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

Pre-1941: Sebezh, town and raion center, Kalinin oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1944: Sebesch, Rear Area, Army Group North (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Nord); post-1991: Sebezh, Pskov oblast’, Russian Federation

Sebezh is located 130 kilometers (81 miles) west-southwest of Velike Luki on the main railroad from Moscow to Riga. According to the 1939 population census, there were 845 Jews (14 percent of the total population) living in Sebezh.

On July 7, 1941, the town was captured by units of the SS-Motorized Division “Totenkopf,” just over two weeks after the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941. During this period, a large portion of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east. Only about 15 to 18 percent of the pre-war Jewish population, composed now mainly of women, children, and the elderly, remained in the town at the onset of the German occupation.

During the entire occupation, from July 1941 to July 1944, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) ran the town. Initially, the commandant was an Austrian, and the Jews bribed him in an effort to ameliorate conditions. The German military administration created a raion council and a police force (Ordnungsdienst) from among local residents. Shortly after the occupation of the town, the German military commandant ordered the council to organize the registration and marking of the Jewish population. Jews were also made to perform heavy physical labor, such as digging trenches and repairing railroad tracks.¹

As early as the summer of 1941, the first 2 Jews were shot in the town as agitators.² In September 1941, a ghetto was created in Sebezh, and 100 to 150 Jews were forcibly relocated into it.³ The ghetto existed until early March 1942, when the Germans ordered its liquidation.⁴ During the liquidation Aktion more than 100 Jews were shot into pits.⁵ The shooting of the Jews was carried out by Russian policemen, headed by the chief of police, a man named Buss. Afterwards local Russians filled in the pits and reported that many of those shot had not been killed outright and had moaned for some time, as the earth thrown over the corpses continued to move. One 12-year-old boy managed to escape from the mass shooting by hiding in a chimney and then made it to the village of Presni. However, despite his pleading, the head of the village handed him over to the Germans to be killed.⁶ [End Page 1819]