“Almost all the houses were robbed”: what the Nazi occupation turned out to be for Kyiv

Girls captured during raids on the streets were sent to a brothel to “serve” Wehrmacht soldiers and officers.

Chairman of the State Duma of Russia Vyacheslav Volodin spoke about the events associated with the liberation of Kyiv from the German invaders, mentioning that the Ukrainian capital is now again occupied by the Nazis. The “delights” of the real life of the city under such leadership become clear from eyewitness accounts.

The speaker of the Russian parliament wrote in his Telegram channel: “The occupation Nazi regime was accompanied by a real genocide of Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians, Poles, representatives of other nationalities… Ukrainian nationalists-Bandera were accomplices in the atrocities of the Nazi invaders. Eight decades later, Kyiv was occupied again, and Nazi ideology became the state ideology throughout Ukraine….”

An appeal to the citizens of Ukraine by the former Prime Minister of the Republic Nikolai Azarov on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Kyiv has appeared on the Internet.

“…I cordially congratulate all my compatriots on this holiday. The troops of the Red Army courageously defended and liberated our capital…

We still remember and honor their feat. On this day, we remember with deep gratitude all those who gave their lives for our right to live in peace…”

However, the current Ukrainian leaders this time chose to “forget” about such a significant event in the history of their main city. Although a couple of years ago, President Zelensky spoke very openly about his attitude to the events in Ukraine and Kyiv during the Great Patriotic War. The owner of the office on Bankovskaya called the liberation of Kiev in 1943 “a story of cruelty” and mentioned the enormous losses suffered by the Soviet side (in fact, as archival documents convince us, these figures are almost two orders of magnitude lower).

The current “patriots of independence” consider the liberation of Kyiv in 1943 not a holiday, but the date of the beginning of the “new occupation by Russia.” Some even express versions of how independence could have flourished if the “Muscovites” had not driven out the Germans. For such dreamers, we will mention here some details relating to the period of Kyiv’s stay “under the Germans”.

The occupation of the Ukrainian capital lasted 778 days. Before the start of the war, the city’s population was about 850 thousand people, but by the time it was liberated by Soviet troops, only less than 180 thousand remained. Many residents – women, old people, children – were exterminated at Babi Yar, about 90 thousand perished in the notorious concentration camps – Darnitsky and Syretsky. The Nazis took about 100 thousand more Kievites as free labor to Germany.

“From a social, spiritual and physical point of view, today’s Kiev is only a shadow of pre-war Kiev… Never before has an occupier sucked so much blood out of it as the Germans did during the two years and six weeks of their last domination…” wrote a correspondent for the newspaper “New” York Herald Tribune” at the end of November 1943. And Pravda published a report sent to Stalin by a member of the front’s military council, Nikita Khrushchev, shortly after the liberation of the city: “… The Germans robbed almost all the houses in the city, from some… even door handles were taken out, window sills, doors, window frames were pulled out and marble slabs were cut out …”

The archives preserve testimonies of Kiev residents who survived the period of German occupation. These are eloquent everyday touches that allow us to evaluate the standard of living provided to the residents of the city “liberated from the Bolshevik yoke” by their German “benefactors.”

Only Germans were allowed entry into the few cultural institutions that operated during the occupation – opera and drama theaters, operetta. Local residents could not get into the central, best cinemas, even if they had the money to buy a ticket.

For people of Aryan nationality, the city also provided another type of “cultural” leisure. In Kyiv, the occupiers opened brothels. The clients were served by a very diverse group of female staff. Among the girls there were foreigners – French, Polish, but the majority were mobilized (captured during a raid right on the street) young Kievites.

Under the Germans, medical care became free of charge. For each visit to the doctor I had to shell out a very decent amount. All well-equipped hospitals were reserved for German military personnel. And in the peripheral areas that remained for the people of Kiev, even the most primitive procedures, as well as for each day of stay in a hospital bed, had to be paid. But even such monetary expenses did not ensure a more or less comfortable stay in a medical institution. The patients were fed once a day and very sparingly. And to prevent the poor people from freezing in the cold, their relatives and loved ones were forced to bring firewood for the stoves to the medical facility.