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

Pre-1941: Orsha, city and raion center, Vitebsk oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Orscha, Rayon center, Rear Area, Army [End Page 1709] Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Orsha, raen center, Vitsebsk voblasts’, Republic of Belarus

Orsha is located 82 kilometers (51 miles) south-southeast of Vitebsk. In 1939, 7,992 Jews lived in the city of Orsha (21.3 percent of the total), and 589 Jews (3.6 percent of the total) lived in the neighboring district of Orshanskii zheleznodorozhnyi poselok (Orsha Railway Settlement, in the census of 1939 referred to as Orshanskii zh.d.). After 1938, in the Orsha raion, there were also the towns of Kopys’, Orekhi-Vydritsa (now Orekhovsk, 123 Jews, or 3.35 percent of the total population in 1939); and Baran’. The rest of the Jewish population of the Orsha raion (excluding the towns of Orsha, Baran’, and Kopys’) included 627 people, the bulk of whom lived in the small towns of Smoliany (950 Jews lived here in 1926) and Osintorf. After the war, the borders of the Orsha raion were changed, and Osintorf was included in the Dubrovno raion. (See also Baran’; Dubrovno; Kopys’; and Smoliany.)

Before World War II, Orsha was one of the most important railway junctions in the western part of the Soviet Union. The Germans bombed Orsha on the first day of the invasion, June 22, 1941, and a further heavy bombing raid followed on the night of June 24–25, when the city center was severely damaged. This event impelled many Jews to leave Orsha, which, with its railway tracks, depots, and industrial plants, seemed to be a dangerous place.

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Sketch map of the Orsha ghetto, January 9, 1946, prepared for the Minsk trial by Paul Eick, who in September 1941 built the ghetto “on the order of the Field Commandant’s Office.”

USHMM RG-06.025*03, MICROFICHE 13, FILES 514–517

Orsha was captured by units of the German 2nd Panzer Group in the course of the Smolensk operation between July 10 and July 20, after heavy fighting.

Ortskommandantur I/906 was initially responsible for Orsha’s administration. From August 1941 onward, Orsha was under the authority of Rear Area, Army Group Center. The area was in the realm of the 286th Security Division, with its headquarters based in Orsha. The city was under the control of Feldkommandantur 683, and of Ortskommandantur I/842, subordinated to it.

A key role in the genocide of Orsha’s Jews was played by the commandant of Ortskommandantur I/842, Baron von Ascheberg, and his deputy, Paul Karl Eick, who appeared in the city at the end of July. Eick was attached to the Ortskommandantur as an officer for special tasks and was subordinated directly to the 286th Security Division. Before his arrival, the Ortskommandantur had registered the Jewish population and ordered the Jews to wear a black armband with a yellow star on it. Some witnesses recollect that, apart from this, the Orsha Jews wore star-shaped patches on their backs. A witness at the Minsk trial in 1946 related that the “[Belo-]russian population was allowed to remain outdoors until 7:00 p.m, the Jews, until [End Page 1710] 6:00 p.m. Food was scarce, and when it was sold at the market, according to a commandant’s order, two separate queues were formed: one for the [Belo]rus sian population and one for the Jewish population. Food products were allotted to the Jewish population only if something remained after the [Belo-]russian population had finished their purchases.”¹ It is not clear whether the Judenrat in Orsha was formed before Eick’s arrival or after it (witness accounts diverge on this point). The chairman of the Jewish Council was Kazhdan, a former bookkeeper. Only one survivor refers to a Jewish police force, which helped to guard the ghetto in Orsha.²

Upon his arrival, Eick imposed a “contribution” on the Jews, amounting to 150,000 rubles. According to Eick’s testimony at the Minsk trial, the Jews were able to pay 125,000 rubles in valuables and cash, of which the cash was left for Orsha’s city authority, and the valuables (silver and gold, according to the testimonies at the Minsk trial) were transferred to the Reichsbank in Berlin.³ Forced labor was imposed on the Jews; it consisted mainly of clearing the city of the ruins left after the bombings.

In early September, Eick, following a decision made at a meeting in the office of the Ortskommandantur, established a ghetto. It consisted of 39 houses on Engels Street (also known previously as Gorodnianskaia),⁴ where about 2,000 people were to be concentrated. The Jews were given three days to move into the ghetto. On one side, the ghetto was bordered by the Orshitsa River, and on the other sides it was surrounded with barbed wire and guarded. The ghetto also bordered the Krasnyi Borets (“Red Fighter”) Iron Foundry. The Jewish cemetery was included in the ghetto area.⁵

The ghetto inmates were crammed together under severely overcrowded conditions; in some houses, according to one survivor’s account, they even divided rooms with planks horizontally, thus creating more space for sleeping.⁶ The Germans provided inadequate food (a witness at the Minsk trial speaks of 10 to 15 grams (0.4 to 0.6 ounce) of flour and some potato per person per day). Typhus epidemics broke out in the ghetto.⁷ According to witnesses, some younger Jews managed to leave the ghetto and exchanged various possessions for food with the local non-Jewish population. Despite the barbed-wire fence, ghetto inmates suffered from intrusions by people whom the witnesses at the Minsk trial called “German soldiers.” Most probably they were locals, perhaps men of the local police. Whoever they were, the intruders robbed Jews of their belongings and sometimes raped women. Ghetto inmates tried to complain about this to Eick, but to no effect.

The first mass shooting of Jews in Orsha was carried out by Einsatzkommando 9 (commanded by Dr. Alfred Filbert) of Einsatzgruppe B, in August 1941. In this month, a group of Jews, 43 people, were killed.⁸ A large mass shooting of Jews in Orsha took place in September 1941 when Einsatzkommando 8 (commanded by Dr. Otto Bradfisch) and part of Einsatzgruppe B, on its way to Mogilev, shot an unknown number of Jews of both genders.⁹

The liquidation of the Orsha ghetto was carried out by the forces of the local SD with the participation of the Ortskommandantur, primarily von Ascheberg and Eick. According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), it took place on November 27, 1941. In the evening of November 26, the ghetto was surrounded by members of the Feldgendarmerie, commanded by Eick. The mass shooting began at 7:00 a.m. The Jews were brought from the ghetto in groups to the Jewish cemetery, where Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) had dug pits. The victims were ordered to undress and made to lie down in the pits; then they were shot with automatic rifles. In this one-day Aktion, 1,873 people were murdered.¹⁰

In April 1942, several Jewish families, 53 people in total, were murdered. It is unclear whether these were “specialists” or Jews discovered in the countryside.

In September 1943, the Nazis attempted to erase the traces of the mass murder. Using a labor force of Soviet POWs, they exhumed and burned the bodies of those who had been killed in 1941–1942; the operation continued for five days. Nevertheless, in 1944 the ChGK was able to estimate that the total number of bodies buried in Orsha was 6,000 (not all of them were Jews).

The town of Orekhi-Vydritsa is located about 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Orsha. According to the witnesses interrogated by the ChGK, in December 1941, 7 Jewish men were brought to the nearby village of Briukhovo and killed there. The rest of the Jews, mainly women and children, were killed in April 1943. Estimates by witnesses of the number of Jews killed during the last Aktion range from 30 to 50. Such a late (for eastern Belorussia) killing of Jews appears unusual; it may actually have occurred in 1942. The list of victims prepared by the ChGK contains 14 names, 6 of which sound Russian, and suggesting, perhaps, that the victims may have been Jews passing as “Aryans.”

Elsewhere in the Orsha raion, a Jew named Finkelshtein, who had worked as a driver in a local kolkhoz, and his two sons were killed in the village of Krashino (about 10 kilometers [6.2 miles] southeast of Orsha). Fourteen Jews were killed in the Krasnyi Bereg kolkhoz in a northern suburb of Orsha. Three Jews, the Vingrover family, were killed in the village of Mezhevo and nine in the village of Shemberevo (5 and 13 kilometers [3.1 and 8.1 miles] northwest of Orsha, respectively). A Jewish blacksmith was killed in the village of Ozerok (22 kilometers [13.7 miles] from Orsha along the Lepel’ railway). A Jewish woman married to a Belorussian was killed in the Tuminichi sel’sovet (about 15 kilometers [9.3 miles] west-southwest of Orsha). A Jewish woman was killed in the village of Solov’e (5 kilometers [3.1 miles] northeast of Orsha).