The Forest of Souls

This is what I know:
Marek Lange.
Born: 1923.
Place of birth: Litva, Poland. (NB no record ‘Litva’. Search Russian archives?)
Father: Stanislau Lange
Mother: Kristina Lange.
Arrived in UK 1943. Joined Polish Free Forces. (What was Lange doing between 1940- 1943? How did he survive the Nazi occupation?)
Marital history: married 1955, divorced, 1961. Ex-wife died, 1963
Children: Katya Lange, born 1959

Any info on KURAPATY FOREST or COLLABORATORS in Eastern Europe during the Nazi Occupation gratefully recieved…

I saw your query on the web – sorry I didn’t pick it up earlier. I have been doing some research into the events of the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. My grandfather who was Lithuanian was on active service in the Ukraine and Belarus from 1941-1944 when he escaped the advancing Red Army and joined up with the Allied advance. My grandmother always talked of him as a hero, but I have recently found out some things that make me doubtful about his role. He served in the 12^th Lithuanian Police Auxiliary Batallion – the Schutsmannschaft. If any of your research gives you information about this, I would be grateful if you could give me access to it. The reason I am contacting you is that he used to talk about death pits in the forest around Minsk, the Kurapaty Forest. A few days before he died, he said to me “We were never the worst.”
Emzed.

Emzed – I don’t think I can tell you anything you want to hear. The 12th Battalion were among the worst. If your grandfather was involved with them, then he at least watched things happening that no civilised person should see.
If you want more information, check out some articles on the Telegraph site (www.telegraph.co.uk). Search for Antonas Gecas, aka Gecevicius. He was the commander of Platoon 3 of the 2nd Company of the 12th Battalion. They were all volunteers.
The Kurapaty Forest was nothing to do with them. In a way, your grandfather was right. More people were killed in Kurapaty than by the Nazis, if you want to judge these things by numbers. Sorry.

I’m working on my doctorate on the occupation of Ukraine 1941-1944, and I came across this when I was going though some original documents from the occupation of 1941- any use? [I have translated this from the original German]

Application by Kube, Generalkommissar of Byelorussia, to Lohse concerning the condition of German Jews in Minsk:
My Dear Hinrich
I wish to ask you personally for an official directive for the conduct of the civilian administration towards the Jews transported fro Germany to Byelorussia. Among these Jews are men who fought at the Front and have the Iron Cross. I am certainly a hard man and willing to help solve the Jewish question, but people who come from our own cultural sphere are just not the same as the brutish hordes in this place. Is the slaughter to be carried out by the Lithuanians and the Letts, who are themselves rejected by the population here? I couldn’t do it. I beg you to give clear directives.
With heartfelt greeting
Heil Hitler!
Yours truly, Wilhelm Kube

Best, KC, Sheffield Uni.

KC – you got any more of this stuff? This is what I want to see.

Couple of links that might interest you:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/1178425.stm
www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s104149.htm

Dean Livesey, Australia Review.

Dean – good stuff. It just gets worse – you working on this at all?

I have an eyewitness account of the Kurapaty massacres – do you want it?

Emzed – thought you might like to see the following article that I wrote last year. You can look up details of the case on the paper’s web site.

Dear Mr Denbigh

I have seen your query and I have some information you may find useful. I have not been able to track down your Marek Lange, but I have access to the archives at Hrodna where such information may be kept.

I am an archivist here in Minsk, and I have access to many papers relating to the last war. Your talk of the Auxiliary Police Battalions brings bad memories to those of us whose families lived through the war. I have attached a picture – you can see the original in our museum here, the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. This is what happened in Minsk, under the rule of the Nazis. This is what the ‘volunteers’ did.

If you should ever travel to Belarus in the course of your researches, I would be happy to assist you in any way.

Yours most sincerely

Adam Zuygev.

Dean – Eye-witness accounts of Kurapty? I didn’t know any existed. Yes, I’d like to see those!

Jake- This is what I’ve got.

Katarina Bahaikuk: (former resident of the village of Zialony Luh)
The shootings began here in 1937. At first, three times a day, dawn, early afternoon and in the evening. They bought truck-loads of people into the forest and shot them. We were children. We used to hide in the forest and watch what they were doing. They threw the corpses into deep pits that had been dug there and when the pit was full, they covered it with sand. I remember the yellow sand piled high and the blood on the ground. In my memory, sometimes the sand heaved, as if the grave was breathing. But maybe that is just a child’s nightmare. Later, they enclosed the site, and the shootings became more frequent. We could hear the trucks arriving all through the nights.

Mikhail Piatrovic:
The graves were dug in the first part of the day. The people were shot in batches. They were lined up in front of the pit, and gags were put in their mouths. The executioners wore NKVD uniforms. They fired their rifles from the side, into the head of the end person, so that the bullet went through two people.

There was a great deal of blood, and groans. Even those who were buried still groaned.

This is what we did to their leaders. What about ours? What about the war criminals Churchill and Roosevelt? What about Berlin? What about Dresden? This is all lies and propaganda. David Garrick-Smith’s book Damned Lies: The politics of truth and the politics of persuasion will tell you what’s really going on here. The Nazis were fighting a war. They were trying to put down Stalin. They had to execute terrorists and insurgents, same as we do now.
Flame

Flame, David Garrick-Smith is full of shit, and so are you. Get off my site.