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

Pre-1941: Khar’kov, city and oblast’ capital, Ukrainian SSR (of which it was also the capital from 1919 to 1934); 1941–1943: Charkow, Rear Area, Army Group South (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Süd); post-1991: Khar’kiv, Ukraine

Khar’kov is located 478 kilometers (299 miles) east-northeast of Kiev. In January 1939, there were 130,250 Jews in Khar’kov, comprising 15.64 percent of the city’s population.

Units of the German 6th Army occupied Khar’kov on October 24, 1941. Anticipating that acts of sabotage and diversion would occur in the city, on October 17, 1941, the 6th Army ordered: “Jews and Bolsheviks should be taken first for collective reprisals. Saboteurs and persons offering armed resistance would be hanged in public.” To force the population to report mined buildings, hostages were to be held in them, again preferably Jews.¹ In compliance with this order, the 57th Infantry Division (commanded by Generalmajor Anton Dostler) had by the end of October shot three civilian political commissars and publicly hanged seven saboteurs, one of them a woman.² At a conference on November 4 at Field Command (Feldkommandantur) 787 (commanding officer Col o nel Laudenbach), which was in charge of the city, it was stated: “The cleansing operation continues, but the work is difficult because unlike other cities no material and no lists have been found in Khar’kov…. Jews, who are often left behind as messengers, arouse the greatest suspicion. Since most of the Jews are still hiding, an Aktion against the Jews is anticipated only after some time. First of all, an order to the ‘chief rabbi’ of the Jews here to ‘secure’ Jewish property by turning in all cash and foreign currency.”³ A series of explosions in the city on November 14 resulted in further reprisals. Among those killed by the blasts were Generalleutnant Georg Braun, the commanding officer of the 68th Infantry Division, and his chief of staff. As a punitive Aktion, 200 “Communists” were immediately shot or hanged and 1,000 hostages arrested.⁴

The municipal administration, headed by Oleksii I. Kramarenko, was actively involved in both the terror and the anti-Jewish measures taken in the city at this time. In its first announcement (prior to November 3, 1941) the municipal administration ordered “the Jewish population of the city” to elect a committee by November 5. The committee was then to appear at the municipal administration for confirmation. Seventy-one-year-old Efim Gurevich, a doctor of medicine and a professor, was elected head of the Jewish community.⁵

Kramarenko responded to the events of November 14 by ordering the mayor of the fifth district, A.P. Orobchenko, to assemble in the district office “no less than 50 Communists and Jews (more is permitted).”⁶ The mayors of the other 18 districts probably received similar orders that same day. The “Communists and Jews” who were assembled with the assistance of German soldiers were held as hostages at the Hotel International. On November 22, the “presidium” of the municipal administration deliberated on “the Jewish question.” The resolution on this point read: “Jews have no right at all to work in state or public institutions. Except for the head of the community, Jews are not to be admitted to the administration offices. Jews must wear armbands on their sleeves. All Jews are to be resettled into one district. The attention of the German command should be drawn to the desire of the population to take measures against the Jews.”⁷ On December 5, the municipal administration passed a resolution to start registering the city’s population on December 6. Jews were to be registered on separate lists. The total number of registered Jews came to 10,271: 1,959 children under the age of 16 (960 boys and 999 girls) and 8,312 people over the age of 16 (2,907 men and 5,405 women).⁸

The main contingent of Sonderkommando 4a, commanded by Standartenführer Paul Blobel, arrived in Khar’kov in mid-November 1941. Blobel began the “final solution of the Jewish question” in the city by concentrating the Jews in one place. According to the report of Einsatzgruppe C:

An area was chosen, where the Jews could be housed in the barracks of a factory district. Then, on [End Page 1767] December 14, 1941, the city commandant issued a summons in which the Jews of Khar’kov were told to move to the area by December 16, 1941. The evacuation of the Jews went off without a hitch except for some robberies during the march of the Jews in the direction of their new quarters. Almost without exception, only Ukrainians participated in these robberies. So far, no report is available on the number of Jews who were arrested during the evacuation. At the same time, preparation for the shooting of the Jews is under way. 305 Jews who spread rumors against the German Army were shot immediately.⁹

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Mug shot of Paul Blobel, commanding officer of Sonderkommando 4a and later Sonderkommando 1005, taken during the Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1947.

USHMM WS #09921, COURTESY OF BENJAMIN FERENCZ

The text of the summons mentioned above was approximately as follows: “The entire Jewish population of the city of Khar’kov is to report to the machine-tool factory for work and residence. Precious objects and money are to be surrendered. Anyone found in the city after 4:00 p.m. on December 16 will be shot.”¹⁰ Dr. L.P. Nikolayev observed the transfer of the Jews: “I saw how they went down Pushkin Street and gathered in groups in front of the ‘Hotel Krasnaia.’ It was a very sad sight. They were thin and pale, dressed in ragged clothes with suitcases, baskets, and packages. They wanted to make a deal with the cart-drivers, but the latter demanded outrageous prices from them.”¹¹

The “barracks of a factory district” were the barracks of a machine-tool factory in the city’s tenth district.¹² There were 26 barracks, and in early December 1941, 861 people were still living in them (each barracks had between 3 and 71 inhabitants). On December 12 and 13, all these people were resettled to make room for the Jewish population.¹³

The following table, compiled from the documents of the municipal administration, shows the number of Jews resettled to the tenth district on December 15–16, 1941.

In September 1943 a report prepared by the municipal commission for the investigation of Nazi crimes in Khar’kov described the conditions in the “Jewish district” or “ghetto” as follows:

The doors and windows in the barracks to which the Jewish population was herded were broken, and the plumbing and heating were ruined. Hundreds of people were settled in barracks intended for 60 to 70 people. In the ghetto they had established, the Germans starved people and prevented them from going out to get water and food. At night people were prevented from going outside even for the needs of nature. Anyone spotted violating the established regime was immediately shot. Many people became [End Page 1768] sick and died. The corpses of the dead remained in the barracks. Taking them outside was not permitted…. Every day the Germans made new demands to deliver warm clothing, watches, and other valuable objects. If these demands were not met because the objects were not available, “soldiers” [probably German police, ed.] took several dozen people away from the barracks and shot them.¹⁴

This description is largely corroborated by contemporary German documentation. A report from Police Battalion 314 indicates: “from December 17, 1941, to January 7, 1942, the companies took it in turn to guard the ghetto. During the guard duty of the First Company, Jews trying to leave the ghetto who did not stop when called were shot by the ghetto guards.”¹⁵

The account of Maria M. Sokol, who managed to escape from the barracks just before the final liquidation, gives further details of conditions there. She slept on the floor in the freezing cold, and her hands and feet grew numb. She suffered from hunger but notes that some Germans would let people go to the market or fetch water if they were bribed. But the Germans also shot people at will, killing about 50 people per day prior to the order for the general execution of everyone.

After concentrating the Jews in one spot, Sonderkommando 4a set about exterminating them. But first, on December 24, 1941, about 200 Jewish patients from the psychiatric hospital were murdered, although the pretext given for their removal from the hospital was that they were being transferred to the Jewish community.¹⁶ On December 27, several hundred Jews who had been concentrated at the factory settlement were executed after being told that they were being sent to work in the Poltava oblast’. The total liquidation of the Jews began on January 2, 1942. It lasted several days because Soviet air raids repeatedly interrupted the shootings, which took place in a ravine outside the city (Drobitskii Iar). In all, more than 9,000 people were shot.¹⁷

SS-Obersturmführer Victor Woithon, an officer of Sonderkommando 4a who took part in the shootings, recalled at his trial in Darmstadt in 1967:

It was a horrific picture. Several layers of corpses lay at one end of a trench 60 to 80 meters [about 197 to 262 feet] long. There was movement in the trench…. I saw one man who shouted, “Finish me off,” and although there was still shooting up ahead, I went down into the trench and finished him off with a pistol…. Then I ordered that a carbine be given to me because it has a great penetrating force and with a pistol I could not get to the people who were still alive in the lower layers. Walking on the mountain of corpses, which gave way under foot, was horrible. At this point Blobel ordered me to come out of the trench because there was still shooting. He accused me of being careless…. Eight men did the shooting. Others loaded the magazines or sorted the valuable objects.¹⁸

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The Pustova family poses with Maya Reznikova (front row, wearing glasses) and her baby daughter, 1962. Yad Vashem honored members of the Pustova family for helping Reznikova’s family, including Maya’s mother Rebeka, whose escape from the Khar’kov ghetto they facilitated.

USHMM WS #64261, COURTESY OF JFR

Several hundred sick or elderly Jews who could not get to the new place of residence because of their physical condition did not obey the order to resettle into the tenth district. They were assembled at the synagogue on Meshchanskaia Street where they soon died of cold and hunger.¹⁹ The murder of the Jews of Khar’kov, although clearly racially motivated, should also be seen in the context of the general hunger of the city’s civilian population resulting from the requisition of food for the German army. In November 1941, a report by the Corps Intendant (supervisor) of the German LV Army Corps considered evacuating the Russian population due to the threat of widespread starvation.²⁰ More than 500 people died of hunger in January 1942, and by April, more than 2,000 city residents were starving each month.²¹

In addition to the sick and elderly, some Jews were still hiding in the city. To expose them the municipal administration issued Order no. 53, dated January 24, 1942, to all district mayors to establish (until the question of a Ukrainian police was resolved) a special unit consisting of three groups. The first group was charged with exposing “Communists, Bolsheviks, Jews, and others.” This group was to check “all suspicious persons and to prepare lists of all Communists, Jews, and Bolsheviks in the district.”²² Jews who had been exposed were handed over to the Security Police for execution. According to Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 187 of March 30, 1942, in addition to “193 agitators and seditious elements,” 64 Jews were executed.²³

In total, about 12,000 Jews were exterminated in Khar’kov in 1941–1942. Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C was primarily responsible for the extermination of the Jews of Khar’kov. The American military tribunal at Nürnberg sentenced the unit’s commanding officer, SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, to death in 1948. He was executed in 1951.

Generalmajor Dostler, who at the end of the war had the rank of Infantry General, was sentenced to death by an American military court in Rome on October 12, 1945. In 1947 the [End Page 1769] Soviet military tribunal in Berlin convicted 15 policemen from the Third Platoon of the Third Company of the Reserve Police Battalion 9. (They were all sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment.) This platoon, which was commanded by Zugwachtmeister Tecklenburg, was most active in killing Jews in Khar’kov. In 1948, former SS-Haupsturmführer Heinz Hellenbroich, who had served in Sonderkommando 4a from October 1941 until February 1942 and was one of the organizers of the extermination of Khar’kov’s Jews, was executed by a French military tribunal.

In 1967, a group of officers and noncommissioned officers from Sonderkommando 4a, some of whom had taken part in executing Jews in Khar’kov (i.e., Victor Woithon and others), was brought to trial in Darmstadt, West Germany.²⁴

The 314th Police Battalion, which arrived in Khar’kov in early December 1941, was also involved in exterminating Jews. A West German investigation of former members of this battalion led to the conviction of two former officers in Traunstein in 1982, but this was for executing Jews in Volhynia in July and August 1941 and in Dnepropetrovsk in October 1941 and not for killing Jews in Khar’kov. Oskar Christ, a former senior officer of this battalion, had faced trial in Wiesbaden in 1968, but for killing his mistress in March 1942 and not for taking part in killing Jews. The court ordered his case closed.²⁵