Chervyen massacre

The Chervyen massacre (; ; Belarusian: Чэрвеньская разня) was one of the NKVD prisoner massacres. 


  Over 1,000 political prisoners from Poland, Belarus and Lithuania were executed by the NKVD near Chervyen (present-day Belarus) on 25–27 June 1941, a few days after the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union began.

Background

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

  The sudden invasion caused such chaos that the NKVD was ordered to kill or evacuate 140,000 prisoners from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, which ended up in two-thirds of the said prisoners being killed.

Massacre

On June 24, 15 Lithuanians who had received death sentences before the evacuation were executed On June 25, about 2,000 prisoners were marched on foot by troops from the 42nd NKVD brigade to Chervyen. 500 prisoners were executed along the way for not walking fast enough. 

On June 27, while the remaining prisoners were put in Chervyen prison, the Belarusian NKVD received a telegram from Mikhail Ivanovich Nikolsky, head of the NKVD prison department in Moscow, ordering him to leave 400 prisoners in Chervyen and execute the rest. Hundreds more prisoners were shot during further evacuation. 200 prisoners escaped, while 40 Lithuanian prisoners survived.

Related pages
 Naliboki massacre
 Genocides by the Soviet Union
 Guerrilla war in the Baltic states

Notes

References

Category:Racism
Category:Communism
Category:Massacres
Category:Soviet crimes against humanity