ALUSHTA
Pre-1941: Alushta, town and raion center in the Crimean ASSR, RSFSR; 1941–1944: Aluschta, (in 1941–1942) Rear Area, 11th Army; post-1991: Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine
Alushta is located 45 kilometers (28 miles) southeast of Simferopol’ on the coast of the Black Sea. According to the 1939 census, there were 251 Jews living in Alushta, comprising 2.6 percent of the town’s total population. Another 277 Jews lived in the settlements of the Alushta raion, comprising about 1 percent of the raion’s total population, excluding the town of Alushta itself.1
Units of the German 11th Army occupied the town on November 2, 1941, four and a half months after Germany’s invasion of the USSR on June 22. During this interim period, according to a report compiled by the statistical office of the town authority of Simferopol’ in February 1942, 120 Jews managed to evacuate eastward,2 while men eligible for military service were inducted into the Red Army. Around 100 Jews remained in the town at the start of the German occupation.
Throughout the period of occupation—from November 1941 to April 1944—a German military administration was in charge of the area around Alushta. The German occupying forces operating in the town included a detachment of Sonderkommando 11b, subordinated to Einsatzgruppe D. This detachment was sent to the town immediately following its occupation and was active there until the summer of 1942; it was primarily this detachment that conducted the mass shootings of Jews. Its commander, until February 1942, was SS-Obersturmführer Hans Stamm, who simultaneously performed the duties of town commandant. Stamm consulted almost daily with the local mayor and the “militia” recruited from local Tartars.
Soon after the occupation of Alushta, the German commandant ordered the town authority to organize the registration and marking of the Jews, who were required to wear white armbands bearing a yellow six-pointed star. Then the Jews were gathered together in a single building, which was sealed from the outside and guarded by a Tatar militia; Gypsies were also placed in this building along with the Jews.3 This building served as a prison-style ghetto.
On November 24, 1941, units subordinated to Einsatzgruppe D conducted the first Aktion against the Jews of Alushta. On that day, in retribution for a partisan attack on a German column of vehicles (three Germans were killed, and six were wounded), 32 Communists and 30 Jewish men from the village of Bium-Lambat and from Alushta were shot.4
In early December 1941, German security forces conducted a second Aktion in Alushta, in which all the Jews and Gypsies were shot in a ravine in the park of Sanatorium no. 7.5 At the beginning of January 1942, Einsatzgruppe D reported that Alushta and the area around it had been rendered judenrein (cleansed of Jews).6
SOURCES
Documentation regarding the extermination of the Jews of Alushta can be found in the following archives: BA-BL (R 58/220); GAARK (R-1289-1-5); GARF (7021-9-31); and Sta. Mü I (22 Js 205/61).
NOTES
1. Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2000), 4:40; 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. 36; Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993), p. 31; and M.I. Tiaglyi, Mesta massovogo unichtozheniia evreev Kryma v period natstistskoi okkupatsii poluostrova (1941–1944): Spravochnik (Simferopol: BETS “Khesed Shimon,” 2005), p. 27. This source indicates that of the Jews living in the Alushta raion, only 20 were evacuated.
2. GAARK, R-137-9-7, p. 6.
3. See the interrogation of Hans Stamm, May 10, 1966, Sta. Mü I, 22 Js 205/61, p. 2456.
4. See BA-BL, R 58/220, Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 156, January 16, 1942. Bium-Lambat: correctly, Biiuk-Lambat, now Malyi Maiak.
5. GAARK, R-1289-1-5, p. 84. Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia, 4:40, dates the final liquidation on December 5, 1941, noting that 250 Jews were shot (in view of the above-cited evacuation figures, this number roughly reflects the losses for both Alushta and the surrounding Alushta raion). In his interrogation on May 10, 1966, Stamm denied responsibility for the murder of the Jews and Gypsies, but other members of Sonderkommando 11b conceded on interrogation that they were aware of the murder of these prisoners; see Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), p. 346, fn. 475.
6. See BA-BL, R 58/220, Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 150, January 2, 1942. This report indicates that the Jews of Alushta were shot before December 15, 1941.
