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

Pre-1942: Nal’chik, capital, Kabardino-Balkar ASSR, RSFSR; October 1942–January 1943: Naltschik, Army Group A (Heeresgruppe A); post-1991: Nal’chik, Kabardino-Balkar Republic (Kabardino-Balkaria), Russian Federation

Nal’chik is located about 600 kilometers (373 miles) southeast of Rostov on Don. According to the 1939 population census, 3,007 Jews were living in Nal’chik (6.27 percent of the total population). After the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, a number of Jewish men were recruited into the Red Army, and some others managed to flee or were evacuated before the German advance into the region in the fall of 1942. There were likely about 1,000 to 1,200 Mountain Jews who remained in and around Nal’chik at the start of the German occupation, as well as a few score of Ashkenazi Jews, including some refugees from towns and cities further to the west.

German forces of Heeresgruppe A captured the city at the end of October 1942. During the occupation, which lasted until early January 1943, the German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur I/794) administered the city. Ortskommandantur I/794 was subordinated to the field commandant’s office (Feldkommandantur 248) in Piatigorsk. The German military administration established a local city council and recruited an auxiliary police force from among local residents. Sonderkommando 10b, commanded by SS-Sturmbannführer Alois Persterer and belonging to Einsatzgruppe D, was stationed in the city in November and December 1942.

Shortly after the occupation of the city, the occupying authorities issued orders calling for the registration of the Jews, the confiscation of their possessions, and the introduction of forced labor for Jews. The Jews also were ordered to wear distinctive markers in the image of a six-pointed star. Consequently, they tried not to venture out into the streets.

According to Soviet sources, German security forces (probably of Sonderkommando 10b) murdered most of the Ashkenazic Jews at some time during the first weeks of the occupation. About 10 Mountain Jews were also shot at this time, probably as alleged Soviet activists.¹

In November 1942, a camp or form of “open ghetto” was established in the city. It was an isolated district into which the Mountain Jews were resettled from different areas of the city.² Some sources describe it rather as a camp, noting that the Mountain Jews did not receive any provisions, although most of them probably survived here until the Red Army returned.³

[End Page 1807] The regulation for the marking of the Jews was changed after December 6, 1942, on the orders of Feldmarschall Ewald von Kleist, the commanding officer of the 1st Panzer Army, after negotiations by the city’s Jewish community with the occupying authorities. Some witnesses recalled that the Jews were required to wear yellow armbands before setting out for labor. Around the same time, a Judenrat consisting of five individuals was formed in Nal’chik.⁴ In December 1942, the head of Einsatzgruppe D, SS-Oberführer Bierkamp, visited the Mountain Jews in the “environs of Nal’chik,” where he “received a welcome reception and declared that other than their common religion, they [the Mountain Jews (Bergjuden)] had nothing to do with the Jews.” Along with this, Bierkamp issued an order to the occupying organs not to harm the Mountain Jews and in general did not speak of them as Jews but as “Taten” (as the local Jews called themselves).⁵ It is likely that for this reason most of the city’s Mountain Jews remained alive.

On January 1, 1943, a few dozen Jewish men, women, and children (probably refugees from the western regions of the Soviet Union) were shot in Nal’chik. SS-Sturmbannführer Eduard Jedamzik organized the mass shooting on the day after he took over command of Sonderkommando 10b on New Year’s Eve. The Jews were shot in an antitank ditch just outside the city and buried on top of the victims of a previous mass shooting. The fur coats of the victims were distributed among the men of the Sonderkommando, who then drank schnaps before evacuating the city to the north.