[Johnny Alias]

The NKVD prisoner massacres refer to a series of mass executions carried out by the Soviet Union's secret police, the NKVD, during World War II. These atrocities occurred in 1941, following Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. As the German army advanced, the NKVD executed thousands of prisoners in various prisons across the western parts of the USSR, in areas that were likely to fall into German hands.

The exact number of victims is not definitively known, but it is estimated that the NKVD killed between 9,000 and 100,000 prisoners during these massacres. The victims included a wide range of detainees, from political prisoners and convicted criminals to prisoners of war and those held for minor offenses.

The NKVD's actions were part of a broader scorched earth policy adopted by the Soviet government, intended to prevent any resources, including human resources, from falling into enemy hands. However, the mass executions were carried out in a particularly brutal and haphazard manner, with prisoners often being shot in their cells or hastily buried in mass graves.

After the German forces occupied these areas, they discovered the massacre sites, which were then used as propaganda against the Soviet regime, portraying them as atrocities committed by the Soviets against their own people.

[kellyhound]

in short: the secret police just loved torturing, raping and killing

the nazi's told lies it was also done by jews to encourage the population to also round up and kill jews.

The victims were mostly Ukrainian nationalists, but also included Polish and Ukrainian intellectuals, as well as some Jews. When German troops arrived in Lvov on June 30, they found over 4,000 corpses of men, women and children in the NKVD prisons, many of whom showed signs of torture, rape, and mutilation. The actual number of victims is difficult to ascertain, due to the fact that two of prisons' basements were filled with bodies from floor to ceiling, making passage into further rooms, which presumably contained more bodies, impossible. Confronted with such a large number of corpses, the German authorities laid out for identification those bodies suitable for transport found on the upper stories of the prisons, but chose to seal the entrances to the basements after covering the victims with lye. On the same day, the local Ukrainian population, enraged by the executions, and encouraged by the German authorities to believe that the murders had been carried out by Jews, began taking part in a pogrom along with Einsatzgruppe C and German soldiers, as well as some of the city's Polish inhabitants. When the violence ended four days later on July 3, 1941, over 4,000 Jews had been murdered. A further 7,000 Jews, as well as 73 NKVD functionaries, were rounded-up and shot by the Einsatzgruppe in various Aktionen carried out in retaliation for the prison massacres.

[Johnny Alias]

More photos and documents, including NKVD execution lists and a January 31, 1938 resolution by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to extend the National operations of the NKVD for the destruction of Polish, Latvian, German, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Iranian, Harbinian, Chinese and Romanian "spy-saboteurs” signed by Josef Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan and Vlas Chubar:

[Brainplague]

So I guess the Russians had a holocaust of their own going on, didn't they? I have some reading to do now...

[Johnny Alias]

Originally Posted by Brainplague ↗

So I guess the Russians had a holocaust of their own going on, didn't they? I have some reading to do now...

Definitely .. a couple more threads coming up from me in this dark period, so stay tuned to for more

***

feel free to add facts, pictures, videos and relevant primary historical documents to the threads as you learn more about em

[Vixənn]

Originally Posted by Johnny Alias ↗

Definitely .. a couple more threads coming up from me in this dark period, so stay tuned to for more

***

feel free to add facts, pictures, videos and relevant primary historical documents to the threads as you learn more about em

what establishes someone as a political prisoner, as opposed to just a regular prisoner?

[Johnny Alias]

Originally Posted by Vixənn ↗

what establishes someone as a political prisoner, as opposed to just a regular prisoner?

Many of the most targeted victims of the NKVD were branded “political prisoners” or “enemies of the people”, these consisted of citizens who mentioned the ideas, culture or music of certain ethnic groups, mainly Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians. But almost anyway be could be accused and shot for being a “spy-saboteur.”

Also shot and tortured were families of the victims, friends, relatives, and people who NKVD officers already had personal vendettas against. One man was shot while still wearing his tie; he had probably been randomly picked up off the street by the NKVD and simply tortured and shot along with the rest.

For the Soviet communists, revolution wasnt much of a revolution without spilling blood, and for them it was better to liquidate 1,000 innocents than to let a single “saboteur” go free ..

[Johnny Alias]

*anyone

[Vixənn]

Johnny Alias
oh shit, okay. so basically the same as the Uighurs in china?

[Johnny Alias]

Originally Posted by Vixənn ↗

Johnny Alias
oh shit, okay. so basically the same as the Uighurs in china?

Yes, and that both are considered targeted genocide, or ethnic cleansing.

However, what distinguished the NKVD from other secret police-state terror organizations like those of the Nazis, Pol Pot, North Koreans or the PRC (China), was that the Soviets seemed to really focus more on inflicting mass torture, mutilations and general hysterical terror than the others. Their state repression was particularly bloody, painful and ruthless.

These prison massacres also took place in the years after the Holodomor occurred, in which millions of Soviet citizens were starved in a mass planned famine in order to break down their nationalistic tendencies and general hesitancy to communist ideas.

The Ukrainians and Poles knew from the mass repressions, shootings and communist engineered famine who their torturers were; so when the Germans invaded in the days after June 22, 1941, the locals found out what the NKVD did to their family members and went on mass killing sprees to take their revenge.

What followed was 4 years of mass genocide in which 27 million Russians and 7 million Germans were killed.