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

Pre-1941: Liubavichi (Yiddish: Liubavich), village, Rudnia raion, Smolensk oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1943: Ljubawitschi, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Liubavichi, Russian Federation

Liubavichi is located 75 kilometers (47 miles) west of Smolensk. By 1926, the number of Jews there stood at 967, or 50 percent of the population.

German forces of Army Group Center occupied Liubavichi on July 21–22, 1941. Approximately one month later, the German military commandant issued an order requiring Jews, under penalty of death, to wear badges in the form of circular patches of yellow fabric on their chests and backs and, subsequently, an armband. They were forbidden to have any contacts with German soldiers and the local population. Soon after this, a number of Jewish men were sent to Rudnia to work, but they never returned.¹

The Jewish population was subjected to various humiliations. People were lined up in formation and made to run. The Nazis knew that Liubavichi was a Jewish religious center and called it a “holy city of Jehovah, rabbis, and ritual murders.” Therefore, the treatment of observant elderly men was particularly cruel. Public floggings were held daily. The men’s beards were pulled out with pliers, and they were forced to dance on the parchment of the Torah scrolls. Then they were shot.²

On September 27, 1941, a detachment of the Security Police and SD from Einsatzkommando 8 arrived in Liubavichi from Rudnia (one witness stated that the detachment was based in Mogilev), accompanied by members of the Rudnia local police force. Assisted by the local police of Liubavichi, they started moving the Jewish population into a ghetto. The Jews were allowed to take with them only what they could carry. The property left behind was confiscated, in part by local policemen and some items were sent to Rudnia. The oppressors assembled all the Jews in the central square of the village, where they took away their warm clothing, kitchen utensils, and other items. Under the pretext of assigning them to work, they selected and escorted away 17 Jewish men, who apparently were shot.³

Allocated to the ghetto were 19 small houses on one of the village streets in which 500 to 600 people were forced to reside: alongside the residents of Liubavichi were also refugees from Orsha, Vitebsk, Smolensk, and Rudnia. The majority of the Jews in the ghetto were craftsmen before the occupation, working in the village’s artels. Going outside the ghetto’s boundaries was forbidden. On the road leading into the ghetto, a police post was set up, and unauthorized persons were denied access to the ghetto.

Inside the ghetto, the Jews lived in extremely congested conditions, with 20 to 30 individuals crowded into a single room. The prisoners in the ghetto were not supplied with food. They built and repaired roads and bridges and did other types of heavy labor. Because of poor sanitation and physical exhaustion, various diseases spread among the Jews. Apparently, several dozen people died in the ghetto before its liquidation. The mortality rate among children was especially high. As one of the witnesses, a Liubavichi resident, noted, the Jewish population was placed in circumstances that doomed it to extinction.⁴

In early November 1941, a detachment of Einsatzkommando 8 and the Rudnia local police arrived in Liubavichi again. Several times they tried to gather the Jews together within the confines of the ghetto, in a pasture where livestock were usually put to graze, but the Jews kept running off in different directions. As one woman, a Liubavichi resident, recalls, [End Page 1802] the Jews were treated worse than cattle. Those who tried to escape were shot on the spot.⁵

On the night of November 4, 1941, Russian policemen from Rudnia and Liubavichi, under the leadership of Security Police and SD officials, encircled the ghetto. The next morning, under the pretext of sending the Jews to perform agricultural work, they led them out of the ghetto into the center of the village. The aged and the ill, along with the bodies of those shot at the previous assembly site, were taken in carts. In the main square of the village, the ghetto inmates were divided into two groups of about 250 people each. One group was herded into the basement of the Church of the Dormition (Tserkov’ Uspeniia Bogoroditsy), the other into a large barn. Around noon, beating the first group of Jews with whips, the German and Russian policemen drove them towards the southern edge of the village and herded them into a slaughterhouse building. From there they led the Jews in groups of 20 to 30 to a small ditch. They made the victims lie facedown on the ground, then shot them with submachine guns. The shooting was carried out by officials of the Security Police and SD. The Germans made parents lie down on the corpses with their small children. After the shooting of the first group of Jews, the second group was murdered in the same way. The shooting lasted about one and a half to two hours. Then the Russian policemen made a group of male village residents cover the grave. The Russian policemen also finished off those Jews who were trying to find their way out from under the mountain of corpses, and they buried some who were still alive. The corpses were lightly covered with earth.⁶

In 1943, after the Red Army liberated Liubavichi, the grave was opened, and 483 corpses were found there. In the file of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) on the opening of the grave of the murdered Jews, it was stated that “the corpses of the children in most cases were found in the embrace of adult corpses.” It was also noted that “the presence of corpses with no signs of damage leads one to assume that these victims of the German fascist invaders were buried alive, which should apply in particular to individuals who were young children.”⁷

A few small children succeeded in escaping from the execution site. They all returned to Liubavichi, to their own homes, where members of the local police seized them. They gathered the children together in a single house, then shot them. Their bodies were tossed into the grave of the murdered Jews.⁸

The report of Einsatzgruppe B for December 19, 1941, contains information about the shooting in Liubavichi of 492 Jews of both genders. It was reported that they had been shot “for hostile attitudes towards the Germans and for sympathizing with the partisans.”⁹ According to ChGK data, more than 500 Jews were shot in Liubavichi.¹⁰

Along with the Security Police and SD, the German army and, in particular, the local Ortskommandantur (OK (II) 930) also bear responsibility for the extermination of the Jewish population of Liubavichi. The German military authorities represented the murders of the Jews as a measure taken in response to partisan attacks. A man named Korotchenkov headed the detachment of the Rudnia local police that participated in setting up the ghetto in Liubavichi in September 1941. Subsequently the Germans shot him for concealing property stolen from the Jews.¹¹ Divakov, the deputy chairman of the Rudnia raion authority, headed the detachment of Russian police that came from Rudnia and participated in the extermination of the inmates of the Liubavichi ghetto on November 4.¹² The local police, under the command of a man named Astrakhanskii, took part in all the cleansing Aktions against the Jews in Liubavichi. He and two other former policemen from Liubavichi were tried by the Soviet authorities in Rudnia. The court sentenced them to be hanged for participation in the shooting of the families of Communists and partisans and in the murder of the Jewish population.¹³