BOGUSLAV
Pre-1941: Boguslav, town and raion center, Kiev oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Boguslaw, Gebiet Korsun, Generalkommissariat Kiew, Reichskommissariat Ukraine; post-1991: Bohuslav, Kiev oblast', Ukraine [End Page 1590]
Boguslav is located about 100 kilometers (62 miles) south-southeast of Kiev on the Ros’ River. According to the 1926 population census, the Jewish population of Boguslav was 6,432 out of a total of 12,140.1 The 1939 census reported the figure of 2,230 Jews, or 25.53 percent of the total population. An additional 195 Jews were residing in what was then the Boguslav raion (including 125 Jews living in the villages of Medvin).2 This considerable decline in the Jewish population was due mainly to the migration of Jews to other areas.
The German Army occupied Boguslav on July 26, 1941, about one month after the German attack on the Soviet Union. Following the invasion, most Jews managed to evacuate eastward, while those eligible for military service were either drafted or volunteered for the Red Army. Only around 15 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in Boguslav under German occupation. In the summer and fall of 1941, a military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) governed the town. The German military administration set up a town council and an auxiliary police force recruited from local residents. The latter took an active part in the anti-Jewish Aktions.
In November 1941, the military authorities were replaced by a German civil administration. Boguslav was incorporated into Gebiet Korsun, where Gemeinschaftsführer Lomann was appointed as Gebietskommissar. Gebiet Korsun was in turn part of Generalkommissariat Kiew in Reichskommissariat Ukraine.3
Soon after the occupation of the town, the German military commandant ordered the newly established Jewish Council (Judenrat) to register all the local Jews. They were forced to wear a distinctive armband on their sleeves and were employed for forced labor tasks (including road maintenance and construction work).
In August 1941, the German occupying forces conducted a first Aktion in Boguslav, in which 45 people (including some Jews) were seized and shot as Communists and Soviet activists.4 On August 15–20, 1941, the military commandant ordered all the Jews to be resettled into one area of the town (Proval’naya Street), which was declared to be a “Jewish residential district.”5 This open ghetto was liquidated one month later, on September 15, when a detachment of Einsatzkommando 5 shot 322 Jews and 13 Communists.6
In September 1941, German forces shot 49 Jews in the village of Medvin I and more than 100 in Medvin II.7 These shootings were probably carried out by a detachment of Einsatzkommando 5.
According to one source, some Jewish skilled workers remained in Boguslav after the Aktion in September 1941; the Germans shot them in July 1943, shortly before retreating.8 A few Jewish children from Boguslav managed to survive the occupation in hiding.
SOURCES
Documents on the persecution and murder of the Jews in Boguslav can be found in the following archives: BA-BL; DAKiO (4758-2-5); GASBU (79-1-937); and YVA.
NOTES
1. TsDAVO, 505-1-395, p. 40.
2. Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993), pp. 20, 56.
3. 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.
4. DAKiO, 4758-2-5, p. 3.
5. GASBU, 79-1-937, p. 100 (intelligence report: “On the history of the anti-Jewish pogroms carried out by the German fascists in Boguslav in 1941”).
6. Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 119, October 20, 1941, published in A. Kruglov, ed., Sbornik dokumentov i materialov ob unichtozhenii natsistami evreev Ukrainy v 1941–1944 godakh (Kiev: Institut iudaiki, 2002), p. 92.
7. DAKiO, 4758-2-5, pp. 63–65.
8. 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. 165.
