“He spoke Yiddish like a Jew”: Neighbors’ Contribution to the Mass Killing of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, July 1941

The mass murder of Jews by the local population during Operation Barbarossa was as common in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia as in eastern Poland, Lithuania, or Galicia. Residents in many localities in these areas seized the “window of opportunity” between the flight of the Soviet administration and the arrival of Romanian or German forces to murder Jews on their own initiative. Plundering was a key component of the pogroms that took place everywhere. The following illustrates the need for further consideration of the chronology and contexts of pogroms at the beginning of the war in the East.