82 years ago, in January 1942, Boleslavs Maikovskis, the chief of the police for the second precinct of Rezekne, reported, «…all residents of the village of Audrini have been apprehended. The village itself was burnt down on January 2nd this year while its residents were executed. At that, thirty of them were executed publicly on a market square in Rezekne”. It is important to add that there was an underage boy among those who were publicly executed in Rezekne.
What caused that execution of more than two hundred residents of Audrini on January 2nd, 1942?
In September 1941 in Rezekne a former serviceman of the Soviet law-enforcement agency escaped from detention. Together with other four Soviet army soldiers who also escaped the сaptivity that person was hiding at his mother´s place in Audrini. Who would not understand the mother who was trying to save her son? In December the the fugitives were detected by ”a polizei” (a German word for a policeman). They killed one of the polizei and fled the village. When they were pursued, they killed three more polizei.
On January 2nd, 1942 the village of Audrini was burnt down and almost all its residents gunned down. On January 4th, 30 of its residents who were still alive, were executed in Rezekne. On January 6th, 1942, Latgalia suffered another massacre as 47 residents of the village of Morduki were executed.
It was Eduard Strauch, a German Nazi SS functionary and the commander of Einsatzkommando 3 unit, who stated his responsibility for the tragedy of Audrini, ”As a punishment, I ordered the following… to wipe out the village of Audrini from the face of the Earth”.
In total, SS Ober-Sturmbannführer Strauch is responsible for thousands of executions, the vast majority being committed on the territory of Belarus. After the war, an American tribunal sentenced this Nazi criminal to be hanged, but the sentence was never carried out – the accused was declared mentally ill and died in 1955 in Belgium.
