On March 22, 1943, the Belorusian town of Khatyn, north of Minsk, was annihilated by occupying German forces. The method of execution was both exceedingly cruel and also tragically common during the war: the entire population of 157 people were herded into a barn, which was set on fire, and German soldiers looking on shot anyone who tried to escape from the blaze.
The attack was not arbitrary: earlier that day, anti-fascist partisans had ambushed a German convoy about six kilometers away, near the village of Koziri, killing four soldiers including their commanding officer, who happened to be Olympic champion shot-putter Hans Woellke.
The unit guarding the convoy was Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118, an auxiliary police unit drawn from members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, a Ukrainian collaborationist group that aided Nazi forces in the genocide of Jews and Poles in western Ukraine. They were joined by the Dirlewanger Brigade, a particularly brutal unit composed of hardened criminals who were turned loose against insurgent groups in occupied Poland and later occupied parts of the USSR.
It’s not known why Khatyn, the further village from the attack, was targeted, or if there was any connection between the partisans and the town. Nonetheless, an example was to be made of the town.
Only six people survived the massacre: five children and one adult man, a blacksmith named Joseph Kamensky. The 56-year-old Kamensky was burned by the blaze, but not seriously. However, his son was mortally wounded and died in his arms.
After the war, the perpetrators of the massacre were variously killed by Soviet authorities, including Bruno Pavel, who ordered the attack, who was prosecuted in the 1946 Riga Trial and executed, and several identified collaborators. However, the executions were not highly publicized by the Soviet authorities, who feared the Ukrainian ethnicity of the killers would create animosities between the two Soviet member republics.
A monument was built on the site in 1969 and today serves as Belarus’ national war memorial. It commemorates all those who died under the Nazi occupation, including the residents of Khatyn, the Jews targeted for industrial extermination as part of the Holocaust, and the 1.2 million Byelorussians killed. A statue portrays Kamensky holding his dying son.
What happened at Khatyn was emblematic of the Nazi treatment of its occupied territories in the east, where Adolf Hitler’s vision of a “Greater Germany” involved depopulating the region of its Slavic, Jewish and Romani inhabitants and replacing them with German settlers - a political program directly modeled on the American conquest of Native American tribal lands. The Volga River, Hitler once said, would be “our Mississippi.”
Nearly one-quarter of Belarus’ population was murdered during the war, including 9 out of 10 Belarusian Jews, or 800,000 people. Like the rest of the occupied Soviet territories, Belarus was a hive of partisan warfare against the Nazi war machine, and such retributions as that experienced by Khatyn were common.
The murder spree only ended in 1944, when nearly the entirety of the BSSR was suddenly liberated in the sweeping Red Army maneuvers of Operation Bagration, which annihilated one-third of the German Army in the east.