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

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

Korma is located about 110 kilometers (68 miles) north of Gomel’. In 1939, there were 981 Jews in Korma (40.3 percent of the population).

Following the German invasion, all men of military age, including many Jews, were called up into the Red Army.

Korma was occupied by German troops on August 15, 1941. During the first weeks of the occupation, the Korma Rayon was administered by military units subordinated to Rear Area, Army Group Center. The Wehrmacht established so-called field and local commandants (Feld- und Ortskommandanturen), which set up local administrations in the towns and surrounding Rayons and appointed local mayors. For a period in 1941, Ortskommandantur 353 was based in Korma. In the area around Korma, the Germans established several military garrisons, the largest being in Korma itself, consisting of more than 200 soldiers.

The military forces supervised a local police unit recruited within 10 days of the German occupation. The chief of police in Korma was Denis Makarenko.¹ A Ukrainian named Nikolay Gurov became chief of police for Rayon Korma, and Mitrofan Blatov was appointed as the head of the Rayon (Rayon-chef) because he spoke German.² The military commandant was initially Major Max Rozmaisel, a Czech by nationality; he was subsequently replaced by Fritz Essel. The surname of the local head of the Secret Field Police (Geheime Feldpolizei, or GFP) was Reger. Leutnant Glazer was the chief of the Department of Agriculture, and a person named Schein was in charge of the punitive detachment.³ A curfew was imposed on the civilian population from 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. Everyone over the age of 16 was obliged to carry a personal identification card, and those found without one could be severely punished.

After the occupation of the town by German forces, shops and private apartments were looted. The Germans ordered the Jews to sew fabric in the shape of yellow stars onto the outside of their clothes.⁴ In September 1941, German soldiers and some younger officers from the military headquarters in Gomel’ arrived in Korma. Together with Makarenko and four policemen, they went to the houses of the Jews and registered every person. After this procedure, the Jews were ordered to stay in their houses and were not permitted to leave their places of residence. Two ghettos were established in Korma: one for the Jews residing in the town, the other for the Jewish population of the surrounding area. Most of the population in both ghettos consisted of women, children, and the elderly. According to different sources, the number of people residing in the two ghettos ranged between 500 and 700 prisoners. One of the ghettos was located in the brick buildings of the Jewish school, which had belonged to the synagogue before, on School Street. The other ghetto was established in the buildings of the former financial department of the town administration of Korma and was located on Abaturov Street. The ghetto areas were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by police units.⁵ In addition, a prison and a concentration camp for the non-Jewish local population were also set up in Korma. The German authorities placed a Latvian named Aleksandr Stsepuro in charge of both ghettos. Before the war, Stsepuro had [End Page 1686] been the head of the Health Department in Korma. However, the military commandant and the Feldgendarmerie retained ultimate responsibility for the administration of both ghettos.⁶

The ghettos in Korma were not established primarily for the purpose of exploiting Jews economically. They served only to concentrate the Jews and to prevent them from escaping before the Germans murdered them. For this reason, the German authorities did not concern themselves with the poor sanitary conditions or make provisions for medical help or other social assistance inside the ghettos. The ghetto areas were much too small for the number of inmates, and the Jews faced terrible overcrowding and extremely unhygienic conditions. The food delivered into the ghettos for each person was only half the ration received by non-Jews in Korma. Meat and butter were prohibited to the Jews. A daily ration of 120 grams (4.2 ounces) of bread, 15 grams (0.5 ounces) of flour, and 10 grams (0.4 ounces) of buckwheat was provided for each person per day. The residents of the ghettos tried to alleviate the shortage of food by digging up potatoes and living off their small stocks of groceries. All contact between the Jews and the local population was forbidden. Though the non-Jewish population also suffered from hunger and there was a strict prohibition on illegal trade into the ghettos, some local inhabitants still sold bread to the Jews. Nonetheless, many children in the ghettos died of starvation and weakness.⁷

Every morning the residents of the ghettos were herded into the market square, and from there they were sent to various work assignments. Those Jews unable to work were humiliated by the Germans and publicly beaten by the police. Every morning the Jews left the ghettos in groups; one police guard was in charge of 20 people. The Germans made the Jews perform forced labor all day. Among the main tasks performed were cleaning toilets, clearing garbage, and road construction. This physically demanding work was sometimes too much for people, and the death rate under these conditions was high.⁸

The ghettos in Korma existed for approximately two months. The Aktion to liquidate the two Jewish ghettos was carried out on Saturday, November 8, 1941. On the previous evening, 50 members of a special SS police unit arrived from Gomel’, wearing uniforms bearing the emblem of a death’s head. The Germans and local police escorted the ghetto inmates to a grave site about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) outside of town and forced some of the victims to excavate a large pit about 42 meters by 12 meters and 0.5 meters deep (138 by 39 by 1.6 feet). The victims were forced to undress completely before being shot. At this time the Germans and their collaborators beat them with rubber sticks and extracted any gold crowns from their teeth. Members of a punitive squad commanded by the head of the local police, Makarenko, actively participated in this killing Aktion. The Jews were forced to lie facedown on the ground and were shot in the back of the head from behind. Among the victims were many elderly people, women, and children, including Aron Libman (born 1879), Genya Girshon (born 1896), the physician Dora Gordon, and others. The young children were thrown into the pit and buried alive.⁹ After the killing Aktion, the police seized the livestock that had belonged to the Jews. The trade department of the German administration in Korma was responsible for all former Jewish property. The proceeds from the sale of Jewish property were paid into the account of the German administration.¹⁰

The town of Korma was among the first settlements in Belorussia to be liberated. Troops of the Soviet 3rd Army of the Belorussian Front recaptured the town on November 26, 1943. According to Soviet figures from May 1944, the population of the Korma region declined from 45,050 to 34,272 during the period of German occupation (a loss of about 24 percent). In the town of Korma itself, the number of inhabitants fell from 2,434 to 928.¹¹ Members of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) exhumed the mass graves in Korma in November 1944. They discovered that there was no sign of bullet wounds on the corpses of the children under six years of age. It was assumed that these victims had been beaten until they were unconscious and then buried alive. The ChGK concluded that the German occupants killed a total of 1,173 people in the Korma raion. In the town of Korma itself, 728 civilian inhabitants and 132 Soviet prisoners of war had been murdered. The ChGK compiled a list of the names of 634 families that were victims of the German invaders. The main concern of the commission’s work was not to establish the nationality of the victims but rather to identify the perpetrators.¹²