CLICK TO ENLARGE Угорські вояки­гонведи з українськими дівчатами на київському пляжі Hungarian foot-soldiers with Ukrainian girls on a Kiev beach

CLICK TO ENLARGE Німецький генерал­майор з українськими дівчатами в національних костюмах German major-general with Ukrainian girls in national costume

CLICK TO ENLARGE Німецький солдат­мотоцикліст з українськими дівчатами German motorcycle-soldier with Ukrainian girls

CLICK TO ENLARGE Угорські військові з дівчатами зі станції Основа під Харковом Hungarian soldiers with girls from the suburb Osnova near Kharkiv

Some German hangings of civilians can be followed step by step, but possibly none in such detail as in the case of the unknown girl in the photographs below around whose neck a placard has been hung, and with a bearded Kiril Trus standing to her right, and with a capped 16-year-old Volodia Shcherbatsevich standing to her left, in Minsk, Belarus on 26 Oct 1941.  It has been speculated that the unknown girl might be either Masha Bruskina or Shura Linevich or perhaps Natasha the assistant nurse who worked in the Minsk Military Hospital.  The placard reads, We are partisans — we have shot at German soldiers.  This same placard being draped across other victims (compare to the placard in the "Belorussia, in the streets of Minsk, 26 October 1941" photo above) suggests that it was mass printed and used to give the appearance that the victim had been proven to have committed the act named on the placard, when in fact the placard may have served as a blanket condemnation of anyone being hanged for any reason, and in the case of an attractive young urban woman, the reason is less likely to be that she shot at soldiers, and more likely to be that she had been the victim of their verboten sexual attention:

Above photograph from www.executedtoday.com/~


Above photograph seems to have been touched up by hand, perhaps to clarify the text on the placard, and to prettify, or merely emphasize, facial features, and which has the effect of making the unknown girl's face in this photograph look different from her face in all the other photographs.


The above version of the same photogarph, although of lower resolution, brings the advantages of not having been touched up, and of being less cropped, at least on the left and along the top.  From www.executedtoday.com/~

As German hanging of civilians was commonplace, there is today no dearth of corroborating photographs, as is demonstrated by the following collection on the Yad Vashem web site, from which the five sepia photographs above were taken.  It should be kept in mind that GARF, the State Archive of the Russian Federation from which these photographs and captions originate, might be motivated to downplay the degree of Ukrainian suffering at the hands of the Germans by identifying hangings in Ukraine as having taken place in the USSR, or even in Russia.  Clicking on a red ampersand below will take the user to a photograph on the Yad Vashem web site where more information than the mere caption may be found; clicking on a blue ampersand will produce the same photograph, but from its storage on xoxol.org, and without the additional information that is on the Yad Vashem web site, the blue option being offered here in case the Yad Vashem version may be unavailable, or when traffic congestion might make it slower to download.  In either case, the user will have to click his BACK, or RETURN-TO-PREVIOUS-PAGE, button to return to the present page.

@  @   1   USSR, Man hanged in suspicion of Partisan activity.
@  @   2   Serbia, Mass hanging of hostages, apparently by the SS but in the presence of German soldiers.
@  @   3   USSR, A man hanged by the Germans.
@  @   4   USSR, Man hanged in suspicion of Partisan activity.
@  @   5   Ukraine, Bogoduchov, Hanging of two suspects of Partisan activity Shevchenko Street, year 1942.
@  @   6   USSR, Man hanged in suspicion of Partisan activity.
@  @   7   Belarus, Minsk, Two men and a woman that were hanged by the Germans.
@  @   8   USSR, Three men hanged in suspicion of Partisan activity.
@  @   9   Serbia, Pancevo, Hanging of local civilians by German soldiers in retaliation for killing two SS troops, 22-Apr-1941.
@  @  10   Romania, Arad, Hanging of civilians by the Germans.
@  @  11   USSR, People hanged by the Germans on suspicion of Partisan activity.
@  @  12   USSR, Two men hanged by the German army.
@  @  13   USSR, Hanging of two men by German soldiers.
@  @  14   Russia, German soldiers hanging a man in the Porkhov area.
@  @  15   USSR, Two suspected of Partisan activity that were hanged by the Germans.
@  @  16   USSR, A citizen hung by the Germans, seemingly because of suspicion of Partisan activity.
@  @  17   Ukraine, Kharkiv, People hanged in the street by the Germans in Shevchenko Street, year 1942.
@  @  18   Ukraine, Kharkiv, Men hanged by the Germans in retaliation for bombing buildings following German occupation, November 1941.
@  @  19   USSR, Suspects of Partisan activity hanged by the Germans in the town square.
@  @  20   USSR, Gayvoron, Suspects of Partisan activity hanged by the Germans in the town square.
@  @  21   Ukraine, Kharkiv, Men hanged by the Germans in retaliation for bombing buildings following German occupation, November 1941.
@  @  22   USSR, Partisan hanged by the Germans.
@  @  23   USSR, Public hanging in the presence of German soldiers.
@  @  24   Ukraine, Kiev, Man hanged by the Germans.
@  @  25   USSR, Man hanged for arson.
@  @  26   USSR, People hanged by the Germans.
@  @  27   Poland, People hanged in public by the Germans.
@  @  28   Ukraine, Kiev, A man hanged by the Germans.
@  @  29   USSR, A suspect of Partisan activity hanged by the Germans.
@  @  30   USSR, A partisan hanged by the German army.
@  @  31   USSR, Two men hanged by the German army.
@  @  32   USSR, A partisan hanged by the German army.
@  @  33   USSR, Suspects of Partisan activity hanged by the Germans.
@  @  34   USSR, Suspects of Partisan activity hanged by the Germans.
@  @  35   USSR, Man hanged by the Germans.
@  @  36   USSR, Orel, People hanged by the Germans in public for sabotage and for refusing to work, February 1942.
@  @  37   USSR, Two men hanged by the Germans.
@  @  38   USSR, Man hanged on suspicion of Partisan activity.
@  @  39   USSR, Suspects of Partisan activity hanged by the Germans.
@  @  40   USSR, public hanging in the presence of German soldiers.
@  @  41   Ukraine, Bogoduchov, Hanging of two suspects of partisan activity by local auxiliaries.
@  @  42   Ukraine, Bogoduchov, Hanging of two suspects of Partisan activity by local auxiliaries.
@  @  43   Ukraine, Kharkiv, Man hanged by the Germans, in suspicion of Partisan activity.
@  @  44   USSR, Man hanged by the Germans.
@  @  45   Ukraine, Kharkiv, Civilians hanged by the Germans in retaliation for a terrorist attack on German headquarters, November 1941.
@  @  46   Ukraine, Teploye, A woman hanged by the Germans for carrying ammunition in her belongings, 03-Nov-1941.
@  @  47   USSR, Man hanged by the Germans in suspicion of Partisan activity.
@  @  48   USSR, Man hanged by the Germans for looting and hiding abandoned Jewish property.
@  @  49   Ukraine, Ten hostages hanged by the Germans.
@  @  50   Poland, Lodz, Hanging of three men by the German police.
@  @  51   Ukraine, Hanging of civilians by German soldiers.
@  @  52   Ukraine, Ten hostages hanged by the Germans.
@  @  53   USSR, man hanged after refusing to work.
@  @  54   Ukraine, Sumy, Two suspects of Partisan activity hanged by the Germans.
@  @  55   Ukraine, Sumy, Two suspects of Partisan activity hanged by the Germans.
@  @  56   USSR, men who were hanged after refusing to work.
@  @  57   USSR, men who were hanged after refusing to work.
@  @  58   USSR, Men who were hanged by the Germans near a train station.
@  @  59   USSR, Men who were hanged by the Germans near a train station.
@  @  60   USSR, Men who were hanged by the Germans near a train station.
@  @  61   USSR, Two civilians hanged by the Germans.
@  @  62   USSR, German soldiers beside men who were hanged after refusing to work.
@  @  63   USSR, A suspect in Partisan activity that was hanged.
@  @  64   Belarus, Minsk, Suspects of Partisan activity hanged in public, 1941.
@  @  65   Yugoslavia, Serbia, Mass hanging of hostages, probably by SS but in the presence of German soldiers.
@  @  66   USSR, Man being hanged by the Germans.
@  @  67   Poland, Lodz, Hanging of three men by the German police.
@  @  68   Yugoslavia, Pancevo, Hanging of locals by German soldiers in retaliation for killing two SS men, 22-Apr-1941.
@  @  69   Ukraine, Kharkiv, Civilians hanged by the Germans in retaliation for a terrorist attack on German headquarters, November 1941.

Ah, well, but surely not all German soldiers spent their time shooting civilians on the edges of pits or hanging them with placards around their necks.  Weren't some Germans employed in blameless activities at some distance from the violence, as perhaps in food procurement, as is exemplified in the photographs below?  Shouldn't the Germans shown in these photographs be recognized as merely participating in the time-honored army activity of scrounging?  Should we not recognize that the sort of work that these scroungers did was as harmless as chasing honking and flapping geese around farmyards?  Should not their congenial smiles remind us that they bore no ill will and participated in no murder?

USSR, Soldiers from the German air force with fowls that were confiscated from local peasants.
Photo and caption from yadvashem


USSR, German soldiers and POW's by a field kitchen.
Photo and caption from yadvashem


USSR, German soldiers with sheep.
Photo and caption from yadvashem


USSR, German soldiers leading a confiscated cow.
Photo and caption from yadvashem

And when it came to food stores, wouldn't the local farmers have been happy to share their supplies with the Germans?

USSR, Peasants with crops, February 1942.
Photo and caption from yadvashem


USSR, German soldiers seemingly confiscating food from the local inhabitants.
Photo and caption from yadvashem

And other soldiers not occupied with food procurement might have been put to the blameless and nonviolent work of locating and procuring accomodation such as that pictured below:

USSR, A peasants hut used to quarter German soldiers, 29-Sep-1941.
Photo and caption from yadvashem


Poland, Wlosow, A peasants hut used to quarter German soldiers, 10-Nov-1941.
Photo and caption from yadvashem

However, the captions above have already begun to erode the image of blameless and fun-loving Germans, for the captions speak of "confiscating" which in the present context is synonymous with "robbing," and which image of blameless Germans the analysis below quite reverses:

The fabled spectre of campaigning through a Russian winter thus assumed a certain foreboding prominence, which loomed in the minds of many Landsers as the weather began to change.  Solomon Perel, who was travelling with a group of soldiers from the 12th Panzer Division, noted that the men "had not forgotten Napoleon's defeat in 1812 and ... [t]hey were scared out of their wits".  Another soldier wrote home on 21 September, "God save us from a winter campaign in the east.  It is very cold here already and rains practically every day."  Wilhelm Prüller wrote in his diary on 28 September that it was so cold he and his comrades had to sleep in their vehicles.  He then continued, "Terribly cold.  You can't wrap yourself in too many blankets.  When I think back on the July and August days, when we simply spent the nights lying in a field on the grass, I have to mourn for the summer...  And who knows what's in front of us as far as the weather goes?"  It was a prudent question, which held dire implications not only for the operational aspects of the campaign, but also for the war of annihilation.  With a chronic shortage of housing in the forward areas of the front, German soldiers ensured they were not the ones being left out in the cold.  As Wilhelm Prüller's diary records: You should see the act the civilians put on when we make it clear to them that we intend to use their sties to sleep in.  A weeping and yelling begins, as if their throats were being cut, until we chuck them out.  Whether young or old, man or wife, they stand in their rags and tatters on the doorstep and can't be persuaded to go...  When we finally threaten them at pistol point, they disappear for a few minutes, only to return again yelling even more loudly. While no one was freezing to death in September 1941, the Russian peasants knew better than anyone what was coming and knew that survival depended on shelter and stores of food for the coming winter.  Without access to these the weather would soon prove fatal for countless Soviet peasants.  In this indirect way Germany's war of annihilation involved average German soldiers to a far greater extent than is often acknowledged.  Between seventeen and eighteen million Soviet civilians died in the war with Nazi Germany and most of these died not as a direct result of a German action (that is, by being shot), but rather from the conditions created by the German army and occupational forces (starvation, disease, exposure, overwork, etc.).  Accordingly, however some historians may seek to "interpret" the circumstances or apply restrictive definitions to what constituted a war crime, the fact remains that the Ostheer and its soldiers, each to varying extents participated in and contributed to the conditions which resulted in the deaths of so many.  In this sense one must keep in mind that the well-known suffering of the German army during the winter fighting had even worse results for the civilian population, especially in the areas of heavy German troop concentrations. David Stahel, Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012, pp. 332-333.

And so John Demjanjuk speaks of eleven million of his fellow Ukrainians having been murdered by the Germans, and author David Stahel speaks of between seventeen and eighteen million Soviet civilians having died in the war, but the two sorts of murderers we have glanced at above, the firing-squad Germans and the hanging Germans, could not possibly have been responsible for that many deaths.  They were brutal killers, without question, and they killed vast numbers, and they deserve the deepest contempt and the harshest punishment, and yet they could only have been the small-time killers.  And so who were the big-time killers?

The big-time killers in the German annihilation machine were those grinning confiscators we saw just above, chasing geese around the farmyard, grabbing a sheep here and there, leading off a cow, carting away sacks of wheat, slamming the door in a farmer's face.  It is these German killers who contributed most to racking up the holocaust of eleven million or seventeen or eighteen million deaths.

Here's how a few of the dispossesed tried to survive, shown suffering and dying even before the snows arrive (note the tree stripped of bark):

People had to chew the wood putty because of starvation.



The child survived.

---

The two above photographs and captions are from englishrussia.com~

Our argument has brought us to the point where it is necessary to recognize: that murder is murder whether it is accomplished by shooting or hanging or starving or freezing; that eighteen million murders is eighteen million murders whether they are committed inside barbed-wire enclosures or outside; that, as the vast mortality numbers demonstrate, confiscating a farmer's livestock and food store and house as winter approaches is indistinguishable in degree of culpability from imprisoning him in a POW death camp where his diet is worms and grass and his protection from the cold is a hole in the ground that he scrapes out with a stick.

Thus it follows that thousands of Germans alive today deserve to be prosecuted for war crimes before John Demjanjuk is prosecuted, especially since the allegation of John Demjanjuk's presence in an unknown capacity somewhere in the Sobibor area is founded on a KGB-forged Trawniki ID Card, and especially since his accusers over the past four decades have distinguished themselves by their zealous mendacity — thus it follows, I say, that thousands of Germans alive today deserve to be prosecuted before John Demjanjuk is prosecuted, starting with those Germans that we saw above murdering civilians with bullets and nooses, and including all those involved in the running of POW death camps, and continuing on to the confiscators who snatched from others the food and the habitation that were needed to sustain life, and extending finally to those who watched the snatching and understood the death sentence it pronounced, but who sat by the fire inside the ejected farmer's house and ate his food anyway.