“In the village of Semenovskoe, in the region of Kalinin, the Germans bound with twine the arms of Olga Tikhonova, the 25-year-old wife of a Red Army man and mother of three children, who was in the last stage of pregnancy, and raped her. After violating her the Germans cut her throat, stabbed her through both breasts, and sadistically bored them out. In the same village the occupants shot a boy of 13 and cut out a five-pointed star on his forehead.
“In November the telegraph operator of the town of Kalinin, Ivanova, went to visit relatives in the village of Burashevo, near Kalinin, together with her 13-year-old son Leonid. When they left the town they were noticed by some Hitlerites, who began shooting at them from a distance of 60 meters; as a result the boy was killed. The mother made several attempts to carry away the child’s body, but whenever she tried to do so the Germans opened fire and she had to leave the body there. For 8 days the German soldiers would not let her remove the body. It was only removed and buried by the mother when the place was occupied by our troops.”
Mention is made, further on in the note, of another child victim of the fascists. The Tribunal will see this murdered boy in our filmed documentary evidence. I would ask the Tribunal to pay attention to the further words of the “note” which I shall read into the Record:
“In Rostov-on-Don a pupil of the commercial school, 15-year old Vitya Cherevichny, was playing in the yard with his pigeons. Some passing German soldiers began to steal the birds. The boy protested. The Germans took him away and shot him, at the corner of 27th Line and 2d Maisky Street for refusing to surrender his pigeons. With the heels of their boots the Hitlerites trampled his face out of all recognition.
“The village of Bassmanova, in the Glinka district of the Smolensk region, liberated by our troops early in September was one mass of ashes after the German occupation. On the very first day of their arrival, the fascist fiends drove into the fields over 200 schoolboys and girls who had come to the village to help in the harvesting. There they surrounded them and savagely shot them all. A large group of schoolgirls was abducted to the rear ‘for their lordships, the officers.’
“The seizure of towns or villages usually begins with the erection of a gallows on which the German executioners hang the first civilians they can lay their hands on. Moreover, they leave the bodies hanging on the gallows for days and even weeks. They do the same with the people they shoot in the streets of the towns and villages, leaving the bodies untended for days on end.
“After the seizure of Kharkov, the German thugs hanged several people from the windows of a large house in the center of the city. Furthermore, in the same city of Kharkov on 16 November 19 persons, including one woman, were hanged from the balconies of a number of houses.”
The bestial acts of violence perpetrated against the women everywhere testify to the profound moral corruption of the criminals. I shall quote from that passage in the note which Your Honors will find on Page 4, Paragraph 4, of the document book:
“Women and young girls are vilely outraged in all the occupied areas.
“In the Ukrainian village of Borodayevka, in the Dniepropetrovsk region, the fascists violated every one of the women and girls.