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

1938–1941: Chechersk, town and raion center, Gomel’ oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Tschetschersk, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Chachersk, raen center, Homel’ voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Chechersk lies about 60 kilometers (37 miles) north of Gomel’ on the Sozh River. In 1939, there were 977 Jews in the town, 18.2 percent of the total population.

After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, all able-bodied men of military age were drafted into the Red Army. In Chechersk, the local authorities formed a rifle battalion of 239 men commanded by Levkovich. The unit included many Jews. Although Chechersk was 37 kilometers (23 miles) away from the nearest railroad station, and despite the lack of an organized evacuation, nearly half of the Jewish population managed to leave before the arrival of the German army in Chechersk. Most of them hoped to return home soon.¹

German forces occupied Chechersk on August 16, 1941, placing the town under the administration of Rear Area, Army Group Center. Commandant von Maibaum assumed military command in the town; Heimann was in charge of the agricultural command office; Kondrat Ganzhin became the head of the Rayon, and Golubovskii, chief of the Rayon police. The German occupiers also set up military strong points in the villages of Pokat’, Nisimkovichi, Poles’e, Zales’e, Beliaevka, Rovkovichi, Merkulovichi, and Dudichi. In these thinly populated settlements, the village elders were assisted by two or three local policemen.²

No anti-Jewish activity took place in Chechersk during the first two months of the occupation; then things changed for the worse. Chumakov became head of the town police and recruited Chechikov, Zbaromirskii, Bel’kin, Ginsher, Kozlov, and Zatikov, among others. Prisoners were held in a jail set up in a building of the veterinary training school in Chechersk.³

Until October 1941, Jews in the town continued to live in their own homes under the control of the local police. They strictly followed the orders issued by the German authorities. In October 1941, the Germans established a ghetto. They arrested all the Jews in Chechersk and held them under guard in the town hall and in nearby houses. Gypsies were confined at a separate location. In the course of interrogations, accompanied by beatings, jewelry and other valuables were taken from the Jews.

The ghetto in Chechersk had no purpose other than to concentrate the Jewish population and prevent those held from escaping before they were annihilated. Consequently, the German authorities took no measures for sanitation, medical services, or the social welfare of the prisoners in the ghetto. They forced the Jews to work without question or [End Page 1660] compensation. This included heavy labor. Often their warders ordered the inmates to perform degrading and senseless tasks: to swat flies in the commandant’s office; to drag carts with water, bricks, firewood, and trash from one place to another; and to dig ditches and then fill them up again.⁴

It was forbidden to feed the prisoners. Sometimes their keepers brought them rotten potatoes but did not provide any other food. If a local inhabitant attempted any communication with an inmate, the guards immediately put a stop to it. Despite the threat of starvation, the authorities prohibited local inhabitants from giving bread to the Jews. In effect, all contact with the local inhabitants was suppressed.

Because of the poor quality of the food, the ghetto inmates suffered from all kinds of gastric ailments. Many of them began having bloody diarrhea from dysentery. Untimely death became the norm. Hunger also provoked mental disorders.

The ghetto in Chechersk existed for about three months. The 435 inmates included mostly elderly men, women, and children. Of the total, 289 were Jews, and 146 were Gypsies.⁵

The annihilation of Jews in the ghetto took place in two main stages. In the first, at the end of November 1941, the Germans slaughtered 84 elderly men and women. Germans and their collaborators transported the weaker inmates to the site of their execution in motor vehicles; those able to walk they herded on foot. Local inhabitants working in a field who witnessed this activity asked the police where they were taking these prisoners. Their warders explained that they were “going to Gomel’ for medical treatment.” The Germans executed this first group in an antitank ditch outside of Chechersk.

The second mass shooting took place towards the end of December 1941. Members of the Gestapo arrived from the military commandant’s office in Gomel’ and instructed the local police concerning this Aktion. In the town hall, early on the morning of December 28, the police began searching the prisoners. They beat them, stripped them naked, and seized whatever personal possessions the victims still had with them. The Germans took gold, watches, and other valuables; the police took clothing and underwear, which they tied into small bundles and hid in their houses. A tailor, Samuil Baskin (born in 1896), who was considered a specialist worker by the Germans, witnessed one of these search-and-seizure operations that took place in an adjoining room.⁶

Before the Aktion began, the Germans and the police went around the town to gather the Belorussians and Russians into the square in front of the town hall. To instill fear, the Germans obliged the assembled local citizens to observe the treatment of the Jews before their execution. At a temperature well below freezing (–30 degrees Centigrade [–22 degrees Fahrenheit]), the Germans made the prisoners strip to their underwear, remove their shoes, and stand in the snow. Then they brought several wooden sledges into the square. At the command of Mayor Ganzhin, the police took from their parents the younger children, including infants, and threw them onto the sledges. Eyewitnesses said that “weeping and wailing filled the streets of Chechersk.” Everybody was crying, including the Belorussians who witnessed the scene. Ganzhin asked the Jews, “Why are you crying? Don’t be afraid, they’re not going to do anything to you, just take you around a bit and let you go.”⁷

The Germans and the police counted the prisoners again, then lined them up in a column 4 abreast and marched them along Sovietskaia Street to the killing site. The place chosen for this purpose was an antitank ditch 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) from the town and not far from the village of Krasnyi Bereg, on the Chechersk-Zabolot’e road. Following the column of prisoners surrounded by members of the punitive expedition and policemen were sledges with the children. When they had all arrived at the site of the Aktion, the column halted, and the first group of male prisoners was ordered to lie face-down in the snow. These were the strongest and healthiest inmates. A member of the punitive party would pin down a doomed Jew by placing a pitchfork without center tines on the neck of the victim so that he could not move his head, while a second German executioner shot him in the back of the head with a pistol. Policemen with pitchforks dumped the bodies in the ditch. Then it was the turn of the next rank of 4 prisoners. The Jews awaiting execution began weeping and crying out. People bid good-bye to one another, and children begged their mothers to take them back home. The Germans, however, paid not the slightest attention. They laid out children in the snow and beat them to death with spades. They grabbed the legs of infants like piglets, beat their heads on the frozen ground, and threw them into the ditch. Many were still alive. By 8:00 p.m., things finally quieted down. The punitive detail covered the bodies with snow. The next day, Ganzhin rounded up local inhabitants and forced them to bury the dead.⁸ Some 500 people perished in the two Aktions, including the Gypsies. The Germans spared only 5 individuals who were tailors or shoemakers, whom they sent to Gomel’.⁹

After the mass killings, Ganzhin and the military commander in Chechersk, von Maibaum, held a banquet at police headquarters “to mark the deliverance of the town from the Jews.”¹⁰ The police department received a cash reward. In January 1942, Mayor Ganzhin awarded Leonid Chechikov 400 rubles for his zeal in guarding the Jews, participating in removing them to the site of their execution, and arresting partisans.¹¹

During the years of the German occupation of the Chechersk raion, 130 inhabited localities were destroyed, while in the town itself some 300 houses were burned down. Before their retreat, German troops mined many buildings and streets in the town. Troops of the Soviet 61st Belorussian Army Front liberated Chechersk on November 27, 1943, in the course of the Gomel’-Rechitsa operation. When the war ended, the population of the Chechersk raion had dropped from 41,845 in 1941 to 30,991 in May 1944, a loss of 26 percent. Comparable figures for the town itself are 5,138 for the pre-war population, and 2,265 at the time of liberation, a loss of 59 percent.¹²

The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), which arrived in Chechersk on December 22, 1943, established that the Germans were responsible for killing 1,137 people in Chechersk and other communities in the raion; that included 716 people who had previously lived in other raions [End Page 1661] of the republic. The commission’s documents do not identify the dead by nationality.¹³