BELOPOL’E
Pre-1941: Belopol’e, town and raion center, Sumy oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Belopolje, Rear Area, Army Group South (rückwärtiges Heeresgruppe Süd); post-1991: Bilopillia, Sumy oblast’, Ukraine
Belopol’e is located about 50 kilometers (31 miles) northwest of Sumy. According to the 1939 census, there were 125 Jews living in Belopol’e (about 0.72 percent of the town’s population).1 In the 1930s, the town was located close to a railway junction and had an electricity-generating plant and a tractor station. Local industries included machine construction and metalworking factories, a flour mill, and a sugar plant.
The town was occupied by German troops of Army Group South on October 7, 1941, about four months after the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22. Before the arrival of German troops, a number of local Jews managed to escape to the east, and some Jewish men were recruited into the Red Army. During the entire period of the German occupation of Belopol’e, between October 1941 and September 1943, a German military administration (Ortskommandantur) was in control of the town.
In the fall or winter of 1941, German authorities sent the remaining Jews they could find in Belopol’e to work cutting peat. Subsequently these people were transferred to Konotop, where they were shot by members of the 1st SS-Infantry Brigade or other German occupation forces.2
According to a report by Feldkommandantur (V) 200, based in Konotop, dated June 1942:
The Jewish question in this area was taken care of in the months of October and November 1941 by the 1st SS-Infantry Brigade, which was deployed here. In May 1942, a further 24 Jews were discovered in the town of Bilopillia [Belopol’e], whose housing in mass accommodations and their subsequent sending away to forced labor was authorized.3
In the view of historian Ilya Altman, the concentration of these 24 Jews in an unguarded building and their subjection [End Page 1763] to forced labor there prior to redeployment for forced labor elsewhere can be viewed as a form of “open ghetto.”4
SOURCES
Relevant documentation, including the files of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission’s (ChGK) investigations into the crimes committed by the German occupying forces and their collaborators in Belopol’e, can be found in the following archives: BA-MA (RH 22/201); DASO; GARF (7021-74-486); NARA (RG-238, T-501, reel 33, frame 351); and TsDAVO (CMF-8-2-157, p. 205).
NOTES
1. Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993), p. 28.
2. 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. 145. This source dates these events to early 1942.
3. BA-MA, RH 22/201, FK V (200), Abt. VII, Dem Kommandierenden General der Sicherungstruppen und Befehlshaber im Heeres-Gebiet Süd, Abt. VII, Betr. Tätigkeitsbericht zum 20.6.1942, as cited by Andrej Angrick, “Annihilation and Labor: Jews and Thoroughfare IV in Central Ukraine,” in Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds., The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2008), p. 204.
4. Il’ja Al’tmann, Opfer des Hasses: Der Holocaust in der UdSSR 1941–1945 (Zu rich: Gleichen, 2008), pp. 97–98.
