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

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

Starodub is located about 140 kilometers (87 miles) southeast of Briansk. In 1939, there were 1,629 Jews in Starodub (12.96 percent of the total population).

The German army occupied the town on August 18, 1941, almost two months after the start of the German invasion of the USSR. In this period men of military age were drafted into the Red Army, and some Jews decided to evacuate to the east, but others hesitated. The Soviet authorities tried to calm civilians with radio broadcasts calling on them not to panic, claiming that the Red Army’s counterattack would start very soon. This information served to confuse the inhabitants of Starodub, as the growing flood of refugees fleeing from the western borderlands brought quite different rumors—of the rapid German advance. The last group of evacuees left town on August 17, consisting mainly of members of the Jewish collective farm “Red Star.” By this time, however, it was too late. Germans forces blocked their path, and the Jews were captured and brought back to Starodub. About two thirds of the pre-war Jewish population came under German occupation.¹

During the occupation, a German military commandant (Ortskommandant) administered the town. The military commandant also established a local town administration and a Russian police force (Ordnungsdienst) recruited from local inhabitants.

Shortly after the occupation of Starodub, the local authorities organized the registration of the town’s Jews and assigned them to perform hard labor. The German military authorities issued numerous orders and decrees that circumscribed Jewish daily life, such as the wearing of distinguishing marks on clothes and by creating an atmosphere of hopelessness and humiliation. The Jews’ last remaining valuables were invariably looted by either the Germans or their collaborators.

At the end of September 1941, the Jews of the town were forced to relocate to a ghetto within 24 hours. The ghetto consisted only of a few cottages and sheds designed for farm animals and surrounded by barbed wire in the suburb of Belovshchina, on the edge of town, from which the Germans had expelled the farmers.² The ghetto was probably established on the orders of Sonderkommando 7b (commanded by SS-Sturmbannführer Günther Rausch). According to a German report, at the time of the resettlement, Sonderkommando 7b shot 272 people on September 25, 1941, allegedly on the grounds of resistance to ghettoization by Jews. Accounts by local witnesses indicate that the Germans lined up all the Jewish males over 14 years of age, some 400 people in all, gave them shovels, and then marched them under close armed guard in the direction of the villages of Brezgunovka and Sokolovka to “work.” The men were ordered to dig “antitank ditches” in the Galye swamps that were actually mass graves. Then they were stripped naked and shot with submachine guns.³

The Jews left after this Aktion, consisting of a few men and many women and children of all ages, were confined inside the ghetto for more than five months. Overcrowding in the ghetto was appalling, as the Jews were packed together with 65 or 70 people to each small cottage, while those who could not be accommodated in the cottages had to live in stables and pigsties. Russian policemen of the Ordnungsdienst guarded the ghetto.

The daily ration for the ghetto inmates was only about 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of bread. As leaving the ghetto to go to the marketplace was forbidden, the inmates were starving. Some occasionally ventured out, at the risk of their lives, to the surrounding fields for some vegetables. Several mothers were killed as they sneaked out to the vegetable plots next to the Babinetz River, looking for something edible to bring back to their children. Some sympathetic local policemen looked the other way, enabling the Jews to smuggle a little food into the ghetto. Due to starvation, exposure, and beatings, the mortality rate from hunger and disease was very high; 153 people died in the ghetto prior to its liquidation.

On February 22, 1942, the inhabitants of the ghetto were awakened by the sound of explosions nearby. The policemen tried to calm the panic among the inmates, assuring them it was only part of German fortification efforts. In reality the Germans were preparing huge mass graves only 500 meters (1,640 feet) from the ghetto, using explosives to break the frozen ground.⁴

A subunit of Sonderkommando 7a under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Matschke shot the remaining several hundred Jews on March 1, 1942.⁵ The local Russian police under the command of Nikolai I. Molodzhevsky played an active role in guarding the Jews during the mass shooting.⁶

Several Jews managed to escape the massacre, but most were captured by policemen the next day on the edge of the forest. The Germans ordered the captives to dig a grave, then to undress, after which they shot them. Two survivors from [End Page 1826] this group of escapees were the Israeliev sisters who reached the village of Shniaki where they convinced a local policeman to help them. They hid in the cellar of an elderly couple of Baptists. The family’s son was a brutal member of the local police living in the same house, who remained ignorant of their presence. Once the policeman had left for work, the Jewish girls were able to come out of the cellar for warmth each day. They managed to survive until the Red Army liberated Starodub on September 22, 1943.⁷