From a folder of historic cards published in 1985 on the 40th anniversary of the victory of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War we continue our series looking at the Hero Cities and Fortresses as well as other sites and battles critical to the Soviet victory. The folder was entitled "No one is Forgotten. Nothing is Forgotten."
This sixteenth post looks at the depravity and cruelty displayed by the Nazi occupiers during the war including at Salaspils in Latvia where a powerful monument was erected after the war to honour the dead.
It is important to never forget the tremendous determination, courage and sacrifices of the Soviet peoples and Red Army in the great struggle of liberation against Nazism and fascism that was World War II.
(The fifteenth installment was Magnitogorsk and the Soviet rear (theleftchapter.com) )
The unprecedented cruelty and monstrous crimes of the fascist executioners committed against the civilian population of the Belarusian Khatyn, Pskov Krasukha, Lithuanian Ablingi and Pirchupis, Latvian Salaspils, where the Nazis burned thousands of civilians alive, including children, still chill the soul.
The population of the Soviet territory temporarily occupied by the Nazis was subjected to brutal violence, robbery and mass terror. The fascist monsters, in a wild rage against everything Soviet, shamelessly exterminated innocent people, destroyed flourishing cities, towns, villages and stanitsas, robbed residents, mocked them, took children from their parents, deprived old people and women of bread and shelter, and condemned the population to death by starvation. To this day, as evidence of the unprecedented cruelty and crimes of fascism, the words Khatyn and Salaspils, Babi Yar and Slavutich are memorized.
According to Hitler's so-called "Ost" plan, it was supposed to destroy 60 million Slavs - Czechs, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and turn the rest into slaves. And this monstrous plan was carried out. In tiny Khatyn alone, 149 people were shot and burned, including 75 children. In the Salaspils death camp, the fascist executioners killed 100,000 prisoners, including hundreds of young children. The Nazi occupiers shot, suffocated in gas chambers, hanged, and burned alive more than 195,000 in Kiev, more than 550,000 in Lvov and the Lvov region, more than 248,000 in the Zhitomir region, and in total more than 4 million Soviet citizens in the occupied regions of Ukraine; about 1.7 million people in the occupied regions of the RSFSR; more than 330,000 prisoners of war in Latvia and more than 313,000 people in Lithuania, including about 40,000 children; and 2,200 thousand local residents and prisoners of war in Belarus. Hundreds of thousands of residents of the occupied regions were driven into slave labor in Germany. Fascism and atrocities are inseparable concepts. The suffering of the peoples who were attacked by the unbridled Hitlerite hordes will never be forgotten.
The central part of the Salaspils memorial - Authors - sculptors L. Bukovsky, J. Zarins, O. Skarainis, architects G. Asaris, O. Zakamenny, O. Ostenberg, I. Strautmanis
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