MOSCOW, 13 APR – RIA Novosti. The defense Ministry has declassified archival documents showing the atrocities of the Nazis in a concentration camp near Vienna Kaisersteinbruch: there were cases when patients are hopelessly buried in the ground alive, and a particularly cruel was the attitude to the Soviet prisoners.
on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Vienna, the defense Ministry has opened on its website a special section “the Viennese waltz of the Victory”, which published the declassified historical documents from the collections of the Central archive of the defense Ministry.
the Documents show that the Soviet concentration camp prisoners were subjected to particularly cruel treatment. “In Kaisersteinbruch camp contained prisoners of war of various nationalities: Russians, Serbs, Romanians, poles, French, British, Americans, Italians. However, the conditions of detention of Soviet POWs differed special cruelty and inhumanity. Regardless of the weather, barefoot and naked prisoners were forced to work 12-14 hours a day with heavy excavation. The bullying, the beatings, the hunger, the death from beatings and disease were commonplace in the camp” – suggests an archival document.
Also published the testimony of major Nikolay Orlov, one of the prisoners of concentration camps, who said that “it was a genuine death camp designed for the extermination of prisoners of war”. “All the camp rules consistent with this goal – lack of food, exhausting work, terrible living conditions and brutal treatment of prisoners by the camp staff. I remember eight Russian officers, three of whom were wounded, and the rest were very high fever and was obliged to go to work. When they are exhausted, exhausted, sat down on the ground, the guards beat them with rifle butts until he lost consciousness”, – stated in the material.
Due to malnutrition and disease mortality in the camp was exceptional high. There were days that only one tuberculosis died before 45. All in the camp died about 13 thousand Russian prisoners of war, reported in the archive.
a Special place in the document also is evidence of the prisoners of war on the representatives of the collaborationist Russian liberation army, whose task was to recruit prisoners of war into the army.
the Fourth of April 1945, the death camp in the Austrian Kaisersteinbruch was liberated by the red army.
the Publication of declassified documents about the liberation of Vienna from Nazi invaders from the funds of the Central archive of the Ministry of defense of Russia is the continuation of the defence Ministry aimed at the preservation and protection of historical truth, countering falsification of history, attempts to revise the results of the great Patriotic and Second world wars, the press service of the defense Ministry.
