The Forgotten Massacres of Defenseless Soldiers in WWII
Red Army's Deadliest Massacre of German Prisoners of War: Grishino 1943
13m
In February 1943, just weeks after the German defeat at Stalingrad, Soviet forces captured the eastern Ukrainian town of Grishino, today known as Pokrovsk. When German troops retook the town days later, they reported finding the bodies of 596 German and Axis soldiers, nurses, civilian personnel, and prisoners who had allegedly been executed after capture.
This documentary examines the Grishino Massacre, one of the most controversial alleged war crimes committed by the Red Army against German and Axis captives during the Second World War. It also places the massacre within the wider context of the Eastern Front, where Nazi Germany's war of annihilation, mass killings, and the Holocaust fueled an increasingly brutal cycle of retaliation.
Discover the battle for Grishino, the German military investigation, the role of the SS Division Wiking, Soviet counteroffensives after Stalingrad, and how this little-known massacre became one of the most disputed atrocities of the war on the Eastern Front.
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