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| FSB declassified testimony of captured Wehrmacht general about crimes in the USSR |
| 2024-07-18 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. [Regnum] The Russian FSB has published declassified archives that talk about the crimes of the military commandant of the Belarusian Mogilev, Major General Gottfried von Erdmannsdorff. The Nazi walked through Moscow 80 years ago, leading a huge column of captured Germans. He is responsible for hundreds of killed and burned Russian soldiers. On July 17, 1944, von Erdmannsdorff was paraded along the main streets of Moscow along with 19 other Wehrmacht generals. This event in history was called the "Parade of the Defeated", or Operation "Big Waltz". The interrogation protocol of von Erdmannsdorff, in which he gives detailed testimony about the war against the USSR and his personal participation in war crimes, has now become available. The German admitted that he gave orders to shoot captured Red Army commissars and arrest communists. From June 22 to September 1941, one commissar was shot and about 600 communists were arrested. They were all shot as well. "On my orders, Soviet citizens were arrested, sent to camps, and forcibly sent to hard labor in Germany. I personally approved 120-125 death sentences handed down by the secret field police to Soviet citizens who had connections with the partisans. All of them were shot, and their bodies were burned," the general's confession is recorded in the protocols. At the end of June 1944, during the offensive operation "Bagration", the city of Mogilev was liberated, which the Nazis intended to turn into an impregnable fortress. In the battles for Mogilev, the Germans lost more than 6,000 soldiers and officers, 2,000 were taken prisoner. Among the prisoners were two generals: the military commandant of Mogilev von Erdmansdorff with his staff and the commander of the 12th Infantry Division, Lieutenant General Rudolf Bamler. When the investigator asked von Erdmannsdorff how he viewed Hitler’s aggression against the USSR, he replied: “as a great crime.” As reported by the Regnum news agency, the collected evidence confirms that the fascists, led by Adolf Hitler, planned to exterminate the Soviet people. This was stated by the Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin. The Russian FSB has published a declassified archive containing testimony from the former chief of staff of the NSDAP state propaganda department, Werner Wächter, a subordinate of Joseph Goebbels, about how the Nazis concealed preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union. The FSB Directorate in the Smolensk Region has declassified archival documents on crimes committed by the Nazis in the region during the Great Patriotic War, including materials on the execution of Poles and the falsification of the Katyn case by the Third Reich's special services. |
| Posted by:badanov |