SYCHEVKA
Pre-1941: Sychevka, town and raion center, Smolensk oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1943: Sytschewka, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Sychevka, Russian Federation
Sychevka is located 70 kilometers (43 miles) north of Viaz’ma on the Vazuza River. According to the 1939 census, Sychevka had a Jewish population of 138, or 1.64 percent of the total.1
German units of Army Group Center occupied the town on October 10, 1941, approximately 16 weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. During [End Page 1828] that time, some Jews were able to evacuate to the east, and men of eligible age were conscripted into the Red Army.
Shortly after the occupation of the town, in October 1941, the German Ortskommandantur appointed a mayor (Bürgermeister) of Sychevka and ordered the local administration to organize the registration and marking of the Jews. The Jewish population was also exploited for various forms of forced labor. To concentrate the town’s remaining Jews in a single place and isolate them from the rest of the population, the Germans ordered them to be moved into a ghetto.2 The Jews may have been separated out from among 4,500 civilians, which the Secret Field Police Group 580 (GFP-Gruppe 580) had temporarily placed in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Sychevka by the end of October 1941.3
The ghetto was liquidated on January 1, 1942, when the town commandant, Oberleutnant Kiesler, ordered all the Jews—probably around 100 mainly women, children, and the elderly—to be shot in the village of Piskovo, outside of Sychevka.4 It is most likely that a detachment of Sonderkommando 7a, which had been based in the town in October and November 1941 and again from late April 1942, carried out the Aktion. Sonderkommando 7a, which at that time was under the command of Kurt Matschke, retreated hastily from Kalinin via Staritsa, Rzhev, Sychevka, and Gzhatsk to Viaz’ma between mid-December 1941 and January 7, 1942, in response to the Soviet winter offensive. This would have placed the unit in Sychevka on around January 1, 1942, corroborating the date given in the Soviet military investigation report.5 Russian policemen also took an active part in the shooting.
SOURCES
Documentation regarding the persecution and murder of the Jews of Sychevka can be found in the following archives: GARF (7021-44-43, 637); GASmO (R-1630-1-324); NARA (N-Doc., USSR-279); TsGAMORF (208/2526/264); and USHMM (RG-22.002M, reel 10).
NOTES
1. Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993), p. 32.
2. GASmO, R-1630-1-324, pp. 101–102.
3. Nicholas Terry, “The German Army Group Center and the Soviet Civilian Population, 1942–1944: Forced Labor, Hunger, and Population Displacement on the Eastern Front” (Ph.D. diss., King’s College, University of London, 2005), p. 188.
4. TsGAMORF, 208/2526/264, Akt gorod Sychevka (military investigation), March 8, 1943, this source gives the date of January 1, 1942, and states there were up to 250 victims. Zverstva nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov. Dokumenty. Vypusk 10 (OGIZ, 1943), p. 5. Another source (Sychevka Raion Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, October 23, 1943) indicates that 27 Jewish families were shot in Sychevka as early as November 1941. NARA, N-Doc. USSR-279, mentions that there were 100 Jewish victims in the town.
5. On the details of the retreat of Sonderkommando 7a, see Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. 20 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1979), Lfd. Nr. 558, p. 727, and vol. 23 (1998), Lfd. Nr. 620, pp. 147–150. Kurt Matschke, on interrogation, denied that any executions were carried out during the retreat; but the temporal coincidence is striking.
