46 volumes of the criminal case. About 15 thousand pages about atrocities committed by Nazi accomplices against Soviet prisoners of war. Thirteen defendants. During the Great Patriotic War, they were all members of the Ukrainian Hundred, a special unit created in the Stalag-337 prisoner-of-war camp near Lesnaya station, twenty-two kilometers off Baranovichi. In the Central Archive of the Committee of State Security of Belarus the file is listed as the file 26540.
Dmitry Voropayev, Head of the Central Archives of the KGB of Belarus:
“The case (which by the way was miraculously preserved in the KGB archives in Belarus) is an exception to the rules. Why? Because according to the regulatory framework that was in the 60s, this case should have been kept somewhere in one of the departments of the then KGB of the Ukrainian SSR.
The case was initiated on January 4, 1967. And five days later, on January 9, the first defendant was arrested in Apatity, Murmansk Region. It was Andrei Yarosh, the leader of the Ukrainian Hundred. After he started talking and turning in his accomplices, arrests took place in many cities of the Soviet Union. On February 17, Nestor Chernobay was arrested; on February 25, Sergey Gayevoy was arrested too. The last to be arrested on July 30 was Ivan Prikmeta.
No time limit. Ukrainian Hundred.
According to Deputy Head of the Institute of National Security of Belarus, doctor of historical sciences Gennady Krasko, “for less than a year, about fifteen hundred witnesses and participants of those events were interrogated. About a hundred autopsies of burial sites were conducted. Various expert examinations (forensic and other), exhumations, operational and investigative measures allowed to establish the truth”.
At the beginning of the investigation only one person was working on the case. By the end of the trial of the Ukrainian Hundred, it was handled by a group of 18 investigators, headed by Captain Karnach, a senior investigator of the investigation department of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the BSSR.
Dmitry Voropayev, Head of the Central Archives of the KGB of Belarus:
This is essentially an unprecedented case because the entire investigation department included about 15 people. In fact, the entire investigation department of the Committee of the Republic was involved in the investigation of this case.
In December 1967, the trial started. The trial was open and took place in the Dzerzhinsky Club. There were 13 defendants on the bench, which was placed right on the stage. The former Nazi collaborators were tried by the court of the Belarusian military district. On December 28th the sentence was passed: seven were sentenced to death penalty and six to long terms of imprisonment.
Thus, after 25 years, the truth about the crimes against Soviet prisoners of war in only one camp became known. And about 160 of them were established in the territory of Belarus.
Even before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, the German government had developed special protocols regarding Soviet prisoners of war, according to which they had to operate in occupied territory. Food was not released to Red Army prisoners of war. They had to be fed at the expense of the local population. The occupation authorities took away food from civilians, who already had nothing to eat. Therefore, prisoners of war in the camps were starving to death by the thousands.
During the Great Patriotic War 810 thousand prisoners of war died in Belarus. 88,407 of them were exterminated in Stalag-337. This is the data of the Extraordinary State Commission. People were dying of hunger, cold, diseases. They were killed, hanged, poisoned in asphyxiators, and the half-dead were buried in graves.
Stalag-337 was one of the largest prisoners of war camps in the occupied Soviet Union territory. It consisted of the main camp, near Lesnaya station, and several branch camps. There was also a quarantine camp, which was in the woods, just a couple of kilometers off the main camp.
Gennady Krasko, Deputy Head of the Institute of National Security of Belarus, Doctor of Historical Sciences:
The Stalag was the central link in this system. Tentatively speaking, Stalag was the central office, and its branches were in any other towns and villages. If we are talking about Stalag-337, it was in Baranovichi and Slutsk.
There is no exact date of Stalag-337. Researchers have several versions close in time. This is August and September 1941. But there is an exact date of liquidation on the January 19, 1944. What makes this camp different from the system of prisoner-of-war camps is the fact that, from 1943 elders, women and children were held here.
Each of the branches began functioning at different times. In Slutsk, branch of Stalag-337 began operating in 1941. The infrastructure for the camp already existed. It was the former Soviet military camp of the 10th Artillery Regiment. There was a railroad nearby, which logistically simplified the moving of prisoners.
Vasily Tishkevich, a researcher of Slutsk local history museum, said that the camp was surrounded by several rows of barbed wire, there were towers along the perimeter, this place was under control. Badges were issued. Two field kitchens were set up in the camp.
In Baranovichi the branch of the Stalag was placed in the central prison. Prisoners were allocated several barracks. There were tens of thousands of inmates in rooms designed for three thousand people. There was not enough room. They slept standing up and interchangeably. Many people were outside.
Alexander Kislitsky, historian of intelligence services:
Some of the people were outside. It was cold, and they are summer soldier shirt. To keep warm somehow, the POWs in these barracks climbed into the attics. In the morning there was a formation. People had to come out of the attic for this roll call and formation. The POWs would climb out onto the roof. The buildings were not high, it was easier to get down from the roof. The German guards were entertaining themselves: they shot those POWs who climbed up on the roof.
A separate barrack was set aside for female prisoners of war. There were about four hundred of them. They were female scouts, parachutists, medical workers, and those who were arrested for communicating with partisans and underground members. There were no sanitary facilities for women.
Gennady Krasko, Deputy Head of the Institute of National Security of Belarus, Doctor of Historical Sciences:
The attitude of the occupiers toward Soviet women, especially servicewomen, is a pint of great pain. It was not customary to talk about it for a long time, but Soviet female soldiers: nurses and radio operators knew about this attitude. They knew what awaited them in German captivity. It was imminent torture, it was rape, it was death.
Railway cars with Soviet prisoners of war started arriving at the Lesnaya station in the summer of 1941. Thousands of hungry, wounded, and exhausted Red Army men were lined up along the ravine and led to the camp through the village. Not everyone managed to walk five kilometers. Some could walk only a few meters. They were thrown into the ravine and covered with earth.
The first prisoners of Stalag-337 were Red Army men who were captured in Belarus. Then the soldiers captured at Yelnya, Smolensk, Vyazma, Rzhev and Moscow were brought in. They were brought in thousands. At one and the same time in the camp near the Lesnaya station could be about 55,000 people. The Soviet prisoners of war were in hastily built barracks.
Alexander Kislitsky, historian of intelligence services:
These people did not even have the opportunity to dig themselves some kind of hole to hide in. They could not build a fire outside because the guards would immediately start fire, and many people died.
People were dying in their thousands a day. Typhus began to spread because of unsanitary conditions. There was no medical care. The German command did not issue medicines to Soviet prisoners of war. There were not even bandages to dress the wounds.
Marina Borodina, the researcher of the Baranovichi Local History Museum said: "Germans did everything for people to die because of difficult living conditions, because of diseases. They lived in very difficult conditions as in the mud. According to former prisoner Zhilin, they didn't wash themselves for four months. Everything was covered with lice, the skin was dirty, gray, and ulcerated”.
Vasil Tishkevich, researcher of Slutsk local history museum:
They were lying tightly against each other. There was not enough room. And in this position, they had to spend the night. This is the reason of the diseases, especially in the lower bunks people were lying on, and their clothes were crawling with lice.
Unbearable living conditions were accompanied by constant famine. The daily norm was 150 grams of bread with sawdust and a bowl of gruel made of rotten potatoes. At the same time prisoners were daily sent to physical labor. The working day could last 15 hours. In any weather.
Locals helped the prisoners in any way they could. Often, they ransomed a prisoner from the camp guards for food, hid them in barns, and then helped them escape. Often, they would take a piece of bread or boiled potatoes to the barbed wire to pass food to the prisoners. But the camp guards reacted immediately: the POW was shot, and the local resident was severely beaten.
People looked like skeletons. Their legs were swollen from hunger, and they could hardly move, but no one was exempt from work. They dug graves, repaired roads. About 500 people were logging every day. Not for the needs of the POWs, but for the camp administration.
Gennady Krasko, Deputy Head of the Institute of National Security of Belarus, Doctor of Historical Sciences:
“According to the rules of the Geneva Convention, officers were not to take part in any work. The German commanders were less than enthusiastic to this requirement, believing that the Soviet Union did not deserve any norms, neither those of the Geneva Convention, nor any others”.
In addition to the main camp and branches of Stalag-337, there were several other places where prisoners of war from this structure were held. The places where they were held belonged to the administration of the occupation authorities. The prisoners ensured a nourishing life for the Nazis.
Siegfried Eichhorn, a Baltic German, was appointed commandant of Stalag-337. The 861st Wehrmacht Guard Battalion of 150 men initially guarded the camp. The Abwehr intelligence department operated in the camp itself, one of the tasks of which was to form the camp administration from prisoners of war.
To select the German prisoners for their units, the camp administration divided them according to their nationality, the Ukrainians were assigned to a special group. In the cards of the prisoners of war they are marked with the letter U. The Abwehr decided to form from them a guard unit the Ukrainian Hundred. Its formation began in March 1942 on a voluntary basis.
Andrei Yarosh was surrounded near Nesvizh. It is unknown, whether he tried to get out to his own people or whether the decision to surrender came at once. But the fact remains that he came on his own to the German commandant's office, which was in the castle at the time.
Initially he was sent in a prison in Baranovichi, and from there to Lesnoy. From battalion commander, he became the leader of the Ukrainian Hundred. Yarosh worked as a schoolteacher before the war, teaching chemistry. And during the Great Patriotic War he helped train fighters of the Ukrainian Hundred. Three squads. Each had about 100 men.
They felt like masters of the camp. It was their job to guard the inner perimeter. They beat prisoners, raped women, shot them, pushed them into the asphyxiators. They killed 700 people a day. They buried them near the camp.
And in the second half of 1943 they began to cover up their crimes. The places of mass graves were leveled and then trees were planted there. They created single burial places, where the prisoners of war who had died in the autumn of 1943 were buried. But in 1967, during the investigation of the Ukrainian case, hundreds of events were held to make the truth known.
Gennady Krasko, deputy head of the Institute of National Security of Belarus, doctor of historical sciences:
As a result of operational measures, a set of search activities, about 60 members of the Ukrainian hundred were identified. Not all of them could have been prosecuted. More than 20 years have passed. Many had already died; others had gone into hiding.
In the summer of 1943, after a radical change in the Great Patriotic War, ten out of thirteen men went to join the partisans. Several joined the Suvorov detachment of the partisan brigade "Soviet Belarus," which operated in the Kossovsky, Ruzhany, and Drogichin districts.
Alexander Kislitsky, historian of special services:
They came and said they had been in captivity. We conducted an initial interrogation. But they came in a group, they testified. As a rule, those who came unarmed, said they had been held captive, or were not in the hundred, they concealed this information. Or there was such a thing: there was a record in the personal card of a partisan that he came from the Ukrainian Hundred. They said: I was there for 10-12 days. I got in, didn't kill anyone, went straight to the partisans.
In December 1967, the tyrants of the Ukrainian Hundred sat in the dock. They did not think that a quarter of a century later they would have to meet again, to look into the eyes of those people they had almost taken their lives.
The atrocities, which they tried so carefully to conceal, still had to be accounted for. The case of the Ukrainian Hundred is exceptional in the procedural practice of the Soviet Union. The capital punishment to which the seven defendants were sentenced was not carried out. The convicts lodged an appeal and appealed for pardon. The capital punishment was commuted to 15 years of imprisonment. They were spared their lives. The criminals responded with long sentences for crimes with no statute of limitations.













