Economic damage caused by the German Nazis during the short-term occupation of Kalmykia (August 1942 – January 1943)

The article is devoted to an urgent problem that has no statute of limitations — the war crimes of the German Nazis in the temporarily occupied territories of the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War. For the first time, it comprehensively highlights the destruction of property, buildings, structures, robbery, export of economic resources to Germany, and the economic atrocities committed by the German Nazis during the short-term occupation of Kalmykia. Although this research topic is devoted to the monstrous atrocities of the German occupiers on the territory of a particular region, it is revealed in the general context of the war crimes of the German Nazis during the Great Patriotic War in the occupied territories of the RSFSR. The source base of the article is made up of archival and published documents, varying in origin and content. Many of them are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time when highlighting this regional problem. Some issues of this topic have been covered only fragmentally in local historiography. Nazi Germany, having attacked the Soviet Union, according to the planned expansionist program of total lightning war, set a barbaric goal — to destroy the state, seize territory, turn it into a raw material appendage, exterminate the bulk of the population, and make the rest slaves of the “Aryan masters.” This gives reason to say that the act of plundering, destroying, and exporting the economic resources of the RSFSR was one of the ways the German fascists carried out the genocide of the Soviet people, and not just providing food to Germany. Therefore, the consequences of the economic goal of the war unleashed by Nazi Germany are the gravest atrocity, a war crime of the German Nazis that have no statute of limitations. This barbarism, evidence of the historical truth about the atrocities of the German fascists, cannot be forgotten or erased from historical memory. It should be a warning about the new threats of the resurgent Nazism in a number of European countries.