MGLIN
Pre-1941: Mglin, town and raion center, Orel oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1944: Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Briansk oblast’, Russian Federation
Mglin is located 100 kilometers (62 miles) west-southwest of Briansk. In 1939, 726 Jews (10 percent of the local population) were living in Mglin.
German forces occupied Mglin on August 18, 1941. By this time, a number of local Jews had managed to escape to the east. Jewish men liable for military service were drafted into the Red Army. At the start of the German occupation, just over two thirds of the pre-war Jewish population was still in the town. From October 1941, Mglin was subordinated to the military field headquarters (Feldkommandantur) FK (V) 528 based in Klintsy. In Mglin the German military authorities established a local administration and a Russian auxiliary police force (Ordnungsdienst) recruited from local inhabitants.
Shortly after the start of the occupation, the town administration organized the registration and marking of the Jews with distinctive symbols. Furthermore, the Jews were forced to perform physically demanding labor of all kinds. On January 21, 1942, all the Jews of Mglin were resettled into a ghetto. The building of the local prison was chosen to serve as the ghetto. The Russian guards who supervised the Jewish prisoners took away their coats and boots. There were no windows in the cells of the prison. The heating system did not function, which meant that during the very cold winter many inmates developed frostbite.1 About 60 people died of starvation and disease inside the ghetto.2
On March 2, 1942, the Germans liquidated the ghetto. On this day a subunit of Sonderkommando 7a, which had arrived from Klintsy under the leadership of SS-Obersturmführer Franz Tormann, shot about 500 Jews with the assistance of the Russian auxiliary police. The majority of the victims were women and children. The Russian police took the outer clothes and any valuables from the half-starved victims and escorted them to the grave site at the edge of a forest about 500 meters (1,640 feet) from the prison ghetto. Some 10 to 20 SS men conducted the shooting. In the course of the Aktion, one member of the SS unit, SS-Oberscharführer Hermann Glockmann, [End Page 1804] was killed accidentally when a bullet ricocheted off the frozen ground and struck him directly in the heart.3 During the Aktion, some Jews succeeded in hiding, but on the following day, 7 of these individuals were captured and shot.4
In June 1942, Feldkommandantur 528 sent to the Reich War Booty Office (Reichshauptkasse Beutestelle) in Berlin some gold coins that had been confiscated from the deputy head of the local Russian police in Mglin. He was shot, apparently for the illegal possession of property.5
Tormann was sentenced on February 10, 1966, to three years’ imprisonment.6
SOURCES
Documentation on the fate of the Jews of Mglin can be found in the following archives: BA-BL (R 2104/28); GABrO; GARF (7021-19-2 and 94); TsGAMORF (239/2187/94); and USHMM. Additional material can be found in the West German trials conducted against Albert Rapp (LG-Ess, 29 Ks 1/64) and Kurt Matschke et al. (LG-Ess, 29 Ks 1/65).
NOTES
1. Vadim Doubson, “Getto na okkupirovannoi territorii Rossiiskoi Federatsii (1941–42),” Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta. Istoriia. Kul’tura. Tsivilizatsiia, no. 3 (21) (2000): 159, 164–165; GARF, 7021-19-2, p. 225.
2. GARF, 7021-19-2, p. 239.
3. LG-Ess, 29 Ks 1/64, verdict in the case of Albert Rapp, March 29, 1965, published in Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. 20 (Amsterdam, 1979), Lfd. Nr. 588a, pp. 30–36. The German court concludes that at least 200 Jews were shot in Mglin. See also the Russian-language article by Alexander Kruglov on the destruction of the Jews in the Smolensk and Briansk oblasts, “Unichtozhenie evreev Smolenshchiny i Brianshchiny v 1941–1943 gg.,” published in Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta v Moskve, no. 3 (7) (1994): 205–220; and GARF, 7021-19-2, p. 239.
4. GARF, 7021-19-2, p. 241.
5. BA-BL, R 2104/28, report of Feldkommandantur 528, June 7, 1942.
6. LG-Ess, 29 Ks 1/65.
