The site of mass shootings near the village of Pashkovo.
In the autumn of 1943, the German military organised the exhumation of the bodies of the murdered to cover up the traces of mass crimes.
Until now, it has not been customary to describe mass murder and brutality in great detail. The events were common knowledge; repeating them would add little new. The testimonies of former participants of those events during the trials, which form the basis of the study, are permeated with lies and the desire to whitewash themselves, to convince everyone that the killers killed against their will. All the more important are those rare testimonies written on the days of the crimes, in which the participants openly describe their feelings and their satisfaction.
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One piece of such evidence are letters by Walther Mattner, then a 36-year-old police secretary from Vienna, written from Mogilev to his wife:
2 October: "[...] and I have signed up for tomorrow's special action. ...Tomorrow I will have the opportunity to use my pistol for the first time. I'm taking 28 rounds of ammunition with me. Perhaps that will not be enough. ...It will be 1,200 Jews who have become too many in the city and need to be killed. When I get home, we'll have a lot to talk about. But that's enough for today, or you'll think I'm bloodthirsty."
5 October: "The day before yesterday I was again present at a mass death. When the first cars [with victims] arrived, my hand was shaking a little, but then I got used to it. By the tenth car I was already aiming at many women, children and babies calmly and confidently. I remembered that I had two children at home to whom these gangs would do the same, if not ten times worse. The death we gave them was a beautiful and short death compared to the hellish suffering of thousands and thousands in the GPU prisons. The babies flew through the air in a great arc, and we shot them in flight before they fell into the pit and into the water. Down with these monsters who have dragged all of Europe into war and are now stirring up war in America as well. ... Hitler was right when he said before the war began, "If the Jews think they can start a war in Europe again, it will not be a victory, but the end of the Jews in Europe." ... ...What a devil! I've never seen so much blood, shit and flesh. Now I understand what the words "intoxication with blood" mean. ... M. is poorer again by a number with three zeros. ...I'm really glad, and many here say that when we return to our homeland, it will be the turn of our Jews. Well, I can't tell you everything. Enough about that, I'll tell you more when I get home."
Understandably, when Mattner was questioned after the war in 1947, he stated that he only fired because he had to simulate endeavour.
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From the memoirs of Stepan Pilunov, a partisan, the only surviving participant in the destruction of the corpses of the local population in the village of Pashkovo.
"On 4 October 1943, the prisoners of the Mogilev prison were loaded onto military trucks and brought to Pashkovo. Some were forced to dig corpses out of ditches, others dug shallow pits to burn these corpses. The corpses were mostly in the anti-tank trenches. Many of them had completely decomposed, and the prisoners used pitchforks to shift their remains into firewood mixed with tar and coal. The stacks, called stoves, were up to 10 metres high. They were doused with petrol and set on fire. Some 35,000 corpses were buried here. The field crematorium worked for almost a month. Then they were moved to the Polykovichi tract. The incinerators there have been smoking for more than a fortnight. The interpreter Yashka reported that 11,000 corpses were left in the ditch. In a short period of time the prisoners dug them up and burnt them, and also unloaded 193 gas vans with recently dead people. When the last "oven" was set, people were driven to the top of the stack and shot. Only Pilunov, wounded in the head, miraculously managed to survive."
Quoted according to: Yushkevich V. In hell we sang the "Stenka Razin song" // Mogilevskie vedomosti. - 17 March 2001.