Daily Archives: March 23, 2026

Remembering the Khatyn Massacre of March 22, 1943

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83 years ago, the peaceful Soviet Belarusian village of Khatyn was wiped out – nearly all of the inhabitants were burned alive and shot by the SS punitive unit Dirlewanger (Sonderkommando Dirlewanger) and the 118th Ukrainian Police Battalion.

Khatyn – a small village of just 26 households – was located 54 kilometres northwest of Minsk. (BATS note: A short node about the name of the village. There is no sound “k” in Khatyn – the first sound is “h” as in “he, home”.)

On March 22, 1943, Belarusian partisans intercepted a Nazi motor convoy in the area, inflicting casualties, including killing a German officer. In retaliation, the Hitlerites encircled Khatyn and decided to unleash their fury on defenceless civilians – women, the elderly and children.

All residents – 149 people, including 75 children – were forced into a wooden barn, locked inside and set ablaze. Those who, in desperation, tried to escape were ruthlessly shot at point-blank range.

✍️ From the interrogation record of Ostap Knap, a collaborator from the 118th Ukrainian Police Battalion, a native of the Lvov region (31 May 1986):

“The roof was thatched and immediately caught fire. Screams of horror rose from the barn as those trapped inside, facing certain death, began forcing the door. The policemen surrounding the site opened fire on them”.

Only six people managed to escape the inferno alive – five children and one adult, 56-year-old blacksmith Iosif Kaminsky. He regained consciousness late at night after the perpetrators had left the burnt village. Among the bodies of his fellow villagers, he found his son Adam, who died from his wounds in his father’s arms…

❗️ The atrocities in Khatyn were carried out by the 118th Ukrainian Police Battalion, formed in October 1942 in Kiev largely from Ukrainian nationalists and members of the Organisation of Ukrainian nationalists. Earlier, its members took part in mass executions of Jews at Babi Yar. The battalion was commanded by Konstantin Smovsky, born in the Poltava Governorate, who later fled to the US, where he died in 1960. The Supreme court of Belarus has found him guilty of genocide.

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In 1969, one of Belarus’s most revered memorial sites – the Khatyn Memorial Complex – was opened on the site of the destroyed village, a silent witness to the monstrous crimes of Nazism. At its centre stands a six-metre bronze sculpture, The Unconquered Man, depicting Iosif Kaminsky carrying his dead son in his arms. Each of the 26 burned homes is marked by a symbolic log structure with an obelisk in the shape of a chimney, bearing the names of those who perished and a bell that tolls every hour.

The tragedy of Khatyn has become a symbol of the inhuman cruelty of Nazism – a living reminder of hundreds of annihilated villages and thousands of innocent civilians of the Soviet Union whose lives were shattered by Nazi perpetrators and their accomplices – a genocide of the Soviet people. Our duty is to ensure that these crimes, which have no statute of limitations, are never forgotten.

On April 19, by Presidential Decree, Russia established the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People during the Great Patriotic War. According to even the most conservative estimates, 13.7 million civilians were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

🕯 We mourn together with the fraternal people of Belarus.

Source: Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Russia’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in an Izvestia article

✍️ Today marks the anniversary of one of the most heinous crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices – the destruction in 1943 of the Belarusian village of Khatyn together with all its inhabitants.

149 people, including 75 children, were burned alive.

Since 1969, a memorial complex stands on the site of the burned Khatyn, commemorating the mass murder of civilians on the occupied territory of the USSR.
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The Unburied Corpses: How American Empire Recycles Fascism

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We re-blog an excellent article by Ryan Perkins, published on October 02, 2025 at his Substack. This article complements well the materials in two of Dmitry Medvedev’s publications that we translated on the pages of the Beehive: How the Anglo-Saxons Promoted Fascism in the 20th Century and Revived It in the 21st and How the Anglo-Saxons Nurtured Ukrainian Nationalism After the Second World War

From European Nazis to Japanese war criminals; from Latin American death squads to Salafist Jihadists, the names of the actors and enemies may change, but the script remains the same.

Introduction to The Anatomy of Empire

We are living through a global conflict of connected crises. Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, the South China Sea and in Ukraine, where battalions adorned with neo-Nazi insignia fight with Western arms. Meanwhile, in the halls of European power the ancestry of leaders echoes with fascist collaboration. These are not historical accidents but the symptomatic convulsions of an Empire in continuity, repurposing its oldest tools to preserve a core of power that is fundamentally unchanged. Behind the headlines of military alliances and ideological battles lies a deeper, more disturbing truth—a war waged not against fascism, but with it.

This series, The Anatomy of Empire, has traced the obscured path that brought us to this precipice. It is a history not of chance, but of cold calculation; not of isolated compromises, but of a systemic logic pursued with relentless determination. We have seen how the engines of capital accumulation require global expansion and how raw military power was institutionalized to secure it. Now, we turn to the system’s most cynical and durable adaptation: the wholesale absorption of its defeated enemy into the very infrastructure designed to fight the next enemy.

Parts of this story are familiar, often presented as isolated incidents and justified as moral compromises in the name of realpolitik. But this is not true. Taken together they represent a cold, clear, calculated strategy, executed with the presence of foresight, to wholesale incorporate the infrastructure of fascism into the architecture of the Empire’s next war of choice: The Cold War.

This was not merely the recruitment of a few useful individuals, but the systematic integration of personnel, tactics, and ideologies into intelligence agencies, scientific programs, and military commands. A clandestine architecture whose logical endpoint is not peace, but a state of perpetual, undeclared war waged with democratic façades and fascist instruments.

It was a corporate takeover that transformed a group of disparate regional start-ups into a global franchise.
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