The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) released declassified documents to the public on Feb. 21 from the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), which reveal atrocities against civilians committed by troops of the 596th Grenadier Regiment of the 327th Infantry Division of Nazi Germany under Col. Friedrich-August Weinknecht, reported TASS.
The documents include transcripts of interrogations with German prisoners of war and a memorandum from the Sudzha District Executive Committee of the Kursk Region. The reports describe a massacre on Feb. 28, 1943, in which Weinknecht’s troops retaliated against the destruction of a German regiment by the Red Army, by executing nearly 350 Soviet civilians. Witness accounts describe villagers attempting to flee, only to be gunned down or killed with grenades in their hiding places. In other nearby villages, Nazi forces killed at least 470 more men, women, and children.
