Naliboki massacre

Naliboki massacre
Naliboki self-defense leaders in a meeting with a Soviet NKVD officer (far left) before being massacred
Location	Naliboki German-occupied Poland
Date	May 8, 1943
Weapons	Automatic and semi-automatic weapons
Deaths	129 (including children)
Victims	Poles
Perpetrators	Soviet and Jewish partisans

The Naliboki massacre (Template:Lang-pl) was the mass killing of 129 Poles, including women and children, by Soviet and Jewish partisans on 8 May 1943 in the small town of Naliboki in German-occupied Poland (the town is now in Belarus). Before the 1939 German-Soviet invasion of Poland, Naliboki was part of Stołpce County, Nowogródek Voivodeship, in eastern Poland.

Background

Before 1939, Naliboki had some 4,000 residents, including several hundred Jews, who were driven out of the town following the German advance during Operation Barbarossa.

Following Operation Barbarossa (Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union), Soviet resistance forces operated in Naliboki Forest, in eastern Poland, behind German lines. Their NKVD leaders were sent in by Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement in 1942, and the partisans were supplied with materiel via airdrops. The local partisans were recruited from Red Army soldiers of all ethnicities who had been trapped by a German encirclement, and from pro-Soviet Belarusians as well as from Ukrainians. They obtained provisions forcibly from villagers, whom they treated as enemies. The murder of peasants by way of terrorizing them into giving up the provisions began in 1943 (in Kamień, Derewno, Borowikowszczyzna, Dziagwie, Rodziewszczyzna, etc). Naliboki was among the villages so raided. Consequently in August 1942, by order of the Germans, the villages formed a self-defense unit, and the village police station was closed.

Some of the members of the self-defense unit were Home Army members who used their self-defense membership as a cover. The Soviet partisans were aware of this, and in March and April 1943 they arranged two meetings with the Polish self-defence leaders. During the talks, the Soviet partisans insisted that the Poles join them, but the Poles refused. However, an agreement was signed with the Poles, represented by Eugeniusz Klimowicz, concerning a truce and joint operations against robbers hiding in the forest. The Soviet partisans violated the truce.

The massacre

On the night of 8–9 May 1943, Soviet partisans raided Naliboki. A few of the Soviet attackers, including a political officer, were killed by the defenders. Polish men were dragged from their homes and shot individually or in small groups. Mass looting followed. Many farmhouses were set on fire. Also killed during the Soviet attack were three Polish women, several teenagers, and a ten-year-old boy. The town's church was set on fire, along with the public school, fire station, and post office. The raid took two to three hours. The Soviet commander reported to the NKVD the killing of 250 people, the capture of weapons, the rounding up of 100 cows and 78 horses, and the destruction of a German garrison. In reality, the number of victims was lower (now estimated at 129); no Germans were present or killed; and only one Belarusian auxiliary policeman happened to be sleeping in the town on the night of the attack.

On 20 March 2001 an investigation into the Naliboki massacre was launched by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance in Łódź, along with an investigation into the Koniuchy massacre committed in the same prewar Nowogródek Voivodeship of northeastern Poland.

Bielski partisans and Soviet partisans

Following Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet partisans active in the area of eastern Poland were often joined by the Polish Jews trying to survive the escape from the Nazi ghettos. The controversy, as noted in a communique released by the IPN, concerns the participation of the Bielski partisans who might have supported the Soviets in the attack based on their ongoing relationship. Survivors of the Bielski group have denied this, particularly after the release of a film about them, entitled Defiance. The Bielski partisans were stationed in Jasionowskie Forest near Wsielub, about 50 kilometres (31 mi) from Naliboki. The group used to requisition foodstuffs from nearby localities, including meat, bread and milk in quantities easy to carry back. They were close enough to the site of the massacre. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance has been investigating the massacre. Although the IPN has not reported its findings as of April 2009, Bogdan Musiał from the Institute has said that there was no evidence to support the allegation that the Bielski partisans were involved in the attack. Also in 2009, the scholarly debate about the Naliboki massacre was summarised by the special issue of the IPN Bulletin.

The routine attacks on Polish underground units by Soviet partisans could not have been circumvented by Jews in their ranks. The IPN historian Kazimierz Krajewski reported that in the forest around Lida some 25% of the partisans were Jewish, or as many as 1,200 people, even though only 162 of them were armed, because the Soviet handouts were few and far between. Notably, the Soviet NKVD persecuted the pro-German Belarusian populace at least as badly as the anti-Nazi Poles. Thousands of Belarusian collaborators were killed, including teachers, local administrators and members of the Belarusian Auxiliary Police, and dozens of Polish communities were destroyed. Resulting from this, at least on ten different occasions the Nowogródek District division (pl) of the Armia Krajowa attempted to negotiate with the Soviet partisans to stop the attacks on hapless villages. Those attempts were futile. In May 1943, the entire Polish delegation was murdered by the Soviets in the powiat of Szczuczyn and the pacifications continued. Apart from Naliboki, other massacres were committed in Koniuchy, Szczepki, Prowżały, Kamień, Niewoniańce, Izabelin, Kaczewo, Babińsk, and Ługomowicze, including murders around Dokudów and near the Narocz and Kromań lakes, as well as in Derewno.

In May 2003, prosecutor Anna Gałkiewicz from KŚZpNP, in charge of the investigations into the massacre in Naliboki and the Koniuchy massacre of 1944, reported that surviving eyewitnesses from Naliboki recognized Jews who had previously been in the Bielski partisans participating in the attack. Gałkiewicz named the Soviet brigades engaged in war crimes against civilians. They included the "Dzerzhinsky", "Bolshevik", and "Suvorov" brigades, as well as the "Stalin" brigade under Pavel Gulevich, which perpetrated the Naliboki massacre. Mieczyslaw Klimowicz, author of The Last Day of Naliboki (2009) was one of the 24 witnesses to the killings. As of May 2016, the regional division of IPN stated that investigations regarding war crimes in Nowogródek Voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic were still ongoing. Nevertheless, the presence of several Jewish residents of Naliboki during the massacre has also been confirmed by their names.

See also

• List of massacres in Belarus
• List of massacres in Poland
• Skidel revolt

External links

• Massacres in Koniuchy and Naliboki
• Naliboki Catholic cemetery