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

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

Lepel’ is located 101 kilometers (63 miles) west-southwest of Vitebsk. In 1939, 1,919 Jews lived in the town, comprising 13.9 percent of the population. The Jewish population of the Lepel’ raion (without the town of Lepel’) was 289 people, the bulk of whom lived in the small town of Kamen’.

German forces (XXXIX Army Corps, Panzer Group 3) entered Lepel’ on July 3, 1941. From August 1941, Lepel’ was under the authority of Rear Area, Army Group Center, being situated on its western edge, close to the area under “civil administration” (Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien). From August 1941 until July 1942, the Lepel’ area lay in the realm of the 403rd Security Division; from July 1942 it fell under the 201st Security Division, with its headquarters in the village of Borovka, northeast of Lepel’. The town of Lepel’ was the site of Feldkommandantur 181. In 1941–1942, Ortskommandantur I/851 was based in Lepel’.

The German military authorities appointed Yu.N. Nedelko, a former schoolteacher of physical training, as the mayor of Lepel’, and Voitekhovich became head of the Belorussian police.¹

Survivors Roza Fishkina and Semyon Feigelman give good accounts of the situation of the Jews in Lepel’ under German occupation. From the start, the Germans shot those whom they suspected were Communists and provoked local people into robbing and murdering Jews.

Both survivors attest that some days after the arrival of the Germans the new authorities introduced the first anti-Jewish measures. One day, early in the morning, they woke up the Jews of Lepel’ and assembled them on a boulevard in the town’s center for a meeting. All Jews, including small children, old people, and the sick “who had been unable to get up from their beds for several years,” in the words of Fishkina, were told to come to the assembly place. The assembly was accompanied by beatings and other kinds of violence; the boulevard was guarded by German soldiers, so some Jews thought that it was a deportation or mass execution. But once there, the Jews simply had to listen to an officer read out new regulations restricting Jewish life. Among other things, forced labor was introduced. A Jewish committee was appointed with the Jewish elder Gordon at its head.²

A ghetto was established in Lepel’ at the end of July 1941. It included the streets Leninskaia, Volodarskaia, Vokzal’naia, and Bannyi Lane (according to another account, Leninskaia, Vokzal’naia, and Kanal’naia Streets). According to Fishkina, the houses in this district of the town were wretched: some of them had neither doors nor windows nor wooden floors. Jews were crammed 30 to 40 people to a house. The ghetto inmates were forbidden to switch on the light, to go out of their houses “without any business,” and to look out of the windows. In winter they were forbidden to take water from wells; they could only melt snow instead. The ghetto inmates did not receive any food.

Every day, the ghetto Jews were escorted to forced labor. On the way they had to sing a song, of which the only words were “Juden kaputt” (the Jews are finished). Fishkina does not mention the Jews being used for any vital or systematic tasks; their work included cleaning the streets of snow, cleaning cesspools without any tools, cutting firewood, transporting bricks, and doing other menial tasks. During the work, “traitors” (local collaborators, most probably, local police) beat the Jews with sticks, trying not to miss anybody.

Germans and politsais (local police) robbed the ghetto Jews of their belongings. As can be inferred from Fishkina’s account, Mayor Nedelko imposed a “contribution” of gold and [End Page 1696] valuables on the ghetto Jews. Raising the contribution proved difficult, and many Jews were killed during the course of its collection. Nedelko may also have tried to extort money from the Jews for protecting them from mass killing. In any case, it is clear that the population, Jewish and non-Jewish, had some knowledge of the forthcoming liquidation of the ghetto.

The ghetto was liquidated on February 28, 1942.³ On the morning of this sunny but very frosty day, the local police, headed by the deputy commander of the Belorussian police in Lepel’, Pavel Sorokin, surrounded the ghetto and began to assemble it’s inhabitants. Later the SS appeared. Some Jews were killed on the spot, which may mean that they put up some resistance. The rest, who, despite the heavy frost, were dressed only in light clothing, were taken in trucks to the killing site: pits near the village of Chernoruch’e, about 5 kilometers (3 miles) south of the town. The initiator of the killing was Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Wiebens, the head of Einsatzkommando 9. Immediately after the mass murders of Jews in Beshenkovichi and Chashniki, Wiebens turned to the Lepel’ Kommandantur with a request to hand over the Jews of Lepel’ to him for liquidation. The deputy commandant, Major Hirschberg, tried to object, claiming that he needed these Jews as manpower for constructing a major road (Rollbahn). As a result, two weeks later Wiebens’s representative appeared in Lepel’ once more with a new order, and the killing took place.⁴ It is unclear what other units, apart from Wiebens’s men, took part. Fishkina mentions also that narodniki, or men of the Russian National People’s Army (RNNA), participated in the Aktion.

The Vitebsk Regional Commission for Assistance to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) estimated the number of victims as 1,000 or (another estimate) 980 people.⁵ The trial of Einsatzkommando 9 (the main defendant being Wiebens) held in West Berlin in 1966 estimated the number of victims of the Lepel’ ghetto at 1,100.⁶

In the village of Kamen’, 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) northeast of Lepel’, in 1926 there were 426 Jews living in the town (80 percent of the population). There was no formal ghetto in Kamen’. Jews were forbidden to leave the town but continued to live in their own houses. The wearing of yellow stars was introduced. Jews continued to perform agricultural labor at the local kolkhoz.

According to the ChGK, 158 Jews of Kamen’ were killed on September 17, 1941. On the day before, the Nazis assembled all the Jews in a building where there had been a wool factory before the war. On September 17, all the male Jews of the town were loaded onto trucks and taken in a northwesterly direction to the cemetery of Borki to dig a mass grave, after which they were killed. Then the Nazis came to the town to take women and children to the massacre site. Before the women were taken to Borki, the teacher Dora Baselovich cried to the others: “Don’t believe the Germans! They took the men not for working but for digging pits for us!” The women and children were killed at the same place.⁷ According to the only survivor, Meise (Moisei) Aksentsov, a German officer from the local garrison informed Jews some days before the murder that they would be killed, but nobody ran from the town. On September 17, when he was brought with the other Jewish men of Kamen’ to dig the mass grave, Aksentsov shouted, “Run away,” attacked a nearby policeman, and hit him on the head with a shovel. The crowd of Jews scattered, but all were mowed down by machine-gunners except for Aksentsov himself, who ran in the direction of the nearby boggy lake, where he succeeded in hiding among the rushes. On this day his wife and four children were killed.⁸

In February 1942, 26 Jews of the village of Pyshno, 16 kilometers (10 miles) northwest of Lepel’, were transferred to Lepel’ and shot there, together with the local Jews, on February 28.⁹

Elsewhere in the raion, the nine members of the Jewish Fishman and Klibanov families were killed in the Poliany sel’sovet, about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) east of Lepel’. Six Jews were killed in the village of Zateklias’e, some 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) west of Lepel’. A one-year-old child of mixed parentage was killed in the area of the village Zabolot’e, 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) southeast of Lepel’.