The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945

Pre-1941: Strizhavka, village, Vinnitsa raion and oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Strishawka, Rayon Winniza-Land, Gebiet Winniza, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Stryzhavka, Vinnytsia raion and oblast’, Ukraine

Strizhavka lies 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of Vinnitsa and was the location of a People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) prison. Before the war, more than 300 Jews lived in the village. [End Page 1569]

Units of the German 6th Army occupied Strizhavka on July 19, 1941, four weeks after Germany’s invasion of the USSR on June 22. In the interim, a small number of Jews had managed to evacuate eastward, and men were drafted or volunteered for service in the Red Army. About 230 Jews remained at the start of the occupation.

In July through October 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) ran the affairs of the village. It appointed a village elder, Vladimir Chaikun, and set up a Ukrainian auxiliary police force. In late October 1941, authority was transferred to a German civil administration. Strizhavka became part of Gebiet Winniza (Gebietskommissar: Gemeinschaftsführer Halle), which belonged in turn to the Generalkommissariat Shitomir.

In the summer and fall of 1941, the same anti-Jewish measures employed in other German-occupied villages of Ukraine were introduced in Strizhavka: Jews were required to wear distinguishing marks in the form of the Star of David (later, a yellow circle); they were used for forced labor; they were prohibited from leaving the village; and they were systematically robbed and beaten by the Ukrainian police.

In the latter half of December 1941, 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) north of Vinnitsa, construction of Hitler’s field headquarters, his Werwolf bunker, began. Security in the construction area was in the hands of the Reichssicherheitsdienst (RSD), Gruppe der Geheimen Feldpolizei, Sicherungsgruppe Ost, headed by SS-Sturmbannführer Friedrich Schmidt (deputy: SS-Untersturmführer Karl Danner). They began their activities by checking the nearby villages for the presence of Jews and Communists, who allegedly could present a threat to the building project.

In particular, while questioning the village elder of Strizhavka, they learned that the Jews of the village (221 people) had been resettled into a ghetto and were working on a kolkhoz, though their work performance was inadequate. Schmidt and Danner stated that “as all the Jews are supporters of the Communist regime and represent a threat to the security of the German Army,” they must be removed immediately from the construction area.¹ The “removal” of the Jews was carried out on January 10, 1942. Members of Organisation Todt (OT) and military servicemen created a mass grave by means of an explosion and filled it in after the Aktion. The participants in the Aktion were four officials of the Security Police from Vinnitsa (subordinated to the Sipo/SD chief there, Theodor Salmanzig), who did the actual shooting of the Jews, 20 officials of the Feldgendarmerie and Schutzpolizei, and all the members of Schmidt’s group, who drove the Jews from their houses, brought them to the grave, and formed a protective cordon around the execution site.² On January 11, 1942, Ukrainian policemen arrested 12 more Jews in Strizhavka and moved them to the prisoner-of-war (POW) camp at Vinnitsa, where they were shot on January 12. Finally, on January 13, the village elder of Strizhavka handed over to Schmidt’s group 3 more Jews, and SS-Untersturmführer Ernst Bunde passed them on to the SD in Vinnitsa.³