NOVOMOSKOVSK
Pre-1941: Novomoskovsk, city and raion center, Dnepropetrovsk oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Nowomoskowsk, Rayon center, Gebiet Dnjepropetrowsk, Generalkommissariat Dnjepropetrowsk; post-1991: Novomoskovs’k, Dnipropetrovsk oblast’, Ukraine
Novomoskovsk is located 26 kilometers (16 miles) north-northeast of Dnepropetrovsk. According to the 1939 census, 757 Jews resided in the city (2.6 percent of the population). By the time the city was occupied, the number of Jews had decreased by several hundred due to the evacuations in August and September 1941 of some Jews to the east.
Units of the German 6th Army occupied the city on September 27, 1941. Until August 1942, the city was governed by Ortskommandantur I/837, which consisted of four officers, one civilian official, 16 noncommissioned officers (NCOs), and 16 soldiers, as well as 30 people recruited from among the local residents to perform guard duty (Hilfswachmannschaften).1 The commandant’s office established a city council and a Ukrainian auxiliary police force; in April 1942 the latter consisted of 162 people, headed by V.F. Tkachenko and his deputy Ivan F. Shchenderei.2
From mid-November 1941 until mid-January 1942, Secret Field Police Group no. 725 (GFP-Gruppe 725) was located in the city; and from mid-January until May 1942, GFP-Gruppe 711 was based there.
On the third day of the city’s occupation, the commandant issued an order that all Jews must register and wear white armbands bearing a blue Star of David on their left arm. Jews were also required to appear every morning at the municipal government building for work assignments. In November 1941, the Germans established an unfenced Jewish residential district (an “open ghetto”) in Novomoskovsk, which was located in two large houses on Lesnaia and Kuznechnaia Streets.3 These streets were flooded in the spring by the Samara River and formed, as a result, a kind of island. By the end of December 1941, all the Jews of the town had been moved into the ghetto—those who were reluctant to move being forcibly resettled. There was considerable overcrowding in the ghetto.4
In mid-March 1942, on the orders of the German Security Police in Dnepropetrovsk, the local police collected all the Jews from the ghetto, telling them they would be relocated. They were then escorted to a five-story flour mill, together [End Page 1630] with some other Jews from the surrounding area, where they were held without food or water for a day or so. Their property items were also collected and confiscated by the police. On March 16, 1942, 2 Jews were publicly hanged on the marketplace. Then the remaining Jews (approximately 350 people) were escorted by the local police and German soldiers in a column to a sandpit on the outskirts of the city, behind the bridge on the road to Pavlograd. The Jews were forced to undress and then shot in the back of the neck by German Gestapo who had arrived from Dnepropetrovsk.5 Some 30 suspected partisans were shot together with the Jews.6
The shootings were probably carried out by SD Sonderkommando Platt (commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Platt) with the assistance of the Ukrainian police and the German Feldgendarmerie. The German Gestapo packed the valuable items in two large suitcases and took them back to Dnepropetrovsk. The remaining property of the victims was distributed among the local police.7
SOURCES
Documents and testimonies regarding the annihilation of the Jews of Novomoskovsk can be found in the following archives: BA-L (B 162/7177); DADO; GARF (7021-57-68); NARA (T-501, reel 18); TsDAVO (3538-1-53); and VHF (# 20288).
NOTES
1. NARA, T-501, reel 18, fr. 586.
2. Ibid., T-501, reel 18, fr. 815. I.F. Shchenderei was tried and convicted by a Soviet Military Tribunal in 1947.
3. BA-L, B 162/7177, p. 343, interrogation of Vasilii V. Han, April 12, 1947, in Ufa, which specifically mentions the existence of a ghetto in Novomoskovsk, established between October and December 1941 by the local police. The other witnesses in this file do not mention the ghetto but were only asked about the mass shooting of the Jews.
4. VHF, # 20288, testimony of Leonid Gol’verk (born 1930).
5. A. Farimets, “Ekho Proshlogo,” in Tkuma: Vestnik Nauchno-prosvetitel’skogo tsentra “Tkuma” (Dnepropetrovsk), no. 6 (37) (2003), pp. 6–7. BA-L, B 162/7177, pp. 330–365, there are contradictions concerning the number of Jews shot and also the dating of the Aktion in the German investigative files (some stating April 16, 1942), but otherwise the witness descriptions of the events largely concur.
6. TsDAVO, 3538-1-53, p. 48.
7. BA-L, B 162/7177, pp. 334–336, interrogation of I.F. Shchenderei, April 21, 1947. Shchenderei claims that 364 Jews were registered in Novomoskovsk just prior to the shooting.
