Khatyn massacre

[5][6] On 22 March 1943, a German convoy was attacked by Soviet partisans near Kozyri village, 6 km away from Khatyn, resulting in the deaths of four police officers of Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118.

[7] Battalion 118 called for help from troops of the Dirlewanger Brigade, a unit mostly composed of war criminals recruited for Nazi security warfare tasks.

Supervised by Hryhoriy Vasiura they together entered the village and drove the inhabitants from their houses and into a shed, which was then covered with straw and set on fire.

Ivan Melnichenko, the leader of the Dirlewanger unit which committed the massacre, was fatally shot by NKVD agents on 26 February 1946 while resisting arrest.

The chief of staff of 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, former Red Army senior lieutenant Hryhoriy Vasiura, was tried in Minsk in 1986 and found guilty of all his crimes.

The case and the trial of the main executioner of Khatyn was not given much publicity in the media; the leaders of the Soviet republics worried about the inviolability of unity between the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples.

Among the foreign leaders who have visited the Khatyn Memorial during their time in office are Richard Nixon of the US, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Rajiv Gandhi of India, Yasser Arafat of the PLO, and Jiang Zemin of China.