History’s Most Horrific Torture & Executions — 2 Hour Compilation

“It’s August 3rd, 1832. We’re in Durham. William Jobling stands on a scaffold with a noose around his neck. He’s 30 years old and a minor from Jarro. Until today, he has been on strike for nearly 9 months. Now, none of that matters. In just a few short minutes, he will be dead, executed for a crime he probably didn’t even commit. But the state doesn’t care.”

“They need Jobling to send a message to the miners. And to do that, they will make sure that his death is not the end of his punishment. In fact, it is just the beginning. From somewhere in the crowd below, a voice cuts through the noise.”

“Farewell, Jobling.”

“His head swivels just for a moment. The rope shifts around his neck. At that moment, the trap door opens beneath his feet. And instead of a quick death, Jobling strangles slowly. After waiting the customary hour, the executioner cuts him down. But they don’t bury him. Instead, Jobling’s corpse is carried back inside the local jail, stripped naked and coated in hot pitch until he’s as black as coal. The blacksmith then arrives with an iron cage custom-made to Jobling’s measurements and begins riveting metal bands around his limbs and twisted neck. 3 days later, his tarred body will be paraded through the streets by hundreds of armed soldiers and hoisted 21 ft into the air at Jerro Slake, where he’ll hang in chains until he rots to the bone.”

“But here’s the surprising twist. His jibbiting, this grotesque punishment reserved for the worst crimes in Britain, would backfire on the state and ultimately help to end the practice forever. This is the grim history of the Jibet, one of the most macabre punishments in British legal history. We’re going to explore what it was and why the state thought that displaying rotting corpses in iron cages would prevent crime. We’ll see how it often had the opposite effect, turning executions into carnivals and criminals into folk heroes. We’ll also see how William Jobling’s case along with one spectacular disaster in Leicester brought the entire practice crashing down in the space of a single month in 1832.”

“Welcome to raw history. So what exactly was a jibet? The word itself could refer to the wooden scaffold used for hanging. But jibbiting, or hanging in chains, meant something more specific and sinister. After execution, usually by hanging, a criminal’s body was placed in a custom-made iron cage and suspended in a public place. The corpse was left there to decompose in full view, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. The legal framework came from the Murder Act in 1752. Parliament, convinced that ordinary hangings had lost their power to deter crime, mandated that convicted murderers’ bodies could no longer be buried. Instead, judges had to choose: either send the corpse for dissection or send it to the Jibet. Both options were designed as a ‘further terror and peculiar mark of infamy.’”

“The jibet was purely spectacular, a punishment that existed only to be seen, and in theory, it was meant to work. But the reality of the jibet was far more complex than the state intended. There was the sound first of all, iron chains that would clank and creak in the wind, sometimes audible for miles. There was also the smell. Despite the waterproofing from the tar and pitch, decomposition was inevitable. In warm weather, the stench could be unbearable. In 1735, residents of Turnum Green successfully petitioned the removal of a Jibbit due to the great annoyance from the smell. And finally, there was the site, the grotesque transformation of human form as flesh shrank from bone.”

“In 1661, the poet Samuel Pepys rode past a Jibet at Shooters Hill and recorded in his diary. He wrote: ‘I rode under a man that hangs at Shooters Hill, and a filthy sight it was to see how the flesh shrunken from his bones.’”

“Later, writer Elizabeth Ham, traveling in Ireland, recorded a similar horror, watching as her daughter Mary peered through the glass at the tarred body swinging in its iron cage and tried to work out which bit had been its face.”

“Jibbits were cited strategically for maximum visibility. They were placed at crossroads, on hilltops, or along busy highways, and at tidal mudflats. For pirates, for example, the location was particularly symbolic. In one example, Captain William Kidd, one of history’s most infamous pirates, was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping in 1701. His body was then coated in tar and hung in chains at Tilbury Point on the Thames’ estuary where it remained for years. Some Jibbits endured for decades. The body of Spencer Broton, an infamous highwayman, hung on the Atacliff Common for 36 years.”

“The economics of Jibet were also surprising. Each cage was bespoke to its user, crafted by a local blacksmith who often had no experience of creating a jibet cage. The average cost was £16, a year’s wages for an agricultural laborer. Some cost far more. One example from 1790, the jibet of a man named John Dean in Middlesex, cost over £56. This expense alone would limit how often the state could use this particular punishment.”

“The Jibet was supposed to inspire fear and submission. Instead, it often became a curiosity, a landmark, even a carnival. When two murderers named Conaway and Richardson were jibbited in London in 1770, the General Evening Post reported: ‘The place where Conway and Richardson hang in chains still continues a particular fair. A booth is erected and several kinds of diversions carried on even under the gallows.’”

“One man is even reported to have climbed up the pole with two lit pipes of tobacco, stuck one in Conaway’s decaying mouth, sat across the jibet, smoking the other, and then announced to the crowd that they’d smoked together before and would again.”

“Jibbits also became landmarks. Streets were named after them. They appeared as reference points in travel directions. And far from preventing crime, some Jibbits seems to inspire it. In one bizarre documented case, a 16-year-old girl invited a friend to a picnic beneath a jibet, then poisoned her with cake because the woman had been offered a job that she coveted.”

“In the early 19th century, the state was beginning to lose control of this particular punishment. And nowhere would this become clearer than in the case of William Jobling. To understand why Jobling’s jibbiting mattered, though, we need to understand the context. The year was 1832, and the northeast coal fields were in revolt. Miners were striking against the bond system, a contract that bound them to a single colliery for a year at a time. The strikes were well organized, massive, and terrifying to the colliery owners and magistrates who depended on cheap controlled labor. On June 11th, 1832, a 71-year-old magistrate and colliery owner named Nicholas Fairless was riding near Jerro’s Slake when two miners stopped him. One was William Jobling. The other was a man named Ralph Armstrong.”

“What happened next is disputed and we may never know the truth. The prosecution claimed that Armstrong held Fairless in place whilst Jobling beat the old man to death with a stone and his own walking stick. Jobling’s version, however, was different. He’d stopped Fairless to beg for money or a drink. Desperate from weeks without pay when Armstrong attacked, Jobling panicked. He claimed that while he did not strike a single blow on Fairless, he did hold his horse. But under the law of common purpose, that was enough. Armstrong fled and was never captured. Jobling, however, stayed but was arrested. He was tried and convicted.”

“The state had its scapegoat. Mr. Justice Park, residing at the Durham Assizes, needed to send a message to these striking miners. The Anatomy Act had just abolished punitive dissection, but Park, either confused by the new law or simply determined to use the harshest punishment available, sentenced Jobling to be hanged and then hung in chains. It was a political execution designed to break the miner’s spirit and send a message. It had the opposite effect. The mining community didn’t see Jobling as a murderer. They saw him as one of their own, sacrificed by the state, desperate to maintain control. Folk songs even began to circulate even before the execution. The ballad written days later, ‘Farewell Jobling,’ captured the community’s view.”

“‘Farewell Jobling,’ rang the shout from the crowd as he was launched into the eternity, and on Jerro’s slake jibbited 21 ft high, he was hung to rot in the hot summer sky.”

“William Jobling, a literate man, a scapegoat, and an innocent victim. The miners weren’t afraid, they were angry, and they were already planning something the state did not expect. After death, his body was taken to the jail, stripped and coated in pitch. Jobling was then riveted into an iron cage around his limbs. The Jibbit cage itself was a marvel of grim engineering: vertical bands up the legs and torso, horizontal hoops across the chest and hip, and a headpiece to keep the skull upright. Some even included a nose guard to prevent the face from collapsing. There were also stirrups to support the feet, all suspended from a swivel hook that would let the body rotate in the wind.”

“On August 6th, 3 days after the execution, the procession left Durham. Jobling’s corpse lay on a cart surrounded by a troop of the Eighth Hussars and two companies of the 15th Regiment of Foot. The authorities knew exactly how the mining community felt about Jobling’s execution, and they were taking no chances. The Jibbit was erected near Jerro Slake, a tidal mudflat near where Fairless had been killed. The post stood 21 ft high, sunk into a stone base, weighing a ton and a half to prevent anyone from digging it up.”

“Jobling’s body swung high above the exposed mud flat, visible for miles in every direction, and visible from one place in particular, the cottage where Isabella Jobling lived with her children. From her window she could see her husband every single day, hanging, rotting, the iron chains clanking in the wind. The smell, when the breeze shifted, was unbearable.”

“The night of August 31st, 1832, less than a month after Jobling’s body was hoisted into the air, the Jibet stood alone in the darkness, unguarded. Under the cover of night, men began to arrive. They scaled the 21 ft post. They removed the iron cage. They carried William Jobling’s body away into the darkness. No one ever informed on the thieves, though, and no body was ever officially recovered. Local folklore suggests that it might have been buried secretly in Jerro’s churchyard, or perhaps near the Willington Quay. The empty Jibbit remained standing for a time, but it was no longer a monument to state power. It was a monument to the state’s failure.”

“The theft of Jobling’s body sent shock waves through the British government. The punishment designed to terrify the miners had instead unified them. The state had been humiliated, and much worse was coming. Just one week after Jobling’s execution, on August 10th, 1832, a 21-year-old bookbinder named James Cook was hanged in Leicester. Cook had murdered a man called John Pass, a brass instrument maker from London following a dispute over debt. His method of disposal was particularly grim. He tried to burn the body in his workshop furnace, dismembering it first. The discovery of the charred remains caused a national sensation. Just like Jobling, Cook was ordered to be hung in chains. His body was suspended from a 33 ft jibet at Saffron Lane near the Alston Tollgate at the edge of Leicester.”

“The authorities intended to create a solemn deterrent, a spectacle. What they got was complete chaos. On the first day, Sunday after the Jibbit was erected, somewhere between 20 and 40,000 people are reported to have descended on Saffron Lane. Vendors set up stalls to sell food and ale. People climbed the jibbit post to get a better look at Cook’s face. Children ran through the crowds. The atmosphere was of a county fair, not a place of judicial terror. The local gentry were horrified, not at the cruelty of the punishment, but at the disorder it had created. They petitioned the authorities immediately. The reaction was unprecedented. On Tuesday, August 14th, just 3 days after the Jibbit was first erected, an order arrived from the Home Office: ‘Take it down immediately.’”

“Cook’s body was removed and buried at the foot of his Jibbit post, iron cage and all. The final Jibbit in England lasted just 3 days before the government, humiliated and outraged, ordered its removal. The practice designed to inspire terror had thrown one of the largest parties that Leicester had seen in years and encouraged more crime to boot. Combined with the theft of Jobling’s body just weeks earlier, the message was clear and unmistakable. The Jibet had failed. The disasters of August 1832 made abolition inevitable. And two years later in March 1834, William Ewart, the MP for Liverpool, introduced a bill to abolish gibbeting for good. He described it as ‘odious and unsullied to the present state of public feeling.’”

“Later that year, Lord Suffield championed the cause in the House of Lords. In his speech on July 18th, 1834, Suffield pointed directly to Cook and Jobling as proof that the punishment had failed. He asked the lords to expunge it forever from the statute book. On July 25th, 1834, the Hanging in Chains Act received royal assent. The practice was formally abolished. Bodies of murderers would now be buried within prison precincts, hidden, private, and unmourned. The era of spectacular public punishment was over in Great Britain.”

“William Jobling’s widow, Isabella, sadly never recovered from what she witnessed. She died in the Harton Workhouse in 1892, aged 91. Jobling’s jibbiting was intended to restore authority, but instead his body was stolen. In Leicester, Cook’s jibbit collapsed into carnival chaos. Together, these events exposed a punishment that no longer served any purpose. In 1834, hanging in chains was abolished. The Jibbits came down across Britain and William Jobling, a scapegoat, a symbol, innocent, was in some small way vindicated.”

“It’s late 1628 and in the dark belly of Male Fizz House, the dreaded witch prison of Bamberg, an old man fumbles for a quill. His fingers are broken, his hands trembling from the thumb screws. This is Johannes Junius, one of the city’s mayors, now reduced to little more than a husk. He’s writing a letter to his daughter. And while he doesn’t know it yet, the words he’s putting on paper will eventually become famous all across Europe. He begins with a heartbreaking farewell.”

“‘Many hundred,000 good nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison. Innocent have I been tortured. Innocent must I die.’”

“For days, Junius has endured torture. In his letter, he recounts the agony of the strappado where he was stripped, suspended from ropes, and dropped until his shoulders nearly tore free from their sockets. He continues to write:”

“‘God in highest heaven have mercy. The executioner drew me up eight times and let me fall. I thought heaven and earth were at an end.’”

“They told him that he must confess, then brought out others, some he’d never met before, who accused him of dancing with witches on Hupsmore Hill. His initial defiance was absolute, a desperate plea for his own soul.”

“‘I have never renounced God and will never do it. God graciously keep me from it. I’ll rather bear whatever I must.’”

“In the end, they broke him just like they broke everyone else that went to the Male Fizz House witch prison. He invented lies. He made up names. He told them that he had familiars. He just wanted the pain to stop. And when it finally did, he was rewarded with death. His letter concludes with the chilling lesson he learned inside the prison. A perfect summary of its cruel logic:”

“‘For whoever comes into the witch prison must be a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head. And God pity him bethinks him of something.’”

“The terrifying truth is that Mayor Junius was not an isolated victim. He was one of nearly 1,000 souls consumed by the Bamberg witch trials, one of the largest and deadliest witch hunts in European history. Between 1627 and 1632, the ultra-Catholic Bavarian town accused almost a thousand people of witchcraft. Of those, almost all were brutally executed. Even more curious was how people were charged. Nobody was immune. Men, women, the old and the young, peasants and nobles alike, were all arrested, tortured, and eventually burned. To understand how a modest and otherwise unremarkable town could become the epicenter of such devastation, we first have to understand what was happening in the era at the time.”

“You see, Bamberg in early 17th century sat on a fault line of one of Europe’s most destructive conflicts, the 30 Years War. Officially, it was a religious war between Catholics and Protestants, but in practice, it became a continent-wide free-for-all where horrid acts could easily be covered up. Amid this chaos, the Catholic Church launched the Counter-Reformation, seeking to purge Protestantism and reassert its dominance across Europe. Bamberg, a Catholic enclave surrounded by Protestant territories, became a front line in both physical and ideological warfare. And its ruler, Prince Bishop Johann Georg Fuchs von Dornheim—there’s a mouthful—took his job very seriously.”

“Dornheim had visions of building a godly state. But there was a problem. His town was infected with heresy and sin. And in 1626, when a freak frost destroyed the region’s crops, he of course blamed it on witches. And soon, so did everyone else. Dornheim quickly established a commission to root out the heretics and ordered the construction of a new prison which he dubbed the Male Fizz House. With his prison built and his commission empowered, Dornheim had created a well-oiled machine for persecution.”

“At first, its gears ground up the poor, the old and social outcasts. But the machine was forever hungry, and soon it turned to the city’s elite, proving that no one, not even the most powerful, was safe. No story illustrates this terrifying escalation better than that of the city’s own vice chancellor, George Han.”

“The first time that George Han tried to stop the witch trials, he actually succeeded. As vice chancellor of Bamberg and a respected legal mind in the city, Han had managed to intervene and halt an early round of persecutions in 1627. He argued with logic and appealed to reason, but he never thought that he would find himself in a place where neither of those things mattered anymore or that he would become a target of the witch trials himself.”

“Prince Bishop Dornheim had riled the masses and convinced them that purification was the only way forward. A great way to distract people from one’s own mismanagement of the city. But people began pointing fingers at almost everyone. Strangers, old enemies, and the well-to-do. That’s how George’s wife Katherina and his daughter Maria found themselves dragged into the Male Fizz House in 1628. Desperate, George Han fled Bamberg with his teenage son Adam, hoping to reach Vienna and if possible the Holy Roman Emperor himself. And to everyone’s surprise, Emperor Ferdinand II actually listened. When George was done, he had an imperial order demanding that Katherina and Maria be released from Male Fizz House. But Bamberg, unfortunately for George, was far away, and by the time he and his son arrived, the women were burned.”

“To make matters worse, under the duress of torture, they had named George and his son Adam as accomplices. The two of them were quickly arrested and after weeks of torture suffered the very same fate as the rest of their family. There was now no stopping what would happen next. The methodical destruction of an entire high-ranking family seems like the work of total anarchy. But the horror inflicted upon George Hans wasn’t the result of a chaotic mob or torch-bearing peasants. With opposition either silenced by fear or killed outright, the trials had become sanctioned by the state.”

“Because witches are technically not human, Prince Bishop Dornheim’s commission was able to operate beyond restraint. And due to the pervasive climate of conspiracism and a local clergy that targeted cunning women, midwives and healers as potential agents of Satan, the public soon became as obsessed as Dornheim with catching and burning witches. But the people of Bamberg quickly moved on from targeting outsiders and outcasts. By now, it had become common knowledge that the church or state would confiscate all of a witch’s property upon conviction. This created incentives to target wealthier citizens, politicians, and most notably, property owners.”

“Before long, the trial process became more like a machine. Entire budgets were reallocated from military defense to internal cleansing of witches. Trials were staffed by jurists, theologians, and doctors of law, many of whom genuinely believed in the reality of witchcraft. The accused were not only apprehended, isolated, and brutally tortured, but they were also denied access to any form of legal defense. Confession was the sole basis for conviction and with enough torture eventually everybody confessed or they died in which case they would be declared innocent. Of course this brutal logic of ‘confess or die, confess and die anyway’ was the engine of the Bamberg persecution machine. And it was utterly indifferent to status, evidence, or even imperial authority.”

“At the heart of Bamberg’s terrifying machine of despair was the Male Fizz House, the witch prison itself. A place purpose-built to turn fear into confession. Constructed in 1627, its goal was to brutally extract the truth, or at the very least something that sounded a bit like it. The building held around 30 cells in total. It was windowless, damp, and packed with the accused. Those who didn’t die from torture often fell ill from the horrid conditions. Victims were subject to thumb screws, leg vices, and of course the dreaded strappado where they were hoisted by ropes and dropped until their limbs were damaged beyond repair. Even when not being actively tortured, many were locked in manacles or chained to the wall for weeks on end. The few who did survive were often maimed for life.”

“Executioners weren’t just interested in confessions either. They wanted names to perpetuate the cycle. After confessing to impossible crimes, victims would be forced to name their accomplices. Every new name meant a new target and a new arrest. In this way, the Male Fizz House became more than just a prison. It was the very nerve center of a well-oiled persecution industry. As the nerve center, the Male Fizz House radiated fear that paralyzed the entire community. One of the primary reasons the Bamberg witch trials lasted as long as they did was that Prince Bishop Dornheim had declared any criticism to be a crime in itself. To speak out was at the very least to risk a flogging or exile or in the worst case accusation and execution. This drove the town’s people into a spiral of paranoia. Some would denounce their neighbors to deflect attention from themselves. Others watched in silence as entire families slowly disappeared. By 1629, even seven-year-olds were being arrested and accused in the trials.”

“Once confessions were secured, most condemned witches were simply burned alive. As the number of executions began to soar dramatically, the city invested in the development of a crematorium, a shocking foreshadowing of the industrialized persecution of the Third Reich some 300 years later. Residents of the nearby towns could recall how for weeks at a time, the sky would turn black with smoke. Between 1626 and 1631, an estimated 900 to 1,000 people were executed, all for being a witch. One of those people was 22-year-old Dorothea Flock. Her execution would prove to be a fatal miscalculation for the witch hunters. She’d come from a prominent Protestant family in Nuremberg, a fact that already drew suspicion when she married George Flock, a counselor in Catholic Bamberg. After years of avoiding accusation, the finger was pointed at her in 1629 while she was heavily pregnant. Her husband, George Flock, acted fast. He escaped and launched a desperate campaign to save her and his unborn child, successfully securing an imperial reprieve from the Holy Roman Emperor himself.”

“Although we’ve seen this story before with George Han, Prince Bishop Dornheim didn’t seem to care. He ordered the trial expedited and just mere hours before the emperor’s decree arrived, Dorothea was led to the courtyard, beheaded and burned at the stake. Terrible as it was, her death and the death of her unborn child ignited a scandal that finally forced the authorities to act. News of the dismissed pardon sent shock waves through the nobility who were horrified. The prince bishop’s power had grown so great unchecked. As a result, immense pressure began to mount on Dornheim. For those still languishing in the dungeons of Male Fizz House, this shift offered a sudden, desperate glimmer of hope.”

“After the death of Dorothea Flock, investigators from the Imperial Chamber Court were dispatched to Bamberg. Upon arrival in Bavaria, they demanded access to trial records. More importantly, they ordered an end to any new arrests. Suddenly finding himself under scrutiny, Prince Bishop Dornheim was forced to slow down his efforts. But that was not the only catalyst. The Protestant Swedish army under King Gustavus Adolphus had recently swept into Germany and was moving toward Franconia. Reports circulated that Gustavus, upon hearing of the atrocities in Bamberg, was prepared to intervene on behalf of the accused witches if he took the city by force. In response, Emperor Ferdinand II appointed Dr. Anton Winter, an outsider known for his skepticism of witch trials, to head a commission to determine what precisely had happened in the town over the past several years. Seeing the writing on the wall, Prince Bishop Dornheim eventually abandoned his bishopric and took refuge in Austria. With Dornheim gone, Dr. Winter shut down the Male Fizz House and released all remaining prisoners and it was just in time.”

“In 1632, Swedish troops did arrive in Bamberg and forbade any further executions. By 1633, Bishop Dornheim was dead, an exile in a foreign land, still clinging to the righteousness of his crusade. But back home, his legacy was in ruins. Imperial officials and many Catholic leaders were deeply disturbed by just how far the witch trials had gone. To make matters even worse, there were now survivors who could spread the word about the horror that they endured. The Male Fizz House was eventually torn down, but the letter from Johannes Junius survived. His words written with shattered fingers are more than a cautionary tale. They are a haunting testament to just how easily a society can be weaponized against itself.”

“Snow was falling over Kharkiv when Anna Ivanova Stoas woke up on a cold February morning in 1933. Hunger had been a permanent guest in her home for months. It took her husband first. His body bloated, his skin like tissue paper stretched over bone. Then it came for three of her four children: Mykola, aged nine; Vassil, seven; and Katya, just five, who grew weaker with each passing day until all died quietly of starvation. Anna didn’t cry. She no longer had the strength. And just 3 days later, consumed by an unbearable hunger, she would make a decision that would haunt her for the rest of her life. According to NKVD records, declassified decades later, Anna murdered her last surviving daughter, Nardia, then stripped the flesh from her body and ate it.”

“It was not an isolated incident in Ukraine in 1933. In a nearby village, a couple named Maria and Stefan Yarova made a grim arrangement with their neighbors. When their children died, they would exchange their bodies so that no parent would be forced to eat their own. This horror has a name: Holodomor. It means ‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian. For decades, Soviet intelligence tried to make everyone believe that this was just a famine. But in reality, it was a political weapon designed to subjugate an entire nation. A weapon that, as we’ll see in this video, would lead to the slow, dehumanizing deaths of up to 10 million people.”

“To understand the Holodomor, it is essential to comprehend Stalin and his perspective on the Ukrainian issue. Since the formation of the USSR in 1922, Ukraine, with its strong national identity and fertile black soil, posed a dual threat to Soviet power, both political and economic. Ukrainian nationalism had briefly flourished after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the Ukrainian intelligentsia, comprising of poets, writers, and academics, promoted a distinct cultural identity separate from the Soviet Union and its socialist ideals. Stalin viewed this cultural independence as a threat to Soviet unity and to his grip on power. At the same time, forced collectivization in the late 20s met fierce resistance from Ukrainian peasants. These ‘kulaks,’ as the regime pejoratively called them, refused to surrender their land and their livestock, often slaughtering their animals rather than to hand them over to the state.”

“In regions like Kharkiv and Dnipro, peasants formed armed bands, raided collective farms, and even tried to reclaim confiscated property. To Stalin, they were the final bastion of resistance against the communist project. In a confidential letter discovered in Soviet archives and dated August 1932, Stalin wrote to senior Soviet politician Lazar Kaganovich stating: ‘If we do not correct the situation in Ukraine immediately, we will lose Ukraine.’”

“His solution was brutal and calculated: to use hunger as a weapon of mass subjugation, a simple and devastating mechanism that completely destroyed a nation.”

“Throughout history, besiegers have used famine to break resistance, cutting off food to force a surrender. But unlike those times when famine was caused by an outside invader, the Holodomor was different. The famine was deliberately inflicted by the state itself to punish what it considered to be its own citizens. The first step the Soviet Union took was to carry out mass requisitions. In 1932, special communist party brigades, backed by NKVD units—the Soviet secret police that would later become the KGB—swept through Ukrainian villages confiscating livestock, cereals, potatoes, and every seed in sight. Official Soviet documents show that the quotas imposed on Ukraine were deliberately designed to leave the population without food. And any household that failed to turn over its grain was accused of hoarding state property and punished accordingly.”

“Yet, Ukrainians refused to surrender. They went to great lengths to hide their grain in the most discrete hidden spots. But unfortunately, the Soviet brigades became expert over time in detecting these hiding spots. So the death rates continued to rise alarmingly.”