SURAZH
Pre-1941: Surazh, town and raion center, Orel oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1943: Surash, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Surazh, Briansk oblast’, Russian Federation
Surazh is located about 42 kilometers (26 miles) north-northeast of Klintsy on the railway line from Unecha to Orsha. The 1939 census showed 2,052 Jews in the town, comprising 22.8 percent of the total population.
German forces occupied Surazh on August 17, 1941, almost two months after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (on June 22, 1941). During this intervening period, a number of the town’s Jews were able to evacuate to the east, and all men obligated to serve in the military were called up to the Red Army. When the Germans occupied the town, only around 30 percent of the Jewish population was still there. [End Page 1827]
The town remained under the jurisdiction of the Wehrmacht throughout the occupation and was run by a German military commandant, who set up a town administration and a police force (Ordnungsdienst), recruited from local inhabitants. Soon after the occupation of Surazh, the town administration organized the registration, marking, and exploitation of Jews for various kinds of hard labor.
In the late autumn of 1941, a ghetto was established. Several dozen Jews died there from hunger, cold, and sickness. On March 27, 1942, the ghetto was liquidated. On that day, 560 people were shot in the village of Kislovka.1 The shooting was carried out by Sonderkommando 7a, which was headed at the time by SS-Obersturmbannführer Albert Rapp.2
After the war the bodies were dug up and reburied in a common grave at the Jewish cemetery.
SOURCES
The ghetto is mentioned in Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 1265.
Documents about the persecution and annihilation of the Jews of Surazh can be found in the following archives: GABrO; GARF (7021-19-6; 7021-19-1); USHMM; and YVA.
NOTES
1. GARF, 7021-19-6, p. 342; see also USHMM, RG-22.002M, reel 9 (GARF, 7021-19-1, p. 18).
2. Rapp was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Regional Court (Landgericht) in Essen on March 29, 1965. See LG-Ess, 29 Ks 1/64, verdict of March 29, 1965, against Albert Rapp, in Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. 20 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1979). Rapp denied any knowledge of the shooting in Surazh, but an Aktion (probably in Surazh) in March or April 1942 is mentioned by other witnesses; see idem, 20:775–778.
