[1] This execution was one of the many massacres of prisoners hastily committed by the NKVD in 1941 in the wake of German invasion.
On 5 September 1941, on the order of Lavrentiy Beria, the NKVD composed a list of 170 Oryol prisoners to be executed.
Beria claimed they formed the "more angry part of the prisoners" and that they "performed defeatist agitation and attempted to organize escapes with the aim of renewing underground activities".
Many of those executed were foreign citizens, among them mathematician Fritz Noether, whose liberation Albert Einstein had demanded.
Other detainees executed that day include Christian Rakovsky, Sergei Efron, Olga Kameneva, Garegin Apresov, Maria Spiridonova and Dmitry Pletnyov.