OSIPOVICHI
Pre-1941: Osipovichi, town and raion center, Mogilev oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Ossipowitschi, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Asipovichy, raen center, Mahiliou voblasts’, Republic of Belarus
Osipovichi is located 45 kilometers (28 miles) northwest of Bobruisk. According to the 1939 census, there were 1,694 Jews living in Osipovichi (12.3 percent of the total population).
German forces occupied the town on June 30, 1941, just over one week after their invasion of the USSR on June 22. During this intervening period, the Germans bombed the town, and a small part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east. Men of eligible age were conscripted into the Red Army. Around 1,200 to 1,300 Jews remained in Osipovichi at the start of the German occupation.
During the entire occupation, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) ran the town, setting up a town administration and a police force (Ordnungsdienst) composed of local residents. Immediately after the town’s occupation, the Ortskommandantur ordered the town administration to register and mark the entire Jewish population and imposed a program of forced labor on the Jews. At the end of July or at the start of August 1941, a detachment of Einsatzkommando 8 carried out the first Aktion in the town. A group of Jews was shot as Soviet activists.1
In August or September 1941, a ghetto was created in the town.2 It included the following streets from Rosa Luxemburg to Vera Khoruzhaia: Kommunisticheskaia, Chumakova, Oktiabr’skaia, Gorky, Raboche-Krest’ianskaia, Polevaia, Kalinin, and Serov; and these streets in their entirety: Karl Liebknecht, Krasnoarmeiskaia Sotsialisticheskaia, Revoliutsionnaia, Karl Marx, Promyshlennaia, and Protasevichskaia. Jews who lived in the northern part of town and in other places were resettled into this area, on Oktiabr’skaia and Promyshlennaia (now Golanta) Streets. Non-Jewish inhabitants were not evicted from their homes. The Jews living in the ghetto were still able to exchange possessions for food. A ration card system was introduced in the town, and a daily ration of 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of bread was issued to each Jewish cardholder. On the left side of the chest and on the back, Jews were required to wear large circular yellow patches. They were forbidden to go to public places such as the markets and the movie theater; to teach children in schools; to greet and engage in conversation with the Belorussian population; to walk on sidewalks; to go outside the boundaries of the ghetto; and to gather on the streets in groups of more than three persons. For failure to comply with any of these restrictions, there was only one punishment: death by shooting. Every morning all able-bodied Jews over the age of 14, including most women (only those with [End Page 1712] infants were exempted), were taken out of the ghetto to perform forced labor, tearing down ruined barracks and other buildings and working at the railroad station and other sites.
A Jewish Council (Judenrat) was organized in the ghetto. One of its three members was Afroim Khavkin, who before the war had been the chief accountant of the voentorg (military store). The members of the Judenrat were appointed by the German Ortskommandantur on the recommendation of the town’s mayor, a man named Goranin. Before the war, Goranin had been a construction technician for Military Construction Administration no. 76 in Osipo vichi. It is known that, as directed by the Ortskommandantur, the members of the Judenrat registered the Jewish population.3
On October 11, 1941, the Germans conducted a second Aktion in the town. A combined force of SS, Wehrmacht, and local police entered the ghetto and seized at least 300 Jewish men, women, and youths, all of working age. The Jews were brought to a barracks, where all their valuables were confiscated. Then they were shot by an execution squad made up of men from the 7th Company of the 339th Infantry Division, which was based in Osipovichi until November 1941.4 The remaining women, children, and elderly were left in the ghetto. The ghetto was liquidated on February 5, 1942, when an SS detachment arrived and shot all the remaining Jews at the Jewish cemetery.5
SOURCES
Information on the fate of the Jewish community of Osipovichi during the Holocaust can be found in the following publications: Yehuda Slutski, ed., Bobruisk: Sefer zikaron le-kehilat, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Former Residents of Bobruisk in Israel and the USA, 1967); V. Zorin and G. Ershova, Osipovichi: Istoriko-ekonomicheskii ocherk (Minsk, 1972), p. 53; “Asipovichy,” in Pamiats’: Belarus’. Respublikanskaia Kniha (Minsk: Belaruskaia Entsyklapedyia, 1995), p. 391; V. Zaitseva and V. Novik, “Iz istorii Kholokosta v Osipovichskom raione,” in D.V. Prokudin and Il’ia Al’tman, eds., My ne mozhem molchat’. Shkol’niki i studenty o Kholokoste. Vyp. 4 (Mos-cow: Tsentr i Fond “Kholokost,” 2008); 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. 946; Marat Botvinnik, Pamiatniki genotsida evreev Belarusi (Minsk: Belaruskaia Navuka, 2000), p. 311; and Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2000), 6:161.
Documentation on the persecution and murder of the Jews of Osipovichi can be found in the following archives: GAMO (852-1-1, p. 169); GARF (7021-82-5); NARB (845-1-60, p. 57); USHMM (RG-50.378*031); VHF (# 34546); and YVA.
NOTES
1. See the report of Einsatzgruppe B on the Aktions conducted at the end of July and in the first half of August 1941, in Johannes Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition. Tresckow; Gersdorf, der Vernichtungskrieg und der Judenmord. Neue Dokumente über das Verhältnis der Heeresgruppe Mitte zur Einsatzgruppe B im Jahre 1941,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (2004): 560.
2. GAMO, 852-1-1, p. 169; NARB, 845-1-60, p. 57; “Asipovichy,” in Pamiats’: Belarus’, p. 391; and VHF, # 34546, testimony of Aleksandra Utevskaia (Otyevskaya).
3. Zaitseva and Novik, “Iz istorii Kholokosta”; and USHMM, RG-50.378*031, testimony of Aleksandra [Sara] Otyevskaya; as she was married to a non-Jewish man, Otyevskaya managed to avoid being registered.
4. Bezirksgericht Erfurt, verdict of December 13, 1962, against Werner Kurt Ha., in DDR-Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Die ostdeutschen Verfahren wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen, vol. 3 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), Lfd. Nr. 1072, pp. 243–245. In October 1941, OK (I) 304 was the Ortskommandantur in Osipo vichi.
5. Zaitseva and Novik, “Iz istorii Kholokosta”; USHMM, RG-50.378*031.
