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

Pre-1941: Toropets, town and raion center, Kalinin oblast’, RSFSR; 1941–1942: Toropez, Rear Area, Army Group Center (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Mitte); post-1991: Toropets, Tver oblast’, Russian Federation

Toropets is located 69 kilometers (43 miles) east-northeast of Velike Luki. According to the 1939 census, there were 500 Jews living in the town, at that time a raion center in the Kalinin oblast’. The Jewish population then accounted for 3.87 percent of the town’s total population. [End Page 1830]

German forces of Rear Area, Army Group Center occupied Toropets on August 29, 1941, two months after the German attack on the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941). During that interval, a large number of Jews from Toropets had succeeded in evacuating to the east. Meanwhile, the Soviets began drafting eligible men into the Red Army. At the start of the German occupation, probably less than 100 Jews remained in the town.

A German military administration governed Toropets throughout the occupation (from August 29, 1941, until January 21, 1942). The German commandant appointed local citizens to a newly created Rayon authority and established a local police force (Ordnungsdienst) recruited from non-Jewish local residents.

On September 20, 1941, the chief of the local police, invoking the authority of the German military commandant, ordered that lists be prepared for him of all the Jews in the town, specifying their ages; that they all be resettled into a designated section of the town (a ghetto); and that they be checked to verify whether they were all wearing identifying armbands.¹ To house the Jews, the authorities selected a building belonging to a local flax mill on the edge of town. They chose a dentist as the ghetto elder. The ghetto elder was responsible for organizing forced labor details for the German authorities.²

A weekly report by the responsible commandant’s office Ortskommandantur (OK) I/532 in Toropets, probably from the end of September 1941, noted that a “Jewish quarter” (Judenviertel) had been established and that the Jews had been marked and registered (21 male and 25 female Jews, out of a total population of 5,724).³

On October 23, 1941, OK I/851, under the command of Major Hirschberg, took over the administration of Toropets from OK I/532.⁴ Shortly afterwards, on October 28, 1941, servicemen of the SS-2nd Cavalry Regiment raided the ghetto, “confiscating” items of women’s clothing and money.⁵ Also stationed in the town at this time were elements of Police Reserve Battalion 131.

The ghetto, which contained about 75 people, remained in existence for about three months.⁶ Postwar testimony by German servicemen reveals a number of additional details about the ghetto and its liquidation, some of which is corroborated by several of the witnesses. According to Hauptmann Pohl, the intelligence officer (Ic) with OK I/851, the Jews consisted mainly of women and children, including a number of young women, and the flax mill was surrounded with barbed wire. The Jews all wore white armbands bearing numbers.⁷

In early November 1941, a detachment of Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP)-Gruppe 710 consisting of 15 to 20 men arrived in Toropets under the command of Feldpolizeisekretär Blohm. In early or mid-December, Blohm received a written order to shoot all the Jews in the ghetto, including the women and children. Several German witnesses maintain that in order to avoid having to shoot the roughly 20 Jewish children in the ghetto, the local commanders planned for a German doctor to kill them using poison or a lethal injection, according to one account, in the context of a “Christmas celebration.” The doctor, however, refused to comply, reporting himself sick.⁸

The Germans liquidated the ghetto in the second half of December 1941.⁹ The Jews were escorted on foot from the flax mill to a gravel pit only a few hundred meters away, where there was a trench about 10 meters long and 3 meters wide (33 by 10 feet). Here the Jews were ordered to undress and place their clothes in a pile. They also had to surrender any valuables, and some Jews were found to have been hiding money in their shoes. The Jews then had to kneel in the ditch in groups and were shot in the back of the neck. The mass shooting was carried out by men of GFP-Gruppe 710. Some of the clothing was distributed to local Russian women who worked for the Germans.¹⁰

A mixed family with a Jewish wife who lived outside the ghetto was initially spared from the massacre. The Germans shot the entire family a short time later, stealing their property.¹¹ Within a few weeks of the ghetto’s liquidation, the Soviet winter counteroffensive had driven German forces out of Toropets by January 21, 1942, seizing this important supply base in the rear of the German 9th Army.