BARANOVKA
1938–1941: Baranovka, town and raion center, Zhitomir oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Baranowka, Rayon center, Gebiet Zwiahel (Nowograd-Wolynskyj) Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Baranivka, raion center, Zhytomyr oblast’, Ukraine
Baranovka is located 70 kilometers (44 miles) west of Zhitomir. In the census of 1939, there were only 1,447 Jews in Baranovka (22.9 percent of the total population) and 839 additional Jews in the villages of the raion, totaling 2,286. [End Page 1515]
German forces occupied Baranovka on July 6, 1941. After the start of the invasion, a number of Jews were able to evacuate to the east. Eligible men were called up or enlisted voluntarily in the Red Army. Around 70 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in Baranovka at the start of the occupation.
From July to October 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) administered the settlement. The German military administration created a local raion authority and an auxiliary Ukrainian police force, which took part in the anti-Jewish measures.
At the end of October 1941, power was transferred to the German civil administration. Baranovka was incorporated into Gebiet Nowograd-Wolynskyj (aka Zwiahel), and Regierungsassessor Dr. Schmidt became the Gebietskommissar. In turn, Gebiet Nowograd-Wolynskyj was incorporated into Generalkommissariat Shitomir in Reichskommissariat Ukraine.1
Soon after the occupation of the settlement, the Ortskommandantur instructed the raion authority to register and mark the Jews. The Jews were required to wear an armband around their sleeves and to perform forced labor (repairing roads, stockpiling timber, and other tasks). At the end of July 1941, the German military administration decreed the establishment of an open ghetto (“Jewish residential district”) in the center of the settlement, composed of a few small houses on Zhaboritskaia Street.2 Jews were prohibited from going outside the borders of the ghetto to buy products from Ukrainians. As a result, famine quickly ensued.
On July 19, 1941, the first Aktion took place: 74 Jewish men were seized and killed in the center of the settlement.3 In all likelihood, it was a detachment of the German Security Police and SD from Sonderkommando 4a (part of Einsatzgruppe C) that carried out the shooting.4
About two weeks later, German security forces drove out in three cars towards the town of Poninka (south of Baranovka), where they shot 100 Jews. This massacre was probably carried out by units of the 8th SS-Motorized Infantry Regiment of the 1st SS-Motorized Infantry Brigade, which was active in the area from July 29 to 30, 1941.5
The third Aktion took place in Baranovka on August 24, 1941.6 German forces, directed by a detachment of the 45th Reserve Police Battalion, escorted 180 people to a location 7 kilometers (4 miles) west of the settlement and shot them.7
In November 1941, all the remaining able-bodied Jewish men were taken to the forced labor camp in Novograd-Volynskii.8 The women, children, and elderly remained in the ghetto until the beginning of January 1942. On January 6, 1942, the Germans liquidated the ghetto, and the Ukrainian police shot 594 people on the northern outskirts of the settlement. These were the Jewish residents of Baranovka and also the Jews who lived in nearby villages.9
More than 1,000 Jews were murdered in Baranovka between July 1941 and January 1942.
During the second half of 1941, 119 Jews in total were murdered in the villages of the Baranovka raion.10 In Dubrovka, 50 people were killed; in Pershotravensk, 40; in Seremlia, 22; in Kashperovka, 4; and in other villages, 3.
SOURCES
Publications on the fate of the Jews of Baranovka during the Holocaust include the following: Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 87; and Boris Zabarko, ed., Holocaust in the Ukraine (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), pp. 53–57.
Documents and witness statements regarding the persecution and extermination of the Jews in the Baranovka raion can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-60-283); GAZO; USHMM; VHAP; VHF; and YVA.
NOTES
1. BA-BL, BDC, SSHO 2432, Organisationsplan der besetzten Ostgebiete nach dem Stand vom 10. März 1942, hg. vom Chef der Ordnungspolizei, Berlin, March 13, 1942.
2. Testimony of Eva Gladkaia, in Boris Zabarko, ed., Zhivymi ostalis’ tol’ko my: Svidetel’stva i dokumenty (Kiev, 1999), pp. 96–97; available also in English as Zabarko, Holocaust in the Ukraine, pp. 53–57.
3. Act of January 10, 1944, Zverstva nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov: Dokumenty, vol. 13 (Voenizdat, 1945), p. 50.
4. Alfred Streim, Das Sonderkommando 4a der Einsatzgruppe C und die mit diesem Kommando eingesetzten Einheiten während des Russlandfeldzuges in der Zeit vom 22.6.1941 bis zum Sommer 1943 (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen in Ludwigsburg, 1964), p. 170.
5. See Alexander. Kruglov, The Losses Suffered by Ukrainian Jews in 1941–1944 (Kharkov: Tarbut Laam, 2005), p. 228 n.17.
6. VHAP (USHMM, RG-48.004M), HSSPF-Russland Süd, Jeckeln Telegram, no. 160, August 25, 1941. Spector and Wigoder, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life, p. 87, date this Aktion on August 19, 1941.
7. Act of January 10, 1944, Zverstva nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov, vol. 13, p. 50.
8. Testimony of Eva Gladkaia.
9. Act of January 10, 1944. (See note 3) Alexander
10. GARF, 7021-60-283, pp. 162–167. These numbers only included those Jews who could be identified by name. The actual number of people killed was greater than this.
