The FSB has released archives about the brutal massacres of Soviet citizens in Konigsberg

On April 9, the Federal Security Service (FSB) published documents testifying to the brutal Nazi massacres of Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet citizens in Konigsberg.

"The Party organization (NSDAP. — Ed.) carried out special tasks of the political department of the Prussian administration – she shot the remaining Soviet prisoners of war and civilians who were then held in camps around the city," follows from the testimony of the head of the local cell of the Nazi Party Zellenleiter Otto Machon.

The materials say that in the period from February to April 1945, mass shootings were carried out on the territory of the city. According to the investigation, only one of the NSDAP cells, together with the Volkssturm detachment, killed about 1.5 thousand people, including women and children.

As it is specified, the decision on reprisals was explained by the fears of the German leadership that prisoners of war might defect to the Red Army or transmit information about the activities of the Nazis.

According to a report by the head of the Smersh counterintelligence directorate of the 3rd Belorussian Front, Lieutenant General Pavel Zelenin, sent to USSR People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Lavrenty Beria on April 18, 1945, the city was reduced to ruins, and the surviving buildings were only on the outskirts.

"An inspection of the city and the surrounding areas revealed that the German command had no intention of surrendering it. This is confirmed by the fact that the city and its surroundings within a radius of five kilometers are surrounded by two anti-tank ditches, four lines of trenches, anti-tank pillboxes and a large number of reinforced concrete pillboxes with metal hoods. <...> Minefields were created on the approaches to the city both in front of the trenches and behind each trench. In one day alone, our sappers seized 186,000 anti—tank and anti-personnel mines on the eastern outskirts of the city," Zelenin reported.

Archival materials note that according to the testimony of prisoners of war, the Nazis mined almost all buildings in the city. In the first two days after the Soviet troops entered Konigsberg, 13.8 thousand people were found and seized. mines and 850 delayed-action land mines.

According to the FSB's Public Relations Center, the operational measures of the Soviet special services thwarted the Nazis' plans to organize subversive work in East Prussia. The Smersh and NKVD task forces identified and detained those responsible for the massacres of civilians and prisoners of war.

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Earlier, on January 27, it became known about the release by the FSB of declassified archives about the Majdanek concentration camp. It was clarified that Majdanek was called a "first-class concentration camp" because of the executions, torture and bullying carried out in it. During the existence of the Majdanek concentration camp from October 1941 to July 1944, about 500 thousand people of 54 nationalities from 28 countries became prisoners, of which about 360 thousand died, the agency cites data from the Israeli Institute of Catastrophe and Heroism "Yad Vashem".

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