LOKHVITSA
Pre-1941: Lokhvitsa, Poltava oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Lochwiza, initially Rear Area, Army Group South (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Süd); from September 1942, center of Gebiet Lochwiza, Generalkommissariat Kiew, Reichskommissariat Ukraine; post-1991: Lokhvytsia, Poltava oblast’, Ukraine
Lokhvitsa is located 101 kilometers (63 miles) south of Konotop. In 1939, there were 614 Jews residing in Lokhvitsa and another 114 Jews residing in the villages of the Lokhvitsa raion.
The Germans occupied Lokhvitsa on September 12, 1941, signifying also the completion of the encirclement of Soviet armies to the east of Kiev. Many Jews from Lokhvitsa were evacuated or managed to flee before the arrival of the Germans. The town remained under the jurisdiction of Rear Area, Army Group South and then Rear Area, Army Group B (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet B) until September 1942, when it became the center of Gebiet Lochwiza in Generalkommissariat Kiew, Reichskommissariat Ukraine.
In early October 1941, the German military commandant ordered the creation of a ghetto, which restricted the Jews to the most densely Jewish-populated areas of the town. The ghetto consisted of two separate sections: the first included part of what was then called Lane III (later, Tupikova Street); and the other section included two Jewish quarters in the area of Gogol’ and Tel’man Streets. The ghetto was not sealed, but the Ukrainian police set up checkpoints, and Jews apprehended outside the ghetto were shot on the spot. In addition to the town’s Jewish residents and those Jews fleeing from further west who became trapped in Lokhvitsa, the Germans also brought some Jews from surrounding villages to the ghetto. For example, in December 1941, Jews from the village of Sencha were brought to the Lokhvitsa ghetto.
With the onset of winter and left with no means to survive, adult Jews sneaked out of the ghetto to collect wood or to exchange any valuables they had left with the Ukrainians for food. The Ukrainian auxiliary police in Lokhvitsa, which in April 1942 comprised 116 men,1 escorted the Jewish labor details tasked with cleaning the streets of mud, snow, and ice.
In early May 1942, additional Jews from the vicinity of Lokhvitsa, including a few from the nearby town of Chervonozavodskoe, were brought to the ghetto.2 On May 12, 1942, a Sonderkommando headed by Karl Plath (operating under the auspices of the Higher SS and Police Leader Russia South) and the Ukrainian police escorted 287 Jews outside the town to the northeast and shot them in a ravine near the village of Blagodarovka. After the mass shooting, the edge of the ravine was blown up to cover the bodies.3 Feldkommandantur (V) 239, responsible for a large area including the town of Lokhvitsa, reported on June 17, 1942, that a “Jewish Aktion” (Judenaktion) had been conducted in Lokhvitsa on May 12, 1942, and that thereafter only a few individual Jews remained within its jurisdiction.4
Farmers working on a kolkhoz near Lokhvitsa assisted the female Jewish doctor Tsipa Sherman, who was living there on Aryan papers as a medical student. When she was arrested following a denunciation, the farmers wrote a petition asserting that she was a good worker and definitely not a Jew. Shortly afterwards she was released.5
Soviet forces drove the Germans from Lokhvitsa in the fall of 1943.
SOURCES
Information on the ghetto in Lokhvitsa can be found in: BA-MA (RH 22/203); the Lokhvytsia Ethnographic Museum (Lokhvyts’kyi krayeznavchyi muzei im. G.S. Skovorody), file 6/R/2); and YVA (M.31/6386).
NOTES
1. NARA, T-501, reel 18, fr. 815.
2. A. Kruglov, Katastrofa ukrainskogo evreistva 1941–1944gg.: Entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik (Kharkov: “Karavella,” 2001), p. 338. In 1939 the Jewish population of Chervonozavodskoe in Lokhvitsa raion was 89. Most Jews managed to flee before the arrival of the Germans.
3. Interview with Vera Riazanskaia, July 22, 1998, Lokhvytsia; Lokhvytsia Ethnographic Museum, file 6/R/2, pp. 1–10. Some sources indicate there may have been 340 victims in total, although only 287 people are recorded in the list of names—information supplied by Alexander Kruglov.
4. BA-MA, RH 22/203, Feldkommandantur (V) 239, Abtlg. VII, Monatsbericht May 16 to June 16, 1942.
5. YVA, M.31/6386, as cited by Frank Golczewski, “Die Revision eines Klischees: Die Rettung von verfolgten Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg durch Ukrainer,” in Wolfgang Benz and Juliane Wetzel, eds., Solidarität und Hilfe für Juden während der NS-Zeit: Regionalstudien II, Ukraine, Frankreich, Böhmen und Mähren, Österreich, Lettland, Litauen, Estland (Berlin: Metropol, 1996), p. 66.
