After the German Army captured Lutsk they discovered the brutal murders of civilians by the NKVD. They erected this monument to mark the atrocity.
The NKVD prisoner massacre in Lutsk was a Soviet war crime conducted by the NKVD and NKGB in the city of Lutsk, situated in occupied Poland (present-day Ukraine). On June 23, 1941, during the second day of the German invasion of the USSR, the Soviets executed a vast majority of the prisoners held in the Lutsk prison, predominantly Ukrainians and Poles. The estimated number of victims is believed to be around 2,000, although there are varying estimates from different sources. This atrocity was one among many prisoner massacres carried out by the Soviet secret police and army during the summer of 1941.
The Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine was characterized by terror and repression as Stalin immediately embarked on a Sovietization drive that not only included the distribution and display of Soviet insignia and propaganda, but also involved a massive campaign against perceived “enemies of the state.” Due to Stalin’s fear of any national or anti-Soviet elements, hundreds of thousands of suspected political adversaries were arrested, imprisoned, deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan, or executed en masse between February and June 1940. Initial arrests and deportations focused on anti-communists, prewar Polish elites, civil servants, governmental officials, military officers, and Ukrainian nationalists. By April 1940, however, the NKVD began arresting a wide variety of people including family members of those previously convicted, as well as prominent doctors, engineers, lawyers, journalists, artists, university professors, teachers, merchants, and well-to-do farmers. Those that avoided immediate deportation or death sentences remained locked in NKVD prisons when the Germans launched their assault on the Soviet Union.
It is estimated that close to 140,000 political prisoners were being held in prisons throughout Soviet-occupied territories on the eve of Operation Barbarossa. Upon hearing news of the German invasion, the NKVD was ordered to evacuate and liquidate all political prisoners under evacuation order No. 00803.
In Western Ukraine the NKVD started to execute prisoners on the morning of June 23, regardless of whether they had been incarcerated for major offenses or were merely waiting to be questioned. In the central prison in the city of Lutsk, located in the northwestern oblast of Volyn, inmates were crowded and locked into small cells under the pretense of a large-scale evacuation. Shortly thereafter, NKVD officers called inmates by name into the courtyard, lined them up, and began throwing grenades at the group while Soviet tanks fired machine guns. A handful of survivors were then forced to spend the rest of the day digging graves and burying corpses until their overseers fled an advancing German unit. Casualty estimates from the Lutsk prison massacre vary based on sources, ranging from 1,500 to 4,000.
It was not only the number of those killed that shocked the populace, but also the manner in which they died. Many of the prisoners killed at the hands of the NKVD in Western Ukraine endured brutal torture before being killed. The first known reports of the NKVD prison massacres appeared in German newspapers in the first week of July 1940 and described scenes of family members searching through thousands of tortured corpses. An unattributed report from Berlin reported that victims in L’viv were crowded into cells where they were either shot or had their stomachs cut open. Similarly horrific reports recount crucified priests with crosses carved into their chests, makeshift torture chambers with blood-soaked walls, and mass graves full of bodies displaying marks of torture and missing limbs.
www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/1941-nkvd-prison-m...
Good photographic material for historians.
