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

Pre-1941: Skvira, town and raion center, Kiev oblast’, Ukraine; 1941–1944: Skwira, Gebiet Belaja-Zerkow, Generalkommissariat Kiew, Reichskommissariat Ukraine; post-1991: Skvyra, Kiev oblast’, Ukraine

Skvira is located 94 kilometers (58 miles) south-southwest of Kiev. The 1939 census recorded that only 2,243 Jews lived in the town (comprising 20.3 percent of the total population).¹ The Jewish population in Skvira had declined by more than half since 1926, when the population had been 4,861 (33.6 percent).

German forces occupied Skvira on July 14, 1941, almost a month after the German attack on the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941). During that interval, a large part of the Jewish population had managed to evacuate to the east. Men eligible for military service were either called up or volunteered for the Red Army. About 40 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in Skvira under German occupation. A German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) governed the town during the summer and fall of 1941. The Germans created a town administration and an auxiliary force of Ukrainian policemen, both composed of local inhabitants. In November 1941, governance passed to a German civil administration. Skvira became part of Gebiet Belaja-Zerkow in Generalkommissariat Kiew, Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The Gebietskommissar was Regierungsrat Dr. Stelzer.²

Among the German punitive units active in the Skvira region from the end of August until the end of September 1941 was Einsatzkommando 5, at that time under the command of SS-Standartenführer Erwin Schulz. The staff unit and other detachments of Police Regiment South were also in Skvira for several days from September 18, 1941. By order of the military commandant, soon after the German occupation of the town, the newly created “Jewish Soviet” (Jewish Council) organized the registration of the Jews, the collection of “contributions,” and the wearing of identifying armbands. Jews were made to perform various kinds of heavy labor, including bringing in the harvest, for which they initially received some payment in the form of grain from the military administration.³

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Jewish women assembled by the German authorities in preparation for a mass murder near the Skvira ghetto, September 1941. The German caption on the back of the original reads: “They will be massacred.”

USHMM WS #17060, COURTESY MJH/CHS

In August 1941, the German authorities created a “Jewish residential area,” or ghetto, in the town on Taras Shevchenko Street, which was only partially fenced in with barbed wire. Ukrainians continued to live on the same street. The Jews lived in overcrowded conditions in small houses or cottages. The Jews ate whatever they could find, but they received little assistance from the local population. The Ukrainian police entered Jewish houses and robbed them of their valuable possessions. From mid-September 1941, the Jews were no longer permitted to go to work.⁴

The ghetto existed for just over a month and was liquidated on September 20, 1941. On that date, the Germans and their Ukrainian collaborators broke into the ghetto at dawn and ordered the Jews onto the street. They rounded up some 850 Jews and confined them in school house no. 2. From there they took them on foot or in vehicles to the Jewish cemetery. At the cemetery they shot them in four pits.⁵ Men from Einsatzkommando 5, assisted by a detachment of Police Regiment South, carried out the mass killing. Several days after this Aktion, the occupiers shot around 140 more Jews in what had been a stable.⁶