The occupation of Kharkov "Terror"

Immediately after the German troops occupied the city, the occupation authorities began their policy of terror. On the first day, 116 people were caught and hanged on the streets

Grabbed indiscriminately, just those who first came to hand. The executions were carried out in public, on the central streets of the city: Sumskaya, Sverdlov, Tevelev Square. The corpses of the hanged men hung for several weeks. This was the first step in frightening the local population.

After the house was blown up in November 1941 by the Soviet radio mine where the headquarters of the commandant Kharkov, commander of the 68th infantry division, stirred up, the executions of Soviet citizens were repeated again, several dozen more people were hanged.

Population of the city in the barracks of the tractor factory. From December 1941, Jews, Gypsies, and citizens of other nationalities were shot on the outskirts of Kharkov in Drobitsky Yar.

At the same time, in December 1941, about 400 patients of the psychiatric hospital (Saburka) were taken to the outskirts of the city and executed.

Now, near the place of execution, the largest market in Eastern Europe is located near the Barabashova metro station, and only a small memorial stone hidden behind a sporting goods store reminds of those tragic events.

Back in Kharkov, the Germans used a machine to destroy unwanted gas exhausts, the so-called gazenvagen. Her driver will be convicted by a Soviet court in December 1943 and executed.

The Germans distinguished themselves in Kharkov, another kind of atrocity, they created an orphanage, where children, and most of them were children under 10 years old, were deliberately starved, and after the child’s body was exhausted, they took the so-called “hungry” blood for transfusion Luftwaffe pilots.

The exact number of dead children is not known now, but definitely we are talking about several hundred.

Soviet prisoners of war were destroyed with extraordinary cruelty, several thousand died in a camp on Cold Mountain, several hundred wounded Soviet soldiers were burned alive by the SS division "Adolf Hitler" in March 1943, during the second assault on the city.

All in all, Kharkov from the city of nearly a million people in the summer of 1941, in the autumn of 1943, numbered about 200 thousand people. This price is less than 2 years of occupation of the city.