SEMENOVKA
Pre-1941: Semenovka, town and raion center, Chernigov oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Semenowka, Rear Area, Army Group South (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Süd); post-1991: Semenivka, Chernihiv oblast’, Ukraine
Semonovka is located 240 kilometers (149 miles) north–northeast of Kiev. According to the December 16, 1926, census, 852 Jews lived in the town of Semenovka, and a total of 1,049 Jews lived in what was then the Semenovka raion. According to the 1939 census, 402 Jews (5.39 percent of the total population) lived in Semenovka.1 The decrease in the Jewish population was mainly the result of Jews moving to other districts, as well as the Holodomor famine of 1932–1933.
German forces of Army Group South occupied Semenovka on August 25, 1941, two months after Germany’s attack on the USSR on June 22. During this period, a considerable number of Jews managed to evacuate to the east, and all men eligible for the draft were either drafted or had voluntarily joined the Soviet Armed Forces. Only about 14 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in the town at the start of the occupation.
During the entire German occupation (from August 25, 1941, to September 22, 1943), the town was ruled by the German military commandant located in Novgorod-Severskii. The German military authorities established a local Rayon administration and an auxiliary Ukrainian police force recruited from the local population.
Soon after the German occupation of the town, the German military commandant ordered the registration and public identification of the Jews (they were required to wear an armband on their sleeves), as well as their employment in a variety of onerous forced labor tasks. At the beginning of [End Page 1773] November 1941, all Jews who remained in town were moved into a specially created “Jewish residential district” (open ghetto) that occupied one designated street. On November 30, 1941, this open ghetto was liquidated. In the course of the liquidation Aktion, the Jews were first gathered in the school basement. The next day, German forces shot them in the birch woods nearby. A total of 55 people were shot.2 The shooting was carried out by a section of the 10th Motorized Infantry Battalion of the 1st Waffen-SS Motorized Infantry Brigade. During the entire period of the occupation, the total number of civilians killed in Semenovka was 66.3 Therefore, the Jewish victims comprised over 83 percent of the town’s total losses.
SOURCES
Documents on the persecution and extermination of the town’s Jewish population can be found in the following archives: DACgO and GARF (7021-78-37).
NOTES
1. Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993), p. 26.
2. GARF, 7021-78-37, p. 144; and Association for the Jewish Organization and Communities in Ukraine (Vaad Ukrainy) “Memory of the Holocaust” Program: Chernigovskai oblast’.
3. “Semenivka,” in P.T. Tron’ko et al., eds., Istoriya mist i sil URSR: U 26 t (Chernihivs’ka oblast’) (Kiev, 1972).
