When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the front line wasn't where the danger was. The danger was behind it.

Men in civilian clothes would work a field by day and shoot sentries at night. A supply truck would leave a village and never arrive. German soldiers were found with their throats cut and nobody in the village had seen a thing.

On July 3, 1941, Stalin went on the radio and made it official. Form partisan units. Blow up bridges. Make conditions unbearable for the enemy everywhere they go.

Under the laws of war at the time, a fighter without a uniform had no protection. The Germans treated every one of them as a murderer, and every village that hid one as an accomplice.

The thing is, Berlin had already decided how this would go. In May 1941, a month before the invasion, the Barbarossa Jurisdiction Decree told German troops they would not be prosecuted for crimes against civilians and could burn villages in collective punishment. When Stalin called for partisan war, Hitler welcomed it. It gave him, in his words, the chance "to eradicate everyone who opposes us."

By September, the official rate was 50 to 100 civilians shot for every German killed.

In Serbia, the rate was 100 for every dead German and 50 for every wounded one. After an ambush near Gornji Milanovac killed 10 Germans in October 1941, around 2,800 men and boys were shot in Kragujevac. Some were high school students marched out of class with their teachers.

The reprisals were supposed to turn the population against the partisans. They did the opposite. A man whose family was shot and whose house was burned had nothing left to lose, so he went to the forest. The partisan movement grew every time the Germans tried to scare it into submission.

So both sides kept raising the stakes.

In December 1942, Keitel told German troops they could use any means "even against women and children," and no one would be punished.

In March 1943, partisans ambushed a German patrol near the Belarusian village of Khatyn and killed Hans Woellke, a German Olympic gold medalist. The next day, the villagers were herded into a barn and burned alive. 149 people. 75 of them children.

Khatyn was one of more than 600 Belarusian villages destroyed along with their people.

The partisans weren't playing by different rules. Prisoners were rarely taken, because there was nowhere to keep them. Wounded Germans were finished off where they lay. Anyone suspected of helping the occupiers was shot or hanged, sometimes with their families. In May 1943, Soviet partisans killed 128 people in the Polish village of Naliboki.

By the end, Belarus had lost roughly a quarter of its population.

It started with shots in the dark and orders that were already waiting to be used. It ended as a war where nobody expected mercy and nobody gave any.

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