Khatyn massacre



Khatyn or Chatyń (Belarusian and Хаты́нь, ) was a village of 26 houses and 156 inhabitants in Belarus, in Lahoysk Raion, Minsk Region, 50 km away from Minsk. On March 22, 1943, the entire population of the village was massacred by the 118th Schutzmannschaft Nazi battalion. The battalion was formed in July 1942 in Kiev and was made up mostly of Ukrainian nationalists from Western Ukraine and collaborators, Soviet army prisoners-of-war/deserters and the Dirlewanger Waffen-SS special battalion.

The massacre was not an unusual incident in Belarus during World War II. At least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were burned, destroyed by the Nazis and some or all their inhabitants were killed (some amounting up to 1,500 victims) as a punishment for collaboration with partisans. Khatyn became a symbol of all those villages. In the Vitebsk region 243 villages were burned down twice, 83 villages three times, and 22 villages were burned down four or more times. In the Minsk region 92 villages were burned down twice, 40 villages three times, nine villages four times, and six villages five or more times. Altogether, over 2,000,000 people were killed in Belarus during the three years of Nazi occupation, almost a quarter of the country's population.

Massacre
On 22 March 1943, a German convoy was attacked by Soviet partisans near Koziri village just 6 km away from Khatyn, resulting in the deaths of four police officers of Schutzmannschaft Batallion 118, which consisted mostly of Ukrainian collaborators, prisoners of war and Soviet army deserters. Among the dead was Hauptmann Hans Woellke, the battalion's commanding officer. Woellke was an Olympic champion in Berlin in 1936 and an acquaintance of Adolf Hitler.

Troops from the Dirlewanger Brigade, a unit mostly composed of criminals recruited for anti-partisan duties, entered the village and drove the inhabitants from their houses and into a shed, which was then covered with straw and set on fire. The trapped people managed to break down the front doors, but in trying to escape, were killed by machine gun fire. 147 people, including 75 children under 16 years of age, were killed — burned, shot or suffocated in fire. The village was then looted and burned to the ground.

Survivors
Only 8 inhabitants of the village survived, from whom six were recognized as witnesses to the tragedy — 5 children and 1 adult. By 2008, only 2 of them were still alive to tell the story.
 * 1) A 12-year-old Baranovsky Anton Iosifovich (1930 — 1969), was left for dead due to wounds in both legs. His injuries were treated by partisans. Five months after the opening of the Memorial Anton died in unclear circumstances.
 * 2) The only adult survivor of the Khatyn massacre, 56-year-old village smith Yuzif Kaminsky (1887 — 1973), also wounded and burnt, recovered consciousness after the executioners had left. He supposedly found his burned son who later died in his arms. This incident was later artistically honored in the form of a statue at the Khatyn Memorial.
 * 3) Another boy, Zhelobkovich Alexander Petrovich (1930 — 1994), who was 12 years old at the time, also survived. When the Nazi soldiers almost surrounded the village, his mother woke him up, put the boy on a horse, on which he escaped to a nearby village. After war, he served in the armed forces. Then was a reserve lieutenant colonel.
 * 4) Yaskevich Vladimir Antonovich (1930 — 2008) managed to survive by hiding in a potato pit 200 meters from his family house. Two Nazi soldiers noticed the boy, yet they spared him. Vladimir noted that they spoke German among themselves, not Ukrainian.
 * 5) That day, early morning Vladimir's sister, Yaskevich (Fiokhina) Sofia Antonovna (b. 1934) hid in the cellar during the tragedy. Worked as a typist, now lives in Minsk.
 * 6) Zhelobkovich Viktor Andreevich (b. 1934), a seven-year-old boy, survived the fire in the shed under the corpse of his mother. He worked at the design office of precise engineering. Now lives in Minsk.

Two other Khatyn women were lucky to be away from the village that day.
 * Karaban Tatyana Vasilyevna (1910 — 200?) was visiting relatives in a neighboring village Seredniaya.
 * A relative of Tatyana, Sofya Klimovich also was in a nearby village then. After war she worked at the Memorial for several years.

Post-war trials
The commander of one of the platoons of 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, Ukrainian Vasyl Meleshko, was tried in a Soviet court and executed in 1975. Chief of Staff of 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, Ukrainian Grigory Vassiura, was tried in Minsk in 1986, was found guilty of all his crimes and by the verdict of the military tribunal of the Belorussian military district was sentenced to death.

The case and the trial of the main executioner of Khatyn was not given much publicity in the media; the leaders of the Soviet republics worried about the inviolability of unity between the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples.

Khatyn Memorial
Khatyn became a symbol of mass killings of the civilian population during the fighting between partisans, German troops, and collaborators. In 1969 it was named the national war memorial of the Byelorussian SSR. Among the best-recognized symbols of the memorial complex is a monument with three birch trees, with an eternal flame instead of a fourth tree, a tribute to the one in every four Belarusians who died in the war. There is also a statue of Yuzif Kaminsky carrying his dying son, and a wall with niches to represent the victims of all concentration camps, with large niches representing those with more than 20,000 victims. Bells ring every 30 seconds to commemorate the rate at which Belarusian lives were lost throughout the duration of the Second World War.

Part of the memorial is a «Cemetery of villages» with 185 tombs. Each tomb symbolizes a particular village in Belarus which was fired together with its population.

Among the foreign leaders who have visited the Khatyn Memorial during their time in office are Richard Nixon of the USA, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Rajiv Gandhi of India, Yasser Arafat of the PLO, and Jiang Zemin of China.

In 2004 the Memorial was renovated. According to 2011 data, the Memorial was in the top ten of the most attended touristic sites in Belarus — that year it was visited by 182.000 people.