occupation regime on the occupied Soviet territory - the regime established on the territory of the USSR, which was temporarily occupied by the troops of Germany and its allies (Romania, Finland, Hungary) during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.

The Nazi occupation regime in Ukraine set itself the main tasks :

Ø provide food, material and human resources for the needs of the Third Reich and the army;

Ø release from the Ukrainian population through its physical destruction, deportation and export to work in Germany,

Ø eastern lands to populate them with German settlers.

Plan "Ost"- a plan for the extermination of the population and the "development" of the "eastern" territories occupied by the Nazis.

- Holocaust- the death of a significant part of the Jewish population of Europe during the systematic persecution and destruction of it by the Nazis and their accomplices in Germany and in the occupied territories in 1933-1945. 6 million Jews died out of 10 million living in Europe.

According to the Ost plan, the Germans established a "new order" in the occupied territory.

Nazi "New Order"- physical and moral terror against the so-called racially inferior peoples: Jews, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Russians, as well as representatives of the Soviet government and communists.

The main events of the "new order":

Repeal of Soviet legislation, introduction of German criminal law and courts;
- introduction of a curfew;
- discrimination of the Ukrainian population;
- total terror

Genocide- the extermination of certain groups of the population on racial, national, ethnic or religious grounds.

Forced mobilization of labor force Germany (2.5 million people)

Ostarbeiters ("Eastern Workers")- a German term for persons taken out by the Nazis during the Second World War for forced labor in Germany from the eastern occupied territories.

Economic exploitation (export of bread, food, equipment of factories and factories, cultural values ​​and even black soil to Germany)

Preservation of the collective farm system under the new name "communal farms" (with the exception of Western Ukrainian lands);

Use of forced labor of the local population, etc.

The inhuman "new order" brought to organize the resistance movement fascist invaders of the occupied territories.

During the Second World War, millions of Soviet citizens were taken to work in Germany or in the countries occupied by it. According to the Donetsk regional archive, more than 250,000 people. Many of them lost their health from overwork, some, upon returning to their homeland, ended up in Soviet concentration camps. Most of the people, after returning from Germany, went through filtration camps, where they were checked by the NKVD. Some were sent to the Gulag, others were allowed to go home. However, even if the person was subsequently not touched by the authorities, the fact of being at work in Nazi Germany aroused suspicion among those around him.

World War II 1941-1945 brought an incalculable number of victims and deaths. The USSR lost about 27 million people, including 11.3 million people at the front, 4-5 million partisans, many people died in the occupied territory and in the rear of the country. About 6 million people ended up in Nazi captivity.

AT Donetsk region 174,416 civilians, 149,367 prisoners of war were killed and tortured, the fates of 252,000 citizens deported to Germany were broken.

In October 1941, the Nazi troops captured the Donbass. Almost immediately, the new government established compulsory labor service in the occupied territory. The whole of Ukraine was turned into a huge labor camp. The camps were divided into 2 categories - for the civilian population and for prisoners of war.

Camps for the civilian population included concentration camps, labor camps, ghettos, Gestapo prisons, transit and labor camps.
Citizens who evaded labor conscription, paying taxes, and orders of local commandant's offices were kept in labor and corrective labor camps. People got there and simply as a result of sudden street raids organized by the German gendarmerie. As a rule, when placing in the camp, the period of stay in it was determined.

For the forced detention of persons of Jewish nationality with a view to their further destruction, ghettos were created.

The Gestapo prisons held prisoners for political reasons.
Detained civilians were placed in transit camps with the aim of their further removal for forced labor in Germany.

Prisoner of war camps were divided into dulags (prefabricated transit points), stalags (for prisoners of war of privates and sergeants), and oflags (for prisoners of war officers).

According to the documents of the State Archive of the Donetsk Region, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Central State Archive of Public Associations of Ukraine and the Central Archive of the Authorities and Administration of Ukraine, it was established that labor camps for the civilian population were located on the territory of our region in the cities of Gorlovka, Krasnoarmeysk, Makeevka, Mariupol, Stalino (Donetsk) , in Artemovsky and Konstantinovsky districts.

According to the protocols of interrogations and examination reports of the emergency commissions, traces of the location of camps for prisoners of war in the cities of Gorlovka, Ilovaisk, Kramatorsk, Makeevka, Mariupol, Slavyansk, Stalino, Torez, in Artemovsky, Dzerzhinsky, Konstantinovskaya, Krasnoarmeisky, Krasnolimansky, Selidovsky, Snezhnyansky, Starobeshevsky, Staro -Kermenchik, Khartsyzsk regions.

In the area of ​​the Chalk Mountain on the north side of the city of Kramatorsk, where from November 1941 to September 1943 a camp was created for the military and civilian population, 3 thousand people died.
Residents of the city of Kramatorsk recalled with shudder and horror on January 25, 1942, when, on the orders of the burgomaster, men, women, and the elderly were rounded up in the city, suspected of sympathizing with the Soviet regime. All the detainees were taken to the camp, then they were shot in groups near the quarries.
Over 10,000 people died in the Makeevka camps.
In Gorlovka, prisoners from the camp in the Kalininsky district worked on the construction of a briquette factory, there was also a camp on the territory of the village of the Kirov Machine-Building Plant, 2,158 people died here.

Over 3 thousand people were shot, tortured and walled up alive by the invaders in the alabaster mine of Artemovsk.

At the beginning of June 1942, in the city of Krasnoarmeysk, near the fireclay factory, a camp was organized to work in army food depots, in which 200 physically healthy prisoners of war were selected, and the remaining 1,600 healthy and sick prisoners of war were loaded into wagons and taken to the station camp in Zaporozhye. The death rate of prisoners of war in the camp did not stop, as typhus raged in the camp. Every day 20-30 people died. The burials of the dead were carried out by the prisoners of war held in the camp. Hunger, a complete lack of food, with the exception of raw corn in heads and hot water, as well as an epidemic of typhus, contributed to the mass death of prisoners of war.

Archival documents of the period of occupation, as well as acts of the Stalin Regional Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Nazi Invaders, are still of interest to researchers and local historians. Archivists use these documents when compiling responses to appeals from citizens of Ukraine and the countries of the former USSR about confirming the fact of residence in the occupied territory, deportation to Germany, and execution.

Unfortunately, the documents of only one camp are stored in the state archive of the Donetsk region - the Yuzovsky Central Camp for prisoners of war, in which the civilian population was also forcibly detained (Donetsk). During January 1942 - September 1943, about 40 thousand people died in this camp. 2,000 Jews were taken out of the camp and thrown into the pit of the Kalinovka mine.

Losses of the Red Army in battles on the territory of the Donetsk region (1941–43)

War inevitably entails losses. They are varied and varied in scale. But whatever the extent of the destruction of cities and villages, they cannot be compared with human losses. Our country is littered with the graves of fallen soldiers and civilians who died during the Great Patriotic War. On the territory of the Donetsk region, there are more than a thousand monuments erected on mass graves, which contain the remains of thousands of Soviet soldiers who died in battles, died in hospitals and in captivity.

And although the war ended 71 years ago, the issue of human losses has not been fully resolved. To date, the losses of the Red Army in many regions of the former USSR have not been calculated. In the Donetsk region, various documents indicate a wide variety of figures for the losses of the Red Army, mainly called the figure 150 thousand dead only when released. Unfortunately, no one has verified these figures, and it is difficult to understand where they come from. All researchers refer to archive data without specifying which ones. So they are published year after year. We believe that these figures are overestimated, do not correspond to reality and require research.

The combat irretrievable losses of the Red Army are divided into those who died in battle and died from wounds at the stages of sanitary evacuation, those who died in hospitals and in captivity.

Total losses in the battles for the region in the period 1941-43. make up to 59 - 60 thousand killed and died at the stages of sanitary evacuation. Slavyansky district ranks first in terms of losses, followed by Shakhtyorsky (up to 12 thousand), Artemovsky (about 8 thousand), Amvrosievsky (4-4.5 thousand), Aleksandrovsky (3.5-3.9 thousand dead). In other areas, the losses were much less.

Similar information.

During the first period of the war, the fascist states by force of arms established their rule over almost all of capitalist Europe. In addition to the peoples of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Albania, who became victims of aggression even before the outbreak of World War II, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, a significant part of France, Greece and Yugoslavia were under the yoke of fascist occupation by the summer of 1941. At the same time, the Asian ally of Germany and Italy, militaristic Japan, occupied vast areas of Central and South China, and then Indochina.

In the occupied countries, the fascists established the so-called "new order", which embodied the main goals of the states of the fascist bloc in World War II - the territorial redistribution of the world, the enslavement of independent states, the extermination of entire peoples, and the establishment of world domination.

Creating the "new order", the Axis powers sought to mobilize the resources of the occupied and vassal countries in order to destroy the socialist state - the Soviet Union, restore the undivided dominance of the capitalist system throughout the world, defeat the revolutionary workers' and national liberation movement, and with it all forces of democracy and progress. That is why the "new order", based on the bayonets of the fascist troops, was supported by the most reactionary representatives of the ruling classes of the occupied countries, who pursued a policy of collaborationism. He also had supporters in other imperialist countries, for example, pro-fascist organizations in the USA, O. Mosley's clique in England, etc. The "new order" meant, first of all, the territorial redistribution of the world in favor of the fascist powers. In an effort to undermine the viability of the occupied countries as much as possible, the German fascists redrawn the map of Europe. The Nazi Reich included Austria, the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, Silesia and the western regions of Poland (Pomorie, Poznan, Lodz, Northern Mazovia), the Belgian districts of Eupen and Malmedy, Luxembourg, the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Entire states disappeared from the political map of Europe. Some of them were annexed, others were divided into parts and ceased to exist as a historically formed whole. Even before the war, a puppet Slovak state was created under the auspices of Nazi Germany, and the Czech Republic and Moravia were turned into a German “protectorate”.

The non-annexed territory of Poland became known as the "governor general", in which all power was in the hands of the Nazi governor. France was divided into an occupied northern zone, the most industrially developed (while the departments of Nord and Pas de Calais were administratively subordinate to the commander of the occupying forces in Belgium), and an unoccupied southern zone, centered in the city of Vichy. In Yugoslavia, "independent" Croatia and Serbia were formed. Montenegro became the prey of Italy, Macedonia was given to Bulgaria, Vojvodina - to Hungary, and Slovenia was divided between Italy and Germany.

In artificially created states, the Nazis planted totalitarian military dictatorships that were submissive to them, such as the regime of A. Pavelić in Croatia, M. Nedich in Serbia, I. Tisso in Slovakia.

In countries that were completely or partially occupied, the invaders, as a rule, sought to form puppet governments from collaborationist elements - representatives of the big monopoly bourgeoisie and landowners who had betrayed the national interests of the people. The "governments" of Petain in France, Gakhi in the Czech Republic were obedient executors of the will of the winner. Above them was usually an "imperial commissar", "viceroy" or "protector", who held all power in his hands, controlling the actions of the puppets.

But it was not possible to create puppet governments everywhere. In Belgium and Holland, the agents of the German fascists (L. Degrel, A. Mussert) turned out to be too weak and unpopular. In Denmark, there was no need for such a government at all, since after the capitulation, the Stauning government obediently carried out the will of the German invaders.

The “new order” meant, therefore, the enslavement of European countries in various forms - from open annexation and occupation to the establishment of “allied”, and in fact vassal (for example, in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania) relations with Germany.

Nor were the political regimes implanted by Germany in the enslaved countries the same. Some of them were openly military-dictatorial, others, following the example of the German Reich, masked their reactionary essence with social demagogy. For example, Quisling in Norway declared himself to be the defender of the country's national interests. The Vichy puppets in France did not hesitate to shout about "national revolution", "fight against the trusts" and "abolition of the class struggle", while at the same time openly collaborating with the occupiers.

Finally, there was some difference in the nature of the occupation policy of the German fascists in relation to different countries. So, in Poland and a number of other countries of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the fascist "order" immediately manifested itself in all its anti-human essence, since the fate of the slaves of the German nation was intended for the Polish and other Slavic peoples. In Holland, Denmark, Luxembourg and Norway, the Nazis at first acted as "Nordic blood brothers", sought to win over to their side certain sections of the population and social groups of these countries. In France, the occupiers initially pursued a policy of gradually drawing the country into the orbit of their influence and turning it into their satellite.

However, in their own circle, the leaders of German fascism did not hide the fact that such a policy was temporary and dictated only by tactical considerations. The Hitlerite elite believed that "the unification of Europe can be achieved ... only with the help of armed violence." Hitler intended to speak to the Vichy government in a different language as soon as the "Russian operation" was over and he would free his rear.

With the establishment of the "new order", the entire European economy was subordinated to German state-monopoly capitalism. A huge amount of equipment, raw materials and food was exported from the occupied countries to Germany. The national industry of the European states was turned into an appendage of the German fascist war machine. Millions of people were driven from the occupied countries to Germany, where they were forced to work for the German capitalists and landowners.

The establishment of the rule of German and Italian fascists in the enslaved countries was accompanied by cruel terror and massacres.

Following the model of Germany, the occupied countries began to be covered with a network of fascist concentration camps. In May 1940, a monstrous death factory began to operate on the territory of Poland in Auschwitz, which gradually turned into a whole concern of 39 camps. The German monopolies IG Farbenindustri, Krupna, Siemens soon built their enterprises here in order to finally get the profits once promised by Hitler, which “history did not know”, using free labor. According to the testimony of prisoners, the life expectancy of prisoners who worked at the Bunaverk plant (IG Farbenindustry) did not exceed two months: every two or three weeks a selection was carried out and all those weakened were sent to the ovens of Auschwitz. The exploitation of foreign labor power here has turned into the "destruction through work" of all people objectionable to fascism.

Among the population of occupied Europe, fascist propaganda intensively propagated anti-communism, racism and anti-Semitism. All mass media were placed under the control of the German occupation authorities.

The "new order" in Europe meant brutal national oppression of the peoples of the occupied countries. Asserting the racial superiority of the German nation, the Nazis provided the German minorities ("Volksdeutsche") living in puppet states, such as the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovenia and Slovakia, with special exploitative rights and privileges. The Nazis resettled Germans from other countries to the lands annexed to the Reich, which were gradually "cleared" from the local population. From the western regions of Poland, 700 thousand people were evicted, from Alsace and Lorraine by February 15, 1941 - about 124 thousand people. The eviction of indigenous people was carried out from Slovenia and the Sudetenland.

The Nazis in every possible way incited national hatred between the peoples of the occupied and dependent countries: Croats and Serbs, Czechs and Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians, Flemings and Walloons, etc.

The fascist invaders treated the working classes and industrial workers with particular cruelty, seeing in them a force capable of resistance. The fascists wanted to turn Poles, Czechs and other Slavs into slaves, to undermine the fundamental foundations of their national viability. “From now on,” said the Polish Governor-General G. Frank, “the political role of the Polish people is over. It is declared to be a labor force, nothing else... We will ensure that the very concept of "Poland" is erased forever. In relation to entire nations and peoples, a policy of extermination was pursued.

On the Polish lands annexed to Germany, along with the expulsion of local residents, a policy of artificially restricting population growth was carried out by castration of people, the mass removal of children to raise them in the German spirit. Poles were even forbidden to be called Poles, they were given the old tribal names - “Kashubs”, “Mazurs”, etc. The systematic extermination of the Polish population, especially the intelligentsia, was also carried out on the territory of the “governor general”. For example, in the spring and summer of 1940, the occupation authorities carried out the so-called “Aktion AB” (“emergency pacification action”) here, during which they destroyed about 3,500 Polish scientists, cultural and art workers, and also closed not only higher, but also secondary educational institutions.

A savage, misanthropic policy was also carried out in the dismembered Yugoslavia. In Slovenia, the Nazis destroyed the centers of national culture, exterminated the intelligentsia, clergy, and public figures. In Serbia, for every German soldier killed by partisans, hundreds of civilians were subject to "merciless destruction".

Doomed to national degeneration and destruction of the Czech people. “You closed our universities,” wrote the national hero of Czechoslovakia Yu. Fuchik in 1940 in an open letter to Goebbels, “you Germanize our schools, you robbed and occupied the best school buildings, turned the theater, concert halls and art salons into barracks, you rob scientific institutions, stop scientific work, want to turn journalists into mind-killing machines, kill thousands of cultural workers, destroy the foundations of all culture, everything that the intelligentsia creates.

Thus, already in the first period of the war, the racist theories of fascism turned into a monstrous policy of national oppression, destruction and extermination (genocide), carried out in relation to many peoples of Europe. The smoking chimneys of the crematoria of Auschwitz, Majdanek and other camps for mass extermination of people testified that the savage racial and political nonsense of fascism was being carried out in practice.

The social policy of fascism was extremely reactionary. In Europe of the “new order”, the working masses, and above all the working class, were subjected to the most cruel persecution and exploitation. Reduction of wages and a sharp increase in the working day, the abolition of the rights to social security won in a long struggle, the prohibition of strikes, meetings and demonstrations, the liquidation of trade unions under the guise of their "unification", the prohibition of political organizations of the working class and all workers, primarily communist parties, to whom the Nazis harbored bestial hatred - this is what fascism brought with it to the peoples of Europe. The “new order” meant an attempt by German state-monopoly capital and its allies to crush their class opponents with the hands of the fascists, crush their political and trade union organizations, eradicate the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, all democratic, even liberal views, planting the misanthropic fascist ideology of racism, national and class dominance and submission. In savagery, fanaticism, obscurantism, fascism surpassed the horrors of the Middle Ages. He was a frank cynical denial of all progressive, humane and moral values ​​that civilization has developed over its thousand-year history. He planted a system of surveillance, denunciations, arrests, torture, created a monstrous apparatus of repression and violence against peoples.

Accept this or embark on the path of anti-fascist resistance and a resolute struggle for national independence, democracy and social progress - such was the alternative that confronted the peoples of the occupied countries.

The people have made their choice. They rose to fight against the brown plague - fascism. The brunt of this struggle was courageously taken up by the working masses, primarily the working class.

The reactionary essence of the political systems of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and militarist Japan was especially evident in their policy towards the population of the occupied countries. Under the slogan of establishing a “new order” in Europe and Asia, they redrawn the previously established state borders, annexed certain territories and entire countries, forcibly imposed unbearable material and moral conditions of existence on other peoples, predatorily used their economic and labor resources, carried out mass resettlements and deportations, tortured and humiliated, physically destroyed millions of civilians and prisoners of war, forced them to work excessively and starved in special death camps and ghettos.

The initiator and main driving force behind the redrawing of the map of Europe was Nazi Germany, which set itself the goal of creating a gigantic empire that would stretch from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, from the shores of the Atlantic to the Urals. She and her allies enslaved the peoples of many countries. From the spring of 1938 to the summer of 1941, Germany conquered 11 countries with the help of military force. Under its domination was a territory of about 2 million square kilometers, where almost 190 million people lived. From the end of June 1941 to December 1942, Germany, with the assistance of its allies, captured about 8% of Soviet territory.

In all the occupied countries of Europe, the invaders pursued a policy of national and social oppression and suppression of opposition movements. The German occupiers were distinguished by the greatest cruelty, but the methods of enslaving the peoples of different countries by them were not the same. If in the East, especially in the temporarily occupied territory of the USSR, the Nazis and their benefits mainly asserted their dominance by bloody terror, then in the West they combined violent measures with the cultivation of collaborationism, support for local fascists, widely attracted local industrialists to cooperate in pursuing a course towards economic integration of their countries within the Great German space. Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium, according to the plan for "economic transformations of the world", prepared on May 30, 1940 by the German Foreign Ministry, were to be included in the sphere of the "Great German Reich". Pursuing a flexible, relatively mild occupation policy in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium, the Nazi government pursued the goal of creating conditions for the unhindered use of material and human resources to prevent the growth of the national liberation movement there, to form influential groups from local political figures, relying on which it would be without excesses to carry out the accession of these countries to Germany.

Hitler and his entourage regarded France as one of Germany's most sworn enemies and intended to permanently exclude her from the ranks of the great powers. According to the terms of the German-French armistice, the southern part of France was left under the control of the government of Marshal Petain, where it settled in Vichy. the policy of collaborationism was formalized during Petain's meeting with Hitler in Montuan in October 1940.

Almost the entire industry of the occupied countries of Western and Northern Europe worked for Germany, from there the labor force was forcibly deported to its industrial enterprises. During the war, 875 thousand workers, 987 thousand prisoners of war and prisoners of concentration camps created there by the invaders were taken out of France, 500 thousand workers from Belgium, 300 thousand from Norway, 70 thousand from Denmark, 500 thousand from Holland .

During the war years, the capture of export to Germany, along with material and cultural values ​​from the occupied countries of Western Europe, including Italy, acquired a wide scope. In accordance with Hitler's order of September 17, 1940, the "Rosenberg Einsatzstab" was created, which was tasked with taking works of art, antique furniture, rare books, etc. from occupied France and other occupied countries of Western Europe. As a result, from 1940 to 1944, more than 20 thousand different works of art were appropriated by Hitler, Goering and other Nazis, and also transported to German museums. In addition, from the looted almost 70 thousand apartments of Jewish families sent to the extermination camps, their property was taken to Germany, which required 674 trains. The peoples of the occupied countries of Western, Northern, South-Eastern Europe and Poland were heavily taxed. Which allegedly went completely to the maintenance of the German troops holding them at gunpoint. The desire to rely on the collaborationist regimes and preserve the freedom of the rear during the preparation and then the war against the USSR was the reason that the Nazi leadership did not switch to large-scale terror against the population of the occupied countries of Western Europe for quite a long time. At the same time, the invaders responded to the slightest manifestation of disobedience, protest and resistance with repressions. In Norway, for example, they first introduced a system of collective fines. In Denmark, in September 1943, a system of indemnities was introduced, according to which the population was obliged to pay 1 million crowns for each killed German soldier. By order of Hitler on December 7, 1941, an operation was carried out under the conditional name "Darkness and Fog". During this operation, which lasted until the end of 1944, in Norway, Holland, Belgium and other countries of Western Europe, as well as in Ukraine and the Czech Republic, civilians were arrested on suspicion without any charges. Then they were secretly transported to Germany for reprisal. The exact number of victims of this operation is not known, but they probably numbered in the tens of thousands. The German invaders began to behave most cruelly and aggressively in the countries of Western Europe after the turning point in the war in 1943 in favor of the anti-Hitler coalition. Among the population of these countries, the desire for disobedience and resistance to the invaders and local collaborators has sharply increased in the hope of bringing their liberation closer. The invaders responded with bloody terror. Retreating, they were engaged not only in robbery and destruction, guided by the tactics of "scorched earth", but often destroyed settlements along with the inhabitants.

The methods of the occupation policy, which were used by the Nazis in the West, became even more severe when they imposed their domination on the occupied territories of Poland, the USSR and the countries of South-Eastern Europe. The bulk of the population of these countries, with the exception of Greece and Albania, were Slavs, whom the Nazis referred to as an "inferior race." A few days after the start of the war in Berlin, under the leadership of Hitler, the development of the so-called Ost plan began. According to the first version of this plan dated July 15, 1941, in order to clear the territory for the Germans to settle in the East, it was planned to expel or destroy from their native land within 25-30 years from 80 to 85% of Poles, 85% of Lithuanians, 75% of Belarusians, 65 % of the population of Western Ukraine, half of the Estonians, Latvians and Czechs, a total of 31 to 45 million people. In April 1942 the general layout of the Ost was modified. It provided for the deportation or extermination of 46-51 million people from their countries of residence.

Taking into account those who died in German penal servitude, the number of deliberately destroyed peaceful Soviet citizens amounted to about 13.7 million people.

The occupation policy of the aggressors in the Balkans was frankly predatory. Attempts by the German military administration to establish its dominance in Yugoslavia and Greece, relying on local collaborators, failed. Resistance to the invaders quickly developed into a large-scale guerrilla war.

Based on everyday anti-Semitism, widespread in Germany, the Nazi government in September 1935 adopted the so-called Nuremberg Laws, according to which Jews could not be citizens of the German Reich, and Germans were not supposed to marry Jews and have children from them. During the war years, the German leadership set the task of exterminating the Jews in all European countries. For this, various methods were used - executions, hanging, overwork and gas chambers in concentration camps, primarily in Auschwitz. In total, 6 million Jews were liquidated, including 1.5 million living in the temporarily occupied territory of the USSR.

The Japanese "new order", which envisaged the creation of a colonial empire in Asia, was essentially no different from the Nazi "new order" in Europe. At the same time, the Japanese occupation policy had its own characteristics. Given the deep hatred of the peoples of Southeast Asia and the Pacific for colonialism, the Japanese government tried to present its own aggression as a war of liberation against the white race, to unite the peoples of the occupied countries under the nationalist slogan "Asia for Asians." In practice, the conquered countries became more and more convinced that the "yellow colonialists" would not give them either freedom or independence. Like the Nazis in Europe, so the Japanese militarists in Asia during the war years met with a growing rebuff from the peoples of the states they occupied.

For countries subjected to aggression, from the very beginning the war of 1939-1945 was a liberation war. In Poland, France, Yugoslavia, the first actions of the Resistance arose from the moment of occupation: anti-fascist forces were consolidated, an underground press was established, anti-fascist propaganda was deployed, acts of sabotage, strikes were committed, and partisan detachments were formed. At the same time, each country revealed its own specifics, used certain forms and methods of struggle.

The emigrant governments of Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Greece, Poland, Yugoslavia, the Resistance organizations of a number of other countries were located in London, the Free French movement was formed, headed by General Charles de Gaulle. Not immediately, but his connections with the internal Resistance of France were being established.

Already at the first stage of the war, Great Britain began to establish contacts with underground Europe. Churchill declared the need to "ignite a fire in Europe." On July 16, 1940, a secret Directorate of Special Operations (OSO) was created under the Ministry of Economic Warfare with an extensive network of connections with various Resistance organizations, primarily in Northern Europe: Belgium, Denmark, Norway. The USO coordinated their actions, sent them weapons and radio transmitters. Radio communications made it possible to unite disparate organizations of the Resistance, created by parties and political groups or arising spontaneously. BBC radio broadcasts from London and the underground press exposed Nazi ideology and propaganda, shaping the anti-fascist consciousness of the population of occupied Europe. This task turned out to be the most difficult in Germany, where, almost until the end of the war, the majority of the population supported the Nazi regime, falsely understood as a patriotic duty. The government of the USSR at the beginning of the war did not encourage the development of the Resistance in Europe. The general leadership of the Resistance in France during this period was carried out by the secretariat of the Central Committee of the PCF, located in the Paris region, which included J. Duclos, B. Frachon and Ch. Tillon. In the fall of 1940, the communists created the first armed groups, which soon united into a militant "Special Organization" (OS). In November 1940, a large student demonstration took place in occupied Paris under the slogan: “Long live France! Long live de Gaulle! Down with Petain! In May 1941, in accordance with the directive of the Comintern on the creation of national fronts, the French Communist Party issued a call for the formation of a National Front.

In Norway, the armed organization "Milorg" was created by former officers and soldiers of the Norwegian army. Civil disobedience campaigns became the predominant forms of resistance.

In the Netherlands, the first underground resistance organizations appeared in May 1940 in Haarlem and other cities. They called themselves "Gozes", distributed anti-Nazi materials, and committed sabotage. On February 17, 1941, the first major anti-fascist strike in occupied Europe took place in Amsterdam under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Netherlands: metalworkers opposed forced deportation to Germany. Following. The political strike on February 25 was attended by 300,000 people.

In Belgium in the fall of 1940, on the initiative of the Communist Party, people's committees for mutual assistance and solidarity were created, which became the organizers of the first patriotic demonstrations. At the end of August 1940, a partisan army was formed, as well as the Belgian Army and the Belgian Legion.

In the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe, as well as in the Balkans, the anti-fascist resistance took shape in general in the same structures as in the West.

Resistance in the Czech Republic and Slovakia developed independently. In the Czech Republic, it took the form of a movement in defense of national culture and against the Germanization that had begun.

The Polish resistance, which began in 1939, was directed mainly against the Nazi occupiers and their policy of brutal repression and genocide. Already at the end of 1939, an underground government military organization, the Union of Armed Struggle, arose on the pre-war territory of Poland. Another mass organization of the Resistance was the peasant battalions (battalions khlopske), politically representing the Peasants' Party (People's sympathy).

The resistance movement in the countries of the fascist bloc had its own specifics. here it was directed against their own regimes and developed under conditions of the most severe repressions from the state and the entire system of mass fascist organizations. In Germany, the underground group of Schulze-Boysen and Harnack, which had arisen as early as 1938, waged a struggle against the Nazi regime. With extensive connections at home and abroad, this group passed on to Soviet intelligence valuable information about Germany's military preparations against the USSR. "Krayzau circle". Many clergy from the standpoint of Christian morality condemned the war, the persecution of Jews, and provided assistance to prisoners of war.

The entry of the USSR into the war against Germany led to the rise of the resistance movement and a change in the position of the Comintern. Great Britain and the United States expanded the network of intelligence agencies of communications with the European Resistance in June 1942 in Washington, with the participation of the British, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was created, whose tasks included organizing sabotage activities in Western Europe together with the previously created British SOS. As the resistance movement grew, it became more and more difficult to lead the Communist parties from one center. This served as a formal explanation for the decision of the Comintern to dissolve itself (May 15, 1943).

The Italian resistance fighters Spinelli and Rossi, while in prison, in 1941 published the famous "Ventotene Manifesto", in which they criticized fascism.

The resistance movement developed along an ascending line: from passive forms to armed struggle. Various social strata poured into it: workers, peasants, intelligentsia, students, small urban entrepreneurs, priests. In France, Italy, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, the Hand, national anti-fascist fronts were formed.

The resistance in France acquired particular importance. In October 1941, de Gaulle notified the British government of his decision to take up political activity in France. Missions were sent to France to unite the internal and external Resistance.

In a number of countries, 2 blocs of anti-fascist forces arose: national and people's liberation fronts were created under the control of the communists and focused on support from the USSR, while other centers that united moderate-liberal forces established contact with emigre governments and sought to gain recognition and support from the USSR. Western allies.

In Yugoslavia, as early as July 1941, armed operations of people's liberation partisan detachments began. By the end of the year, they had liberated two-thirds of the Serbian territory, where the so-called Uzhitz Republic was established. In November 1942, the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia was created, headed by Tito.

The occupation regime in the enslaved countries. Resistance movement

Nazi "New Order" in Europe

In the occupied countries, where almost 128 million people lived, the invaders introduced the so-called "new order", striving to achieve the main goal of the fascist bloc - the territorial division of the world, the destruction of entire peoples, and the establishment of world domination.

The legal status of the countries occupied by the Nazis was different. The Nazis incorporated Austria into Germany. Part of the regions of western Poland was annexed and settled by German farmers, mostly "Volksdeutsche" - ethnic Germans, several generations of whom lived outside Germany, while 600 thousand Poles were forcibly evicted, the rest of the territory was declared by the German Governor General. Czechoslovakia was divided: the Sudetenland was included in Germany, and Bohemia and Moravia were declared a "protectorate"; Slovakia became an "independent state". Yugoslavia was also divided. Greece was divided into 3 zones of occupation: German, Italian and Bulgarian. Puppet governments were formed in Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Luxembourg was incorporated into Germany. France found itself in a special position: 2/3 of its territory, including Paris, were occupied by Germany, and the southern regions with the center in the city of Vichy and the French colonies were part of the so-called Vichy state, whose puppet government, headed by the old Marshal Pétain, collaborated with the Nazis.

On the conquered lands, the invaders plundered the national wealth and forced the peoples to work for the “master race”. Millions of people from the occupied countries were forcibly taken to work in the Reich: already in May 1941, over 3 million foreign workers were working in Germany. To strengthen their dominance in Europe, the Nazis planted collaborationism - cooperation with the occupation authorities of representatives of various segments of the local population to the detriment of the interests of the nation. To keep the peoples of the occupied countries in obedience, the system of hostage-taking and massacres of civilians was widely used. The symbols of this policy were the complete destruction of the inhabitants of the villages of Oradour in France, Lidice in Czechoslovakia, Khatyn in Belarus. Europe took refuge in a network of concentration camps. Prisoners of concentration camps were forced to do hard labor, starved, and subjected to savage torture. In total, 18 million people ended up in concentration camps, 12 million of whom died.

The policy pursued by the Nazis in different zones of occupied Europe had some differences. The Nazis declared the peoples of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Albania an "inferior race" subject to complete enslavement and, to a large extent, physical destruction. In relation to the countries of Northern and Western Europe, the occupiers allowed a more flexible policy. In relation to the "Nordic" peoples - Norwegians, Danes, Dutch - it was planned to completely Germanize them. In France, the occupiers at first pursued a policy of gradually drawing their influence into the orbit and turning into their satellite.

The fascist occupation policy in various countries of Europe brought national oppression to the peoples, an extreme increase in economic and social oppression, a frenzied revelry of reaction, racism and anti-Semitism.

Holocaust

Holocaust (eng. "burnt offering")- a common term for the persecution and destruction of Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices after Hitler came to power and until the end of World War II.

Anti-Semitic ideology was the basis of the program of the National Socialist Party of Germany, adopted in 1920 and substantiated in Hitler's book "My Struggle". After coming to power in January 1933, Hitler pursued a consistent policy of state anti-Semitism. Its first victim was the Jewish community in Germany, numbering more than 500 thousand people. By 1939, the Nazis were trying by every possible means to "cleanse" Germany of the Jews, forcing them to emigrate. Jews were systematically excluded from the state and public life of the country, their economic and political activities were prohibited by law. Not only the Germans followed this practice. Anti-Semitism has infected all of Europe and the United States. But in no country of Western democracy was discrimination against Jews part of a planned government policy, since it ran counter to basic civil rights and freedoms.

The Second World War turned out to be a terrible tragedy for the Jewish people in its history. After the capture of Poland, a new stage of the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazis began. More than 2 million Jews living in this country turned out to be under their control. Many Polish Jews died, and the rest of the Jewish population who survived were driven into the ghetto - a part of the city fenced off by a wall and a police cordon, where Jews were allowed to live and take care of themselves. The two largest ghettos were in Warsaw and Lodz. Thanks to the ghetto, the Germans provided themselves with almost Jewish slave labor. Lack of food, diseases and epidemics, overwork led to a huge death rate of the inhabitants of the ghetto. Jews of all Nazi-occupied countries were subject to registration, they were required to wear armbands or patches with a six-pointed star, pay an indemnity and turn in jewelry. They were deprived of all civil and political rights.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union, the systematic general extermination of all Jews began. On the territory for the extermination of Jews, 6 death camps were created - Auschwitz (Auschwitz), Belzec, Chełmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek. These camps were equipped with special equipment for the daily killing of thousands of people, usually in huge gas chambers. Few managed to live in the camp for a long time.

Despite the almost hopeless situation, in some ghettos and camps, Jews still resisted their executioners with the help of weapons that they managed to secretly get. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto (April-May 1943), the first urban uprising in Nazi-occupied Europe, became a symbol of Jewish resistance. There were uprisings in the death camps at Treblinka (August 1943) and Sobibor (October 1943), which were brutally suppressed.

As a result of the ruthless war of the Nazis against the unarmed Jewish population, 6 million Jews died - more than 1/3 of the total number of this people.

The resistance movement, its political orientation and forms of struggle

The Resistance Movement is a liberation movement against fascism for the restoration of the independence and sovereignty of the occupied countries and the elimination of reactionary regimes in the countries of the fascist bloc.

The scope and methods of the struggle against the fascist invaders and their accomplices depended on the nature of the occupation regime, natural and geographical conditions, historical traditions, as well as on the position of those social and political forces participating in the Resistance.

In the Resistance of each of the occupied countries, two directions were defined, each of which had its own political orientation. Between them there was a rivalry for the leadership of the anti-fascist movement as a whole.

At the head of the first direction were émigré governments or bourgeois-patriotic groups that sought to expel the invaders, eliminate fascist regimes and restore pre-war political systems in their countries. The leaders of this direction were characterized by an orientation towards the Western countries of liberal democracy. Many of them initially adhered to the tactics of "attantism" (waiting) - that is, they saved their forces and waited for liberation from the outside by the forces of the Anglo-American troops.

The position of the communist parties in the occupied countries was difficult. The Soviet-German non-aggression pact (1939) actually paralyzed the anti-fascist activities of the communists and led to the growth of anti-communist sentiments. By 1941, there was no question of any interaction between communists and anti-fascists. Only after the German attack on the Soviet Union did the Comintern call on the Communist Parties to resume the anti-fascist struggle. The courageous struggle of the Soviet people against fascism led to an increase in sympathy for the USSR, which also weakened anti-communist sentiments. The decision to dissolve the Comintern, taken in 1943 under pressure from the allies, allowed the communists to act as independent national forces and actively join the resistance movement. Thus, another direction in the Resistance was determined. It was led by communist parties and political forces close to them, which selflessly fought for national liberation and expected to carry out profound political and social transformations after the end of the war. The leaders of this trend were guided by the military assistance of the Soviet Union.

An important condition for the development of the resistance movement was the unification of anti-fascist forces. The general governing bodies of the resistance movement began to form. So, in France, they united under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle.

The anti-fascist resistance of the population of the occupied countries appeared in two forms: active and passive. The active form consisted in partisan struggle, acts of sabotage and sabotage, in the collection and transfer of intelligence information to the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition, in anti-fascist propaganda, etc. boycott of propaganda activities of the Nazis, etc.

The greatest scope of the resistance movement received in France, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia and Greece. In Yugoslavia, for example, the Communist-led People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia at the beginning of 1943 liberated two-fifths of the country's territory from the invaders. The Resistance Movement played an important role in the fight against fascism and hastened its defeat.

The system created by the Nazis in the countries they captured was called "new order". It was a German-controlled Europe, whose resources were placed at the service of the Reich and whose peoples were enslaved by the "Aryan master race". "Unwanted elements", primarily Jews and Slavs, were subject to destruction or expulsion from European countries.

Occupied Europe was subjected to continuous looting. The enslaved states paid Germany 104 billion marks in the form of an indemnity. Only from France during the years of occupation was exported 75% of the rice crop, 74% of the smelted steel, 80% of the oil produced.

It was much more difficult for the occupiers to "manage" the war-ravaged Soviet territories. But even from there, in 1943, 9 million tons of grain, 3 million tons of potatoes, 662 thousand tons of meat, 12 million pigs, 13 million sheep were exported to Germany. The total value of the loot in Russia, according to the calculations of the Germans themselves, amounted to 4 billion marks. It is understandable why the population of Germany until 1945 did not experience such material deprivation as during the First World War.

When Germany had already taken over almost the entire European continent, it had not yet been determined how the Nazi empire would be organized. It was only clear that the German Reich itself should become the center, which directly included Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg, the Flemish-populated part of Belgium, and the “returned” Polish lands along with Silesia. From the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, half of the Czechs were supposed to be evicted to the Urals, and the other half to be recognized as suitable for Germanization. Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Walloon-populated part of Belgium were to "dissolve" into the new German Reich, and it remained unclear whether they would become imperial regions or retain the remnants of state independence. France, in whose population Hitler had great distrust, was supposed to be turned into a colony of Germany. Sweden and Switzerland were also supposed to be attached to the future empire, since they "did not have the right" to an independent existence. The Fuhrer was not particularly interested in the Balkans, but Crimea (under the name Gotenland), inhabited by immigrants from South Tyrol, was to enter his future empire. The picture of the new great empire was supplemented by the allies and satellites of the Third Reich, who were dependent on it to varying degrees, from Italy with its own empire to the puppet states of Slovakia and Croatia.

The life of the people in occupied Western Europe was hard. But it could not be compared with what befell the inhabitants of Poland, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union. In the East, the general plan "Ost" was in effect, which probably arose at the turn of 1941 - 1942. That was the plan colonization of Eastern Europe where 45 million people lived. Approximately 30 million people declared "unwanted on racial grounds" (85% - from Poland, 75% - from Belarus, 64% - from Western Ukraine) were subject to resettlement in Western Siberia. The project was supposed to be implemented within 25-30 years. The territory of the future German settlements was to occupy 700 thousand square kilometers (while in 1938 the entire area of ​​the Reich was 583 thousand square kilometers). The main directions of colonization were considered northern: East Prussia - the Baltic states and southern: Krakow - Lviv - the Black Sea region.