Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

Commissariat of Volhynia-Podolia with the exception of 500 skilled workers.

During this meeting, Reichskommisar Koch’s deputy gave an assurance that

these ‘hundred per cent cleansings’ were ‘also the emphatic wish of the Reichs-

kommissar’. 222 This ‘wish’ on Koch’s part may also have had something to do with the fact that he had just had higher delivery quotas imposed upon him by

Berlin. 223 Shortly before the conference, between 19 and 23 August, about 15,000

Jews had been murdered in the city.

After this massacre the occupying power systematically set to work on the

General Commissariats of Volhynia-Podolia and Zhitomir murdering county by

county almost all the Jews still living there.

The murders in Volhynia-Podolia are comparatively well documented. The

Pinsk out-station 9 of the SD played a considerable role in the destruction of the

ghettos in the District Commissariats of Pinsk and Stolin, most of which had been

set up in the spring of 1942. The shootings themselves were carried out by the

SD. 224 They were supported by the district commissars, the Gendarmerie, local auxiliary police, as well as several police battalions. The biggest of these massacres

took place in Pinsk in late October/early November and cost far more than 15,000

people their lives, perhaps even more than 26,000. The destruction of the ghetto

had been ordered by Himmler at short notice. 225

After this the first ghetto to be destroyed in August was the one in Mokrov, in

which 280–300 people were shot. On 3 September 1942 the ghettos in Kozan-

grodek and Lakhva were destroyed. During the night of 2/3 September the 500

inhabitants of the ghetto in Kozangrodek were shot. Then the execution com-

mando squad of Pinsk SD travelled to the neighbouring town of Lakhva and

murdered 500, possibly 2,000 people there.

On 18 September, during the liquidation of the Luniniec ghetto between 1,000

and 2,800 people were murdered. In the period between 9 and 12 September 1942,

the ghettos in the department of Stolin were destroyed, with 8,000 to 10,000

people murdered. 226 After that the murder detachment returned its attention once more to the District Commissariat of Pinsk. On 24 and 25 September, during

the liquidation of the ghetto of Yanov, between 1,500 and 2,000 people were

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

351

murdered. At around the same time in Drohotshin (in the neighbouring District

Commissariat of Kobrin) between 1,500 and 2,000 people were also killed. Then

the members of the Pinsk SD station set about wiping out the ghetto in Pinsk itself

with the help of units of the Order Police. This mass murder lasted from

29 October until 1 November and involved at least 16,200 victims.

There is a written order from Himmler to HSSPF Prützmann about this

massacre, dated 27 October 1942: ‘On the basis of the reports I have received,

the ghetto in Pinsk should be seen as the headquarters of the entire bandit

movement in the Pripet Marshes. I therefore recommend, despite the existence

of economic concerns, that the ghetto in Pinsk be immediately dealt with and

destroyed. A thousand male workers should, if the action allows it, be handed over

to the Wehrmacht to make wooden huts. But the work of these 1,000 workers may

only take place in a closed and heavily guarded camp. If this guard cannot be

guaranteed, these 1,000 are also to be exterminated.’227

In the district of Antoniny (also in the General Commissariat of Volhynia-

Podolia), the German civil administration had interned the population that was fit

for work, over 300 people, in forced labour camps in Orlincy and Antoniny in

October 1941. At the beginning of 1942, in three places, small ghettos for Jews who

were not fit for work were set up. These people were murdered in July 1942 by

members of the KdS post Staro-Konstantinov, as were those Jews fit for work who

were still alive in autumn 1942. 228 For the district of Kamentsk-Podolsk there is a report from the SD out-station there, issued at the beginning of August, which

stated that 1,204 victims had been recently killed during two actions in three

villages in Rayon Dunayevtse. 229

In August, in the District Commissariat of Kremenec (Kreminanec), members

of the KdS out-station, with the help of the District Commissariat, the Gendarm-

erie, Ukrainian volunteers, and the police battalion 102 murdered the Jews still

living in the ghettos. Between 10 August and early September 1942 the ghetto in

Kremenec, which was set up early in 1942, was liquidated, with 8,000–12,000

people murdered. Over the next few months 1,500 ‘work-Jews’ who were excluded

from the action were also shot. 230 This was followed on 13 August by the murders of 238 Jews from Berezhy as well as 1,000–2,000 people from the ghetto of

Potschajew (Pochayev). During the three days that followed, 5,000 Jews from

the ghetto of Wischnewez (Wisnowiec) were murdered, and on 14 August and the

days that followed the Jews of Schumsk (Szumsk) were massacred leaving around

2,000–3,000 people dead. 231

The ghetto of Sarny, built in April 1942, into which the Jews from the towns of

the surrounding district had been driven, was cleared on 25 August, and the Jews

put in a camp. On 28 August all the Jews from the camp along with about 200

Gypsies were shot next to prepared pits. Figures for the victims vary between

10,000 and 17,000. On 20 August, the ghetto of Rafalovka was encircled by

Ukrainian militias, who took some 3,000 Jews out of the ghetto on 29 August

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

and had them shot by the same firing squad that had previously been active in

Sarny. 232

In the district of Kobryn, at a date that can no longer be precisely estab-

lished, between 11,000 and 14,500 Jews from Kobryn Bereza-Kartuska, Antopol,

Drogitschin (Drogichin), and other towns were shot. Some of the people were

deported in railway trains to the vicinity of the town of Bronnaja (Bronnaya)

Gora, where a shooting facility had been set up. 233 In Ljudvipol (Sosnovoye) in the District Commissariat of Kostopol 1,500 Jews from the ghetto there, which

had been set up in April 1942, were shot in August or September (possibly on

14 September). 234 In Vladimir-Volynsky 13,500 people were murdered at the beginning of September, and with the dissolution of the ghetto of Dubno on

5 October about 3,000. 235 In the liquidation of the ghetto of Lubomil in October 1942 about 8,000 people