The FSB Directorate for the Volgograd Region declassified documents on Nazi crimes

The Russian FSB Directorate for the Volgograd Region has declassified documents about the atrocities of the German fascists during the Great Patriotic War in the region.

“On the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Fascism, which has been celebrated since 1962 on the second Sunday of September, the Russian FSB Directorate for the Volgograd Region declassified documentary materials testifying to the facts of atrocities by the German invaders in the Stalingrad Region against Soviet prisoners of war,” the department said in a statement.

According to the FSB, the largest camp for prisoners of war in the Stalingrad region was the Dulag-205 transit camp, located in the village of Alekseevka near Stalingrad. The camp regime here was very strict, the guards had unlimited powers. The prisoners were beaten with sticks, starved, dogs were set on them, and they were shot.

“Russian prisoners of war held in the Alekseevsky camp “Dulag-205”, as well as in other German prisoner of war camps, were fed hand to mouth only so that they could work for us... The atrocities that we committed against prisoners of war were aimed at exterminating them as superfluous people... In the German army in relation to the Russians there was a belief that is a law for us: Russians are inferior people, barbarians who have no culture. The Germans are called upon to establish a new order in Russia,” the department’s report quotes the words of a former counterintelligence officer at the camp, Captain Langheld, as he said during interrogation on September 1, 1943.

It is noted that the same attitude towards defenseless prisoners of war was applied in other camps. From declassified documents it became known that prisoner of war camps were also located in the village of Bolshaya Rossoshka, in the city of Kalach and the villages of Ostrovsky and Sukhanov. The living conditions in these camps were extremely difficult: prisoners worked daily for 12-13 hours without a break, slept on bare ground in sheds and ate steamed rye without salt once a day, and were beaten with sticks for the slightest offense.