Murder Story of Petrovskoye Jews on Turgeniev Street in Petrovskoye (Gas Vans)

... The Fascist monsters committed many atrocious acts of mass murder of peaceful citizens. During excavations of the burial areas in the village of Petrovskoye, [on] Baranichya Mountain, there were dozens of victims of fascist terror: in the first grave 74 bodies were found; in the second, large grave there were about 800 bodies. Several other graves were found next to those [graves]: in one were seven people [bodies] ; in the second -- 40; in another three graves there were two in each grave; and in another one -- three. During the exhumation of the bodies one could tell that some victims were killed by poison gas and some were killed by gunfire. All the bodies were naked. Among the bodies were also those of nursing children, as well as of older ones. The photographs which were taken during the exhumation of those graves, underlined the cruelty that the fascist villains displayed against the Soviet civilians. The district commander Wolf and the county commander Hellein, as well as their accomplices -- the heads of the [local] police – the butchers Novoseltsev and Bibik, and also the mayor [sic] of the region Butner and the [village] elder Bayden were responsible for all of these vile deeds. … With the arrival of the German-fascist occupiers in the village of Petrovskoye, in the Stavropol Kray District, in August 1942, there ensued the first act of their bestiality, the shooting of three civilians whose identity could not be determined. They were shot on the pretext that they had belonged to the partisan movement…. In regard to the bestial crime – the mass killing of Jews in the month of September 1942, according to the witnesses Yefrosinta Petrova and Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Gusenko, we were told the following: “On one day all of the Jews who lived in the County were summoned to the courtyard of Turgeniev Street No. 7. According to the witnesses, there were 500 people, all of them locked up in barracks. Until evening, the whole quarter was guarded by the fascist soldiers, while the other [non-Jewish] civilians were forbidden under threat of punishment to leave their homes or to look out from [their own] windows. The people who lived in the neighboring courtyard told us that from the other courtyard where the unfortunate victims were they heard the sounds of beatings and insults, and the inhuman cries of tortured adults and children. During a period of two to three hours, every half hour a covered vehicle drove into the courtyard. The [fascist] butchers threw their victims into there, after they (the victims) had been forced to undress. Immediately after the motor[of the vehicle] was started the voices became silent. During the exhumation of those graves some victims were found without gunshot wounds and the statements of the witnesses that the sound of voices in the vehicle became silent are indications that the killing in the vehicle was carried out with some kind of poison. Moreover, according to the witnesses Hamilkis and Gitter, on October 12, 1942 in the village of Michailovki, Stavropol Kray District, Gestapo men shot to death about 100 Jewish families, who were being transported from the village of Petrovskoye in August 1942 when they were stopped by German paratroopers in the village of Palagiada....