KHOTIMSK
Pre-1941: Khotimsk, town and raion center, Mogilev oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Chotimsk, Rayon center, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Khotsimsk, raen center, Mahiliou voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Khotimsk is located about 168 kilometers (105 miles) east-southeast of Mogilev. The Jewish population in 1939 was 786 (roughly a quarter of the total).
German forces of Army Group Center occupied Khotimsk on August 15, 1941, less than seven weeks after the German attack on the Soviet Union. During that interval, a number of Jews managed to evacuate to the east, while the local authorities called up eligible men to serve in the Red Army. However, several hundred Jews remained in Khotimsk under the Germans. Throughout the occupation, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) governed Khotimsk. The Ortskommandantur established an auxiliary police force (Ordnungsdienst) recruited from local inhabitants.
By order of the military commandant soon after the occupation, the local authorities registered the Jews, required them to wear distinguishing patches, and assigned them to various kinds of forced labor. Jews were also forbidden to leave the town on pain of death.
Little information is available about the living conditions of the remaining Jews in Khotimsk between the summer of 1941 and the summer of 1942. It appears that some Jews from other towns where massacres had already occurred arrived in Khotimsk, warning the inhabitants of their likely fate.
On July 12, 1942, the Germans collected the Jewish population of Khotimsk in the building of a Jewish school under the guise of registration and tortured them in various ways. During this roundup, they shot 24 Jews.1 The Jews were then held in the school building as a makeshift ghetto for almost two months, under conditions of hunger and overcrowding. During this period some Jews were taken to prepare large pits. Fearing the worst, the pharmacist poisoned himself and his family, rather than submit to being shot by the Germans.2 On September 3–5, 1942, a detachment of Einsatzkommando 8, subordinated to Einsatzgruppe B, assisted by men of Reserve Police Battalion 91 (which was stationed in Khotimsk from July 1942), shot more than 300 Jews, mostly women, children, and the elderly, at the site of the flax mill.3
A number of Jews were active in the Soviet partisan groups in the Khotimsk region, including Boris Veniaminovich Levertov, who was decorated with the order of the Red Banner. Soviet partisan detachments disrupted German communications and blew up trains.4
SOURCES
Relevant publications concerning the fate of the Jews in Khotimsk during the Nazi-German occupation include Pamiats’: Belarus’ (Minsk: Respublikanskaia Kniha, 1995), p. 471; 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. 621.
Information concerning the extermination of the Jews in Khotimsk may be found in the following archives: BA-L; GAMO; GARF (7021-88-47 and 532); NARA (T-315, reel 1678); NARB (4683-3-1047); USHMM (RG-22.002M); VHF (# 44385); and YVA.
NOTES
1. NARA, T-315, reel 1678, p. 72, KTB Sich. Div. 221 Ia, July 12, 1942; GARF, 7021-88-532, p. 18. These sources corroborate each other, giving July 12, 1942, as the date of ghettoization. On the existence of a ghetto, see also NARB, 4683-3-1047, p. 58.
2. VHF, # 44385, testimony of Galina Myrkina (born 1923), interviewed in 1998.
3. BA-L, ZStL, V 205 AR 512/63, vol. 1, pp. 90, 155 ff., 213–214, and vol. 8, p. 1023. According to Pamiats’: Belarus’, p. 471, the ghetto was liquidated on September 4, 1942, with 800 victims. This figure is almost certainly too high. GARF, 7021-88-532, gives the figure of 652 Jewish victims, probably for the entire German occupation.
4. David Meltser and Vladimir Levin, eds., The Black Book with Red Pages (Tragedy and Heroism of Belorussian Jews) (Cockeysville, MD: VIA Press, 2005), pp. 387–389.
