Audio tour Hall THREE

On October 25, 1941, Kharkiv was captured by German troops. A black night of Nazi occupation descended on the city. The occupation regime imposed on the population of the occupied areas of Ukraine in the form of a sinister "new order" was extremely brutal and was, in fact, not only anti-Soviet but also anti-human. In the first days of the occupation of Kharkiv, the Nazis hanged 116 residents of the city on the balconies of houses, in parks, and on lampposts.

Beginning in January 1942, the Germans shot Jews in DrobitskyYar, and later - residents of the city - representatives of other nationalities. The number of executions in DrobitskyYar reached 16 thousand people. Hundreds of people were burned alive by the Nazis in the barracks of Verstatobud, where the Jewish ghetto was located. Nazis gathered more than 400 elderly people, cripples and children in the synagogue on Hromadyanska Street and blocked the entrance. Everyone died of hunger and cold…

In the Nazi-occupied lands of Ukraine, the Germans allowed the creation of local governments to facilitate the exploitation and robbery of the local population. Kharkiv City Council, which was located at Sumska Street 18/20, was established in November 1941. On December 3, 1941, the board began publishing the newspaper "New Ukraine".

In addition to Nazi terror, there was another deadly threat to the civilian population of the city of almost half a million - famine. It was especially strong in Kharkiv and other cities of the region. In occupied Kharkiv, more than 100,000 people died of hunger, cold and disease, mostly children and the elderly.

The occupying power did not supply food to the population of the occupied city. In the vast majority of rural areas of Kharkiv region, special units confiscated grain and meat for the needs of the Wehrmacht and the Reich. Already in December 1941, an unprecedented famine began in the history of the city. In order to survive, people ate everything they could get their hands on:bran, frozen fodder beets, potato husks, pets, even casein glue, but nothing saved them.

Those Kharkiv residents who could still move did not sit idly by: they went to the villages to exchange household items for food. The exchanges took place in extreme conditions of an unprecedented cold winter, in the absence of transport and constant threat to life - leaving the city was limited by the Nazis.

During the occupation, there was an orphanage in the Sokolniki district in the Forest Park. Some of the children in the orphanage were immediately killed by the Nazis, including Jews and Gypsies. The hungry exhausted children who survived were forced to donate blood and cerebrospinal fluid by the Nazis. Many children died of starvation, exhaustion, and were deported to Germany.

The mass deportation to forced labor in Germany was a terrible disaster for many Kharkiv residents and residents of the region. The sinister labor export program began in early 1942. The occupiers resorted to violent methods of deportation. Slaves from the east were not considered human: they were for the Germans only a living tool.

A total of 164,045 prisoners were deported from the Kharkiv region to Germany for forced labor.Resotting in bitter, mutilated destinies, lost health. Some died on the way, others - in a foreign land - from torture, hunger, disease and so on. But most Ostarbeiters, for resisting the Nazis, will end up in death camps: Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Dora, Dachau, Sachsenhausen. From 1933 to 1945, there were 23 concentration camps in Germany and the countries occupied by it, and with branches1,634. 18 million people passed through the hell of these camps, of which 11 million people were physically destroyed.

A striking example of courage is the fate of our compatriot Igor FedorovichMalitsky. In 1942, Igor Fedorovich was forcibly sent to work in Germany. However, the boy did not obey, fled twice, and in 1943 was sent to the Terezin concentration camp (Czechoslovakia), in May 1944 he was transferred to the Auschwitz-1 concentration camp (Poland), in August 1944 to the Mauthausen concentration camp, and later to the Linz-3 concentration camp. Austria). It is even difficult to imagine how this young man, exhausted by hard work and hunger, beatings and abuse, was able to survive, survive and not lose simple human values. On May 5, 1945, as a result of an uprising, the prisoners of the concentration camp killed the SS guards and freed themselves.

A month after the occupation, underground regional committees of the party and the Komsomol began operating in the Kharkiv region. In Kharkiv itself, there were 4 district committees (Nagorny,Zavodsky, Zaliznychny, Osnovyansky).

The underground was usually leaded by the heads of pre-war district committees and district councils, ie well-known people in the district and region. Many had no experience of underground struggle. After the Germans entered the city, the underground collapsed. The system of central and district leadership was destroyed. Many people died or left the city, some simply deserted and refused to obey orders. In December 1941, 2 of the 4 district committees operated.