Khatyn massacre

The massacre was not unusual in Belarus during World War II. At least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were burned and destroyed by the Nazis, and often all their inhabitants were killed (some amounting to as many as 1,500 victims) as a punishment for collaboration with partisans. In the Vitebsk region, 243 villages were burned down twice, 83 villages three times, and 22 villages were burned down four or more times. In the Minsk region, 92 villages were burned down twice, 40 villages three times, nine villages four times, and six villages five or more times. Altogether, over 2,000,000 people were killed in Belarus during the three years of Nazi occupation, almost a quarter of its population. ==Massacre==

On 22 March 1943, Battalion 118 received a report that a telephone line had been damaged in the section between Plyeshchanitsy and Lahoysk. A construction unit from Plyeshchanitsy and two platoons from the 1st company of the Battalion 118 was sent to the site near Kozyri village, 6 km from Khatyn to restore the line. While this was in progress, they were attacked by Soviet partisans, resulting in the deaths of four of the police officers. Among the dead was Hauptmann Hans Woellke, the Company commander. The partisans immediately fled eastward to Khatyn. The policemen from the platoon pursued them but decided to retreat because they were under strength. While waiting for the reinforcements, they detained a group of 40 to 50 individuals from Kozyri settlement. The group had been recently tasked with chopping down woods alongside roadsides near the Plyeshchanitsy-Lahoysk road. Suspecting them of having something to do with the partisans, they were all arrested and taken to Plyeshchanitsy by several local officers. The trapped people managed to break down the front doors but while trying to escape were killed by machine gun fire. Around 149 people, including 70 (or 75) children under 16 years of age, were killed due to burning, shooting or smoke inhalation. The village was then looted and burned to the ground. ==Survivors==

Eight inhabitants of the village survived, of whom six witnessed the massacre – five children and an adult. • Twelve-year-old Anton Iosifovich Baranovsky (1930–1969) was left for dead with wounds in both legs. His injuries were treated by partisans. • The only adult survivor of the massacre, 56-year-old village smith Yuzif Kaminsky (1887–1973), recovered consciousness with wounds and burns after the killers had left. He supposedly found his burned son, who later died in his arms. This incident was later commemorated with a statue at the Khatyn Memorial. • Viktor Andreevich Zhelobkovich (1934–2020), a seven-year-old boy, survived the fire in the shed under the corpse of his mother. • Sofya Klimovich, a relative of Karaban, was also visiting a nearby village. After the war she worked at the Memorial for several years. ==Post-war trials==

In 1946, the officer who ordered the massacre, Bruno Pavel, was prosecuted at the Riga Trial and executed. Ivan Melnichenko, the leader of the Dirlewanger unit which committed the massacre, was fatally shot by NKVD agents on 26 February 1946 while resisting arrest. Multiple collaborators who participated in the massacre were tried in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of them were executed. The commander of one of the platoons of 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, former Soviet junior lieutenant Vasyl Meleshko, was tried in a Soviet court and executed in 1975. The chief of staff of 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, former Red Army senior lieutenant Hryhoriy Vasiura, was tried in Minsk in 1986 and found guilty of all his crimes. He was sentenced to death by the verdict of the military tribunal of the Belorussian Military District. Vasiura was executed in 1987. The case and the trial of the main executioner of Khatyn was not given much publicity in the media; the leaders of the Soviet republics worried about the inviolability of unity between the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples. ==Khatyn Memorial==

Khatyn became a symbol of mass killings of the civilian population during the fighting between partisans, German troops, and collaborators. In 1969, it was named the national war memorial of the Byelorussian SSR. Among the best-recognized symbols of the memorial complex is a monument with three birch trees, with an eternal flame instead of a fourth tree, a tribute to the one in every four Belarusians who died in the war. There is also a statue of Yuzif Kaminsky carrying his dying son, and a wall with niches to represent the victims of all the concentration camps, with large niches representing those with more than 20,000 victims. Bells ring every 30 seconds to commemorate the rate at which Belarusian lives were lost throughout the duration of the Second World War. Part of the memorial is a Cemetery of villages with 185 tombs. Each tomb symbolizes a particular village in Belarus that was torched along with its population. According to Norman Davies, the Khatyn massacre was deliberately exploited by the Soviet authorities to cover up the Katyn massacre, and this was a major reason for erecting the memorial – it was done in order to cause confusion with Katyn among foreign visitors. In 2004, the Memorial was renovated. According to 2011 data, the Memorial was in the top ten of the most attended tourist sites in Belarus: that year it was visited by 182,000 people. File:Khatyn Panorama.jpg|Panorama of the central part of the Khatyn Memorial File:Khatyn National Memorial Complex - Near Minsk - Belarus - 05 (27547853896).jpg|Another view of the Cemetery of Villages File:Khatyn National Memorial Complex - Near Minsk - Belarus - 07 (26973000813).jpg|Village names on memorial File:Foreign delegations at the Minsk offensive jubilee 05.jpg|A delegation from Azerbaijan, China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan at the statue of Yuzif Kaminsky ==See also==