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Vasyl Andriyovych Meleshko (Ukrainian: Василь Андрійович Мелешко, April 26, 1917 – 1975) was a Ukrainian war criminal who participated in the Khatyn massacre.
Meleshko was sent to a prisoners of war concentration camp at Hammelburg (Oflag-XIII D). He agreed to collaborate with the Germans.
In the autumn of 1942, after receiving special training in Germany, Meleshko was transferred to Kiev for service in the occupation units. He joined the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion composed of former Soviet soldiers and Bukovinians. Some sources state that along with other members of the unit he took part in executions of Jews in Babi Yar.Central Archive of the KGB (State Security Committee) of the Republic of Belarus. Arch. criminal case 26746 (interrogation of Hryhoriy Vasiura)
Meleshko received the rank of Zugführer and became the commander of a platoon of the 118th battalion. Initially, the unit performed security functions at various sites in Kiev of secondary importance.
From January 1943 to July 1944, Meleshko and his platoon took part in dozens of pacification actions — including the operations Hornung, Draufgänger, Cottbus, Hermann and Wandsbeck — that were part of the "Scorched earth" policy of annihilating hundreds of Belarusian villages in order to remove the support base for alleged partisans. 60 major and 80 smaller actions affected 627 villages across occupied Belarus.
The first victims of the 118th Battalion were the residents of the village of Chmelevichi, Lahoysk District, Minsk Region. On January 6, 1943, during the punitive operation in the village, 58 houses were looted and burned. Battalion forces threw half-dressed people out in a winter frost, and three of them were shot. Meleshko personally fired on the village with a rifle and gave orders to fire. In this and in a number of other operations, the battalion acted in conjunction with the SS-Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger, located in the district center of Lahoysk. This unit was created in 1940 by SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in accordance with Adolf Hitler’s personal order. Berger later suggested that the suitable commander for the unit is his old comrade, the notorious Oskar Dirlewanger who had just joined the SS.
In February 1943, the battalion members, after a heavy fight with partisans, decided to vent anger at residents of the villages of Zarechie and Koteli. They killed 16 people and burned 40 houses.
In April 25, 1974, Hryhoriy Spivak, a private of the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion said "In general, the first company we had was the cruelest and most devoted to the Germans. Most, if not all of them, were nationalists from Western Ukraine. Specifically, Meleshko's platoon was the most “vanguard” one."Central Archive of the KGB (State Security Committee) of the Republic of Belarus. Arch. criminal case 26613. T.Z.L., 184-199. (testimony of Hryhoriy Spivak)
Shortly before the ambush, the company members on the road met 50 residents of the village of Kozyri who were cutting down trees in the forest. Furious at his wound and Woellke's death, Meleshko accused the of concealing partisans and ordered them to be escorted to Pleschenitsy. He then went to the headquarters to call for reinforcements. When the vehicles of the 118th Battalion, raised by the alarm, arrived, the lumberjacks started running away. The company forces opened fire on them. Meleshko himself shot them at close range with a medium-sized machine gun and finished off the wounded. 26 people were killed.
On November 19, 1973, Ostap Knap said,
When I arrived at the site of the shooting, there were really a lot of people lying on the road. The entire place was drenched in blood. ... I saw how Ivankiv was firing with a machine gun upon the people who were running for cover in the forest, and how Vladimir Katriuk and Meleshko were shooting the people lying on the road. ... Meleshko and Pankiv were particularly cruel to the loggers—Meleshko because he had been wounded, and Pankiv because he wanted to avenge the from his home region.Shortly afterwards, the policemen from the 118th Battalion and the 1st company of SS-Sonderbatailllon Dirlewanger attacked and surrounded the village of Khatyn, where several partisans remained. They started shooting at the village. The platoon commander Meleshko even pushed away one of his subordinate machine gunners and began shooting himself. Troops from Dirlewanger's company used mortars and heavy guns to weaken the partisan's resistance.
After the resistance has been neutralized, They entered the village and plundered it. They drove all the residents into a barn, closed it, and set it on fire. Like other commanders, Meleshko was in the immediate vicinity of the barn, and along with others, he fired on the burning barn with an automatic rifle while people tried to escape from it. All the houses in the village of Khatyn were also burned. 149 civilians died.
During the offensive of the Red Army in 1944, the 118th Battalion retreated along with the occupation forces to East Prussia. Together with the 115th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, it was included in the 30th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS and sent to the west to fight French partisans.
Seeing the inevitability of the Third Reich's defeat, the division's soldiers decided to join the partisans. Meleshko became one of the initiators of that defection. Former battalion members formed the 2nd Ukrainian Taras Shevchenko Battalion, which was later included in the French Foreign Legion. While a part of this formation, Vasyl Meleshko arrived in North Africa. Later he said "By joining the Foreign Legion, I was not going to return to the Soviet Union, although I had no definite plans for the future. But the service in the Legion, practices in the foreign army with the prosperous officers' violence caused me to reconsider my views. I believed the defection to the French partisans would to somehow mitigate my guilt if my service in the 118th police battalion was revealed. I myself did not intend to tell about my service with the Germans."
Later Meleshko decided to move to his wife's relatives in the Rostov Oblast, but on the way there, he was arrested. During his interrogation, he confessed to having Collaborationism with the occupiers but he did not say he had served in the 118th police battalion, referring to a battalion of the Ukrainian Liberation Army as his place of service. He stated that while in Belarus, he was guarding railway communications and participated in military operations against partisans. On January 5, 1949, he was convicted for collaboration by a military tribunal of the Moscow Military District. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison and 6 years of loss of his rights. He was serving his sentence in the form of correctional labor in Vorkuta. At the end of 1955 he was granted amnesty in accordance with the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of September 17, 1955.
He returned to peaceful life on the Kirov farm in the Rostov region. He had two sons, and his wife, Nikol Meleshko, taught German at a local school. Meleshko became the chief agronomist of a collective farm named after Maxim Gorky. In the early 1970s, his wife died.
In September 1974, he was arrested and sent to the pre-trial detention center in the city of Grodno. The trial took place in Minsk behind closed doors, and the press was not allowed access. Survivors of Khatyn and the surrounding villages, as well as Meleshko's former colleagues from the police battalion, were summoned to the court as witnesses. Despite the direct testimony of witnesses, the defendant denied his personal complicity in crimes.
From Vasyl Meleshko's testimony: "At that moment, the barn with people caught fire. The staff translator Lukovich torched it. People in the barn began to shout, asked for mercy, there were screams, a horrible picture, it was terrible to listen to. Someone from the inside broke down the barn door, a burning man jumped out. Then Kerner ordered to open fire at the barn. I received such an order from Vinnytsky, and I gave it to my subordinates. All punishers, who stood in the cordon, began to shoot at people who were in the barn, they were firing two machine guns, which had been set on either sides of the barn. A machine gunner, Leshchenko, was firing one of these guns. My subordinates also were shooting rifles. I personally didn’t shoot, although I had a SVT rifle, I could not shoot at unarmed, innocent people. All the people driven into the barn - mostly women, old people, and children - more than 100 people were shot and burned." The tribunal of the Red Banner Belarusian Military District sentenced Meleshko to death. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, taking into account the exceptional gravity of the crimes committed by Meleshko, rejected his Pardon. In 1975 Vasyl Meleshko was executed.
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