It’s a sad fact that a war’s worst victims are usually civilians just trying to get on with
their lives. In few places has this been more true than Eastern Europe during the Second World War.
Caught between two of the most brutal regimes in recent history,
Eastern Europeans faced unimaginable hardship. In this video, we shed light on their dark story.
As a disclaimer, this is an overview, not
an exhaustive list of the atrocities suffered throughout the conflict.
Eastern Europe was a very different place in the years preceding the Second World War.
For starters, countries such as Poland and the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania as well as Soviet-occupied Ukraine and Byelorussia were surprisingly ethnically
diverse. A plethora of different languages were spoken throughout the cities and villages.
In the south, villages speaking derivatives of old Mongol and Turkic languages were as
common as towns and cities predominantly speaking Yiddish and Polish dialects.
The entire regional economy was founded on agriculture.
Heavy industry had yet to take over, and most people lived close to the land. It wasn’t idyllic,
but for the most part, people lived simple lives. But in Soviet-controlled Ukraine and Byelorussia,
things had already gone bad. State mismanagement and forced collectivisation killed between
four and five million Ukrainians during the 1930s. They called the period Holodomor, meaning “Death
by hunger.” It was horrific, as described by a contemporary doctor who later starved to death:
“The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those
who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill
their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the late 1930s brought Stalin’s Great Purges to Eastern Europe.
No one was safe. Even those in revered authority positions could
find themselves on one of Stalin’s lists and disappear, never to be seen again.
We don’t know precisely how many were killed in the purges, but most estimates range from 700,000
to 1.3 million, with thousands of Eastern Europeans included in that number.
Things weren’t nearly as bad in Poland and the Baltic, areas not under Soviet control,
but with the outbreak of war, that soon changed.
Once war began and Europe was divided along the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact lines,
a second stage in the destruction of Eastern Europe began. The first, from roughly 1933 to
1938, was orchestrated and perpetrated entirely by the Soviet Union, but now Germany had entered
the fray. In this second stage, lasting from 1939 to the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in 1941,
Germans and Soviets vied for the bloody honour of who could do more damage to Eastern Europe.
Sandwiched between them both, Poland got hit the hardest.
Before crossing into Poland, Hitler ordered his top commanders to “Close your hearts to pity.”
German soldiers were constantly told that Poles were subhuman barbarians
and that they needed to be put in their place by the German Ubermensch. They did this by massacring
civilians and committing war crimes everywhere they went. Following are just three examples:
A German armoured unit found a barn-turned-Polish-medical-station
marked with a Red Cross. After setting it on fire, the tanks fired on anyone who ran out.
Once the building had burned down, the tanks ran over the wounded survivors.
Near the village of Sladow, Germans used Polish POWs as human shields
while they attacked a cavalry unit. The cavalrymen were wiped out,and the Germans
forced the POWs to bury their comrades, before executing all 300 of them.
In December, two German soldiers were killed by a known Polish serial killer. In response,
114 Polish men were rounded up and shot. They had nothing to do with the incident.
We probably won’t ever know the true scale of the German destruction wrought on Poland during
the opening salvos of the war in Europe, but they by no means had a monopoly on war crimes.
The Soviets were just as active in the Eastern part of the country
Anyone who’s looked into the German campaign in the East would have come across Soviet scorched
earth policies. In the grand scheme of things, scorched earth makes sense:
trading space for time, forcing your enemy to consume its resources chasing you deep into the
interior. What often goes unmentioned, however, is that ordinary people bear the consequences.
As the rapid German advance pushed toward the Russian heartlands, frontline troops began to
outrun their supply lines. Their solution was to loot the countryside for the vital
food and fuel they needed. As Ukraine was about to be overrun, Stalin gave the following order:
“The enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, not a single pound of grain
or gallon of fuel. The collective farmers must drive off all their cattle and turn
over their grain to the safe keeping of the state authorities for transportation
to the rear. All valuable property ... that cannot be withdrawn must be destroyed without fail.”
The NKVD, which managed the Soviet interior, carried out Stalin’s orders with gusto, seizing
and destroying everything they could get their hands on. Ukraine and Western Russia, the most
populous region of the Soviet Union, was scoured. Entire villages were sacked and all food supplies
destroyed. Peasants were forced to keep up with the retreating Red Army or face starvation.
Even the crown jewels of Soviet industrialisation weren’t safe. The Dnieper Hydroelectric Station,
one of the Soviet Union’s greatest achievements, was blown up by NKVD troops. They didn’t even
wait for the Red Army to finish crossing the river first, and the resulting tidal wave killed between
20,000 and 100,000 soldiers and civilians. In the words of American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker:
“The Russians have proved now by their destruction of the great dam at Dniepropetrovsk that they mean
truly to scorch the earth before Hitler even if it means the destruction of their most precious
possessions ... Dnieprostroy was an object almost of worship to the Soviet people. It
was the largest, most spectacular, and most popular of all the immense projects
of the First Five-Year Plan … and so it occupied a place in the imagination
and affection of the Soviet people difficult for us to realize.”
The soldiers did the fighting, though it was the innocent civilians
who suffered for it. But things were about to get a lot worse.
Scorched earth was nothing compared with what Germany had in store for
the civilians of Eastern Europe. Until the Soviets returned three years later,
these civilians were subjected to one of the worst genocides in history: the Holocaust.
And nowhere was impacted more by the Holocaust than Byelorussia. A slavic people,
Byelorussians were subjected to the Hunger Plan by Hitler’s eastern commanders,
after losing nearly everything to Stalin’s scorched earth policy.
The locals were in no shape to carry out a pogrom against the region’s large Jewish population,
which they had never taken issue with before. This is where the Germans stepped in.
On July 8th 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of Reich Security, ordered all male Jews between
15 and 45 in occupied Byelorussia to be shot on sight. By August, this order expanded to women,
children, and the elderly. The massacres were predominantly carried out by Einsatzgruppen and
Sicherheitsdienst, which acted as mobile killing squads. German military police and
interior troops were also complicit in what became known as the “Holocaust by Bullets.”
By the time the Red Army arrived in 1944, 245,000 Byelorussian Jews had been murdered.
This horrific number represented 66% of the region’s pre-war Jewish population.
As for everyone else, anti-slav racism and starvation policies killed over
a quarter of the population, while another quarter was forced to flee.
But as the end of the war drew nearer, things only got worse. Byelorussia was
subjected to scorched earth policies again by the retreating Germans, who also liquidated
camps rather than leave them to the advancing communists. All of the region’s industry, 85%
of all infrastructure, and 209 out of its 245 settlements were completely destroyed. No other
region was hit harder than Byelorussia, and it would be decades before they recovered.
Far from liberation, the Red Army’s arrival in Eastern Europe heralded
yet more suffering for its inhabitants. The Germans adopted scorched earth policies
wholesale across Eastern Europe. Anything that peasants managed to keep for themselves
was liable to be confiscated by Soviet soldiers, who weren’t always fed properly.
Civilians from Poland and the Baltic States who had been conscripted into the German military
or labour corps faced persecution at the hands of their new communist overlords.
Even those who had signed the “Volkeslists” and other documents declaring allegiance to Germany
to escape starvation were treated as traitors to the motherland. Thousands
were shipped off to Stalin’s gulags, their suffering ensured for many more years.
Starved and overworked before the war began,
plundered and burned by the retreating Red Army in ‘41, subjected to genocidal Nazis and the
worst of the Holocaust under German occupation, invaded, looted, and scorched a second time
by the retreating Germans, then at the mercy of Stalin’s consolidation of power,
the civilians of Eastern Europe suffered more during the war than anyone else
But what do YOU think? Did YOU know the Soviet’s destroyed the pride of their 5-year plan?
Or that 85% of Byelorussia was completely destroyed? How do YOU
think the average peasant managed to survive such hardship? Let us know in the comments!