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The Germans made bacteriological warfare


Another unknown facts of the WII was committed by the Germans in Belarus when the Soviet Army was advancing.
   They set up camps for civilians, whom deliberately infected with typhus to the Russian soldiers who tried to help were infected by them.
   The details of the account in his book Michael Jomnes Total War. London 2011. Pages 141  to 143.

"  By 17 March over 47.000 civilians were inside the camps. Convoys of vehicles began to draw up outside the fences, ans seriously ill hospital patients were carried out and interspersed amnog the prisoners. Thousands of people bagan to fall ill. The camp surround were mined, and the Werchmat troops wthdrew further west. The waited for their red Army opponents to discover them.
   Advancing Soviet soldiers did so on 19 March. Reconnaisance units from the Sixty- Fifth Army´s 37th Guard Division reporting seeing large concentrations camps in the marshland area of Polesie. " They are enclosed by barbed wire and in them thousand of civilians are huddled together, without any form of shelter whatsoever ", one Red Army related. " It´s almost too terrible to look at ". The division´s commander. General Ushakov, inmediately sent several units to overpower the camp guards and release the prisoners.
   Whatever the barbarity of these camps, which were merely pens in which civilians could be left to die of expossure, the reality was worse. The German plan was to infect the inmates with typhus and thus create an epidemic among advancing soldiers and civilians alike. And the plan was working - most of the prisoners were now ill. As Soviet soldiers rushed into the camp to help the weak and sick, they had no inkling that typhus, carried by lice and thriving in unsanitary condictions was now rampant in the camp - and that disease would now be transmitted to them ".

The transfer of civilians from their villages and towns, which were left empty, it was taken with the extreme cruelty common to the  Germans, one of the prisoners told their liberators :

" At night we were driven through knee-deep mud into a camp. On the forced march the German beat us - and anyone who lagged behind was inmediately finished off. One of the women has there small children. The youngest slipped in the mud, and a German soldier inmediately shoot him. When the other two turned round, frozen in terror, the soldier shot tem as well. The mother let out a heart-rending cry - but this was cut short by the final bullet."

  Filip Ivanovich related : "The Germans brought us into a camp in an area of marshland. There are not shelter, food or water - and any food people was carrying was confiscated by the soldiers, along with coats, boots and warm clothing. It was forbidden make fire. On the first night more that five hundred people died,mostly small childern "

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