LIPOVETS
Pre-1941: Lipovets, town and raion center, Vinnitsa oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Lipowez, Rayon center, Gebiet Illinzi, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Lypovets’, raion center, Vinnytsia oblast’, Ukraine
Lipovets is located 41 kilometers (25.5 miles) east of Vinnitsa. According to the 1939 census, 1,353 Jews (52.6 percent of the total population) were living in the town. An additional 993 Jews were residing in the villages of the Lipovets raion. Between June 22 and July 23, 1941, on which date German forces occupied the settlement, part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east. Some Jewish men were conscripted into the Red Army or enlisted voluntarily. Around 1,000 Jews remained in Lipovets at the start of the German occupation.
Initially a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) ran Lipovets. In October 1941, authority passed to a German civil administration. Rayon Lipowez was incorporated into Gebiet Illinzi, which, in turn, was part of Generalkommissariat Shitomir. Kreisleiter Heinrich Scholdra was the Gebietskommissar, and Meister Andreas Wagner was the Gendarmerie-Gebietsführer.1 In Lipovets itself, a Gendarmerie post was established, commanded (according to Soviet sources) by an officer named Häsl or Heese, assisted by his deputy Otto Koinder.2 The Gendarmerie assumed authority over the local Ukrainian police. Both the German Gendarmerie and the Ukrainian police played an active role in the Aktions carried out against the Jewish population in the area.
Shortly after the occupation of the settlement, the Ortskommandantur organized the registration and marking of the Jews. The Jews were ordered to wear white armbands bearing the Star of David and to perform various forms of heavy labor for little or no pay.
In September 1941, the first Aktion was carried out in the town. Some 200 people were rounded up, including 17 Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) accused of being Soviet activists and Communists.3 German forces shot them near the village of Berezovka. Among those executed were a number of Jews.
Sometime in the fall of 1941, the Germans established an “open ghetto” for the Jewish population in the settlement.4 According to Leontii Usharenko, a Jewish survivor, the German soldiers and Ukrainian police beat Jews they caught not wearing a Star of David on their chests. The Ukrainian police helped the Germans to identify the Jews and were more stringent than the Germans. At this point no one was allowed to leave the open ghetto, except for work details. However, Jewish girls still went to the market to barter items for bread, as there was not much else to eat. Labor tasks included cleaning toilets for the Germans until late into the night. Usharenko’s sister worked in a factory that made vegetable oil.5
In late April or early May 1942, the ghetto in Lipovets was liquidated. More than 700 Jews were shot near the village of Vikentievka, to the northeast of Lipovets.6 Around 20 local villagers were requisitioned to prepare ditches for the mass shooting and became witnesses to the murder. The Aktion was organized by an SD detachment from Vinnitsa, commanded by SS-Obersturmführer Theodor Salmanzig, assisted by the German Gendarmerie and the Ukrainian police. At the site of the mass shooting, a number of Jews were selected out with the aid of a translator as specialist workers (artisans). Only the Jewish artisan workers and their families remained after that, confined to a small remnant ghetto in Lipovets. They were shot on June 3, 1942. There were 167 victims.7
On June 3 (or possibly May 3), 1942, the SD detachment from Vinnitsa, with the help of the German Gendarmerie [End Page 1541] and Ukrainian police, also shot several hundred Jews from the village of Vakhnovka. The Jews were confined first within the church, while the mass grave was being prepared by 20 of the Jews about 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) outside the village. The victims included 150 women, 100 children, and more than 20 men. Some of the infants were thrown into the grave and buried alive.8 There was also a report of a shooting of Jews in the nearby village of Zozov.
Leontii Usharenko managed to escape from the remnant ghetto in Lipovets shortly before the final liquidation with the aid of a forged identity document that enabled him to pass as a non-Jew.9
SOURCES
Documents describing the destruction of the Jews in Lipovets and the surrounding area can be found in the following archives: BA-L (II 204a AR-Z 138/67); DAVINO; GARF (7021-54-1254); VHF (# 29972); 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. BA-L, II 204a AR-Z 138/67, p. 315.
3. GARF, 7021-54-1254, p. 3.
4. DAVINO, R4422-1-36.
5. VHF, # 29972, testimony of Leontii Usharenko.
6. Ibid., # 29972, dates the Aktion on May 3, 1942—most other sources in April. BA-L, II 204a AR-Z 138/67, Soviet material, Bild 313–316. According to the materials of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), 2,000 Jews from Lipovets were killed in April 1942. There were 800 people killed near the village of Berezovka, and 700 people, followed by another incident with 500 people, killed near the village of Vitsentovka; see GARF, 7021-54-1254, pp. 3 and reverse side. The documents list the number of Jews in Lipovets before the war as 1,353, and some of them went into the army and others evacuated the area. Therefore, this figure is probably too high. It is likely that at the end of April 1942 more than 700 Jews from Lipovets were executed near the village of Vikentievka. According to one source (see below), the Jews who were arrested in the villages of Rayon Lipowez were shot near the village of Berezovka. See I.S. Finkel’stein, “Massovoe unichtozhenie evreev Podolii natsistskimi palachami v 1941–1944 gg.,” in Katastrofa i opor ukrains’koho evreistva (1941–1944): Narysy z istorii Holokostu i Oporu v Ukraini (Kiev, 1999), p. 75.
7. VHF, # 29972; GARF, 7021-54-1254, p. 3. In the report dated January 9, 1944, compiled by the local residents and the local army section, 60 to 70 people (of indeterminate nationality) living in the town were killed in October 1942; in November 1942, 80 persons were killed; and in June 1942, 60 people were killed. See Zverstva nemetskofashistskikh zakhvatchikov: Dokumenty, Vypusk 13 (Voenizdat, 1945), p. 20.
8. GARF, 7021-54-1254, pp. 3 and reverse side. See also BA-L, II 204a AR-Z 138/67, Soviet material, Bild 313–316.
9. VHF, # 29972.
