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

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

Vitebsk is located 221 kilometers (137 miles) northeast of Minsk. In 1939, according to the last pre-war census, 37,095 Jews lived in the city, comprising 22.2 percent of the population. Between the census of 1939 and June 22, 1941, 3,820 Jewish refugees from Poland settled in the Vitebsk region, of whom, most probably, between 1,800 and 2,000 settled in the city of Vitebsk.¹ The Jewish population of the Vitebsk raion within its pre-war borders (without the city of Vitebsk) numbered 538.

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Jews at forced labor pushing a German field kitchen in Vitebsk, 1941.

USHMM WS #25123, COURTESY OF YIVO

In early July 1941, with the approach of German forces, Soviet authorities began to evacuate the most important industrial enterprises along with their workers, including many Jews. Thousands of Jews left Vitebsk between June 22 and July 8; at the same time, many Jewish refugees from northwestern Belorussia entered the city, swelling its Jewish population; not all of them succeeded in continuing their trek eastward. According to eyewitness accounts, the number of Jewish refugees in Vitebsk under the German occupation was significant.

The city fell to units of German Panzer Group 3 on July 11, after two days of fighting, during which the city suffered considerable damage, partly because of large fires that the retreating Soviets set. Sonderkommando 7a of Einsatzgruppe B, which entered the city that month, reported that Vitebsk was much more devastated than even Minsk.

Vitebsk became the headquarters of the 9th Army, coming under the authority of its rear area command (Korück 582). From August 1941 onward, Vitebsk fell under the authority of Rear Area, Army Group Center. The 403rd Security Division had its headquarters there, along with those of its subordinate commands, Feldkommandantur 815 and Ortskommandantur 282.

The first mayor of Vitebsk was Vsevolod F. Rod’ko from western (formerly Polish) Belorussia, who had been known as a Belorussian nationalist leader in the interwar period. Lev G. Brandt, a local ethnic German (Volksdeutscher), was appointed as his deputy. A Belorussian police force was formed, headed by P.A. Shostak, also from western Belorussia. Formally the police was subordinated to the uprava (local authority); in fact, it acted on the orders of the Feldgendarmerie.²

The German military authorities set up a Jewish Council (Judenrat) in Vitebsk; the Germans demanded that only local Jews, not refugees, should make up the council. It included D.S. Blen, a former director of the House of Children’s Artistic Education; Kagan, a former schoolteacher of German; [End Page 1745] Leitman, a former bookkeeper in a chemical artel; Beizerman, a schoolteacher; and also V.T. Tsadikman, I.O. Glezerman, and D.Kh. Ginzburg.³ With the assistance of the Jewish Council, the authorities registered the Jewish population. An announcement on July 17 stated that the registration of the Jews would be conducted on July 18–20; those liable for registration included not only Jews but also Mischlinge (half-Jews) of the first and second degrees, as well as everybody cohabiting with a Jew.⁴ The registration did not cause a panic among the Jews, but it took a long time; on July 26, Sonderkommando 7b reported that only 3,000 Jews had been registered. It is unclear how many Jews were registered in total; estimates vary from 10,000 to 16,000.

The Germans shot several groups of Jews between July and September 1941. On July 20, they ordered all Jewish men ages 15 to 50 to assemble at the Lenin Park. They formed the Jews into several rows, arbitrarily selected 30 men from each row, and then shot them as a punishment for the failure of some Jews to affix yellow badges to their clothes.⁵ At the end of July, some Jews were shot publicly for “failure to report for work.”⁶ At about this time, the second Aktion took place: 300 Jewish men, mainly the younger and stronger ones, were taken for “hard labor” on the outskirts of Vitebsk; they were even given picks and shovels. All of them were shot in the vicinity of Mazurino and Ulanovichi (northern suburbs of Vitebsk); a notice posted by the commandant the next day informed people that they had been “executed” for committing arson in the city.⁷ Witnesses interrogated by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) mention a mass shooting of members of the Jewish intelligentsia near Tulovo on August 26, 1941. In early September, the military authorities permitted Einsatzkommando 9 to select 397 Jewish prisoners from the civilian internment camp (Zivilgefangenenlager) whom they regarded as terrorists, and the Einsatzkommando shot them. On September 4, Einsatzkommando 9 reported shooting 149 Jews from the “NKVD leadership, political functionaries, as well as persons evading forced labor.”⁸ There were also some other shootings of groups of Jews in this period, albeit on a smaller scale.

On July 25, the Feldkommandantur ordered the Jews to move to the right (in Vitebsk this means the western) bank of the Dvina by July 28. Soviet forces had blown up the bridge across the Dvina before their retreat, and the Germans prohibited the civil population from using the pontoon bridge they had constructed, so the only way to get across was by boat. Many of the locals who lived close to the river had boats; they offered to take Jews across the river in return for payment. Some Jews made primitive rafts.

The Germans turned the river crossing into a slaughter of the Jews. German soldiers in boats in the middle of the Dvina overturned boats and rafts that were carrying Jews and their belongings; Jews who could not swim were left to drown. Other soldiers, who remained on the right bank, did not let the Jews disembark onto the bank; some even shot at the boats. According to various estimates, some 200 to 300 Jews perished during the crossing.⁹

The Nazis established an area of Jewish residence in the northern part of the right bank along the Il’inskii Embankment (former Nizhne-Naberezhnaia). The city’s inhabitants dubbed this area the “pale of Jewish settlement.” This “pale” consisted of several sites of Jewish residence. Some of the city’s Jews were crammed into a former vegetable store, others into the yeast plant, the former flyers’ club, the tobacco factory, a house at 30 Komsomol’skaia Street, and other places.¹⁰ This pale of settlement can be regarded as the first ghetto of Vitebsk. Einsatzkommando 9 (under Filbert), which entered Vitebsk either in the last days of July or on August 1–2, found the ghetto already in existence, “fenced and guarded by Jewish orderlies.”

The second, much smaller “ghetto” was established at the metalworkers’ club (Dom metallistov) and in the surrounding area. It was set up sometime in September; the exact date is unclear. On September 16, 1941, the uprava issued an order forbidding the citizens “of non-yid origin” (nezhidovskogo proiskhozhdenia) to remain in the ghetto area, as well as forbidding “all yids” to leave the ghetto area, which gives a rough indication of the date of the second resettlement. All the Jews from the previous ghetto area were crammed into the metalworkers’ club. Because of the shortage of medical workers in Vitebsk (only 29 “Aryan” doctors remained in the city), some Jewish doctors were allowed to stay outside the ghetto fence.

The second ghetto was enclosed by the Il’inskii Embankment, Engels Street, Komsomol’skaia Street, and Kirov Street. At both corners of the embankment, barriers were established. The ghetto was fenced. There was a narrow passageway from the ghetto to the river near one of the barriers, and the inmates were able to collect water from the Dvina. The passageway was also fenced; later it was closed. The main entrance to the ghetto was on Engels Street. After the great fire, the right bank, where Jews had been made to resettle, was an area of scorched, charred ruins, according to an eyewitness; there were almost no buildings fit for habitation. People created makeshift dwellings from bricks, planks, and old beds. Having no firewood, the inmates broke window frames from wrecked houses and burned them for cooking and heating.¹¹

In the period of existence of the larger ghetto, some Jews were made to perform forced labor, mainly clearing the city of ruins and rubble left after the fighting and the fire and performing services for the local garrison. Work columns were escorted in the morning across the pontoon bridge to their workplaces, and in the evening they were led back to the ghetto.

Neither in the first, larger ghetto nor at the metalworkers’ club did the Germans provide the inmates with food, except on rare occasions. The Jews soon exhausted the food supplies they had brought with them; non-Jews came up to the ghetto fence and exchanged food for clothing. The rate of exchange was very unfavorable for the ghetto Jews, because famine prevailed throughout the city. There was no water supply in the second ghetto other than one pipe from which water poured constantly. There was a permanent queue of inmates at this [End Page 1746] pipe. All the witnesses attest that the mortality rate from starvation in the ghettos of Vitebsk was very high.

The number of Jews who perished from hunger and disease is not clear. Soviet witnesses who gave their testimony to the ChGK estimated the rate of “natural deaths” in the Vitebsk ghetto variously: from between 30 people a day in September to 70 people a day in early October, which adds up to between 1,100 and 2,600 deaths from September 1 to October 8. It was not until September that the deaths began in the ghetto of Vitebsk. Historian Christian Gerlach estimates the total number of deaths at between 5,000 and 10,000, which would mean that a majority of the Jews who remained in Vitebsk starved to death or perished from typhus, rather than being shot by Filbert’s Einsatzkommando.

The Vitebsk ghetto was liquidated on October 8 and 10, 1941, under the pretext of the “danger of an epidemic” (Seuchengefahr). Einsatzkommando 9, quartered in Vitebsk at this time, with the assistance of the Belorussian police, brought the last Jews of the Vitebsk ghetto to the Tulovskii (Ilovskii) ravine near the village of Sebiakhi, east of Vitebsk, and shot them.

A survivor, a man of mixed Jewish-Belorussian parentage, says that when he came to the ghetto fence on October 10 to find his mother, the ghetto site was empty; all its inmates were gone.¹²

The number of Jews killed by Filbert’s unit has been a matter of dispute. Ereignismeldung 124 of October 25, 1941, reports a figure of around 3,000 Jews killed; however, Ereignismeldung 148 of December 19, 1941, mentions 4,090 Jews killed in Vitebsk. Some scholars are inclined to think that these reports deal with two different mass murders—one in October, the other in December 1941—and therefore they add these numbers together (thus arriving at the estimate of 7,000 or even 8,000 victims). Christian Gerlach questions whether the Einsatzgruppen reports deal with one or two Aktions. Both reports mention the same Aktion on October 8 and 10, 1941; the second total simply is more accurate than the previous one. The witnesses who gave testimonies to the ChGK may have exaggerated the numbers of victims, but it is unlikely that they would completely forget the second mass shooting of Jews in Vitebsk. No survivors mention a second Aktion, either.

Mikhail Ryvkin and Arkadii Shulman interpret the accounts collected by the ChGK to mean that the mass murder continued until October 12, rather than until October 8. On the basis of several witness accounts, they maintain that some group shootings of Jews (and prisoners of war) also took place in Vitebsk during the second half of October. The number of victims in this subsequent October Aktion was 800.¹³ According to Ryvkin and Shulman, in early November another relatively small group of Jews was shot.¹⁴ The precise fate of the Vitebsk Jews in late 1941 is still a subject of debate among scholars.

The Jewish doctors and artisans who were left in the city were killed at about the same time. They may have been included in the report of December 19, 1941. Some Jews continued to live clandestinely in Vitebsk even after this; thus the list of prisoners arrested between July and September 1942 and detained in the city’s SD prison contains more than 120 Jews.¹⁵

The number of Jews who perished in Vitebsk in 1941 may be estimated at between 6,500 and 13,000. The most probable estimate is 7,500, which constitutes 20 percent of the pre-war population of Vitebsk; this means that 80 percent of the Jews evacuated or fled from this industrial city. If there were indeed two separate mass shootings of Jews (probably separated by a very short interval, and they might have been conflated in the memories of the witnesses into a single event), the most probable estimate of the number of victims is 10,500.¹⁶

It is not clear in which villages of the Vitebsk raion Jews were killed. Some sel’sovets (Dolzha, Borovliany, Nikolaevo) are notable for the large number of people killed in them by the Nazis. It is unclear whether there were Jews among these victims.

Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Vitebsk in 1941 were not uniform. On the one hand, some survivors attest that in the first weeks of the occupation some “shady characters” were trying to break into their houses and rob Jewish belongings.¹⁷ On the other hand, the partisan Yevdokiya Spiridonova in 1941 escorted many Jews from Vitebsk to a partisan base at the former peat-cutting facility “20 let Oktiabria” (20th Anniversary of the October Revolution), and from there they were taken across the front line to the Soviet side in 1942.¹⁸