MOSCOW, June 20 (RAPSI) — The Supreme Court of Crimea is to start considering the case of genocide of the Soviet people during the years of the occupation of the peninsula during the Great Patriotic War on June 27, the court’s press service informs RAPSI.

In the course of an open trial, numerous facts of crimes, testimonies and archival documents, materials of the investigation of a criminal case initiated by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation under the Russian Criminal Code on genocide will be considered. Crimean and local historians are to be engaged in the case, the court informs.

During the Great Patriotic War, the Nazis shot 72,000 people in Crimea. More than 18,000 people died in prisons and camps. Over the past eight years, the state archive in the Crimea and the archive of the Federal Security Service department for the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol have declassified a great number of documents on the period of occupation, thanks to which, several years ago, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office resumed a closed criminal case of 1969, also related to the crimes of the Nazis and their accomplices.