KHERSON
Pre-1941: Kherson, city, Nikolaev oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Cherson, Gebiet center, Generalkommissariat Nikolajew; post-1991: Kherson, center, Kherson oblast’, Ukraine
Kherson is located about 58 kilometer (36 miles) southeast of Nikolaev. According to the 1939 census, 16,145 Jews were living in Kherson (16.65 percent of the total population).1 On August 19, 1941, eight weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet [End Page 1624] Union on June 22, the SS Motorized Brigade “Leibstandarte-Adolf-Hitler” occupied the city. By that time, more than half of the Jewish population had been able to evacuate to the east. More than 7,000 Jews remained under German occupation (40–45 percent of the pre-war Jewish population).
From August until October 1941, a German military commandant’s office ran the city. Oberstleutnant von Rochow was in charge until September 5, 1941. Oberstleutnant von Lepel succeeded him until September 16, 1941, and after that date, Hauptmann Barth.2 The military administration established a local council and a Ukrainian auxiliary police force recruited from among the city residents. The police force initially consisted of 157 men.3
In November 1941, the Germans established a civil administration. Kherson was incorporated into Generalkommissariat Nikolajew. Bürgermeister Mattern was named the city mayor (Stadtkommissar). Major Heinrich Hannibal of the Order Police (Schutzpolizei) became the senior commander of the SS and Police Leader (SS- und Polizeistandortführer) in the city. Hauptmann Lang of the Schutzpolizei administration in Wiesbaden became the new head of the Schutzpolizei. He was later succeeded in this position by Hauptmann Fischer.4
Starting on August 20, 1941, a detachment of Sonderkommando 11a, consisting of 13 men commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Eberhard Heinze, was stationed in Kherson.5 From the end of September to the start of November 1941, the entire force of Sonderkommando 11a, under the command of SS-Sturmbannführer Paul Zapp, was located in the city; after that, only a part remained.
In the spring of 1942, a regional Security Police outpost (Sipo-Aussendienststelle) was set up in Kherson. It served under the Commander of the Security Police and SD (KdS) in Generalkommissariat Nikolajew. The first person in charge of the Kherson Sipo-Aussendienststelle was SS-Sturmscharführer Kurt Steffen. In June 1942, he was succeeded by SS-Obersturmführer Waldemar Kolter.
On August 23, 1941, the Sonderkommando formed a Judenrat and ordered the Jews of the city to wear a Star of David 10 centimeters (4 inches) in diameter as a distinguishing mark on their left breast pockets and backs as of August 25. From August 24 to August 27, 1941, the Jews were ordered to register and hand over to the Judenrat all money and objects of value. Anyone failing to comply would be shot.6 After marking and registering the Jews, Sonderkommando 11a issued orders that they could only reside on certain designated streets, establishing a ghetto on September 7. The ghetto was located in a remote section of the city near the intersection of Frunze and Rabochnaia streets. A Jewish police force functioned within the ghetto. Overseeing the ghetto from its establishment to its liquidation was SS-Scharführer Baron Leo von der Recke of Sonderkommando 11a. On a daily basis, the Jews were summoned to perform various forms of humiliating and heavy physical labor. According to one source, Jews were forced to clean toilets and were harnessed to carts instead of horses or obliged to pull heavy trucks with the engines switched off.7
Almost immediately after starting to impose these restrictions, Sonderkommando 11a began shooting Jews. On August 29, 1941, the city’s commandant announced the “execution” (by shooting) of 100 Jews and 10 “leading Bolsheviks” as a reprisal measure, and on September 6, 1941, the shooting of 100 Jewish men and 10 Jewish women.8 As of September 10, 1941, 400 Jewish men and 10 Jewish women had been killed.9 Just a short time later, 17 more Jews were shot for not wearing the Star of David.10
On September 24–25, 1941, the ghetto was liquidated, and the remaining Jews were shot.11 Prior to the Aktion, Jews in the ghetto were informed that they would be resettled to Palestine. Sarah Yudkovich realized the likely purpose of the operation and escaped from the ghetto on September 23, fleeing to the hospital in search of help. However, the staff there were too afraid to assist her.12 At this time the Germans searched the hospital, assisted by local policemen, who were better able to identify the Jews. The two most notorious native policemen, Val’ka the German and Grishka the Gypsy, shouted: “Who is hiding Yids here, big and small?” One of the Jewish doctors was stabbed in the buttocks by a local policeman before they left.13
When the Aktion started, the Jews were first marched on foot to a factory site on the edge of the city. From there they [End Page 1625] were conveyed in groups on trucks to an antitank ditch 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) northeast of the city, near the settlement of Zelenivka. The Jews were shot in groups of 10 to 12 by two rifle squads of the same size into two graves simultaneously. Those waiting their turn could hear the shots. Women and children screamed and clung to each other.14 According to evidence from the postwar German legal investigation, one 12-year-old blond Jewish girl was spared by the personal intervention of a senior SS officer, Heinze.15 Soviet forensic experts estimated in 1944 that more than 8,000 people were buried in the mass graves.16 Among those shot at this site were possibly also some Jewish Soviet prisoners of war, as the Jews were already being separated out from among the other Red Army captives held in the city from September 1941.17 Assisted by the local police and denunciations from the local population, German security forces continued to hunt down and kill Jews who had gone into hiding over the following weeks and months.
In January 1942, another mass Aktion was carried out. The victims were around 400 Jews living in mixed marriages, who had been quartered separately in September 1941.18 Einsatzkommando 12 was probably responsible for this killing Aktion.
SOURCES
Documents regarding the annihilation of the Jews of Kherson can be found in the following archives: BA-BL; DA-KherO; GARF (7021-77-420 and 421); LG-Mü I (IV 9/69 Paul Zapp); NARA (N-Docs., NOKW and NO series); RGVA; and VHF.
NOTES
1. Mordechai Altshuler, Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993), p. 25.
2. Bericht über die Tätigkeit des Sk 11a in Cherson vom August 22 to September 10, 1941 (NARA, N-Doc. NOKW-636); Report of the Ortskommandantur II/915, September 18, 1941 (NARA, N-Doc. NOKW-1839).
3. NOKW-636.
4. 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. See also the memo (Schnellbrief) of October 25, 1941, from the chief of the Security Police, RGVA, 1323-2-121, pp. 33–34.
5. NOKW-636; Eberhard Heinze died in Pozńan on January 22, 1945. Sonderkommando 11a was itself a subunit of Otto Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe D.
6. Order from Sonderkommando 11a to the Jews in the city of Kherson on August 23, 1941, LG-Mü I, verdict of February 26, 1970—IV 9/69—in the case against Zapp and others, in Justiz und NS-Verbrechen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1979), vol. 33, Lfd. Nr. 724, p. 451.
7. NOKW-636; Oleksandr Ivanovych Melnyk, “Behind the Frontlines: War, Genocide and Identity in the Kherson Region of Ukraine, 1941–1944” (Master’s thesis, Edmonton University, 2004), pp. 49–53. Melnyk cites DA-KherO, r-1479-1-11, p. 26, regarding the types of forced labor imposed. Also see JuNS-V, vol. 33, Lfd. Nr. 724, pp. 452, 458–459; and 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. 618.
8. GARF, 7021-77-420, pp. 153 and reverse.
9. NOKW-636.
10. BA-BL, R 58/218, Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 107, October 8, 1941.
11. GARF, 7021-77-421, pp. 11, 13, and reverse.
12. Melnyk, “Behind the Frontlines,” pp. 55–56. Yudkovich was shot with the other Jews of Kherson.
13. Ibid., p. 53, citing Zubris, “Ne zaroslo travoiu zabuttia,” Nadniprians’ka Pravda, September 21, 1995.
14. JuNS-V, vol. 33, Lfd. Nr. 724, pp. 448–449.
15. Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), p. 437.
16. See the report of the court medical experts on March 23, 1944, in Zverstva nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov: Dokumenty, vypusk 13 (Voennoe izdatel’stvo NKO, 1945), pp. 59–62. According to the testimony under oath of former SS-Hauptscharführer Robert Barth on September 12, 1947, Sonderkommando 11a executed around 5,000 Jews in Kherson with the support of Sonderkommando 10b; see NARA, N-Doc. NO-4992.
17. Melnyk, “Behind the Frontlines,” p. 54, citing DA-KherO, r-3562-2-32, p. 106.
18. GARF, 7021-77-420, p. 117; Melnyk, “Behind the Frontlines,” p. 48, notes that 150 female Jews living in mixed marriages with Ukrainians remained alive after the mass killings in September 1941, citing DA-KherO, r-1824-1-95, p. 2.
