STARAIA RUSSA
Pre-1941: Staraia Russa, town and raion center, Leningrad oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1944: Staraja Russa, Rear Area, Army Group North (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Nord); post-1991: Staraia Russa, Novgorod oblast’, Russian Federation
Staraia Russa is located about 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of Novgorod on the Polist’ River, to the south of Lake Il’men’. According to the 1939 census, there were 828 Jews living in Staraia Russa, accounting for 2.2 percent of the population.
Units of the German 16th Army occupied the town on August 9, 1941, seven weeks after Germany’s invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941. In that time, some Jews had managed to evacuate eastward, and men liable for military service were inducted into the Red Army. Approximately 15 to 20 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in the town.
Throughout the occupation (August 1941 to February 1944), a German military commandant was in charge of the town. For much of the occupation, Feldkommandantur 820, under Oberstleutnant Colonel Mossbach, was based in Staraia Russa. The German military administration established a town authority and a police force (Ordnungsdienst) recruited from local residents. An ethnic Estonian was named as chief of police: Alexander Kiutt (in 1948 a Soviet tribunal sentenced him to 25 years in prison). The police force was made up of men of various nationalities, including Pavel Goldt (employed in the investigative division), who had one Jewish parent and posed as an ethnic German. Especially active in persecuting Jews was the town’s deputy mayor, Vasilii Bykov (arrested and sentenced in 1944), whose responsibilities included oversight of “Jewish affairs.”1
Among the German security units operating in the town were the Feldgendarmerie, which was subordinated to Feldkommandantur 820, and a detachment of Einsatzkommando 1b of Einsatzgruppe A. This detachment was sent to the town immediately after its occupation2 and was active there until November or December 1941; it probably organized most of the shootings of Jews.
In the first few days of September, the German military commandant’s office in Staraia Russa ordered the registration and marking of all the Jews, requiring them to wear a white armband with a yellow six-pointed star. Jews were also used for various kinds of forced labor, and all their property was confiscated. A few days after the registration, the Germans arrested all the Jews and placed some in the prison and the rest into a monastery, which served as a temporary ghetto for them.3 The liquidation of the ghetto, accomplished by shooting all the Jews gathered in the monastery, apparently was carried out on October 15, 1941; around 80 people were shot.4 One month later, Jews who were married to non-Jews were arrested. These Jews, some 30 in total, were shot between December 6 and 10, 1941.5 A former employee of the town police, Tamara Finagina, questioned after the war in connection with these events, stated:
I also know that under Kiutt’s leadership, the police arrested up to 30 Jews in December 1941; initially, after the Germans came, these people had been left alone because they had Russian husbands or wives. In August and September 1941, the Germans exterminated Jewish families in which there were no Russians. All these Jews were herded by the police and Gendarmes into the monastery and shot inside the ruined walls by the police and Gendarmes. That was told to me by policemen, whose names I don’t recall.6
Besides the above-mentioned shootings, it is likely there were other shootings of Jews in the town. In total, about 150 to 200 Jews were shot in Staraia Russa in the period from August to December 1941.
A number of townspeople, at great danger to themselves, hid Jews in their homes. Some of them paid for it with their lives. On September 21, 1941, the sisters Anna and Taisia Degtarev were sentenced to death for hiding Jews. Two days later, several others were publicly executed for concealing Jews: Ivan Nikolaevich Burmagin, 69, a carpenter; Ol’ga Sergeevna Burmagin, 68, a housewife; Nina Ivanovna Burmagin, 40, a teacher; Anna Egorovna Voskoboinikov (age not specified), a member of the church choir; and Sidor Timofeevich Voskoboinikov, 64, a church elder.7
SOURCES
Documentation regarding the extermination of the Jews of Staraia Russa can be found in the following archives: AFSBNO (file 1/6995); GANO; GARF (7021-34-361 and 765); and USHMM (RG-22.002M, reel 9).
NOTES
1. G. Nasurdinova, “Pamiat’ i bol’ kholokosta,” Novgorodskie vedomosti, no. 45, September 27, 2003; and G. Nasurdinova, “Zakat na ulitse Betkhovena,” Novaia Novgorodskaia Gazeta, no. 9, 2007.
2. See BA-BL, R 58/216, Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 71, September 2, 1941.
3. Nasurdinova, “Pamiat’ ”; Nasurdinova, “Zakat”; and GARF, 7021-34-361.
4. See official diary of Police Chief Alexander Kiutt (AFSBNO, investigative file in the case against Alexander Kiutt).
5. Ibid.
6. Cited in B.N. Kovalev, “Svidetel’skie pokazaniia v ugolovnykh delakh kollaboratsionistov v Rossii,” Vestnik Novgorodskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, no. 33 (2005): 111. Another source states that the Germans shot the Jews in the courtyard of the prison in groups of 25 to 30 while the other victims looked on, awaiting their fate; see GARF, 7021-34-765.
7. Nasurdinova, “Zakat.”
