[...] Before leaving Dubno, the Russians, as they had done in
Lvov, committed extensive mass-murder.
[...] Before their flight [from Tarnopol], as in Lvov and
Dubno, the Russians went on a rampage there. Disinterments
revealed 10 bodies of German soldiers. Almost all of them had
their hands tied behind their backs with wire. The bodies revealed
traces of extremely cruel mutilations such as gouged eyes, severed
tongues and limbs.
The number of Ukrainians who were murdered by the Russians,
among them women and children, is set finally at 600. Jews and
Poles were spared by the Russians. The Ukrainians estimate the
total number of [Tarnopol] victims since the occupation of the
Ukraine by the Russians at about 2,000. The planned deportation of
the Ukrainians already started in 1939. There is hardly a family
in Tarnopol from which one or several members have not
disappeared. [...] The entire Ukrainian intelligentsia is
destroyed. Since the beginning of the war, 160 members of the
Ukrainian intelligentsia were either murdered or deported.
Inhabitants of the town had observed a column of about 1,000
civilians driven out of town by police and army early in the
morning of July 1, 1941.
As in Lvov, torture chambers were discovered in the cellars of
the Court of Justice. Apparently, hot and cold showers were also
used here (as in Lemberg [Lviv]) for torture, as several bodies
were found, totally naked, their skin burst and torn in many
places. A grate was found in another room, made of wire and set
above the ground about 1m in height, traces of ashes were found
underneath. A Ukrainian engineer, who was also to be murdered but
saved his life by smearing the blood of a dead victim over his
face, reports that one could also hear screams of pain from women
and girls. (Operational Situation Report USSR No. 28, July 20,
1941, in Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, The
Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi
Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews July 1941-January 1943,
Holocaust Library, New York, 1989, p.38-40)
(14) Had their noses, ears, tongues and even genitals cut away.
F. Fedorenko
MY TESTIMONY
When the bolsheviks retreated before the German onslaught in
the Second World War they took care in advance not to leave any
prisoners behind when the Germans arrived.
The prisoners were driven, en masse, under heavy NKVD guard
deep into Russia or Siberia, day and night. Many of them were so
tired that they could go no further. These were shot without
compunction where they fell. Terrible things happened then.
Sometimes, wives recognized their husbands among the evacuees, as
the prisoners were being driven through the villages. There was
great despair when they saw their loved ones taken under the
muzzles of automatic guns, to far, unknown places.