Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

Schulz). On 15 September, as an incident report explains, the town of Boguslav was

made ‘free of Jews’ ‘via the execution of 322 Jews and 13 Communist functionar-

ies’. 58 On 22 and 23 September Einsatzkommando 5 carried out a ‘major operation’

in Uman in which, according to their own report, 1,412 Jews were shot. 59 In Cybulov, on 25 September, 70 Jews were shot; 537 Jews (men, women, and

young people) were shot on 4 October in Pereyaslav; and shortly thereafter in

Koshchevatoye ‘all the Jews in the town’ were executed. 60

On the basis of the generalized order to murder issued in August, the number of

the people killed by Einsatzkommando 5 increased considerably. For the period

between 7 September and 5 October, the commando reported that ‘207 political

functionaries, 112 saboteurs and looters, as well as 8,800 Jews had been liquid-

ated’. 61 A few weeks later, the Commando reported that ‘as of 20 October 1941, the number of those executed by Einsatzkommando 5 came to 15,110’. 62

Einsatzkommando 6 (sub-unit Kronberger) began shooting Jewish women

in October in Krivoi-Rog after Himmler had inspected it on 3 October. 63 On 20 October, Krivoi-Rog was declared ‘free of Jews’. In the incident report

of 19 November Einsatzkommando 6 stated that ‘1,000 further Jews had been

shot’. 64

226

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

From the beginning of August onwards, Sonderkommando 4a shot women in

large numbers in the area around Zhitomir, and shortly thereafter also children. 65

In Bila Zerkva, too, 500 men and women were shot on 8 or 9 August by the

vanguard of Sonderkommando 4a designated for Kiev. The Jewish children who

had initially been abandoned in a school building to fend for themselves were shot

on 19 and 22 August by the members of Sonderkommando 4a. The second round

of shootings could only take place after the Commander in Chief of the 6th Army,

von Reichenau, had intervened and lifted a ban on shooting children that had

been imposed by the staff of an infantry division. 66 According to commando reports, before the end of August in Fastov ‘the entire Jewish population aged

between 12 and 60, 252 in all, were shot’. 67 In Radomyshl on 6 September, a further 1,668 Jewish men, women and children were executed. 68 In Zhitomir, where they were based and where a ghetto had been established, Sonderkommando 4a

proceeded to murder all Jewish inhabitants regardless of age or sex. After multiple

mass executions in the second half of August that claimed several thousand lives,

3,145 Jews were shot in the course of liquidating the ghetto on 19 September 1941,

according to the commando’s own report. 69 By 24 August Sonderkommando 4a had shot 7,152 people in all, again according to its own reports. 70

Police Battalion 45, which was part of Police Regiment South, began to murder

Jews regardless of their age or sex at the end of July and at the beginning of

August. The first victims were the entire Jewish population of the town of

Shepetovka, where the Battalion had been based between 26 July and 1 August

1941. According to the account of Battalion Commander Besser made after the

war, this meant some 40 to 50 men and women, but in reality this figure was

probably significantly higher. 71 Besser claimed to have been acting on orders from the Commander of the Police Regiment South, who in turn had referred to a

general order for liquidation issued by Himmler. 72

In the following weeks the Battalion repeated this pattern in other Ukrainian

villages. It murdered Jewish men and women in Slavuta (according to the declar-

ation of Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia South this came to 522

people), 73 in Sudylkov (471 dead) and in Berdichev (where there were 1,000

victims). 74 When Besser’s successor, Rosenbauer, was being briefed on his tasks as Battalion Commander by the Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia

South, Jeckeln, according to his own testimony he was given very clear instruc-

tions: ‘Jeckeln said that there was an order from Reichsführer SS Himmler that

would be the basis for solving the Jewish question. The Ukrainians would become

a slave population working only for us. We had no interest, however, in letting the

Jews multiply, so the Jewish population had to be exterminated. ’75

Police Battalion 314, which was likewise part of Police Regiment South, was also

shooting women and children as early as July. This can be documented for the first

time in the case of a company of the Battalion on 22 July in a town near Kovel: the

Extension of Shootings to Whole Jewish Population

227

private diary of a member of the Battalion states that on that day 217 people,

among them entire families, had been shot. 76

In December 1941 the Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia South

organized the murder of the Jews of Kharkov—Jeckeln’s successor, Prützmann,

was represented by Korsemann who had been chosen to become Higher SS and

Police Commander for the Caucasus. Sonderkommando 4a and Police Battalion

314 shot between 12,000 and 15,000 Jews. 77 Further massacres followed in Stalino (on 9 January), Kramatorsk (on 26 January), Artemovsk (also in January), and

Zaporozhe (in March 1942). 78

Einsatzgruppe D

The way Einsatzgruppe D acted continued to be determined by the Judenpolitik of

Germany’s Romanian allies. From the end of July on, Romanian troops were

expelling tens of thousands of Jews from the reconquered areas of Bessarabia and

the Bukovina over the Dniester and into Soviet territory under German occupa-

tion. Einsatzgruppe D had been assigned to drive the Jews back again. In this

context it also began to include women and children in the shootings. 79 The fact that the Jews expelled from Hungary had been murdered on a hitherto unprecedented scale by Jeckeln at the end of August in Kamenetsk-Podolsk, leaving some

23,600 dead, will also have had repercussions for the manner in which Einsatz-

gruppe D acted.

The shooting of women and children in the area of Einsatzgruppe D is documen-

ted for the first time for the period at the end of August. On or around 29 August, in

the region of Yampol, Einsatzkommando 12 shot several hundred women and

children from a convoy of more than 11,000 people, which the commando was

driving over the Dniester bridge into Romanian-occupied territory. 80

Shortly thereafter, at least three,