CHERNOBYL’
[End Page 1592] Pre-1941: Chernobyl’, town and raion center, Kiev oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Tschernobyl, initially in Gebiet Nowo-Schepelitschi, then Gebiet Chabnoje, Generalkommissariat Kiew; post-1991: Chernobyl’, Kiev oblast’, Ukraine
Chernobyl’ is located 101 kilometers (63 miles) north-northwest of Kiev.
In 1926, the Jewish population of Chernobyl’ numbered 3,165 (39 percent of the total population). According to the 1939 census, there were 1,783 Jews living in Chernobyl’ (21 percent of the population).1 The significant decline in the Jewish population by almost 1,400 in the years 1926–1939 is explained by the resettlement of Jews to other areas, as well as by the Holodomor famine of 1932–1933 and political repression.
German armed forces occupied the town on August 25, 1941, two months after the invasion of the USSR on June 22. During this time, many Jews were evacuated or fled to the east, and reservists born between 1905 and 1918 were called up for military service. Less than one third of the pre-war Jewish population remained in Chernobyl’ on the arrival of the German army.
In the period from the end of August until November 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) was in charge of the town. The German military administration created a raion council (uprava) and an auxiliary Ukrainian police force, recruited mainly from local residents. Between September 12 and 14, 1941, units of the 1st SS-Brigade conducted security operations in the region between Chernobyl’ and Ovruch, in which they killed 437 Jews. At this time, however, most remaining Jews capable of work and their families were left alive in the larger towns.2
In November, authority was transferred to the German civil administration. Chernobyl’ initially became part of Gebiet Nowo-Schepelitschi, within Generalkommissariat Kiew, in Reichskomissariat Ukraine. Subsequently it became part of Gebiet Chabnoje. The Gebietskommissar in Nowo-Schepelitschi and then in Chabnoje was Nachwuchsführer Venediger.3
Soon after the town’s occupation, the German commandant ordered the council to register and mark the Jews (they were made to wear armbands). In October 1941, by order of the Ortskommandantur, a small “Jewish residential area” (open ghetto) was created in the town, and all the Jews were forcibly moved into it. Jews from the ghetto were compelled to perform forced labor. Among the assigned tasks was the collection of scrap metal.
German security forces liquidated the ghetto on November 19, 1941,4 by shooting all the Jews. More than 500 Jews were killed in total.5 The Aktion was probably carried out by a detachment of Einsatzkommando 5.
SOURCES
Documentation regarding the persecution and extermination of the Jews of Chernobyl’ can be found in the following archives: DAKiO (4758-2-52); GARF (7021-65-241); and USHMM (RG-31.002M and RG-31.018M).
NOTES
1. Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993), p. 20.
2. Martin Cüppers, Wegbereiter der Shoah: Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die Judenvernichtung 1939–1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005), p. 205. The Brigade also reported that the Ukrainian police (Miliz) had assisted in the arrest of Jews, handing them over to the German army.
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; and USHMM, RG-31.002M, reel 3, 3206-2-19, p. 34.
4. The date of the shooting is taken from the inscription on the memorial erected at the site of the execution. 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. 248, however, dates the Aktion as occurring on November 7, 1941.
5. DAKiO, 4758-2-52, p. 43 reverse.
