[Regnum] The Kaliningrad Regional Court began considering the case on recognition of the genocide of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War by the Nazis and their collaborators in the territories currently included in the Kaliningrad Region. The first meeting took place on October 20.“The prosecutor's office of the Kaliningrad region has carried out work to study archival documents, materials of criminal cases, attract specialists, and testimonies of eyewitnesses of those events. Based on the results of this work, evidence of crimes was established ,” said Deputy Regional Prosecutor Evgeny Protsevsky.
The investigation was carried out on behalf of the Prosecutor General of Russia Igor Krasnov . The lawsuit includes archival documents; in total, the criminal case materials contain 15 volumes.
Investigators found that on the territory of the modern Kaliningrad region there were at least 56 camps for prisoners of war and forcibly resettled people. The Nazis kept Russian prisoners in the worst conditions. They had “SU” stripes on their uniforms, the food was extremely poor, they were forced to work for 14 hours, up to 500 prisoners were kept in barracks for 100 people, and no treatment was provided. For any disobedience they were severely beaten or executed.
The investigation also revealed the execution of 5 thousand prisoners in early 1945, when the Red Army was approaching. Prisoners were killed on the ice of the Baltic Sea, their bodies were drowned. Those who lagged behind when the prisoners were led to execution were killed along the way.
The court heard testimony from Lyubov Platonova , who was born in May 1944 in a Nazi camp. Her mother was driven to East Prussia from Bryansk. After birth, the baby was taken away by security; they were allowed to see the child extremely rarely, bringing him to the fence. According to the mother of the victim, it is known that experiments were carried out on children in the camp, irradiating them with X-rays.
Also at the trial, they got acquainted with a video recording of a survey of Anna Kuptsova , born in 1935, made in 2020 . She told how she and her mother and sisters were taken to East Prussia, where they were sold to a German merchant. They were forced to work a lot, were not paid, were fed poorly, and had to eat grass. The German beat the victim's mother so that she could not get up. The family was liberated by Soviet soldiers in 1945.
The next hearing of the Kaliningrad Regional Court was scheduled for October 24.
As Regnum reported, in March 2023, the State Duma adopted a statement on the genocide of the peoples of the USSR by Germany and its accomplices. The document states that the deputies made a decision based on the provisions of the UN Charter, the Charter and the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Convention on the Inapplicability of the Statute of Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity.