The Holocaust saw agenocide committed againstRussian Jews during the occupation ofSoviet Russia byNazi Germany.
On 22 June 1941,Adolf Hitler abruptly broke the non−aggression pact andinvaded the Soviet Union. The Soviet territories occupied by early 1942, including all of Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine and most Russian territory west of the line Leningrad–Moscow–Rostov, contained about four million Jews, including hundreds of thousands who had fled Poland in 1939. Despite the chaos of the Soviet retreat, some effort was made to evacuate Jews, who were either employed in the military industries or were family members of servicemen. Of 4 million about a million succeeded in escaping further east. The "Holocaust by bullet" was the task of SS death squads calledEinsatzgruppen, under the overall command ofReinhard Heydrich. These had been used on a limited scale in Poland in 1939, but were now organized on a much larger scale. Most of their victims were defenseless Jewish civilians (not a singleEinsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations).[1] They used their skills to become efficient killers, according toMichael Berenbaum.[2] By the end of 1941, however, theEinsatzgruppen had killed only 15 percent of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, and it was apparent that these methods could not be used to kill all the Jews of Europe. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, experiments with killing Jews in the back of vans using gas from the van's exhaust had been carried out, and when this proved too slow, more lethal gasses were tried. Units of the Wehrmacht also participated in many aspects of the Holocaust in Russia.
The Black Book of Soviet Jewry contains a section on occupied Russia, with testimonies about the Holocaust inSmolensk,Rostov-on-Don,Yessentuki,Kislovodsk andStavropol among others.
It is estimated by some that before the war, 130,000 Jews lived in parts of the RSFSR that would be later be occupied. The majority evacuated eastward, and a report written by Einsatzgruppen mentions the massive flight.[3] Most of the Jews who remained in occupied RSFSR territories with the advance of the Wehrmacht were murdered by the beginning of 1942, except for some in the southern areas who were murdered between spring 1942 and winter 1942–1943.[4]
TheYIVO encyclopedia places the number of Holocaust victims in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic at over 119,000.[5] This is because while much of the local Jewish population escaped, many refugees from places further west fled to these areas, only for them to be captured later. According to this source, most Holocaust victims in the RSFSR were murdered in the areas ofRostov-on-Don,Krasnodar,Smolensk andBryansk.
The Nazigenocide of the Jews, carried out by GermanEinsatzgruppen and theWehrmacht alongside local collaborators, resulted in the almost complete annihilation of the Jewish population over the entire territory controlled by Germany andits allies during theSecond World War.[6] DuringWorld War II,Léon Poliakov established theCenter of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (1943) and after the war, he assistedEdgar Faure at theNuremberg Trial.
In July 1943, a Soviet military court inKrasnodar held the firstwar crimes trial ofWorld War II. There were 11 defendants, all of whom were collaborators. They were each charged with treason for helping the Germans murder 7000 people during the occupation of Krasnodar. All but one of the defendants were members of the death squadSonderkommando 10a, a subunit ofEinsatzgruppe D.[7][8]
All of the defendants pleaded guilty and begged for leniency. Eight of them were sentenced to death and publicly hanged on 18 July 1943, the day after sentencing. The other three were deemed to have had relatively minor roles and were instead each sentenced to 20 years of hard labour. While outside observers viewed the proceedings as a show trial, they did not doubt the severity or the extent of the crimes themselves, nor the guilt of the defendants. Observers said the true purpose of the trial was to showcase the suffering of Soviet civilians and deter further collaboration.[9][10][11]
Following the war, the Soviet Union suppressed or downplayed the impact of Nazi crimes on its Jewish citizens. An anti-Semitic campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" (i.e. "Zionists") followed. On 12 August 1952, in the event known as theNight of the Murdered Poets, thirteen most prominentYiddish writers, poets, actors and other intellectuals were executed on the orders of Joseph Stalin, among themPeretz Markish,Leib Kvitko,David Hofstein,Itzik Feffer andDavid Bergelson.[12]
TheUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Mandel Center's Initiative on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union works to gain a better understanding of this developing subfield and unearth the crimes and casualties.[13] The Mandel Center partnered with various international organizations such as the International Centre for History and Sociology of World War II and its Consequences at theNational Research University Higher School of Economics, TheYiddish Language Institute, the Center for Judaic Studies at theUniversity of Latvia, the Museum “Jews in Latvia",Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, theUkrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, and theNational University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.