NKVD prisoner massacres

Before the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviets were holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in NKVD prisons across their occupied territories in Eastern Europe. 

  Right after the invasion began, the NKVD was ordered to kill or evacuate 140,000 prisoners from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. 

Events

The order was carried out in chaos. Two-thirds of the said prisoners were killed by the NKVD. Among the prisoners killed by the NKVD, at least 9,800 were reportedly executed in prisons and 1,443 executed during evacuation. 

Geographically, 20,000–30,000 of them died in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, and 9,000 in the Ukrainian SSR, which had just gone through the Holodomor and Great Purge-related massacres in the 1930s. Rather than releasing their prisoners as they hurriedly retreated during the first week of the war, the Soviet secret police killed most of them. In the first week of the invasion, the NKVD prisoner executions totaled some 10,000 in western Ukraine and more than 9,000 in Vinnytsia, eastward toward Kyiv. Comparable numbers of prisoners were executed in eastern Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Soviet areas had already sustained hundreds of thousands of executions during the 1937–1938 Great Purge.Valery Vasiliev, Yuriy Shapoval, "Stages of «Great Terror»: The Vinnytsia Tragedy", Zerkalo Nedeli, No. 31 (406), August 17–23, 2002, (in Russian , in Ukrainian  ) They were targeted for mass murder over their Polish or Ukrainian identity. Many historians classify the NKVD prisoner massacres as crimes against humanity. 

Medical students who came across the victim bodies of one of such massacres in Lviv described the scene:"Lviv museum recounts Soviet massacres" , Natalia A. Feduschak. CDVR. 2010. Retrieved 6 feb 2017


Academic views

Historian Yury Boshyk wrote:

Related pages

 Holodomor
 Great Purge
 Genocides by the Soviet Union

References

Category:Racism
Category:Communism
Category:War crimes
Category:History of the Soviet Union
Category:Massacres in Europe during World War II