KRAMATORSK
Pre-1941: Kramatorsk, city, Stalino oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Rear Area, Army Group South (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Süd); post-1991: Donets’k oblast’, Ukraine
Kramatorsk is located 170 kilometers (106 miles) southeast of Khar’kov. According to the 1926 population census, 136 Jews lived in the city of Kramatorsk, and 141 Jews in the remainder of the Kramatorsk raion.1 According to the 1939 population census, there were 1,849 Jews living in the city (1.96 percent of the total population).2 The rapid increase in the Jewish population from 1926 to 1939 can be explained by the arrival of a number of Jews in the city as it developed into an important manufacturing center during the industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, becoming the site of two large power plants and several armaments factories.
Units of the German 6th Army occupied the city in late October 1941, more than four months after the German invasion of the USSR on June 22. As Kramatorsk was a major industrial center, the Soviet authorities evacuated a good part of the working population into the Soviet interior, including a majority of the Jews. Men of an eligible age were conscripted into the Red Army or enlisted voluntarily. Approximately 10 percent of the pre-war Jewish population came under German occupation in Kramatorsk.
During the course of the occupation from October 1941 to September 1943, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) ran the affairs of the city. The German military commandant established a city administration and a Ukrainian auxiliary police force recruited from local inhabitants. The man appointed as mayor was an ethnic German named Schopen. Sonderkommando (Sk) 4b (a mobile detachment of the Security Police [Sipo] subordinated to [End Page 1771] Einsatzgruppe C) was stationed in the city under the command of SS-Sturmbannführer Fritz Braune from November 1941 to March 1942.3
Shortly after the occupation of the city, the German military commandant ordered the registration and identification of the Jews, who were forced to perform various kinds of heavy physical labor. According to one source, the Germans established a ghetto in the Melovaia gora area, on the western outskirts of the city. The ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire, and many Jews died from starvation and the horrific sanitary conditions. From there, the Germans took groups of Jews to the nearby quarry and shot them.4 Other sources, however, indicate that non-Jewish civilians (suspected Communists) and Soviet prisoners of war may have been interned in the same camp and suffered the same fate as the Jews, either at the same time or subsequently.5
On January 25–26, 1942, Sk 4b, assisted by the local Ukrainian police, carried out a mass killing Aktion. All the remaining Jews were shot, along with a number of Communist activists, in a ravine in the Melovaia gora area.6 According to an Einsatzgruppen report, Sk 4b shot 139 Jews at that time, probably reflecting the number of Jews murdered in Kramatorsk. More than 700 non-Jews also were murdered by Sk 4b around this time.7
German soldier Kurt Rogel, who was based in Kramatorsk in early 1942, observed a camp consisting of six or seven wooden barracks, which was surrounded by a wire fence and contained about 400 civilian prisoners (men, women, and children). The camp was guarded by Gendarmes (probably Feldgendarmerie). One day the SD arrived, took out all the prisoners in groups of 20, and shot them in a nearby gravel pit. Rogel was surprised that the prisoners spoke “German” among themselves but could not say if all the victims were Jews.8 A few remaining Jews were still being tracked down and shot by the Feldgendarmerie in the vicinity of Kramatorsk in the spring of 1942.9
SOURCES
Documentation regarding the murder of the Jews in Kramatorsk can be found in the following archives: BA-BL; BA-L (B 162/3793); DADnO; GARF (7021-72-21); NARA; and StA-N.
NOTES
1. 1926 All-Union Census, (Moscow, 1929), 13:412.
2. Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993), p. 24.
3. On January 12, 1973, Fritz Braune was sentenced by a court in Düsseldorf, Germany, to nine years in prison.
4. See the report of January 12, 1944, regarding the crimes of the German Fascist invaders in the city of Kramatorsk, extracts reproduced in Samuil Gil’, ed., Krov’ ikh i segodnia govorit (New York, 1995), pp. 85–86.
5. Handbuch der Lager, Gefängnisse und Ghettos auf dem besetzten Territorium der Ukraine (1941–1944) (Kiev: Staatskomitee der Archiven der Ukraine, 2000), p. 147. This source indicates that the Germans shot some 3,500 persons in the Kreidianii gora area near Kramatorsk during the occupation.
6. See the report of January 12, 1944, regarding the crimes of the German Fascist invaders in the city of Kramatorsk, in Nimets’ko-fashysts’kyi okupatsiinyi rezhym na Ukraini (Kiev, 1963), pp. 263–270. See also the report of January 26, 1942, by the section of the 1st Staff of the 17th Army Section, which details the mass-cleansing operation of the SD in Kramatorsk, in StA-N, Bestand KV-Anklage, N-Doc. 3350.
7. BA-BL, R 58/220, Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 173, February 25, 1942, states that SK 4b “shot 861 persons from January 14 to February 12, 1942, according to the regulations of military law. Among those killed were 649 political functionaries, 52 saboteurs and partisans, and 139 Jews.” Since SK 4b was at that time located in Kramatorsk, one may surmise that the 139 Jews were shot there. According to the materials of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), more than 600 Jewish families, or 2,000 persons, were shot. See the document of January 26, 1944, in GARF, 7021-72-21, pp. 72, 74, 78, 81, 84. This figure, however, seems too high. A second source makes mention of 72 Jewish families; see I. Erenburg, “Narodoubiitsy,” Znamia (1944), Kn. 1–2, p. 190.
8. BA-L, B 162/3793, pp. 2–6, statement of Kurt Rogel (Feldwebel in Krankentransport-Abt. 562), February 11, 1965. Rogel dates this incident to February or March 1942, but it was probably linked to the Aktion on January 25–26, 1942.
9. NARA, N-Doc., NOKW-767, military report for the period March to May 1942.
