YESSENTUKI
Pre-1942: Yessentuki, town, Ordzhonikidze krai, RSFSR; August 1942–January 1943: Jessentuki, Army Group A (Heeresgruppe A); post-1991: Yessentuki, Stavropol’ Krai, Russian Federation
Yessentuki is located about 150 kilometers (93 miles) southeast of Stavropol’. According to the 1939 population census, there were 581 Jews living in the town.1 After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Jewish population initially decreased, as men of eligible age were conscripted into the Red Army. However, about 1,500 Jews—out of several thousand Jews who were evacuated at the start of the war from the western regions of the USSR to the northern Caucasus—arrived in the town, and most were unable to flee in the summer of 1942 due to the rapidity of the German advance.
On August 11, 1942, German armed forces occupied Yessentuki. Throughout the town’s occupation, which lasted until January 11, 1943, a German military administration ran the town. In August 1942, the Ortskommandant in Yessentuki was Oberstleutnant von Beck. The German military created a town administration and an auxiliary police force, recruited from among local residents.
The murder of the Jews of the town was organized by the Security Police of Einsatzkommando 12 (Einsatzgruppe D). This detachment was stationed in Piatigorsk, and it was headed by SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Wiens, who went missing from the military at the end of the war.
Shortly after the occupation of the town, Ortskommandant von Beck ordered the establishment of a Jewish Council, or Judenrat, which consisted of five members. The Judenrat was responsible for carrying out the registration of all the Jews in the town. The results indicated 507 able-bodied Jews and around 1,500 deemed unfit to work, including children and elderly people.2 Other regulations excluded Jews from receiving bread rations, and able-bodied Jews were exploited for various kinds of heavy physical labor, including the cleaning of military hospitals. On September 7, 1942, all Jews except those in mixed marriages were ordered to appear on September 9 at a school on the outskirts of the town, on the pretext of being resettled to sparsely populated areas. Most of those who obeyed the instruction were taken out in the early morning of September 10, 1942, and murdered in an antitank ditch near the glass factory at Mineral’nye Vody.3
It appears from the sparse information available that the several hundred able-bodied Jews in Yessentuki were temporarily spared and returned to the school building, which may have served as a form of remnent ghetto or labor camp for six more weeks. According to one source, this camp was liquidated on October 29, 1942, when 483 Jews were shot in a nearby forest. About 15 Jews from mixed marriages were excluded from the antisemitic measures and survived in Yessentuki, although these people also went into hiding during the last days of German occupation, fearing that the Germans might kill them too before they retreated.4
SOURCES
Published accounts on the fate of the Jews in Yessentuki during the brief German occupation include Vasilii Grossman and Il’ya Ehrenburg, eds., Chernaia kniga o zlodeiskom povsemestnom ubiistve evreev nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvatchikami vo vremenno okkupirovannykh raionakh Sovetskogo Soiuza i v lagerakh Pol’shi vo vremia voiny 1941–1945 (Kiev, 1991), pp. 279–280—available in English as The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland During the War of 1941–1945, trans. John Glad and James S. Levine] (New York: Holocaust Library, 1981); and I. Al’tman and Sh. Krakovskii, Neizvestnaia Chernaia kniga: Svidetel’stva ochevidtsev o Katastrofe sovetskikh evreev (1941–1944) (Jerusalem, Moscow, 1993), pp. 389–390—published in English translation by Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman, eds., The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007), pp. 271–272.
Relevant documentary sources can be found in the following archives: GARF; Sta. Mü I (119c Js 12/69); USHMM; and YVA.
NOTES
1. “Yessentuki,” in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2000), 4:434.
2. Grossman and Ehrenburg, Chernaia kniga, pp. 279–280; A. Tol’stoi, “Korichnevyi Durman,” Pravda, August 5, 1943. Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), p. 618, names the head of the Jewish Council as the physician Grigory Konievich; but other sources state it was a Jewish lawyer.
3. Grossman and Ehrenburg, Chernaia kniga, pp. 279–280. According to A. Tol’stoi, the extermination of the Jews took place on the night of September 6–7, 1942.
4. Testimony of the artist L.H. Tarabukin and his daughter D. Gol’dshtein, published in Al’tman and Krakovskii, Neizvestnaia Chernaia kniga, pp. 389–390; I. Al’tman, Zhertvy nenavisti: Kholokost v Rossii 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow, 2002), pp. 94, 100, 101, 273, 281. In nearby Kislovodsk, the Germans also temporarily kept alive a few cobblers and tailors; see Ehrenburg and Grossman, The Black Book, p. 269.
