Korablev and the Vinnitsa NKVD
Valeriy Vasylyev and Roman Podkur Translated by Simon Belokowsky
From the first days of the Nazi occupation, Vinnitsa’s citizens began to approach the occupation authority requesting that it investigate the secret burials carried out by the NKVD in 1937 and 1938 during the Great Terror.
However, it was only after their defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 that the Nazis began their investigation, unleashing a wide-reaching propaganda campaign accusing the Communist regime of the mass killing of Ukrainians. In this, they sought to discredit Soviet power in the eyes of the local population, hoping that it could be mobilized as a source of resistance to the approaching formations of the Red Army. This was happening at the same time that Hitler’s forces were themselves guilty of mass shootings and genocide in Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian lands.In April 1943, an international commission of experts examined the mass burial sites of Polish prisoners of war executed in the Katyn forest near Smolensk by the NKVD. The next month, mass exhumations began in Vinnitsa. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), brought together a group of criminal investigators to work in Vinnitsa. From 24 May to 3 October 1943, four commissions examining mass graves operated in the city, three German ones and one international commission made up of experts in criminal forensics from Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, and Hungary. In all, 95 graves containing 9,439 corpses were exhumed.1
Newspapers in Ukraine and many other European countries devoted significant attention to these events, labeling them a “frightening depiction of Bolshevik inhumanity.”2 Moscow offered a different assessment. On 12 August 1943, the newspapers Pravda and Izvestiia published a statement from the Soviet Information Bureau: “Berlin provocateurs are currently announcing supposedly ‘accidental’ discoveries of mass graves, attempting to attribute their own monstrously evil deeds to the Soviet authorities. In Vinnitsa, the Hitlerites are staging an odious and shameless comedy over the remains of its own victims.
The killers, whose hands are stained with the blood of innocents, are digging up the corpses of the people they have annihilated and putting on farcical inspections of their graves. The world has never before seen such atrocities and hypocrisy.”3When Soviet troops entered Vinnitsa in March 1944, witnesses to the exhumations who had been quoted in occupation newspapers or who simply told their neighbors about them were persecuted.4 In the course of the Nuremberg trials, Soviet representatives did all they could to avoid the dissemination of information about the events in Vinnitsa.
During the Cold War, information about the tragedy in Vinnitsa periodically appeared in the Ukrainian emigre press. The diaspora preserved the memory of the tragedy, discussing it in terms of crimes against the Ukrainian nation, genocide, or a “forgotten Holocaust.” Occasionally, the monstrous crimes of the Soviet regime in Vinnitsa garnered attention in connection with political developments. In September 1959, for example, the US House of Representatives held hearings on the events in Vinnitsa in 1943. It was no accident that these hearings directly followed Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States; the relevant report was published under the title “The Crimes of Khrushchev.”5 In Ukraine, the first newspaper articles revealing the mass killings of 1937 and 1938 in Vinnitsa were published only in 1988. The tragedy was referred to as the “Vinnitsa Kurapaty,” referring to a wooded tract on the outskirts of Minsk where mass graves were uncovered, also in 1988, containing the remains of those executed by the NKVD during the Great Terror. Only recently has the rich documentation on the Great Terror contained in the State Archive of the Security Services of Ukraine (HDA SBU) enabled the unlocking of the secrets of the Great Terror in Vinnitsa.6