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

Pre-1941: Zhitomir, city, raion and oblast’ center, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Shitomir, Rayon and Gebiet center, capital of Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Zhytomyr, raion and oblast’ center, Ukraine

Zhitomir is located 136 kilometers (85 miles) west-southwest of Kiev. According to the 1939 population census, 29,053 Jews lived in the city of Zhitomir (30.6 percent of the total population).

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Jews rounded up by the Wehrmacht to view the hanging of Mosche Kogan and Wolf Kieper on the Zhitomir market square, August 7, 1941.

USHMM WS #17549, COURTESY OF DÖW

On July 9, 1941, German forces of the 1st Panzer Division occupied the city, just 17 days after the German invasion of the USSR. During this intervening period, nearly 20,000 Jews evacuated the city. Eligible men were conscripted into the Red Army or enlisted voluntarily. No more than 7,000 Jews remained in Zhitomir at the start of the occupation.

From July to October 1941, a German military administration ran the affairs of the city. The Wehrmacht established a city authority in Zhitomir and an auxiliary Ukrainian police unit recruited from among the local residents.

At the end of October 1941, authority was transferred to a German civil administration. Zhitomir became the administrative center of Gebiet Shitomir. Regierungspräsident Kurt Klemm became the Gebietskommissar. Gustav Magass was appointed as Stadtkommissar. SS-Oberführer Otto Hellwig served from November 1941 to May 1943 as the SS- und Polizeistandortführer in Generalkommissariat Shitomir. In October 1942, Gauleiter Ernst Ludwig Leyser was appointed as deputy to the Gebietskommissar. Initially the head of the Schutzpolizei was Hauptmann Friedemann from the police administration in Dresden; he was succeeded by Hauptmann Netzbandt. They each served under Gotthilf Oemler, the Kommandeur der Ordnungspolizei (KdO) in Generalkommissariat Shitomir.¹

From July to September 1941, Sonderkommando (Sk) 4a, commanded by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, was the first of the various punitive German units to be deployed in the city of Zhitomir. Starting in October 1941, Einsatzkommando (Ek) 5 was deployed in the city. It was commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Herbert Meyer. In January 1942, part of Ek 5 was reorganized into the office of the Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und SD (KdS) in Generalkommissariat Shitomir, which was headed until the end of 1942 by SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Franz Razesberger.²

The first murders of Jews in Zhitomir were carried out by Sk 4a upon its arrival in the city. As of July 26, 1941, the unit had killed 363 persons; between July 27 and August 9, 1941, it killed 1,015 people; between August 10 and August 23, 1941, it killed 266 people. Of these 1,644 people who were murdered, the majority were Jews.³

At the end of July, Sk 4a shot 148 Jews “for robberies and engaging in communist activity.” Following that Aktion, Ek 5 killed another 74 Jews in the city.⁴ The best-documented anti-Jewish Aktion during this period was carried out on August 7, 1941, when 2 Jews were hanged and 402 Jews were shot in public.⁵

Further mass executions of Jews were carried out at the end of July 1941 by the 3rd Company of the 45th Police Reserve Battalion, commanded by Oberleutnant Berensen.⁶ Altogether, in the months of July and August 1941, around 2,000 Jews were murdered in the city of Zhitomir. Many of the mass shootings took place in a wooded area about 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) west of the city.

In the summer and fall of 1941, German forces implemented a series of anti-Jewish measures in Zhitomir. A Jewish Council (Judenrat) was established. Jews were ordered to wear [End Page 1579] distinctive armbands bearing the Star of David. Jews were also subjected to forced labor.

In August 1941, a ghetto or Jewish residential quarter was created in Zhitomir. A number of streets—Chudnovskaia, Ostrovskaia, and Katedral’naia—were cordoned off for that purpose, enclosing an area of roughly 500 by 400 meters (547 by 437 yards). Inside the ghetto area was the largest synagogue and also a former prison building, both of which were used to house Jews, together with a number of residences. The ghetto was overcrowded, with about 5 people sharing each room. Jews were not permitted to leave the ghetto, and they were forced to perform the dirtiest and hardest work.⁷ According to one witness, the ghetto was fenced with barbed wire, but it was still possible for the inhabitants to barter items for food. The Ukrainian police guarded the ghetto, but Jews were able to leave its area for one or two hours per day, and some non-Jews also approached the fence.⁸ A local census taken on September 5, 1941, registered 4,820 Jews in the ghetto.⁹

On September 19, 1941, Sk 4a carried out a large-scale Aktion against the prisoners in the ghetto. The following details are taken from Einsatzgruppen report no. 106, dated October 7, 1941:

After the resettlement of the Jews into the designated area by the Feldkommandantur, at the behest of Sonderkommando 4a, the situation in the markets and other public places appeared to calm down considerably. At the same time, stubborn rumors began to die out and it appeared that the concentration of the Jews had largely denied communist propaganda its basis of support. Within a few days, however, it seemed that the mere concentration of the Jews without the establishment of a formal ghetto was not sufficient and in a short time the previous problems emerged again. Various offices reported complaints about the insolent behavior of Jews in their places of work. It was ascertained that the Jewish living quarter was the source for the dissemination of [communist] propaganda among the Ukrainians, which asserted that the Red Army would soon return to recover its lost territory. The local police was shot at from concealed positions both at night and in broad daylight. Furthermore, it was established that Jews were selling their belongings for cash and trying to leave the city in order to settle in Western Ukraine—that is—on territory that was already under a civil administration. All these developments were confirmed, but the Jews concerned were only rarely captured, since they had sufficient possibilities to escape arrest.

Therefore, on September 18, 1941, a meeting was convened with the Feldkommandantur on this issue, which concluded that the Jews of Zhitomir should be radically and completely liquidated, since the previous warnings and special measures had not produced a noticeable relief.

On the evening of September 18, 1941, the Jewish quarter [Judenviertel] was encircled by 60 Ukrainian policemen. At 4:00 a.m. on September 19, 1941, it was cleared. The transport operation was carried out using 12 trucks, which had been made available by the Feldkommandantur and also the city administration of Zhitomir. Once the transport was completed, and the necessary preparations [digging the grave] had been completed with the assistance of 150 prisoners, 3,145 Jews were registered and executed.¹⁰

Charna Glibovskaya, who managed to escape from the ghetto at this time by telling one of the guards she was a Ukrainian from a children’s home who had only come to look at the ghetto, says that the Germans duped the Jews before the Aktion by announcing that they would be resettled to the west for a better life. She understood, however, that the Germans wanted to kill the Jews and made good her escape.¹¹

In October 1941, Ek 5 and the Ukrainian police shot the majority of those who had remained alive in the ghetto after the Aktion on September 19. On October 5, 1941, a local newspaper reported that 340 Jews were still living in the city of Zhitomir.¹² These people were doctors, craftsmen, and skilled laborers, resettled into a special labor prison camp.¹³ In April 1942, a few hundred artisans and skilled laborers from Vinnitsa were added to the population of the camp.¹⁴ At least a part of the workforce was responsible for the building of Himmler’s field command post (Feldkommandostelle Hegewald), which was located a few kilometers south of the city. In the second half of 1942, the majority of the prisoners in the labor camp were shot. On August 19, 1942, 237 Jewish laborers were executed.¹⁵ At the end of October and November 1942, there were two separate mass shootings: during the first one, approximately 60 people were killed, and during the second, around 300 Jews. These shootings were carried out by an SS-Feldgendarmerie company under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Karl Gillner, which was stationed in Zhitomir from May to November 1942.¹⁶ In 1943, all the remaining Jewish artisans—only a small group by this time—were murdered.

From September 15, 1941, to November 26, 1943, a number of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) were incarcerated in what was designated as POW prison camp no. 358 (Kriegsgefangenen-Stammlager 358), located in Boguniia, on the western outskirts of the city of Zhitomir. The prison population included Jews and Communists or those suspected of being Jews and Communists. SD forces separated them from the rest of the POWs and regularly took them out to be shot in the nearby woods. Friedrich Buck, former chauffeur in the prison, testified that during the first few months of the prison’s existence, he and five or six other chauffeurs transported 1,200 to 1,400 Jewish POWs to the site, where they were shot.¹⁷

Of the 7,000 or so Jews trapped in Zhitomir by the German occupation in July 1941, only around 20 people are known to have survived to be liberated by the Red Army in December 1943. [End Page 1580]