Ukraine commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Koriukivka’s tragedy
In the chronicle of Hitler's terror in the occupied territories, as the symbols of mass extermination of civilians was recorded - Belarusian Hatyn’ with 149 killed, Czech Lidice with 320 victims, French Oradour-sur-Glane where the Schutzstaffel (SS) soldiers killed 642 people. But the biggest one-stage Nazis punitive action against civilians happened on March 1, 1943 in the Ukrainian village Koriukivka (the Chernihiv region). Nearly seven thousand people were shot or burned alive in this Ukrainian village!
From the first months of occupation, the Nazis began the repression in the Koriukivka village. In January 1942 the occupants shot all the Jews (about 300 people) in February - 131 partisan relatives and 12 Gypsies.
Morning of March 1, 1943, after the partisan raid against Nazis garrison in Koriukivka, on the order of the Nazis General Hoizenberg, the Germans punitive detachment surrounded the village and began to exterminate the civilians. Under the pretext of checking documents, the people drove to the premises of restaurant, theater, club, clinic, two schools and the churchyard. The victims were shot by the parties of 50-100 people, regardless of gender and age. March 2, 1943 the buildings stuffed with corpses (only in the restaurant more than 500 bodies) began to burn, but the killings continued.
"My little daughter was lying on my chest when we started to shot at the restaurant. We were driven there like cattle at the slaughterhouse ... Fascist shot into my eye ... I do not remember anything else. Three of my children were killed. They even haven’t been buried ... they were burned by the cursed torturers "- remember Eugen Rymar.
Punishers scoured the village, took the people and thrown them alive into burning houses. Vira Sylchenko, who hid in a haycock, saw how Fascists threw into the fire her mother, sister and sister-in-law. At the same time the large groups of people had been shooting with machine guns at the churchyard. By the end of the day March 2, 1943 the Koriukivka was completely burned.
Koriukivka survivors hid into the forest, some of them, mostly the elderly, a few days later came back to the village. But on March 9, 1943 the Nazis appeared again. Olds was driven out from their homes, brought to a shed, poured with kerosene and burned. People was pushed into the plant furnace for burning bricks and burned ...
According to the conclusion of the Regional Commission on the Investigation of the crimes of the Nazis in Koriukivka, during two days Fascists brutally killed at least 6,700 people (5,612 bodies remain unidentified). From 1300 Koriukivka’s buildings survived just ten. The Nuremberg trials recognized this massacre as the largest German punitive expeditions against civilians in World War II.
Tragedy Koriukivka was only an episode of realization of the major inhuman Nazi Reich - plan "Ost". The first fully published only in 2009, it was a program of mass ethnic cleansing of the population of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Hitler's part of a global plan "exemption living space" for Germans and other "Germanic peoples" at the expense of territories of "lower races" - first of all Slavs.