The most horrible things Nazis did during WWII

The most horrible things Nazis did during WWII

A particularly vicious but somewhat lesser known Nazi crime was the establishing of typhus camps.

In March 1944, reconnaissance detachments of the Soviet 37th Guards Rifle Division of the 65th Army discovered several large concentration camps in the Poleise area, eastern Byelorussia. The conditions were absolutely appalling, typical of German brutality. According to an urgent report sent to Moscow by the Army’s chief of intelligence:

The camps were in open fields - surrounded by barbed wire. Their approaches had been mined. There was no shelter at all, not even of the flimsiest kind. Those imprisoned inside it were forced to lie on the ground. Many of them - already weak - lost the ability to move, and lay unconscious in the mud. The prisoners were forbidden to collect brushwood to make fires - for the slightest breach of this rule the Germans would shoot people. These camps have been deliberately put on the edge of a military zone. Most of the occupants are women, children and the elderly.

However, these were no ordinary death camps.

For the previous few weeks, the commander of German Army Group Centre Field Marshal Ernst Busch (who wasn’t exactly the brightest light in the military department but was a fervent Nazi) had ordered his 9th Army to herd over 47,000 Soviet civilians into these camps. Then they specifically brought in 2,000 typhus patients and interspersed them among the prisoners, creating an epidemic. The German calculation was that Soviet soldiers and medical personnels liberating these camps would rush in to help the gravely ill prisoners and typhus - carried by lice and fleas - would be transmitted to them.

The Germans also left a network of informers (who had been inoculated against typhus) in the camps to relay information about the spread of the disease among prisoners as well as Red Army units. Just as the Germans expected, Soviet soldiers, doctors and nurses were rapidly infected. Mikhail Gulyakin, a Soviet military surgeon with the 37th Guards Division, recalled:

When we reached the region of Ozarichi, in the Polesie marshes, our soldiers began falling ill with typhus. When we investigated the cause, we found that the Fascists had erected several concentration camps, in open fields, where thousands of Soviet citizens were forced to lie in the mud. The Nazis specifically brought typhus patients here, with the intention of creating an epidemic after the liberation of the camps by the Red Army.

According to General Pavel Batov - the commander of Soviet 65th Army, his entire 19th Rifle Corps had to be quarantined. When Field Marshal Busch heard of this information from his informers, he considered the heinous operation a stunning success and ordered more typhus camps to be built near Mogilev, Vitebs and on the east bank of the Dniepr.

Out of the original 49,000 prisoners, by the time the Red Army arrived, only 32,000 were alive. Over 15,000 of them were children under the age of 13 and 517 of these were orphans since their mothers had been shot or died from typhus, hunger and exposure.

“These atrocities we would neither forgive nor forget”, General Pavel Batov said. True to his words, only 3 months later in June 1944, General Batov and his 65th Army would take part in Operation Bagration to liberate the whole of Byelorussia and exact a bloody revenge on the German invaders. The entire German Army Group Center would be annihilated in a matter of weeks, paying in blood for their atrocities