KARACHEV
Pre-1941: Karachev, town and raion center, Orel oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1943: Karatschew, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Karachev, Briansk oblast’, Russian Federation
Karachev is located 44 kilometers (27 miles) southeast of Briansk. Jews probably first arrived in Karachev in the late nineteenth century. In 1897, there were 326 Jews residing in the town, and by 1926 the number had increased to 522.1 According to the results of the 1939 census, the number of Jewish residents had decreased to 443 people (or 2.48 percent of the [End Page 1796] total population).2 Karachev was occupied by units of the German 2nd Panzer Army, Army Group Center, on October 5, 1941, almost three and a half months after the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. By this time, a large number of the local Jews had managed to escape to the east. Jewish men fit for military service were drafted into the Red Army. When German troops occupied Karachev, only about one quarter of the pre-war Jewish population was still in town, roughly 100 people.
During the entire period of the German occupation (from October 1941 until August 1943), a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) exercised authority in the town. The military commandant established a local administration and an auxiliary police force (Ordnungsdienst), recruited from local inhabitants. The chief district administrator (Rayonleiter) in Karachev was an ethnic German physician, Dr. Schepel.
A short time after the start of the occupation, the local Russian administration organized the registration of the Jews. They were forced to wear a distinctive symbol on their clothes marking them as Jews. Men and women were forced to conduct physically exhausting labor. Probably at the end of October 1941, the Germans established a ghetto in Karachev. It was more like a temporary holding camp, as it was in the open air and there were no buildings within the confines of the camp.3 On December 12, 1941, the ghetto was liquidated. All the Jews were shot. The number of victims is estimated to have been about 100 people.4 It is most probable that the liquidation of the ghetto was carried out by a subunit of Einsatzkommando 8, which was based in Briansk at this time.5
SOURCES
The files of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission into the crimes of the German occupying forces and their collaborators, including the statements of witnesses, can be found in the following archives: GABrO and GARF (7021-19-3).
NOTES
1. Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 595.
2. Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Centre for Research and Documentation of East-European Jewry, 1993), p. 31.
3. Vadim Doubson, “Getto na okkupirovannoi territorii Rossiiskoi federatsii (1941–42),” Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta. Istoriia. Kul’tura. Tsivilizatsiia, no. 3 (21) 2000: 157–184, here pp. 158–159.
4. Il’ia Al’tman, Zhertvy nenavisti: Kholokost v SSSR 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow: Fond Kovcheg, 2002), p. 98.
5. See USHMM, RG-30, Accession 1999.A.0196 (NARA, RG-242, T-175), reel 234, Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 146, December 15, 1941.
