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The Pyrgoi massacre was a large-scale massacre on April 23, 1944, in Kozani, Greece, perpetrated by Germans with local accomplices. [1] Records indicate that 563 men, women, and children were killed on that day. [1] Among the atrocities that were committed, women and children were rounded up and burned alive. [2]
Colonel Karl Schümers, commander of the 7th constitution armored Grenadier police of the SS, was responsible for the massacres in Pyrgoi, Kleisoura Kastoria, and Distomo Boeotia which killed 862 men, women and children.
The survivors were forced to walk to Ptolemaida and the town was completely destroyed.
Each year the President of Greece goes to Pyrgoi to be present at the established memorial for the victims of the Holocaust. The events of April 1944 are the subject of documentaries.
The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question refers to a plan orchestrated by the Nazi regime of Germany during World War II for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews. The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the murder of 90% of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
The Lidice massacre was the complete destruction of the village of Lidice in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which is now a part of the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and acting Reichsprotektor Kurt Daluege, successor to Reinhard Heydrich. It has gained historical attention as one of the most documented instances of German war crimes during the Second World War, particularly given the deliberate killing of children.
Majdanek was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, it was used to murder people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. In operation from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, it was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove the most incriminating evidence of war crimes.
Around six million Polish citizens are estimated to have perished during World War II. Most were civilians killed by the actions of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Lithuanian Security Police, as well as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its offshoots.
The Dirlewanger Brigade, also known as the SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger (1944), or the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, or The Black Hunters, was a unit of the Waffen-SS during World War II. The unit, named after its commander Oskar Dirlewanger, consisted of convicted criminals. Originally formed from convicted poachers in 1940 and first deployed for counter-insurgency duties against the Polish resistance movement, the brigade saw service in German-occupied Eastern Europe, with an especially active role in the anti-partisan operations in Belarus. The unit is regarded as the most brutal and notorious Waffen-SS unit, with its soldiers described as "the ideal genocidal killers who neither gave nor expected quarter". The unit is regarded as the most infamous Waffen-SS unit in Poland and Belarus, and arguably the worst military unit in modern European history based off its criminality and cruelty.
The Kalavryta massacre, or the Holocaust of Kalavryta, was the near-extermination of the male population and the total destruction of the town of Kalavryta, Axis-occupied Greece, by the 117th Jäger Division (Wehrmacht) during World War II, on 13 December 1943.
The governments of the German Empire and Nazi Germany ordered, organized, and condoned a substantial number of war crimes, first in the Herero and Namaqua genocide and then in the First and Second World Wars. The most notable of these is the Holocaust, in which millions of European Jewish, Polish, and Romani people were systematically abused, deported, and murdered. Millions of civilians and prisoners of war also died as a result of German abuses, mistreatment, and deliberate starvation policies in those two conflicts. Much of the evidence was deliberately destroyed by the perpetrators, such as in Sonderaktion 1005, in an attempt to conceal their crimes.
The Ponary massacre, or the Paneriai massacre, was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, by German SD and SS and the Lithuanian Ypatingasis būrys killing squads, during World War II and the Holocaust in the Generalbezirk Litauen of Reichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station at Ponary, a suburb of today's Vilnius, Lithuania. 70,000 Jews were murdered at Ponary, along with up to 2,000 Poles, 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilnius, and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto.
The Kaunas pogrom was a massacre of Jews living in Kaunas, Lithuania, that took place on 25–29 June 1941; the first days of Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. The most infamous incident occurred at the garage of NKVD Kaunas section, a nationalized garage of Lietūkis, an event known as the Lietūkis Garage Massacre. There several dozen Jewish men, allegedly associates of NKVD, were publicly tortured and executed on 27 June in front of a crowd of Lithuanian men, women and children. The incident was documented by a German soldier who photographed the event as a man, nicknamed the "Death Dealer", beat each man to death with a metal bar. After June, systematic executions took place at various forts of the Kaunas Fortress, especially the Seventh and Ninth Fort.
The Vinnytsia massacre was the mass execution of between 9,000 and 11,000 people in the Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD during the Great Purge in 1937–1938, which Nazi Germany discovered during its occupation of Ukraine in 1943. The investigation of the site first conducted by the international Katyn Commission coincided with the discovery of a similar mass murder site of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn. Among the 679 dead identified by the Germans in 1943, there were also a certain number of Russians and 28 Poles. Nazi propaganda invoked mention of the massacre to illustrate communist terror by the Soviet Union.
The Holocaust in Lithuania resulted in the near total eradication of Lithuanian (Litvaks) and Polish Jews[a] in Generalbezirk Litauen of the Reichskommissariat Ostland in the Nazi-controlled Lithuania. Of approximately 208,000–210,000 Jews at the time of the Nazi invasion, an estimated 190,000 to 195,000 were killed before the end of World War II, most of them between June and December 1941. More than 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was murdered over the three-year German occupation, a more complete destruction than befell any other country in the Holocaust. Historians attribute this to the massive collaboration in the genocide by the non-Jewish local paramilitaries, though the reasons for this collaboration are still debated. The Holocaust resulted in the largest loss of life in so short a period of time in the history of Lithuania.
Fritz Maria Josef Dietrich was an Austrian SS officer and member of the Nazi Party. He held a doctoral degree in chemistry and physics. His name is also seen as Emil Dietrich. After the war, Dietrich was tried as a war criminal by the Dachau Military Tribunal for ordering the killings of 7 American prisoners of war. He was found guilty of these murders and executed.
The Liepāja massacres were a series of mass executions, many public or semi-public, in and near the city of Liepāja, on the west coast of Latvia in 1941 after the German occupation of Latvia. The main perpetrators were detachments of the Einsatzgruppen, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Ordnungspolizei (ORPO), and Latvian auxiliary police and militia forces. Heer soldiers and German naval personnel were present during shootings. In addition to Jewish men, women and children, the Germans and their Latvian collaborators also killed Roma (c.100), communists, the mentally ill and so-called "hostages". In contrast to most other Holocaust murders in Latvia, the killings at Liepāja were done in open places. About 5,000 of the 5,700 Jews trapped in Liepāja were shot, most of them in 1941. The killings occurred at a variety of places within and outside of the city, including Rainis Park in the city center, and areas near the harbor, the Olympic Stadium, and the lighthouse. The largest massacre, of 2,731 Jews and 23 communists, occurred in the dunes surrounding the town of Šķēde, north of the city center. This massacre, which was perpetrated on a disused Latvian Army training ground, was conducted by German and collaborator forces from December 15 to 17, 1941. More is known about the killing of the Jews of Liepāja than in any other city in Latvia except for Riga.
Babi Yar, a ravine near Kyiv, was the scene of possibly the largest shooting massacre during the Holocaust. After the war, commemoration efforts encountered serious difficulty because of the policy of the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a number of memorials were erected. The creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was initiated in 2016.
The Mesovouno massacre refers to two massacres perpetrated by members of the Wehrmacht in the village of Mesovouno in Ptolemaida, Greece, during the Axis occupation of Greece, carried out on 23 October 1941 and 22 April 1944.
Pyrgoi is a village and a community of the Eordaia municipality. It is located in Northern Greece, in the region of Western Macedonia. Before the 2011 local government reform it was part of the municipality of Vermio, of which it was a municipal district. The 2021 census recorded 745 inhabitants in the village.
The Massacre of Kommeno was a Nazi war crime perpetrated by members of the Wehrmacht in the village of Kommeno, Greece, in 1943, during the German occupation of Greece in World War II.
The Sochy massacre occurred on 1 June 1943 in the village of Sochy, Lublin Voivodeship in Zamość County, Lublin Voivodeship during the German occupation of Poland when approximately 181–200 of its inhabitants, including women and children, were massacred by the German Ordnungspolizei and SS in retaliation for the village's support for the Polish resistance movement.
World War II saw the largest scale of war crimes and crimes against humanity ever committed in an armed conflict, mostly against civilians and specific groups and POWs. The war also saw the of indiscriminate mass rape of captured women, Carpet bombing of civilian targets and use of starvation as weapon of war
Nazi Germany perpetrated various crimes against humanity and war crimes against children, including the killing of children of unwanted or "dangerous" people in accordance with Nazi ideological views, either as part of their idea of racial struggle or as a measure of preventive security. They particularly targeted Jewish children in the Holocaust, but also ethnically Polish children and Romani children and children with mental or physical disabilities. Thousands of children died in Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis and their collaborators killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks.
