Real genocide

Typhoid haze of fascist night

The bacteriological weapon of the Third Reich was tested on Belarusian women and children

The investigation by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the criminal case on the genocide of the Belarusian people during the Great Patriotic War is ongoing. But behind the new facts, one should not forget the old, well-known ones. The Belarus Segodnya Publishing House, with the support of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Belarus, continues the No Statute of Limitations project. Today you can read a story about Ozarichi death camp.

The very picture of sorrow, suffering, pain and tears

That’s how Yakub Kolas once called the Ozarichi concentration camp. For the first time, the world heard this name on February 14th, 1946, when at the Nuremberg trials, the assistant to the chief prosecutor from the Soviet Union, Lev Smirnov, presented to the court documents testifying to the atrocities of the Nazis on Belarusian land. One of them stated, “On March 19th, 1944, the attacking units of the Red Army discovered three concentration camps on the front line of the defence of the German army near the town of Ozarichi, Polesie Region, Byelorussian SSR, in which there were more than 33,000 children, disabled women and the elderly...”
Other documents proved the deliberate use of bacteriological weapons by the Nazis: the elderly, women and children were deliberately infected with typhus.

Human shield

At the beginning of 1944, the front line passed through the territory of Belarus along the Dnieper and Berezina Rivers. At the end of February, the civilian population in the rear front of the 9th Wehrmacht Army — the elderly, women and children — was driven into the swamp by the Nazis. The order of the commander of the 9th German Army dated March 8th, 1944 ‘On sabotage’ was preserved in the reports of the commander of the LVI Panzer Corps, Friedrich Hoßbach, which indicated the task: to create a human shield to protect military facilities from the attack of the Red Army troops.
To increase the infection, 7,000 people with typhus were brought to the camp. Blumenthal said, ‘A glass of water drunk, every cubic metre of inhaled air should infect every person.’
In late February — early March 1944, the occupiers began to drive, bring disabled population from the Gomel, Mogilev Regions of Belarus, Smolensk, Bryansk and Oryol Regions of Russia to specially designated places in the Ozarichi — Podosinnik — Dert villages under the guise of evacuation from the operational zone.
On March 9th, 1944, the chief of staff of the 9th Army, Schtedtke, and the chief of staff of the rear of the 9th Army, Bodenstein, announced the immediately enforceable order to deport the population to the Ozarichi concentration camp and (at the end of the operation) to destroy it at the meeting in Bobruisk.

Failed epidemic

According to the list of people who were in the military field hospital No. 2199 (located in the village of Novoselki, Domanovichi District), stored in the archives of the Military Medical Museum of the Russian Ministry of Defence, more than two thousand people who contracted typhus were treated there. In one list, among 720 people with typhoid patients, there were more than 150 soldiers and officers of the Red Army who took an active part in rescuing the prisoners of the Ozarichi concentration camp.


The epidemic affected the 19th Corps of the 65th Army, which was directly involved in the liberation of people. The corps was withdrawn from the front and sent to quarantine. This, however, had no any effect on front-line events: the Red Army continued its offensive.




The average life expectancy of people in the camp was three days. During this time, about 17,000 people died in inhuman conditions, many just lost their minds.


Of the 33,480 people liberated from the camp, 15,960 were children under 13, 517 of whom were orphans.

Memoirs of eyewitnesses on both sides of the front
‘In March 1944, scouts of the 37th Guards Division discovered three death camps created by the Nazi command at the turn north of Ozarichi and further towards Parichi in the swamps. Thousands of Soviet citizens languished and died there — mostly the elderly, women and children. The history of these camps is one of the vilest atrocities of the fascist invaders committed during the war years on Belarusian land.’
Pavel Batov, lieutenant general who commanded the 65th Army of the 1st Belorussian Front, which liberated Ozarichi (from the In Campaigns and Battles book)

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‘I was returning from the front line, not suspecting that I would see such horrors. I felt the change first by a strange, unsettling sound that I couldn’t understand where it came from until I found the camp in the distance. The unceasing prayers of many voices turned into a roar and ascended from there into the sky. Then I saw how the soldiers dragged the body of an elderly man like dead cattle. The dead old woman was lying on the road with a fresh gunshot wound in her forehead. The paramedic pointed me to some knots in the mud. There were the dead bodies of children.’
Josef Perau, Divisional Chaplain of the 110th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht (from his diary, March 17th, 1944)

By Maksim Osipov
Photo documents provided by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Belarus