NKVD prisoner massacres

• 1. Introduction

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  The NKVD prisoner massacres killed close to 100,000 political prisoners across Eastern Europe in a matter of weeks in the summer of 1941. When German troops crossed the Soviet border on June 22, the NKVD, the Soviet Union's People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, held tens of thousands of prisoners in jails stretching from Poland to Crimea. Standing orders called for evacuating those prisoners deep into Soviet territory. But as the Red Army retreated in haste, and transport and other supplies ran short, guards in prison after prison turned to execution instead. Estimates put the toll at nearly 9,000 people in the Ukrainian SSR and between 20,000 and 30,000 in what was then eastern Poland. What made a retreating guard choose a bullet over a train seat? And what happened in the cells where there was not even time for that choice?

• 2. Background

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  Operation Barbarossa caught the NKVD off guard, and its jails across territory annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were already crowded with political prisoners. In occupied eastern Poland, NKVD evacuation order No. 00803 made the service responsible for liquidating or evacuating more than 140,000 prisoners. In Ukraine and Western Belorussia, another 60,000 people were forced onto the roads on foot.

  The Soviet Union's own official count tried to draw a cleaner picture than the one that emerged. It listed more than 9,800 people executed inside prisons, 1,443 killed during evacuation marches, 59 shot while trying to escape, 23 killed by German bombs, and 1,057 deaths from other causes.

  Historian Yury Boshyk, quoted by Orest Subtelny, wrote that "it was not only the numbers of the executed, but also the manner in which they died that shocked the populace." Families who rushed to the prisons after the Soviet retreat found bodies mutilated beyond recognition, evidence that many prisoners had been tortured before they were killed.

  Of the roughly 150,000 prisoners the NKVD held when the invasion began, about two thirds were murdered. Most of the rest were transported into the Soviet interior, though some prisoners were simply abandoned in emptied cells and others managed to escape.

  Postwar investigators working in Germany, Poland, Belarus and Israel would go on to identify at least 25 prisons where the killings took place, along with a far larger number of mass execution sites scattered from Poland to Crimea.

• 3. The Belarusian Death Roads

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  At Berezwecz, in what is now Hlybokaye, NKVD guards shot at least several dozen inmates on the night of June 23 and 24, 1941. The next day the remaining prisoners were forced onto what became known as the Death Road, a 120-kilometer march toward Vitebsk during which exhaustion, hunger, thirst and the guards themselves killed prisoners in large numbers. The march ended at the Taklinovo kolkhoz, now called Mikalajeva, where on June 28 the Soviets executed almost everyone still alive. In total, an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 people were murdered in the evacuation of the Berezwecz prison.

  Near Minsk, the NKVD began emptying every prison in the city in late June. Between June 24 and 27, at least 1,000 people were killed in the town of Chervyen and along the death marches that led there.

  In Hrodna, called Grodno before the war, the NKVD shot several dozen prisoners at the local jail on the 22nd of June 1941, the very day the invasion began. The advancing German army and the NKVD's own hurried retreat meant the remaining 1,700 prisoners there were never executed.

  From the prison at Vileyka, once known as Wilejka, the NKVD shot at least 28 prisoners on the 24th of June 1941. More than 1,000 men and women were then marched east toward Barysaw, and an estimated 500 to 800 of them died at the hands of their guards along the way.

  Prisoners evacuated from Valozhyn, formerly Wołożyn, were marched on foot for two days before roughly 100 of them were shot by the NKVD near the village of Tarasovo in late June 1941.

  Farther north, in Soviet-occupied Estonia, the killing took a different shape: a single mass shooting, at a single prison, weeks after the roads through Belarus had gone quiet.

• 4. The Baltic Killings

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  At Tartu prison in Estonia, the NKVD shot 193 detainees on the 9th of July 1941, more than two weeks after German forces first crossed into Soviet territory.

  In Vilnius, known before the war as Wilno, the NKVD murdered a large number of prisoners held at the city's Lukiškės Prison after the invasion began.

  Near the town of Telšiai, in what became known as the Rainiai massacre, the NKVD killed up to 79 political prisoners on June 24 and 25, 1941.

  At the Pravieniškės prison near Kaunas, the NKVD murdered 260 political prisoners in June 1941, along with every Lithuanian staff member working inside it.

  Some prisoners held in Lithuania never died on Lithuanian soil at all. They were marched out toward Belarus instead, and a number of them were killed after crossing the border, including near a village called Bigosovo.

  West of the Baltic states, in the Poland the Soviets had occupied since 1939, the killing was measured less by single prisons and more by what fraction of a population had been locked up to begin with.

• 5. Poland's Prisons

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  By 1941, much of the ethnically Polish population living under Soviet rule in eastern Poland had already been deported to remote parts of the USSR. Others who remained, including large numbers of Belarusian and Ukrainian civilians, were held in provisional prisons awaiting deportation to NKVD prisons in Moscow or to the Gulag.

  Out of roughly 13 million people living in eastern Poland, an estimated half a million were jailed, more than 90 percent of them men. That worked out to about 10 percent of all adult men in the region imprisoned at the moment the German offensive began.

  Many of those prisoners died in custody from torture or neglect rather than execution. Documented methods of torture included scalding victims and cutting off their ears, noses and fingers.

  Historian Timothy Snyder has estimated that the NKVD shot approximately 9,817 imprisoned Polish citizens in the wake of the German invasion of the USSR in 1941.

  The prison sites themselves outlasted the border that once defined them. The ground where those killings happened now lies inside Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.

• 6. Western Ukraine's Prisons

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  In Berezhany, known before the war as Brzeżany, the NKVD prison staff executed between 174 and 300 Polish citizens between June 26 and 30, 1941. Many of the dead were ethnic Ukrainians.

  At Chortkiv, called Czortków under Polish rule, the Soviets shot an estimated 100 to 200 prisoners in the final days of June 1941. The remaining prisoners were evacuated east by train or on foot, and hundreds died along the way from inhumane transport conditions or at the hands of guards. By the end of July, 767 prisoners evacuated from Chortkiv had been executed in Uman.

  In Dobromyl, Soviet forces murdered hundreds of prisoners who had been evacuated from nearby Przemyśl in late June 1941, dumping the bodies into a salt mine on the edge of the city.

  At Dubno, the Soviets executed an estimated 500 to 550 prisoners between June 23 and 25, 1941. Only a handful of people survived the massacre.

  In Ivano-Frankivsk, known before the war as Stanisławów, more than 500 Polish prisoners, including 150 women and dozens of children, were shot by the NKVD and buried in mass graves at a site called Dem'ianiv Laz.

  At Lutsk, after German bombs struck the prison, Soviet authorities promised amnesty to the political prisoners to stop them from trying to escape. As they lined up outside, Soviet tanks opened fire on them with machine guns. Guards then told survivors, "Those still alive get up." About 370 stood, buried the dead, and were then murdered themselves. The Nazi foreign ministry later claimed 1,500 Ukrainians were killed at Lutsk, while the SS and German military intelligence put the number at 4,000.

  In Sambir, once called Sambor, the Soviets executed an estimated 500 to 700 prisoners in the last days of June 1941. Late in the massacre, some prisoners actively fought back, and resistance saved a number of lives.

  At Zolochiv, known before the war as Złoczów, the Soviets killed every inmate in the prison in late June 1941, an estimated 650 to 720 people.

  One city in the region absorbed a death toll larger than any of these on its own: Lviv, where the killing began the moment the invasion did and did not stop for six days.

• 7. Lviv

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  In Lviv, called Lwów under Polish rule, the massacres began on the 22nd of June 1941, the day of the German invasion, and continued until June 28. NKVD guards executed several thousand inmates across a number of provisional prisons in the city.

  Guards used methods that included shooting prisoners inside their cells, throwing grenades into the cells, and leaving prisoners to starve in cellars. Some prisoners were bayoneted to death. An estimated 4,000 people were murdered this way, and only around 270 survivors are known.

  A Ukrainian uprising briefly drove the NKVD out of the city, but the guards returned to kill the prisoners still left in the cells. Medical students who later described one prison scene wrote: "From the courtyard, doors led to a large space, filled from top to bottom with corpses... Among them were many women... most were stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet."

  The massacres in Lviv were followed by the Lviv pogroms, carried out by German military forces and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists after Germany took the city. Jewish residents were targeted by German soldiers, OUN members and local citizens, and the German authorities documented the NKVD killings and used them in anti-Soviet and anti-Jewish propaganda. In some instances, the violence against Jewish residents was framed as revenge for the NKVD murders.

  Not every mass killing that summer happened west of the Dnieper. In Donetsk, Kharkiv, Simferopol and Yalta, the NKVD kept killing prisoners for months after Lviv had gone quiet.

• 8. Beyond Western Ukraine

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  In Donetsk, prisoners were killed at a site known as Rutchenkovo Field. In Kharkiv, in what became known as the Kharkiv tragedy, 1,200 prisoners were burned alive.

  In Simferopol, the NKVD shot a number of people in the NKVD building and the city prison on the 31st of October 1941. In Yalta, on November 4, the NKVD shot every prisoner held in the city's prisons.

  Soviet records for 78 prisons across Ukraine give a fuller picture of how prisoners were disposed of overall: 45,569 were evacuated, 8,789 were killed inside the prisons, 48 were killed as runaways, 123 were killed "legally," 55 were killed "illegally," and 3,536 were left alive.

  The killing reached well beyond Ukraine and into Russia itself. In September 1941, 157 political prisoners were executed in the Medvedevsky Forest near Oryol, among them Christian Rakovsky, Varvara Yakovleva, Maria Spiridonova, Olga Kameneva and Dmitri Pletnyov.

  On the 28th of October 1941, in the village of Barbysh near Kuybyshev, the NKVD shot 20 high-ranking former Red Army officers and party officials without trial. It was more than four months after the invasion that had set the killings in motion, and the war those officials had served was only beginning.