On April 19, 2026, the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People, perpetrated by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 was celebrated in Russia for the first time.
On April 19, 1943, when the Victory Day of May 1945 was still more than two years away, the Decree № 39 “On punishments for Nazi villains guilty of murdering and torturing Soviet civilians and captured Red Army soldiers, for spies, traitors to the Motherland from among the Soviet citizens and their accomplices” was issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
The total number of victims among the civilian population of the USSR during the occupation period was about 14 million people. Those atrocities, which have no statute of limitations, were of the scale the history of mankind hasn’t seen.
The German invaders and their accomplices destroyed and burned hundreds of thousands of settlements. The mass extermination of people was carried out by barbaric methods and means, including executions, gallows, gas chambers, burning, hunger, cold, unbearable physical labor and the spread of epidemics. Thousands of the best representatives of the Ossetian people became victims of fascism in 1941-1945.
The memory of those terrible years has not been forgotten in Belarus, where the National Remembrance Day of the Victims of the Great Patriotic War and the Genocide of the Belarusian people is celebrated annually on June 22.
Today, we remember all those who at the cost of their lives fulfilled their duty to protect the Motherland, all those who were tortured to death in Nazi captivity, all those who died in the rear from hunger and deprivation.
19 April 2026