I was with a reserve police battalion attached to the 49th Army. It was our job to find NKVD murder squads and put an end to their activities. We had intelligence that a death squad from Lvov and Dubno had gone north to Lutsk and, in our light panzer wagons and Puma armored cars, we tried to get there ahead of them. Lutsk was a small town on the Styr River with a population of seventeen thousand. It was the seat of a Roman Catholic bishop, which was hardly likely to endear it to the communists. When we arrived there we found almost the entire population gathered around the NKVD prison and in great distress about the fate of relatives incarcerated there. One wing of the prison was well ablaze, but using our armored cars we managed to break down a wall and save the lives of more than a thousand men and women. But we were too late for almost three thousand others. Many had been shot in the back of the head. Others had been killed by grenades tossed in the windows of cells. But most had just been burned to death. I will never forget the smell of burnt human flesh as long as I live.

The local townspeople told us which way the death squad had gone and so we gave chase, which was easy enough in the panzer wagons. The dirt roads were hard as concrete. We caught up with them only a few miles north in a place called Goloby. A firefight ensued. Thanks to the cannon mounted on our car, we won it easily. Thirty of them were captured. They hadn’t even had time to throw away their distinctive red identification documents, which, inconveniently for them, contained photographs. One of them even had the keys to Lutsk Prison still in his pocket as well as numerous files relating to some of the murdered prisoners. There were twenty-eight men and two women. None of them was older than twenty-five or -six. The youngest, a woman, was nineteen and good-looking in that high-cheekboned, Slavic way. It was hard to connect her with the murders of so many people. One of the prisoners spoke German and I asked him why they had murdered so many of their own people. He told me the order had come straight from Stalin and that their party commissars would have had them shot if they had failed to carry out his order. Several of my men were for taking them with us so they could be hanged in Minsk. But I did not care for this extra baggage. And so we shot them all, in four groups of seven, and headed north again, toward Minsk.