Audrinsky tragedy

Mostly Russian Old Believers lived in Audrini. At the end of 1941, one of the inhabitants of the village, Anisya Glushneva, hid a Red Army son and five of his comrades who escaped from the Rezekne prisoner of war camp ^[1] . She understood that she was at risk, but she did not dare to drive the guys out of the house, since they were severely exhausted.

On December 18, policemen of the second section of the Rezekne police station, Ludborg and Ulyanov, at the denunciation of a resident of the neighboring village of Zarechye, Marina Morozova and her mother Akulina Rogova, appeared in the house of Glushneva. The Red Army fought back, Ludborg and one of the Red Army soldiers were killed in a shootout, and the rest fled.

Subsequently, according to the testimony, Rogova made excuses: “I wanted to ruin Glushnev, and not all” ^[2] .

On the same day, the punishers, led by the 33-year-old captain Boleslav Maykovsky, surrounded the Glushneva hut, and captured Anisya and her youngest son Vasya. Maykovsky personally tortured them, trying to find out where the fugitives had gone.

Another group of police went to comb the forest, but on December 21 lost three more people in a shootout. Only on December 31 the police managed to overtake, surround and destroy the Glushnev group.

The head of the Rezekne County Police Department Major Albert Eichelis, returning to Rezekne from the raid to search for Glushnev, suggested that Maykovsky ask permission from the Daugavpils District Commissioner Friedrich Schwung to completely destroy the village of Audrini and its inhabitants. They obtained such permission on December 21, 1941 ^[3] .

In the morning of December 22, the punishers began to go round Audrini house by house, ordering the peasants to get dressed and go outside. All were gathered in a barn, after which they were transported to the Rezekne prison by carts.

An order signed by the security commander of the Ostland Reichskommissariat Obersturmbannführer SS Strauch about the destruction of Audrina, the arrest and subsequent execution of all its inhabitants for harboring the Red Army was posted in public places throughout Rezekne County. 30 Audryn men were ordered to be shot publicly, in the market square of Rezekne.

On January 2, 1942, punitive forces headed by Eichelis and Majkovsky appeared in Audrini. Eichelis planned to set fire to 42 Audryn yards at the same time, for which police officers with torches were placed near each. At 2 p.m., the village was set on fire by a signal from a rocket launched by Eichelis.

On January 3, 1942, the inhabitants of Audrini began to be taken out of prison, loaded onto cars and taken to the Anchupan hills , about 5 km from Rezekne . Grave pits were dug in advance. They started to shoot right away. The shooting was carried out by local police from the village of Malta, led by Harald Puntulis . The local commandant, former lieutenant commander of the Latvian Army, Alexander Mach, was responsible for organizing the execution. ^[4]

One of the women in the prison had a child, whom the mother tried to put in a pile of rags on the edge of the grave before being shot. However, the infant was noticed by the senior police officer Smiltnieks and shot him in the head with a shot. Witness J. Klapars recalled that Smiltnieks later boasted: “When I fired, he scattered to smithereens” ^[2] .

On the first day of the execution, 170 (according to other sources - 205 ^[5] ) residents of the village who were in prison (including more than 50 children) were shot. The former Aizsarg platoon commander, the head of the 4th police station of the Rezekne district Harald Puntulis, was appointed responsible for the execution. The same person is responsible for the extermination of Jews in Ludza and other punitive actions in Latgale.

On January 4, 1942, at 11.30 on the Bazarnaya Square in Rezekne, 30 men from Audrini were shot, including teenagers from 10 to 17 years old. In groups of 10 people, 20 policemen from the village of Malta shot them.

Rodion Glushnev is buried in the Bratskoye cemetery of Soviet soldiers in Vilyany ^[6] .

In 1973, a monument was erected in memory of the victims of the tragedy at the place of their burial in the Anchupan hills , which was created by landscape architect Alfons Kiskis and sculptor Alice Weinbach.

Rezekne city and regional council remember January 4, 1942 as a mourning date. Commemorative events are held at the site of the execution of Audrintsy and the death of their village. At the initiative of the leader of the Socialist Party, Alfred Rubiks, its representatives gather here annually for the past 15 years ^[2] . In 2014, the memory of the victims of the execution was honored by the current president of Latvia, Raymond Vejonis , while the Minister of Defense. He urged not to allow such crimes.

• Maykovsky Boleslav Yazepovich , born in 1909, head of the 2nd section of the Rezekne police. After the war he lived in the USA. ^{[1] [7]}
• Puntulis Harald Petrovich , born in 1909, was appointed mayor in Daugavpils during the years of occupation. After the war, he managed to emigrate to Canada, where he opened a construction company in Ontario ^[1] .
• Eichelis Albert Yanovich , born in 1912, on January 4, 1942, not only directed the execution of 30 Audryn men, but also personally killed the wounded with a pistol ^[2] . He fled from Latvia with the retreating Nazis and hid in West Germany, in the city of Karlsruhe .

The circumstances of the death of the village of Audrini were revealed in the documentary Vilkači (Traitors), which described the personal role of Latvian punishers in organizing mass killings. The CIA informant, who saw this film while traveling in Latvia, recalled that in 1942 he had heard about the destruction of the village of Audrini, but the Germans did it. However, the informant considered the film to be true, in which it was told how Majkovsky proposed destroying the population of the village for communication with the partisans by shooting or hanging everyone without exception. He confirmed that the original German newsreel captured after the war was used in the film ^[7] .

The KGB of the Latvian SSR in 1964-65 conducted an investigation into the activities of the police leaders of the Rezekne district A. Eikhelis, B. Maykovsky, H. Puntulis, J. Basankovich, J. Krasovsky and Peteris Vaichuk, collecting in more than 40 volumes the protocols of interrogations and confrontations of the accused , witnesses, participants, injured ^[4] . The criminal case contained not only information about the Audrinsky tragedy, but also about the massacres and the Holocaust in Rezekne, Kaunat , Viljak , Ludza , Riebini ^[8] .

The Soviet government demanded from Canada, the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany the extradition of war criminals living there, but to no avail ^[7] . The US rejected the request on the basis of doubts about the fairness of the judicial process in the USSR, although the FBI conducted its own investigation of the identity and crimes of B. Maykovsky, who received asylum in the USA, and received irrefutable evidence of his guilt in war crimes ^[7] .

The destruction of the village of Audrini is described in two reports. In the first, from July 3, 1942, to the authorities in Daugavpils it is reported that all inhabitants of the village Audrini were arrested, and the village was burned. The second, detailed report, dated July 8, 1942. "December 22 of last year, - it is reported in the report, - on the order of the regional commissioner in Daugavpils all inhabitants of Audrini were arrested, and on January 2 the village was burned down, and inhabitants were executed. 30 people were publicly executed on the market square in Rezekne . ” The report was signed by Boleslav Maikovsky, the head of the 2nd section of the Rezekne auxiliary police, secretary V. Štitsmanis ^[9] .

At a trial in Riga from October 11 to 30, 1965, eyewitnesses gave evidence from the neighboring villages and the city of Rezekne. ^[2] Maykovsky , Puntulis and Eichelis were sentenced to be executed in absentia. ^[2] The court sentenced the court to Basankovich and Krasovskis to death, Vaychuk to imprisonment in a labor camp for 15 years. Basankovich and Krasovskis were shot.

After the restoration of the state independence of the Republic of Latvia, facts concerning the activities of the Latvian SS Legion were revised, and evidence of their guilt collected in Soviet times was considered dubious. So, on the website of the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, the entire trial of those responsible for the Audrinsky tragedy, held in 1965, is presented as attacks by the Soviet government on the freedom fighter of Latvia, the activist of the Latvian diaspora in the United States, Maykovsky. The Soviet film about the trial “The verdict cannot be appealed” is interpreted as Soviet propaganda, designed to confirm the “fascist nature” of the Latvians. “Of course, the destruction of Audrini is a tragic and obscure episode in the history of Latvia, but the facts presented in the film show the methods of work of Soviet propaganda and the KGB , and not an attempt to establish the truth and punish the guilty,” the museum website says. The testimony of a defector agent Imant Leschinskis, who stated that the purpose of the trials of war criminals were activists of anti-Soviet organizations and the emigrant press, is to testify to "compromise the emigrant organizations led by war criminals." Leshchinskis also stated that the documents on the basis of which they accused Maykovsky, Eichelis and Puntulis “could be falsified,” because the same Maykovskis was tried in the West, but the democratic court did not establish his guilt, since “all the evidence was based on assumptions” ^[10] .

The historian Kaspars Zellis drew attention to the fact that in Latvia there is a tendency to exaggerate the "German factor", which allows to reduce the responsibility of local residents for war crimes, to justify them in whole or in part. He recalls the words of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman : “The idea that criminals were a natural part of civilization or a disease, leads not only to a morally convenient self-justification, but also to dangerous moral and political disarmament. This allows you to distance yourself, because the events occurred at a different time, in another country, and someone else is guilty of them, not us ” ^[11] .

• Khatyn
• Lidice
• Krasukha

• Uldis Neiburgs . Dievs, Tava zeme deg! Latvijas Otrā pasaules kara stāsti.
• Latvijas enciklopēdija. 1. sējums. - Rīga: Valērija Belokoņa izdevniecība. 2002 .-- S. 370.

• Information on the site Russian.lv
• Eduard Linins (January 15, 2017). The tragic events in Audrini in January 1942 . Through the eyes of a contemporary . Latvijas Radio 1 / LSM.lv.