MINSK, 19 March (BelTA) - We must never forget the tragedy of the Ozarichi death camp, Aleksandr Shpakovsky, the head of the information and educational outreach center Actual Concept, said in his Telegram channel.
“Today marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Ozarichi death camp. In fact, it was a compound of three camps located in the present-day Kalinkovichi District, Gomel Oblast. The death camp was put up for ‘unemployable residents' of the frontline areas, mostly very old men, women and children. All men aged between 15 and 65 were made to dig trenches and do other works for the benefit of the occupying forces. The camps were known for executions, torture, prisoner starving, typhoid infection. Some historians tend to believe that the Germans specifically created the epidemic among prisoners in order to use typhus as a biological weapon against the advancing Soviet troops. More than 20,000 of the total 50,000 prisoners rounded up in Ozarichi died in a short period of time," Aleksandr Shpakovsky reminds.
In his opinion, it was the Wehrmacht that was responsible for these crimes, not the Gestapo or the SS. "Commander of the 35th Infantry Division Lieutenant General Johann-Georg Richert was charged with war crimes and convicted by the Soviet Military Tribunal in the Minsk Trial and executed by hanging in 1946 in Minsk. We must not forget about it. We need to revisit the eyewitness accounts and share these terrible stories with children. Otherwise the so-called ‘historians' living off of foreign grants will take over and tell our children that none of this happened, and that Germany would not have attacked Belarus if it had not been for the ‘totalitarian Soviet Union',” the analyst said. “I am very serious about it because at one of the dialogue platforms I already heard the opinion that policemen and collaborators were ‘resistance movement fighters' ‘opposed to the dictate of the Communist Party'.”
