... it is not uncommon that Red Army soldiers are in the camp literally without any clothes or shoes or even there is no underwear... The RUD delegation does not remember the sheer nightmare and horror of beatings, mutilations and complete physical extermination that was carried out on Russian Red Army prisoners of war, especially communists, in the first days and months of captivity.”
The fact that nothing has changed even after a year and a half follows from the report of the chairman of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation of the Mixed Soviet-Polish Commission on Prisoners of War, Refugees and Hostages E. Aboltin, prepared in February 1923: “Perhaps due to the historical hatred of the Poles to the Russians or for other economic and political reasons, prisoners of war in Poland were not considered as unarmed enemy soldiers, but as powerless slaves... Food was given unfit for consumption and below any subsistence level. When captured, all wearable uniforms were removed from a prisoner of war, and prisoners of war were very often left in only their underwear, in which they lived behind the camp wire... the Poles treated them not as people of an equal race, but as slaves. Beatings of prisoners of war were practiced at every turn.” There is also a mention of the involvement of these unfortunates in work that degrades human dignity: instead of horses, people were harnessed to carts, plows, harrows, and sewage wagons.
From A.A. Ioffe’s telegram to Comrade Chicherin, Polburo, Tsentroevak dated December 14, 1920, Riga: “The situation of prisoners in the Strzhalkovo camp is especially difficult. The mortality rate among prisoners of war is so high that if it does not decrease, they will all die out within six months. All captured Red Army Jews are kept in the same regime as communists, keeping them in separate barracks. Their regime is deteriorating due to the anti-Semitism cultivated in Poland. Joffe."
“The mortality rate of prisoners under the above conditions was terrible,” noted the report of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation. “It is impossible to establish how many of our prisoners of war died in Poland, since the Poles did not keep any records of those who died in 1920, and the highest mortality rate in the camps was in the fall of 1920.”
According to the procedure for counting prisoners of war adopted by the Polish army in 1920, not only those who actually ended up in the camps were considered captured, but also those who were left wounded and unaided on the battlefield or were shot on the spot. Therefore, many of the tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers who “disappeared” were killed long before they were imprisoned in concentration camps. In general, prisoners were destroyed in two main ways: 1) executions and massacres and 2) the creation of unbearable conditions.
Mass murders and executions
Polish historians significantly underestimate the number of Soviet prisoners of war and most often do not take into account that not all of them ended up in camps. Many have died before. The reasonableness of this assumption of Russian historians is consistent with Polish documentary evidence. Thus, one of the telegrams from the Polish military command dated December 3, 1919 states: “According to available data, the fronts do not adhere to the procedure for transportation, registration and sending to the prisoner of war camp... Prisoners are often not sent to assembly points, but directly after being captured prisoners are detained at the fronts and used for work; because of this, an accurate accounting of prisoners of war is impossible. Due to the poor state of clothing and nutrition... epidemic diseases spread terribly among them, bringing a huge percentage of mortality due to the general exhaustion of the body.”
Modern Polish authors, speaking about the enormous mortality rate among prisoners sent to concentration camps, themselves note that “Polish publicists and most historians point, first of all, to a lack of money. The resurgent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth could barely clothe and feed its own soldiers. There were not enough prisoners, because there could not be enough. However, not everything can be explained by a lack of funds. The problems of the prisoners of that war began not behind the barbed wire of the camps, but on the first line, when they abandoned their weapons.”
Russian scientists and researchers believe that even before being imprisoned in concentration camps, only during the period of captivity and transportation of captured Red Army soldiers from the front, a significant part of them (about 40%) died. Very eloquent evidence of this is, for example, the report of the command of the 14th Wielkopolska Infantry Division to the command of the 4th Army dated October 12, 1920, in which, in particular, it was reported that “during the battles from Brest-Litovsk to Baranovichi, a total of 5,000 captured and left on the battlefield about 40% of the named amount of wounded and killed Bolsheviks"
On December 20, 1919, at a meeting of the main command of the Polish Army, Major Yakushevich, an employee of the Volyn KEO (command of the transport district) reported: “Prisoners of war arriving in trains from the Galician front look exhausted, hungry and sick. In just one train sent from Ternopil and containing 700 prisoners of war, only 400 arrived.” The mortality rate of prisoners of war in this case was about 43%.
“Perhaps the most tragic fate is that of new arrivals, who are transported in unheated carriages without appropriate clothing, cold, hungry and tired, often with the first symptoms of illness, lying madly with apathy on bare boards,” Natalia Bielezhinska from the Polish Red Cross described the situation. “That’s why many of them end up in hospitals after such a trip, and the weaker ones die.” The mortality rate of prisoners recorded at sorting stations and transfers was very high. For example, in Bobruisk in December 1919 - January 1920, 933 prisoners died, in Brest-Litovsk from November 18 to 28, 1920 - 75 prisoners, in Pulawy in less than a month, from November 10 to December 2, 1920 - 247 prisoners...
On December 8, 1920, Minister of Military Affairs Kazimierz Sosnkowski even ordered an investigation into the transportation of hungry and sick prisoners of war. The immediate reason for this was information about the transportation of 200 prisoners from Kovel to a kind of “tambour” before entering the camps - a concentration point for filtering prisoners of war in Pulawy. On the train, 37 prisoners of war died, 137 arrived sick. “They were on the road for 5 days and during all this time they were not allowed to eat. As soon as they were unloaded in Pulawy, the prisoners immediately attacked the horse’s corpse and ate the raw carrion.” General Godlevsky, in a letter to Sosnkovsky, indicates that in the indicated train on the day of departure he counted 700 people, which means that 473 people died along the way. “Most of them were so hungry that they could not get out of the cars on their own. On the first day in Puławy, 15 people died.”
From the diary of Red Army soldier Mikhail Ilyichev (captured on the territory of Belarus, he was a prisoner of the Strzalkovo concentration camp): “... in the fall of 1920 we were transported in wagons half filled with coal. The crowding was hellish, before reaching the disembarkation station, six people died. Then they marinated us for a day in some kind of swamp - this was so that we could not lie down on the ground and sleep. Then they drove under escort to the place. One wounded man could not walk, we took turns dragging him, which disrupted the pace of the column. The convoy got tired of this, and they beat him to death with rifle butts. It became clear that we wouldn’t last long like this, and when we saw the rotten barracks and our people wandering behind the thorns in their mother’s clothes, the reality of imminent death became obvious.”
Mass executions of Russian prisoners in 1919-1920. - this is not a propaganda fiction, as some Polish media try to present the case. One of the first testimonies known to us belongs to Tadeusz Kossak, a fighter of the Polish Corps formed by the Austrians during the First World War, who described in his memoirs published in 1927 (“Jak to bylo w armii austriackiej”) how in 1919 in Volyn the lancers of the 1st regiment were shot 18 Red Army soldiers.
Polish researcher A. Wieleweisky, in the popular Polish Gazeta Wyborcza, dated February 23, 1994, wrote about the orders of General Sikorski (the future prime minister of the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) to shoot 300 Russian prisoners of war with machine guns, as well as General Piasecki not to take Russian soldiers alive. There is information about other similar cases. Including evidence of the systematic reprisals of Poles against prisoners on the front line by the aforementioned K. Switalski, one of Pilsudski’s closest collaborators. Polish historian Marcin Handelsman, who was a volunteer in 1920, also recalled that “our commissars were not captured alive at all.” This is confirmed by Stanislav Kavchak, a participant in the Battle of Warsaw, in the book “The Silent Echo. Memories of the war of 1914-1920." describes how the commander of the 18th Infantry Regiment hanged all the captured commissars. According to the testimony of Red Army soldier A. Chestnov, captured in May 1920, after the arrival of their group of prisoners in the city of Siedlce, all “...party comrades, including 33 people, were singled out and shot right there.”
According to the testimony of Red Army soldier V.V. Valuev, who escaped from captivity and was captured on August 18 near Novominsk: “From the entire staff (about 1000 people were captured - approx.), - he testified during interrogation in Kovno, - they chose communists, command staff, commissars and Jews, and right there, in front of all the Red Army soldiers, one Jewish commissar was beaten and then shot.” He further testified that everyone’s uniform was taken away, and those who did not immediately follow orders were beaten to death by the Polish legionnaires. All those captured were sent to the Tuchol concentration camp in Pomeranian Voivodeship, where there were already many wounded who had not been bandaged for weeks, as a result of which worms appeared in their wounds. Many of the wounded died; 30-35 people were buried every day.
In addition to the recollections of eyewitnesses and participants, at least two official reports are known about the execution of captured Red Army soldiers. The first is contained in the report of the III (operational) department of the Supreme Command of the Polish Army (VP) dated March 5, 1919. The second is in the operational report of the command of the 5th Army of the VP, signed by the chief of staff of the 5th Army, Lieutenant Colonel R. Volikovsky, which states that on August 24, 1920, west of the Dzyadlovo-Mlawa-Tsekhanov line, about 400 Soviet Cossacks were captured by the Polish 3rd Cavalry Corps of Guy. As retribution “for 92 privates and 7 officers brutally killed by the 3rd Soviet Cavalry Corps,” soldiers of the 49th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Polish Army machine-gunned 200 captured Cossacks. This fact was not noted in the reports of the III Department of the Supreme Command of the Eastern Military District.
As Red Army soldiers V.A., who returned from Polish captivity, subsequently stated. Bakmanov and P.T. Karamnokov, the selection of prisoners for execution near Mlawa was carried out by a Polish officer “by their faces”, “presentable and cleaner dressed, and more cavalrymen.” The number of those to be shot was determined by a French officer (pastor) who was present among the Poles, who stated that 200 people would be enough.
Polish operational reports contain several direct and indirect reports about the execution of Red Army soldiers during captivity. An example is an operational report dated June 22, 1920. Another example is a report dated March 5, 1919 from the group of Gen. A. Listovsky, which reported: “... a detachment under the command of por. Esmana, supported by Zamechek’s mobile detachment, occupied the village of Brodnitsa, where 25 Red Army soldiers were captured, including several Poles. Some of them were shot.” The existing practice of treating prisoners of war is evidenced by a report from the Polesie group of the Polish Northeastern Front dated August 7, 1920: “During the night, units from the [Soviet] 8th and 17th infantry divisions crossed over to our side. Several companies moved in full strength with officers. Among the reasons for the surrender, officers cite excessive fatigue, apathy and lack of food, as well as the proven fact that the 32nd Infantry Regiment does not shoot prisoners.” It is quite obvious, says G.F. Matveev, that “executions of prisoners should hardly be considered something exceptional if information about them was included in documents intended for the high command. The reports contain reports of Polish punitive expeditions against the rebels in Volyn and Belarus, accompanied by executions and arson of individual houses and entire villages.”
It should be said that the fate of many prisoners, with whom, for one reason or another, the Poles did not want to “mess around,” was unenviable. The fact is that at the final stage of the war the destruction of Red Army soldiers who found themselves in the Polish rear became quite widespread. True, there is not much evidence of this at our disposal, but it is very significant. How else can one understand the meaning of the address of the head of the Polish state and supreme commander-in-chief J. Pilsudski “To the Polish people”, dated approximately August 24, 1920, i.e. a time when the red units defeated near Warsaw were rapidly retreating to the east.
Its text was not included in the marshal’s collected works, but is given in full in the work of the Catholic priest M.M. dedicated to the 1920 war. Grzybowski. It said, in particular:
“The defeated and cut off Bolshevik gangs are still wandering and hiding in the forests, robbing and plundering the property of the inhabitants.
Polish people! Stand shoulder to shoulder to fight the fleeing enemy. Let not a single aggressor leave Polish soil! For the fathers and brothers who died defending the Motherland, let your punishing fists, armed with pitchforks, scythes and flails, fall on the shoulders of the Bolsheviks. Give those captured alive into the hands of the nearest military or civil authorities. Let the retreating enemy not have a moment of rest, let death and captivity await him on all sides! Polish people! To arms!"
Pilsudski’s appeal is extremely ambiguous; its content could also be interpreted as a direct call for the extermination of the Red Army soldiers who found themselves in the Polish rear, although this is not directly stated. Piłsudski's appeal had the most serious consequences for the wounded Red Army soldiers who were "generously" abandoned on the battlefield. Evidence of this can be found in a note published hot on the heels of the Battle of Warsaw in the Polish military magazine Bellona, containing information about the losses of the Red Army. It says, in particular: “The losses in prisoners are up to 75 thousand, the losses in those killed on the battlefield, those killed by our peasants and the wounded are very large.” who died defending the Fatherland by A.V. Kirilin, “approximately 216 thousand were captured, of which a little more than 160 thousand ended up in camps. That is, even before the Red Army soldiers got to the camps, they were already killed along the way”).
From the testimony of Ilya Tumarkin, who returned from Polish captivity: “First of all: when we were taken prisoner, the slaughter of Jews began and I was spared death by some strange accident. The next day we were driven on foot to Lublin, and this transition was a real Golgotha for us. The bitterness of the peasants was so great that the little boys threw stones at us. Accompanied by curses and abuse, we arrived in Lublin at the feeding station, and here the most shameless beating of Jews and Chinese began... 24/V-21.”
According to the deputy General Commissioner of the Civil Administration of Eastern Lands Michal Kossakovsky, killing or torturing a captured Bolshevik was not considered a sin. He recalls that “... in the presence of General Listovsky (commander of the operational group in Polesie), they shot the boy just because he allegedly smiled unkindly.” In the concentration camps themselves, prisoners could also be shot for trifles. Thus, the captured Red Army soldier M. Sherstnev in the Bialystok camp was killed on September 12, 1920 only because he dared to object to the wife of Second Lieutenant Kalchinsky in a conversation in the officer’s kitchen, who on this basis ordered his execution.
There is also evidence of the use of prisoners as living targets. Major General V.I. Filatov - in the early 1990s. the editor of the Military Historical Journal, who was one of the first to raise the topic of the mass death of Red Army soldiers in Polish concentration camps, writes that the favorite pastime of some Polish cavalrymen (“the best in Europe”) was to place captured Red Army soldiers throughout the huge cavalry parade ground and learn from them how to “fall apart to the waist” from the entire “heroic” shoulder, at full gallop of a person. The brave lords chopped down the prisoners “on the fly, on the turn.” There were many parade grounds for “training” in the cavalry cabin. Just like the death camps. In Puława, Dąba, Strzałkow, Tuchola, Baranovichi... Garrisons of brave cavalrymen stood in every small town and had thousands of prisoners at hand. For example, the Lithuanian-Belarusian division of the Polish army alone left 1,153 prisoners at its disposal in Bobruisk.
According to I.V. Mikhutina, “all these unknown victims of tyranny, which cannot be even roughly calculated, expand the scale of the tragedy of Soviet prisoners of war in Polish captivity and show how incompletely the data known to us reflects it.”
Some Polish and Russian-language authors argue that the cruelty of the Poles in the war of 1919-1920 was caused by the cruelty of the Red Army. At the same time, they refer to scenes of violence against captured Poles described in the diary of I. Babel, which served as the basis for the novel “Cavalry” and present Poland as a victim of the aggressive Bolsheviks. Yes, the Bolsheviks knew that the closest route to exporting the revolution to Europe lay through Poland, which occupied an important place in the plans for the “world revolution”. However, the Polish leadership also dreamed of restoring the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within the borders of 1772, that is, passing just west of Smolensk. However, in both 1919 and 1920, the aggressor was Poland, which, after gaining independence, was the first to move its troops to the east. This is a historical fact.
In connection with the widespread opinion in Polish scientific literature and journalism about the cruelty of the Red Army in the occupied Polish territory in the summer of 1920, G.F. Matveev cites evidence from a competent Polish military institution - the 6th exposition of the II department (military intelligence and counterintelligence) of the Warsaw military headquarters district dated September 19, 1920. In the so-called “invasion report” she characterized the behavior of the Red Army as follows: “The behavior of the Soviet troops throughout the occupation was impeccable, it was proven that until the moment of retreat they did not allow any unnecessary looting and violence. They tried to carry out requisitions formally and paid the required prices in money , although devalued. The impeccable behavior of the Soviet troops in comparison with the violence and unnecessary plunder of our retreating units significantly undermined confidence in the Polish authorities" (CAW. SRI DOK I.I.371.1/A; Z doswiadczen ostatnich tygodni. - Bellona, 1920, No. 7, s 484).
Creating unbearable conditions
In the works of Polish authors, as a rule, the fact of the very high mortality rate of Soviet military personnel in captivity due to unbearable living conditions is denied or hushed up. However, not only the memories of survivors have been preserved, but also diplomatic notes from the Russian side (for example, a note dated January 6, 1921) with protests against the cruel treatment of prisoners, which detail the monstrous facts of the camp life of the Red Army soldiers.
Bullying and beatings. In Polish concentration camps, beatings, humiliation and cruel punishment of prisoners were systematically practiced. As a result, “the inhuman conditions of keeping prisoners had the most terrible consequences and led to their rapid extinction. In the Dombe camp, cases of beating of prisoners by officers of the Polish army were recorded... In the Tukholi camp, the commissar of the 12th regiment, Kuzmin, was beaten. In the Bobruisk prison, a prisoner of war’s hands were broken only because he did not follow orders to clean up the sewage with his bare hands. Instructor Myshkina, captured near Warsaw, was raped by two officers and thrown into prison on Dzelitna Street in Warsaw without clothes. The Red Army field theater performer Topolnitskaya, also captured near Warsaw, was beaten during interrogation with a rubber tourniquet, hung from the ceiling by her feet, and then sent to a camp in Dąba. These and similar cases of abuse of Russian prisoners of war became known to the Polish press and caused certain voices of protest and even parliamentary inquiries.
Paragraph 20 of the instructions of the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs for camps dated June 21, 1920, strictly prohibited the punishment of prisoners by flogging. At the same time, as documents show, punishment by caning “became the system in most Polish prisoner of war and internment camps throughout their existence.” N.S. Raisky notes that in Zlochev the Red Army soldiers were also “beaten with whips made of iron wire from electrical wires.” There have been recorded cases of prisoners being flogged to death with rods and barbed wire whips. Moreover, even the press of that time wrote openly about such facts.
Nazi sadists largely repeated the actions of their Polish predecessors. ( And if the Germans acted more like ants - doing routine work, then the Poles killed with passion and pleasure - arctus)
It is known that in Poland history has long been a character active on the political scene. Therefore, bringing “historical skeletons” to this stage has always been a favorite activity of those Polish politicians who do not have solid political baggage and, for this reason, prefer to engage in historical speculation.
Original taken from arctus in Polish concentration camps of the 20s surpassed the Nazi ones in atrocities
The situation in this regard received a new impetus when, after winning the parliamentary elections in October 2015, the party of the ardent Russophobe Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Law and Justice (PiS), returned to power. The protege of this party, Andrzej Duda, became the President of Poland. Already on February 2, 2016, at a meeting of the National Development Council, the new president formulated a conceptual approach to Warsaw’s foreign policy: “The historical policy of the Polish state should be an element of our position in the international arena. It must be offensive."
An example of such “offensiveness” was the recent bill approved by the Polish government. It provides for imprisonment of up to three years for the phrases “Polish concentration camp” or “Polish death camps,” in reference to the Nazi camps that operated in occupied Poland during World War II. The author of the bill, the Polish Minister of Justice, explained the need for its adoption by the fact that such a law would more effectively protect the “historical truth” and “the good name of Poland.”
In this regard, a little history. The phrase “Polish death camp” came into use largely with the “light hand” of Jan Karski, an active participant in the Polish anti-Nazi resistance. In 1944, he published an article in Colliers Weekly entitled “The Polish Death Camp.”
In it, Karski told how he, disguised as a German soldier, secretly visited the ghetto in Izbica Lubelska, from which prisoners Jews, Gypsies and others were sent to the Nazi extermination camps “Belzec” and “Sobibor”. Thanks to Karski’s article, and then the book he wrote, “Courier from Poland: Story of a Secret State,” the world first learned about the Nazis’ mass extermination of Jews in Poland.
I note that for 70 years after World War II, the phrase “Polish death camp” was generally understood as a Nazi death camp located on Polish territory.
The problems began when US President Barack Obama in May 2012, posthumously awarding J. Karski the Presidential Medal of Freedom, mentioned the “Polish death camp” in his speech. Poland was outraged and demanded an explanation and apology,since such a phrase allegedly cast a shadow on Polish history. Pope Francis' visit to Poland in July 2016 added fuel to the fire. Then, in Krakow, Francis met with the only woman born and survivor of the Nazi camp Auschwitz (Auschwitz). In his speech, the Pope called her birthplace "the Polish concentration camp Auschwitz." This clause was replicated by the Vatican Catholic portal “IlSismografo”. Poland was again indignant. These are the known origins of the above-mentioned Polish bill.
However, the point here is not only the above-mentioned unfortunate reservations of world leaders regarding the Nazi camps.
The Polish authorities, in addition, urgently need to block any memories that in Poland in 1919 - 1922. There was a network of concentration camps for Red Army prisoners of war captured during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919 - 1920.
It is known that due to the conditions of existence of prisoners of war in them, these camps were the forerunners of the Nazi concentration death camps.
However, the Polish side does not want to recognize this documented fact and reacts very painfully when statements or articles appear in the Russian media that mention Polish concentration camps. Thus, the article caused a sharply negative reaction from the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Russian Federation Dmitry Ofitserov-Belsky Associate Professor of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Perm) entitled “ Indifferent and patient"(05.02.2015.Lenta.ru https://lenta.ru/articles/2015/02/04/poland/).
In this article, the Russian historian, analyzing the difficult Polish-Russian relations, called Polish prisoner of war camps concentration camps, and also called the Nazi death camp Auschwitz Auschwitz. He thereby allegedly cast a shadow not only on the Polish city of Auschwitz, but also on Polish history. The reaction of the Polish authorities, as always, was immediate.
The Deputy Polish Ambassador to the Russian Federation, Jaroslaw Ksionzek, in a letter to the editor of Lenta.ru, stated that the Polish side categorically objects to the use of the definition of “Polish concentration camps”, because it in no way corresponds to historical truth. In Poland from 1918 to 1939. such camps allegedly did not exist.
However, Polish diplomats, refuting Russian historians and publicists, once again got into a puddle. I had to face critical assessments of my article “The Lies and Truth of Katyn”, published in the newspaper “Spetsnaz Rossii” (No. 4, 2012). The critic then was Grzegorz Telesnicki, First Secretary of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Russian Federation. In his letter to the editors of Spetsnaz Rossii, he categorically asserted that the Poles did not participate in the Nazi exhumation of Katyn graves in 1943.
Meanwhile, it is well known and documented that specialists from the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross participated in the Nazi exhumation in Katyn from April to June 1943, fulfilling, in the words of the Minister of Nazi Propaganda and the main falsifier of the Katyn crime J. Goebbels, the role of “objective” witnesses. Equally false is the statement of Mr. J. Książyk about the absence of concentration camps in Poland, which is easily refuted by documentation.
Polish forerunners of Auschwitz-Birkenau
To begin with, I will conduct a small educational program for Polish diplomats. Let me remind you that in the period 2000-2004. Russian and Polish historians, in accordance with the Agreement between the Russian Archives and the General Directorate of State Archives of Poland, signed on December 4, 2000, prepared a collection of documents and materials “ Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922"(hereinafter referred to as the collection "Red Army Soldiers...").
This 912-page collection was published in Russia in a circulation of 1 thousand copies. (M.; St. Petersburg: Summer Garden, 2004). It contains 338 historical documents revealing the very unpleasant situation that prevailed in Polish prisoner of war camps, including concentration camps. Apparently, for this reason, the Polish side not only did not publish this collection in Polish, but also took measures to buy up part of the Russian circulation.
So, in the collection “Red Army Soldiers...” document No. 72 is presented, called “Temporary instructions for concentration camps for prisoners of war, approved by the Supreme Command of the Polish Army.”
Let me give a short quote from this document: “... Following the orders of the High Command No. 2800/III of 18.IV.1920, No. 17000/IV of 18.IV.1920, No. 16019/II, as well as 6675/San. temporary instructions for concentration camps are issued... The camps for Bolshevik prisoners, which should be created by order of the Supreme Command of the Polish Army No. 17000/IV in Zvyagel and Ploskirov, and then Zhitomir, Korosten and Bar, are called “Concentration camp for prisoners of war No....».
So, gentlemen, a question arises. How, having adopted a law on the inadmissibility of calling Polish concentration camps, will you deal with those Polish historians who allow themselves to refer to the above-mentioned “Temporary Instructions...”? But I will leave this issue for consideration by Polish lawyers and return to Polish prisoner of war camps, including those called concentration camps.
Familiarization with the documents contained in the collection “Red Army Soldiers...” allows us to confidently assert that the point is not in the name, but in the essence of the Polish prisoner of war camps. They created such inhuman conditions for keeping Red Army prisoners of war that they can rightfully be considered as the forerunners of Nazi concentration camps.
This is evidenced by the absolute majority of documents placed in the collection “Red Army Men...”.
To substantiate my conclusion, I will allow myself to refer to the testimony of former prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau Ota Krausa(No. 73046) and Erich Kulka(No. 73043). They went through the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau and were well aware of the rules established in these camps. Therefore, in the title of this chapter I used the name “Auschwitz-Birkenau”, since it was this name that was used by O. Kraus and E. Kulka in their book “The Death Factory” (M.: Gospolitizdat, 1960).
The guard atrocities and living conditions of Red Army prisoners of war in Polish camps are very reminiscent of the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz-Birkenau. For those who doubt, I will give a few quotes from the book “Factory of Death”.
O. Kraus and E. Kulka wrote that
- “They didn’t live in Birkenau, but huddled in wooden barracks 40 meters long and 9 meters wide. The barracks had no windows, were poorly lit and ventilated... In total, the barracks housed 250 people. There were no washrooms or toilets in the barracks. Prisoners were forbidden to leave the barracks at night, so at the end of the barracks there were two tubs for sewage...”
- “Exhaustion, illness and death of prisoners were caused by insufficient and poor nutrition, and more often by real hunger... There were no utensils for food in the camp... The prisoner received less than 300 grams of bread. Bread was given to the prisoners in the evening, and they ate it immediately. The next morning they received half a liter of a black liquid called coffee or tea and a tiny portion of sugar. For lunch, the prisoner received less than a liter of stew, which should have contained 150 g of potatoes, 150 g of turnips, 20 g of flour, 5 g of butter, 15 g of bones. In fact, it was impossible to find such modest doses of food in the stew... With poor nutrition and hard work, a strong and healthy beginner could only last for three months...”
« For entire groups of prisoners... usually a punishment was applied, which was called "sport". Prisoners were forced to quickly fall to the ground and jump up, crawl on their bellies and squat... Transfer to a prison block was a common measure for certain offenses. And staying in this block meant certain death... In the blocks, prisoners slept without mattresses, right on bare boards... Along the walls and in the middle of the block-infirmary, bunks with mattresses soaked in human waste were installed... The sick lay next to the dying and already dead prisoners».
Below I will give similar examples from Polish camps. Surprisingly, the Nazi sadists largely repeated the actions of their Polish predecessors. So, let’s open the collection “Red Army Men...”. Here is document No. 164, called “ Report on the results of the inspection of the camps in Dąba and Strzałkowo"(October 1919).
- “Inspection of the Dombe camp... The buildings are wooden. The walls are not solid, some buildings do not have wooden floors, the chambers are large... Most of the prisoners without shoes are completely barefoot. There are almost no beds or bunks... There is no straw or hay. They sleep on the ground or boards... No linen or clothes; cold, hunger, dirt and all this threatens with enormous mortality...".
- “Report on the inspection of the Strzalkowo camp. ...The state of health of the prisoners is appalling, the hygienic conditions of the camp are disgusting. Most of the buildings are dugouts with holes in the roofs, earthen floors, planks are very rare, the windows are boarded up instead of glass... Many barracks are overcrowded. So, on October 19 this year. The barracks for captured communists were so crowded that entering it in the midst of the fog it was difficult to see anything. The prisoners were so crowded that they could not lie down, but were forced to stand, leaning on one another...".
It was mentioned in document No. 333 “ Note from the Russian-Ukrainian delegation to the chairman of the Polish delegation protesting against the conditions of detention of prisoners in Strzałkowo" (December 29, 1921) and in document No. 334 " Note from the Plenipotentiary Mission of the RSFSR in Warsaw to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland regarding the abuse of Soviet prisoners of war in the Strzałkowo camp"(January 5, 1922).
It should be noted that in both Nazi and Polish camps, the beating of prisoners of war was commonplace. Thus, in the above-mentioned document No. 334 it was noted that in the Strzałkowo camp “ To this day, violations of the personalities of prisoners occur. The beating of prisoners of war is a constant phenomenon..." It turns out that brutal beatings of prisoners of war in the Strzalkowo camp were practiced from 1919 to 1922.
This is confirmed by document No. 44 “ Attitude of the Ministry of War of Poland to the High Command of the Eastern Military District regarding an article from the newspaper “Courier Nowy” regarding the abuse of Latvians who deserted from the Red Army with a transmittal note from the Ministry of War of Poland to the High Command"(January 16, 1920). It says that upon arrival at the Strzalkovo camp (apparently in the fall of 1919), the Latvians were first robbed, leaving them in their underwear, and then each of them received 50 blows with a barbed wire rod. More than ten Latvians died from blood poisoning, and two were shot without trial.
Those responsible for this barbarity were the head of the camp, Captain Wagner and his assistant lieutenant Malinovsky, characterized by sophisticated cruelty.
This is described in document No. 314 “ Letter from the Russian-Ukrainian delegation to the Polish delegation of the PRUSK with a request to take action on the application of Red Army prisoners of war regarding the former commandant of the camp in Strzałkowo"(September 03, 1921).
The Red Army statement said that
- “Lieutenant Malinovsky always walked around the camp, accompanied by several corporals who had wire lashes in their hands and ordered whoever he didn’t like to lie down in a ditch, and the corporals beat him as much as was ordered. If the beaten one moaned or begged for mercy, it was time. Malinovsky took out his revolver and shot... If the sentries shot the prisoners then. Malinowski gave them 3 cigarettes and 25 Polish marks as a reward... Repeatedly it was possible to observe how a group led by por. Malinovsky climbed onto machine gun towers and from there fired at defenseless people...”
Like the Nazis, the Polish authorities used starvation as an effective means of exterminating captured Red Army soldiers. Thus, in document No. 168 “Telegram from the fortified region of Modlin to the section of prisoners of the High Command of the Polish Army about the mass disease of prisoners of war in the Modlin camp” (dated October 28, 1920) it is reported that an epidemic is raging among prisoners of war at the concentration station of prisoners and internees in Modlin stomach diseases, 58 people died.
“The main causes of the disease are the prisoners eating various raw peelings and their complete lack of shoes and clothing" I note that this is not an isolated case of starvation deaths of prisoners of war, which is described in the documents of the collection “Red Army Soldiers...”.A general assessment of the situation prevailing in Polish prisoner of war camps was given in document No. 310 “ Minutes of the 11th meeting of the Mixed (Russian, Ukrainian and Polish delegations) repatriation commission on the situation of captured Red Army soldiers"(July 28, 1921) It was noted that "
RUD (Russian-Ukrainian delegation) could never allow prisoners to be treated so inhumanely and with such cruelty... RUD does not remember the sheer nightmare and horror of beatings, mutilations and complete physical extermination that was carried out on Russian prisoners of war of the Red Army, especially communists, in the first days and months of captivity... .The same protocol noted that “The Polish camp command, as if in retaliation after the first visit of our delegation, sharply intensified its repressions... Red Army soldiers are beaten and tortured for any reason and for no reason... the beatings took the form of an epidemic... When the camp command considers it possible to provide more humane conditions for the existence of prisoners of war, then prohibitions come from the Center».
A similar assessment is given in document No. 318 “ From a note from the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR to the Charge d'Affaires Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Polish Republic T. Fillipovich on the situation and death of prisoners of war in Polish camps"(September 9, 1921).
It said: "
According to the calculations of the Russian military historian M.V. Filimoshin, the number of Red Army soldiers who died and died in Polish captivity is 82,500 people (Filimoshin. Military History Magazine, No. 2. 2001). This figure seems quite reasonable. I believe that the above allows us to assert that Polish concentration camps and prisoner of war camps can rightfully be considered the forerunners of Nazi concentration camps.
I refer distrustful and inquisitive readers to my research " Antikatyn, or Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity”, presented in my books “The Secret of Katyn” (M.: Algorithm, 2007) and “Katyn. Modern history of the issue" (M.: Algorithm, 2012). It gives a more comprehensive picture of what was happening in the Polish camps.
Violence due to dissent
It is impossible to complete the topic of Polish concentration camps without mentioning two camps: the Belarusian " Birch-Kartuzskaya" and Ukrainian " Bialy Podlaski" They were created in 1934 by decision of the Polish dictator Jozef Piłsudski, as a means of reprisal against Belarusians and Ukrainians who protested against the Polish occupation regime of 1920-1939. Although they were not called concentration camps, in some ways they surpassed the Nazi concentration camps.
But first about how many Belarusians and Ukrainians accepted the Polish regime established in the territories of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine captured by the Poles in 1920 . This is what the newspaper Rzeczpospolita wrote in 1925.« ...If there are no changes within several years, then we will have a general armed uprising there (in the eastern cresses). If we don’t drown it in blood, it will tear several provinces away from us... There is a gallows for an uprising and nothing more. Horror must fall on the entire local (Belarusian) population from top to bottom, from which the blood in their veins will freeze » .
In the same year, the famous Polish publicist Adolf Nevchinsky on the pages of the newspaper “Slovo” stated that with Belarusians it is necessary to conduct a conversation in the language of “gallows and only gallows... this will be the most correct resolution of the national question in Western Belarus».
Feeling public support, Polish sadists in Bereza-Kartuzska and Biała Podlaska did not stand on ceremony with the rebellious Belarusians and Ukrainians. If the Nazis created concentration camps as monstrous factories for the mass extermination of people, then in Poland such camps were used as a means of intimidating the disobedient. How else can one explain the monstrous tortures to which Belarusians and Ukrainians were subjected? I will give examples.
In Bereza-Kartuzskaya, 40 people were crammed into small cells with a cement floor. To prevent prisoners from sitting down, the floor was constantly watered. They were forbidden to even talk in the cell. They tried to turn people into dumb cattle. A regime of silence for prisoners was also in force in the hospital. They beat me for moaning, for grinding teeth from unbearable pain.
The management of Bereza-Kartuzskaya cynically called it “the most athletic camp in Europe.” It was forbidden to walk here - only run. Everything was done on the whistle. Even the dream was on such a command. Half an hour on your left side, then the whistle, and immediately turn over to your right. Anyone who hesitated or did not hear the whistle in a dream was immediately subjected to torture. Before such a “sleep”, several buckets of water with bleach were poured into the rooms where the prisoners slept, for “prevention”. The Nazis failed to think of this.
The conditions in the punishment cell were even more terrible.The offenders were kept there from 5 to 14 days. To increase the suffering, several buckets of feces were poured onto the floor of the punishment cell.. The pit in the punishment cell had not been cleaned for months. The room was infested with worms. In addition, the camp practiced group punishment such as cleaning camp toilets with glasses or mugs.
Commandant of Bereza-Kartuzskaya Jozef Kamal-Kurgansky in response to statements that prisoners could not stand the torture conditions and preferred death, calmly stated: “ The more of them rest here, the better it will be to live in my Poland.».
I believe that the above is enough to imagine what Polish camps for the rebellious are, and the story about the Biala Podlaska camp will be redundant.
In conclusion I will add that the use of feces for torture was a favorite means of Polish gendarmes, apparently suffering from unsatisfied sadomasochistic tendencies. There are known facts when employees of the Polish defense forces forced prisoners to clean toilets with their hands, and then, without allowing them to wash their hands, they gave them lunch rations. Those who refused had their hands broken. Sergey Osipovich Pritytsky, a Belarusian fighter against the Polish occupation regime in the 1930s, recalled how Polish police poured slurry into his nose.
This is the unpleasant truth about the “skeleton in the Polish closet” called “concentration camps” that forced me to tell the gentlemen from Warsaw and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Russian Federation.
P.S. Panova, please keep this in mind. I am not a Polonophobe. I enjoy watching Polish films, listening to Polish pop music, and I regret that I did not master the Polish language at one time. But I “hate it” when Polish Russophobes brazenly distort the history of Polish-Russian relations with the tacit consent of official Russia.
Original taken from pbs990 in THE HORROR OF POLISH DEATH CAMPS. THE GERMAN FASCISTS HAD WORTHY TEACHERS
Dark spots of history: how Russians were tortured and killed in Polish captivity
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Nikolai Malishevsky, “Strategic Culture Foundation”.
In the spring of 2012, the European Court of Human Rights decided that Russia was not guilty of the mass execution of soldiers and officers of the Polish army near Katyn. The Polish side almost completely lost this case. There are surprisingly few reports of this in the media, but the lack of truthful information about the fate of the dead people should not open the way to political speculation that poisons relations between the two peoples. And this applies not only to the fates of thousands of Polish soldiers and officers, but also to the fates of tens of thousands of Russian compatriots who found themselves in Polish captivity after the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921. This article is an attempt to shed light on one of the “dark spots” of Russian, Polish and European history.
As a result of the war launched by Poland against Soviet Russia, the Polish army captured over 150 thousand Red Army soldiers. In total, together with political prisoners and interned civilians, more than 200 thousand Red Army soldiers, civilians, White Guards, and fighters of anti-Bolshevik and nationalist (Ukrainian and Belarusian) formations ended up in Polish captivity and concentration camps.
The Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created a huge “archipelago” of dozens of concentration camps, stations, prisons and fortress casemates.
It spread across the territory of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania and included not only dozens of concentration camps, including those openly called “death camps” and so-called in the European press of that time. internment camps (mainly concentration camps built by the Germans and Austrians during the First World War, such as Strzałkowo, Shipturno, Lancut, Tuchole), but also prisons, marshalling concentration stations, concentration points and various military installations such as Modlin and the Brest Fortress, where there were four concentration camps at once - Bug-schuppe, Fort Berg, Graevsky barracks and officers' camp...
The islands and islets of the archipelago were located, among others, in Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian cities and villages and were called Pikulice, Korosten, Zhitomir, Alexandrov, Lukov, Ostrov-Lomzhinsky, Rombertov, Zdunska Wola, Torun, Dorogusk, Plock, Radom, Przemysl, Lvov, Fridrikhovka, Zvyagel, Dombe, Deblin, Petrokov, Wadowice, Bialystok, Baranovichi, Molodechyno, Vilno, Pinsk, Ruzhany, Bobruisk, Grodno, Luninets, Volkovysk, Minsk, Pulawy, Powazki, Rivne, Stry, Kovel
This should also include the so-called. work teams that worked in the district and with surrounding landowners, formed from prisoners, the mortality rate among whom at times exceeded 75%. The most deadly concentration camps for prisoners were those located in Poland - Strzałkowo and Tuchol.
The situation of the prisoners already in the first months of the operation of the concentration camps was so terrible and disastrous that in September 1919, the legislative body (Sejm) of Poland created a special commission to investigate the situation in the concentration camps. The commission completed its work in 1920 just before the start of the Polish offensive on Kyiv. She not only pointed out the poor sanitary conditions in the camps, as well as the prevailing hunger among the prisoners, but also admitted the guilt of the military authorities for the fact that “mortality from typhus was brought to an extreme degree.”
As Russian researchers note, today “the Polish side, despite the indisputable facts of inhumane treatment of captured Red Army soldiers in 1919-1922, does not admit its responsibility for their death in Polish captivity and categorically rejects any accusations in this regard against it. Poles are particularly outraged by attempts to draw parallels between Nazi concentration camps and Polish prisoner of war camps. However, there are grounds for such comparisons... Documents and evidence “allow us to conclude that the local performers were not guided by the correct orders and instructions, but by oral directives from senior Polish leaders.”
V. Shved gives the following explanation for this: “The head of the Polish state, former terrorist fighter Jozef Pilsudski, became famous in tsarist Russia as the organizer of the most successful actions and expropriations. He always ensured maximum secrecy of his plans. The military coup that Pilsudski carried out in May 1926 came as a complete surprise to everyone in Poland. Pilsudski was a master of disguise and diversionary maneuvers. There is no doubt that he used this tactic in the situation with captured Red Army soldiers.” Also, “with a high degree of confidence we can conclude that the predetermination of the death of captured Red Army soldiers in Polish camps was determined by the general anti-Russian mood of Polish society - the more Bolsheviks died, the better. Most politicians and military leaders in Poland at that time shared these sentiments.”
The most pronounced anti-Russian sentiment that reigned in Polish society was formulated by the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland, Jozef Beck: “As for Russia, I do not find enough epithets to characterize the hatred that we feel towards it.” The head of the then Polish state, Józef Pilsudski, expressed himself no less colorfully: “When I take Moscow, I will order to write on the Kremlin wall: “It is forbidden to speak Russian.”
As the Deputy General Commissioner of the Civil Administration of the Eastern Lands, Michal Kossakovsky, noted, killing or torturing a “Bolshevik,” which included civilian Soviet residents, was not considered a sin. One example of what this resulted in in practice: the Red Army cultural worker N.A. Walden (Podolsky), captured in the summer of 1919, later recalled how at stops to the train, where he, stripped by the Poles to “underpants and a shirt, barefoot,” was loaded and in which the prisoners traveled for the first 7-8 days “without any food,” Polish intellectuals came to mock or check personal weapons on the prisoners, as a result of which “we missed many during our trip.”
“Horrors were happening in the Polish camps...” This opinion was shared by representatives of the joint Soviet-Polish commission, and representatives of the Polish and Russian Red Cross, and the French military mission in Poland, and the emigrant press [“Freedom” by B. Savinkov, the Parisian “Common Cause” ", Berlin "Rul"...), and international organizations (among them the American Christian Youth Union under the leadership of Secretary of Prisoner of War Affairs D. O. Wilson (UMSA), American Relief Administration (ARA)].
In fact, the stay of the Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity was not regulated by any legal norms, since the government of J. Pilsudski refused to sign the agreements prepared by delegations of the Red Cross societies of Poland and Russia at the beginning of 1920. In addition, “the political and psychological atmosphere in Poland was not conducive to maintaining generally accepted humane treatment of former combatants.” This is eloquently stated in the documents of the Mixed (Russian, Ukrainian and Polish delegations) commission on the repatriation of prisoners.
For example, the real position of the supreme Polish authorities in relation to the “Bolshevik prisoners” is set out in the minutes of the 11th meeting of the commission dated July 28, 1921. It states: “When the camp command considers it possible... to provide more humane conditions for the existence of prisoners of war, then prohibitions come from the center.” The same protocol formulated a general assessment of the situation in which the captured Red Army soldiers were in the Polish camps. The Polish side was forced to agree with this assessment: “RUD (Russian-Ukrainian delegation) could never allow prisoners to be treated so inhumanely and with such cruelty... it is not uncommon that Red Army soldiers are in the camp literally without any clothes or shoes or even there is no underwear... The RUD delegation does not remember the sheer nightmare and horror of beatings, mutilations and complete physical extermination that was carried out on Russian Red Army prisoners of war, especially communists, in the first days and months of captivity.”
The fact that nothing has changed even after a year and a half follows from the report of the chairman of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation of the Mixed Soviet-Polish Commission on Prisoners of War, Refugees and Hostages E. Aboltin, prepared in February 1923: “Perhaps due to the historical hatred of the Poles to the Russians or for other economic and political reasons, prisoners of war in Poland were not considered as unarmed enemy soldiers, but as powerless slaves... Food was given unfit for consumption and below any subsistence level. When captured, all wearable uniforms were removed from a prisoner of war, and prisoners of war were very often left in only their underwear, in which they lived behind the camp wire... the Poles treated them not as people of an equal race, but as slaves. Beatings of prisoners of war were practiced at every turn.” There is also a mention of the involvement of these unfortunates in work that degrades human dignity: instead of horses, people were harnessed to carts, plows, harrows, and sewage wagons.
From A.A. Ioffe’s telegram to Comrade Chicherin, Polburo, Tsentroevak dated December 14, 1920, Riga: “The situation of prisoners in the Strzhalkovo camp is especially difficult. The mortality rate among prisoners of war is so high that if it does not decrease, they will all die out within six months. All captured Red Army Jews are kept in the same regime as communists, keeping them in separate barracks. Their regime is deteriorating due to the anti-Semitism cultivated in Poland. Joffe."
“The mortality rate of prisoners under the above conditions was terrible,” noted the report of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation. “It is impossible to establish how many of our prisoners of war died in Poland, since the Poles did not keep any records of those who died in 1920, and the highest mortality rate in the camps was in the fall of 1920.”
According to the procedure for counting prisoners of war adopted by the Polish army in 1920, not only those who actually ended up in the camps were considered captured, but also those who were left wounded and unaided on the battlefield or were shot on the spot. Therefore, many of the tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers who “disappeared” were killed long before they were imprisoned in concentration camps. In general, prisoners were destroyed in two main ways: 1) executions and massacres and 2) the creation of unbearable conditions.
Mass murders and executions
Polish historians significantly underestimate the number of Soviet prisoners of war and most often do not take into account that not all of them ended up in camps. Many have died before. The reasonableness of this assumption of Russian historians is consistent with Polish documentary evidence. Thus, one of the telegrams from the Polish military command dated December 3, 1919 states: “According to available data, the fronts do not adhere to the procedure for transportation, registration and sending to the prisoner of war camp... Prisoners are often not sent to assembly points, but directly after being captured prisoners are detained at the fronts and used for work; because of this, an accurate accounting of prisoners of war is impossible. Due to the poor state of clothing and nutrition... epidemic diseases spread terribly among them, bringing a huge percentage of mortality due to the general exhaustion of the body.”
Modern Polish authors, speaking about the enormous mortality rate among prisoners sent to concentration camps, themselves note that “Polish publicists and most historians point, first of all, to a lack of money. The resurgent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth could barely clothe and feed its own soldiers. There were not enough prisoners, because there could not be enough. However, not everything can be explained by a lack of funds. The problems of the prisoners of that war began not behind the barbed wire of the camps, but on the first line, when they abandoned their weapons.”
Russian scientists and researchers believe that even before being imprisoned in concentration camps, only during the period of captivity and transportation of captured Red Army soldiers from the front, a significant part of them (about 40%) died. Very eloquent evidence of this is, for example, the report of the command of the 14th Wielkopolska Infantry Division to the command of the 4th Army dated October 12, 1920, in which, in particular, it was reported that “during the battles from Brest-Litovsk to Baranovichi, a total of 5,000 captured and left on the battlefield about 40% of the named amount of wounded and killed Bolsheviks"
On December 20, 1919, at a meeting of the main command of the Polish Army, Major Yakushevich, an employee of the Volyn KEO (command of the transport district) reported: “Prisoners of war arriving in trains from the Galician front look exhausted, hungry and sick. In just one train sent from Ternopil and containing 700 prisoners of war, only 400 arrived.” The mortality rate of prisoners of war in this case was about 43%.
“Perhaps the most tragic fate is that of new arrivals, who are transported in unheated carriages without appropriate clothing, cold, hungry and tired, often with the first symptoms of illness, lying madly with apathy on bare boards,” Natalia Bielezhinska from the Polish Red Cross described the situation. “That’s why many of them end up in hospitals after such a trip, and the weaker ones die.” The mortality rate of prisoners recorded at sorting stations and transfers was very high. For example, in Bobruisk in December 1919 - January 1920, 933 prisoners died, in Brest-Litovsk from November 18 to 28, 1920 - 75 prisoners, in Pulawy in less than a month, from November 10 to December 2, 1920 - 247 prisoners...
On December 8, 1920, Minister of Military Affairs Kazimierz Sosnkowski even ordered an investigation into the transportation of hungry and sick prisoners of war. The immediate reason for this was information about the transportation of 200 prisoners from Kovel to a kind of “tambour” before entering the camps - a concentration point for filtering prisoners of war in Pulawy. On the train, 37 prisoners of war died, 137 arrived sick. “They were on the road for 5 days and during all this time they were not allowed to eat. As soon as they were unloaded in Pulawy, the prisoners immediately attacked the horse’s corpse and ate the raw carrion.” General Godlevsky, in a letter to Sosnkovsky, indicates that in the indicated train on the day of departure he counted 700 people, which means that 473 people died along the way. “Most of them were so hungry that they could not get out of the cars on their own. On the first day in Puławy, 15 people died.”
From the diary of Red Army soldier Mikhail Ilyichev (captured on the territory of Belarus, he was a prisoner of the Strzalkovo concentration camp): “... in the fall of 1920 we were transported in wagons half filled with coal. The crowding was hellish, before reaching the disembarkation station, six people died. Then they marinated us for a day in some kind of swamp - this was so that we could not lie down on the ground and sleep. Then they drove under escort to the place. One wounded man could not walk, we took turns dragging him, which disrupted the pace of the column. The convoy got tired of this, and they beat him to death with rifle butts. It became clear that we wouldn’t last long like this, and when we saw the rotten barracks and our people wandering behind the thorns in their mother’s clothes, the reality of imminent death became obvious.”
Mass executions of Russian prisoners in 1919-1920. - this is not a propaganda fiction, as some Polish media try to present the case. One of the first testimonies known to us belongs to Tadeusz Kossak, a fighter of the Polish Corps formed by the Austrians during the First World War, who described in his memoirs published in 1927 (“Jak to bylo w armii austriackiej”) how in 1919 in Volyn the lancers of the 1st regiment were shot 18 Red Army soldiers.
Polish researcher A. Wieleweisky, in the popular Polish Gazeta Wyborcza, dated February 23, 1994, wrote about the orders of General Sikorski (the future prime minister of the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) to shoot 300 Russian prisoners of war with machine guns, as well as General Piasecki not to take Russian soldiers alive. There is information about other similar cases. Including evidence of the systematic reprisals of Poles against prisoners on the front line by the aforementioned K. Switalski, one of Pilsudski’s closest collaborators. Polish historian Marcin Handelsman, who was a volunteer in 1920, also recalled that “our commissars were not captured alive at all.” This is confirmed by Stanislav Kavchak, a participant in the Battle of Warsaw, in the book “The Silent Echo. Memories of the war of 1914-1920." describes how the commander of the 18th Infantry Regiment hanged all the captured commissars. According to the testimony of Red Army soldier A. Chestnov, captured in May 1920, after the arrival of their group of prisoners in the city of Siedlce, all “...party comrades, including 33 people, were singled out and shot right there.”
According to the testimony of Red Army soldier V.V. Valuev, who escaped from captivity and was captured on August 18 near Novominsk: “From the entire staff (about 1000 people were captured - approx.), - he testified during interrogation in Kovno, - they chose communists, command staff, commissars and Jews, and right there, in front of all the Red Army soldiers, one Jewish commissar was beaten and then shot.” He further testified that everyone’s uniform was taken away, and those who did not immediately follow orders were beaten to death by the Polish legionnaires. All those captured were sent to the Tuchol concentration camp in Pomeranian Voivodeship, where there were already many wounded who had not been bandaged for weeks, as a result of which worms appeared in their wounds. Many of the wounded died; 30-35 people were buried every day.
In addition to the recollections of eyewitnesses and participants, at least two official reports are known about the execution of captured Red Army soldiers. The first is contained in the report of the III (operational) department of the Supreme Command of the Polish Army (VP) dated March 5, 1919. The second is in the operational report of the command of the 5th Army of the VP, signed by the chief of staff of the 5th Army, Lieutenant Colonel R. Volikovsky, which states that on August 24, 1920, west of the Dzyadlovo-Mlawa-Tsekhanov line, about 400 Soviet Cossacks were captured by the Polish 3rd Cavalry Corps of Guy. As retribution “for 92 privates and 7 officers brutally killed by the 3rd Soviet Cavalry Corps,” soldiers of the 49th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Polish Army machine-gunned 200 captured Cossacks. This fact was not noted in the reports of the III Department of the Supreme Command of the Eastern Military District.
As Red Army soldiers V.A., who returned from Polish captivity, subsequently stated. Bakmanov and P.T. Karamnokov, the selection of prisoners for execution near Mlawa was carried out by a Polish officer “by their faces”, “presentable and cleaner dressed, and more cavalrymen.” The number of those to be shot was determined by a French officer (pastor) who was present among the Poles, who stated that 200 people would be enough.
Polish operational reports contain several direct and indirect reports about the execution of Red Army soldiers during captivity. An example is an operational report dated June 22, 1920. Another example is a report dated March 5, 1919 from the group of Gen. A. Listovsky, which reported: “... a detachment under the command of por. Esmana, supported by Zamechek’s mobile detachment, occupied the village of Brodnitsa, where 25 Red Army soldiers were captured, including several Poles. Some of them were shot.” The existing practice of treating prisoners of war is evidenced by a report from the Polesie group of the Polish Northeastern Front dated August 7, 1920: “During the night, units from the [Soviet] 8th and 17th infantry divisions crossed over to our side. Several companies moved in full strength with officers. Among the reasons for the surrender, officers cite excessive fatigue, apathy and lack of food, as well as the proven fact that the 32nd Infantry Regiment does not shoot prisoners.” It is quite obvious, says G.F. Matveev, that “executions of prisoners should hardly be considered something exceptional if information about them was included in documents intended for the high command. The reports contain reports of Polish punitive expeditions against the rebels in Volyn and Belarus, accompanied by executions and arson of individual houses and entire villages.”
It should be said that the fate of many prisoners, with whom, for one reason or another, the Poles did not want to “mess around,” was unenviable. The fact is that at the final stage of the war the destruction of Red Army soldiers who found themselves in the Polish rear became quite widespread. True, there is not much evidence of this at our disposal, but it is very significant. How else can one understand the meaning of the address of the head of the Polish state and supreme commander-in-chief J. Pilsudski “To the Polish people”, dated approximately August 24, 1920, i.e. a time when the red units defeated near Warsaw were rapidly retreating to the east.
Its text was not included in the marshal’s collected works, but is given in full in the work of the Catholic priest M.M. dedicated to the 1920 war. Grzybowski. It said, in particular:
“The defeated and cut off Bolshevik gangs are still wandering and hiding in the forests, robbing and plundering the property of the inhabitants.
Polish people! Stand shoulder to shoulder to fight the fleeing enemy. Let not a single aggressor leave Polish soil! For the fathers and brothers who died defending the Motherland, let your punishing fists, armed with pitchforks, scythes and flails, fall on the shoulders of the Bolsheviks. Give those captured alive into the hands of the nearest military or civil authorities. Let the retreating enemy not have a moment of rest, let death and captivity await him on all sides! Polish people! To arms!"
Pilsudski’s appeal is extremely ambiguous; its content could also be interpreted as a direct call for the extermination of the Red Army soldiers who found themselves in the Polish rear, although this is not directly stated. Piłsudski's appeal had the most serious consequences for the wounded Red Army soldiers who were "generously" abandoned on the battlefield. Evidence of this can be found in a note published hot on the heels of the Battle of Warsaw in the Polish military magazine Bellona, containing information about the losses of the Red Army. It says, in particular: “The losses in prisoners are up to 75 thousand, the losses in those killed on the battlefield, those killed by our peasants and the wounded are very large.” who died defending the Fatherland by A.V. Kirilin, “approximately 216 thousand were captured, of which a little more than 160 thousand ended up in camps. That is, even before the Red Army soldiers got to the camps, they were already killed along the way”).
From the testimony of Ilya Tumarkin, who returned from Polish captivity: “First of all: when we were taken prisoner, the slaughter of Jews began and I was spared death by some strange accident. The next day we were driven on foot to Lublin, and this transition was a real Golgotha for us. The bitterness of the peasants was so great that the little boys threw stones at us. Accompanied by curses and abuse, we arrived in Lublin at the feeding station, and here the most shameless beating of Jews and Chinese began... 24/V-21.”
According to the deputy General Commissioner of the Civil Administration of Eastern Lands Michal Kossakovsky, killing or torturing a captured Bolshevik was not considered a sin. He recalls that “... in the presence of General Listovsky (commander of the operational group in Polesie), they shot the boy just because he allegedly smiled unkindly.” In the concentration camps themselves, prisoners could also be shot for trifles. Thus, the captured Red Army soldier M. Sherstnev in the Bialystok camp was killed on September 12, 1920 only because he dared to object to the wife of Second Lieutenant Kalchinsky in a conversation in the officer’s kitchen, who on this basis ordered his execution.
There is also evidence of the use of prisoners as living targets. Major General V.I. Filatov - in the early 1990s. the editor of the Military Historical Journal, who was one of the first to raise the topic of the mass death of Red Army soldiers in Polish concentration camps, writes that the favorite pastime of some Polish cavalrymen (“the best in Europe”) was to place captured Red Army soldiers throughout the huge cavalry parade ground and learn from them how to “fall apart to the waist” from the entire “heroic” shoulder, at full gallop of a person. The brave lords chopped down the prisoners “on the fly, on the turn.” There were many parade grounds for “training” in the cavalry cabin. Just like the death camps. In Puława, Dąba, Strzałkow, Tuchola, Baranovichi... Garrisons of brave cavalrymen stood in every small town and had thousands of prisoners at hand. For example, the Lithuanian-Belarusian division of the Polish army alone left 1,153 prisoners at its disposal in Bobruisk.
According to I.V. Mikhutina, “all these unknown victims of tyranny, which cannot be even roughly calculated, expand the scale of the tragedy of Soviet prisoners of war in Polish captivity and show how incompletely the data known to us reflects it.”
Some Polish and Russian-language authors argue that the cruelty of the Poles in the war of 1919-1920 was caused by the cruelty of the Red Army. At the same time, they refer to scenes of violence against captured Poles described in the diary of I. Babel, which served as the basis for the novel “Cavalry” and present Poland as a victim of the aggressive Bolsheviks. Yes, the Bolsheviks knew that the closest route to exporting the revolution to Europe lay through Poland, which occupied an important place in the plans for the “world revolution”. However, the Polish leadership also dreamed of restoring the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within the borders of 1772, that is, passing just west of Smolensk. However, in both 1919 and 1920, the aggressor was Poland, which, after gaining independence, was the first to move its troops to the east. This is a historical fact.
In connection with the widespread opinion in Polish scientific literature and journalism about the cruelty of the Red Army in the occupied Polish territory in the summer of 1920, G.F. Matveev cites evidence from a competent Polish military institution - the 6th exposition of the II department (military intelligence and counterintelligence) of the Warsaw military headquarters district dated September 19, 1920. In the so-called “invasion report” she characterized the behavior of the Red Army as follows: “The behavior of the Soviet troops throughout the occupation was impeccable, it was proven that until the moment of retreat they did not allow any unnecessary looting and violence. They tried to carry out requisitions formally and paid the required prices in money , although devalued. The impeccable behavior of the Soviet troops in comparison with the violence and unnecessary plunder of our retreating units significantly undermined confidence in the Polish authorities" (CAW. SRI DOK I.I.371.1/A; Z doswiadczen ostatnich tygodni. - Bellona, 1920, No. 7, s 484).
Creating unbearable conditions
In the works of Polish authors, as a rule, the fact of the very high mortality rate of Soviet military personnel in captivity due to unbearable living conditions is denied or hushed up. However, not only the memories of survivors have been preserved, but also diplomatic notes from the Russian side (for example, a note dated January 6, 1921) with protests against the cruel treatment of prisoners, which detail the monstrous facts of the camp life of the Red Army soldiers.
Bullying and beatings. In Polish concentration camps, beatings, humiliation and cruel punishment of prisoners were systematically practiced. As a result, “the inhuman conditions of keeping prisoners had the most terrible consequences and led to their rapid extinction. In the Dombe camp, cases of beating of prisoners by officers of the Polish army were recorded... In the Tukholi camp, the commissar of the 12th regiment, Kuzmin, was beaten. In the Bobruisk prison, a prisoner of war’s hands were broken only because he did not follow orders to clean up the sewage with his bare hands. Instructor Myshkina, captured near Warsaw, was raped by two officers and thrown into prison on Dzelitna Street in Warsaw without clothes. The Red Army field theater performer Topolnitskaya, also captured near Warsaw, was beaten during interrogation with a rubber tourniquet, hung from the ceiling by her feet, and then sent to a camp in Dąba. These and similar cases of abuse of Russian prisoners of war became known to the Polish press and caused certain voices of protest and even parliamentary inquiries.
Paragraph 20 of the instructions of the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs for camps dated June 21, 1920, strictly prohibited the punishment of prisoners by flogging. At the same time, as documents show, punishment by caning “became the system in most Polish prisoner of war and internment camps throughout their existence.” N.S. Raisky notes that in Zlochev the Red Army soldiers were also “beaten with whips made of iron wire from electrical wires.” There have been recorded cases of prisoners being flogged to death with rods and barbed wire whips. Moreover, even the press of that time wrote openly about such facts.
