On the 5th of January 1946 in Leningrad, a city that suffered heavily during the Second World War, a number of men were led out to a large gallows structure which had been created inside of the square in the ruins of Leningrad near to a market.
Each of the eight men who were then stood under the gallows had the nooses fastened around their necks by a Soviet executioner, but to those thousands of people who looked on, these men were some of the most evil war criminals.
These condemned soldiers were former members of the German Army, and one was even a Major General, and they had been responsible for the horrific slaughter of civilians inside of Soviet villages as a German Army invaded and rampaged following the launching of Operation Barbarossa.
Each of the eight men had been found guilty of a number of different crimes, and to the Soviets, they represented the evil horror of the Nazi regime, but one by one the men were executed on the gallows.
Operation Barbarossa was launched by the German Army on the 22nd of June 1941, and it was the largest land offensive in history with 10 million soldiers taking part.
No one would have anticipated that Hitler would launch an invasion on the Soviet Union to begin with, as he actually signed an non-aggression pact with Stalin, and the pair had agreed not to fight each other for allegedly a decade.
But this was unbroken as Hitler’s whole belief was to rampage to the East, and he wanted to destroy communism.
But during the course of Operation Barbarossa, 3.8 million Axis soldiers entered the Western Soviet Union along a front of around 3,000 kilometers, and they were supported by 600,000 vehicles and more than 600,000 horses.
This opened up the Eastern Front, which became the bloodiest theater of the Second World War and source of the biggest battles in history, but the crimes that the Nazis and the Germans committed inside of the Soviet Union were endless.
For example, the Nazis deliberately killed over 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, and millions of civilians died from starvation and mass food shortages.
But following the German Army was a paramilitary death squad known as the Einsatzgruppen; these were soldiers who were there to round up civilians and execute them.
The Einsatzgruppen’s crimes were horrific, and they would force many to dig their own graves before they were then shot in these pits, and still many of their crimes have not been uncovered, and their victims still lie under the ground.
Further horror occurred as the German Army would abuse civilians; they would burn and raze settlements to the ground as well as loot whenever they could.
Hitler had specifically given orders for commissars to be shot immediately without trial, and mass killings occurred every single day.
The citizens of Leningrad were subjected to a hard and rough ordeal during the Second World War, as they would experience a siege that lasted 872 days, and with this, over a million people would starve to death.
Around 400,000 of these victims were children younger than 14, and the German-finished blockade of the city cut off food supplies, fuel, and materials, and rations sunk to a very low amount.
There was hardly any food to go around, and the Soviet civilians were forced to eat pets, and others resorted allegedly to cannibalism; there were 2,000 people arrested for eating human flesh during the siege.
There was a huge amount of suffering; Leningrad became the site of the most lethal siege in the whole of history.
The city had also suffered from German bombardment from the skies, as bombers would rain down on the city and thousands would be killed by the German bombs; artillery bombardment also hit the city, and the city was in complete ruins.
The siege was eventually lifted, but Leningrad was scarred with the horror of what had happened.
The sentiment of those who witnessed what happened inside of Leningrad led to the belief that those Germans were completely evil, and after the war, there was a significant amount of reprisal wanted against those enemies of the Soviets.
But at the end of the war, Leningrad became the site to where eight German soldiers who had committed crimes inside of the Soviet Union were executed in the square.
11 Germans were tried in this trial, which occurred inside of Leningrad, and most of them had committed crimes in the Pskov region.
It’s not known specifically why the Germans were collected in this group and why they were then taken to Leningrad for their trial; it may have been a propaganda effort because of the horror that occurred in a city during the war.
Eight of these men were then sentenced to death.
The most senior of those condemned was Major General Heinrich Remmlinger, who would join the war, order 14 expeditions of German soldiers who would rampage in the Pskov region and would burn villages down.
He was linked to the slaughter of 8,000 people, mostly women and children, and documents discovered linked him to this, as well as witness testimony.
Did his soldiers shot over 200 people in Knyazhevo, and 200 more were burned alive in wooden buildings in Itagos?
The horrors of Remmlinger’s troops were many more.
Another condemned man was Captain Karl, who shot 25 people in the Arensburg region.
He ordered his men to shoot children and young boys with machine guns, and he was known for shooting 200 people with his own weapons himself.
Other personnel included Fritz, who was part of the platoon that would burn seven villages, and these men shot 80 people and burned 100 houses and sheds, and the horrors of Fritz’s actions were told to the courtroom.
Urban and Sporm were found guilty of burning villages down such as Krivets, Alkhol, and others, in which around 60 were shot dead and Bam shot six people himself.
Lieutenant Edward Sonnenfeld went on the rampage from December 1943 to February 1944, and he burned villages with his men; in Zapolye, his men killed 40, and in another village named Seglitsy, Sonnenfeld’s men ordered civilians to dig trenches.
They then forced them in as his men threw grenades into the trenches.
Sonnenfeld took part in executions, and the court reached a conclusion that he himself had killed around 200 Soviet civilians with his own hand and weapon.
Janicke Gerhard was a soldier; he was not of any particular rank but was in the village of Malaya Lutsy, where 88 civilians, mostly women, were driven into a barn and were then burned, and Gerhard was linked to personally slaughtering over 300 people.
Soldier Irvin Ernst was also involved in burning villages, and he killed 100, mostly women and children.
The final man who was condemned for his crimes, also known as Irvin, was involved in the executions of 150 people in Luga; he burned 50 homes and was then involved in burning other villages and around 200 houses.
Those German soldiers and officers were seen by the Soviets after the Second World War as the ultimate evil, especially following the experiences of those who had lived through the Leningrad Siege.
Their trial was covered by the Leningrad press, and newspapers each day documented what happened.
For this mentioned, those men were sentenced to death, and the gallows had been created in Leningrad on the square near to a market.
The crowds on the 5th of January 1946 gathered near to the gallows for the executions of the German soldiers, and to those who would witness the executions, it was in a sense justified.
They had seen how the Germans treated the Soviet civilians firsthand; they knew the horrors that had occurred.
These were people who had been shot at constantly by artillery fire and had been bombed by aircraft of the Luftwaffe, but they were there to see reprisal and revenge.
The crowd was large, and the Germans were brought out; each of them were paraded in front of the crowd, and they did remain calm in their final moments, but General Heinrich Remmlinger was not as calm, and he looked for a way out, but it was not one, and he went to his execution not as calm as the others.
If it would have broke from the executioners, it’s possible who would have been torn to pieces by the Leningrad population; there was no sympathy for these men, and the executioner and the officials then announced the crimes of each of them.
What struck some was that these were men who had slaughtered many; many of those slaughtered were women and children.
The Germans had been loaded onto the backs of vehicles and lorries, which were then reversed under the gallows inside of the square.
Each one had the noose tied around their necks, and when all of the men had been secured to the gallows, the vehicles then slowly drove off.
This led to the Germans now swinging from the gallows in the air, and they were left hanging until they were then killed.
After the crowds left, the Soviet guard was there to protect the remains, and some boys from the ice at the executed bodies, but the guard did nothing to prevent this.
The witnesses did not cheer, but there was a sense of justification and revenge for the German soldiers who were executed that day.
The city of Leningrad suffered heavily during the Second World War, and the civilians in the city who died during the siege numbered around one and a half million, but there was a huge death toll also for the Red Army and the German forces.
It was one of the bloodiest events of the Second World War, and the levels that the people of the city had to sink to during the siege to survive led to many believing that after the end of the war, executions against German soldiers and officers were completely justified.
These men who were executed were not involved in the siege; they were not involved in the attacks on the city, but they were involved in attacks against Soviet civilians and villages in regions hundreds of miles away.
To those civilians of Leningrad, all of those men were evil.
There is no doubt that their actions were horrific and that their actions led to the slaughter of innocent people, but the deaths of those Germans on the scaffold in the center of Leningrad was seen by some as a small reprisal for the horrors that they had personally experienced.
