Rostov-on-Don 1942: A Little-Known Chapter of the Holocaust

Over the course of just two days in August 1942, Sonderkommando 10a of Einsatzgruppe D murdered 27,000 men, women, and children in Rostov-on-Don—some 15,000 to 18,000 of them Jewish. The number of victims approaches that of the infamous Babi Yar massacre of September 1941, yet the case of Rostov has received little scholarly attention to date. The author of this article demonstrates that a tradition of privileging “official” perpetrator sources has worked to the detriment of research on this particular chapter of the Holocaust. The author argues that, while historians need to correlate different categories of sources, the absence, incompleteness, or inaccuracy of some need not inhibit the exploitation of others.