bombsaway wrote: ↑Wed Feb 25, 2026 11:30 pm
So in light of this, I hope you can see why I think your pleading around Secret Order No. 612/43 is so silly. This applied only to people in concentration camps, which there's no evidence that the "resettled" Jews of of Volhynia and Podolia even sniffed . So you're just moving the conversation towards a completely different subject, derailing this thread.
The figures your opponent cites regarding the 'unfit' and children in Volhynia must be viewed through the lens of German military pragmatism in 1942. From their perspective, a child who loses their parents in a 'security clearing' is not just a logistical burden; they are a future partisan.
Under the Barbarossa Decree, the goal was the 'total pacification' of the East. Leaving a generation of survivors who harbor an 'obvious hate' for the occupying force was seen as a strategic failure. Just as Alexander Pechersky proved that Soviet-trained Jews were an immediate existential threat at Sobibor, the German administration viewed the youth as a long-term security risk. They weren't 'clearing the books' via 14f13; they were conducting a generational military operation to ensure no 'avengers' could ever threaten the Heer's rear area again. This is the documented administrative reality of the East, regardless of any later gassing narratives.
You are viewing these records through a 21st-century humanitarian lens. In 1942, the Barbarossa Decree was the law of the land. It didn't matter if the 3,000 people shot in Rovno were children or 'unfit'; under German military law, they were a security risk and a logistical burden in a total war.
The Germans weren't 'clearing the books' with 14f13—that was for the camps. In the East, they were neutralizing a population that produced men like Alexander Pechersky. They saw the 'obvious hate' of the survivors as a future military liability. The executions were a generational security operation, documented as such in their own administrative records, long before any narratives about gassing were introduced.
To understand why the German administration in Volhynia and Podolia acted with such 'restrained aggression,' one must look at what the NKVD had already done in Kurapaty and Vinnytsia.
The Jews of the East were caught in a 'biological and logistical' pincer. On one hand, the Soviet state had already been 'clearing' Jewish intellectuals and 'enemies of the people' in sites like Kurapaty. On the other, the German Barbarossa Decree viewed the remaining population as a Soviet asset.
When the Germans found the NKVD pits in Vinnytsia, it reinforced their military belief that the East was a zone where 'civilized' rules of war did not apply. This wasn't a gassing narrative; it was a competition of massacres. The German 'security clearings' were a response to a Soviet system that had already established the administrative precedent for mass execution. If you ignore the Soviet atrocities, you ignore the very 'existential threat' the Germans used to justify their laws.
Kurapaty (Belarus)
Located on the outskirts of Minsk, this site contains victims executed by the NKVD between 1937 and 1941.
Official Belarusian SSR Investigation (1988): Estimated at least
30,000 victims.
Revised Official Estimate (1990s): Later government investigations lowered the figure to around
7,000.
Independent Historical Estimates: Historian Zianon Pazniak, who first revealed the site, originally estimated between 102,000 and 250,000 deaths. Other scholars suggest a range of 30,000 to 100,000.
Vinnytsia (Ukraine)
This massacre occurred during the Great Purge in 1937–1938 and was exhumed by German forces in 1943.
Documented Recoveries: International commissions in 1943 recovered 9,439 bodies from 91 mass graves.
Estimated Total: Most historical records cite over 9,000 documented deaths, though local testimonies suggested other grave sites remained uninvestigated due to the German retreat.
Victim Profile: Identification efforts showed the majority were Ukrainians, followed by ethnic Poles and some
While there were certainly Jewish victims at both Kurapaty and Vinnytsia, historical evidence and investigations show that they were not the majority.
Vinnytsia: Investigations conducted in 1943 identified the vast majority of victims as ethnic Ukrainians, followed by ethnic Poles. Of the bodies identified, very few were Jewish. Nazi propaganda at the time often depicted the NKVD perpetrators with stereotypical Jewish features to promote the idea of "Judeo-Bolshevism," which may be the source of the claim you read.
Kurapaty: The victims were primarily Soviet citizens from Belarus, including a wide cross-section of the population (intellectuals, farmers, and workers). While some investigations in the 1990s by a "civil commission" attempted to claim the victims were mostly European Jews killed by Germans, most historians and eyewitnesses maintain the victims were a diverse mix of locals executed by the NKVD. A monument was later installed by the Jewish community in Kurapaty to honour the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim victims of the site.