Image: Jews being killed in Eastern Europe, October 1941. (Yad Vashem)
On this day in history, more than 23,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered by the Gestapo in occupied Ukraine.
History Daily: 365 Fascinating Happenings Volume 1 & Volume 2 – August 28, 1941
The Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre was a World War II extermination of Jews carried out in the beginning stages of Operation Barbarossa by the German Police Battalion 320 along with Friedrich Jeckeln’s Einsatzgruppen, Hungarian soldiers, and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The killings were conducted in the Soviet City of Kamianets-Podilskyi (now Ukraine), occupied by German troops on July 11, 1941. According to the Nazi German reports, 23,600 Jews were murdered, including 16,000 earlier expelled from Hungary.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union had pushed forward to the point where mass air raids on Moscow and the occupation of some parts of Ukraine were beginning to occur. On August 26, Hitler displayed the joys of conquest by inviting Benito Mussolini to Brest-Litovsk, where the Germans had destroyed the city’s citadel. The grand irony is that Ukrainians initially saw the Germans as liberators from their Soviet oppressors and allies in their struggle for independence. But as early as July, the Germans were oppressing Ukrainians, agitating and organizing for a provisional state government with an eye toward autonomy, and began placing them in concentration camps. The Germans also began carving the nation up, giving parts to Poland (already occupied by Germany) and Romania.
But the true horrors were reserved for Jews in the territory. Thousands of Hungarian Jews had been expelled from that country and migrated to Ukraine. The German authorities tried sending them back, but Hungary would not take them. SS General Friedrich Jeckeln vowed to deal with the inundation of refugees by the “complete liquidation of those Jews by September 1.” He worked even more rapidly than promised.
The city of Kamianets-Podilskyi, now in south-western Ukraine, was part of the Ukrainian SSR invaded by German forces on June 22, 1941, during the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa launched from occupied Poland. Shortly after Hungary (Germany’s ally) declared war on the Soviet Union on June 27, 1941, authorities in Hungary decided to deport foreign Jews, primarily Polish and Russian Jews, but there were also refugees from Western Europe. Jews who could not establish Hungarian citizenship were equally vulnerable to deportation. As a result, many Hungarian Jews who could not document their citizenship were also deported. Many Jewish communities, especially in the Governate of Subcarpathia (then part of Hungary), were expelled in their entirety.
The Hungarians loaded the Jews into freight cars. They took them to Korosmezo (now Yasinia, Ukraine), near the Hungarian-Polish border, where they were transferred across the former Soviet border and given to the Germans. By August 10, 1941, over 14,000 Jews had been sent from Hungary to German-controlled territory. Once in German hands, the Jews, often still in family units, were made to march from Kolomyia to Kamianets-Podilskyi.
On August 27 and 28, a unit of Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) in Kamianets-Podilskyi and troops under the Higher SS and Police Leader for the southern region, SS General Friedrich Jeckeln, achieved the mass murder of the entire Jewish community, including both deportees and locals. According to Jeckeln’s report, 23,600 Jews were massacred in this action. He marched over 23,000 Hungarian Jews to bomb craters at Kamenets Podolsk, ordered them to undress, and riddled them with machine-gun fire. Those who did not die from the bullets were subsequently buried alive under the weight of corpses piled atop them. It was one of the first wide-reaching mass murder operations in the Final Solution in Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Within the Soviet Union grounds, it was preceded by a similar killing spree which began on July 9, 1941, and continued until September 19, in the city of Zhytomyr (made Judenfrei) with three mass-murder operations conducted by German and Ukrainian police in which 10,000 Jews died. It was followed up by killing 28,000 Jews shot by the SS and the Ukrainian paramilitary in Vinnytsia on September 22, 1941.
In September 1941, German forces invading the Soviet Union took the city of Kyiv and soon afterward perpetrated one of the most horrific acts of genocide in history. On September 29, they forced much of Kyiv’s Jewish population to go to Babi Yar, also known as Babyn Yar, a ravine located just outside the city. After being ordered to undress, the victims were forced into the canyon, where they were shot by the SS and German police units and their auxiliaries. As the SS later reported to headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were executed over two days.
The Babi Yar massacre and the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre were the apexes of the “Holocaust by bullets,” a term used by historians to describe the shooting executions perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, which continued even after they began killing European Jews on a massive scale with poison gas in death camps such as the Auschwitz complex in Poland.
What makes Babi Yar and the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre stand out within the Holocaust as a whole is that metropolitan cities in Europe lost virtually all of their remaining Jewish inhabitants to premeditated murder for the first time in history, and more Jews died in it than in any other German massacre.
A wave of shooting executions by Germans had started in the summer of 1941 in places such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Ukraine as antisemitism escalated to violence. All in all, as many as two million people were killed in mass shootings by Nazi forces during World War II.
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