Odessa massacre (1941)
The Odessa massacre was a genocidal massacre of the Jews in Odessa, Ukraine on October 22–24 1941.[2] 30,000–100,000 Jews are estimated to have been killed within two weeks by the occupation forces of the Kingdom of Romania, then-allied with Nazi Germany as one of the WWII Axis Powers ("Axis") under the totalitarian rule of her Prime Minister Ion Antonescu[1], who called himself Conducător in imitation of Adolf Hitler's Führer.[3]
Background
changeAfter occupying much of Western Europe and the Balkans, Nazi Germany and some of her Axis allies[4][5] launched the Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 to invade the Soviet Union as part of Hitler's plan to colonize Eastern Europe. They made initial success by capturing most of Ukraine, Belarus and knocking on the gates of Moscow within four months.
On 16 October 1941, Romanian forces took over Odessa, when 70,000–120,000 Jews were trapped in the city, some of whom were Jewish refugees from Bessarabia who had fled Romanian brutality[6] and sought refuge in Odesa. The massacre was preceded by escalating violence towards Jews by the antisemitic Romanian troops.[2][3]
Prelude to massacre
changeOn the evening of 22 October 1941, the Romanian military headquarters in Odessa was blown up mysteriously for which Jews were blamed together with communists by Antonescu, who ordered the start of the massacre.[2][3]
Massacre
changeWithin two days, at least 5,000 Jews had been hanged, while another few thousand were deported to the nearby village of Dalnyk, who were confined to barns, sheds and warehouses, which were later sprayed with machine gunfire and set ablaze. Jews who tried to escape met their fate immediately, while some of the captive buildings were blown up by Romanian troops, causing thousands to perish instantly. Thousands more were slain in mass shootings, some of whom were also burned alive in artillery warehouses.[2][3]
Around 25,000 Jews who briefly survived were deported to a ghetto in Odessa's neighborhood Slobidka, where they subsequently endured cold and hunger for the remainder of the war. Holocaust experts estimated the death toll at Dalnyk alone was at least 20,000.[2][3]
Nazi German involvement
changeDespite Romanian forces having carried out most of the atrocities in Odessa, they were backed up by the Nazi German SS Einsatzgruppe[7] D, who shot some Jews from the Fontans'ka Street prison and were hunting down Jews until November 1941, whose inflicted death toll numbered in thousands.[6] It is recorded that ethnic Germans in Odessa formed the militias Selbstschutze to facilitate the Holocaust in the area.[2][3]
Death march
changeBy the end of October 1941, 25,000–30,000 Jewish deportees were forced on a death march to the Bogdanovka concentration camp, where the deportees were crowded in pigsties, almost all of whom were ultimately slain in further mass shootings or burned alive, just as their late brethren at Dalnyk,[8][9] by the end of January 1942, when the Soviets pushed back the Axis invaders from the outskirts of Moscow. Meanwhile, Romanian forces burned the Jewish corpses to destroy evidence of the genocidal massacre. By autumn 1942, over 90% of pre-war Jews were no longer present in Odessa.[2][3]
Aftermath
change
Remaining Jews in Odessa
changeAround 1,000 Karaite Jews survived the war due to the Nazi designation of them as "Turks", which spared them from the fate that 67% of the pre-war European Jews met, so as dozens of other Jews, who were either forced laborers or hiding under false identities. Vera Bakhmutskaia, an Odessan Jew who survived the war by hiding in the house of a gentile friend, said,
There were very few of us [Jews] left. Very few. When the Romanians withdrew [...] I was walking in the street and it seemed to me that I was the only Jew left in the city.[12] [...] God forbid that anybody would learn [of me being Jewish ...] If they knew, they would have denounced me immediately. [... But] there were [also] people who were very humane, very nice, those who helped us.[13]
The Soviets retook Odessa on 10 April 1944 and conducted a census within two months, finding that Jews in Odessa had fallen from the pre-war level of 200,000 to 2,640, a 98.7% drop.[2][14]
Trial
changeTogether with Ion Antonescu, other instigators of the genocidal massacre, including Gheorghe Alexianu[15]were sentenced to death in 1946.[2][16]
Gentiles who saved Jews
changeDozens of gentile Odessans who saved Jews in the war have been recognized by the Yad Vashem as the Righteous Among the Nations.[17][18]
See also
changeReferences
change- ↑ 1.0 1.1 /ˌæntəˈnɛskuː/
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 "The Holocaust in Odesa". Holocaust Encyclopedia. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6
- International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania. Final Report. President of the commission: Elie Wiesel. Edited by Tuvia Friling, Radu Ioanid, and Mihail E. Ionescu. Iași: Polirom, 2004.
- Ioanid, Radu. The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Roma under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944. Second edition. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.
- Kruglov, Aleksander, and Kiril Feferman. “Bloody Snow: The Mass Slaughter of Odessa Jews in Berezovka Uezd in the First Half of 1941.” Yad Vashem Studies 47, no. 2 (2019): 15.
- Solonari, Vladimir. A Satellite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941–1944. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.
- Zipperstein, Steven J. The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.
- ↑ Italy, Hungary, Finland and Slovakia.
- ↑ John Graham Royde-Smith (September 16, 2024). "Operation Barbarossa". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Murder of the Jews of Romania". Yad Vashem. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
Romania [...] had a Jewish population of about 757,000 before World War II [...] the Romanian army, with the partial cooperation of Einsatzgruppe D and some of the local population, massacred 100,000-120,000 of the Jewish population of Bessarabia and North Bukovina [...] In total, 380,000 – 400,000 Jews, including the Jews of Transnistria, were murdered in Romanian-controlled areas under the dictatorship of Antonescu.
- ↑ The Selbstschutz (lit. “self-protection units”) militia units had been created by a special German SS formation (Sonderkommando Russland). As of August 1942, this SS unit was officially responsible for the Selbstschutz militias, based on a formal agreement with the Romanian occupation authorities. Prior to this agreement, the lines of authority were less established, but it is clear that in practice the SS controlled these militias.
- ↑
- "80 years since forgotten Bogdanovka massacre". The Times of Israel. January 1, 2022. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
- Hillen, Aiko (November 10, 2022). ""Taken to German Villages and Liquidated." The "Selbstschutz" Organization and the Bogdanovka Massacre in 1941". Eastern European Holocaust Studies. doi:10.1515/eehs-2022-0007. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
The killing of up to 40,000–50,000 Jews in Bogdanovka in the winter of 1941–1942 represented one of the largest murder operations carried out during the Holocaust outside of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps. [...] Transnistria was administered on a bilateral level between Nazi Germany and fascist Romania [...] became a place of mass extermination.
- "The Holocaust's forgotten massacre". The Jewish Chronicle. January 26, 2023. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
- ↑
- Ancel, J. 2003. Transnistria. 1941–1942. The Romanian Mass Murder Campaigns. Tel-Aviv: Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center.
- Achim, V. 2009. “Die Deportation der Juden nach Transnistrien im Kontext der Bevölkerungspolitik der Antonescu-Regierung.” In Holocaust an der Peripherie. Judenpolitik und Judenmord in Rumänien und Transnistrien 1940 – 1944, edited by W. Benz, and B. Mihok, 151–61. Berlin: Metropol.
- Desbois, P. 2018. Broad Daylight. The Secret Procedures behind the Holocaust by Bullets. La Vergne: Arcade Publishing.
- ↑ Ukrainian description: Голокост у Подільському районі, Одеська область, Україна.
- ↑ Inscription:
לזכור למען העתיד! ממקום זה התחילה דרך המוות של עשרות אלפי יהודי אודסה אשר גורשו וחוסלו ע"י הנאצים בחדש דצמבר 1941 במחנה השמדה "בוגדנובקה"
במחוז ניקולאיב. אוקראינה
[Remember for the future! From here began the path of death of tens of thousands of Odessa Jews who were deported and exterminated by the Nazis in December 1941 in the Bogdanovka extermination camp in Nikolaev Oblast. Ukraine]
Помнить во имя будущего! С этого места началась дорога смерти для десятков тысяч евреев г.Одессы угнанных и уничтоженных нацистами в декабре 1941 г. на территории лагеря "Богдановка" в Николаевской области. - ↑ Interview with Vera Bakhmutskaia, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, May 17, 1998, segment 54; 23:38.
- ↑ Interview with Vera Bakhmutskaia, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, May 17, 1998, segment 54; 23:10.
- ↑ "Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today (JUST) Act Report: Romania". U.S. Department of State. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
- ↑ Former Romanian fascist governor of Transnistria.
- ↑ "March of Time – outtakes – Russian, Polish, Yugoslav governments; War Crimes Trial: Romanian war criminals". Grinberg Archives. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
"Ion Antonescu governed Romania from 1940 until 1944 [...] became one of Nazi Germany's closest allies. Romania joined in the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. [...] While Antonescu ultimately refused to hand Jews over to the Germans, Romanian forces brutally killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. [...] Soviet forces entered Romania in 1944, Antonescu was arrested [...] returned Antonescu to Romania in 1946 to stand trial. A tribunal found him guilty of war crimes. He was executed on June 1, 1946.
- ↑ "Righteous Among the Nations". Holocaust Encyclopedia. Retrieved October 22, 2024.
The Righteous Among the Nations are non-Jewish individuals who have been honored by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, for risking their lives to aid Jews during the Holocaust.
- ↑ "The Righteous Among the Nations". Yad Vashem. Retrieved October 22, 2024.