Six criminal cases opened in Russia over Nazi crimes committed in WWII - prosecutor general

MOSCOW. Nov 20 (Interfax) - Six criminal cases have been opened in a number of Russian regions over the new information of war crimes committed by the Nazis during WWII, Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov said.

"Six criminal cases have been opened on the basis of the uncovered facts. The Prosecutor General's Office is supervising the investigation process," Krasnov said at the scientific and practical forum "Lessons of Nuremberg" in Moscow on Friday.

Circumstances of the uncovered Nazi crimes against the civilian population are being established within the framework of Project "Without Time Limitation," Krasnov said. "As a result of this work, archived materials regarding crimes committed by Nazi punitive units in the republics of Karelia and Crimea, the Krasnodar Territory, and the Leningrad, Novgorod, Pskov, and Rostov regions were retrieved and de-classified," he said.

A court recently recognized the brutal murder of over 2,500 civilians and prisoners of war by the Nazis near the village of Zhestyanaya Gorka in the Novgorod region in 1942-1943 as a war crime and a crime against humanity, as well as an act of genocide against peoples populating the Soviet Union, Krasov said. "This is how they were defined in the Charter of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal and reaffirmed by UN General Assembly resolutions in 1946," the prosecutor general said.

The studying and de-classification of archived materials have been arranged in another 22 constituent territories of Russia in order to detect every crime committed by the Nazi forces of occupation, he said.