Khatyn massacre

Massacre

On 22 March 1943, a German convoy was attacked by Soviet partisans near Koziri village just 6 km away from Khatyn, resulting in the deaths of four police officers of Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118, which consisted mostly of Ukrainian collaborators, and Red Army prisoner-of-war volunteers and deserters. Among the dead was Hauptmann Hans Woellke, the battalion's commanding officer. Woellke was an Olympic champion in Berlin in 1936 and an acquaintance of Adolf Hitler.

Troops from the Dirlewanger Brigade, a unit mostly composed of criminals recruited for anti-partisan duties, entered the village and drove the inhabitants from their houses and into a shed, which was then covered with straw and set on fire. The trapped people managed to break down the front doors, but in trying to escape, were killed by machine gun fire. 147 people, including 75 children under 16 years of age, were killed – burned, shot or suffocated in fire. The village was then looted and burned to the ground.

Survivors

Only eight inhabitants of the village survived, from whom six were recognized as witnesses to the tragedy – five children and a single adult. By 2008, only two of them were still alive to tell the story.

1. Twelve-year-old Anton Iosifovich Baranovsky (1930–1969), was left for dead due to wounds in both legs. His injuries were treated by partisans. Five months after the opening of the Memorial, Anton died in unclear circumstances.
2. The only adult survivor of the Khatyn massacre, 56-year-old village smith Yuzif Kaminsky (1887–1973), also wounded and burnt, recovered consciousness after the executioners had left. He supposedly found his burned son, who later died in his arms. This incident was later commemorated in the form of a statue at the Khatyn Memorial.
3. Another boy, Alexander Petrovich Zhelobkovich (1930–1994), who was 12 years old at the time, also survived. When the Nazi soldiers almost surrounded the village, his mother woke him up and put him on a horse, on which he escaped to a nearby village. After the war, he served in the armed forces and later became a reserve lieutenant colonel.
4. Vladimir Antonovich Yaskevich (1930–2008) managed to survive by hiding in a potato pit 200 meters from his family house. Two Nazi soldiers noticed the boy, yet they spared him. Vladimir noted that they spoke German between themselves, not Ukrainian.
5. Early that morning, Vladimir's sister, Sofia Antonovna Yaskevich (later Fiokhina) (born 1934) hid in the cellar during the tragedy. As an adult she worked as a typist, and now lives in Minsk.
6. Viktor Andreevich Zhelobkovich (born 1936), a seven-year-old boy, survived the fire in the shed under the corpse of his mother. As an adult, he worked at the design office of precise engineering, and now lives in Minsk.

Two other Khatyn women survived because they were away from the village that day.

Post-war trials

The commander of one of the platoons of 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, Ukrainian Vasyl Meleshko, was tried in a Soviet court and executed in 1975. The chief of staff of 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, Ukrainian Grigory Vassiura, was tried in Minsk in 1986 and found guilty of all his crimes. He was sentenced to death by the verdict of the military tribunal of the Belorussian military district.

The case and the trial of the main executioner of Khatyn was not given much publicity in the media; the leaders of the Soviet republics worried about the inviolability of unity between the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples.

Khatyn Memorial

Khatyn became a symbol of mass killings of the civilian population during the fighting between partisans, German troops, and collaborators. In 1969, it was named the national war memorial of the Byelorussian SSR. Among the best-recognized symbols of the memorial complex is a monument with three birch trees, with an eternal flame instead of a fourth tree, a tribute to the one in every four Belarusians who died in the war. There is also a statue of Yuzif Kaminsky carrying his dying son, and a wall with niches to represent the victims of all the concentration camps, with large niches representing those with more than 20,000 victims. Bells ring every 30 seconds to commemorate the rate at which Belarusian lives were lost throughout the duration of the Second World War.

Part of the memorial is a Cemetery of villages with 185 tombs. Each tomb symbolizes a particular village in Belarus that was torched along with its population.

Among the foreign leaders who have visited the Khatyn Memorial during their time in office are Richard Nixon of the US, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Rajiv Gandhi of India, Yasser Arafat of the PLO, and Jiang Zemin of China.

According to Norman Davies, the Khatyn massacre was deliberately exploited by the Soviet authorities to cover up the Katyn massacre, and this was a major reason for erecting the memorial—it was done in order to cause confusion with Katyn among foreign visitors.

In 2004, the Memorial was renovated.

According to 2011 data, the Memorial was in the top ten of the most attended touristic sites in Belarus – that year it was visited by 182,000 people.