BOBRINETS
Pre-1941 and post-1943: Bobrinets, town and raion center, Kirovograd oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Rayon and Gebiet center, Generalkommissariat Nikolajew, Reichskommissariat Ukraine; 1991: Kirovohrad oblast’, Ukraine.
Bobrinets is located 54 kilometers (34 miles) south of Kirovograd. According to the census of 1926, the town had 2,265 Jewish residents (20.4 percent of the total population); in 1939, there were only 654 Jews remaining (14 percent of the total). [End Page 1619] This population decline was mainly due to the resettlement of Jews to other regions. In what under German occupation was to become the area of Gebiet Bobrinets, in 1939 there were also 353 Jews in the Ustinovka raion, 189 in the Bobrinets raion, 123 in the Rovnoe raion, and 21 in Vytiazevka. According to a German report dated October 10, 1941, there were 33 Jews registered in Rayon Rownoje at that time.1
Forces of the German XIV Motorized Corps occupied Bobrinets on August 6, 1941. By the time German troops arrived in the town, several hundred local Jews had escaped to the east. All men of military age were drafted into or voluntarily joined the Red Army. About 55 percent of the pre-war Jewish population was still in town when the German forces arrived. In the summer and fall of 1941, a German military administration was in charge of the town. For part of that time, it was under the control of the 444th Security Division. The military authorities established a local administration in Bobrinets and a Ukrainian auxiliary police force recruited from local inhabitants.
In mid-November 1941, authority was transferred to a German civil administration. The town became the administrative center of Rayon and Gebiet Bobrinets. Three other towns also became Rayon centers within the Gebiet: Vytiazevka, Ustinovka, and Rovnoe.
A short time after the start of the occupation, the German military authorities gave instructions to register all the Jews of the town. They also ordered the Jewish population to wear special armbands on their sleeves. The German authorities forced the Jews to perform physically demanding work of various kinds (such as repairing the streets and damaged buildings). While conducting forced labor, the Jews were also subjected to humiliations and beatings at the hands of the local Ukrainian police. At the end of December 1941, the Gebietskommissar, Gemeinschaftsführer Holzmann, ordered the establishment of an enclosed Jewish residential area. The ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded day and night by the local police.2 At the beginning of January 1942, one inmate managed to escape from the ghetto. As a punishment, the German police killed 10 Jews, burning them alive in a house. At the end of January or at the beginning of February 1942, the Germans liquidated the ghetto. They shot all remaining ghetto residents—344 persons in all—in an area to the southwest of the town. Among the victims were 20 men, 180 women, 120 children, and 24 older persons. In May 1942, the German forces shot another group of 20 Jews close to the regional hospital (12 women, 6 children, and 2 older persons).3 Including the killing of another 5 Jews on August 10, 1942,4 the total number of Jewish victims in Bobrinets was 379.
In the late spring of 1942,5 the Gebietskommissar in Bobrinets issued orders for some 25 Jews scattered in the surrounding villages of Rayon Ustinowka to be arrested and brought to the local police station in Ustinovka. Another 35 to 40 Jews were brought to Ustinovka from Bobrinets, where they had been collected from the other outlying Rayons of the Gebiet.6 In the village of Izrailevka, there were about 60 Jews still living in their own homes who had not been confined to a ghetto.7
The Gendarmerie and local police (Schutzmannschaft) escorted the Jewish women, children, and men from Izrailevka to a freshly dug pit near Izrailevka, to which those held in Ustinovka were also brought. Members of the Security Police, Gendarmerie, and Schutzmannschaft then shot the Jews in the pit. The Bobrinets Gebietskommissar and the Rayon-chef in Ustinovka, a local ethnic German by the name of Fried-rich Strohmeier, stood by and observed the massacre.8 Having taken away the “racially pure” Jews that morning, some policemen were sent back to Izrailevka to collect about 20 half-Jewish children, who were then killed as well. In total, more than 100 people were murdered at this site.9
SOURCES
The correspondence of the NKVD chief of the district of Bobrinets from March 30, 1946, can be found in Evreiskie vesti (Jewish News) (Kiev, 1994), nos. 23–24.
Documents on the persecution and murder of the Jews of Bobrinets and the surrounding raions can be found in the following archives: ANA; GARF (7021-66-124); DAKO; and Sta. Dortmund.
NOTES
1. USHMM, RG-11.001M.13, reel 92, 1275-3-664, p. 39.
2. GARF, 7021-66-124, Soviet Extraordinary State Commission report for the Bobrinets raion, p. 2.
3. See the correspondence of the NKVD chief for the Bobrinets raion dated March 30, 1946, in Evreiskie vesti, nos. 23–24, p. 15.
4. Testimony by the witness M.D. Globodzinskii of Bobrinets, GARF, 7021-66-124, p. 2.
5. The precise date of the Aktion is not clear from the Soviet witness statements. The main surviving eyewitness dated the shooting in May or June 1942; see Australian Special Investigations Unit (SIU), statement of Ivan Konstantinovich Zhilun, December 23, 1989. However, the German Generalkommissar for the Nikolajew Generalkommissariat reported in the spring of 1942 that there were no longer any Jews or half-Jews in his region as of April 1, 1942.
6. SIU (SBU Kirovograd), statement of Alexander A. Gibner (Hübner), March 20, 1947, at his own trial. See also the additional evidence collected by the SIU in the case of Heinrich Wagner and by Sta. Dortmund in the case of Ernst Hering (45 Js 30/93).
7. SIU, statement of Ivan K. Zhilun, December 23, 1989.
8. See SIU (SBU Kirovograd), statements of Alexander A. Gibner, March 20, 1947, and April 1, 1947, at his own trial; F.F.S., March 1, 1958, and I.K.K., February 13, 1958, in Criminal Case File No. 4419 (Mefodii Marchik).
9. LG-Kö (4. grosse Strafkammer, 1. Jugendkammer), Verdict (Urteil) B. 104-28/97 in der Strafsache gegen Ernst Hering, December 19, 1997 (Hering Verdict), pp. 43–49; in June 1991, a team of forensic experts employed by the Australian SIU exhumed the mass grave near Izrailovka. The skeletal remains of 19 children aged less than 11 years were uncovered, lying at the top of the grave. Under these bodies, a layer of soil was found and beneath that the remains of more than 100 adult humans.
