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

Pre-1941: Yalta, city and raion center, Crimean ASSR, RSFSR; 1941–1944: Jalta, administered initially by the Rear Area, Eleventh Army; post–1991: Yalta, Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine

Yalta is located 444 kilometers (276 miles) south of Dnepropetrovsk. According to the census of December 1926, of the 28,811 inhabitants of Yalta, 2,392 were Jews, including 39 Crimean Jews (Krymchaky). In the Yalta district, including the towns of Alupka, Gurzuf, and Simeiz, there lived another 213 Jews, 14 of them Crimean Jews. In January 1939, of the 36,653 residents of Yalta, 2,109 were Jews. In addition, 911 more Jews were living in the surrounding Yalta raion.¹

Between the attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR on June 22, 1941, and the German occupation of the area at the beginning of November 1941, 1,120 Jews were evacuated from the city of Yalta in an organized fashion, 140 Jews from the Yalta area countryside, and 430 from the Yalta area towns (Alupka, Simeiz, Koreiz, Miskhor, Gaspra, Livadiia, Massandra, and Gurzuf), accounting for 1,690 Jews in total.² In addition, a number of Jews escaped from the city in late October and early November 1941 in the course of a spontaneous evacuation after German troops broke through the Soviet line of defense across the Perekop isthmus. Furthermore, at least 100 Jews were drafted or volunteered for the Red Army. At the same time, a number of Jewish refugees from Odessa and also other regions of the Crimea arrived in Yalta.

Yalta was occupied by the troops of the German 11th Army on November 8, 1941. The city and nearby districts were administered by Ortskommandantur II/662, with Hauptmann Kump in charge. Nineteen people, including four officers and several bureaucrats, worked in the Kommandantur.³ The Kommandantur reported to the commander of the Rear Area of the 11th Army. The Kommandantur established a local administration in the city (Stadtverwaltung) and a police force recruited from local residents; the city administration dealt mostly with running city services under the supervision of the Kommandantur.

On approximately November 9–10, 1941, part of Sonderkommando 11a, under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Eberhard Heinze, arrived in Yalta. The Sonderkommando, under [End Page 1777] overall command of SS-Sturmbannführer Paul Zapp, was part of Einsatzgruppe D of the German Security Police, at that time commanded by SS-Oberführer Otto Ohlendorf. One of the Sonderkommando’s tasks, together with the identification and extermination of Soviet partisans, Communists, members of the underground, and saboteurs, was the extermination of the Jewish population.

Sometime in the middle of November 1941, Sonderkommando 11a created a Jewish Council (Judenrat) in the city that consisted of five or six members, and several days later, the German authorities issued an order for all Jews to wear a six-pointed star 10 centimeters (almost 4 inches) in diameter on the left side of their chests and on their backs and to turn in all their money and valuables to the Jewish Council.⁴

On November 21, 1941, the first anti-Jewish Aktion was conducted in the city: the Feldgendarmerie surrounded house no. 14 on Sredne-Slobodskaia Street, arrested all the Jewish tenants (17 people), presumably for alleged contacts with the partisans, and shot all of them that same day. On November 22, 2 Jews who were only wounded during the shooting returned from the grave site.⁵

A week later, on November 28, 1941, on the order of the Security Police and SD, the Jewish Council conducted a registration of the Jews. The next day, November 29, SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinze ordered the remaining Jews to move into the ghetto by December 5, 1941. The ghetto consisted of the former buildings for adult education courses of the Agricultural College on the outskirts of the city, near the suburb of Massandra, which were surrounded by high stone walls. The Jews were only allowed to enter the city between 8:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.; those who had a job were required to work. The Jewish Council was ordered to organize the move of the Jews into the ghetto. The German authorities issued instructions that due to the cramped space (2.5 square meters [27 square feet] per person) Jews were only permitted to take a few of their most valuable possessions with them. The Jewish Council was also required to organize a cooperative, workshops, a hospital, and a police force within the ghetto. The latter consisted of young people who wore white armbands with a blue six-pointed star on the left arm and who controlled the return of the Jews into the ghetto at the gate.⁶

On December 16, 1941, the ghetto was closed, and even the working Jews were not allowed into the city. On December 17, men were taken out of the ghetto to a ravine near the towns of Massandra and Magarach and made to dig two ditches; after completing the job, the German forces shot them. On December 18, the rest of the Jews were driven to the ditches and shot by members of Sonderkommando 11a. Altogether up to 1,500 people were killed during those two days.⁷ On the order of the Security Police and SD, members of the Jewish Council had to help organize the convoying of all the Jews to the killing site. With the aid of a detailed registration list, they put family after family onto the trucks that departed and then returned for more families; the members of the Council checked off on the list those who had been taken away. The last truck took away the members of the Jewish Council.⁸

In the first half of 1942, several more small groups of Jews who had escaped previously from the ghetto and had been hiding were discovered and also shot.

According to the first postwar census in 1959, 1,200 Jews lived in Yalta. On February 26, 1970, the regional court (Landgericht) in Munich sentenced former SS-Obersturmbannführer Paul Zapp, who commanded Sonderkommando 11a in 1941–1942, to life imprisonment. Together with him, former SS-Scharführer and interpreter for Sonderkommando 11a Baron Leo Karl Eugen von der Recke, who took an active part in the shooting of the Yalta Jews, was sentenced to 13 years in prison. The man immediately responsible for organizing the anti-Jewish Aktions of December 17–18, 1941, SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinze, was killed in Poznań on January 22, 1945.