
35th Infantry Division (Wehrmacht)

The 35th Infantry Division (German: "35. Infanteriedivision") was a German Army infantry division in World War II.
History.
The 35th Infantry Division was raised in October 1936 in Germany's re-militarisation. It was used mostly used on the eastern front.
In May 1940, the division was part of the German forces sent to invade France and Belgium, remaining as an occupational formation in the two nations until June the next year, when it took part in Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union). Between then and April 1945 the division would remain in the central and southern sectors before being forced back to East Prussia by the advancing Red Army.
The 35th Infantry Division was one of many Wehrmacht units which committed war crimes in the Soviet Union. During early 1944 it was involved in an operation in the Gomel Region of Belarus in which 40,000 civilians were expelled from their homes as the German Army retreated; approximately 9,000 civilians died. The 35th Infantry Division undertook a similar operation in early April 1944 in which it rounded up civilians who it then either used for forced labour or expelled from the region; 3,500 were expelled. During that month, the divisional engineer battalion's third company massacred civilians in the towns of Karpilovka and Rudabelka. This operation was planned by the company's officers, who retained control over their soldiers during the killings. Nine members of the division were convicted of this massacre by a Soviet military tribunal in 1947 and sentenced to 25 years hard labour.