🕯 April 19 marked, for the first time, the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People committed by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Great Patriotic War.

The National Center for Historical Memory under the President of the Russian Federation has prepared an online exhibition, “No Statute of Limitations: The Genocide of the Soviet People.”

Before launching their war against the USSR, the Nazis devised sweeping plans to dismantle Soviet statehood, colonize its territories, seize its resources, and exterminate and enslave the population.

The occupiers developed the Generalplan Ost, which envisaged the deportation and destruction of 50 million people in the USSR; the enslavement of 14 million; and the forced Germanization of 1 million.

They also planned to starve the population through the so-called Hunger Plan (Backe Plan), aimed at extracting as much food as possible for Germany while drastically restricting rations for Soviet citizens.

📑 From the Directive on the Administration of the Economy in the Occupied “Eastern Territories” (June 1941):

“It is necessary <…> to organize the exploitation of natural resources (oil, coal, ores, etc.) in the interests of the German war economy <…>”

Following Nazi Germany’s treacherous invasion of the USSR in June 1941 and the occupation of parts of its territory, German forces operated in coordination with units formed in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Finland, as well as individual volunteers from Austria, Latvia, Poland, France, and the Czech lands.

Through collaborationist and auxiliary police battalions (Estonian, Latvian, Ukrainian, and others), Nazi occupiers carried out punitive operations against the civilian population. Baltic units, in particular, committed hundreds of atrocities in northwestern Russia and Soviet Belarus, killing at least 3'000 people aged from 2-3 months to 60 years. In Karelia, Finnish occupiers placed those they deemed “non-native” into concentration camps (14 in total across the region).

👉 These facts may point to the international nature of the crimes committed during the genocide of the Soviet people by Nazi perpetrators and their European collaborators.

The systematic extermination of Soviet civilians and the large-scale destruction of entire settlements in the occupied USSR were carried out not only by Wehrmacht units, but also by SS formations, police units, and various collaborators.

Across the Soviet Union, the Nazi occupiers established a vast network of concentration camps and detention sites for civilians and Red Army prisoners of war (more than 528 camps in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic alone), where tens of thousands perished — including children, women, the elderly, and countless wounded and sick soldiers captured by the enemy.

▪️ The largest camps on Soviet territory included: Dulag-130 (Roslavl, Smolensk Region; 130,000 dead), Stalag-372 (later Dulag-376, Porkhov, Pskov Region; 75,000 dead), camps in Gatchina (Leningrad Region; 80,000 dead), Dulag-142 or the “Bryansk Buchenwald” (40,000 dead), the “Krasny” camp (Simferopol, Crimea; 15,000 dead), and Finnish camps in Karelia (Petrozavodsk; over 8,000 dead, including around 2,000 children).

During World War II, the Nazis widely practiced the deportation of people from occupied Soviet territories to Germany for forced labor. In East Prussia alone, more than 200'000 Soviet citizens were subjected to slave labor under inhumane conditions at major military-industrial enterprises of the Third Reich.

📖 More:

• More on the genocide of the Soviet people and its key aspects
• Video address by Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
• A dedicated section on the genocide of the Soviet people at the Russian MFA's website