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

Pre-1941: Stalino (Iuzovka before 1924), city and capital, Stalino oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Rear Area, Army Group South (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Süd); post-1991: Donets’k oblast’ center, Ukraine

Stalino is located 594 kilometers (369 miles) southeast of Kiev. According to the 1939 census, the population of Stalino was 462,395 people, of which 24,991 (5.4 percent) were Jews.

Troops of German Army Group South occupied Stalino on October 20, 1941.¹ The city remained under German military administration until September 1943. At the beginning of December 1941, Feldkommandantur 240 reported: “So far the Jewish problem does not play a major role in Iuzovka. The number of remaining Jews is estimated at around 3,000. As in other places, the wealthy Jews have fled. Mea sures for the evacuation of the Jews by the SD have so far not been carried out because of the weather conditions.”²

In eastern Ukraine more than 80 percent of the Jewish population was able to escape before the occupation. At the same time, it can be assumed that nearly all the Jewish families that came under German occupation in Stalino were murdered. After the liberation of the Donbass, the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) found, in the Stalino oblast’ alone, mass graves containing—according to its estimates—more than 323,000 corpses (about 174,000 civilians and 149,000 Soviet prisoners of war) who had been shot, hanged, or asphyxiated with gas by the Germans or had just died in camps from hunger, freezing, and disease.³ Although the accounts of the ChGK concerning the larger mass graves were often estimates based on volume calculations, and therefore sometimes probably too high, they clearly show the dimensions of the terror exercised by German rule in the region.

Einsatzkommando 6, headed by Robert Mohr from October 1941 until September 1942, and responsible for the murder of Jews, Communists, Gypsies, and other “enemies” in Stalino, was based in the city prior to the establishment of a fixed office of the Kommandeur of the Security Police and SD (KdS) there at the end of June 1942.⁴

At the end of February 1942, Einsatzkommando 6 ordered the city mayor of Stalino, Petushkov, and his deputy Eichmann to establish a Jewish ghetto. The intended location for the ghetto was a settlement named “Belyi Kar’er” (White Pit) at a former quarry on the outskirts of the city. During his interrogations before a Soviet military tribunal in 1946, Eichmann recalled: “At the end of February 1942 … Heidelberger [head of the executive department and deputy chief of Einsatzkommando 6] arrived from Berlin at the SD. Together with Graf [head of the intelligence section of Einsatzkommando 6], he came to the city administration to Petushkov and I. During a joint meeting with the police chiefs and the mayors of the city districts it was decided to create a Jewish ghetto at a special place, where the entire Jewish population, including children and old people, would be sent.” The existing inhabitants of Belyi Kar’er were evicted from their cottages within two days. The quarry was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and police guards were posted. In March 1942, the police chiefs and the mayors of the city districts were ordered to transfer the Jews into the ghetto. Families had to take their valuables, their best clothes, and food for five or six days. Apartment keys were handed over to the policemen who carried out the resettlement. During the resettlement action, children and the infirm were supported or carried on the arms of others. The policemen drove the Jews before them with whips and rifle butts, accompanied by groaning, screaming, and the weeping of children. Due to the limited number of cottages, part of the population remained under the open sky. All valuables and property were collected and handed over to the SD.⁵

The chiefs of the different police districts and their policemen played a major role in identifying and arresting the Jewish families. The chief of the first police district, Babenko, testified at his postwar trial: “In accordance with an order issued by the SD deputy chief Graf, I had to compose name lists for all of the Jews who lived in my police district. The other police districts received the same order…. Then, two days later Graf came to me and demanded the list. He took one copy and left two with me. He ordered that on the same day, after the curfew hour, all Jews had to be evicted from their apartments, informing them that they would be evacuated to the Zaporozh’e region, because of the approaching front line.”⁶ After these evictions, Graf and Eichmann usually inspected the apartments of the Jewish families and took away any remaining property.

Indirectly the establishment of the ghetto was reflected in the local press, which mentioned on March 15, 1942, the approaching resettlement of Stalino’s Jews.⁷ There is very little information concerning living conditions in the ghetto in the few testimonies by survivors. According to these accounts, more than 300 families lived in the ghetto. Policemen guarded the ghetto, and the inmates were not allowed to leave.⁸ During daytime the ghetto inmates had to work hard. The survivor B.A. Geker recalled: “When I was in ‘Belyi Kar’er’ every morning policemen came to us, took 10, 20, or 100 people, men and women, with them and drove them to work somewhere. Some of them came back, others disappeared without a trace. When I was in ‘Belyi Kar’er,’ the entire Jewish population lived in destroyed houses without windows and doors or directly on the street. But it was winter and cold. Food was not distributed at all. I was starving, as were the other Soviet citizens. Children and old people died of hunger and nobody took any notice of that.”⁹

The separation and murder of the Jews was largely visible to the local population. The chiefs of the different police [End Page 1775] districts and their policemen played a major role, and a point was made of ensuring that local policemen were present when Jews were shot. It was the Germans’ intention “to break the fascination which Jews had as bearers of political power in the eyes of many Ukrainians.” By contrast, mass killings of Ukrainians and Russians were generally carried out by Einsatzkommando 6 in a much more secretive manner.¹⁰

The ghetto in Stalino existed for less than two months. As different witness testimonies confirm, it was liquidated during the night of April 30 to May 1, 1942. The city deputy mayor Eichmann recalled: “At that time the whole Jewish population—more than 3,000 people—were shot or taken away in special gas vans. The dead bodies were thrown into a coal shaft at the Kalinovka mine. Then the cottages were destroyed by the police.”¹¹

The Jewish survivor B.A. Geker testified at Eichmann’s postwar trial: “On April 30, 1942, around 2:00 a.m., policemen and Germans came to the quarry. They announced that we should all assemble and take with us bread for three days, valuables, and good clothes. They would take us to another place to work. One of the Soviet citizens said that they were going to shoot us now. I told my son that he should run away and tried to hide myself in the gorge. I was lying there for several hours. Then I fled to the Poltava region, pretending to be Polish. Regarding my 28 family members, who were also in the quarry—none of them ever came back. Their fate is unknown.”¹²

It appears that Einsatzkommando 6 began the mass killings of Jewish families in Stalino at the beginning of April 1942. Friedrich Zapp, a member of Einsatzkommando 6, testified during his court inquiry in Germany in June 1962:

I witnessed the first executions in Stalino on Easter Monday [April 6]…. It was an Aktion using a gas van. Several hundred people were gassed. Men, women, and children were loaded into the van. On that Easter Monday by no means all of them were gassed. I think, that starting from around 7:00 a.m. until 10:30 a.m., when the Aktion was ended for that day, I had to load and unload four vans…. They were Jews, without doubt. In such a composition and number they could only be Jews. There were no plunderers and saboteurs in such numbers. And above all the presence of children confirms this conclusion. The Jews had to get into the van with all their clothes on. No selection took place. Men, women, and children had to get on board. I would estimate that each time around 60 people had to climb into the van…. It did not look like the Jews knew they would be gassed. After the door was closed, we drove either in front of or behind the gas van to a closed coal shaft. The gas van could not drive close to the shaft. So we had to haul the dead bodies out of the van, drag them to the coal shaft, which was about eight meters away, and throw them into it.¹³

At this closed coal shaft of the “4-4-bis Kalinovka” mine on the outskirts of Stalino, the German Einsatzkommandos frequently carried out mass shootings.¹⁴ After the city’s liberation, the ChGK found in this coal shaft one of the largest mass graves of the entire region, holding—according to the ChGK’s estimates—up to 75,000 corpses.¹⁵

In December 1967, a trial against Robert Mohr, the commander of Einsatzkommando 6, and other members took place in Wuppertal. Mohr was sentenced to eight years in prison.¹⁶ Other German trials against members of Sonderkommando 4b and members of the office of the KdS in Stalino took place in Düsseldorf and Dortmund in the late 1960s and early 1970s.¹⁷

In Stalino, a Soviet military tribunal convicted the former deputy and later city mayor Eichmann, together with 17 other members of the city administration and local police, in 1946. Eichmann and the head of the police, Babenko, were sentenced to death. The other defendants were sentenced to either 15 or 20 years of forced labor.¹⁸