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

Pre-1941: Pochep, town and raion center, Orel oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1943: Potschep, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Pochep, Briansk oblast’, Russian Federation

Pochep is located about 80 kilometers (50 miles) to the southwest of Briansk on the Sudost’ River and on the railway line from Moscow to Kiev. By 1939, the number of Jewish residents in the city stood at 2,314 people (14.87 percent of the total population). An additional 266 Jews were counted in the villages of the Pochep raion.

Units of the German XLVIIth Panzer Corps occupied Pochep on August 21, 1941, two months after the initial German invasion of the Soviet Union. During these two months, part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east, and men of eligible age were called up to the Red Army. Up to 75 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in the town at the start of the German occupation.

During the period of occupation, which lasted until September 21, 1943, the Germans set up a military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) and a local administration in the city. They also recruited a Russian auxiliary police force (Ordnungsdienst, or OD) from among the local residents.

In March 1942, at the time of the mass killing, a 10-man detachment of the Secret Field Police (Geheime Feldpolizei, GFP) Unit 729 and a small detachment (2 or 3 men) of Sonderkommando 7a (part of Einsatzgruppe B) were based in the town.

Shortly after the start of the German occupation, the town administration organized the registration and marking of the Jewish population. Jews were also forced to perform various forms of heavy labor.

Sometime at the start of 1942, the commandant’s office in Pochep ordered the establishment of a ghetto. The ghetto consisted of a series of barracks on the grounds of a cabbage-pickling factory on the edge of the town, guarded by the OD.¹ It is possible that some Jews were also resettled into the ghetto from the outlying villages in the Pochep raion with the aid of the OD.

In March 1942, Sonderkommando 7a, under the command of Obersturmbannführer Albert Rapp based in Klintsy, organized the liquidation of the ghetto, shooting all the Jewish inmates. According to the records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, the number of victims was 1,854, including men, women, and children.² The shooting, which lasted several hours, was carried out by six men of Sonderkommando 7a, with the help of the OD who escorted the victims and members of the GFP 729 and Feldgendarmerie that cordoned off the area. The killing site was a large ditch, possibly prepared by the Russians as an antitank ditch, located less than 100 meters (328 feet) from the site of the ghetto.³