It was
only when the Red Army regained territory
previously controlled by the German Army
that the Soviet Government became fully aware of the war
crimes that had been committed. Soviet soldiers who had been taken
prisoner had been deliberately starved to death. Of the 5,170,000
soldiers captured by the Germans, only 1,053,000 survived.
Women and
children were also killed in large numbers. The Jews
were always the first to be executed, but other groups, especially
the Russians, were also killed. German soldiers were given the instructions
that the "Jewish-Bolshevik system must be destroyed". Adolf
Hitler was aware that to control the vast population of the Soviet
Union would always be an extremely difficult task. His way of dealing
with the problem was by mass exterminations.
Soviet
authorities estimate that in all, over twenty million of their people
were killed during the Second World War. However,
it has been argued that Hitler's policy of exterminating the Soviet
people guaranteed his defeat. Stories of German atrocities soon reached
Red Army soldiers fighting at the front.
Faced with the choice of being executed or being killed fighting,
the vast majority chose the latter. Unlike most other soldiers, when
faced with defeat in battle, the Soviet army rarely surrendered.
This was
also true of civilians. When territory was taken by the German
Army, women, children and old men went into hiding and formed
guerrilla units. These groups, who concentrated on disrupting German
supply lines, proved a constant problem to the German forces.
Kerch,
like other parts of the Soviet Union suffered at the hands of the
Schutz Staffeinel (SS).
Dmitri Baltermants took this photograph
of survivors seaching for friends and relatives in 1942.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
