Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus 9781648250033, 9781800100381

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Beyond the Pale

Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe Senior Editor: Timothy Snyder Yale University Additional Titles of Interest Revolution and Counterrevolution in Poland, 1980–1989: Solidarity, Martial Law, and the End of Communism in Europe Andrzej Paczkowski Translated by Christina Manetti The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia Rory Yeomans Kyiv as Regime City: The Return of Soviet Power after Nazi Occupation Martin J. Blackwell Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova Ellen Hinsey and Tomas Venclova Witnessing Romania’s Century of Turmoil: Memoirs of a Political Prisoner Nicolae Margineanu Edited by Dennis Deletant Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1906–1916 Ilya Gerasimov Making Martyrs: The Language of Sacrifice in Russian Culture from Stalin to Putin Yuliya Minkova The Balkans as Europe, 1821–1914 Edited by Timothy Snyder and Katherine Younger An American in Warsaw: Selected Writings of Hugh S. Gibson, US Minister to Poland, 1919-1924 Edited and annotated by Vivian Hux Reed With M. B. B. Biskupski, Jochen Böhler, and Jan-Roman Potocki Polish Literature and National Identity: A Postcolonial Perspective Dariusz Skórczewski Translated by Agnieszka Polakowska A complete list of titles in the Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe series may be found on our website, www.urpress.com.

Beyond the Pale

The Holocaust in the North Caucasus

Edited by Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman

Copyright © 2020 by the Editors and Contributors All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2020 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN: 978-1-64825-003-3 hardback ISBN: 978-1-80010-038-1 ePDF ISSN: 1528-4808 ; v. 24 Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress Cover image credit: Execution site of Jewish refugees in Ladozhskaia identified by Yahad-In Unum. © Yahad-In Unum/Markel Redondo

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations

xi

Note on Terminology

xv

Introduction 1 Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman 1 The Caucasus: A Rock in the Grinding Wheels of World History Georgi Derluguian

25

2 Dwelling at the Foot of a Volcano? Jewish Perspectives on the Holocaust in the North Caucasus Kiril Feferman

48

3 “Operation Blue,” Einsatzgruppe D, and the Genocide in the Caucasus Andrej Angrick

69

4 The Kaukasier Kompanie (“Caucasian Company”): Soviet Ethnic Minorities, Collaborators, and Mass Killers Stephen Tyas

95

5 Mass Executions in Krasnodar Krai: Cross-Checking Sources for the Holocaust in the North Caucasus Andrej Umansky

118

6 In the Shadow of “Mass Treason”: The Holocaust in the Karachai Region 145 Crispin Brooks

vi  ❧  contents

7 Rescue and Jewish-Muslim Relations in the North Caucasus Sufian Zhemukhov and William Youmans

184

8 “We Were Saved Because the Occupation Lasted Only Six Months”: (Self-)Reflection on Survival Strategies during the Holocaust in the North Caucasus 218 Irina Rebrova 9 The Holocaust on Soviet Territory—Forgotten Story? Individual and Official Memorialization of the Holocaust in Rostov-on-Don 241 Christina Winkler Glossary 263 Bibliography 265 List of Contributors

293

Index 295

Illustrations Maps 1

The North Caucasus in 1942: administrative divisions

2

2

The North Caucasus in 1942: main cities and other locations

3

3

Soviet evacuation routes into and out of the North Caucasus in 1941–42 53

4

The Karachai autonomous oblast in 1938

155

Figures 5.1

Viktor M., eyewitness to an execution of Jewish refugees in Ladozhskaia 142

8.1

Tankha Otershtein, during a 2013 interview with Irina Rebrova 221

Tables I.1

The North Caucasus population in 1897

10

I.2

The North Caucasus population in 1939

11

4.1

Gas van killings in the North Caucasus

5.1

Executions of Jews in Krasnodar krai in August 1942 (excluding Krasnodar) 121

5.2

Executions of Jews in Krasnodar krai in September 1942

115

122

viii  ❧  illustrations

6.1

Prewar ethnic composition of the Karachai autonomous oblast 157

6.2

Ethnic composition of the districts and major settlements of the Karachai autonomous oblast in 1939

158

6.3

Jewish evacuees in the Karachai autonomous oblast in March 1942

161

6.4

Mass killings of Jews in the Karachai autonomous oblast

171

7.1

The Beslenei orphans’ adopted names

208

7.2

Entry from the Beslenei household record book, with survivor Vova Tseev

213

8.1

Estimates of Jewish victims in the North Caucasus based on Soviet sources

228

Acknowledgments Over the time it has taken for this volume to emerge, the editors have incurred many debts of gratitude. First, we have greatly appreciated the support of our home institutions: the University of Southern California (both the USC Shoah Foundation and USC Libraries Special Collections) and Ariel University. We would like to thank Sonia Kane, Julia Cook, and Rio Hartwell from University of Rochester Press, as well as Professor Timothy Snyder, the series editor, who found interest in the volume and thoughtfully and patiently proceeded with it. The three anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript for University of Rochester Press provided much insight and guidance to make this a better book. The volume’s authors are all commended for being able to adjust their insights to meet the editors’ requirements. We owe a big thank you to Andy Rutkowski, the USC Libraries Visualization Librarian, for carefully crafting the maps in the book, and to Gabe Vincent and the USC Libraries Interlibrary Loan and Integrated Document Delivery team, who handled numerous obscure and difficult requests. Special mention also goes to Ron Coleman at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Patrice Bensimon at Yahad-In Unum. At various times, Peg Levine, Jared McBride, and Martha Stroud read portions of the manuscript and gave valuable feedback. Crispin is also extremely grateful for the encouragement of his wife, Yelena, and the humor of his son Sasha, as well as for the inspiration and guidance of his late father, Nicholas Brooks. Kiril is deeply indebted to his father, late mother, and wife for their support and patience in letting him work on the volume.

Abbreviations ASSR

Avtonomnaia sovetskaia sotsialisticheskaia respublika (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic)

BA Berlin

Bundesarchiv Berlin (Federal Archives in Berlin)

BA Koblenz

Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Federal Archives at Koblenz)

BAL

Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg (Federal Archives at Ludwigsburg)

BStU

Bundesbeauftragter für die Stasi-Unterlagen (Stasi Records Archives)

ChGK

Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia (The Extraordinary State Commission, a shortened version of its full title: The Extraordinary State Commission to Establish and Investigate the Atrocities of the German-Fascist Occupiers and Their Accomplices and the Damage Caused by Them to Citizens, Collective Farms, Social Organizations, State Enterprises and Institutions of the USSR)

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

CIC

Counter Intelligence Corps (United States Army)

DAARK

Derzhavnyi arkhiv Avtonomnoi respubliky Krym (State Archive of the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea)

EG Einsatzgruppe EK Einsatzkommando FK

Feldkommandatur (field headquarters)

FSB

Federal’naia sluzhba bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service)

GAKK

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Krasnodarskogo kraia (State Archive of Krasnodar Krai)

GARF

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation)

GFP

Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Field Police)

GUBB

Glavnoe upravlenie po bor’be s banditizmom (Main Directorate for the Struggle against Banditry)

xii  ❧  abbreviations ICJ

Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Department of Oral History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

IMT

International Military Tribunal

KGB

Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security)

MA

Freiburg Militärarchiv Freiburg (Military Archives in Freiburg)

MVD

Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del (Ministry of Internal Affairs)

NARA

National Archives and Records Administration (United States)

NKVD

Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs)

OK Ortskommandantur (regional headquarters) POW

prisoner of war

RGAE

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (Russian State Archive of the Economy)

RGASPI

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History)

RSHA

Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Head Office)

RSFSR

Rossiiskaia Sovetskaia Federativnaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic)

SD Sicherheitsdienst SK Sonderkommando SS Schutzstaffel SSR

Sovetskaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika (Soviet Socialist Republic)

StA München I Staatsanwaltschaft München I (Public Prosecutor’s Office Munich I) TNA

The National Archives (United Kingdom)

TsAMO

Tsentral’nyi arkhiv ministerstva oborony (Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense)

USCSF

University of Southern California Shoah Foundation

USHMM

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

VKP(b)

Vsesoiuznaia kommunisticheskaia partiia (bol’shevikov) (All-Union Communist Party [Bolsheviks])

abbreviations  ❧ xiii YIU

Yahad-In Unum

YVA

Yad Vashem Archive

YVHN

Yad Vashem Hall of Names

Note on Terminology To romanize Russian words, we have used the Library of Congress system, but without diacritics and ligatures (ё = e rather than ё; й = i rather than ĭ; ц = ts rather than ts͡; э = e rather than ė; ю = iu rather than iu͡; я = ia rather than ia͡ ). This includes all geographic names, except for certain commonly encountered places: Chechnya, Evpatoria, Feodosia, Grozny, Mineralnye Vody, Moscow, Nalchik, Rostov-on-Don, Sevastopol, Simferopol, Stavropol, and Yeysk. All translations are the authors’ own, except where noted. Non-English titles of sources found in the footnotes were translated by the authors and/ or the editors.

Introduction Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman By definition, the North Caucasus refers to the area lying north of the Caucasus Mountains and stretching from the Black Sea in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east. Today, this region of the Russian Federation encompasses Rostov oblast, the Krasnodar and Stavropol krais, and the republics of Adygea, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. This volume covers only those areas that fell under World War II Nazi German occupation, which stopped short of Chechnya and lasted, with some local variation, for around five months, from summer 1942 until early 1943. We also touch on events in occupied Kalmykia, insofar as it was part of the same wave of German advance and killing operations. Here we address a topic—the Holocaust—that might at first glance seem foreign to the Caucasian mosaic. After all, with all the ethnic and religious heterogeneity of the Caucasian population, Jews have never figured prominently. Their destruction was carried out by a foreign power bent on realizing its ideas everywhere, irrespective of local circumstances. In fact, in terms of sheer numbers and the relatively condensed time and place, the Holocaust in the North Caucasus seems to pale in significance next to the many violent events that befell and continue to befall this region. Suffice it to remember the most prominent among them. In the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, the long Russian-Caucasian war ended in Russian victory in 1864 and was followed by the mass expulsion of the Circassian people. The twentieth century saw the fighting between the Bolsheviks and their numerous adversaries during the Civil War, the Soviet de-Cossackization campaign of the 1920s and 1930s, famine and collectivization in the 1930s, and, after the German occupation, the deportations of several non-Russian ethnic groups (in particular, the Balkars, Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, and Karachais) from the region in 1943–44. More recently, the two Chechen wars began in the 1990s and continued into the early twenty-first century. In and of themselves, some

2  ❧  introduction Mountain

RUSSIA (RSFSR)

Caucasus Mountains Furthest German advance 1942

UKRAINIAN SSR

STALINGRAD OBLAST

ROSTOV OBLAST KALYMK ASSR CRIMEAN ASSR

KRASNODAR KRAI ORDZHONIKIDZE (STAVROPOL) KRAI

1. Adyghe autonomous oblast 2. Cherkes autonomous oblast 3. Karachai autonomous oblast 4. Kabardino-Balkar ASSR 5. North Ossetian ASSR 6. Checheno-Ingush ASSR 7. Dagestani ASSR

GEORGIAN SSR ARMENIAN SSR TURKEY

AZERBAIJANI SSR

Map 1. The North Caucasus in 1942: administrative divisions

of these events have been cited as examples of ethnic cleansing or genocide by both local and Western scholars, although this is not a position shared by most Russian scholarship. Viewed from another perspective, however, these very same factors—the diversity, the remoteness from major centers of the Holocaust and World War II, the region’s violent past and present, the competing memories and interpretations—create fertile ground for scholarly engagement with the Holocaust in the North Caucasus. And they raise questions. Were the behavior, treatment, and fate of local Caucasian Jews different from what happened to nonlocal Jews, thousands of whom found themselves in the region as refugees on the eve of its occupation by Nazi Germany? What local nuances did the Germans consider in carrying out their policies in the region? To what extent did the local population assist the Germans or provide help to their intended victims? How has the Holocaust, which affected primarily nonlocals, been perceived by the local inhabitants? How has the Holocaust been grasped in relation to the violent events that preceded it and succeeded it (e.g., ethnic mass deportations)? These are just a few questions among many that the authors of this volume address.

introduction  ❧ 3 Caucasus Mountains Furthest German advance 1942

Rostov-on-Don

Mineralnye Vody Zheleznovodsk Essentuki

Piatigorsk

Kislovodsk

Map 2. The North Caucasus in 1942: main cities and other locations

Historiography With the North Caucasus situated on the periphery of the Jewish world, of Soviet space, and of the Nazi empire, research into the Holocaust in the region has been slow to emerge. Furthermore, Western exploration of what happened there was greatly impaired by the almost total inaccessibility of relevant sources, kept under lock and key in Soviet archives. For its part, Soviet historiography was particularly cautious in tackling a topic so deeply embedded in the context of the Great Patriotic War in its classical Soviet interpretation, one emphasizing military history,1 avoiding delicate questions such as collaboration and local anti-Semitism, and placing all the blame at the Germans’ feet.2

1 2

Andrei Grechko, Bitva za Kavkaz [The battle for the Caucasus] (Moscow: Ministerstvo Oborony SSSR, 1971). For example, Khadzhi Ibragimbeili, “Krakh gitlerovskogo okkupatsionnogo rezhima na Kavkaze” [The collapse of the Hitlerite occupation regime in the Caucasus], in Narodnyi podvig v bitve za Kavkaz: Sbornik statei [The people’s

4  ❧  introduction

The situation changed after the downfall of the Soviet Union. Scholars, primarily local ones, were able to benefit from the opening of Russian archives, and they focused increasingly on the history of World War II in the North Caucasus and on the German occupation in particular.3 A separate group of collections and studies emerged around the issue of the deportations of Caucasian ethnicities accused by the wartime Soviet leadership of collaboration with the Germans;4 hence, for Holocaust historians the question arises about the extent to which local people collaborated with the Germans in carrying out the “Final Solution.” Availability of primary sources is a major issue. Despite generally better access than before, Russian archives remain less accessible than those in many other countries of the former Soviet Union, and local North Caucasian archives continue to be less accessible than those in many other parts of Russia. A short archival thaw, which saw significant declassification of Russian archival holdings pertaining to World War II (including even the publication of documents from security archives), was largely reversed by 2010. Everything related to collaboration, broadly interpreted, has since been out of reach to researchers, on the grounds that it could infringe on the

3

4

bravery in the battle for the Caucasus: Collected articles], ed. Aleksei Basov and Georgii Kumanev (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 265–85. For example, Sergei Linets, Severnyi Kavkaz nakanune i v period nemetsko-fashistskoi okkupatsii: Sostoianie i osobennosti razvitiia (iiul’ 1942–oktiabr’ 1943) [The North Caucasus before and during the German-Fascist occupation: The situation and specifics of development (July 1942–October 1943)] (Rostovon-Don: Severo-Kavkazskii nauchnyi tsentr vysshei shkoly, 2003); Evgenii Krinko, Zhizn’ za liniei fronta: Kuban’ v okkupatsii (1942–1943) [Life behind the front line: The Kuban and occupation (1942–1943)] (Maikop: Adygeiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2000). For example, Svetlana Alieva, ed., Tak eto bylo: Natsional’nye repressii v SSSR, 1919–1952 gody [Thus it was: National repressions in the USSR 1919–1952], 3 vols. (Moscow: “Insan,” 1993); Nikolai Bugai, Iosif Stalin—Lavrentiiu Berii: “Ikh nado deportirovat’”; Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii [Joseph Stalin to Lavrenty Beria: “They must be deported”; Documents, facts, commentaries] (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1992); Nikolai Bugai and Askarbi Gonov, Kavkaz: Narody v eshelonakh; 20–60-e gody [The Caucasus: Peoples in echelons; 1920s–60s] (Moscow: INSAN, 1998); Pavel Polian, Ne po svoei vole … Istoriia i geografiia prinuditel’nykh migratsii v SSSR [Against their will … The history and geography of forced migrations in the USSR] (Moscow: O.G.I.: Memorial, 2001). Also see Yaacov Ro’i, “The Transformation of Historiography on the “Punished Peoples,” History and Memory 21, no. 2 (2009): 150–76.

introduction  ❧ 5

privacy of the collaborators, should they or their heirs still be alive. Relevant holdings kept in local civil archives contain materials on the Soviet administration (before and after the occupation), the evacuated population, local administration (collaborationist), as well as local newspapers and propaganda and Soviet investigations by local Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia (Extraordinary State Commission [ChGK]) and other bodies. In the West, the North Caucasus initially attracted barely any attention from established scholars.5 A few works addressed the region in terms of the wartime military campaign from an outlook influenced by the Cold War, stressing the Caucasians’ fight for freedom from Soviet domination.6 For their part, émigré Caucasian researchers, who found themselves in the West, having retreated from the region with the Wehrmacht, avoided this sensitive topic.7 On the other hand, studies of the Soviet mass deportations of ethnic groups in general (including North Caucasians) proved more popular.8 More-recent Western studies also have benefited from the opening of Russian archives,9 but as a rule they draw on German sources. The decades since 2000 alone saw the appearance of several important German studies that have shed light on various aspects of German occupation policies in the

5 6

7 8

9

One exception is Rudolf Loewenthal, “The Judeo-Tats in the Caucasus,” Historia Judaica 15 (1952): 51–62. Joachim Hoffmann, Die Ostlegionen 1941–43: Turkotataren, Kaukasier und Wolgafinnen im deutschen Heer [The eastern legions 1941–43: Turko-Tatars, Caucasians, and Volga Finns in the German army] (Freiburg: Rombach, 1981); Joachim Hoffmann, Kaukasien, 1942–1943: Das deutsche Heer und die Orientvolken der Sowjetunion [The Caucasus 1942/43: The German army and the eastern peoples of the Soviet Union] (Freiburg: Rombach, 1991). For example, Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov and Marie Broxup, eds., The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). Robert Conquest, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (London: Macmillan, 1970); Aleksandr Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York: Norton, 1978); Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (1998): 813–61. Jeronim Perović, From Conquest to Deportation: The North Caucasus under Russian Rule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

6  ❧  introduction

North Caucasus, including the Holocaust, the Nazi exploitation of Islam and Soviet Muslims, and the operations of the Germans’ main killing squad.10 As a topic in its own right, however, study of the Holocaust in the North Caucasus effectively began in 2005 with a PhD thesis that also has the distinction of being the first and hitherto only dissertation on the Holocaust ever defended in Russia.11 In 2011, several entries dealing with the North Caucasus written by Pavel Polian appeared in a Holocaust encyclopedia published in Russia.12 The first publication to deal specifically with the Holocaust in the region was a 2013 edited collection of papers from a conference on the fate of the Jewish intelligentsia.13 Three contributors to this volume have done the most relevant and extensive work on the topic to date. Andrej Angrick’s book on Einsatzgruppe 10 On the Holocaust: for example, Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militarbesatzung und einheimische Bevolkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 [The rule of the Wehrmacht: German military occupation and the indigenous population in the Soviet Union 1941–1944] (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009). On the exploitation of Islam and Muslims: David Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2014). On the killing squad: Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der sudlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 [Occupation policies and mass murder: Einsatzgruppe D in the southern Soviet Union 1941–1943] (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003). 11 Elena Voitenko, “Kholokost na iuge Rossii v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (1941–1943)” [The Holocaust in the south of Russia during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1943)] (PhD diss., Stavropol’skii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2005). 12 Il’ia Al’tman, ed., Kholokost na territorii SSSR: Entsiklopediia [The Holocaust in the USSR: An encyclopedia], 2nd ed. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009). 13 Il’ia Al’tman et al., eds., Istoriia Kholokosta na Severnom Kavkaze i sud’by evreiskoi intelligentsii v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny: Materialy 7-i Mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii “Uroki Kholokosta i sovremennaia Rossiia,” Rostov-na-Donu, 12–14 avgusta 2012 g. [The history of the Holocaust in the North Caucasus and the fate of the Jewish intelligentsia in World War II: Materials of the seventh international conference “Lessons of the Holocaust and contemporary Russia,” Rostov-on-Don, August 12–14, 2012] (Moscow: Tsentr “Kholokost,” 2013). On the Soviet scholarship of the war and the Holocaust in this region, see in the same volume Evgenii Krinko and Sergei Kropachev, “Natsistskaia okkupatsiia i Kholokost na iuge Rossii: Otechestvennaia istoriographiia” [The Nazi occupation and the Holocaust in the south of Russia: Domestic historiography], 19–23.

introduction  ❧ 7

D detailed its killing operations in both Crimea and the North Caucasus, based on German documentation.14 Along with several articles, this volume’s coeditor Kiril Feferman has published a book on the Holocaust in the same two regions.15 Incorporating the reports and survivor accounts of the Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), he broadens discussions beyond the killings to focus especially on Jewish perspectives in relation to evacuation, enlistment, Mountain Jews, and both Jewish and non-Jewish responses to the Holocaust in the region. Andrej Umansky’s 2016 dissertation focuses exclusively on the North Caucasus and further combines Soviet wartime evacuation records and Soviet and German postwar investigation materials to provide an in-depth picture of the German executions.16 This is the first book in English devoted solely to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus. Using the existing body of work as a springboard, we had several aims in mind. First, we wanted to create a volume of case studies going into detail on selected topics, rather than attempting a comprehensive account. Second, we wanted to bring into focus the broader contexts of the North Caucasus, rather than viewing the Holocaust in isolation. This means not only revisiting and, where necessary, revising existing understandings of where, when, and how many Jews were killed in the North Caucasus during the German occupation—and determining who killed them. It also means examining the background of Russian and Soviet rule as well as delving into the complex and politically charged issues of local collaboration and memorialization. 14 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik. 15 “Nazi Germany and the Mountain Jews: Was There a Policy?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 96–114; “Food Factor as a Possible Catalyst for the Holocaust-Related Decisions: The Crimea and North Caucasus,” War in History 15, no. 1 (January 2008): 72–91; “A Soviet Humanitarian Action? Centre, Periphery and the Evacuation of Refugees to the North Caucasus, 1941–1942,” Europe-Asia Studies 61, no. 5 (July 2009): 813–31; “To Flee or Not to Flee: The Conflicting Messages of Soviet Wartime Propaganda and the Holocaust, 1941,” Cahiers du monde russe 56, nos. 2–3 (April–September 2015): 517–42; The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016). 16 Andrej Umansky, “L’extermination des Juifs dans le Caucase du Nord pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (1942–1943)” [The extermination of the Jews of the North Caucasus during World War II] (PhD diss., University of Amiens, 2016).

8  ❧  introduction

In this, we have benefited from having multiple authors, with a heterogeneity of perspectives that are not necessarily in complete agreement. Study of such a complex and disputed (and often poorly understood) region requires a diverse approach. Thus, contributions come from scholars not only of Holocaust studies but also of military history, sociology, and international relations, and we made a point of bringing together scholars representing Russian, Caucasian, Israeli, Western European, and North American perspectives on the region. With local archives largely inaccessible, the volume still draws heavily from German postwar trial records and Soviet documentation. Yet oral histories are especially prominent, not only those from long-established archives (such as Yad Vashem [YVA]) but also from relatively young (University of Southern California Shoah Foundation [USCSF]) and very young public archives (Yahad-In Unum [YIU]), as well as from private collections. What follows is a synopsis of the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, integrating the findings of the authors of this book.

Background As Georgi Derluguian highlights in the first chapter, the North Caucasus is rich in diverse languages and in ethnic groups who have survived there for centuries and even millennia. The region’s inhospitable geography made it largely impenetrable to the powerful empires to the north and south. Over time, the indigenous peoples developed their own social practices and structures, entirely independent of those of their neighbors. These same factors played against the emergence of any North Caucasian countries or states. By the eighteenth century, the dominant religion of the indigenous groups was Islam, while to the north the Russians practiced Orthodox Christianity and the Kalmyks practiced Buddhism. The legacy of Russian imperial expansion is central. Russians first began arriving in the region in the 1500s, seeking to displace the Persians and the Ottoman Turks from their southern frontier.17 By the early nineteenth century, with the South Caucasus conquered and the Ottomans defeated (1828–29), the Russian Empire moved to take charge of the North Caucasus. 17 Michael Khodarkovsky, “Of Christianity, Enlightenment, and Colonialism: Russia in the North Caucasus, 1550–1800,” Journal of Modern History 71, no. 2 (June 1999): 394–430.

introduction  ❧ 9

Between 1834 and 1859, a Dagestani cleric, Imam Shamil, united the North Caucasus under the banner of Islam in a holy war against the invaders,18 events that would presage Chechnya’s war of separatism in the 1990s and the jihadism of the twenty-first century. Russian rule finally prevailed through a combination of large-scale violence, negotiation, and colonization. In the 1860s, the Russians massacred and expelled much of the Circassian population from the northwest of the region. Close to the end of the long Caucasian War, the region was officially enshrined for the first time by Czar Alexander II: “The whole space, located to the north of the main ridge of the Caucasus Mountains and comprising both the Terek and Kuban oblasts, and the Stavropol governorate, will henceforth be called the North Caucasus.”19 Colonization proceeded apace. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russians (including large numbers of Cossacks), who were already the dominant population in the vicinity of Rostov, became the main group in what would become Krasnodar krai and Ordzhonikidze (Stavropol) krai.20 While indigenous North Caucasians represented the majority in the highland regions, even there Russians often remained a large, and occasionally the largest single, group (Table I.1). The situation remained largely the same by the outbreak of World War II (Table I.2). The end of the Russian Empire saw fighting in the North Caucasus, with North Caucasians involved on both the communist Red and pro-czarist White sides of the Russian Civil War (1917–21).21 Separately, there was a short-lived attempt to form an independent North Caucasian state in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia—the Mountain Republic (1917–19). 18 Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker, and Gary Hamburg, eds. and trans., RussianMuslim Confrontation in the Caucasus: Alternative Visions of the Conflict between Imam Shamil and the Russians, 1830–1859 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). 19 Ukaz Imperatora Aleksandra II 8 fevralia 1860 g. [Decree of Emperor Alexander II of February 8, 1860], vol. 35: Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii: Sobranie vtoroe [Complete collection of the laws of the Russian Empire: Second series] (Saint Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1862), 122, article 35421, microfiche, 3495. 20 Thomas Barrett, “Crossing Boundaries: The Trading Frontiers of the Terek Cossacks,” in Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917, ed. Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 227–48. 21 Leone Musgrave, “Mountain Alternatives in Eurasia’s Age of Revolution: North Caucasia’s ‘National Indifference,’ Anticolonial Islam, and ‘Greater War,’ 1917–18,” Revolutionary Russia 32, no. 1 (2019): 59–85.

Table I.1. The North Caucasus population in 1897 Region

Total population

Jewish population

Don Host oblast1

2,564,238 (Russians2 95%)

15,121 (0.6%)

Rostov-on-Don

119,476

11,183 (9%)

1,918,881 (Russians 91%)

2,105 (0.1%)

873,301 (Russians 92%)

1,425 (0.2%)

933,936 (Russians 34%, Chechens 24%, Ossetians 10%, Kabardians 9%)

6,582 (0.7%)

Dagestan oblast

571,154 (Avars 28%, Dargins 21%, Russians 3%)

10,0566 (1.8%)

Total

6,861,510

35,289 (0.5%)

Kuban

oblast3

Stavropol governorate4 Terek

oblast5

Source: N. Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1897 g. [The first general census of the population of the Russian Empire, 1897], 89 vols., (Saint Petersburg: Izd. Tsentral’nago statisticheskago komiteta Ministerstva vnutrennykh del, 1899– 1905), microfilm. See volumes 12 (Don Host oblast), 52 (Dagestanskaia oblast), 65 (Kuban oblast), 67 (Stavropol governorate), and 68 (Terek oblast). Notes: 1 With some border changes, the Don Host oblast later became Rostov oblast. 2 In the terminology of the 1897 census, “Russians” referred to a combination of “Great Russians” (Russians), “Little Russians” (Ukrainians), and “White Russians” (Belorussians). 3 Kuban oblast comprised what became Krasnodar krai but also included the later Cherkes and Karachai autonomous oblasts of Ordzhonikidze krai. 4 With some changes, Stavropol governorate later became Ordzhonikidze krai (1937–43) and, after 1943, Stavropol krai. 5 Terek oblast included what later became Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, ChechenoIngushetia, and parts of Ordzhonikidze (Stavropol) krai and Dagestan. 6 This is the number for adherents of the Judaic religion. The number of speakers of the “Jewish language” in Dagestan oblast was 7,361.

Table I.2. The North Caucasus population in 1939 Region

Total population

Jewish population

Rostov oblast

2,892,580 (Russians 90%)

33,024 (1%)

Rostov-on-Don

510,212

27,039 (5%)

Krasnodar krai

3,172,674 (Russians 87%)

7,351 (0.2%)

Adyghe autonomous oblast

241,799 (Russians 71%, Adyghes 23%)

302 (0.1%)

Ordzhonikidze krai1

1,950,887 (Russians 82%)

7,791 (0.4%)

Cherkes autonomous oblast

92,898 (Russians 58%, Cherkes 17%)

98 (0.1%)

Karachai autonomous oblast

150,303 (Karachai 47%, Russians 43%)

159 (0.1%)

Kabardino-Balkar ASSR

359,219 (Kabardians 42%, Russians 36%, Balkars 11%)

3,414 (1%)

North Ossetian ASSR

329,205 (Ossetians 50%, Russians 37%)

1,714 (0.5%)

Checheno-Ingush ASSR

697,009 (Chechens 53%, Russians 29%, Ingush 12%)

4,434 (0.4%)

Dagestani ASSR

930,416 (Avars 25%, Dargins 16%, Russians 14%)

10,932 (2%)

Total

10,331,990

68,361 (0.7%)

Note: 1 Ordzhonikidze krai was renamed Stavropol krai in 1943 after the Soviets recaptured the region.

12  ❧  introduction

After the capturing the region, the new Soviet authorities presented themselves as pro-Caucasian, in contrast to the defeated czarists. They granted the larger indigenous groups their own ethno-territorial regions within the Mountain Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (later, the North-Caucasian krai) that gave the appearance of unified local autonomy. In accordance with their nativization policies, the Soviets promoted the local languages and cultures and developed infrastructure. Unlike other religions, Islam was largely tolerated until 1929.22 To enforce their political, economic, and religious programs, however, the Soviets resorted to sustained levels of violence. Frequent anti-Soviet insurgencies were brutally quelled by the military and security forces.23 Some groups, especially the Cossacks, were continuously discriminated against, in the form of property confiscation, large-scale deportations, and arrests.24 The regime relentlessly pursued policies adhered to elsewhere in the country: collectivization to the point of famine and “purges” that reached their peak in 1937–38.25

Jews in the North Caucasus Unlike the western parts of the Russian Empire, the North Caucasus was beyond the Pale of Settlement: Jews were not supposed to live there and comprised a tiny fraction of the region’s population. Only one community of any 22 Jeronim Perović, “Uneasy Alliances: Bolshevik Co-optation Policy and the Case of Chechen Sheikh Ali Mitaev,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 729–65. 23 Jeronim Perović, “Highland Rebels: The North Caucasus during the Stalinist Collectivization Campaign,” Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 2 (2016): 234–60. 24 S. A. Kisilitsyn, “‘Raskazachivanie’—strategicheskii kurs Bolshevistskoi politicheskoi elity v 20-kh gg.” [“De-Cossackization”—the strategic policy of the Bolshevik political elite in the 1920s], in Vozrozhdenie kazachestva: Istoriia i sovremennost’ [The Cossack revival: History and modernity], ed. A. Kozlov (Novocherkassk: Novocherkasskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2001), 98–107. 25 Aleksander Savochkin, Massovye repressii 30–40 kh gg XX veka na Severnom Kavkaze kak sposob utverzhdeniia i podderzhaniia iskliuchitel’noi samostoiatel’nosti gosudarstva [Mass repressions of the 1930s–40s in the North Caucasus as a means of asserting and supporting the exclusive independence of the state] (PhD diss., Vladimirskii iuridicheskii institut Federal’noi sluzhby ispolneniia nakazanii, 2008).

introduction  ❧ 13

size, over eleven thousand Ashkenazi Jews, was to be found in Rostov-onDon (Table I.1).26 On the eve of World War II, the overall picture was barely any different. In the intervening years, with the arrival of many Ashkenazi Jews, the Jewish population had grown along with the rest of the population, but it remained proportionally very small; Rostov continued to have by far the region’s largest Jewish community (Table I.2). This situation strongly contrasts with other regions of the Soviet Union occupied by Nazi Germany, where Jews made up as much as one-third of the population of some cities in Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic States.27 Unique to the Caucasus, however, was an indigenous Jewish group, the Mountain Jews, who had lived there for centuries. Owing to the unique geographic conditions, they were largely detached from the main centers of Judaism. Academic and popular knowledge of this group, including what was known to German scholars before and during World War II, also remained limited.28 Indeed, the existence of the Mountain Jews was a source of confusion to the Germans, who debated whether or not those they found should be considered Jews and killed (chapter 3, Angrick; chapter 7, Sufian Zhemukhov and William Youmans).29 While the Germans conducted at least two large-scale executions of Mountain Jews in the North Caucasus,30 it is notable that in the towns of Nalchik and Mozdok, communities of Mountain Jews survived the Holocaust. The evidence suggests that their local ties and integration into North Caucasian culture enabled

26 Elsewhere, there were Jewish populations of over one thousand in Stavropol, Vladikavkaz, Grozny, Nalchik, and Dagestan (especially Derbent, Temir-KhanShura, Kiura okrug, and Khasav-Iurt okrug). 27 For example, Jews comprised one-third of the population of Lwów (Lviv), 30 percent of Minsk, and 28 percent of Wilno (Vilnius). 28 Bey Essad, Der Kaukasus, seine Berge, Völker und Geschichte [The Caucasus, its mountains, peoples, and history] (Berlin: Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft, 1931); Egon von Kapherr, Der Kaukasus und seine “hundert” Völker [The Caucasus and its “hundred” peoples] (Langensalza: J. Beltz, 1937). 29 The Karaites in Crimea and Georgian Jews in France are examples of other Jewish groups with whom Nazi planners were unfamiliar and who managed to survive the German occupation. See Feferman, “Nazi Germany and the Mountain Jews,” 100–101. 30 In Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe in September and October 1942. The Germans had earlier killed all the Mountain Jews they had encountered at the Shaumian kolkhoz in Crimea.

14  ❧  introduction

them to elicit greater local help from the region’s non-Jews (Zhemukhov and Youmans; chapter 6, Brooks). Most of the Jews who were local to the North Caucasus are believed to have fled or been evacuated before the Germans arrived. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Jews who found themselves under German occupation in the North Caucasus were not locals, but refugees. After June 22, 1941, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, huge numbers of civilians were evacuated from Ukraine, Crimea, and central and northern Russia into the region. In some areas, the share of Jews among the refugees was as high as 75 percent. By August 1942, Feferman (chapter 2) estimates, there were approximately 50,000 Jews among the 110,000 or so total refugees in the North Caucasus.31 Why so many Jews remained in the region in 1941–42— when they should have known of German atrocities, and when German forces were relatively close—is the central question addressed by Feferman in his chapter. The refugee context is especially significant to the three of the studies in this volume: on Krasnodar krai, the Karachai autonomous oblast, and Jewish survival and rescue. The Germans likely had access to the Soviet records of the evacuees, which included their ethnicity (chapter 5, Umansky). In comparison to the Mountain Jews, we can speak of comparatively very low levels of survival and only a few instances of local help (Umansky, Brooks). An exception to this pattern is the remarkable (and to a certain extent, mythologized) case of Beslenei, a Circassian village whose residents rescued around thirty Russian and Jewish child evacuees by adopting them, changing their identity to Circassian, and falsifying local Soviet records; in this, Zhemukhov and Youmans posit that Circassian cultural traditions played a role in the villagers’ decision-making. In general, the comparative absence of local Jews and the predominance of Jewish refugees sets the North Caucasus apart from other regions of the occupied Soviet Union and indeed from most of occupied Europe as a whole.

German Occupation In summer 1942, the armies of Nazi Germany commenced “Operation Blue,” breaking through the Soviet front and pouring into the North Caucasus. Given the history of Russian and then Soviet violence, the 31 Feferman, Holocaust, 90.

introduction  ❧ 15

Germans anticipated receiving considerable local support. In this, they were informed by some of Europe’s leading contemporary specialists on the region. In the interwar years, Berlin had become a center for anticolonial thought, including that of the North Caucasus as Civil War–era émigrés from the region gravitated to the city.32 With the region primarily of interest because of its oil (and as a gateway to the oilfields of Baku),33 the German army crafted and enacted military occupation policies that were designed to appeal to the local population and prevent local hostility and that were significantly milder, for example, than those of the Germans’ civilian administration in Ukraine. Measures included reopening churches and mosques, promising the reprivatization of collective farms, and endeavoring to treat the indigenous peoples respectfully.34 Conversely, it is striking that the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service; SD) had virtually no useful information for its needs in the North Caucasus (Angrick). After capturing Rostov-on-Don for the second time on July 24, 1942 (chapter 9, Christina Winkler), the Germans advanced rapidly eastward to within one hundred and fifty miles of the Caspian Sea. Soviet forces held them there, however, along the main ridge of the Caucasus Mountains, outside the city of Ordzhonikidze (later renamed Vladikavkaz) in North Ossetia and Malgobek in Checheno-Ingushetia. In Chechnya, a local anti-Soviet uprising anticipated a German arrival that never materialized.35 South of the Caucasus, the Germans got only as far as the port of Novorossiisk. Crucially, the Soviets stopped a separate thrust of the German offensive farther north

32 David Motadel, “The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire,” American Historical Review 124, no. 3 (June 2019): 843–77; Ian Johnson, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). 33 Joel Hayward, “Hitler’s Quest for Oil: The Impact of Economic Considerations on Military Strategy, 1941–42,” Journal of Strategic Studies 18, no. 4 (1995): 94–135. 34 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), 226–52; Boris Kovalev, Natsistskaia okkupatsiia i kollaboratsionizm v Rossii 1941–1944 [The Nazi occupation and collaborationism in Russia 1941–1944] (Moscow: Tranzitkniga, 2004), 101–3, 254–55, 464–66. 35 Jeffrey Burds, “The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’: The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 2 (2007): 267–314.

16  ❧  introduction

at Stalingrad: crushing defeat there caused the Germans to retreat hurriedly from the North Caucasus in January 1943 to avoid further encirclement. For most of the North Caucasus, the occupation was thus comparatively short, lasting around five months in total, but there were exceptions. In one case, it was even shorter: the Germans occupied Nalchik and the vicinity for a little over two months, beginning only in late October 1942. In two other areas, the occupation was longer. In the very west of Krasnodar krai, including Novorossiisk, the Germans remained for over a year, until October 1943. Finally, the Germans held on to a small part of Rostov oblast (Taganrog) for the best part of two years, from mid-October 1941 until late August 1943.

Killing Operations The task of mass-murdering Jews in the North Caucasus belonged to Einsatzgruppe D, one of four mobile killing units of the German security forces that was deployed in the Soviet Union. Operating in the south, it moved with the German army from its earlier base in Crimea. Angrick shows that by summer 1942, relations between the German military and the security forces were no longer strained, and the newfound mutual respect and cooperation allowed for operations to proceed much more smoothly than before. To cover the region, the Einsatzgruppe split into several subunits, known as Einsatzkommandos or Sonderkommandos, which were assigned to specific towns and areas. Drawing from German postwar trial documentation especially, Angrick valuably summarizes here the movement of each of these subunits in the North Caucasus, giving the main execution sites, dates, and estimates of numbers killed. An important part of Einsatzgruppe D’s work at this time was its extensive use of gas vans—specially customized trucks with hermetically sealed cargo areas in which victims were asphyxiated with engine fumes. Stephen Tyas explores this topic in detail in chapter 4 and provides a list of over thirty locations in the North Caucasus where gas vans are known to have been employed (Table 5.1). Overall, these operations were the easternmost and southernmost mass killings conducted by the Germans. With Nazi death camps already

introduction  ❧ 17

functioning in Poland, the executions in the North Caucasus marked the end of what has become known as the “Holocaust by bullets.”36

Victim Numbers It is difficult to determine with certainty how many Jews were killed in the North Caucasus. By mid-1942, the various German agencies operating in the region (army, Schutzstaffel [SS]) contented themselves either with general statements that a given region was “free of Jews” or simply produced no reporting at all—owing to security concerns or because it was obvious to everyone. In the available sources, there is considerable variation. Victim numbers derived from West German postwar trials, for instance, tend to be low and are not always consistent for the same place; here, one must factor in the possibility that witnesses may have downplayed, obfuscated, or been unaware of the extent of the killings. On the other side, Soviet sources tend to give much higher figures. The ChGK reports have tremendous detail about where each massacre was conducted, but the final victim numbers are sometimes imprecise. In his study, for example, Umansky uses the oral testimonies collected by Yahad-in Unum to show that the ChGK numbers for those killed in three obscure locations in Krasnodar krai are too high. A close reading of the numbers for each mass execution in the Karachai autonomous oblast reveals discrepancies within the local ChGK reports for the region (Brooks). The caution is justified. In a particularly egregious case, one ChGK report attributed the massacre of over three hundred Balkar civilians in the KabardinoBalkar ASSR in December 1942 to the “German-fascist invaders”; only much later was it shown to have been the work of the Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs [NKVD]).37 This does not discredit the ChGK in its entirety but rather emphasizes the need for researchers to take into account the different levels of competence 36 Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 37 GARF, 7021-7-109, report no. 40, July 13, 1943, 123–27; K. Azamatov et al., Cherekskaia tragediia [The Cherek tragedy] (Nal’chik: El’brus, 1994); Boris Temukuev, Sem’ dnei odnogo veka: 27 noiabria–5 dekabria 1942 goda: V dokumentakh 1943 g. [Seven days of the same century: 27 November–5 December 1942: in documents], 2 vols (Nal’chik: Poligrafservis i T, 2004).

18  ❧  introduction

and diligence of those investigating as well as the pressures of time, local politics, and propaganda that were involved.38 As a result, it is hardly surprising that the authors in this volume give different totals for the number of victims. From German sources, Tyas estimates that Einsatzgruppe D killed at least thirty thousand people in the North Caucasus, 90 percent of whom were Jews. A higher figure of thirtyfive thousand to forty-five thousand is suggested by Feferman in his book.39 The numbers compiled by Irina Rebrova (Table 9.3) give a good idea of the range found in Soviet sources: some fifty-eight thousand to eighty-four thousand Jews, which would mean at least half of all the Jewish Holocaust victims murdered in Russia. More-settled numbers will depend on extensive microresearch on every part of the region.

Collaboration Local collaboration is a topic intrinsically interwoven with the Holocaust and, at the same time, one that is especially sensitive in the North Caucasus; while exploring it openly, we endeavor to avoid the poles of demonization or apologetics. While the Germans were the primary and most important agents of the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, understanding collaboration is crucial to understanding the specifically local traits of the Holocaust—both because the Germans viewed the Caucasus as a friendly region and because, here as elsewhere, they relied on local help to achieve their goals. Also, it provides historians the necessary tools to juxtapose the Holocaust history of the North Caucasus with the wider phenomenon of “neighbors,” to use Jan Gross’s famous term,40 during the “Solution of the Jewish Question” in German-dominated Europe. This volume tackles two aspects of collaboration in detail (Tyas, Brooks). The first of these relates to Einsatzgruppe D’s recruitment of around two hundred Caucasians from Soviet prisoners of war captured in Crimea to form the Kaukasier Kompanie (Caucasian Company) to assist in its operations. 38 On the latter point, see Marina Sorokina, “People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 797–831. 39 Feferman, The Holocaust, 230. 40 Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin, 2002).

introduction  ❧ 19

After training, this unit deployed to the North Caucasus and played a direct role in the implementation of the Holocaust by providing the personnel to operate the gas vans. The unit’s commander was an Azerbaijan-born ethnic German émigré from the time of the Russian Civil War, while the recruits included numerous Azeris and Georgians, who evidently hoped they would be returning to the South Caucasus. They were selected for their virulent anti-Soviet attitudes, and they viewed their participation in mass murder pragmatically, rather than as an expression of any open anti-Semitism (Tyas). Given the appalling conditions in the POW camps, however, even for the Caucasian POWs who were treated preferentially, it is debatable to what extent the fresh recruits’ motivation was sincere.41 Once the Germans arrived in the North Caucasus, they encountered some enthusiastic support from among the local populations. For example, levels of collaboration were so high in the Karachai region, Soviet authorities later charged, that they felt compelled to punitively deport the entire Karachai people after they recaptured the region. Building on recent research, however, Brooks finds conversely that the numbers of those who assisted the Germans were far fewer than those implied by the Soviets’ rationale. Furthermore, the collaboration was in fact a multiethnic phenomenon involving all groups in the oblast and nearly as many Russians as Karachais. In this sense, viewing collaboration through an ethnic lens is unhelpful. Despite an absence of overt local anti-Semitism and a lack of German labor, the Germans nevertheless had sufficient local help to kill almost all of the Jews in the region. In this, the lure of financial reward and dissociation from the nonlocal Jewish refugees were major factors. Although not a topic focused on in this book, the situation in the Cossack majority regions of the North Caucasus was rather different. There, as in western Ukraine or Lithuania, it is possible to speak not only of an intense hostility toward Soviet rule but also of longstanding traditions of anti-Semitism.42 Cossacks provided police and military support to the Germans,43 41 For a recent discussion of this topic, see Mark Edele, Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers Became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941–45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2017). 42 Ekaterina Norkina, “The Origins of Anti-Jewish Policy in the Cossack Regions of the Russian Empire, Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” East European Jewish Affairs 43, no. 1 (2013): 62–76. 43 Petr Krikunov, Kazaki: Mezhdu Stalinym i Gitlerom: Krestovyi pokhod protiv bol’shevizma [The Cossacks: Between Stalin and Hitler: The crusade against Bolshevism] (Moscow: Yauza, 2006).

20  ❧  introduction

and the Germans allowed the establishment of a Cossack self-governing district in Krasnodar krai.44 It appears that there was significant and sometimes independent action taken by Cossack collaborators against the Jews found in those regions.45 This is an avenue for further research, however.

Jewish Responses The actions and levels of agency of those Jews caught in the North Caucasus varied considerably. Analyzing the actions of Jewish refugees in the region on the eve of the German invasion, Feferman finds that, despite the increasing anti-Semitism, the Soviet authorities’ generally successful handling of the evacuees and the distrust of official Soviet news had the effect of encouraging many Jews not to move farther away to safety. During the two-and-a-half-month occupation of Nalchik, the Mountain Jewish community was able to organize, present itself as non-Jewish, and, helped in part by Kabardian locals, convince local German commanders who were receiving mixed messages about their racial origins. The same circumstances of short occupation and German hesitation about the Mountain Jews likely also contributed to Jewish survival in Mozdok; additionally, the Jews seem to have taken matters into their own hands by organizing a leather factory so as to appear useful to the Germans, and likely also by not registering themselves as Jews (Zhemukhov and Youmans). Through oral history sources, Rebrova traces in chapter 8 the main trajectories of Jewish survival, often in family groups. The main technique was to change names either orally, or by amending documents, or by destroying documents. Another aspect of this was trying to look local, in terms of clothing or by mimicking Christian expressions and gestures. Passing as Armenian was a route taken by some Jews (also noted by Brooks). Ultimately, many survivors conclude they were simply fortunate that the occupation was comparatively short.

44 Alexander Dallin, The Soviet Partisan Movement in the North Caucasus, 1942– 43 (Washington, DC: Air Research and Development Command, Human Resources Research Institute by Headquarters, United States Air Force, 1954), 129–33. 45 Feferman, The Holocaust, 421, 443–48.

introduction  ❧ 21

Holocaust Memory Three different aspects of memory work in the North Caucasus are explored in this book. Examining oral histories recorded locally by the USCSF in the 1990s and by the author in the 2010s, Rebrova draws attention to many contexts that affect the narratives of Jewish survivors: their experience as children during the war, their long postwar exposure to official Soviet narratives, and the trauma of witnessing the deaths of family members or friends. The Soviet mass deportations of North Caucasian ethnic groups have had a massive impact on local identity and memory, dominating the historiography. As a result, in the Karachai region, for example, the Holocaust has been almost completely sidelined. Another factor is that many historians of the region simply cite verbatim the ChGK reports, thereby repeating that body’s outlook that the Germans executed all Soviets citizens “irrespective of nationality.” Clashing memory politics led to locals digging up the corpses from one mass grave site and moving it to another because of outrage that Karachais had falsely been accused of killing Jews in the first location (Brooks). Another example of memory politics can be found in the complex ways the Holocaust has been memorialized in the city of Rostov-on-Don from the end of the occupation until today. There, in the city with the largest mass execution of Jews in all of Russia, Soviet authorities for many years refused to permit any memorial to be built, least of all one highlighting Jewish victimhood. When one was finally opened in 1975, it did not mention Jews. Only in 2004 was a commemorative plaque mounted that referred to the twentyseven thousand Jews killed in the Holocaust there. Evidently, the Soviet (and perhaps tacitly anti-Semitic) attitudes remain, however: seven years later, controversy erupted when the city administration backtracked and removed the plaque (Winkler). This reemergence of the Soviet equal-suffering argument was the only such case in Russia and probably elsewhere in the postSoviet space;46 thus, the fact that it took place in the North Caucasus is very important. What flows from the discussion and analysis in this volume is a picture of a very complex region, with considerable discontent, occasionally to the point of resentment, harbored by various factions in the local population toward Soviet rule. Arguably, these factors set the North Caucasus apart from other “old,” core Soviet territories (eastern Ukraine and Belorussia, 46 In contrast to the glorification of local collaborators that has been seen in western Ukraine and Lithuania, for example.

22  ❧  introduction

northern and central Russia) and bring it closer to the more tumultuous annexed areas farther west that came under the Soviet sway only after the outbreak of World War II (eastern Poland, western Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Bukovina) and proved far from pacified. With respect to anti-Semitic feelings, which in the annexed territories were frequently interwoven with anti-Bolshevism,47 the situation in the North Caucasus seems to have been rather different. On the one hand, this double “anti” (i.e., anti-Bolshevik and anti-Jewish) sentiment was shared first and foremost by the Cossacks, and hence it is not entirely surprising that they, in keeping with the Germans’ expectations, became some of the most ardent supporters of the Nazis’ “new order” in the region, including the German genocide against the Jews. In fact, such sentiments, in evidence even prior to the German occupation, led many Jews to leave the North Caucasus during the interim Soviet period and thus be spared destruction at the hands of the Nazis and local collaborators. On the other hand, despite local differences and somewhat contrary to German expectations, many among the non-Russian ethnicities seem to have been less enthusiastic about Nazi antiBolshevism and anti-Semitism. A factor that unifies both the Russian-dominated plains and the non-Russian highlands is that the Holocaust in the North Caucasus appears largely as an externally imposed phenomenon, with relatively little impact on the indigenous populations and with relatively limited support from them (the Cossacks being the notable exception). The motivating force behind the violence, Nazi Germany, was not a neighboring power that had ever previously been involved in the region, while the great majority of its civilian victims were also outsiders—recently arrived Jewish war refugees. This is the opposite of what one finds elsewhere in the occupied Soviet Union, where there were often established local Jewish communities, bearing the weight of decades- or even centuries-old tensions with the local people, and where the proportion of refugees, if there were any at all, was usually much smaller. The Jewish refugees in the North Caucasus were perhaps especially vulnerable, ostracized both as Jews and as refugees. The exact relationship between the two types of ostracism is difficult to ascertain. While there was some local 47 Joanna Michlic, “Anti-Polish and Pro-Soviet? 1939–1941 and the Stereotyping of the Jew in Polish Historiography,” in Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve, eds., Shared History—Divided Memory: Jews and Others in SovietOccupied Poland, 1939–1941 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007), 67–101.

introduction  ❧ 23

defense of the Mountain Jews, this did not result in any large-scale opposition to German anti-Jewish policies directed at Ashkenazi Jewish refugees, who were frequently viewed as a foreign group in the region. In part, this was because of the anti-Soviet and anti-Russian sentiments that the Nazis skillfully capitalized on. There is an additional layer to this, however. Before the German occupation, the Soviet administration had forcefully billeted Jewish (and other) refugees in local people’s dwellings, generally free of charge, and had sustained them using local resources. As a result, the local population harbored a growing feeling of weariness toward the refugees to the point of estrangement and alienation. From the German perspective, this attitude was an effective psychological barrier, a sort of a ghetto without walls, instrumental in preventing local people from helping Jews. Since its recapture by the Soviets, the North Caucasus has had a unique record on Holocaust memorialization, combining the apparently contradictory trends of (1) attempting officially to obliterate the Holocaust by subsuming it into the tragedy of Soviet peoples (something that continues today) and (2) perpetuating Holocaust memory on an individual level. In this respect, the region is probably more extreme compared with the Soviet Union in general and certainly compared with the contemporary Russian Federation. Thus, the North Caucasus emerges as another region of competing grievances, something it has in common with most German-occupied Soviet territories. A major difference between the North Caucasus and Belorussia, Russia, and Ukraine—where the Nazis viewed the Slavic majority populations as “subhuman”—was that the German occupation of the former was notably milder with respect to the local population and thus left fewer scars on local national memory. The exception was the Jews, especially those who came to the North Caucasus from elsewhere and were murdered there. In the victimhood narrative that gained currency first in the Soviet Union and then in post-Soviet Russia, however, these differences have sometimes become blurred in the local memory and historiography. A factor that seems to frame North Caucasian attitudes toward World War II (and all interwoven issues, including the Holocaust) is that the region has remained part of Russia, unlike the independent Ukraine and Baltic states where the discourse on World War II is often stridently anti-Soviet/Russian. In the North Caucasus, this produces the distinctive and paradoxical narrative of loyalty to the Soviet, and now Russian, Rodina (Motherland), which at the same time was the source of intense suffering and bitterness as a result of the mass deportations. In this view, Joseph Stalin’s unjust treatment of many North Caucasian

24  ❧  introduction

ethnic groups further equalized the situation, turning it into a common tragedy, of which Holocaust is but a part. The editors hope that this volume leads to further scholarly attention to and debate about the Holocaust in the North Caucasus.

Chapter One

The Caucasus: A Rock in the Grinding Wheels of World History Georgi Derluguian This chapter seeks to provide a substantive answer to the simple question, What is the Caucasus? As with all such ostensibly simple questions, the answers tend to become complex and far from short. In order to keep it reasonably brief and still meaningful, the answer would have to be impressionistic yet undergirded by whole batteries of theories relegated to footnotes. I cannot engage here either the legacies of classical Orientalism, the numerous recent commentaries on post-Soviet wars, or the impressively growing bodies of academic research in anthropology and literary studies.1 For those seeking more detail, several superbly written overviews of the region are now available 1

Legacies of classical Orientalism: John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London: Longmans, Green, 1908). Commentaries on postSoviet wars: Moshe Gammer, The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule (London: Hurst, 2006); Oliver Bullough, Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the Defiant People of the Caucasus (London: Penguin, 2010); Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, trans. Alexander Burry and Tatiana Tulchinsky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Anthropology: Bruce Grant and Lale YalçınHeckmann, eds., Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories and the Making of a World Area (Münster: Lit, 2007). Literary studies: Rebecca Gould, Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

26  ❧  chapter one

in English.2 A singular achievement is the historical atlas produced by the Ossetian scholar Artur Tsutsiev, who succeeded in mapping the ethno-constructivist perspective of Benedict Anderson onto the landscape and longue durée structures of Fernand Braudel.3 This chapter rather takes the angle of historical sociology, which its doyen Charles Tilly expressed in a monograph title of unbeatable brevity: Why?4 One may notice from the titles already cited that in the West the prevalent associations with the Caucasus are imperial conquest and ferocious native resistance as well as the amazing resilience shown by the myriad of its peoples over the centuries. In fact, the Caucasus is far from merely another “bloodlands” at the distant reaches of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This volume, among other things, documents examples of empathy and humanity even in the darkest times. It is also our Caucasus. In many respects, the region may seem downright incredible, beginning with its fabled customs and ethno-linguistic diversity. Here we discover the little-known parallels and echoes of historical processes first evolving in the cradles of civilization, in Mesopotamia and ancient Greece as well as the nomadic Great Steppe. Later in time, the Caucasus came to play a wonderfully disproportionate role in shaping Russian politics, culture, even cuisine and popular humor. (Look up for starters the once legendary jokes attributed to “Radio Yerevan.”) In the nineteenth century, the Caucasus captivated such giants of Russian literature as Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Leo Tolstoy. In the transformative and extreme twentieth century, various Caucasians sided with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, and quite a few rose to the topmost positions in Moscow. After all, Stalin himself was an ethnic Georgian. Still later, during the chaotic aftermath of Soviet collapse in the 1990s, the wildly blooming “Russian mafia” actually included major ethnic components originating in the Caucasus: Chechens and Dagestanis,

2

3 4

Neal Ascherson, Black Sea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Thomas de Waal, The Caucasus: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Artur Tsutsiev, Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus, trans. Nora Seligman Favorov (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). Charles Tilly, Why? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 27

Georgians and Armenians, the exotic Yazidi Kurds and Mountain Jews.5 So, what is this Caucasus—and why?

The Mountain of Tongues The fundamental fact of the geography, immediately visible from maps, is that the Caucasus consists of formidable snow-capped mountains tightly flanked by the Black and Caspian Seas. Yet none of the indigenous peoples had ever specialized in seafaring or even coastal fishing. The reason is right on the map: much unlike the Mediterranean, the Black and Caspian Seas offer none of the convenient archipelagoes or protective harbors. A good half of the year navigation is scarcely possible owing to the harsh winds blowing from the northern steppe and central Asian deserts. Climate and geography caged the Caucasus peoples in their separate protective valleys. Yet the same landscape could be seen as a natural fortress providing refuge to its inhabitants. Hence the great paradox of unyielding rock in the grinding wheels of world history. On its southern end, the Caucasus borders on Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Persia, from where the ancient agrarian empires radiated their influences. The Babylonians knew the Caucasus mostly as the huge Mount Ararat at the far end of their universe, where Noah (or rather, in the earlier myths, Utnapishtim) could land his ark.6 5 6

Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). Irving Finkel, The Ark before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014). For the ancient Greeks it was the mythical land of the Golden Fleece visited and robbed by Jason and his Argonauts. In the north lies the flat Great Steppe. Christopher Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Waves of nomadic invaders from Inner Asia had been recurrently sweeping over the steppes since the Bronze Age: the Indo-European Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans; next the medieval Turkic Huns, Bulgars, Kipchaks; then the Mongols and, two centuries later, Tamerlane’s armies. The last arrivals, in the seventeenth century, were the exotic Lamaist Kalmyks, another Mongolian people, finally stopped in their tracks by the power of Russian and Circassian firearms. The Kalmyks subsequently settled in the steppe between the lower Volga and Dagestan, forming today the only officially Buddhist jurisdiction in Europe, with a white lotus on its saffron-colored

28  ❧  chapter one

The medieval Arab geographer Al Masoudi famously called the Caucasus the “mountain of tongues.” Indeed, the relatively small region boasts an improbable variety of endemic languages. The Nakh (i.e., ChechenIngush) and Dagestani, the Abkhaz-Circassian, and Kartvelian (Georgian) are three unique linguistic families of their own found nowhere else in the world. The Ossetian is the sole survivor in the ancient Scythian lineage of the Indo-European family. The relic Armenian, though in the same very large taxonomical family, forms its peculiar ancient lineage distantly related to Greek. The Karachai, Balkar, and Kumyk are the tiny remnants of the medieval Turkic Kipchak (Polovtsian). Only Azeri is a large close relative to modern Turkish, although the historical formation of Azeri culture and predominant religion have been directly influenced by Persia, first Zoroastrian and later Shi’ite Islamic. A modern political observer would appreciate what an obstacle this resplendent mouthful of ethnic appellations might pose for state integration. In fact, political and cultural fragmentation, or “tribalism,” has been the prevalent pattern in the Caucasus for the last three millennia despite the recurrent imperial invasions by Assyrians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, and Ottomans. Xenophon and Strabo, the two quite different ancient Greeks with direct familiarity of local realities, left us colorful descriptions. Even the medieval Arab caliphate gave up on converting the Armenians and Georgians in order to directly integrate them into the rising empire of Islam. A loose feudal suzerainty seemed the most to be achieved, and therefore the Armenians and Georgians could proudly persist in their relic versions of Eastern Christianity.7 Likewise, since time immemorial, the various communities of non-European Jews could carve their niches in the Caucasian mosaic.

7

flag. Michael Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met: the Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600–1771 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). The Caucasus was perennially in the vortex of Eurasian history, and yet, shielded by the mountains, it could remain itself. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 29

The Arrival of Modernity In the late eighteenth century, the Russian Empire became a major external force advancing into the Caucasus and, for the first time, one arriving from the north. From the classicist imperial palaces of Saint Petersburg, the Caucasus initially appeared merely a geographic barrier to be skipped on the way to the colonial destinations of Asia and a valuable bridgehead in the strategic encirclement of the perennial foe, the Ottoman Turks.8 Rescuing the fellow Christian Armenians and Georgians, just like the Balkan Slavs and Greeks, appeared at the time an excellent ideological justification for the Russian advance. Moreover, the local Christian nobilities and clergies, after sorting out a few nasty questions of equivalency to the imperial Table of Ranks, provided a pool of eager supporters and prospective recruits for the officer corps and administrative bureaucracy. A dynamic and colorfully hybrid colonial society soon sprang up in the centers of imperial administration, above all at the seat of the new viceroyalty in Tiflis (Tbilisi), which rivaled Odessa as a polyglot metropolis at the southern edges of Russia’s expanding empire. Incidentally, the same famously generous and energetic Prince Vorontsov, an enlightened Anglophile, served from the 1820s to the 1850s as viceroy and chief builder of both Odessa and, later, Tiflis.9 Already in the nineteenth century, many Georgians and Armenians rose to the highest ranks in the Russian Empire—among them the hero of the 1812 war against Napoleon, the Georgian Prince Bagration; and the chief minister to the reformer Czar Alexander II, the Armenian General Mikhail Loris-Melikov. In the following century, Russian revolutionary parties obtained their militants in disproportionate numbers from the Caucasus, in this respect matched only by Jews. The Mensheviks in fact ended up with a Georgian majority in their ranks, and in May 1918 Georgia became the first country in the world governed by an elected Social-Democratic majority.10 In the Soviet governments in Moscow, besides the Georgians Stalin, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and Lavrenty Beria, a common fixture was the competent 8

Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov and Marie Bennigsen Broxup, eds., The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World (London: Hurst, 1992). 9 Anthony L. H. Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov: Viceroy to the Tsar (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990). 10 Stephen F. Jones, Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

30  ❧  chapter one

and diligent son of Armenian peasants Anastas Mikoyan. His inordinate survivor skills were captured in the popular rhyme “ot Il’icha do Il’icha bez infarkta i paralicha”—from Ilich (i.e., Vladimir Ilich Lenin) to another Ilich (Leonid Ilich Brezhnev) without a stroke or paralysis. His younger brother designed the line of fighter planes called MiG (after Artyom Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich). Equally notable to this day remains the presence of Georgians, Armenians, and Azeris in the managerial and artistic elites of Russia. The Caucasus surely reaped its benefits of empire, too. Commonly neglected is the fact that the imposition of Russian rule proceeded quite smoothly also in the southeastern corner of the Caucasus adjacent to the Caspian, in the future Azerbaijan.11 Wrestled from the weakened Qajar Persia in a series of quick border wars early in the nineteenth century, this fertile and densely populated territory was locally governed by an assortment of mostly Perso-Turkic khanates. Their Shi’ite Muslim rulers soon switched allegiance to the new powerful suzerain that had benevolently left intact most of their traditional privileges. The presumably great differences of religion and culture in this instance failed to explode, overridden by the class interests of landed nobility. Russian empire surely had a great deal of experience in integrating such Muslim elites.12 Later in the nineteenth century, Baku, the capital of Russian Azerbaijan, would become a world center of the nascent oil industry, with all its extremes of nouveau-riche wealth and angry proletarian militancy.13

11 Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 12 Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and the Tsar: Islam and Empires in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 13 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1990). The explosive industrial growth produced in Baku a range of new opportunities and the attendant competitive conflicts. This situation fed vicious rivalries between Christian Armenians, inordinately successful in the modern urban environments, and the predominantly rural Muslims. The tensions erupted in ethnic pogroms and massacres with the collapses of state power during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The Armenian-Azeri conflict, forcefully contained during the Soviet period, reignited once again after 1988 and flared up into the Karabagh war between the post-Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War (New York: NYU Press, 2003). Indicatively, however, even the belligerents themselves omitted religion from their lists of

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 31

North Caucasus: Modern Roots of Jihad The commonly neglected story of Azerbaijan under Russian rule highlights by contrast the processes that in the North Caucasus produced the Islamic holy wars against imperial domination in the 1820s to the 1860s and again in the post-Soviet 1990s. The typically romantic journalistic references to “mountain freedom” and the endemic Islamic militancy, however, appear sorely insufficient when placed in a broader comparative perspective. Why do some strands of Islam at certain times and places become militant but not others? What really must be explained here is the insurgency. It emerged from the profound shifts in the structures of local societies and their social psychology, in turn (surprise, surprise!) triggered by the spread of European modernity. The following section presents a historical-sociological hypothesis for which I bear the main responsibility. The stereotypical imagery of the Caucasus—a motley multiplicity of mountain tribes abiding by the rigorist honor codes and living the austere lifestyle of sheepherding and poor mountain farming—in fact refers mainly to the North Caucasus. This area, now a part of the Russian Federation, extends from the tremendous bare peaks of Dagestan on the Caspian side to the densely forested hills of Circassia on the Black Sea. To illustrate this by an inevitably simplifying analogy, if the Armenians, Azeris, and Georgians could be perhaps compared in Eastern Europe, respectively, to the Greeks, Romanians, and Poles, then in the North Caucasus we rather encounter something akin to the rugged isolating landscapes of Albania, Sardinia, and Corsica, or the Rif Mountains of Morocco. The larger Mediterranean region historically abounded in such tribal refugia.14 The social hierarchies of the North Caucasus tribes were anything but simple and primordial. These were quite complex and supple adaptations to environments where no agrarian states or merchant cities could have ever emerged by concentrating the land taxes and trade flows. Instead, the North Caucasus peoples, many of them linguistically and genetically traceable back

causes. The Azeri-Armenian rivalries remained purely nationalist—and therefore also very modern. 14 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972–73).

32  ❧  chapter one

to antiquity or even the Bronze Age,15 almost all with their peculiar languages in separate valleys, had been traditionally ruled by the hereditary princely chiefs and warrior aristocracies ordered along the ladder of distinct traditional ranks. Free commoners, however, formed the bulk of tribal societies. Crucially, as we shall soon see, these commoners enjoyed the rights to convene in popular assemblies, own land, and bear arms, at least to the degree of their material means. Below these patricians and plebes (the ancient Roman equivalences are not incidental here), there still existed a subordinate hierarchy of personal statuses ranging from the landless client families of freedmen and serf peasants to indentured house servants and the actual chattel slaves. Raiding for slaves and selling them to foreigners has been in fact a very long-running phenomenon in the North Caucasus, recorded as far back as in Hellenistic antiquity. In the medieval period slaves appear as the single major export from the Caucasus, purchased on the spot by the Byzantines, the Genoese, and later the Turks. The roots of slaving were both in the internal factor of status competition among warrior elites and in the region’s external position as distant periphery in the Mediterranean-world economy. The Caucasus, generally poor in natural resources, could offer few valuable items for external trade except its own people. Circassian maidens commanded the highest prices in the Arab and Ottoman slave markets as graceful whiteskinned concubines, while the boys reputedly made the most loyal and ferocious Mamelukes as palace guards.16 (Here, “Circassian” functioned rather as a commercial brand name for nearly all captives taken from the region.) For the Caucasus warrior aristocracies, like all such status groups always pressed to keep up their exclusive appearances and reputations, the best opportunity to acquire elite weaponry and horses was in a lightning night raid to abduct a few adolescents from another tribe to be quickly sold to Ottoman slavers on the Black Sea coast. Collecting from their own peasants the usual feudal rents in grain, sheep, and fox hides was patently insufficient to maintain noble riders to the desired high standards. The mountain peasants endured such predations only as long as they could not acquire the effective weapons to match the strike force of their armor-clad robber barons on fast steeds. 15 Chuan-Chao Wang et al., “Ancient Human Genome-Wide Data from a 3000Year Interval in the Caucasus Corresponds with Eco-geographic regions,” Nature Communications 10, article no. 590 (February 2019), https://www. nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08220-8.pdf. 16 William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (London: Hurst, 2003).

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 33

Jumping ahead, this balance of inequality would change dramatically in the eighteenth century with firearms falling into the hands of commoners. Another novel limitation was introduced since the 1820s with antislavery patrolling by the Russian navy on the Black Sea. Not unlike abolitionism in Western countries, the Russian action was ideologically justified and emotionally buttressed by very different factors at the levels of state policy and popular imagination. Saint Petersburg projected itself as a modern European power alongside the other Western colonialisms of its age that were forcefully civilizing the “savage” East. Yet there also existed a specifically Russian motivation rooted in the national memories of centuries-long horror and humiliation at the hands of Tatar slave-raiders. The Russian sailors and soldiers, even if serf peasants themselves, on many reported occasions willingly provoked their officers into action when spotting suspected slavers.17 All this would add much human complexity to the long campaigns of Russian conquest in the Caucasus. The legendary hospitality and vengeful bellicosity of Caucasian highlanders were in fact two sides of the same coin. In an armed yet stateless society the only precarious guarantees of one’s life, honor, and property were the social reputations of implacable foe and protective generous host.18 Again, recall the deeper historical precedents like the Celtic tribes of ancient Europe, Macedon before Alexander, or Scandinavian Vikings. In fact, a great many such anarchic societies had once existed just outside the realm of agrarian civilizations, typically in the geographical protection of mountains, forests, and deserts. Quite a few of them have survived well into the present.19 Two material factors—guns and maize, both of them emerging from European modernity—in the eighteenth century rapidly spread in the North Caucasus and wrought profound consequences. One can hardly imagine today what a “traditional” Caucasian meal would be without the new American staples such as chili peppers, beans, tomatoes, pumpkins, and potatoes, not to forget tobacco in the end. But above all, it was the wonderfully productive and drought-resistant American corn, or maize (which also feeds the meaty exotic bird misleadingly called turkey). The arrival of new 17 Konstantin Staniukovich, Maximka: Sea Stories, trans. Bernard Isaacs (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1969). 18 Timothy Earle, How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 19 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

34  ❧  chapter one

crops boosted a tremendous demographic growth that had soon more than recovered the huge medieval losses from plagues, nomadic invasions, and the internecine slave-raiding. The multiplication of humans in the North Caucasus (for the lack of state-sponsored population censuses visible now only archaeologically in the spread of village sites) brought renewed pressure to claim lands for cultivation and pasturage, especially in the fertile foothills and adjacent plains. The erstwhile highlanders—above all, the Chechens and Circassians—began descending from their protective mountains into the open, where they clashed with the marauding mounted aristocrats and with other tribes. And here guns come into action. As mentioned before, the last great wave of nomadic invaders, the Mongolic Kalmyks, was met with gun salvoes already in the 1630s. Those early guns were obtained from the Ottomans via the Crimean Khanate, apparently in exchange for the traditional booty of slaves. The new gunmaking technology, however, was soon mustered by the industrious smiths of Dagestan and Georgian cities (many such artisans traditionally were ethnic Armenians) whose mass production of the slowly loaded, yet impressively effective grooved-barreled rifles eventually brought down the prices to within the means of commoners. If the splendid equipment of medieval Caucasian knights, consisting of chain mail, helmet, and saber, not to forget the purebred steeds, typically cost a fortune (the equivalent of hundreds of sheep or several slaves), now the commoners could afford their rifles and daggers for as little as a dozen sheep.20 Armed with such new weapons, the commoners at once found themselves a lethal match for the raiding aristocrats and capable of repulsing the old pillaging exactions in staples and virgin girls. In the Caucasus, guns did prove a social equalizer. Steeped in the courses of sublime political philosophy, we tend to forget that the earliest democracies did not derive from the lofty ideas alone. Premodern democracies typically served as the rudimentary cooperatives of armed commoners, whether farmers or urban craftsmen and merchants, who banded together to defend their households from predatory raiding by warrior elites. The new weapons alone, however, would not be enough. Group solidarity raised to the level of moral imperative became the sine qua non for the success of civic communes. In the North Caucasus, the source of inspiration along with organizational template was found in the original example

20 E. G. Astvatsaturian, Oruzhie narodov Kavkaza [Weaponry of the peoples of the Caucasus] (Nalchik: El-Fa, 1995).

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 35

of the Prophet Muhammad and his conquering band of religiously inspired Arabian Bedouins. Islam was a surprisingly late arrival in the North Caucasus.21 The original armies of the Arab Caliphate had to end their expansion at the southern edge of Dagestan, in the ancient fortress town of Derbent. Their foray into the vast inhospitable steppe to the north and the marshes of the lower Volga evidently could only punish the nomadic Khazars but failed to convert them. As we know from medieval legend, the Khazar elite instead chose Judaism, evidently in a sly plot to claim the prestigious legacy of civilization and a religion of the Book even older than and equidistant from the official creeds of both Byzantines and Arabs. This hypothesis recently obtained a surprising corroboration in a Viking-era hoard of treasure unearthed in Sweden. It contained Khazar coins struck with the wonderfully evasive Arabic inscription “Musa Rasul al-Allah”—that is, Moses Messenger of God.22 This polymorphous religious situation was revolutionized during the transformative eighteenth century. An activist network of charismatic Sufi preachers rapidly spread west from Dagestan to Chechnya and Circassia. Almost all were the locals who had traveled on their own to receive religious education in the Middle East and later increasingly in Dagestan. The majority of them were commoners in social rank or even former slaves manumitted for their exemplary piety. The tribal communities now competed in attracting the prestigious Islamic scholars—perhaps not unlike the erstwhile competition of Greek poleis for the itinerant philosophers. Islam challenged the traditional tribal norms largely skewed to benefit the princes and warrior aristocrats. In a series of dramatic episodes, armed peasants gathered to swear allegiance to each other and to Sharia justice. The resisting aristocrats were ostracized, exiled, or murdered, their belongings 21 Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (London: Hurst, 2000). 22 V. Ia. Petrukhin, Problema obrashcheniia khazar [The problem of Khazar conversion], The 2012 Summer School Lecture at the Sefer Center of Judaic Culture, Moscow, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G18imPEqvA. This legendary episode serves to illustrate the daunting logistics faced by the earliest Islamic advance. Still much later, in the Golden Horde period, when the conversion of Volga Tatars had already taken place, there is precious little evidence of Islamic presence in the mountains of North Caucasus. The local tribes continued to venerate their sacred oaks or even the ruins of Byzantine chapels and relic stone crosses.

36  ❧  chapter one

confiscated. The newly adopted ruling firmly banned offering any aid and hospitality to such outcasts. Imagine now what happens when imperial Russia accidentally steps into this boiling cauldron. The class instinct of Russian commanders, themselves serf-owning nobles, suggested alliance with the beleaguered aristocracies of mountain peoples. This affinity enmeshed the Russian colonial armies from the 1780s on in an endless series of border raids, local skirmishes, and punitive expeditions against the rebellious peasants. The blowback effect became unexpectedly massive. In the early 1830s, isolated rebellions coalesced and flared up in what was now a unified pan-Caucasus holy war to repulse the advancing Christian empire. Its supreme leader, the Dagestani Imam Shamil, proved not only a charismatic preacher but also a superbly capable builder of military and administrative structures. For the first time ever, Shamil’s rebel imamate transcended the tribal boundaries.23 The mountainous landscape, mobile guerrilla tactics, the superior accuracy of locally manufactured rifles, moreover the ferocious determination of the Caucasus highlanders inspired and directed by their legendary imam combined to produce the intractable armed resistance of a strength and duration that Russian armies had encountered perhaps only in Poland— and this with the significantly smaller populations of the North Caucasus. Notoriously, a few rebellious Poles and adventurous British agents, precursors of Lawrence of Arabia, had also rushed to the Caucasus from the opposite side.24 They sought to aid the Circassians, at the time enormously romanticized in Europe, and block the feared Russian advance toward Asia.25 This much-publicized spy action, however, for better or for worse, made little difference, on soberer account. Imam Shamil remained always his own leader, particularly during the Crimean war of 1853–56, when he astutely evaded allying himself to the British. The epic of Shamil’s ghazawat (the prevalent term for jihad in the Caucasus) was depicted in numerous poetic ballads and in literary masterpieces by no less than Leo Tolstoy, himself a participant as a young artillery officer. Here, let me limit myself to just three cursory theoretical observations.

23 More detail can be found in Georgi Derluguian, “The Forgotten Complexities of Jihad in the North Caucasus,” in Caucasus Paradigms, 75–92. 24 Ascherson, Black Sea. 25 Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (London: Kodansha International, 1992).

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 37

To stress it first, Shamil found in the original Islamic tradition not only his fundamentalist inspiration but also the functional blueprint for war-making and state-building in a tribal society. Unlike the other world religions formed inside the classical agrarian empires, Islam emerged in tribally divided Arabia and from the outset combined proselytizing with state-building and expansive warfare.26 The effects of centuries-long Roman occupations arguably did not apply to Muhammad. Second, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Islam underwent a powerfully militant revival, spreading from the tribal edges of its realm after the imperial centers in the Ottoman, Persian, and Mogul Empires had succumbed to disintegration and Western colonial conquest. The North Caucasus ghazawat was not at all unique in its time. Holy wars and revivalist movements emerged in the contemporaneous peripheries from Maghrib to sub-Saharan western Africa, from Libya, Sudan, and Somalia to Afghanistan, British India, the islands of Southeast Asia, and, of course, centrally including the Arabian Wahhabites. At the end of the twentieth century, we see largely the same geographies reignited in the latest wave of jihadi movements. The last observation is perhaps the most awkward politically, at least in the Caucasus. It was the same state structures built by Imam Shamil during his resistance campaigns of the 1830s–50s that ultimately enabled Russian “pacification” in the 1860s. Shamil himself surrendered on honorable terms in 1859 and moved with his family and retainers to a comfortable exile in heartland Russia after being introduced to the incredulously curious court officials in Saint Petersburg. Scores of Shamil’s naibs (deputies) and village headmen received government pensions or equivalent positions in the Russian administration in the Caucasus. The earlier Russian attempts to incorporate the highlander aristocracies had failed because the peasants, armed with guns and newly inspired by Islamic ideology, had refused to obey their erstwhile rulers. But now, after several decades of increasingly organized resistance, a new kind of ruling elite had coalesced inside the theocracy of Imam Shamil. Former rebels grew weary over the years of fighting, and at least some of them became more ready to accept the Russian bargain. The side with vastly more manpower and industrially manufactured weapons (aided by none other than the American inventor Samuel Colt),27 as well as 26 Michael Cook, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 27 Joseph Bradley, Guns for the Tsar: American Technology and the Small Arms Industry in Nineteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University

38  ❧  chapter one

strategic patience learned during the protracted campaigns, eventually overwhelmed the Caucasus highlanders and invited a series of defections. Such was the situation in Shamil’s heartland in Dagestan. Elsewhere in Chechnya and especially in the coastal regions of Circassia, the news of Russian victory generated a panic of eschatological proportions. Despairing and terrified by the rumors of pending conversion to Christianity and resettlement to Siberia, many thousands of Chechen and Circassian extended families in the early 1860s crowded the Black Sea beaches hoping, often despite the dangerous winter storms, to catch boats leaving for the Turkish shores. An unknown though tragically large number of these muhajirs (religious refugees) perished in the passage or died from disease and starvation upon landing. Some would eventually return to the Caucasus, further complicating the counts. Today, Circassian activists in the diaspora and in the Russian North Caucasus itself seek recognition of these grievous events as genocide.28 The political campaign first emerged in 1988–90 during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms and flared up again in the run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, once the last-stand Circassian stronghold on the Black Sea coast.29 While the historical details await a systematic investigation, the general picture seems incontrovertible. The macrohistorical sociologist Michael Mann in his extensive theoretical study of ethnic cleansings, ancient and modern, places the 1860s exodus of defeated Muslims from the North Caucasus in the category of colonial cleansings alongside the destruction of Native American peoples and the German extermination acts in South West Africa.30 The refugee survivors started the Circassian communities still existing in the former Ottoman provinces in present-day Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Kosovo. As many as a few million can be found in Turkey itself. In the violently volatile epochs such as the collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Press, 1990). 28 The most pointed charges, however, belong to Anglo-American authors. See Bullough, Let Our Fame Be Great, and Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). 29 Robert W. Orttung and Sufian Zhemukhov, Putin’s Olympics: The Sochi Games and the Evolution of Twenty-First Century Russia (New York: Routledge, 2017). 30 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The Russian translation of this book contains important editorial notes and additional references; see Maikl Mann, Temnaia storona demokratii (Moscow: 5 Rim, 2016), 202–5.

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 39

Empires at the turn of the twentieth century, former victims could turn into vengeful perpetrators.31 The Circassian militias infamously contributed to the late Ottoman genocides. In the meantime, Circassia was drastically depopulated, losing perhaps as much as three-quarters of its indigenous inhabitants. But why did Circassia suffer the greatest losses in Russian colonial conquest? Geographic proximity to the Black Sea coast and therefore to Turkey is only the beginning of explanation. More important was the politics of conquest and resistance. The influence of Dagestani Imam Shamil among the Circassians of the northwest Caucasus had always been distant and tenuous. Shamil’s final bargain with the czar could not mean much for the majority of Circassians. And then, a profound social split among the Circassians themselves must be taken into account. Evidently the greatest losses befell the more “democratic” and therefore militantly free tribes where the traditional aristocrats enjoyed next to no influence. In coastal Circassia the Russian empire builders found few indigenous counterparts to incorporate into the imperial service. The imperial command, at first surprised by the exodus of prospective subjects, apparently decided that the departure of more intransigent Muslims would benefit the colonization of newly acquired lands. Russian authorities negotiated with the Ottomans an exchange of populations bringing from coastal Turkey, mostly from the area of Trabzon, numerous Greeks and Armenians to settle on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus. These new arrivals were welcomed as commercial tobacco farmers whose loyalty and taxes helped to consolidate the conquest. The numbers of new settlers were further boosted by ethnic Moldavians, Bulgarians, Germans, and even Estonians who also engaged in commercial farming. By the 1890s, the Caucasus economy was booming and rapidly developing along capitalist lines. Railroads and modern seaports changed the landscape. The population numbers multiplied accordingly, soon creating severe land shortages and new conflicts that the czarist empire could barely contain.

31 Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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Empires Imploding By far the largest settler population in the North Caucasus were the Cossacks. This label enmeshed in historical mythology and stereotypes requires some untangling. Today, Russian and Ukrainian enthusiasts may claim that the first “knights of the Steppe” originated as early as the medieval Kievan Rus. This is historical nonsense. The possession of guns is what enabled the Cossack forays into the nomad-dominated steppe, not before the latter sixteenth century.32 Many such groups of armed and independent frontiersmen emerged at the far edges of European expansion: Brazilian bandeirantes, Austro-Hungarian Grenzers, South African Boers. Like the seaborne privateers, they were regarded as a useful mercenary addition to imperial armies in times of war, often reverting to brigandage or staging rebellions once their wartime funding had ended.33 The story of the Cossacks is largely the story of modern state-making in imperial Russia.34 Following the huge and lasting scare of the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–75, the government of Catherine the Great resolved to strictly regiment the Cossack borderlands. From then until 1917, the Cossack commanders were to be nobleman officers appointed from Saint Petersburg. The commoner ranks were reduced to lifelong compulsory service essentially as a variety of state-owned military serfs under the War Ministry, rather than the Interior Ministry in whose purview were the common state peasants. Except for the Terek Cossack Host dating back to the late sixteenth century, the North Caucasus received the majority of its military settlers mainly after the 1790s, from the Russian Don area and the Ukrainian Zaporozhie. For their frontier service, the Cossacks could expect generous land plots in the newly conquered areas and the special privileges of what now became a special estate in the imperial hierarchy, alongside the nobles, clergy, merchants, town dwellers, and peasants. The Cossack journalism emerging with the spread of literacy and newspapers at the turn of twentieth century may surprise us today with its persistently plaintive discourse regarding the “declining situation” (oskudenie) of 32 William H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 33 Michael Khodarkovsky, “The Stepan Razin Uprising: Was It a “Peasant War”? Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 42, no. 1 (1994): 1–19. 34 Nancy Shields Kollmann, The Russian Empire 1450–1801 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 41

their estate. Advancing grievances evidently was an effective strategy of mobilizing group awareness, which is what was happening all over the declining empire of the czars. First, perhaps surprisingly to many, it was the use of Cossack mounted troopers as punitive police detachments in the suppression of strikes and other mass protests. The Cossacks themselves increasingly regarded this as demeaning for the estate of war heroes. In summer 1918, reports an émigré memoirist, at the parade of White forces in Ekaterinodar (later Krasnodar), one of General Anton Denikin’s officers ventured a cheerful exclamation: “Kazaki—molodtsy!” (Cossacks—the brave lads!) To which the Cossack commander standing nearby audibly retorted, “For three centuries we’ve been brave lads. It would be nice to at last become citizens.”35 In the course of Russian Civil War, the Whites themselves ended up disbanding the Cossack autonomist government (the Kuban Rada) and killing several of its leaders. The second and major source of pre-1917 Cossack complaints in the North Caucasus became the shortage of lands. This might sound no less surprising. After all, the Cossacks’ service in the Russian Empire was to be rewarded with fairly generous land allotments. The demographic dynamics of modernization, however, offer a glaring explanation. At the end of the Caucasus wars in 1864, the population of the Kuban Cossack Host stood at around 150,000.36 Its wonderfully fertile lands seemed plentiful. By 1913, the population of Kuban oblast grew to 1.5 million—a tenfold increase! Much of it was due to the spread of commercial farming by ethnic Germans, Bessarabian and Ukrainian settlers, and the wealthier entrepreneurial Russians who, legally or less legally, paid good money to the Cossack headmen for leasing what were theoretically communal lands. Now add the sizable migration of poorer farm labor from the core regions of the Russian Empire after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. In 1917, this situation exploded, as a contemporary Bolshevik commentator put it, in the “wildest of class struggles” between the landowning Cossacks and landless migrants.37 35 D. Skobtsov, Tri goda revolutsii i grazhdanskoi voiny na Kubani [Three years of revolution and civil war in the Kuban] (Paris: n.p., 1962). 36 V. Ratushniak, Sel’skokhoziaistvennoe proizvodstvo Severnogo Kavkaza v kontse XIX–nachale XX veka [Agricultural production in the North Caucasus at the turn of twentieth century] (Rostov-on-Don: Izdatel’stvo Rostovskogo universiteta, 1989). 37 G. Ladokha, Ocherki grazhdanskoi bor’by na Kubani [Essays on the Civil War in the Kuban] (Krasnodar: Burevestnik, 1924).

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In the Caucasus, agrarian conflicts could readily acquire an ethnic dimension. Here is an illustrative story gleaned from archival materials.38 Late in 1905, a native prince who had been wasting away his time and money at taverns with friends mounted his horse and rode into the mountain villages to collect from peasants the rents due to him since the abolition of serfdom in the 1860s. This time, however, the peasants refused to pay, citing the revolution, which, they heard, had abolished such rents. Enraged, the prince lashed an old woman with a horsewhip. After such an offense, the prince readily found his head covered in a smelly shepherd’s felt cape (burka) and received a good beating. The humiliated prince rode straight to the local gendarmerie, where a Russian officer explained that the Empire was enmeshed in war with Japan and internal revolution—no Cossack troops were available anywhere in the district. The nobleman then gathered his friends from the tavern, and, armed with whatever weapons they could find at home, the improvised punitive expedition returned to the offending village. This time, there were deaths in the skirmish. Almost two years later, after the first Russian revolution had been suppressed, the gendarmes finally captured a few rebel peasants and sent them in chains to Siberia—where the prisoners met the Bolsheviks. After 1917, they returned from Siberia already as converts to the new political creed and fighters in the Civil War then flaring up. Now comes the rub: the prince was a Georgian from the town of Gori (incidentally, Stalin’s birthplace), while his peasants were ethnic Ossetians. The economic class dimension of this old conflict became forgotten, yet the ethnic memories of violence persisted and would explode again in the South Ossetian wars of 1990 and 2008. The scale and ferocity of violence in the Russian Civil War is baffling even taking into account that this was in direct continuation of industrial mass violence from World War I.39 38 Dokumenty i materialy k godovshchine Pervoi russkoi revolutsii v Iugo-Osetii [Documents and materials on the anniversary of the first Russian revolution in South Ossetia] (Staliniri: Gospolitizdat, 1955). 39 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Suffice it to cite a few episodes. In January 1918, the nascent Azeri militias massacred at the railroad node of Shamkhor up to ten thousand Russian soldiers of the former imperial army in an attempt to seize their weapons. Firuz Kazemzadeh, The Struggle for Transcaucasia, 1917–1921 (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951). On March 31 of the same year, the Bolshevik forces of the Baku Commune and their Armenian allies killed, while purging the suspect Muslim neighborhoods,

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 43

All this stands in contrast to the post-Soviet conflicts of the 1990s: twenty thousand dead on both sides during the three years of the Karabagh war, seven thousand to nine thousand in Abkhazia, and even in Chechnya in 1995–96, with all the indiscriminate use of modern firepower amid the rickety Soviet-era high-rises in the city of Grozny, a realistic count comes to seventy thousand to eighty thousand dead, the vast majority of the victims being civilians caught in the crossfire.40 Certainly great tragedies, but on a different order of magnitude. The mass violence raging for three decades after 1914 on the ruins of Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires stands exceptional by modern standards.

Anticapitalist Modernization The Caucasus perspective helps us to appreciate why the Bolsheviks won and how they subsequently used their power to change whole societies. In fall 1918, the Whites were razing with artillery fire the Ingush and Chechen villages because they could not find there the scattered remnants of the defeated Reds. But why did the Muslim villagers, at such great cost, provide asylum to communists? The largely untold story is that the Russian Revolution revived by various estimates, between three and twelve thousand people. The fall of the Baku Commune that September was accompanied by another massacre claiming nearly twenty thousand lives, this time mainly Armenian. In a similar series of conflicts, in spring 1918, Red militias spontaneously emerging in the city of Ekaterinodar tried to preventively disarm the Circassians from nearby native villages (auls). Facing the intransigence of “counterrevolutionary Asiatics,” the Reds in a matter of days leveled some twenty villages with artillery fire. Soon the Whites took the city and in the first three days executed eight thousand Reds. A few months later, the same White army of General Denikin submitted to punishing bombardment Ingush and Chechen villages before marching on the Bolshevik-held cities of Tsaritsyn (later renamed Stalingrad) and Moscow. This operation was recorded in the wartime diaries of Mikhail Bulgakov, a one-time White officer and future author of The Master and Margarita. Still in 1922, after the Bolshevik victory, the Kuban commissar for agriculture, comrade E. Epstein, merrily reported to the regional party conference (amid approving laughter in the audience) that the Cossack villages (stanitsy) paid all their food-tax arrears once the “misunderstandings” had been ironed out with the “steamroller of Red terror.” Ladokha, Ocherki, 62. 40 Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: The Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

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the fighting spirits among the descendants of Imam Shamil’s peasant warriors. Some were hoping to restore the imamate on their own, while others actually saw allies in the communists. In what must have been a fascinating doctrinal disputation, Comrades Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Sergei Kirov, both close friends of Stalin, finding themselves deep in the rear of the rapidly advancing White army, managed to convince a critical mass of highlanders that the Bolsheviks were waging essentially a variety of jihad. The common enemy was imperial oppression, and the shared goal of both Islam and Marxism was social justice. In the beginning of 1919, as the Whites were closing on Moscow, the joint “Red-Green” guerrilla rebellion of communists and highlanders suddenly threatened the Terek Cossack villages from the rear, helping the Bolsheviks to turn the tide.41 Were the credulous natives cruelly cheated by the communists? Not quite so. In December 1917, shortly after seizing power in Petrograd, Lenin and his comrades still acted on older social-democratic instincts by readily granting full independence to Finland in the expectation that it would also soon become revolutionary. But once anti-Bolshevik regimes emerged in Finland and in many other ethnic regions of the defunct empire, the Leninists had to reconsider their nationality policy. In one of their opportunistic and yet most consequential improvisations, the Soviet national republics were soon invented, first in the framework of the Russian Soviet Socialist Federation and, after 1922, the Soviet Union.42 A whole epoch of dynamic capitalist transformation separated the North Caucasus rebels of 1918–20 from the legendary times of Imam Shamil. The city of Grozny now stood as major proof of modernity: one of the world’s earliest centers of the oil industry, which, as elsewhere, produced the bright new attractions of urban life amid the miserable poverty and exploitation in the barracks of migrant workers. The Bolshevik promise of social justice and material modernity came in the Caucasus with the credible offer of national development through the newly established Soviet republics. Paradoxically, the Bolsheviks could uniquely win back the huge multiethnic state precisely because they were ultramodernistic internationalists. In a further bitter paradox, the evidence of Bolshevik success in enabling a tremendous historical optimism and the actual profound transformation of 41 Dzhabrail Gakaev, Ocherki politicheskoi istorii Chechni [Essays on the political history of Chechnya] (Moscow: Izd-vo ChKTs, 1997). 42 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 45

ethnic societies could be found in the scope of reactions to Stalinist forced collectivization in the 1930s. In Adygea, on the southwestern bank of the Kuban River, resistance of Circassian peasants was kept to a minimum thanks to the enormous personal trust placed in Shakhan-Girei Khakurate, a former paramedic and guerrilla commander, who had emerged at the end of the Civil War as the preeminent local Bolshevik. According to oral tradition, Khakurate tirelessly campaigned for collectivization among his fellow Circassians using two arguments: Haven’t you seen what happened to the resisting Cossacks on the other side of river Kuban? And we are not Cossacks, and our children will be better off if we now help to industrialize Soviet power. Remarkably, Adygea became the first region of complete collectivization in the entire Soviet Union. Arguably this did help to save many lives, though not that of Khakurate himself. He died in 1936 from what was proclaimed a heart attack but was widely rumored to be poisoning—just like the hugely popular Abkhaz Bolshevik leader Nestor Lakoba, who also did his best to buffer the effects of forced collectivization on his people before succumbing in 1936 after a feast with Stalin’s infamous henchman Lavrenty Beria. As one might expect, Chechnya offered the strongest resistance to collectivization and the Great Terror of 1936–38, culminating in the proclamation of a guerrilla republic in the mountains. Yet its leaders were themselves the veterans of the Civil War rebellion against the Whites and were also young Komsomol activists who had earnestly insisted on their socialist aspirations. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, by that time a key member of Stalin’s Politburo coordinating Soviet industrialization, desperately sought to intercede on behalf of his old Chechen comrades in arms until his own breakdown and apparent suicide (or murder?) in February 1937. Stalin ordered the deportations of Chechen, Ingush, and other Caucasian peoples in the winter of 1943–44, after the expulsion of Nazi forces from the region, evidently seeking to cover up his own earlier blunders with wholesale charges of local collaborationism during the brief German occupation. A huge insult was added to huge injury. Two little-known facts might be added by way of a postscript. In 1992, the Chechen separatist government of General Dzhokhar Dudaev ordered a central square in Grozny renamed after Nikita Khrushchev in recognition of his 1956 de-Stalinization and the return of exiled Caucasian peoples to their homelands. General Dudaev was hoping that this gesture would also help Russo-Chechen reconciliation. In the meantime, pious Buddhists among the

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Kalmyks recognized in Khrushchev a hidden Bodhisattva for the same virtuous acts.43 Perhaps many such examples could be identified in field research, yet these remain so far isolated symbolic gestures toward interethnic conciliation. Since the Soviet collapse in 1991, the entire Caucasus, almost without exception, has been through episodes of intense violence, ethnic conflicts, terrorist campaigns, and forced migrations comparable among former communist regions perhaps only to the former Yugoslavia. The last three decades were hardly the time for reconciliation or even for disciplined scholarly reflection. Instead of the usual theoretical summary, let me end this overview on a personal note. When I was first hired in 1997 as tenure-track professor at an American university, among the piles of contract papers was the health insurance questionnaire that asked me to list the causes of deaths in my family during the twentieth century. The routine document forced on me the realization that in the last century almost none of my male ancestors on either the paternal Armenian side or the maternal Kuban Cossack side had ever met a natural death from old age. The men and also a few women had perished in the course of the Young Turk genocide, the Russian Civil War, Stalinist repressions, and the Nazi occupation. The widows then lingered for many years to rear my parents, my sister, and myself. Our grandmothers never spoke about anything that happened in their lives between 1914 and 1945. Still, a remarkable family story could be pieced together from the occasional utterances and the rare surviving documents: the story of my great-granduncle. The Reverend Ter-Karapet Derluguian at the turn of twentieth century served as the senior Armenian priest, or vardapet, in the town of Artvin, located in the mountains south of the Black Sea port of Batumi and now in the Turkish Republic. Ter-Karapet was highly educated, receiving his degrees in theology, medicine, and languages from the seminaries and universities of Venice and Vienna. In the naturally beautiful but small and remote Artvin, he kept a large library and liked to receive learned visitors at his home. Some of those books were purportedly subversive, while some visitors prone to learned conversations were in fact revolutionaries fleeing from the Russian or Turkish police. One of them later called himself Stalin.

43 Georgi Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-Systems Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

a rock in the grinding wheels of world history   ❧ 47

In the early 1920s, the Bolshevik Revkom (Revolutionary Committee) in the city of Krasnodar mandated the nationalization of the Armenian church and its school, only recently built by the refugees from what now became Turkey. Reverend Derluguian traveled to Moscow and, to everyone’s astonishment, returned with a photo of himself seated next to Stalin on a garden bench. The Armenian cultural institutions in Krasnodar could thus survive into the 1930s, when another wave of purges prompted the old priest to request another meeting with his erstwhile guest. This time, there were no miracles, and the elderly vardapet ended up in prison, where his fellow inmates demanded to know why he would ever save this damn Stalin! The vardapet responded always with a dignified smile: The human duty is just to save. Only He, from above, knows whom do we save—and what for.

Chapter Two

Dwelling at the Foot of a Volcano? Jewish Perspectives on the Holocaust in the North Caucasus Kiril Feferman1 This stage of the Holocaust could have been avoided. The destruction of Jews caught in the westernmost part of the North Caucasus around the city of Taganrog could be somehow explained by the aftershock of the Blitzkrieg, although the Wehrmacht reached the area almost four months after the invasion. But the Jews killed by the Germans and their accomplices in the North Caucasus in the second half of 1942 should have survived. This was my conviction before I started to explore the Holocaust in 1

Unless stated otherwise, I do not deal with the Holocaust in the Rostov district or the Holocaust of Mountain Jews. The trajectories in which they were developing were different from the Holocaust of Ashkenazi Jews in other parts of the North Caucasus analyzed in this article. By the “North Caucasus” or the “Caucasus,” used interchangeably, I mean the areas occupied by the German army in summer–fall 1942: (1) Krasnodar krai (territory), including the autonomous oblast (region) of Adygea; (2) a larger part of Ordzhonikidze (renamed Stavropol from 1943 onwards and referred to in this article as such) krai, including the Karachai and Circassian autonomous oblasts; (3) the autonomous republic of Kalmykia; (4) the autonomous republic of Kabardino– Balkaria; and (5) a part of the autonomous republic of North Ossetia.

dwelling at the foot of a volcano?  ❧ 49

this region, and it only grew in the course of my work on it, which culminated in my book.2 Jews in the North Caucasus were not crammed within the borders of European states whose Jewish subjects could only hope and pray that their governments would not cave in to German pressure (Bulgaria, Romania) or that their respective countries would not be seized by Nazi Germany (Italy, Hungary).3 Those European Jews had almost nowhere to go: their countries had borders that were protected, and even if they somehow managed to cross them, almost all of Europe was dominated by a Nazi Germany bent on finding and killing Jews everywhere it found them. In contrast, by summer 1942, a considerable part of the Soviet Union remained under the control of the Soviet government. In the days immediately following the German invasion of June 22, 1941, it created and maintained an infrastructure for the large-scale movement of its population into the country’s hinterland.4 By summer 1942, these facilities were still intact. Furthermore, from December 1941 to June 1942, the front line between Soviet and German forces at the southern sector of the Soviet-German front remained static, with Wehrmacht troops being deployed in the North 2

3

4

My thoughts on this issue were summarized in two articles: “A Soviet Humanitarian Action?: Centre, Periphery and the Evacuation of Refugees to the North Caucasus, 1941–1942,” Europe-Asia Studies 61, no. 5 (July 2009): 813–31, and “Jewish Refugees under the Soviet Rule and the German Occupation in the North Caucasus,” in Zvi Gitelman and Yaacov Ro’i, eds., Revolution, Repression and Revival: The Jews of the Former Soviet Union (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 211–44. My book is The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016). Raz Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Nicola Caracciolo, Uncertain Refuge: Italy and the Jews during the Holocaust, trans. and ed. Florette Rechnitz Koffler and Richard Koffler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Zoltán Vági, László Csosz, and Gábor Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013). There exists a vast literature on the evacuation of Soviet Jews. See, for example, Anna Shternshis, “Between Life and Death: Why Some Soviet Jews Decided to Leave and Others to Stay in 1941,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 477–504; Albert Kaganovich, “Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities during World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 38, no. 2 (2010): 1–37; Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

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Caucasus itself. Finally, up until summer 1942, Soviet Jews had numerous opportunities to learn from many different sources about the German mistreatment and extermination of their brethren. So if they knew why they should flee (Holocaust-related information and proximity of the Germans) and knew how to do it, why didn’t all the Jews in the North Caucasus leave the region by summer 1942, preferring instead to “dwell at the foot of a volcano”? The present paper seeks to elucidate whether and to what extent the aforementioned assumptions hold true. My goal is not to find a culprit by placing the blame for the Holocaust on the Soviet authorities or the Jews themselves. After all, it is evident that the unfortunate Jews who found themselves in the North Caucasus during the occupation in the second half of 1942 were murdered by the Germans and their local accomplices. Rather, an attempt is made to understand the motives behind the Jewish decisions not to escape from the region before the summer 1942 German offensive. What transpired after the Germans arrived is left out of this discussion, since Jewish behavior during this period was informed by entirely new circumstances, and their survival could only be facilitated on an individual basis, whereas the mass of Jews was doomed. The article begins with a brief overview of the history of Jewish presence in the North Caucasus leading up to the events of 1941–42. It discusses Jewish evacuation and flight into and out of the region5 and the interactions 5

The author is aware of the difference between organized evacuation and the unorganized flight of civilians in the wartime Soviet Union. For the purposes of the study, however, the terms “evacuee,” “refugee,” “newcomer,” and “incomer,” as well as “evacuation,” “flight,” and “escape,” are used interchangeably to denote all those who moved into the North Caucasus, whether under a government-initiated program or independently, unless stated otherwise. I did not find many traces of the evacuation in summer 1942 of those brought to the region in an organized manner or local Jews ordered to leave the North Caucasus. At any rate, it seems that these people were not numerous, as compared to the entire number of Jewish refugees. What is especially important for the central concern of the article is the fact that these people did not use and could not use their discretion when it came to evacuation-related decisions. These decisions were made by their superiors. Other Jewish groups that were apparently impacted by special considerations included Polish Jewish refugees who came to the North Caucasus prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union and local North Caucasian Jews. There is an extreme paucity of information on the Polish Jews in the region. By all accounts, they knew more about anti-Jewish atrocities and hence were

dwelling at the foot of a volcano?  ❧ 51

of Jews with the Soviet authorities and the local population. It is followed by an analysis of the information available to the Jews from official and informal sources that could impact their evacuation-related decisions. The article draws on testimonies of Jewish survivors preserved mainly at the Yad Vashem Archive, the Department of Oral History at the Hebrew University Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, and the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation, as well as on official Soviet records. The author is aware that each of these sources has its limitations and, whenever possible, attempted to juxtapose and cross-reference them in order to present a balanced picture of events.

Historical Background The North Caucasus was home to a small group of indigenous Mountain Jews6 whose presence was tolerated relatively unscathed by the Russian Empire even before it pacified the region in 1864.7 It was, however, situated outside the Pale of Settlement and was therefore formally closed to Ashkenazi Jews. In the second part of the nineteenth century, a small Jewish community comprising mainly merchants and former soldiers with privileges emerged in Rostov-on-Don, the most important Russian city in the region and also the safest. In other areas, Jewish presence was numerically insignificant and semilegal. In 1905, Rostov witnessed the second bloodiest pogrom in the Russian Empire, with some 150 Jews slaughtered. Despite the government’s attempts to push the Jews out of the city and the policy of state

6

7

quicker to move away. The responses of the Caucasian Jews, many of whom were detached from Holocaust related information, were different, and many of them remained in the region. Their responses are analyzed in detail in my book, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the Caucasus, 292–96. Mark Kupovetskii, “Sotsiokul’turnyi analiz formirovaniia kollektivnoi pamiati i mifologem o proiskhozhdenii gorskikh evreev Vostochnogo Kavkaza do 80-kh godov XIX veka” [A sociocultural analysis of the formation of collective memory and mythology about the origin of Mountain Jews of the eastern Caucasus up to the 1880s], Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 6 (2009): 58–73. Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London: Frank Cass, 1994).

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anti-Semitism conducted everywhere in the region, especially in Cossack areas, Jews continued living there until 1917.8 After the Bolshevik Revolution, some Jews migrated into the North Caucasus, mainly into industrial and resort centers. The mild climate, favorable food conditions, and resort capacities attracted a number of Jews, especially during the 1930s when the overall food situation in the Soviet Union became strained. Yet as the region remained primarily agricultural, it offered only modest employment opportunities for the newcomers. By the time hostilities broke out between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Ashkenazi Jews constituted a foreign and numerically negligible minority in the North Caucasus. In 1939, 4,600 Jews were recorded in Kabardino–Balkaria, 2,100 in North Ossetia, 7,600 in Krasnodar Krai, and 7,100 in Stavropol Krai.9

The North Caucasus and Jewish Evacuation After the outbreak of the Soviet–German war, the North Caucasus quickly turned into one of the major destinations for Jewish evacuation.10 It was a natural escape route for those fleeing eastward from Ukraine and Moldavia.11 Statistical research on the national composition of the evacuees conducted in 8

Ekaterina Norkina, “The Origins of Anti-Jewish Policy in the Cossack Regions of the Russian Empire, Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” East European Jewish Affairs 43, no. 1 (2013): 62–76. Mikhail Gontmakher, Evrei na donskoi zemle: Istoriia, fakty, biografiia [Jews in the land of the Don: History, facts, biography] (Rostov-na-Donu: RostIzdat, 1999), 20–180. 9 Including Mountain Jews. 10 This subject is enlarged upon in my article “A Soviet Humanitarian Action?” 11 Chernovtsy: testimony of Mina Horowitz, August 1, 1973, Yad Vashem Archive (henceforth YVA), 0.3/3682, 6. Kiev, Vinnitsa: testimony of Roza Lipkin, n.d., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Department of Oral History (henceforth ICJ), TC 2860 (not transcribed); testimony of Sarra Labinov, n.d., ICJ, TC 2773, side A, not transcribed. Odessa: Saul Borovoi, Vospominaniia: Pamiatniki evreiskoi istoricheskoi mysli [Memoirs: Monuments of Jewish historical thought] (Moscow: Evreiskii Universitet v Moskve; Jerusalem: Gesharim, 1993), 249; testimony of Semion Rechister, December 20, 1991, Yad Vashem Hall of Names (henceforth YVHN). Kharkov, Krivoi Rog: testimony of Mordukhai Cherkasskii, January 25, 1991, YVHN. For more information, see the testimony of Anfisa Kalnitskaia, 1926, ICJ, TC 2759, not transcribed; Moldavia, Kishinev and other areas: testimony

dwelling at the foot of a volcano?  ❧ 53 Soviet Civilian evacuation route Caucasus Mountains

Map 3. Soviet evacuation routes into and out of the North Caucasus in 1941–42

Krasnodar Krai revealed that “as of October 1, 1941, 218,000 people, 73 percent of them Jews, were received and accommodated in the Krai.”12 It appears that as of autumn 1941 Jews constituted the majority of, or at least the very considerable part of, the evacuees all over the region.13 Refugees arrived via both organized means and individual initiative. The age and gender composition of the Jewish evacuees was predominately young and middle-aged women, while the share of persons over the age of sixty

of Sarra Gisa, May 15, 1955, YVHN; testimony of Boris Levit, May 16, 1999, YVHN. 12 Aleksandr Beliaev and Irina Bondar’, eds., Kuban’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945: Khronika sobytii [The Kuban in the years of the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945: A chronicle of events], vol. 1 (Krasnodar: Sov. Kuban’, 2000), 76–77. 13 Stanitsa Uspenskaia in August 1941, Krasnodar in November−December 1941, village of Slavianskaia in Krasnodar krai in November 1941: Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 249–50, 252; testimony of Rachel Gurevich, ICJ, TC 2761; diary of Grigorii Ioffe, entry from November 9, 1941, State Archive of the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea (henceforth DAARK), P-156/1/31, 31.

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was significant too.14 There were rather few young and middle-aged men.15 Family units sometimes arrived—that is, elderly couples, elderly individuals with middle-aged children, or mothers with small children.16 Overall, the more dependents young and middle-aged family members had, the more difficult it was for them to continue evacuating eastward. Noteworthy was the very high number of children among the evacuees in the North Caucasus. Many of them were brought as a part of the organized evacuation of twenty-four children’s homes.17 Their share was high from the beginning of evacuation into the region, but it particularly increased by January 1942 (at which point they constituted almost half of the 51,353 refugees who remained in Krasnodar Krai).18 The reason for this growth has to do with the fact that many adults abandoned the Caucasus individually. Unlike adults, children placed in special state institutions could not evacuate on their own, and even if they wanted to flee, they were entirely dependent on the Soviet authorities for organized evacuation. Jewish refugees in the North Caucasus were displaced persons with little or no knowledge of local customs. Perhaps their aloofness was also a factor in their behavior during this period, although this is equivocal. It may be anticipated that those Jewish evacuees who viewed their stay in the region as short and transitional were not willing to forge, or interested in forging, morepermanent connections to the local population. In turn, this led them to 14 Young and middle-aged women: testimony of Leonid Luda, April 29, 2000, YVHN; testimony of Stepanskaia, apparently undated, YVHN; testimony of Semion Rechister, December 20, 1991, YVHN. Persons over sixty, Kishinev and other areas: testimony of Sarra Gisa, May 15, 1955, YVHN; testimony of Bella Goldshtein, October 6, 1992, YVHN. 15 Testimony of Genia Shaulov, November 1, 1956, YVHN; testimony of Mikhail Skladman, October 22, 1979, YVHN. 16 Elderly couples: testimony of Fedor (Froim) Berezovskii, September 5, 2000, YVHN. Elderly individuals with middle-aged children: testimony of Mordukhai Cherkasskii, January 25, 1991, YVHN; testimony of Josef Kodner, March 18, 1975, YVHN. Mothers with small children: testimony of Inda Bergman, 1993, YVHN; testimony of Anna Kliatskina, May 26, 1974, YVHN; testimony of Semion Rechister, December 20, 1991, YVHN; testimony of Sima Cherchikova, October 18, 1999, YVHN. 17 From Odessa and Yalta: Act of the Commission on the Odessa orphanage No. 6 evacuated into the Caucasus, n.d., YVA, M.33/286, 5–8; testimony of Vadim Maniker, April 1975, YVA, 0.3/4108, 2. 18 Testimony of Vadim Maniker, April 1975, YVA, 0.3/4108, 2.

dwelling at the foot of a volcano?  ❧ 55

having fewer employment opportunities in the North Caucasus and tended, other conditions being equal, to push them away from the North Caucasus. Other conditions, however, such as health problems, material hardship, or malnourishment could bring other Jews to view their stay in the region more favorably and to consider employment there, even in the short term. This latter group was composed of those Jews who were aware of the inherent dangers of the German occupation. That said, we should also take into account those Jews who remained unaware of, or who refused to believe, information on the German anti-Jewish atrocities prior to the German occupation of summer 1942. Like everywhere, the intention and ability of Jews who found themselves in the Caucasus to escape the approaching German forces were contingent upon their location. It seems that in 1941 the best sources for getting Holocaust-related information were in the towns, which served as transportation centers through which Jewish refugees tried to make their way eastward. This information was more difficult to come by in some places than others, however. Villages were particularly problematic, as long distances turned into an effective barrier preventing Jews from learning about the proximity of danger.19 Jews staying in big transportation centers found it easier to evacuate, unless they were situated on railways not leading away from the North Caucasus.20 In summer 1942, the situation changed. Despite the fact that “urban” Jews seemed better informed of the proximity of the Germans, their ability to evacuate decreased considerably because of the enormous transportation problems. Conversely, those Jews who resided in rural areas had opportunities to escape on their own, provided their location was far enough from the advancing German troops. Regardless, it should be remembered that evacuation from such a vast area as the North Caucasus was a multistage process:

19 Villages of Dzhiginka in winter 1941–42 and Ivanovka in November– December 1941: testimony of Hana Melinsky, January 12, 1986, YVA, 0.3/4342, 4; testimony of Gurevich, ICJ, TC 2761. 20 Stavropol, Kislovodsk and village of Izobil’noe: Osip Gurevich, interview 28802, Visual History Archive, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation (henceforth USCSF), segment 59, accessed November 13, 2015; Leonid Beshenkovskii, interview 31665, segment 59, accessed November 13, 2015; Sofia Langarber, interview 35615, segment 25, accessed November 23, 2015.

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one could escape the first wave of the German attack in the region yet find oneself swept by the second one.21 Judging by their testimonies, Jews in the North Caucasus were motivated by personal circumstances when considering the possibility of evacuation. These included illness and physical disabilities, as well as personal reluctance. A Jewish invalid considered under official Soviet classification as belonging to “the 2nd category” (which implied “serious disabilities”) did not succeed in evacuating from Essentuki, owing to his condition; in Krasnodar, another Jew’s wife was ill, and because “it was difficult for her to leave the place with her children,” she opted to stay.22 The high proportion of mothers with children, as well as lone children and elderly persons, among the Caucasian evacuees could account for the lack of resolve to escape.23 Another Jewish family decided to stay because of emotional attachment to their new Jewish friends who could not evacuate.24 Food conditions in the region also influenced the behavior of Jewish refugees. In contrast to many other Soviet rear areas, the food situation in the North Caucasus remained relatively satisfactory during the first year of the war. This was a consideration for all Jewish refugees but particularly for those coming from Leningrad, who had already experienced enormous starvation during the siege of the city since September 1941. Evacuation elsewhere from such a “blessed” region as the North Caucasus was fraught with uncertainty and was frowned on by the potential refugees.

Relations with the Authorities The behavior of the Soviet authorities could affect Jewish refugees arriving in the North Caucasus. The provision of accommodation, food, and 21 From Krasnodar into Nalchik: Testimony of Aron Gurevich, n.d., State Archive of the Russian Federation (henceforth GARF), 7021-17-206, 329; testimony of Lidiia Amchislavskaia, May 17, 1989, YVHN; testimony of Izrail Tomachevskii, October 3, 1999, YVHN. 22 Essentuki: testimony of Samuil Belenkov, August 10, 1943, GARF, 7021174, 24. Krasnodar: testimony of Mikhail Shapiro, February 16, 1974, YVA, 0.3/6019, 5. 23 Kropotkin: Tatiana Pushinskaia-Emtsova, interview 43272, USCSF, segment 74, accessed November 17, 2015. 24 Village of Sukhoi: Sofia Langarber, interview 35615, USCSF, segment 21, accessed November 23, 2015.

dwelling at the foot of a volcano?  ❧ 57

employment—the role of the authorities, primarily of the local administration, was of paramount importance here—could likely lead the Jews to consider staying in the region longer than they initially envisaged. Alternatively, the administration’s indifference to the evacuees’ needs or its encouragement of their departure might be weighty factors in fostering their flight farther eastward. The refugees were billeted free of charge in private homes or state-owned buildings, yet the conditions in which they had to live were sometimes difficult.25 Local employment policy was inconsistent throughout the period under review. In the early stages of the war, the refugees were provided with work in towns and in rural areas,26 which may be indicative of long-term Soviet plans to accommodate the refugees in the region. But in retrospect, employment turned out to be a trap for the evacuees, as the employed were less inclined to move on.27 As the influx of refugees continued to grow throughout the summer and fall of 1941, the government program became increasingly strained. Consequently, those who came in the fall were not always guaranteed employment or food.28 Among those who came in 1942, only a small minority was provided with employment. This may be the result of the Soviets’ logistical inability to provide masses of newcomers, 25 Budennovsk, Slavianskaia village: letters received by Efim Ginzburg, November 18, 1941, YVA, 0.75/324, 74; diary of Ioffe, entry from November 9, 1941, DAARK, P-156/1/31, 31. 26 Towns—Krasnodar, Mikoianshakhar, Piatigorsk: Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 251; file of Shamail, Ferdaus, Sultan, and Mukhtar Khalamliev, 1994, YVA, M.31/6228; testimony of Khania Knor, n.d., ICJ, TC 2772, not transcribed. Rural areas—Stanitsa Labinskaia, Krasnodar krai: file of Sysoeva. File of Klavdia Sysoeva, Agripina Dedova and others, n.d., YVA, M.31/8884; testimony of Ida Mandelblat, May 25, 1998, YVA, VT/1911, not transcribed. 27 Budennovsk: letters received by Efim Ginzburg, November 18, 1941, YVA, 0.75/324, 75. 28 Village of Ivanovka, Krasnodar: testimony of Gurevich, ICJ, TC 2761; diary of Ioffe, entry from November 19, 1941, DAARK, P-156/1/31, 33. See also Aleksandr Israpov, “Gosudarstvennye organy upravleniia i narod v 1941–1945 gg.: Aspekty politicheskogo, ekonomicheskogo i organizatsionno-pravovogo vzaimodeistviia na materialakh avtonomnykh respublik Severnogo Kavkaza” [State organs of control and the people in 1941–1945: Aspects of political, economic, and legal-organizational interaction from materials of the autonomous republics of the North Caucasus] (PhD diss., Dagestanskii nauchnyi tsentr Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, 2004), 165.

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including many white-collar workers, with suitable employment in the region. Alternatively, the authorities may not have considered the presence of these evacuees in the Caucasus a long-term project. The authorities attempted to organize the incoming evacuation of both refugees and those who were systematically brought into the region. The newcomers were both registered and nonregistered,29 and apparently the great majority were supplied with food. In 1941, Jewish evacuees were dispatched all over the North Caucasus from towns to numerous Russian villages, including Cossack settlements.30 According to a Soviet wartime report, 39,100 out of 51,353 evacuees in Krasnodar Krai had been sent to villages as of January 1942.31 This policy repeated itself in 1942 when incoming Jews were again dispatched all over the North Caucasus, especially into the resort towns of Stavropol Krai.32 Overall, the rationale behind the Soviet policy was to lessen the friction between the newcomers and the native population, as well as to evenly distribute the burden of accommodation among many localities. This would have been a good policy for handling the refugee crisis had there been no immediate danger to the Soviets’ hold on the area. It conveyed a soothing signal to the evacuees, however, by reassuring them that the situation was under the firm control of the Soviet authorities. It also made it very difficult to urgently embark on their evacuation if the situation became critical. 29 Registered, Krasnodar and elsewhere in the region: diary of Ioffe, entry from November 12, 1941, DAARK, P-156/1/31, 31; memorandum of the Crimean District Committee of the VKP(b) on the evacuation of population from the Crimea and rendering assistance to it in destination points, May 18, 1943, DAARK, R-1/1/2182. Nonregistered, village of Slavianskaia: diary of Ioffe, entry from November 9, 1941, DAARK, P-156/1/31, 31. 30 Towns of Elista, Nalchik: testimony of Ludmila Bradichevsky, May 13, 1996, ICJ, (217) 183, 1; testimony of Iurii Piler, July 16, 1990, YVHN. Villages of Naturbovo and Levokumskoe, unidentified kolkhoz in Krasnodar krai: interrogation of Klavdia Parshikova, August 12, 1942, YVA, M.33/291, 98; memoirs of Petr Belokurov, November 13, 2002, YVA, 0.33/6783, 1–2; Rakhil’ Goferman, interview 15933, USCSF, segment 24, accessed November 13, 2015. Cossack settlements of Stanitsy Labinskaia and Tbilisskaia: questioning of Leonid Borukhovich, September 6, 1943, YVA, M.33/292, 18; questioning of Anna Suzdalenko, May 10, 1944, YVA, M.33/308, 29. 31 Kuban’, 2000, 181–82. 32 Essentuki, Piatigorsk: testimony of Debora Shklovskaia, March 5, 1991, YVHN; testimony of Sima Roiak, September 24, 1994, YVHN.

dwelling at the foot of a volcano?  ❧ 59

Many Jewish newcomers appeared to appraise the situation precisely along these lines. Despite official assurances, they doubted the Soviets’ ability to hold on to the region against the advancing German armies. A document of the local Krasnodar agency in charge of the “resettlement” policy dated September 1941 is telling: “The evacuees go out constantly from the areas assigned them and bombard the resettlement department with persistent requests to send them to other areas and territories.”33 This was exacerbated by the Soviet anxieties over the possible penetration of enemy agents under the guise of refugees.34 As a result of security and logistical problems, Soviet authorities became increasingly concerned with the incessant influx of evacuees. They attempted to solve the problem by limiting incoming evacuation. Beginning September 30, 1941, they banned registration of the newcomers and empowered local authorities to dispatch unemployed people within two days of their arrival to work in key industrial and military centers.35 Local authorities evidently took an even more restrictive step toward limiting the number of incoming evacuees by deciding “to entrust the issuance of resettlement permits to the military authorities.”36 The result was a massive flight of refugees farther eastward with the explicit encouragement of the Soviet authorities. According to a Soviet report, “as of January 1942, 51,353 people remained in Krasnodar Krai out of 226,000 who had been evacuated there. The rest departed to the far rear areas.”37 When the situation on the southern flank of the Soviet-German front stabilized in the winter of 1941–42, however, the Soviet approach changed diametrically. In December 1941, the authorities imposed a complete ban on leaving the area.38 It was in effect for almost two months and, beyond its direct consequences, had a long-term negative impact on the Jews contemplating the possibility of leaving. They had no choice but to remain, and 33 “Note of the Resettlement Department of the Executive Committee of Krasnodar krai,” in Kuban’, 2000, 56–57. 34 “Note of the Resettlement Department,” 56–57. 35 Krasnodar, Maikop, Novorossiisk, Tuapse: “Note of the Resettlement Department,” 56–57. 36 “Note of the Resettlement Department,” 56–57. 37 “Note of the Resettlement Department,” 181–82. 38 Complete ban in Budennovsk and severe limitations in Krasnodar: letters received by Efim Ginzburg, entry from December 13, 1941, YVA, 0.75/324, 76; testimony of Melinsky, YVA, 0.3/4342, 4.

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in order to survive, they had to make arrangements for a prolonged stay in the region, which mainly involved accommodations and employment. Later, when it became possible to evacuate, these arrangements could likely negatively affect their decisions to leave the region. Since in the winter of 1941–42 the situation seemed more secure, the Soviet government began to view the North Caucasus as a relatively safe shelter for refugees from other regions. It is against this backdrop that the Soviets made and implemented the decision to direct many people from several endangered areas (besieged Leningrad, Soviet enclaves in the Crimea and Rostov) into the North Caucasus, primarily into the territories of Krasnodar and Stavropol.39 Obviously, the arrival of many evacuees into the North Caucasus served to assuage Jews’ fears and led at least some of them to assess that the region was and would remain an unassailable fortress. It seems safe to estimate the number of the evacuated Jews in the region as of July–August 1942 at about fifty thousand. Acting apparently on their own initiative, low-ranking Soviet officials occasionally rendered critical aid to Jews by allocating them transport, while in other cases they tried to prevent Jews from unauthorized leaving.40 Overall, however, the Soviet authorities tended to remain neutral, by neither encouraging Jewish refugees to move eastward nor discouraging them from doing so. This was done with an eye to a number of considerations, most specifically in order to maintain a delicate balance between evacuating certain target population groups and factories, on the one hand, and not spreading panic, on the other hand. The result was a lack of guidance, critical

39 “Decree of the Bureau of the Committee of the VKP(b) of [Stavropol] krai and the Executive Council of the krai on accommodation of the population evacuated from Leningrad,” February 10, 1942, in S. Boiko, Stavropol’e v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945 gg. [The Stavropol region in the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945] (Stavropol: Stavropol’skoe knizhnoe izd., 1962), 75; Kuban’, 2000, 249; Memorandum of the Committee of the VKP(b) of the Karachai autonomous oblast, no later than June 24, 1943, GARF, 7021-17-8, 2–3; testimony of Vladimir Shpits, June 7, 1992, YVHN. 40 Allocated transport: Tatiana Pushinskaia-Emtsova, interview 43272, USCSF, segment 83, accessed November 17, 201; Testimony of Gurevich, ICJ, TC 2761. Prevented from leaving, unidentified village in Krasnodar krai and Georgievsk: Mariia Gurdzhi, interview 45463, USCSF, segment 105, accessed November 17, 2015; Lev Batkilin, interview 43529, USCSF, segments 40–41, accessed November 14, 2015.

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for those who had no other sources of reliable information, until it became too late to flee.41

Relations with the Local Population A certain number of Jewish testimonies that I was able to look over pass in silence over the attitudes of the local population in the North Caucasus toward them, which may indicate a lack of friction between the two groups. Sometimes there were references to rather positive attitudes from the local people toward the Jews, although it was not always possible to ascertain whether the local people were cognizant of the fact that the newcomers were Jews. These relatively positive attitudes were generally recorded during the first stages of the almost year-long evacuation process42 that took place in the North Caucasus and placed a tremendous burden on the local inhabitants forced to accommodate the refugees in their homes. Many testimonies, however, point to negative attitudes on the part of the local population toward the newcomers. Sometimes it is impossible to establish whether these sentiments were nurtured by anti-Semitism or by a dislike of refugees. But whatever the explanation, when, as a Jewish refugee recorded, “Kuban [Krasnodar Krai] received us, all the evacuees, very badly. They didn’t let [us] into their houses or even into their barns, unless we paid… . We understood there that no one liked the evacuees; they didn’t even give [us] water,”43 it made a strong impression on her family and resulted in their attempting to leave this inhospitable area as soon as possible. On the whole, it turns out that the arrival of masses of predominantly Jewish evacuees led to an upsurge in anti-Jewish sentiments among the local 41 S. A. Gladkova, “Organizatsiia evakuatsii liudskikh i material’nykh resursov” [The organization of the evacuation of people and material resources], in Kalmykian Institute for the Humanitarian Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Committee for Archival Affairs of the Republic of Kalmykia, eds., Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina: Sobitiia, liudi, istoriia [The Great Patriotic War: Events, people, history] (Elista: Dzhangar, 2001), 73. 42 Alla Anikeeva, interview 47598, USCSF, segment 61, accessed November 13, 2015; Anna Goldenberg, interview 30042, USCSF, segment 65, accessed November 18, 2015; Testimony of Sarra Labinov, n.d., ICJ, TC 2773, side A, not transcribed; Testimony of Mandelblat, YVA, VT/1911. 43 Maria Achkinazi-Chubar’, interview 48039, USCSF, segment 49, accessed on November 15, 2015.

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population. They involved the refusal to allow specifically Jewish evacuees to reside in the place: the local inhabitants were recorded as saying, “We’ll let Russians in, but not Jews” and “We’ll be answerable on account of you, Jews. If Hitler comes here you’ll be hanged, and he won’t have mercy on us either.”44 Anti-Semitism was clearly noticeable in a number of Russian and to a lesser extent non-Russian areas from the beginning of the war.45 According to the postwar memories of a Jewish escapee, in Krasnodar in the autumn of 1941 local people would let one another pass in lines at the expense of Jews and would make anti-Semitic remarks.46 Importantly, the same author noticed that as the Germans approached in autumn 1941, the enmity toward Jews increased.47 The atmosphere of anti-Semitism in the North Caucasus with respect to the Jewish evacuees is also indicated in many Jewish testimonies.48 For their part, the local authorities recorded an increase in anti-Semitic feelings too. The following two excerpts from Stavropol underscore the point. According to the memorandum of the District Committee of the Vsesoiuznaia kommunisticheskaia partiia (bolshevikov) [All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), or VKP(b)], prepared in September 1941, “hostility toward Jews on the part of anti-Soviet elements is clearly on the rise, recently, in a number of areas.”49 On January 6, 1942, a lecturer of the VKP(b) Department of Agitation and Propaganda communicated to the

44 Session of the Council of People’s Commissars of Kabardino–Balkar ASSR, Speech by Senior Inspector Shklovski, May 5, 1942, YVA, JM/24678; Rakhil’ Goferman, interview 15933, USCSF, segment 25, accessed November 13, 2015. 45 Testimony of Kalnitskaia, ICJ, TC 2759; testimony of Bradichevsky, ICJ, (217) 183, 3. For more information, see “Report of Stavropol krai Committee of the VKP(b) in September 1941,” in Maksim Andrienko, “Naselenie Stavropol’skogo kraia v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: Otsenka povedencheskikh motivov” [The population of Stavropol krai in the years of the Great Patriotic War: An evaluation of behavioral motives] (PhD diss., Piatigorskii gosudarstvennyi lingvisticheskii universitet, 2005), 57. 46 Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 252. 47 Borovoi, 254. 48 Testimony of Kalnitskaia, ICJ, TC 2759; testimony of Bradichevsky, ICJ (217) 183, 3. 49 Andrienko, “Naselenie Stavropol’skogo kraia,” 57.

dwelling at the foot of a volcano?  ❧ 63

NKVD regional administration, “In the area of Libkhnet, draftees departed for the front in an anti-Soviet spirit: ‘Beat Yids and Communists!’”50 Anti-Jewish attitudes could be more extreme. For example, a sixth-grade schoolboy was repeatedly beaten because he was a Jew.51 Another Jewish refugee mentions in her postwar interview that from early August to midNovember 1941, dreadful anti-Semitism prevailed in stanitsa (Cossack settlement) Vyselkovskaia (Krasnodar Krai), where she settled: “Neither my brother nor I could actually learn anything in the school: children were abusive to us, shouting at us ‘Yids!’ At school, the teachers used to say to the children: ‘Why are you bothering them? It’s not their fault they are Jews.’”52 When the Germans captured Rostov-on-Don for the first time (mid-November 1941), her family moved away toward Transcaucasia. She says that when “we entered local villages to procure food the population was ill-disposed toward us and even behaved in a belligerent fashion. We were never invited to enter houses in order to clean up. It was even a feeling of terror.”53 Yet, in many cases it cannot be established whether this hostile attitude was due to the fact that the witness was Jewish or that he or she was a refugee. Such examples are indicative of an increase in anti-Semitism among the local Slavic people on the eve of the German occupation of the North Caucasus. Increasing outbursts of anti-Semitism from the local Russian population or enmity to the Jews because of their being refugees could likely lead the latter to consider prompt escape from the region.54

50 Andrienko, 57. 51 Stanitsa Vyselkovskaia in Krasnodar krai; Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), 17/88/131, 75–76, in Ilona Iurchuk, “Politika mestnykh vlastei Kubani po zashite detstva i ee prakticheskaia realizatsiia v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (1941–1945 gg.)” [The policy of local authorities of the Kuban for protecting children and its implementation in practice during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945)] (PhD diss., Armavirskii institut sotsial’nogo obrazovaniia, 2008), 82. 52 Testimony of Kalnitskaia, ICJ, TC 2759. 53 Testimony of Kalnitskaia, ICJ, TC 2759. 54 Stanitsa Uspenskaia and Krasnodar in autumn 1941: Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 250, 252.

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Critical Information In the North Caucasus, Jews based their evacuation decisions on their knowledge of German anti-Jewish policies and the proximity of the Wehrmacht. Since radio was of minor significance in the dissemination of this information, the role of the local press, such as the main newspapers of the Stavropol and Krasnodar territories—Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda (Ordzhonikidze Truth) and Bolshevik—grew considerably.55 A close examination reveals that during the period from June 22, 1941, to mid-July 1942, not a single word was written about evacuation from the North Caucasus. Soviet propaganda in the North Caucasus, as seen from the newspapers, persisted as “business as usual” up to the point when the Germans reached critical proximity to the region.56 Extremely uncommon were references to the Germans’ maltreatment of Jews, especially in the occupied Soviet territories.57 A rare excep55 On radio: Inna Somova, “Kul’turnye i religioznye uchrezhdeniia Stavropol’skogo kraia v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny” [The cultural and religious institutions of Stavropol krai during the Great Patriotic War] (PhD diss., Piatigorskii gosudarstvennyii lingivisticheskii universitet, 2004), 47–48. Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda was published daily by the Ordzhonikidze District Committee of the VKP(b), the District Council of the Deputies of Workers, and the Voroshilovsk (Stavropol) Municipal Committee of the VKP(b). Bolshevik was published daily by the Krasnodar District and Municipal Committee of the VKP(b) and the District Council of the Deputies of Working People. I looked through all the issues of these two newspapers from June 22, 1941, to late July 1942, when their publication ceased. 56 Editorial, “O provedenii sel’khozrabot osen’iu v krae” [On the conduct of agricultural work in the fall in the krai], Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda 230 (2294), September 28, 1941, 1; editorial, “O khode sbora urozhaia” [On the progress of the harvest], Decree of the Bureau of the Ordzhonikidze District Committee of the VKP(b) from July 9, 1942, Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda 159, July 10, 1942, 1; editorial, “Rabotat’ i ne shadit’ sil dlia fronta” [Work and spare no effort for the front], Bolshevik 176, July 26, 1942, 1. 57 A. Faigel’man, “V lapakh gitlerovskikh banditov” [In the paws of the Hitlerite bandits], Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda, 154 (2218), July 2, 1941; “Amerikanskii zhurnal o sekretnykh instruktsiiakh germanskogo komandovaniia” [An American journal on the secret instructions of the German command], Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda 174 (2238), July 25, 1941, 1; G. D., “Gitlerovskii ‘novyi poriadok’ v Evrope” [The Hitlerite “new order” in Europe], Bolshevik 175 (1157), July 26, 1941, 4; “Zverskoe povedenie nemtsev v Varshave” [The bestial behavior of the Germans in Warsaw], Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda

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tion to the trend was the Note of the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, which invoked the special maltreatment the Germans inflicted on Jews in Lvov and Kiev. It was widely publicized across the country in early January 1942.58 Finally, general information on the advance of the German armies, let alone their offensive toward the Caucasus, was infrequent and clearly outdated.59 In the absence of official trustworthy information, rumors turned out to be a major source of news. This is indicated in a postwar Jewish testimony pertaining to Krasnodar Krai: “My family, five people, stayed in the village of Ivanovka for one to one and a half months. Around November–December 1941, it was rumored that Jews were gradually abandoning the village. So, my family made up its mind to move to Krasnodar.”60 A wartime letter that arrived from Budennovsk in October 1941 is also indicative of the influence of rumor: “Minvody [Mineralnye Vody] was bombed. Many of the evacuees started moving away from here to Makhachkala. Rumors were circulating that it was impossible to reach Makhachkala, that on the way people were put off and dispatched to kolkhozes, and that an epidemic of typhus had 9 (2384), January 11, 1942, 4. In the occupied territories: editorial, “Mest’ i smert’ fashistskim sobakam” [Vengeance and death to the fascist dogs], Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda 218 (2282), September 14, 1941, 1; Vanda Vasilevskaia, “Zapadnaia Ukraina istekaet krov’iu” [Western Ukraine is bleeding], Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda 219 (2283), September 18, 1941, 2; “Chto proiskhodit v Kieve” [What is happening in Kiev], Bolshevik 285 (1267), December 2, 1941, 2. 58 Note, “O povsemestnykh grabezhakh, razorenii naseleniia i chudovishnikh zversvakh germanskikh vlastei na zakhvachennykh imi sovetskikh territoriiakh” [On the ubiquitous looting, devastation of the population and monstrous atrocities of the German authorities on the captured Soviet territories], Pravda, January 6, 1942. A translation can be found in Vyacheslav Molotov, Soviet Government Statements on Nazi Atrocities (London: Hutchinson, 1946), 22. 59 A. Krasnov, “Geroicheskaia oborona Kieva” [The heroic defense of Kiev], Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda 212 (2276), September 7, 1941, 2; M. A. Suslov, secretary of Ordzhonikidze District Committee of the VKP(b), “Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina i zadachi partiinykh organizatsii” [The Great Patriotic War and the duties of party organizations], Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda 233 (2297), 2 October 1941, 2. Editorial, “Otbit’ napadenie vraga!” [Repel the enemy attack!], Ordzhonikidzevskaia Pravda 175 (2550), July 29, 1942, 1; editorial, “Bit’ vraga naverniaka” [Beat the enemy for sure], Ordzhonikidzevskaia pravda 167 (2542), July 19, 1942, 1. 60 Testimony of Gurevich, ICJ, TC 2761.

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broken out in Makhachkala.”61 The last testimony suggests that information about the various effects of the Soviet evacuation program played a certain role in the behavior of Jews. According to another source, however, when Jews grasped the devastating nature of the situation, their knowledge of the negative effects of the Soviet evacuation procedure had a negligible impact on their decisions.62 Sometimes information on the proximity of the Germans emanated from Red Army personnel. A piece of postwar evidence of a Jewish survivor underscores this point: Apparently in the winter months of 1941–1942, my infant, my sister-in-law with her child, and I found ourselves in the village of Dzhiginka. Near the village there was an air base. One of the pilots learned that we were Jews and told us to escape as the Germans approached and that they would kill us. He advised us to talk to the Major who was a Jew and to speak Yiddish to him. The Major issued us certificates that we belonged to the military personnel and gave us a car.63

This evidence also depicts Jews volunteering to share critical information that affected evacuation-related decisions. Information transfer could also be facilitated by Holocaust survivors escaping from Rostov-on-Don. The first German occupation of the city, from November 20 to 28, 1941, and the intensive mistreatment of Jews caused local Jews to expediently escape the area.64 Many of these refugees eventually failed to leave the North Caucasus.65 Yet some of them were able to share with other Jews their firsthand information on the experience of Jews living under German rule.66

61 Letters received by Efim Ginzburg, November 18, 1941, YVA, 0.75/324, 75. 62 Stavropol in autumn 1941, Georgievsk in spring 1942: testimony of Mandelblat, YVA, VT/1911; testimony of Kalnitskaia, ICJ, TC 2759. 63 Testimony of Melinsky, YVA, 0.3/4342, 4. 64 Ernst Klink, “The Conduct of Operations: 1. The Army and Navy,” in Horst Boog, Ernst Klink, et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. 4: The Attack on the Soviet Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 619. 65 Solomon Schwarz, Evrei v Sovetskom Soiuze s nachala vtoroi mirovoi voiny (1939–1965) (New York: American Jewish Working Committee, 1966), 58; report of Evenson, n.d., YVA, P.21.2/1. 66 Testimony of Kalnitskaia, ICJ, TC 2759; testimony of Mandelblat, YVA, VT/1911.

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The contradictory military developments in the southern part of the Soviet-German war in the first part of 1942 puzzled many Jews who attempted to analyze them for an indication of whether or not to flee. On the one hand, Red Army victories during the winter campaign of 1941–42 partly assuaged Jewish fears.67 On the other hand, the fiasco of Soviet forces near Kharkov in mid-May, the fall of Sevastopol on July 2, and, particularly, the abandonment of Rostov on July 23, 1942, caused Jews to consider evacuating the Caucasus.68 The available testimonies indicate that by mid-1942 the number of those who did not know of the German discrimination against Jews became lower among the Ashkenazi Jews residing in the Caucasus, as compared to 1941. Yet there remained a certain number of disbelievers.69 Such was one Jewish professor who claimed, “I do not believe that the civilized nation of Goethe and Schiller can behave like barbarians.”70 Those were the same arguments cited by the Jews reluctant to flee in 1941, which indicates that this group of Jews remained largely unaffected by Soviet propaganda and wholly refused to accept the rumors emanating from the refugees. Others embraced the revelations of German anti-Jewish atrocities but only partly and assumed, for example, that the Germans would make do with executing only those Jews caught in the first roundup.71 The Jews who made that assumption remained in the region. The North Caucasus in 1941–42 turned out to be a trap for the Jewish refugees. In retrospect, it is evident that that best thing the Jews could have done was not to stay there at all. Once stuck there, they should have done their utmost to get out of the North Caucasus. In fact, everything that may have 67 B. I. Nevzorov, “Sokrushenie Blitskriga” [Smashing the Blitzkrieg] and “Zimnee nastuplenie Krasnoi Armii” [The winter advance of the Red Army], in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina: 1941–1945 [The Great Patriotic War: 1941–1945], ed. V. A. Zolotarev, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 248–84 and 285–318. 68 O. N. Kudriashov and P. P. Chevela, “Oborona Stalingrada i Severnogo Kavkaza” [The defense of Stalingrad and the North Caucasus], in Zolotarev, 369. 69 Leonid Beshenkovskii, interview 31665, USCSF, segments 55–56, accessed November 13, 2015; Osip Gurevich, interview 28802, USCSF, segment 57. 70 For Mikoianshakhar, see also Nicholas Poppe, Reminiscences, ed. Henry G. Schwartz (Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1983), 161. 71 Eugene Elsner, interview 31734, USCSF, segment 19, accessed November 14, 2015.

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enticed Jews into staying in the region in the short run (good accommodations, availability of food, favorable attitudes on the part of the authorities and the local population, etc.) was detrimental to their survival in the long run. Conversely, all the factors that showed the ugly face of the Soviet evacuation program and that made Jews want to leave the North Caucasus as soon as possible (lack of, or inadequate, accommodations; an inhospitable population turning its back on the refugees; etc.) ended up saving their lives in the long run. Alongside this group of Jews whose decisions to flee (or not) were largely informed by the way they were treated in the North Caucasus, there were other Jews who made up their minds not to escape anywhere. In contrast to my findings for 1941, by mid-1942 I was unable to identify those who were paralyzed by fear of the apparently unstoppable German war machine; after all, by then it was already proven that the Germans were not invincible. Rather, this group of Jews quietly but firmly rejected information of German mistreatment of Jews or at least viewed it as highly overblown. The major reason for their continuous disbelief seems to have been the fact that this information came from the Soviet media, which had discredited itself in the interwar period as a reliable news supplier.72 This was the paradox that this group of unfortunate Jews failed to comprehend: during the war the Soviet media did indeed largely remain a propaganda tool of the Soviet regime. Yet in retrospect, its difficult-to-believe reports on the German maltreatment of Jews appeared to have been mainly accurate and sometimes even an understatement.73

72 On a similar phenomenon in 1941, see my “To Flee or Not to Flee.” 73 On this phenomenon in literature, see, for example, Jeremy Hicks, “‘Too Gruesome to Be Fully Taken In’: Konstantin Simonov’s ‘The Extermination Camp’ as Holocaust Literature,” Russian Review 72, no. 2 (April 2013): 242–59; Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 116–33. On the Soviet media reporting of the Holocaust during the war, see Mordechai Altshuler, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mass Media during the War and in the First Postwar Years Re-examined,” Yad Vashem Studies 39, no. 2 (2011): 121– 68; Karel C. Berkhoff, “‘Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population’: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–1945,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 61–105.

Chapter Three

“Operation Blue,” Einsatzgruppe D, and the Genocide in the Caucasus Andrej Angrick This chapter presents an overview of Nazi mass killing operations in the North Caucasus from August 1942 to January 1943, set against military developments in the region and drawn especially from the findings of the author’s book on Einsatzgruppe D.1 It looks into the ways Einsatzgruppe D and the Wehrmacht cooperated in the North Caucasus in the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” with an eye to employment of local collaborators, and provides unit-by-unit descriptions of the larger executions.

Background and Military Strategy For the summer of 1942, Germany’s Nazi dictatorship and three-branched military prepared an offensive intended as a decisive final strike against the Soviet Union, finishing what Operation Barbarossa had started. The code name of this undertaking was “Operation Blue.” At the start of the great war against the Soviet Union in 1941, the declared objective of Hitler and 1

Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 [Occupation policies and mass murder: Einsatzgruppe D in the southern Soviet Union 1941–1943] (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003).

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his general staff was for German troops to penetrate far enough eastward to reach (ideally) a north-south line from Arkhangelsk to Astrakhan,2 thus enabling the establishment of four Reich commissariats (Ostland, Ukraine, Muscovy/Russia, and Caucasus). Therefore, the collapse of the Soviet Union would not end with just the loss of its European territories. Ultimately, it was also necessary for Siberia to fall under German domination and for German troops to occupy the southern regions that had fallen to the Soviet Union during the War Communism period. In particular, this was also to secure the oil reserves of the Caspian Sea for Germany’s continuing war efforts— now against its main opponent, the United States. The German forces were not strong enough to fight a war along the entire length of its eastern front, thrusting toward Siberia, Moscow, and central Russia, and in the south toward the Volga and the Caucasus. Hitler had to make a choice, so he chose the southern option.3 German soldiers, backed up by panzer divisions and air fleets, would march toward Stalingrad, with an even more massive force heading south through Rostov-on-Don, the “Gateway to the Caucasus.” Its assignment was to push toward Mount Elbrus, Nalchik, Elista, Mozdok, and Grozny. The city of Baku was particularly coveted; if this petroleum center could be taken, thereby opening up further geostrategic options for moving against not only the Soviet Union but also the British colonies, then the campaign of Army Group A (led by Field Marshal Wilhelm von List) would be a success, having been dispatched for this purpose alone.4

2

3 4

“Directive 21, Operation Barbarossa” of December 18, 1940, and “Directive 32, Preparations for the Period after Barbarossa” of June 11, 1941, repr. in Hitlers Weisungen für die Kriegführung 1939–1945: Dokumente des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht [Hitler’s instructions for the war 1939–1945: Documents of the Wehrmacht high command], 2nd ed., ed. Walter Hubatsch (Koblenz: Bernard & Graefe, 1983), 84–88, 129–34. Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegführung 1940–1941 [Hitler’s strategy: Policy and warfare 1940–1941], 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Bernard & Graefe, 1982), 540–49. “Directive 41” of April 5, 1942, in Hubatsch, Hitlers Weisungen, 183–88. Dietrich Eichholtz, Deutsche Ölpolitik im Zeitalter der Weltkriege: Studien und Dokumente [German oil politics in the age of the world wars: Studies and documents] (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010), 416–19. “Directive 45,” dated July 23, 1942, in Hubatsch, Hitlers Weisungen, 196–200. Eichholtz, Deutsche Ölpolitik, 416–19 and 437–41.

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The Advance of Army Group A and the Relationship between the Military and the Einsatzgruppen The offensive made good progress, with Rostov-on-Don falling in late July 1942 and Maikop in German hands by August 9. Although it was still another 1,000 kilometers (about 620 miles) to Baku, these initial successes convinced Hitler and his military that they would soon take possession of the key passes to Transcaucasia, along with Tbilisi and Batumi, before ultimately marching into Baku. The advancing German infantry and panzer units were accompanied by the notorious Einsatzgruppen (deployment groups), which were mobile units of the SS and the SD.5 For the Caucasus, this was Einsatzgruppe D, established by the Reich Security Head Office and comprising Sonderkommando (special commando, or SK) 10a, 10b, 11a, and 11b, as well as Einsatzkommando (deployment commando, or EK) 12. SK 11a (commanded by Paul Zapp) remained on the Crimea in Simferopol, while SK 10a (led by Kurt Christmann from August 1942) and EK 12 (from April 1942 under the command of Erich Müller, former chief of the Berlin Gestapo) were immediately assigned to the southward push.6 On the other hand, SK 10b (commanded by Alois Persterer) was to advance across the Kerch Strait onto the Taman Peninsula, swinging from there toward the south.7 Meanwhile, SK 11b began under the command of Werner Braune, an experienced SD official, who then passed the reins to Paul Schultz in the Caucasus. As for the headquarters of Einsatzgruppe D, this, too, was initially located on the Crimea, which acted as a kind of springboard for further operations; but after successful German advances, it migrated in the summer of 1942 along with the military leadership of Army Group A to Voroshilovsk,8 where they occupied a building together.

5

Foundational reading: Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938–1942 [The troops of the ideological war: The Einsatzgruppen of the SS and the SD 1938–1942] (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981), esp. 107–278. 6 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 513, 554–56. 7 Angrick, 574, 622. 8 Note that, after the Soviets recaptured the North Caucasus in 1943, the city of Voroshilovsk was renamed Stavropol.

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This shared usage of an administrative facility can be seen as symptomatic of the rapprochement between these two previously competing apparatuses (the Sicherheitspolizei and the military).9 Even as late as 1941, the relationship between Nazi officials and the German military had sometimes been very problematic, but this had since given way to an interaction that was now routine, or even “comradely”—to use the jargon of the time. Each organization now recognized the assigned tasks and competencies of the other. For the military, this naturally included the conduct of war and the pacification of the civilian population, along with military defense operations (such as combating partisans, assassins, and leftover Red Army soldiers), while the Einsatzgruppen were principally responsible for combating all “elements inimical to the Reich”—regardless of whether or not they were actively resisting the German occupation. This particularly meant all Jews without exception but also took in the Roma, “antisocial elements,” communists, and—as “parasites on the body of the German people” and bearers of “unworthy life”—anyone with physical or mental handicaps. Indeed, it was no small number of people who were murdered by members of Einsatzgruppe D in its first year up to the 1942 summer offensive. According to an admission by the first head of Einsatzgruppe D, SS-Oberfführer (later SS-Brigadeführer) Otto Ohlendorf, the perpetrators’ own documentation showed that his men had killed around 90,000 people. His estimation closely matched reality: the last reliable report on the liquidation totals of the murderers (before Heinrich Himmler finally forbade the transmission of exact numbers, not only owing to the danger of radio messages being intercepted but also to general considerations of maintaining secrecy) states that up until early April 1942, exactly 91,678 people had been murdered by the commandos of Einsatzgruppe D.10 Most of the victims had been gunned down; some were suffocated in gas vans;11 while others were beaten to death or buried alive, either on a whim or just to save bullets. Entire Jewish communities had been extinguished: be it in the town of Anan’ev; on the Crimean Peninsula; or along the Sea of Azov, nobody was spared, neither women nor children, neither infants nor seniors.12 Such total 9 Angrick, 584–85, 605–7. 10 Bundesarchiv Berlin [Federal Archives in Berlin, hereafter BA Berlin], R 58/221, Ereignismeldung UdSSR 190 [Event report USSR 190], dated April 8, 1942. 11 “Soul killers,” as they were rendered into Russian. 12 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 131–385 and 485–522.

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and radical annihilation campaigns had been proceeding since late August 1941, and these crack troops in the war of ideologies were now preparing to apply their murderous handiwork to the Caucasus, fulfilling the commands of the top leadership—that is, of Hitler and Himmler. Although Einsatzgruppe D and the Wehrmacht might have shared a mutual rivalry back in 1941, by now they had come to appreciate each other’s professionalism, especially in the joint implementation of antipartisan actions in the rear, and also in the subjugation of an allegedly Stalin-loyal urban population. They could count on one another, reciprocally requesting “administrative assistance.” Besides Einsatzgruppe D, additional police units under SS-Brigadeführer Gerret Korsemann, who was the Höhere SS und Polizeiführer Kaukasien (Higher SS and Police Leader—Caucasus), were also ready for deployment in the Caucasus,13 and more such police units were to be established.14 In terms of the military, there was also the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP, the secret military police commonly known as the “Gestapo of the Wehrmacht”), the ordinary military police, and the Abwehr (Germany’s military intelligence, including the infamous Sonderverband “Bergmann” [Special Unit “Miner”]), who all stood ready to quash any political opposition. If Jews or other “Reich opponents” were encountered by these military services during everyday duties, they were to be handed over to the Einsatzgruppe or else subjected to immediate and arbitrary “security police processing”—meaning summary execution, perhaps with a short interrogation at most.

Kaukasier Kompanie The command staff of Einsatzgruppe D also had a significant trump card at its disposal—namely, a special volunteer force: the Kaukasier Kompanie (Caucasian Company). The personnel of this auxiliary unit were recruited from Germany’s prisoner of war camps (primarily those located in the Crimea) and consisted of Red Army soldiers with anti-Bolshevist sentiments 13 Angrick, 636–37. 14 Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv Potsdam [Brandenburg State Archive in Potsdam], Rep. 2 A I, fol. 623, sheets 24–31R: Express letter from Chief of the Ordnungspolizei dated August 21, 1942, re: Deployment of Ordnungspolizei command staff with the SS and Political Leaders in the General-Districts Kuban, North Caucasus, Mountain Peoples and in the Head District Kalmykia of the Caucasus Reich Commissariat.

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(and thus the corresponding motivation). In enlisting local confederates (such as Crimean Tatars), along with spies for Operation Zeppelin (an undercover operation behind Soviet front lines, not only for gathering information but also for conducting attacks),15 the commanders of the Einsatzgruppe and the military recognized that local collaborators could be of great use, owing to their familiarity with the region’s languages and territory.16 This was even more true for the remote regions of the Soviet Union, where even the SD’s foreign experts could only offer inadequate information, having been mostly limited to outdated encyclopedic publications until now. For example, a reprint of the red-covered manhunt book carried by the Einsatzgruppen17 clearly shows that—in contrast to the western regions of the Soviet Union and the Ukraine—there was hardly any relevant information about the cities and regions of the Caucasus; in particular, there was no list of persons to be arrested there. Also in contrast to the western regions, there was no information on the building locations of the NKVD, the Communist Party, newspaper offices, or Jewish institutions (indispensable for collecting the personnel documentation of enemy organizations and for the persecution of Jews). There were just a few general reference entries (probably extracted from Soviet encyclopedias) on Astrakhan, Baku, Krasnodar, Kutaisi, Maikop, Piatigorsk, and Voroshilovsk. Significantly, there was no information about Grozny, a point on which Einsatzgruppe members were completely let down by their “manual.” 15 Klaus-Michael Mallmann, “Der Krieg im Dunkeln: Das Unternehmen ‘Zeppelin’ 1942–1945” [The war in the dark: Operation “Zeppelin” 1942– 1945], in Nachrichtendienst, politische Elite und Mordeinheit: Der Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS [Intelligence, political elite, and killing unit: The security service of the Reichsführer-SS], ed. Michael Wildt (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 324–46. Andrej Angrick, “Unternehmen Zeppelin” [Operation Zeppelin], in Einvernehmliche Zusammenarbeit? Wehrmacht, Gestapo, SS und sowjetische Kriegsgefangene [Mutual cooperation? The Wehrmacht, Gestapo, SS, and Soviet prisoners of war], ed. Johannes Ibel (Berlin: Metropol, 2008), 59–69. 16 Andrej Angrick, “Die Einsatzgruppe D und die Kollaboration” [Einsatzgruppe D and Collaboration], in Täter im Vernichtungskrieg: Der Überfall auf die Sowjetunion und der Völkermord an den Juden [Perpetrator in the war of annihilation: The attack on the Soviet Union and the genocide of the Jews], ed. Wolf Kaiser (Berlin: Propyläen, 2002), 71–84. 17 Cf. Werner Röder, ed., Sonderfahndungsliste UdSSR [Special investigation list USSR] (Erlangen: Verlag D und C, 1977).

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The completion of an assignment—meaning the extermination of all Jews and the destruction of the NKVD apparatus—could only happen if the right information were generated on the ground. Therefore, in recruiting men for the Kaukasier Kompanie, it was important not only to vet their ideological orientation but also to ensure, as much as possible, that they came from the targeted areas—southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, etc.—and thus had the corresponding motivations.18 The unit would be divided into three platoons based on ethnic origin: a Georgian one, an Azerbaijani one, and a mixed Armenian-Russian one. One might suspect that for many recruits, joining the German forces was a kind of symbolic rejection of the forced Sovietization of the Caucasus;19 but for the Muslims an additional factor was their devotion to Islam, which had become increasingly suppressed in the Soviet Union. So whereas on the foreign-policy level Germany wanted to win the allegiance of Turkey through its activities in the region and its planned push into Iran,20 at this grassroots level it conversely tried to use the defense of Islam and the fight against the infidels as a motivation for the Muslim Caucasians to join the SS and German police forces as brothers-in-arms. In this motivational mindset, Bolshevism was often regarded as a Jewish phenomenon needing eradication. This meant that the Einsatzgruppen recruiters and the recruits themselves were expected to share a considerable overlapping of interests. Indeed, it was ultimately this deadly alliance of professional murderers in uniform—consisting of Einsatzgruppen men, the German military, and volunteer squads—that was assigned to implement the “Final Solution” in the Caucasus.21 18 Hennig Pieper, “SS-Oberscharführer Walter Kehrer und die ‘KaukasierKompanie’: Eine Sondereinheit und ihre Rolle im Zweiten Weltkrieg” [SS-Oberscharführer Walter Kehrer and the “Caucasian Company”: The special unit and its role in World War II], Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 3 (2008): 197–221, esp. 203–5. 19 On this, see Alex Marshall, The Caucasus under Soviet Rule (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 147–216. 20 On the problems of adapting the lessons learned through the Crimean extermination policies and applying them to the Caucasus, and the decisions made about the relevant policies in the latter, see Kiril Feferman, “Looking East or Looking South? Nazi Ethnic Policies in the Crimea and the Caucasus,” in Eradicating Differences: The Treatment of Minorities in Nazi-Dominated Europe, ed. Anton Weiss-Wendt (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 103–18. 21 On the active contributions of military units in the Caucasus, see Manfred Oldenburg, Ideologie und militärisches Kalkül: Die Besatzungspolitik der

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Extermination Policies in the Caucasus Rostov-on-Don The story of the Final Solution in the Caucasus region in 1942 begins in earnest with the recapture of Rostov-on-Don. Although SK 10a had already committed the first executions in November 1941, it been forced to abandon the city after only a very short time. With the second conquest, of July 22–24, 1942, the majority of Rostov’s population was considered entirely “subdued” and “very willing” to obey the orders of the occupying forces. The systematic mass killings started in August. Numerous “long-term arrests” were immediately conducted in Rostov by SK 10a and GFP Group 13, so that by August 2, 1942, some seven hundred persons had been arrested, four hundred of whom were “liquidated” shortly after interrogation. This was just the start of a larger projected campaign; the next step for SK 10a was to get Rostov’s remaining Jews registered.22 Their homes were scattered across the city, since Rostov did not have a traditionally enclosed Jewish quarter, and the Germans had not established a ghetto there. According to the surveys of SK 10a during the first occupation of the city, there were still some fifty thousand Jews living in Rostov during the winter of 1941, including many businesspeople. By the second occupation, however, the German registration campaign showed only two thousand of them still living in the city; the rest had been evacuated to the interior by the Red Army in the face of approaching danger. Those left behind were mostly the Wehrmacht in der Sowjetunion 1942 [Ideology and military calculation: The occupation policy of the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union 1942] (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 286–306. Besides the Einsatzgruppe’s Caucasian Company, particular infamy was earned by the Kalmykian Cavalry Corps under Otto Doll, Sonderverband “Bergmann” (Special Unit “Miner”), and the Fürst Urach Cavalry Regiment of Korück 531. For more on the Kaukasier Kompanie, see the chapter by Stephen Tyas in the present volume. 22 Concerning the Jewish population statistics of the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II, the best source is still the Soviet Census of 1939, in our case using oblast-level statistical data to calculate the Jewish population figures for southern Russia and the Caucasus republics. Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem: Centre for Research of East European Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Yad Vashem, 1998), 243–52.

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aged and infirm, along with many women and children, who either could not or would not be evacuated.23 To get a complete list of the Jews still residing there, the SK 10a leadership ordered posters put up across the city on August 4. These carried a message to the Jews of Rostov from a Dr. Lurje (or Lurie), chairman of the “Jüdischer Ältestenrat” (Jewish Elders’ Council), stating that they could live in the city without worry but had to be registered. The mandated registration took about five days to complete.24 Rostov saw more posters hung on August 9, once again signed by Dr. Lurje, urgently calling on the Jews scattered across the city to move together into a segregated neighborhood, where they would be no longer exposed to the “violent actions of the non-Jewish populace.” The poster stipulated August 11, 1942, as the day of relocation, when “all Jews of both sexes and every age group, as well as persons stemming from mixed marriages between Jews and Aryans/non-Jews,” had to appear by eight o’clock in the morning at one of six designated assembly points across the city. They had to bring their personal papers along with the keys to their homes. It was also recommended “that Jews bring along their valuables and cash; and if desired, baggage containing bare essentials for installation in their new place of residence.” Many years later, Lothar Heimbach, who had been second-in-command of SK 10a since the spring of 1942, would bluntly state why the Jewish Elders’ Council under Dr. Lurje had been exploited like that: “The purpose of this poster campaign was to gather the local Jews as smoothly as possible, so that they could be liquidated as quickly as possible, according to plan.”25 For many of those who had been asked to relocate, it was equally clear that the German police were not interested in the protection of the Jewish populace but in their annihilation. While some committed suicide, and others 23 On the evacuation policies of the Soviet Union, see Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Concerning Rostov-on-Don, esp. 70–72. 24 Bundesarchiv Koblenz [Federal Archives in Koblenz, hereafter BA Koblenz] R 58/698, M 16, dated August 14, 1942. Militärarchiv Freiburg [Military Archives in Freiburg, hereafter MA Freiburg], film WF-03/31522, n.p.: Armeeoberkommando 17 [Army High Command 17], Abt Ic/AO, Annex Volume XI Activity Reports [dated March 15 to August 13, 1942], Activity Report AO. Here, the entry dated August 2, 1942. 25 Js 202/61 of the Staatsanwaltschaft München I [Public prosecutor’s office Munich I, hereafter StA München I], vol. 6, testimony of Lothar Heimbach, sheet 1335.

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tried unsuccessfully to barricade themselves in their homes, most ultimately obeyed and reported to one of the assembly points as directed. On the morning of August 11, members of SK 10a checked to see if any of the registered Jews had failed to appear at an assembly point. Those who had refused to appear at their own doom, or were too weak or too lame, were to be picked up. Implacably, the trucks drove the Jews of Rostov toward the northwest, until they reached a site called Zmievskaia Balka, or “Snake Ravine,” not far from the village of Zmievka. Near this Snake Ravine was a one-story building surrounded by greenery, completely abandoned. It was decided by Heinz Seetzen (the commander of SK 10a) and Heimbach that this was where incoming families would be divided by age and gender and stripped of their valuables and possessions. Entirely naked, these people were then forced through the building’s back door to the Snake Ravine, where they were shot by waiting executioners before falling lifelessly into the prepared sandpits. The massacre was still not finished by the evening of August 11, so the operation had to continue through the next two days as well, during which a gas van was also used. The total number killed in Rostov by SK 10a is unknown but could be—according to eyewitness testimonies—more than the estimated two thousand Jewish inhabitants of the city itself; the participant Nikolaus Winokurow (or Vinokurov) spoke of several thousand Jews.26

Krasnodar From Rostov-on-Don, SK 10a moved on to Krasnodar, where it took up quarters in mid-August 1942. Initial operations, however, were not aimed at Jews but at hunting down NKVD agents, as well as—because of fear of booby traps—securing the properties taken over from the NKVD. It was only after SK 10a felt itself secure in Krasnodar that its commander, Kurt Christmann, turned to the extermination of the city’s Jewish population. After a meeting with Walther Bierkamp (the commander of Einsatzgruppe D, who was then on an inspection tour) and Christmann’s predecessor, Seetzen (who had wanted to stay with his old troop as a “camp follower” without specific duties), the precise action plan was decided. Although the fall of Krasnodar had been no big surprise, its defenders had still been unable to evacuate the 26 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 560–66. For discussion of the postwar memorialization of the killings in Rostov, see the chapter by Christina Winkler in the present volume.

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entire Jewish population in time. After all, before Germany launched its Caucasus offensive, the Soviet general staff considered its southern front to be so secure that even endangered scientists and artists were sent there from the besieged city of Leningrad, owing to the belief that they were better protected there. Therefore, southern Russia and the Caucasus functioned more as refuge zones for families fleeing from German mass murder—either on their own initiative or through the evacuation programs of the Soviet administration.27 This miscalculation meant that the number of Jews remaining in Krasnodar was somewhat higher (according to conservative estimates) than in Rostov-on-Don: at least two thousand persons, although the true number may have been considerably higher. As usual, the occupiers made registration compulsory, with the additional proviso that each housing block containing Jews had to select an “Elder” to act as a liaison for the promulgated deportations. At the end of the registration process, Christmann ordered a verification of the lists, because he did not believe that all Jews had “voluntarily” let themselves be counted. By having each neighborhood searched for unregistered Jews, as well as any in hiding, he hoped to achieve complete accuracy in the list of Jewish inhabitants. Similarly to the mass executions at Rostov-on-Don, there was an “action” lasting several days, during which the majority of families were assembled at designated places across Krasnodar, brought to the city’s outskirts, told to undress, and then forced to lie down in half-excavated antitank ditches near a vineyard. Marksmen with carbines and submachine guns then shot at this first “layer” of prone victims until they were all dead, before the next group was forced to lie down on the rows of fresh corpses. At the end of the massacre, Soviet POWs were used to bury the mass grave, before being similarly eliminated as unwelcome witnesses.28 From Krasnodar, Christmann also dispatched subunit commandos to the towns of Yeysk, Anapa, Temriuk, and Novorossiisk and to stanitsa Varenikovskaia. The “racially undesirable populace” residing there, as well as those in the surrounding towns and villages, was similarly registered and executed by these subunits. The same fate awaited all opponents of the

27 Kiril Feferman, “A Soviet Humanitarian Action? Centre, Periphery and the Evacuation of Refugees to the North Caucasus, 1941–1942,” Europe-Asia Studies, 61, no. 5 (2009): 813–31. 28 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 578–80.

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occupation regime.29 The German army had full knowledge of these happenings, at least tolerating and perhaps facilitating them, as can be clearly seen in the terse military language of an activity report to the Seventeenth Army’s high command, dated August 28, 1942, mentioning the work of an SK 10a subunit: “EK 10a is cleansing Korenovskaia and environs of Jews.”30 In the course of this working relationship, over seven thousand people may have been killed in Krasnodar and its vicinity.31

Voroshilovsk After Krasnodar, the next most important administrative center in the traditionally Russian area of the North Caucasus was Voroshilovsk, which was a regional capital like Krasnodar. Immediately after Voroshilovsk fell to soldiers of the Third Panzer Division, Einsatzkommando 12 (EK 12, under the command of Erich Müller) marched into the city and took up quarters in the “House of the Red Army.” The command staff of Einsatzgruppe D would also redeploy to the city, sharing a building with the command staff of Army Group A. The Einsatzgruppe men did not wait long to start carrying out their orders. On August 10, 1942, the summons went out to all Jewish townspeople who had taken up residence in Voroshilovsk since June 22, 1941—this largely meant refugees and those evacuated here in vain.32 They were told to appear in front of the city’s railway station in the early morning hours of August 12 with luggage of no more than twenty kilograms (about fortyfour pounds), in order to be “transferred” to other areas of the Soviet Union under German occupation. The city’s “Jewish Council” was ordered to conduct the registration process, which was a typical technique of the German military administration for registering its enemies, particularly aimed at 29 Angrick, 621. Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 291–92. 30 MA Freiburg, film WF-03/31522, n.p.: Armeeoberkommando 17 [17th Army High Command], Abt Ic/AO, Annex Volume X Activity Reports [dated August 14 to December 15, 1942], Activity Report AO. Here the entry dated August 28, 1942. 31 Js 202/61 of the StA München I, bill of indictment against Dr. Kurt Christmann, sheet 20. 32 Their registration had already been completed on August 8, 1942, by men from Einsatzgruppe D.

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those scattered by war since June 22, 1941 (the cutoff date), who otherwise could not have been identified through the rolls of the city’s Soviet administration.33 According to postwar German historical research, at least one thousand Jewish men, women, and children complied with this summons, and the true figure was probably more than double this number. One accomplice even spoke of three thousand persons. The main person responsible for this rapid implementation was SS-Unterscharführer Kurt Wenzel, a close associate and later the personal adjutant of EK 12 commander Müller, who had commissioned Wenzel to oversee the Final Solution in Voroshilovsk. All these townspeople gathered at the city’s designated assembly point, Ordzhonikidze Square, where they were forced onto trucks and taken out of town. A second summons followed on August 13, stipulating that all local/ native Jews had to report “for registration purposes” at the former NKVD building taken over by EK 12. On August 14, at least five hundred people gathered at its entrance, mostly seniors, women, and children. Although they did complete their registrations, they were not allowed to leave the premises. The EK 12 transport squad took them in trucks to a wooden hall at a provisional airfield. Under the supervision of Wenzel, SS-Obersturmführer Karl Kotzendorfer, and SS-Obersturmführer Werner Kleber, the last Jews of Voroshilovsk surrendered their valuables before undressing. Their murderers then took them to some concrete tanks, where they were shot dead. As a result, another town was now “judenfrei” (free of Jews), and the spoils could be distributed as usual, with Field Command 676 using the clothes of their murdered victims to dress their Hiwis (Hilfswilliger, volunteer assistants) and civilian employees. For Müller, the completion of this mass execution meant that he could immediately pull out of Voroshilovsk with the bulk of his personnel and did 33 On the part played by Dept. VII—War Administration—in registering the population: Andrej Angrick, “Zur Rolle der Militärverwaltung bei der Ermordung der sowjetischen Juden” [The role of the military administration in the murder of Soviet Jews], in “Wir sind die Herren dieses Landes”: Ursachen, Verlauf und Folgen des deutschen Überfalls auf die Sowjetunion [“We are the masters of this country”: Causes, process, and consequences of the German invasion of the Soviet Union], ed. Babette Quinkert (Hamburg: VSA-Verlag, 2002), 104–23. Also Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 [The rule of the Wehrmacht: German military occupation and the indigenous population in the Soviet Union 1941–1944] (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009), 103–35.

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not need to stay near the command staff of his Einsatzgruppe. Leaving behind a subunit of around twenty men under the command of Werner Kleber, he immediately set out for Piatigorsk with the main body of EK 12. In contrast, Bierkamp remained with the command staff in Voroshilovsk. As a final step, the men “cleansed” (bereinigt, in the terminology of the perpetrators) the minor localities immediately surrounding Voroshilovsk. The main focus was on Proletarskaia (about forty kilometers [around twenty-five miles]) from Voroshilovsk), where they investigated the deaths of German soldiers murdered by the NKVD, and on Jewish settlements. Patients from the municipal sanatorium—660 people—were also killed.34 The pacification campaign resulted in further actions, fanning out from Voroshilovsk to the localities of Petrovskoe, Spitsevka, Mikhailovskoe, Blagodatnoe, and Kugulta.35 The great majority of the Jewish population in Voroshilovsk and the surrounding area—including both new arrivals and long-established locals— was thus annihilated. Meanwhile, the Einsatzgruppe and its commando units had established a map room for organizing the manhunt, relying not only on Caucasians but also on local ethnic German recruits, who now served as interpreters, to help conduct the search.36 This was how they continued tracking and capturing any remaining fugitives, who were then transferred to a makeshift jail. Executions were delayed until it was “worth the effort,” since individual executions took too much time. But as soon as fifteen to thirty captives were in custody, it was time to empty the jailhouse and shoot the inmates. This happened about five times until October 1942, when two gas vans were brought in under the watch of SS-Hauptscharführer Schmidt, the jail keeper, to be used as the execution method from that point forward.

34 Bundesbeauftragter für die Stasi-Unterlagen [Federal Commissioner for Stasi Records, hereafter BStU], ZUV 23, file 3, testimony of Herbert Brabant on April 4, 1975, sheets 53–54, file 9, written statement of EK 12 member Gustav Gent, sheet 103, file 12, declaration by Dr. David Gambarow dated July 11, 1943, sheet 16. The killings mainly happened on August 5, 7, and 10, but patients were still admitted until the retreat and were then murdered in batches. 35 320 Js 14197/83 of the StA München I, nolle prosequi against Friedrich Pelz and Edgar Orth dated April 8, 1986, sheet 9. 36 BStU, ZUV 23, file 9, written statement of EK 12 member Gustav Gent, sheets 103–4.

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These later victims numbered around two thousand people in total: mostly Jews, but also Roma, communists, and resistance fighters.37

“Caucasian Jews” In comparison to the other regions conquered thus far, the invaders’ available information on the Caucasus region was almost laughable and was expanding only slowly. Because of the aforementioned closeness to Turkey and the activation of a pan-Islamic movement for Nazi foreign policy purposes, however, it was important to act more cautiously in determining precisely who was friend and who was foe. Therefore, as the Caucasus offensive progressed, the Reichs­sicherheits­ haupt­amt (Reich Security Head Office [RSHA]) considered it advisable to have the origins of the Caucasian Jews “scientifically” investigated by its own Wannsee Institute, just to be on the safe side. This research facility, formerly led by Georgian émigré Michael Achmeteli,38 declared in its “expert opinion” that the local “Jews had not succeeded in assimilation.” This verdict was not limited to just those Jews who had immigrated “in recent decades,” “particularly under the rule of Bolshevism,” but also applied to the “Caucasian Jews.” This latter group was defined by the Wannsee Institute as the “Mountain or Dagestan Jews (dagh-cufut)” and the “Georgian Jews (eberali),” who had come from Media, Babylonia, and Palestine during antiquity and settled in the Greater Caucasus region on the coast of the Caspian Sea. These definitions helped the Einsatzgruppe in recognizing with greater clarity their “ideological enemies” and thus were seen as a guideline—despite the “scientific value” of this “expert opinion,” or even because of it—for deciding which population groups in the new deployment area were to be exterminated. The Wannsee Institute may have been equally aware of the meaning and purpose of its investigation, as can be seen in its final summary: “Regardless of the accuracy of this or any other opinion [on the origins of the long-established Caucasian Jews], the Jews, including both the newly

37 BStU, ZUV 23, file 9, testimony of Pawel Wasjutin (or Pavel Vasiutin) on October 8, 1975, sheets 18–21. 38 Gideon Botsch, “Politische Wissenschaft” im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Die “Deutschen Auslandswissenschaften” im Einsatz 1940–1945 [“Political Science” in World War II: “German Foreign Studies” in use, 1940–1945] (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 51–56, 200–205, 284.

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immigrated and the ‘Caucasian Jews,’ are to be seen as foreign elements in the Caucasian region.”39 It should be noted, however, that Bierkamp, as a self-proclaimed and selfempowered local expert on the ground, issued an order in late 1942 that one of the Jewish subgroups, the Mountain Jews, was to be henceforth excluded from the extermination campaigns, contrary to the previous guidelines.40 In late December 1942, Bierkamp had “visited” a Mountain Jew settlement near Nalchik and been “received very hospitably” by them.41 During his visit, the SS-Oberführer determined that Mountain Jews “had nothing in common with Jews except for their shared religion” and that they were more influenced by Islam, since they also practiced polygamy. Therefore, the Mountain Jews, who were now to be referred to as “Tats,” were no longer in danger, since Bierkamp had also instructed his “subordinate units” to this effect.42 It was a decision that ultimately had no impact on the practical course of extermination in the Caucasus, as the order was soon followed by a call to retreat. But up until that point, Bierkamp’s men performed their duties with sweeping effect, entering conquered cities immediately in the wake of the German army. Therefore, let us return to the events of the summer of 1942.

Maikop After the fall of Sevastopol in July, SK 11b was regrouped at Simferopol (having been widely scattered across the Crimea) in order to begin its march into the Caucasus. Passing through Taganrog, Rostov-on-Don, and Krasnodar, it reached Maikop in August 1942. While Maikop was insignificant in comparison to the oilfields of Grozny, it nonetheless represented the only oilfield 39 BA Berlin, film 3363, sheets 5904–6086: Caucasus, pub. by Chief of the Sicherheitspolizei and SD, Wannsee Institute 1942. Quotation from sheet 5968. 40 Arad, Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 294–95. 41 Kiril Feferman, “Nazi Germany and the Mountain Jews: Was There a Policy?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 1 (2007): 96–114, esp. 101–7. 42 BA Koblenz, R 6/65, sheet 233: From the authorized person at the High Command of the Ordnungspolizei of Army Group A, 26 December 26, 1942, to the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, re: Mountain Jews. Additionally, see Nicholas Poppe, Reminiscences, ed. Henry G. Schwartz (Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1983), 166; and Heather Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 232–33.

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then in German hands, and thus, beyond its symbolic value, it was also connected to the many hopes of the Reich’s top leadership. It therefore came as no surprise when Maikop was made the headquarters of SK 11b, which additionally received the security police assignment of guarding the oil wells, as these had to be protected at all costs from the remaining saboteurs and emerging partisan groups. SK 11b fanned out and sent subunits to Armavir, Kropotkin, Cherkessk, Labinskaia, Khadyzhenskaia, and Belaia Glina, since its job was to control the entire region and not just the city of Maikop, which was already heavily occupied by German soldiers. The job of annihilating the Jews living in Maikop was given to the Kubiak subunit. Everything went as usual, with clockwork organization. Posters announced that the city’s Jewish residents had to report to the former NKVD building on the specified day for relocation purposes. For the registration of the Jews, SK 11b benefited as usual from the assistance of the Ortskommandantur (regional headquarters, or OK), in this case the OK I/921, since the OK had already registered the entire population and kept extra lists for communists, evacuees, and so forth. Like all other military commands in the area, they were acting in accordance with orders from above: the registration of political opponents had been mandated by higher-ranking departments, although the actual work was done by local mayors or community leaders.43 With these lists, the various units of Einsatzgruppe D could check whether anyone had failed to appear for relocation or had gone into hiding. The main organizer in Maikop, Erich Kubiak, seemed jovial in the face of the frightened people who had gathered on the forecourt of the former NKVD building, now the headquarters of SK 11b and—according to the “routine” summons issued to the Jews of Maikop—the designated assembly point for relocation. He spoke to them reassuringly, even exchanging a few words with some of the younger women, smiling at them and patting one of the girls on the shoulder. For the people gathered there, it might have seemed like nothing bad could happen. Carrying diverse pieces of luggage, they stood in the forecourt and discussed the promulgated relocation before going inside the building for registration and verification that these were the 43 In this regard, there existed under the commander of the rear guard of Army Group A (Berück A), a department headed by Senior War Administrative Councillor Dr. Werner Füßlein with the revealing title “Sondermaßnahmen gegen Juden” [Special measures against Jews]. The deployed armies possessed corresponding branches. See Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 558. See also Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 103–35.

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designated persons. Then they were arrested, forced into the gas vans, executed on the spot, and buried on the premises of the assembly point. While one part of Maikop’s Jewish population was interred under the large forecourt of the NKVD complex, the other part was taken by the commando’s personnel transport to an execution site outside town, where the victims were shot dead in waiting ditches. Other subunits of SK 11b were just as ruthless, cool, and systematic as the one in Maikop, as they meticulously carried out their assignments in their respective spheres of operation during the late summer and autumn of 1942, with Armavir suffering the highest number of Jewish victims. By the start of 1943, the region under SK 11b was “judenfrei.”44

The Spa Towns of the North Caucasus Meanwhile, Einsatzkommando 12, which had previously been the farthest behind, now became the spearhead of the undertaking. Its “activities” were focused on Piatigorsk and the surrounding spa towns. To exert comprehensive control over the conquered territory, Erich Müller stationed subunits in Essentuki, Kislovodsk, Mineralnye Vody, and Georgievsk. Another squad was based in Stepnovskoe (Stepnoe). In all these towns, the occupying forces gave the Jewish populace absolutely no chance of survival, as their “resettlement” was launched—using the usual methods—soon after EK 12 took up its post in Piatigorsk in late August 1942. For the first time, EK 12 was also supplied with gas vans for carrying out mass murder, suggesting that more of these execution devices had been manufactured in Berlin and delivered to the site specifically for this purpose, as a way to meet the scale of the task and also reduce the mental stress on the marksmen. In Piatigorsk, it took about eight days to register the Jewish residents, after which the commando ordered their extermination. The summons to relocation, addressed to the Jewish population of Piatigorsk and the surrounding localities of Goriachevodsk, Svoboda, Novopiatigorsk, and Krasnaia Slobodka, stated that all Jews living in these places were to assemble on September 5, 1942, at the cavalry barracks, from where they would be taken to areas that were “somewhat freer from the rest of the populace.” Around eight hundred to one thousand Jews obeyed the order, including men, women, and children. At the barracks, they were told they would now be relocated, and therefore had to board the waiting trucks for the upcoming 44 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 582–90.

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journey. After some thirty minutes of travel, they arrived at a gravel pit, with the surrounding vicinity cordoned off by members of EK 12 and their Hiwis while the rest of the commando prepared for the execution at the pit. After disembarking from the trucks, the Jews first had to deposit their valuables on outstretched blankets, before being made to undress. Now entirely naked, they were forced to board the gas van, which then drove back and forth for a few minutes in the immediate area of the execution site before finally stopping at the edge of the pit. Other Jewish captives—who had been told they would be spared if they volunteered—had to pull out the dead with their bare hands and throw them into the pit, so that the van could be pressed back into service as quickly as possible.45 While the majority of the presiding perpetrators carried out their tasks “calmly and methodically,” as the Jewish witness Moisse Ewenson put it, simply ensuring that none of the captive Jews fled the execution and that valuables and clothing were collected in an “orderly” fashion, there were also a few who did not seem satisfied with simple murder. These became excessive abusers like Kurt Wenzel, who tormented a beautiful Jewish woman by accusing her of hiding gold in her private parts. This was his pretext for sexually molesting her.46 None of the victims survived this day. The next task was to annihilate the Jewish populations of the nearby spa towns. In Kislovodsk, the Ortskommandantur (regional headquarters) issued an order on August 6, 1942, for the establishment of a Jewish Committee; under the leadership of Dr. Moses Belinsch, it had to promptly implement every directive of the German administration. The registration and tagging of all Jews living in the city was the first priority, with a deadline of August 18. After registration was complete, the committee had to see to it that “all 45 Js 206/61 of the StA München I, vol. 4, statement of Fritz Grothe, sheet 823; Paul Otto, sheets 983–85. Vol. 5, statement of Wilhelm Hettrich, sheet 1147. Statement of Heinz Hoffmann, sheets 1268/1269. BStU ZUV 23, file 12, Summons to the Jewish Populations of the Towns of Piatigorsk and Goriachevodsk, and the Settlements of Svoboda, Novopiatigorsk, and Krasnaia Slobodka [translated from the Russian], sheets 114–15. Quotation also from here. 46 Js 206/61 of the StA München I, vol. 4, statement of Leonhard Pauly, sheet 997. 119c Js 12/69 (119c Js 17/69) of the StA München I, bill of indictment against Kurt Wenzel, sheets 19–21. Statement by Moisse Ewenson printed in Wassili Grossman and Ilja Ehrenburg, eds., Das Schwarzbuch: Der Genozid an den Sowjetischen Juden [The black book: The genocide of the Soviet Jews] (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994), 426.

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valuable items, such as gold, diamonds, silver, carpets, suits, clothing, and shoes, are to be immediately confiscated from the Jewish populace and delivered to the German commando.” It is very likely that the Jewish Committee members were well aware of the impending danger. But they believed—mistakenly—that for the sake of the Jewish populace and themselves, they could “save lives by confiscating these valuable items and [surrendering them] to the German commandant.” According to the average market prices of the time, the “collected contribution” had a value of five million rubles.47 The Jewish population was then pressed into forced labor for the next few weeks, until EK 12 finally issued the “relocation” summons through posters and broadcast announcements. The Jews living in Kislovodsk were to report early on the morning of September 7, 1942, at the freight yard, from where they would be relocated to “sparsely inhabited areas of Ukraine” for the purpose of “populating” them. Each person was permitted to bring up to twenty kilograms of luggage, including foodstuffs and any remaining valuables. The summons made clear that while baptized Jews also had to be relocated, along with “half-breeds” living alone, those families “where one of the parents is a Jew, but the other is a Russian, Ukrainian, or a member [of another nation]” were allowed to remain in the town. The occupying forces, however, added a cynical observation that “In the future, when possible, a voluntary relocation of mixedmarriage families of the 1st and 2nd categories may also be undertaken.”48 On the morning of September 7, around eighteen hundred Jews reported to the freight station as instructed and were loaded into the twenty cars of the waiting freight train. Around noon, the train departed toward the northeast, passing by the spa town of Mineralnye Vody, where OK II/915 was stationed. The guards on board seemed uncertain, and stopped the train in the open countryside. From here they scanned the vicinity with binoculars, before deciding there was no place away from the tracks that was suitable for an execution of this size. So the train was taken back to Mineralnye Vody and parked on a siding near the local glassworks. This was about one kilometer 47 State Archive of the Russian Federation at Moscow, collection 70445, Nuremberg trial materials, file 93/2: testimony of unnamed survivor, part of the evidence presented in the report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Stavropol region, submitted as Nuremberg document USSR 1. Statement by Moisse Ewenson, printed in Das Schwarzbuch, 421–23. 48 Nuremberg document USSR 434: To All Jews [summons by EK 12]. 22 Js 206/61 of the StA München I, vol. 7, testimony of Anton Kappes, sheet 1738.

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(six-tenths of a mile) away from an antitank ditch that had been selected as the execution site by Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Wiens, the EK 12 member in charge of this operation. Just as in Piatigorsk, the perpetrators used gas vans to murder the Jews. Each time, around fifty to sixty victims would be forced aboard a van, which then drove around the countryside for a few minutes before arriving at the antitank ditch with the corpses of the now suffocated people. These were met by “volunteer Jews” who pulled out the bodies and threw them into the ditch. Although the execution site had been chosen to be away from the tracks, the commando was not performing its “work” in secret. For example, it was apparent that Ortskommandantur 915 also knew about the operation, as it clearly had nothing better to do than to bring a recaptured Jew (who had managed to escape the train but was then given up by locals) straight to the execution site in a military vehicle and hand him over to EK 12. The killings at the glassworks were not limited to the Jews of Kislovodsk; the Jewish populace of Essentuki was also brought to the antitank ditch by EK 12. A “Jewish Committee”—led by the physician Grigorij Konjewitsch (or Grigorii Konevich)—had been established in Essentuki on August 11, 1942, in accordance with an order by Oberstleutnant von Beck, the local commandant. It was primarily charged with the registration of the Jewish populace and by September 7 had registered 507 employable persons (meaning family heads) with a total of around 1,500 family members. On this date they, too, were deported to the glassworks and executed, just like the Jewish inhabitants of Kislovodsk. Another 87 victims came from the town of Zheleznovodsk.49 It must be noted that before the invasion, the Soviet forces had managed to evacuate at least some of the vulnerable Jews who were important to the war effort because of their professions, as shown by the biography of Richard Koch, a physician and medical-theory researcher who had emigrated from Germany. A resident of Essentuki, he succeeded in relocating to Georgia, along with his family. After the Soviet recapture of Essentuki, he returned to this spa town to find his house abandoned, his

49 119c Js 12/69 (119c Js 17/69) of the StA München I, bill of indictment against Kurt Wenzel, sheet 18. 22 Js 206/61 of the StA München I, vol. 10, testimony of Alfred Winkel, sheets 2379–81. BStU, ZUV 23, file 3, Essentuki record [commission report] dated July 10, 1943, sheets 155–56, Zheleznovodsk record [commission report], dated July 12, 1943, sheets 175–86.

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considerable research library plundered, and all the local Jews murdered in his absence.50 Finally, in Georgievsk, the “Caucasian Company” of EK 12 surrounded the homes of Jewish residents, drove them out with great brutality, and executed them outside of town or sent them to the glassworks. It should also be noted that even before the larger massacres at the glassworks, EK 12 had already killed the approximately two hundred Jews living in the town of Mineralnye Vody, “as a precaution”; this meant that every man of the local subunit would be available later to help receive the large shipments of doomed people, and that the local Jews could no longer tell their coreligionists that Mineralnye Vody had seen no preparations to house them in a ghetto—they could only expect death here.51 As for the final death tolls at Mineralnye Vody and the glassworks, there exist very divergent estimates; the aforementioned figures could be considered conservative minimums, in contrast to the Soviet maximum estimates of up to fourteen thousand victims.52

Budennovsk, Kalmykia While the majority of EK 12 personnel were concentrated within a single region, Müller also made sure to send a squad under SS-Obersturmführer Herbert Weber as far as Mikoian-Shakhar (Karachaevsk) to liquidate the Jews there,53 while another subunit under Walter Strohschneider traveled considerably farther eastward. This subunit established itself in Budennovsk (aka Prikumsk) in late August 1942. From there, the Caspian Sea and the mouth of the Kuma River were less than 200 kilometers (about 124 miles) eastward. The Strohschneider subunit included around thirty persons and was—along with the Sonderkommando “Astrachan”—the farthest east of all the units 50 Beyond his research efforts, Richard Koch became primarily known as a physician and as a correspondent of Franz Rosenzweig. He was also the father-in-law of the prominent historian Walter Laqueur. 51 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 616–19. 52 Js 206/61 of the StA München I, vol. 11, German Federal Justice Ministry report dated February 4, 1966, concerning a Soviet trial and the victim death tolls cited there, sheet 2760. 53 Js 206 of the StA München I, vol. 10, testimony of Karl Kotzendorfer dated June 17, 1965, sheet 2238. Poppe, Reminiscences, 164–65. For more on the Final Solution in Mikoian-Shakhar and surrounding settlements, see the chapter by Crispin Brooks in the present volume.

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in Einsatzgruppe D. But even in this thinly populated region, their main task remained the same. In several smaller “actions,” the subunit rounded up Jews and political opponents before shooting them dead “outside of town, in ditches, pits, and forest fringes.” One person in charge admitted that some three hundred to four hundred residents of Budennovsk were killed by the Strohschneider subunit, while Soviet researchers came up with a figure of as many as three thousand victims.54 From their base at Budennovsk, the Strohschneider subunit “processed” the surrounding smaller localities all the way into the Kalmyk Steppe (where the Sonderkommando “Astrachan” otherwise had its mission area), searching, with the active assistance of the newly trained indigenous police forces, for Jews in hiding. Some of those captured had come from western Ukraine, having managed to already flee a couple of thousand kilometers (around twelve hundred miles) to the south. Many of these killings and crime scenes can no longer be traced, but there is at least testimony that some 180 people were shot dead in Arzgir, along with more than 40 in a ravine near Budennovsk.55 For Strohschneider’s subunit, as for all parts of EK 12, this once again meant the “combating of elements inimical to the Reich” and the “security-service processing of the various living areas.”56 Meanwhile, Sonderkommando “Astrachan,” located farther east (and adjacent to Strohschneider’s mission area), fulfilled its mass-murder assignment in late September 1942. In Elista, the capital of Kalmykia, it arrested ninety-three families containing around three hundred members and took them out into the steppe, where a mass grave had been prepared. Under the leadership of Hauptsturmführer Rolf Maurer, the subunit shot dead every Jewish man, woman, and child, including infants and seniors, one family at a time.57 It is likely that the nonlocal Jews (coming to Elista from Gomel,

54 BStU, ZUV 23, file 4, testimony of Herbert Drabant, sheets 64–72; written statement by Drabant, sheet 74; written statement by Drabant, sheet 94; testimony of Herbert Drabant, sheets 98–108. File 6, testimony of Pjotr Birjukow, sheets 113–15. 55 BStU, ZUV 23, file 4, testimony of Herbert Drabant, sheets 152–184; file 7, testimony of Akop Matesowjan (or Matesovyan), sheets 3–39. Berlin Document Center, RuSHA Strohschneider. 56 As phrased by Strohschneider in his CV. Berlin Document Center, SSO Strohschneider. 57 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 623–24.

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Dnepropetrovsk, and Kiev) had already been killed by then.58 The overall death toll for Kalmykia is estimated at two thousand “Soviet patriots,” with the majority of these not being Jews.59

Prokhladnyi, Nalchik, Mozdok During the course of the offensive, SK 10b had also left the Crimea, crossing the Kerch Strait to the Taman Peninsula and continuing to the Caucasus. Its main task was to take on designated localities that had not already been “processed” by other commandos. SK 10b traveled from Temriuk on the Taman Peninsula, southeast across the conquered territories, to the front lines on the Terek River. The leader of SK 10b, Alois Persterer, stationed subunits in Prokhladnyi and Mozdok, while choosing Nalchik as a base for himself and his command staff. Although the available documentation for the activities of SK 10b in this region is entirely inadequate, participants later admitted conducting executions in these places, too, albeit on a much smaller scale. They testified to the shootings of Jews and partisans on the highway between Prokhladnyi and Mozdok, as well as the extermination of the Jews still in Nalchik—mostly seniors, women, and children.60

Retreat For some people, execution did not come until the retreat was underway, either as part of a “scorched earth” pacification policy, or because they were not recognized and arrested as Jews until shortly before a town was 58 MA Freiburg, RH 24-40/116, n.p.: translation from captured papers (handwritten note: training documents for political education), n.d. (probably spring 1943). Joachim Hoffmann, Deutsche und Kalmyken 1942 bis 1945 [Germans and Kalmyks from 1942 to 1945], 4th ed. (Freiburg: Rombach, 1986), 103–4. Elista’s resident registration list had already been scrutinized in late August. 59 Hoffmann, Deutsche und Kalmyken, 102. 60 See relevant locations and transmitted messages of individual commandos in BA Berlin, R 58/698 M 18, dated August 28, 1942. BA Berlin, R 58/222 M 26, dated October 23, 1942, and R 58/223 M 36, dated January 8, 1943. 22 Js 203/61 of the StA München I, vol. 4, testimony of Friedrich Hummel, sheets 919 and 927. Vol. 5, testimony of Jakob Gietzen, sheets 996–98; testimony of Erwin Hansen, sheet 1018. Vol. 8, testimony of Siegfried Schuchart, sheets 1761/1762. Vol. 10, testimony of Jakob Gietzen, sheets 2311 and 2315R.

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abandoned, or because their services as Jewish laborers were no longer needed. This was how, sometime in mid-December, the men of EK 12 came to execute another 55 Jews, who had come from villages near Budennovsk and were now gathered in the courtyard of their accommodations. From here, two trucks departed for the moors with the victims on board—including women and children. Upon arrival, they had to remove their shoes and outer clothing. They were then led away in small groups and shot dead.61 By the year’s end, SK 10b was evacuating from Nalchik and murdering the town’s apparently Ashkenazi Jews on the commando’s execution ground. Just before dying, the victims could see—in the mass grave reopened for burials— the already rotting corpses of the previously executed.62 In Voroshilovsk, the gas vans were in use until the very end, and the last “work Jews”—some 100–130 men who had been exploited for forced labor until then—were executed in mid-January.63 All threads led back to Bierkamp, who supervised and directed the retreat until the end. In accordance with his orders, SK 10b left Nalchik on January 1, 1943 (along with the German military forces); EK 12 left Piatigorsk on January 18; the new SK 11a64 left Voroshilovsk on January 19 (along with the rearguard command of the Einsatzgruppe D general staff and the army’s field command); and SK 11b left Maikop on January 21. Meanwhile, SK 10a, stationed in the Kuban River area, was still far enough from the front to be excluded from the immediate retreat plans. During the evacuation of Krasnodar, however, it would liquidate all the inmates in its makeshift jail. On February 18, Bierkamp submitted a summary report to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the new head of the RSHA, stating that although the retreat had been accomplished without losses, the majority of equipment had had to be abandoned. This included a gas van that had been left behind on the march. The mechanics no longer had enough time to repair the execution machine, so they immediately blew up this “soul killer.” Such an extremely 61 BStU, ZUV 23, file 9, testimony of Wilhelm Hettrich, dated March 31, 1948, sheet 122. 62 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 675–76. It is possible that Mountain Jews were among the victims here, as Bierkamp’s order to spare them either did not reach SK 10b in time or was ignored. 63 BStU, ZUV 23, file 8, testimony of Isaak Schlifstejn, dated October 10, 1975, sheets 168–69; file 9, testimony of Pawel Wasjutin (or Pavel Vasiutin), dated October 8, 1975, sheet 21. 64 This unit arose from Sonderkommando “Astrachan.”

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incriminating piece of evidence could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Soviet intelligence services. The perpetrators had already left too many clues behind, however, with mass graves everywhere bearing witness to their genocidal mission; and while Aktion 1005 would work to erase all traces of mass murder farther west, in the Caucasus region it was much easier for investigators from the Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) to put together the many pieces of evidence.65 Nevertheless, this failed to make a lasting impact in the collective memory of the perpetrators’ homeland. Even today, the Shoah in the Caucasus has remained largely unknown in Germany.

65 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 670–85.

Chapter Four

The Kaukasier Kompanie (“Caucasian Company”): Soviet Ethnic Minorities, Collaborators, and Mass Killers Stephen Tyas

Introduction The German army occupying Crimea on New Year’s Eve 1941 was caught off guard. Despite the presence of an experienced and professional German force, the Soviet army began a series of seaborne invasions on the Crimea in an attempt to recover territory using mainly untested troops recruited in the Caucasus. They attacked the easternmost town of Kerch, the major crossing point across the narrow Taman Straits into the Caucasus. A second Soviet assault took place at nearby Feodosia on the southern coast and a third on the western side of the Crimean peninsula at Evpatoria. The two latter attacks were easily repulsed, while the first, on Kerch, required several weeks for the German army to recapture the town and surrounding area. Large numbers of new Soviet prisoners of war overcrowded the POW camps. It did not take long before German counterintelligence services, the Abwehr and the SS-Einsatzgruppe, realized the prize that had fallen into their hands. Among the captured troops from the Caucasus, they found an underlying hatred of

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czarist Russia going back centuries and more recently of Soviet Russia, which had occupied and incorporated their homelands into the Soviet Union just twenty years earlier. German intelligence officers preyed on these anti-Soviet sentiments to recruit a thousand or more Caucasian POWs (Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, and others) for their own purposes. Some became agents dropped by parachute by the Abwehr and the RSHA (respectively, the “Walli” and “Unternehmen Zeppelin” operations) into their homelands on intelligence gathering missions. Many more would become involved with German troops in the future ground operations. But about two hundred Caucasians were recruited by Einsatzgruppe D and subordinated to the SD and the Security Police based in Simferopol, Crimea, under the banner of a “common goal,” that of liberating their homelands. These young men were established under SS control as the Kaukasier Kompanie, collaborated in the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” and became Holocaust perpetrators by helping the Einsatzgruppe and its subunits (Kommandos) to kill the Jews of the Caucasus during 1942, then elsewhere in 1943–44.1 This article examines the relationship between the Kaukasier Kompanie and Soviet minorities in the Caucasus and their involvement in mass murders, with a special emphasis on the Holocaust through the use of gas vans (Gaswagen) in mobile gassing operations. The article draws upon KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti [Committee for State Security]) material supplied to the then-West German state prosecution service in Munich in the 1970s and 1980s. This material consists of interrogation reports from former Kaukasier Kompanie men who had been convicted of war crimes and imprisoned and from suspects who were under investigation. These have been treated with caution as they are detailed about recruitment and employment in the Crimea of the Kaukasier Kompanie but mainly silent about their activities in the Caucasus, their reasons for joining the Germans, and especially about confronting and participating in mass murder. By comparison, the earlier Soviet interrogations from 1961 and 1962 of former Kaukasier Kompanie men before the North Caucasus Regional Military Tribunal in Krasnodar were much more informative about their 1

Earlier, in the late summer of 1941, Einsatzgruppe A had recruited large numbers of Latvians and Lithuanians who, at its command, committed numerous executions of many thousands of Jews in the Baltics. Latvia and Lithuania (and Estonia) had been occupied by Soviet forces in August 1940 as agreed in the secret annexes of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact of August 24, 1939. Einsatzgruppe B and C, who were stationed in Ukraine, both attempted to recruit collaborator units to help in their extermination campaigns.

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actions with Sonderkommando (SK) 10a in the Krasnodar region. Records from United Kingdom National Archives relating to Kaukasier Kompanie men who came to Britain after the war, together with captured German records from archives in Germany, Poland, and the United States, were used to establish the short history of this unit.

Emergence By November 16, 1941, practically the entire Crimean peninsula had fallen to the German Eleventh Army under General Erich von Manstein, who laid siege to the last Soviet enclave at Sevastopol. Many thousands of Soviet soldiers had been captured and were being held in poor conditions. The Soviet high command staged several military assaults to retake the Crimea. The failure of the Soviet seaborne attacks on Crimea over New Year’s Eve 1941 and New Year’s Day 1942 brought even more prisoners of war into German POW camps. Many young men drafted into the Soviet army from the Caucasian ethnic minorities became targets for German intelligence officers. Both the Abwehr and Einsatzgruppe D were interested in combing the POW cages for their own purposes. The SD Foreign Intelligence Service, RSHA VI in Berlin, had begun a program (Operation Zeppelin) to recruit suitable ethnic minorities from the Caucasus as intelligence agents. Some of those recruited by the SD were taken to Auschwitz in Poland for training in intelligence gathering, encrypting radio messages, and operating radios. The agent training in Auschwitz naturally found some trainees unsuitable for espionage work, and ten to fifteen were sent back to the Crimea, where Einsatzgruppe D recruited them into the Kaukasier Kompanie before the move into the Caucasus during July–August 1942. Eventually a number of SD-trained Georgians were dropped by parachute from Luftwaffe aircraft into their homelands, especially into Georgia and Azerbaijan, and proceeded to send military information back to the SD.2 How successful they were is debatable. Soviet archives reveal that the Soviets had prior warnings about the parachute drops—possibly from British intelligence passing on intercepted and decrypted German 2

The National Archives of the UK (TNA), Kew, HW 19/235 to HW 19/248, Bletchley Park, the UK signals intelligence service, was able to intercept and decrypt over one thousand radio messages transmitted by RSHA VI Berlin to their Unternehmen Zeppelin units in the Soviet Union detailing many agent infiltration operations.

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radio messages from their top-secret communication center at Bletchley Park, or by Soviet radio-interception operations. In 1942, the SD dropped a group of twenty-five agents, who were all “machine-gunned” coming down in their parachutes. Of nineteen agent groups dropped over the Caucasus, “fifteen were eliminated,” and the other four “surrendered immediately after landing.” Hardly a success story, less so when Soviet intelligence began playing back to RSHA Berlin the agents’ radio sets with false information.3 Einsatzgruppe D recruited Caucasian ethnic minorities from the POW cages for another purpose, especially those who professed ardent anti-Soviet views. These young POWs came from Azerbaijani, Georgian, Armenian, and other Caucasus groups and had earlier received training from Soviet instructors without disturbance and safely beyond the range of Luftwaffe air raids. Apart from being young, they also needed to be able-bodied and without injury. To plan for their future deployment in the Caucasus, during the spring of 1942 SS-Oberführer Otto Ohlendorf ordered SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Wiens to begin training this new group of young Caucasian men, who would be known as the Kaukasier Kompanie. An ethnic German born in Ukraine and fluent Russian speaker, Wiens was a professional SD officer. His first group of about one hundred men were recruited under the slogan of joining in the “liberation” of their homelands and returning home as freedom fighters. The training took place in Simferopol, and they wore their Red Army uniforms for a few weeks until those were replaced by standard issue German field-gray uniforms without rank badges. During training, more recruits arrived, and it became possible to make three distinct platoons representing the nationalities: Azerbaijani, Georgian, and a mixed platoon consisting of Armenians, Ossetians, Ingush, Kazakhs, Ukrainians, and Russians. The three platoon commanders were Musa Magiramow (Azerbaijani), Wasso Elisbarischwili (Georgian), and Ivan Solowjow (the mixed platoon). The company commander in charge of all three platoons was a Russian-born ethnic German, Sergei Edigaj, who became Walter Kehrer’s second-in-command.4

3

Robert W. Stephan, Stalin’s Secret War: Soviet Counterintelligence against the Nazis, 1941–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 182–90; Günther W. Gellermann, Moskau ruft Heeresgruppe Mitte [Moscow calling Army Group Center] (Koblenz: Berbard und Graefe Verlag, 1988). 4 Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg (BAL), B162/2858, statement M. M. O. Efendijew, September 28, 1973. The spellings of names are rendered here as they appear in the German documentation.

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In May 1942, SS-Sergeant Kehrer arrived at Simferopol to rejoin Einsatzgruppe D after eight months’ detached duty in Dubossary, Bessarabia. Kehrer had been assigned to Einsatzgruppe D in June 1941 at the assembly point near Leipzig. He came from the Gestapo office in Elbing, where he had worked as an investigator, but the more significant reason for his posting was his fluent Russian and Azerbaijani language skills. He was born on December 28, 1912, in the ethnic German village of Helenendorf (now the city of Goygol, Azerbaijan), and during his school years in 1920 the Red Army occupied and then incorporated Azerbaijan into the Soviet Union. When still a teenager Kehrer fled Soviet rule and traveled via Turkey to Germany, where he joined the Nazi Party shortly before his twentieth birthday in 1932. With his language skills and ability to bond with the recruits, Kehrer took over the Kaukasier Kompanie training when Ohlendorf sent Wiens to join Einsatzkommando (EK) 12 in readiness for the summer 1942 military campaign in the Caucasus.5 In the period May–July 1942 at Simferopol, Kehrer finished training the recruits, armed them with former Soviet rifles, and had them stand guard duty at the various buildings housing the Einsatzgruppe staff headquarters and EK 11b. At his trial after the war, Kehrer denied that he had been commander of the Kaukasier Kompanie and was unable to name someone who had been in command after the departure of Wiens. Although Wiens was an SS officer, the sole reason he had been in charge of the training was because he spoke Russian. Einsatzgruppe D had very few officers capable of speaking the language, but it had a number of SS sergeants who could. It seems prudent to believe that Kehrer arrived at Simferopol at the right time and in the right place when Wiens was needed elsewhere. For all his denials, Kehrer was de facto commander of the Kaukasier Kompanie and made the best of his position attached to staff headquarters, first with Ohlendorf and then with Ohlendorf ’s replacement from June 1942, SS-Oberführer Dr. Walther Bierkamp.

Operating the Gas Vans Both Ohlendorf and Bierkamp would have noted that Kehrer had his new charges soon employed in the grisly work of killing people in Simferopol, where Einsatzgruppe D had two gas vans in operation. A third gas van had 5

BAL, B162/2857, statement Walter Kehrer, May 22, 1969.

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been sent to Taganrog, where SK 10a was stationed. The gas vans had been developed by RSHA Berlin on orders from Himmler as a means of reducing the psychological toll on German shooters at executions.6 Soviet interrogations of former Kaukasier Kompanie men, taken in prisons after their Soviet trials, are remarkably silent not only about their motives in joining the enemy German forces but also about why they agreed to participate in the indiscriminate killing of Soviet Jews, their fellow citizens— especially in gassing so many innocent men, women, and children, Jewish or not. Whether the SS men themselves agreed with Himmler’s idea of reducing their torment by replacing shooting with gas vans can be found in their own West German police interrogations. Few of them wanted anything to do with the gas van operations and claim only to have seen them from a distance or when loading prisoners. Their preference therefore was shooting people: since these were individual acts, they could deny being there, whereas gas van operations were much more complicated and involved a number of people. It cannot be said that this was a postwar motive to avoid incrimination; it was a choice made at the time. With this choice being made in 1942, it becomes evident that if most SS men themselves did not want this duty, it would have to be done by someone else. Who else was in the right place at the right time but the Kaukasier Kompanie, who became enmeshed in the gas van operations under Einsatzgruppe D in the Caucasus in 1942? Most eyewitnesses recall the gas vans as having the appearance of furniture removal vans. The side panels had mock windows painted on them. The rear had two outward-opening doors that locked in the center. A Russian Jewish POW, Jecheskel Moschkowitsch Fenichel, worked for Einsatzgruppe D as a vehicle mechanic in their Voroshilovsk (Stavropol) workshops and in 1943 gave a detailed statement to the Soviet authorities on the operation of the gas vans.7 The killing chamber was about 5 meters (16 feet, 5 inches) long, 2.5 meters (8 feet, 2 inches) wide, and 2.5 meters high. Inside, the chamber was lined throughout in galvanized-iron sheeting. Above the floor was a wooden grating, while underneath were two 2.5-meter pipes connected to form an H 6 Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein and Adalbert Rückerl, eds., Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas: Eine Dokumentation [National Socialist mass killings by poison gas: A documentation] (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1983), 81–109. 7 “Report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices,” Soviet War News (London) August 7, 1943.

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shape. The pipes had holes drilled into them at regular intervals. The open end of one pipe extended down through the floor of the chamber, and a short rubber hose connected it to the engine exhaust. The rear doors were lined on the inside with rubber. There were no seats; the prisoners stood. Once the Germans and their collaborators had the gassing vehicles loaded with victims and the rear doors closed, the driver would keep the engine ticking over for up to ten or fifteen minutes. All the exhaust fumes were directed into the hermetic chamber behind the driver, and once the prisoners realized the fumes were coming into the chamber, they began beating the sides of the chamber and shrieking. The men attempted to storm the rear doors and force them open. By the fifteen-minute mark, carbon monoxide exhaust fumes ensured a comatose condition among the victims before death eventually took place. The gas van drivers then drove off with an accompanying escort to a prepared burial location; the most regular burial locations were antitank ditches. On arrival, the gas van would usually back up to almost the lip of the ditch, and the drivers then opened the rear doors. The scene inside was gruesome, with reddish-pink bodies. Most of the dead were tangled together in front of the doors, covered in urine and feces. The physical work of unloading the corpses and throwing them into graves would be undertaken by other prisoners brought in a second vehicle. The work was easier when the victims were clothed, as opposed to operations when they were stripped naked or to their underclothing. Once all the dead had been unloaded, the unloaders were then shot and shoved into the ditch. The guards proved able to shovel a small amount of earth over the bodies before they all returned to headquarters. The gas vans were washed out after every operation to prevent unwanted smells for their next use. The vehicle described by Fenichel was a Saurer and could take seventy to eighty people at a time. A second gassing vehicle, described by others as smaller but of similar construction, was the “Diamond” gas van. It operated in the same way, taking up to forty people at a time. The gas vans had arrived in Simferopol, Crimea, with the Einsatzgruppe D group staff in early 1942. A Saurer vehicle was dispatched to SK 10a in Taganrog, where it spent November 1941–July 1942. SK 10a took it with them into the Caucasus and used it at the Rostov-on-Don killings in August 1942 and later in Krasnodar. In Simferopol and throughout the Caucasus, the Kaukasier Kompanie men provided the guards at either end of most gas van operations and would shoot the corpse unloaders. The typical gas van operation was removing suspects held for interrogation in the cells (Jewish men, women, and children; partisans; Red Army men; communist apparatchiks). The Caucasians formed

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a double line between the prison cells to the back of the gas van, forcing the victims forward without delay, pushing and beating them. A few minutes after all the victims had been loaded, the gas van drove off to the grave site. Several Caucasians participated in at least four (and possibly six) such gas van operations in Simferopol, with forty-sixty victims on each occasion. The gas van drove out to the burial site on the Feodosia road accompanied by another Kommando vehicle carrying the escort of Caucasians and several prisoners with spades. When the gas van arrived, the victims were already dead. The prisoners unloaded the bodies and threw them into the antitank ditch, which already held ten thousand bodies of Jews shot in December 1941. When the gas van had been emptied and the burial completed, the prisoners were shot and buried by the Caucasians. On one occasion, a second gas van arrived at the mass grave at the same time. Following their recruitment, the period between May and July 1942 for the Kaukasier Kompanie involved them in training to use the gas vans.8 They would soon be used more regularly in the Caucasus. The three gas vans of Einsatzgruppe D, in their much more active role in the Caucasus, were soon recognized by the local population, who gave them the name “soul destroyer” (dushegubka in Russian, translated into German as Seelentöter).9 After the war, both the German and Caucasian perpetrators sought to play down the number of gas van operations in Simferopol and in the Caucasus, and thereby the number of victims, to avoid self-incrimination. Their postwar statements, on the other hand, also imply a very regular reduction of people held in the Kommando prison cells, implying the regular use of gas vans. In Simferopol alone, a weekly operation meant eight to ten such events between May and late July 1942. On other days, the vehicles probably ran a regular circuit to other locations in the Crimea where the Kommandos had their suboffices and held prisoners in cells: Alushta, Evpatoria, Bakhchisarai, Feodosia, Yalta. There was never a shortage of suspected persons, Jews uncovered in hiding, and partisans. Few were released; most were killed in the gas vans.

8 9

BAL, B162/2858, statement A. A. I. Ibragimow, October 2, 1973; statement A. E. Matewosjan, October 5, 1971; statement S. S. Sarkisjan, September 27, 1973. BAL, B162/2858, statement T. V. Baratischwili, September 25, 1973.

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In the Caucasus In July 1942, Einsatzgruppe D and its Kommandos were on the move, quitting their winter stations and heading for the Caucasus. The group staff took the longer northern route via Melitopol, Taganrog, and Rostov, heading for Voroshilovsk in the North Caucasus. In the first days of August, SK 10a advanced from Taganrog to nearby Rostov-on-Don, where it assembled, registered, then shot and gassed the Jewish population. It then moved south to make its headquarters in Krasnodar. EK 12 moved from Fedorovka to Stalino, then southward to Voroshilovsk, where it arrived before the group staff. From Crimea, Kommandos 10b, 11a, and 11b, each with small groups of Kaukasier Kompanie men, went eastward to Kerch and crossed over the Taman Straits by ship with all their vehicles and supplies.10 After docking, they went their separate ways. The target area for Kommando 10b was Baku, the major oil production hub and the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan on the south Caspian Sea coast; EK 11a was sent toward Astrakhan on the north Caspian coast; for Kommando 11b it was Maikop, another oil production center. German plans to acquire fresh oil production sources were thwarted by Soviet military resistance that foiled the advance on Baku and by Soviet partisans who destroyed practically all the oil wellheads in Maikop and those the Germans had managed to restore. Naturally, with such a large geographic area in the Caucasus for the Kommandos of Einsatzgruppe D to cover, and with only three gas vans, not all the Kaukasier Kompanie men were needed for the new campaign of extermination. Some found themselves put on guard duty at the various headquarters buildings and prisons used by the Kommandos, became truck drivers, assisted in arrests and antipartisan drives, or were used as kitchen staff. Under the command of Ohlendorf, Einsatzgruppe D reported that it had killed 91,678 people, mainly Jews, between July 1941 and April 8, 1942.11 Under its new commander, Bierkamp, the killings continued in the North Caucasus from August 1942 to January 1943. Whereas we have original 10 At the time of the summer 1942 advance into the Caucasus, EK 12 had neither Kaukasier Kompanie men nor a gas van. They acquired both only once they arrived in August 1942 in Voroshilovsk, where they shared quarters with the Einsatzgruppe D Group Staff. 11 Bundesarchiv Berlin (BA Berlin), R58/221, USSR Situation Report (Ereignsmeldung UdSSR) Nr. 190, April 8, 1942; at Nuremberg this document was given the reference NO-3359.

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German documentation from Ohlendorf in which the above number is quoted, there is less information available to construct the exact number of victims killed under Bierkamp’s command. From a search of German, American, and Soviet archives it has been possible to compile a list of executions carried out by Einsatzgruppe D in the Caucasus, resulting in a minimum number of 30,000 people killed, of whom about 90 percent were Jewish men, women, and children. Killings organized by Einsatzgruppe D in the Caucasus were not restricted to shooting but also involved the increased use of its three gas vans. One of the large Saurer vans was extensively employed by SK 10a in the Krasnodar region. The second Saurer and the smaller Diamond gas van remained under the overall command of Einsatzgruppe D Staff HQ in Voroshilovsk. These two vehicles were extensively used by the detachments of EK 12 in the Voroshilovsk and Mineralnye Vody regions. At times, one of the vans was detached for use in Maikop, the area of EK 11a. There are reasons to believe that the Diamond gas van was employed on a regular weekly basis, operating on a circuit between Voroshilovsk, Armavir, Kropotkin, and Maikop, taking away all prisoners in the cells. These would be Jews (men, women, and children), Red Army men, Red Army commissars, partisans, and “spies” (loosely interpreted). This new phase of killings during the summer of 1942 began in Rostov, first with a gas van operation. SK 10a under SS-Obersturmbannführer Heinz Seetzen had spent the previous winter at Taganrog, thirty miles from Rostov, and in July moved into Rostov after the new German military advance had occupied the city. SK 10a brought its own gas van for the move into the Caucasus. In Rostov, the men put up placards calling on Jews to register. At the same time, they investigated local hospitals and on August 3, 1942, carried out gas van operations at a mental institution, killing seventy-three patients.12 Nine days later, the local Jewish population of two thousand men, women, and children assembled with their luggage for “resettlement,” a euphemism for execution. The elderly and infirm were taken by truck and gas van to a ravine, Zmievskaia Balka, on the western edge of Rostov, while the rest marched there under SS guard. Kaukasier Kompanie men were present and participated in the unfolding events. When they arrived at Zmievskaia Balka, the Jewish men were separated from the women and taken farther 12 Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 [Occupation policies and mass murder: Einsatzgruppe D in the southern Soviet Union 1941–1943] (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS, 2003), 561–62.

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forward. Here, they were forced to hand over any valuables, stripped naked, and, in groups of ten, forcibly marched to the edge of the ravine, where the firing squads shot them. After all the men had been shot came the women and children. The same routine continued throughout the day and finished in the evening. Shortly afterward, SK 10a left Rostov and traveled southward into the Kuban region. They made their next headquarters at Krasnodar and remained there until January 1943.13 The Kuban region was where many gypsies (Roma, Sinti, Zigeuner) moved around, and, as elsewhere in the German-occupied Soviet territories, the Germans regarded them as a security risk who could be passing intelligence information to the enemy. In September 1942, a small SS detachment from SK 10a in Krasnodar under SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Trimborn arrived at Kolkhoz Ordzhonikidze, near Poliakovka, and took away the entire gypsy labor force (men, women, and children), with their luggage, in three trucks. They were shot in nearby woods. On December 6, 1942, the intelligence officer of the army’s Security Division 454 reported the arrest of a “Zigeunergruppe” (gypsy group) of twenty-two persons who were considered “a danger” and their transfer to a “Judenlager” (Jewish camp) at Kushchevskaia. A Judenlager would come under the control of the SS, and in this case, SK 10a. Before the end of December 1942, the camp had been dissolved and the prisoners killed. These executions of gypsies appear to have been carried out without reporting the assistance of the Kaukasier Kompanie and indicates gypsies found in other areas of the North Caucasus would have been similarly murdered. In the first days of January 1943, in one of the last sweeps of the Krasnodar SS prison, a gas van was used to remove some of the last prisoners, including four elderly gypsy women.14 In the Caucasus, the gas vans were employed in four basic operations that were followed almost without exception: 1. At mass executions (e.g., Rostov, Voroshilovsk, and Mineralnye Vody), the gas vans operated from the assembly point. Jews who were elderly or infirm and women with children were taken from this point to the execution 13 Angrick, 561–62. 14 Angrick, 518; US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), T315 Roll 2219; the author thanks Alexandr Kruglov (Kharkov) for providing source material. Details of Soviet interrogation of the Ossetian national and member of the Kaukasier Kompanie Urusbek Dzampayev, dated December 20, 1962, on gas van activity in Krasnodar in January 1943 was kindly supplied by Dr. Martin Dean, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington, DC.

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site, and they would be killed on the way. Able-bodied Jews or Soviet POWs would remove the bodies from the van and throw them into a mass grave. 2. The second task was removing mentally and physically handicapped patients, including numerous children, from the sanatoria, hospitals, clinics, health resorts, and spas that dotted the Caucasus. This can be seen as an extension of the euthanasia program of “useless eaters” in Germany that killed over seventy thousand German patients suffering mental or physical disabilities prior to 1941, when Hitler ordered the scope of the operation significantly diminished. 3. The third and no less murderous use of gassing vehicles was the removal of people arrested and detained in Kommando prisons. One postwar SS witness said the gas van arrived weekly at Maikop to clear the prison, taking away thirty to forty people at a time. The victims held in these prisons included Jews of both sexes and all ages who were found after the first wave of mass shootings, alleged Soviet agents and spies, communist officials, POWs, and any other undesirables brought in for questioning. Examining the evidence provided by Walter Kehrer about about the two gas vans that operated from Einsatzgruppe D staff headquarters in Voroshilovsk, it appears that Kommando prisons all over German-occupied areas of the Caucasus were cleared by gas van operations. When reviewing the geographic layout from Voroshilovsk, it can be seen that one gas van, probably the smaller Diamond, went on a circuit down to Maikop and then along the north–south military road running through the Caucasus from Kropotkin to Armavir to Nevinnomyssk (about 160 kilometers [99 miles]).15 4. The first wave of mass shootings of Jews was centered on the larger towns and cities of the Caucasus. From Voroshilovsk and Mineralnye Vody, one gas van proceeded to visit all the villages and hamlets in the surrounding areas, killing small Jewish populations. Existing documents list at least seven locations where local Jews in the vicinity of Voroshilovsk were killed in a gas van; four locations totaled 390 victims. EK 12 proved to be the most active in killing Jews, using two gas vans and mass shootings. Their new commander, SS-Standartenführer Dr. Erich Müller, had had a long career in the Gestapo, recently as Gestapo liaison officer with Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry in Berlin. EK 12’s activity 15 BAL: 213 AR 1901/66, vol. 15, 3089–90, Franz Grell, June 1, 1967 (Maikop Prison); 213 AR 1901/66, vol. 6, 1226–28, Rudolf Sciewer, July 23, 1942 (Armavir Prison); 213 AR 1897/66, vol. 10, 2180–82, Werner Kleber, March 10, 1969 (Voroshilovsk Prison).

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began soon after they arrived in Voroshilovsk (Stavropol) on August 5–6, 1942. They quickly organized placards all over the city calling for the Jewish population to register on August 12, bringing their luggage with them to the market square. The local psychiatric hospital was located, and after investigations, they began regular gas van operations, removing 660 patients over the next few days.16 This operation probably required at least twelve separate journeys, with the Kaukasier Kompanie aiding in the loading and unloading of the vehicle. The gas van made the eight-mile journey from the hospital to the edge of the local airport, where an antitank ditch had been found. This was the killing and burial site for the Jews of Voroshilovsk. The Kommando was surprised on August 12, when four thousand Jewish men, women, and children—far more than they had reckoned—packed the market-square assembly area in readiness for their resettlement. The SS officers in charge, commander Dr. Erich Müller and his deputy, Dr. Heinrich Bolte, left the organization of the imminent mass execution to SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Wiens and Werner Kleber. Wiens was the only one with any prior experience of mass executions, having been present at the three-day executions in Simferopol the previous December and earlier with SK 10a in Ukraine during the summer of 1941 and also in Poland during 1939.17 Dr. Müller decided to ask the German army for the loan of trucks and their drivers, who in concert with the Kommando’s few trucks would transport the Jews from the marketplace to the Voroshilovsk airport killing site. Elderly Jews were registered, parted from their luggage, and loaded into one of the gas vans, assisted by friendly Russian-speaking Kaukasier Kompanie men. Then they were driven out to the execution site, where their corpses were thrown into the mass grave. The more able-bodied Jewish men were the first loaded into ordinary trucks, with some of the Kaukasier Kompanie men ensuring that no one jumped out and escaped. In this way, a steady stream of victims enabled the firing squads to be more accurate and take turns: the Kommando’s detachment of Schutzpolizei (protection police) men, followed by their Waffen-SS reservists, and then Kaukasier Kompanie men. The Gestapo and SD men rarely joined the firing

16 “German Crimes in the Stavropol Territory, Northern Caucasus: Report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices,” Soviet War News (London), August 7, 1943; BAL, AR 1902/66, vol. 14, 3321–28, statement Wilhelm Merkelbach, June 24, 1970. 17 Berlin Documentation Center, SSO Heinrich Wiens.

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squads other than giving a coup de grâce to anyone found still alive in the mass grave. The killings continued into a second day. On the third day, the final five hundred victims were shot, and the mass grave was covered over with earth. In all probability, it was necessary that all the SS officers belonging to EK 12 attend this event to acquire some knowledge from SS-Hauptsturmführer Wiens, who now belonged to this Kommando, of how to organize further mass executions. To some extent, this is borne out by what happened next. After the massacre at Voroshilovsk, Dr. Müller dispatched a large detachment (Teilkommando) of men under SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Heinrich Bolte farther south to set up a base in Mineralnye Vody. With Dr. Bolte came SS-Hauptsturmführer Wiens and Fritz Wölbing, SS-Untersturmführer Karl Fischer, and SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Walter Strohschneider, who would take smaller detachments to towns in the surrounding area. They arrived in late August at this spa town, famous for its mineral-water springs (Mineralnye Vody in Russian means “mineral waters”). The town was also the railhead for a forty-kilometer (twenty-five-mile) spur line connected to other spa towns and health resorts: Piatigorsk, Essentuki, and Kislovodsk. They also brought a gassing truck and a number of Kaukasier Kompanie men.18 The SS officers soon discovered that the area held an influx of refugees and family groups, not all Jewish, from Ukraine and northern and central Russia who had been evacuated to the Caucasus in 1941 to escape the German advances. At all three locations Jews were ordered to register for resettlement, and a decision was made (by whom is not known) to use the railroad to bring the Jews from Kislovodsk, Essentuki, and Piatigorsk to Mineralnye Vody, where they would be shot. In Mineralnye Vody an execution site had been found: a large antitank ditch near the glass factory that sat alongside the railroad. The trains stopped a few hundred meters from the execution site so that the victims could be separated from their luggage and by gender. As usual, mothers with young children, the elderly, and the infirm were helped into the gas vans and killed during the journey. The more able-bodied were marched off to the execution site and shot, first the men, then the women and children. The Jews of Mineralnye Vody were the first to be shot on September 1 (five hundred victims). Between September 6 and 10, the Jews of Piatigorsk (twenty-eight 18 BAL, AR 1902/66, vol. 4, 1063–84, statement Dr. Heinrich Bolte, April 18, 1962; AR 1902/66, vol. 6, 1355–66, statement Otto Fischer, October 12, 1962.

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hundred victims), Kislovodsk (eighteen hundred victims), and Essentuki (two thousand victims) were all killed. The total number of Jews murdered in the area of the glass factory is estimated at about seventy-five hundred.19 When this mass shooting was over, various SS officers took small detachments into the surrounding area to find and kill other Jews. The Saurer gas van was sent into the mountain foothills, where numerous spas and sanatoria were located. On December 22, 1942, the gas van found itself in Teberda. At the International Military Tribunal trying the major German war criminals at Nuremberg, the Soviet prosecutor reported eyewitnesses to this crime: members of the sanatorium staff. According to the proscutor’s summary, medical sister S. E. Ivanova and medical aide Polupanova testified, Before the entrance of the first section of the sanatorium … a German automobile drew up. Seven German soldiers, who had arrived in the vehicle, dragged fifty-four seriously sick children, ranging in age from three years upward, out of the sanatorium (they were too ill to move and therefore were not driven forcibly into the van) and stacked them in layers inside the vehicle. They then closed the door, let in the carbon monoxide gas, and drove off from the sanatorium. An hour later the vehicle returned to Teberda. All the children had perished. They had been exterminated by the Germans and their bodies thrown into the Teberda ravine near Gunachgir.20

This killing of fifty-four children, all Jewish, in Teberda was not the only gas van action involving children that happened in the Caucasus. SK 10a had used their Saurer gas van on September 21, 1942, at the Krasnodar Regional Hospital, taking away forty-two children. The same gas van was used in a more murderous way at the hospital for mentally handicapped children in Yeysk. Heinrich Görz, a medical student waiting to do his final examinations in Berlin, was serving in SK 10a and arrived in Yeysk on October 9, 1942, with the gas van. After advising the Soviet medical staff that the children would be taken to Krasnodar for treatment, Görz had his accompanying Kaukasier Kompanie men load the more able-bodied into the van. They 19 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 617–19; witness statement Henrik Schächter, Nuremberg, 21 October 1947, IMT trial document NO-5510. 20 Nuremberg document, USSR-1, the Soviet report dated July 5, 1943, on events at Teberda: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-18-46.asp; BAL, AR 1902/66, vol. 19, 3195–99, statement Army Administration officer Max Hämmerle, March 10, 1971. On Teberda, see also the chapter by Crispin Brooks in the present volume.

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did not go willingly, kicking and screaming until subdued by the Caucasians. On the following day, October 10, 1942, the remaining bedridden children were loaded on top of each other in the gas van. In this way, 214 children were killed and their bodies thrown into the antitank ditch outside the town. Their bodies were exhumed six months later, when Soviet armies had driven the German armies from most areas of the Caucasus.21 On December 19, 1942, the Kaukasier Kompanie men in Voroshilovsk, about one hundred of them, organized a feast for the Islamic festival Kurban Bayram.22 They feted Einsatzgruppen chief Walther Bierkamp and their own chief, Walter Kehrer, and invited all the Einsatzgruppen personnel. The feast included colorful Caucasian folklore dancing and typical food and drink. Bierkamp gave a short speech in which he called the Kaukasier Kompanie “Liberators of their Homeland”—a rather empty speech, as they would be retreating from the Caucasus in the next two weeks. As the evening proceeded the alcohol took hold of the Caucasians, leading to drunken excesses, and Bierkamp took exception to this behavior. The following morning, Kehrer was arrested and placed in a cell. The Kaukasier Kompanie made strong representations to Bierkamp about the arrest of Kehrer, and after a few days he was released and allowed to go on home leave over Christmas 1942.23 Kehrer had not returned before the New Year of 1943, which saw Soviet armies beginning to advance following their recent victory at Stalingrad. On the North Caucasus front, the tide also turned against the weak and extended German front lines. They began to fall back, and the southernmost Kommando, SK 10a in Nalchik, was given the same order. By mid-January 1943, in Voroshilovsk, Einsatzgruppe D staff headquarters had packed up, and, with their vehicle column escorted by the Caucasians, they began the northward journey to Rostov along the northern coastal route of the Sea of Azov, from Taganrog to Melitopol. En route one of the gas vans broke down 21 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 648–50; BAL, AR 1898/66, vol. 12, 2684–86, statement Heinrich Görz, March 4, 1965, and vol. 15, 3377–80, statement Xaver Bockhart, September 16, 1965. 22 This religious festival is celebrated across Muslim regions and countries as a day of sacrifice. Typically a sheep is slaughtered, then barbecued and eaten by the people attending. The Azerbaijans and some Georgians in the Kaukasier Kompanie were Muslims, but the non-Muslims among them would have known of this annual celebration. 23 Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (BStU), MfS HA IX/11 KV 6/74, vol. 58, BStU 000076.

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and could not be repaired. The decision was made that they it could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Russians, where its purpose could be established, so it was blown up.24 While most of the Kommandos retreated via Rostov, SK 10a, based in the Kuban at Krasnodar, also controlled the area westward to Temriuk on the Taman Straits. In January 1943, SK 10a packed up and set their former headquarters building ablaze, burning to death prisoners locked in the cells. They then set off for Temriuk via Anapa and took a ship across the Taman Straits to Kerch in Crimea and safety.25 In February, all the Kommandos of Einsatzgruppe D assembled in ethnic German villages around Melitopol, southern Ukraine. The German defeat at Stalingrad and their retreat from the Caucasus meant the Kaukasier Kompanie would not be returning to liberate their homelands. Instead, they continued the German war of murder and destruction in the Pripet marshes, Lemberg (L’viv), Lublin, Warsaw, and other locations along the way. By 1944, the term “Kaukasier Kompanie” fell out of use; when stationed in the Generalgouvernement (General Governement)—the area of occupied Poland that was not formally annexed to Germany, administratively attached to German East Prussia, or incorporated into the German-occupied part of the Soviet Union—they were called the Kosakenkompanie in official German documents, even though they did not have any Cossack recruits. In the North Caucasus, Einsatzgruppe D killed over thirty thousand people, mainly Jews. By the end of the war, the Kaukasier Kompanie may well have participated in the murder of at least another nineteen thousand victims in the Pripet, Lemberg, Lublin, and Warsaw.26

24 BStU, ZR 920, vol. 51, 51–52. 25 BAL, AR 1898/66, vol. 24, 5310–16, statement Theodor Dennerlein, November 11, 1970, Brunnschmid; BAL, AR 1898/66, vol. 15, 3304–15, statement Walter Salge, August 31, 1965. 26 Pieper Henning, “SS-Oberscharführer Walter Kehrer und die ‘KaukasierKompanie’: Eine Sondereinheit und ihre Rolle im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1942– 1944” [SS-Oberscharführer Walter Kehrer and the “Caucasian Company”: The special unit and its role in World War II], Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft 56, no. 3 (2008): 197–221.

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Postwar Justice After the war, few of the German perpetrators from Einsatzgruppe D went on trial. Of the two Einsatzgruppe D commanders, Walther Bierkamp committed suicide near the family home in northern Germany on May 15, 1945; Otto Ohlendorf was condemned by a US military tribunal in Nuremberg and hanged on June 6, 1951. Walter Kehrer died in 1992 while on trial for murders committed when commanding the Kaukasier Kompanie. Their earlier commander, SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Wiens, had disappeared at the end of the war. The Kaukasier Kompanie men were taken prisoner by British forces in Italy at the end of the war. As agreed by Stalin, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British prime minister Winston S. Churchill at Yalta in February 1945, all Soviet nationals taken by the Western Allies would be handed over to Soviet authorities, and thousands were sent back at gunpoint to face Siberian and Kazakh gulags.27 Many of the Azerbaijanis, Armenians, and Georgians eventually returned to their homes and in the 1960s faced fresh KGB investigations, trials, and prison sentences. On October 23, 1963, a trial of nine former Kaukasier Kompanie men before the North Caucasus Regional Military Tribunal in Krasnodar resulted in eight death sentences by firing squad and one fifteen-year prison sentence. Some others did not return to face justice: of the three platoon commanders, only Ivan Solowjow was confirmed killed during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising; the two others, Musa Magiramow and Wasso Elisbarischwili, along with the company commander, Sergei Edigaj, disappeared at the end of war. When West German prosecutors were looking at the same crimes from a German perspective, they traveled to the Soviet Union and with KGB officers and interviewed many former Kaukasier Kompanie men serving sentences at Saransk prison, Mordovia, about 630 kilometers (391 miles) east of Moscow, a consequence of trials in the Caucasus republics during the 1960s. Not all of those captured in 1945 were handed over in Italy, however. Two Kaukasier Kompanie men were brought to Britain by the British secret service, MI6, for training as possible agents to be parachuted into their homelands. But the Cold War came to Europe, and espionage missions into the USSR hinterlands were dropped as being too dangerous. The two men, both Georgians, were quietly introduced into English civilian life 27 Nikolai Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta, rev. ed. (London: Corgi Books, 1979), 498–516.

the kaukasier kompanie  ❧ 113

with fresh identities: Yuri Chapodze became George Chapell, and Avtandil Pardzhanadze became Anton Husak. Both were later the subject of Soviet extradition requests (in 1970 and 1968, respectively). The requests were denied by the British Foreign Office.28 Chapodze died in London in 1972, Pardzhanadze at his home in Wales in 2003. It is possible that a further four or five men also came to Britain masquerading as Ukrainians.29 Further episodes in the postwar history of the Kaukasier Kompanie involved two more of their Georgian numbers who also came west at the end of the war. Georgii Tzinaridze (who used the name David Geldiashvili) went to Canada, and Yermak Lukianov went to Belgium. Each returned to the Soviet Union on vacation, was recognized and arrested, then was put on trial for collaborating with the Germans and treason. Tzinaridse received a fifteen-year sentence and died in a Soviet prison in 1978. Lukianov was sentenced to death and executed in Elista, Kalmykia, in 1984.30 A final twist bringing to an end the postwar judicial proceedings against Kaukasier Kompanie men happened in Germany. In 1991, an elderly Russian-born ethnic German, Alfons Götzfried, was allowed to emigrate from Russia to Germany. Unfortunately for Götzfried, six years after his arrival he appeared as a witness at a war crimes trial in Dortmund, where he mentioned his participation in killing five hundred Jews during the war. This resulted in his own prosecution for participating with Kaukasier Kompanie men at a massacre of Jews at Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. Under the code name “Aktion Erntefest” (Operation Harvest Festival), SS and German police shot over forty thousand Jews in November 1943, of 28 TNA, FCO 28/483, FCO 28/1156; Times (London), April 25, 1970. 29 Research by the author among UK naturalization certificates, TNA. After the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Eastern and Western Europeans were resettled in the United Kingdom. From 1946 they began applying for British naturalization. The British government declassified carbon copies of the certificates after fifty years (from 1996 onward). Using the criteria of (1) born between 1915 and 1924 (military draft age) and (2) born in the Caucasus, the author examined over 125,000 certificates. Six possible candidates for the Kaukasier Kompanie were identified and included Chapodze and Pardzhanadze. 30 On Tzinaridse: Globe & Star (Toronto), September 27, 1974; Jewish Chronicle (London), October 4, 1974. On Lukianov: Le Soir (Brussels), August 17, 1983; Times (London), August 17, 1983, and June 6, 1984. The Belgian Embassy in London wrote to the author on March 7, 2000, following inquiries about Lukianov. They stated that Brussels (the Belgian Foreign Office) had informed them “that this person is unknown to their services.”

114  ❧  chapter four

whom seventeen thousand were killed at the Majdanek camp. Götzfried was convicted by a Stuttgart court in May 1999 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He walked free owing to time served because the court took into consideration the thirteen years he had spent in Siberian gulags as a result of an earlier Soviet war crimes prosecution in 1947. Götzfried died on July 7, 2006, at Esslingen, near Stuttgart.31 When Daniel J. Goldhagen wrote Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996),32 he argued that ordinary Germans had carried out the SD-Einsatzgruppen killings. It can be similarly argued that the young Caucasian men who joined the Kaukasier Kompanie were “ordinary Azerbaijanis” or “ordinary Georgians,” and so on. There is a marked comparison when examining the statements of the Germans involved, including Ohlendorf and Kehrer as two extreme examples, and those of the Caucasians. Not one of the latter professed antiSemitism or anti-Jewish sentiments, as though killing and gassing people was all in a day’s work. A common thread in their statements is anti-Soviet and anticommunist attitudes, but this does not explain why killing innocent civilians, including children, became the norm. Perhaps such disparate national groups of perpetrators felt an admission of anti-Semitism even more unacceptable than lying in their statements about their own guilt.

31 “Gutachten” (expert opinion) of Dr. Martin C. Dean, August 25, 1998, for trial of Alfons Götzfried before Landgericht Stuttgart (kindly supplied to the author by Dr. Dean); BAL, AR 1025/97, 4–10, statement Alfons Götzfried, April 21, 1997. 32 Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). A very similar argument is used by Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).

Table 4.1. Gas van killings in the North Caucasus Date

Kommando Location

Victims

August 3, 1942

SK 10a

Rostov-on-Don

transporting Jews to burial site

August 5–10, 1942

EK 12

Voroshilovsk (Stavropol) psychiatric hospital

660 patients

August 12–15, 1942

EK 12

Voroshilovsk

transporting Jews to burial site

September 1, 6–10, 1942

EK 12

Mineralnye Vody (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

transporting Jews to burial site

September 5, 1942

SK 10a

Beresanskaia asylum (Krasnodar Krai)

20 patients

September 21, 1942

SK 10a

Krasnodar regional hospital

42 children

September 1942

SK 10a

Krasnodar city hospital

unknown number of patients

September 1942

SK 10a

Krasnodar psychiatric hospital

20–25 female patients

September 1942

SK 10a

Krasnodar district hospital

over 100 patients

September 1942

SK 10a

Korenovskaia (Krasnodar Krai)

200 Jewish men, women, and children

September 1942

EK 11b

Cherkessk (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

over 200 Jewish men, women, and children

September 1942

EK 12

Mikhailovskoe (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

two gassing actions, around 100 local Jews

September 1942

EK 12

Blagodarnoe (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

gassing action, local Jews

—(continued)

Table 4.1—continued September 1942

EK 12

Zheleznovodsk (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

80 Jewish men, women, and children

September– EK 11b December, 1942

Maikop (Krasnodar weekly clearing of Krai) Kommando prison

September– EK 12 December, 1942

Piatigorsk (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

weekly clearing of Kommando prison

September– EK 12 December, 1942

Voroshilovsk

weekly clearing of Kommando prison

October 9–10, 1942

SK 10a

Yeysk children’s home (Krasnodar Krai)

214 children

October 1942

SK 10a

Krasnodar

40–50 men and women

October 1942

SK 10a

Starominskaia (Krasnodar Krai)

70 Jewish men, women, and children

October 1942

SK 10a

Kolkhoz Proletarskii (Krasnodar Krai)

gassing action, local Jews

October 1942

EK 11b

Armavir (Krasnodar gassing action, local Jews Krai)

October 1942

EK 12

Kugulta (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

80–90 Jewish men, women, and children

October 1942

SK 11b

Cherkessk (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

around 50 Jewish men, women, and children

October 1942

EK 12

Petrovskaia (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

around 300 Jewish men, women, and children

November 22, 1942

SK 10a

Gostagaika (Krasnodar Krai)

around 100 captured partisans

November 1942

SK 10a

Anapa (Krasnodar Krai)

10 men —(continued)

Table 4.1—concluded November 1942

EK 11b

Armavir (Krasnodar two gassing actions, Krai) around 300 Jewish men, women, and children

November 1942

EK 12

Blagodarnoe (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

74 Jewish men, women, and children

November 1942

EK 12

Petrovskaia (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

73 Jewish men, women and children

November 1942

EK 12

Spitsevka (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

153 Jewish men, women, and children

December 22, 1942

EK 12

Teberda sanatorium 54 Jewish children (Ordzhonikidze Krai)

December 1942

SK 10a

Stanitsa Ust’Labinsk

gassing action, local Jews

January 1943

SK 10a

Krasnodar prison

gassing action, 4 elderly gypsy women and an unknown number of other prisoners

Source: This table was compiled from a review of hundreds of statements taken during East and West German police investigations of former Einsatzgruppe members between 1959 and 1990. Many could remember the locations, but the dates varied, and the number of victims was not always recalled. Note: The Paris-based organization Yahad-In Unum, directed by Father Patrick Desbois, has recently sent their own research teams into the Caucasus to examine execution sites of Jews by Nazi forces in 1942. The website lists twelve killing sites in the Krasnodar area and another thirteen in the Mineralnye Vody area for which there is no German documentation (Yahad-In Unum, “Map of the Holocaust by Bullets,” 2012, http://yahadmap.org/#map/). Some of these will be burial sites for victims of gas van actions.

Chapter Five

Mass Executions in Krasnodar Krai: Cross-Checking Sources for the Holocaust in the North Caucasus Andrej Umansky Prior to the German occupation of August 1942, a large number of evacuees had arrived in Krasnodar krai.1 Although in 1939 only 7,351 Jews lived there (0.2 percent of the region’s total population), tens of thousands of Jews were placed in its cities and villages after the outbreak of war in the summer of 1941.2 Of the 218,000 people officially evacuated to the region in August 1 2

The region was occupied in less than two weeks (by August 12, 1942), with the exception of Novorossiisk and its strategic port, which were defended by Soviet troops until September 11. See the evacuation lists for Krasnodar krai in 1942 compiled by the evacuation council, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG‐22.027M, “Glavnoe Pereselencheskoe Upravlenie” [Main resettlement administration] reels 127 to 131 (from the State Archives of the Russian Federation [GARF], fond A-327-2-158 to 163). On the evacuation of Jews to the Caucasus, see the recently published groundbreaking work by Kiril Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016), 81–109, and, for further sources, Andrej Umansky, “L’extermination des Juifs dans le Caucase du Nord pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (1942–1943)” [The extermination of Jews in the North Caucasus

mass executions in krasnodar krai  ❧ 119

1941, over 160,000 (73 percent) were Jewish.3 Additionally, an unknown but significant number of people came individually, without the help of the state structures. More Jews arrived during the spring and summer of 1942. They came from Ukraine, Rostov oblast, or Leningrad, driven by fear of the news of German atrocities.4 Upon arrival, they were usually placed throughout the district—in the cities, villages, kolkhozes, and sovkhozes, with the help of the local population.5 Once the German advance into the region began in late summer 1942, many had no way of leaving and eventually found themselves under German occupation. During the six months of occupation (August–February 1943), over 15,660 Jews were executed in almost fifty different cities and villages throughout Krasnodar krai.6 Nearly the entire Jewish population living in the region at the time of the German occupation was exterminated, and Jews comprised around 90 percent of all the civilian victims there during World War II. The killings were carried out from the end of summer to the

3

4

5

6

during World War II (1942–1943)] (PhD diss., University of Amiens, France, 2016), 125–38. Aleksandr Beliaev, I. Bondar, and T. Orlova, eds., Kuban’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945: Khronika sobytii [The Kuban in the years of the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945: A chronicle of events], vol. 1 (Krasnodar: Sov. Kuban’, 2000), 77. For example, see train no. 111, which departed from Leningrad on March 10, 1942, and arrived in Belaia Glina on April 1, 1942, with 705 evacuees (32 Jews among them). The evacuees were dispatched to the town itself and to seven different local kolkhozes. USHMM, RG‐22.027M, “Glavnoe Pereselencheskoe Upravlenie,” reel 126 (from GARF, A-327-2-15), 136. In the kolkhozes and sovkhozes, the brigadiers decided which family should house the evacuees. For different examples, see Yahad-In Unum (YIU) testimonies 279R, April 6, 2012 (Mikhailovskaia); 292R, April 10, 2012 (Petropavlovskaia); 295R, April 11, 2012 (Udobnaia); and 314R, June 8, 2012 (Ladozhskaia). Umansky, “L’extermination,” 336. Other sources give very different numbers. According to the indictment of September 29, 1971, by the prosecutor of the Munich I court against Kurt Christmann, the number was 7,000 Jewish victims: Bundesarchiv Außenstelle Ludwigsburg (BAL), B 162/1196, 20. On the other hand, Al’tman proposes 20,500 or even 27,000 victims: Il’ia Al’tman, Zhertvy Nenavisti: Kholokost v SSSR, 1941–1945 [Victims of hate: The Holocaust in the USSR, 1941–1945] (Moscow: Fond Kholokost, 2002), 283; Il’ia Al’tman, ed., Kholokost na territorii SSSR: Entsiklopediia [The Holocaust in the USSR: An encyclopedia], 2nd ed. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), 475.

120  ❧  chapter five

autumn of 1942 by Teilkommandos of Einsatzkommando 11 as well as units of Sonderkommando 10a.7 As thousands of evacuees had been assigned to rural areas and particularly to kolkhozes, it is not surprising that these demographically less important places became mass execution sites. The executioners had at their disposal information from the local administration about the evacuees, including the “Jewish nationality” of some of them. This enabled them to identify Jewish families living in such remote villages. By studying the executions in Krasnodar krai, we can observe geographic and time details. The data show that three-quarters of the victims were killed within the first two months of the occupation, in August (over 8,500 victims)8 and September (over 4,100 victims) 1942. Over 1,000 more victims would be killed by the end of the year:9 Also, we can clearly distinguish four major sites by the significantly large number of Jewish victims. The Jews of Krasnodar, the capital city of the region, were immediately registered and then exterminated by Sonderkommando 10a on the territory of sovkhoz no. 1 on August 21, 1942. Estimates of the total number of victims vary depending on sources: 2,000 according to the German justice system, and 3,000 as stated by Russian researchers.10 These numbers are not surprising given that the local Jewish community numbered almost 2,000 people in 1939. In the countryside, the Jews were shot in a systematic and pitiless way even if there were only 7 Einsatzkommando 11, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe D, was divided in July 1941 into Sonderkommandos 11a and 11b until July 1942. Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 [Occupation policies and mass murder: Einsatzgruppe D in the southern Soviet Union 1941–1943] (Hamburg: HIS Edition, 2003), 95; Ralf Ogorreck, Die Einsatzgruppen und die “Genesis der Endlösung” [The Einsatzgruppen and the “genesis of the Final Solution”] (Berlin: Metropol, 1996), 271n162. See also Andrej Angrick’s article in the present volume. 8 At least 2,500 Jews were killed in the city of Krasnodar: Umansky, “L’extermination,” 212–22. 9 At least 1,900 victims on October 1942, 130 in November 1942, 900 in December 1942, and 50 in January 1943: Umansky, “L’extermination,” 334–75. 10 State Archive of Krasnodar krai (GAKK), R-817-1-8, 20–21; Al’tman, Zhertvy, 281; Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 580. A ChGK draft report for the Jewish AntiFascist Committee, undated but probably from the end of 1943, states that five hundred Jews were killed in Krasnodar (GARF, 7021-148-164, 101).

Table 5.1. Executions of Jews in Krasnodar krai in August 1942 (excluding Krasnodar) Date

Place

Victims

early August

Belaia Glina

over 3,000

August 7

Gul’kevichi

72

mid-August

Arkhangel’skaia

3

mid-August

Korenovsk

120

August 20

Proletarskii

3

mid-August

Ilinskaia

over 400

August 23

Voroshilov

3

August 25

Belorechensk

4

August 29

Uspenskoe

46

August, undated

Kurgannaia

over 600

August, undated

Mikhailovskaia

n/a

August, undated

Oktiabr’skii

n/a

August, undated

Labinsk

540

August, undated

Tikhoretsk

316

August, undated

Alekseevskaia

5

August, undated

Tbilisskaia

around 200

August, undated

Kropotkin

200

August, undated

Bezlesnyi

75

August, undated

Neelinskii

95

August, undated

Sergievskaia

92

August, undated

Sadovoi

30

August, undated

Pervomaisk

7

August, undated

Novopavlovka

10

August, undated

Temirgoevskaia

under 15

August, undated

Dneprovskaia

75

August, undated

Timashevsk

75

August, undated

Sovkhoz Timachevets

21

August, undated

Ust’-Labinsk

n/a

August, undated

Turkin

47

August, undated

Poltavskaia

24

Source: Umansky, “L’extermination des Juifs,” 286–88.

Table 5.2. Executions of Jews in Krasnodar krai in September 1942 Date

Place

Victims

early September

Armavir

539

September 2

Anapa

over 75

September 3

Uspenskoe

85

September 5

Abinsk

200

September 8-15

Starominskaia

63

September 10

Novoshcherbinovskaia

200

mid-September

Labinsk

30

mid-September

Peredovaia

29

mid-September

Otradnaia

64

September 15

Kopanskaia

7

September 16

Zelenchuk-Mostovoi

19

mid-September

Petropavlovskaia

1,000

September 17

Bratkovskoe

1

September 18

Arkhangel’skaia

35

September 19

Armavir

14

mid-September

Abinsk

13

September 22

Makhoshevskaia

8

September 24

Abinsk

11

September 29

Kanevskaia

over 300

September 30

Novodereviankovskaia

3

end of September

Kamyshevatskaia

1

September, undated

Sovetskaia

over 10

September, undated

Bezskorbnaia

over 30

September, undated

Kalnibolotskaia

48

September, undated

Starodereviankovskaia

7

September, undated

Dinskaia

40

September, undated

Novopokrovskaia

23

September, undated

Belorechensk

n/a

September, undated

Yeysk

30 —(continued)

mass executions in krasnodar krai  ❧ 123 Table 5.2—concluded September, undated

Zubov

10

September, undated

Kossiakinskaia

40

September, undated

Dzhiginka

72

September, undated

Temriuk

more than 2

Source: Umansky, “L’extermination,” 331–33.

a few Jewish inhabitants. Usually the number of victims varied from one Jew to several hundred, with examples of larger executions in the towns of Kurgannaia11 (over 600), Armavir (539), and Novorossiisk (over 600).12 Three other places with large numbers of victims provided by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (known by its Russian acronym, ChGK) do not provide the same demographic profile, however: while the aforementioned executions took place mostly in larger cities, the following three locations were all much smaller, having between 5,000 and 15,000 inhabitants before the occupation. All three are in different areas across the region, yet each one had more than 3,000 victims, according to ChGK.13 One was Belaia Glina, where one of the region’s first mass killings of Jews was carried out in early August 1942. In September, a second large-scale execution took place in Petropavlovskaia. The third occurred in Ladozhskaia in December 1942. This analysis will try to find an explanation for the high number of victims and establish the crime topography of these three cases on a microlevel using different sources and comparing them. First, some description of the three main available sets of sources. Information about the activities of subunits provided by wartime German documents and postwar investigations by the German justice system allow one only partially to reconstruct the facts.14 Although some in-depth aca11 This town has been known as Kurganinsk since 1951. 12 The shootings took place on August 29, 1942 (Kurgannaia), the beginning of September (Armavir), and on October 16, 1942 (Novorossiisk). For more details about the shootings, see Umansky, “L’extermination,” 240–47, 267–72, 299–305. 13 For a topography of the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, see Umansky, “L’extermination.” 14 The files and legal proceedings of the Zentrale Stelle der Landes​justiz​ver​waltungen zur Aufklärung von NS-Verbrechen [Central office of state judicial authorities for the investigation of National Socialist crimes] can be found

124  ❧  chapter five

demic works on the Holocaust in the east have been based on them,15 these types of sources have several major flaws. Most the perpetrators did not reveal everything about the killings and always knew more than investigators, who were unable to visit the crime scenes and whose historical knowledge was limited. Also, the questions and topics raised by the legal system are not symmetrical with those of historians.16 Often, questions about topography or logistics were not raised. Last but not least, a major problem was that the investigators were unable to travel easily to the sites of the crimes. Historical and geographical knowledge, especially for regions like southern Russia, was limited. Given this, it is remarkable that the prosecutors and police investigators from Munich, who worked on the crimes of the Einsatzgruppe D in Ukraine and Russia, managed to compile a solid source of information that has enabled historians to analyze the Holocaust in southern Russia.17 These sources, however, cannot reveal all the answers to questions like the identities of the perpetrators in each case. There were other executions committed by Wehrmacht units or local policemen. The killing unit’s identity is often hard to determine with certainty and thus has to be estimated. That is why the documentation collected in 1943 and 1944 by local delegations of ChGK is crucial for understanding the Holocaust in Krasnodar in the German federal archives in Ludwigsburg. For a brief history of the Zentrale Stelle’s work until 2009, see Andrej Umansky, “Geschichtsschreiber wider Willen? Einblick in die Quellen der ‘Außerordentlichen Staatlichen Kommission’ und der ‘Zentralen Stelle’” [The reluctant historians? Insight into the sources of the Extraordinary State Commission and the Central Office], in Bewusstes Erinnern und bewusstes Vergessen: Der juristische Umgang mit der Vergangenheit in den Ländern Mittel- und Osteuropas [Conscious remembering and conscious forgetting: The legal handling of the past in countries of Central and Eastern Europe], ed. Angelika Nußberger et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 347–74. 15 See, for example, the groundbreaking work on the Holocaust in eastern Galicia by Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944: Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens [The National Socialist persecution of Jews in eastern Galicia 1941–1944: The organization and implementation of a state mass crime] (Munich: Oldenburg, 1997). 16 For examples, see Andrej Umansky, La Shoah à l’Est: Regards d’Allemands [The Shoah in the East: The views of Germans] (Paris: Fayard, 2018). 17 See the groundbreaking work of Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, and his chapter in the present volume.

mass executions in krasnodar krai  ❧ 125

krai.18 It was documented in a topographic manner, and the vast majority of executions committed within a six-month period (August 1942–January 1943) were thoroughly recorded.19 While the documents of the commission should still be used in a cautious way, different studies have shown that it remains the best source when it comes to writing the microhistory of the Holocaust in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.20 As we will establish in our analysis, while the numbers of the victims counted by ChGK have to be corrected, the rest of the information can be confirmed by crossreferencing other sources.21 The study of the local process of extermination of Jews is also based on the research results of Yahad-In Unum (YIU), which carried out two severalweek-long research trips to Krasnodar during the spring and summer of 2012, interviewing eighty-nine execution witnesses. The methodology of YIU has at its core the thesis that no execution was carried out without witnesses and that neighbors were often not only eyewitnesses but also sometimes forced participants in the logistics of the crime. Another conclusion is that the witnesses were often children or adolescents, curious and unafraid, trying to find out what was happening with their Jewish neighbors. The interviews are conducted in a semidirective way, with precise practical questions helping to reconstruct the witnesses’ memories. Usually, the interviews collected by YIU help us to understand precisely the local dynamics on the historical microlevel and to corroborate the testimonies with the German and Soviet archival material.22 For this reason, these three sources will be used in the present 18 For a brief history and analysis of ChGK, see Umansky, “Geschichtsschreiber,” 347–74. 19 ChGK files concerning Krasnodar krai can be found in GARF, 7021-16, and GAKK, 897-1. 20 Umansky, “Geschichtsschreiber,” 368–71. 21 See for an exemplary study of ChGK material in the Kiev District: Kiril Feferman, “Soviet Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,” Journal of Genocide Research 4 (2003): 587–602. 22 Founded in 2004 by Father Patrick Desbois, YIU is an organization that raises awareness about the sites of Jewish and Roma mass executions by Nazi killing units in Eastern Europe during World War II. By mid-2018, YIU had researched 2,365 execution sites and had gathered 5,728 testimonies during the course of its 135 research trips to eight countries (Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Lithuania, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). For an overview of YIU’s activities and methodology, see the following works by Patrick Desbois: The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to

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study to better understand the process and extent of exterminations of the Jewish population in the three aforementioned localities.23

Belaia Glina The largest execution in Krasnodar Territory, outside the regional capital Krasnodar, took place at the beginning of August 1942 in Belaia Glina. The number of Jewish victims is estimated at as many as 3,800.24 This seems even more astonishing in the context of the prewar Jewish population: in 1939, the village had four Jewish inhabitants.25 Between summer 1941 and summer 1942, however, thousands of evacuees came to the district from all over the Soviet Union but especially from Ukraine.26 Many came through Sevastopol and then moved farther either by truck or on horse-drawn Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures behind the Holocaust by Bullets (New York: Arcade, 2018); and “Neue Ergebnisse zur Geschichte des Holocaust in der Ukraine: Das “Oral History”-Projekt von Yahad-In Unum und seine wissenschaftliche Bewertung” [New results on the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine: Yahad-In Unum’s oral history project and its scientific evaluation], in Besatzung, Kollaboration, Holocaust: Neue Studien zur Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden [Personnel, collaboration, Holocaust: New studies on the persecution and murder of European Jews], ed. Johannes Hürter (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 177–87. 23 For an exemplary juxtaposition of different sources in a case study see Andrej Umansky, “Metodika isledovanii provodimykh tsentrom Yahad-In Unum i ikh rezultaty na primere rabot v gorode Motol, Belarus” [Yahad-In Unum’s research methodology and results in the case of the town of Motol, Belarus], in Voina na unichtozhenie: Natsistskaia politika genotsida na territorii Vostochnoi Evropy; Materialy Mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii (Moskva, 26–28 aprel’ia 2010) [War of destruction: Nazi genocidal policy in Eastern Europe; Materials of the international research conference (Moscow, April 28–29, 2010)], ed. A. Diukov and O. Orlenko (Moscow: Fond istoricheskoi pamiati, 2010), 462–80. 24 Inscription on the local memorial states thirty-eight hundred victims. The ChGK report estimates thirty-five hundred civilian victims (GARF, 7021-16435, 265); according to Al’tman, there were at least three thousand Jewish victims (Entsiklopediia, 60; Zhertvy, 281). 25 Al’tman, Entsiklopediia, 60. 26 YIU, 326R, June 12, 2012, and Raisa Pisarevskaia, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, interview 49447, segment 20.

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vehicles. Some of them had been able to find shelter with local peasants and even find jobs.27 One witness interviewed by YIU claimed she had housed two women from Dnepropetrovsk.28 Also, three Jews who had been evacuated from Leningrad to Novopavlovka, a village near Belaia Glina, were taken to Belaia Glina after their belongings were confiscated.29 This information is confirmed, for example, by the evacuees’ reports from spring 1942. Besides a convoy from Leningrad with 705 individuals, 602 persons came especially from different Ukrainian regions. Among those evacuees, it is possible to identify 142 Jews.30 It is also worth mentioning that the executions were carried out by a small Teilkommando numbering between seven and ten men. This commando included members of the Einsatzkommando 11b under the provisional command of the SS-Untersturmführer Hermann Schmitt. For two or three days, the unit hunted for Jews in and around the town. Those whom they found were killed and their bodies thrown into a well.31 Typically for the heterogeneous composition of the Einsatzgruppen, Schmitt’s unit was formed of several SS members, including some Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans), a Kriminalpolizei officer, and a Waffen-SS soldier. The unit had three cars, including one van.32 Its members arrived in the beginning of August 1942; they were first lodged at a school until they were transferred to a two-story building in the village center that also had a basement that served as a prison. The Teilkommando remained there until the winter of 1942–43.33

27 For an analysis of the local interaction see Kiril Feferman, “A Soviet Humanitarian Action? Centre, Periphery and the Evacuation of Refugees to the North Caucasus, 1941–1942,” Europe-Asia Studies 61, no. 5 (2009): 819–28. 28 YIU, 325R and 326R, June 12, 2012. 29 GARF, 7021-16-435, 257. 30 For the Leningrad evacuees, see endnote 4. Some of the evacuees were placed in the city itself and others in around a dozen local kolkhozes. USHMM, RG‐22.027M, reel 126 [from GARF, A-327-2-158], 136–91. 31 Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 589. After the executions, SS-Untersturmführer Herbert Knöpfel took over command of the unit: statement of Kurt Zimmer dated March 1, 1967, BAL, B 162/1061, 2970; statement of Herbert Wollenweber dated January 12, 1968, BAL, B 162/1063, 3357. 32 Statement of Herbert Wollenweber dated January 12, 1968, BAL, B 162/1063, 3357–59. 33 YIU, 326R and 327R, June 12, 2012.

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A Waffen-SS soldier, Herbert Wollenweber, was in charge of the unit’s food supplies. He collected cattle, which were kept next to the building.34 During his postwar interrogation, Schmitt talked about a village on the way to Armavir where his Teilkommando killed the Jews. With the help of a starosta,35 they gathered all local Jews—in other words, two families. Afterward, the Jews were shot in a field on the outskirts of the village and buried in a mass grave.36 Upon their arrival in Belaia Glina, the Teilkommando was assigned to search all the neighboring villages for Jews. In one village, ten Jews had been gathered in a school. The victims—men, women, and children—were taken to a well outside the village. The group had to stand facing the well. Wollenweber recalled, “We fired with rifles and submachine guns from an eight-meter [twenty-six-foot] distance targeting the back of the neck. I think I fired once or twice… . The corpses were then thrown into the well. Next was the turn of other Jews who were waiting at one side to stand in front of the well. They could see the previous group’s execution.” Wollenweber concluded his testimony by emphasizing the skills of his superior: “The Jews were rather calm. Schmitt dealt well with the case. He had the right attitude.”37 The unit members had no recollections of a large number of victims, but this has been contested by other sources, including testimonies registered by the local commission in 1943. These sources allow us to conclude that several executions took place in Belaia Glina, as the Germans regularly brought Jews from neighboring villages and held them in a club building in Belaia Glina prior to their executions. The screams coming out of the club were heard throughout the village. The club, which was also used as a regular prison, was guarded by an armed local policeman. Apart from Jews, the Germans arrested Communist Party members who had been denounced by local inhabitants.38 34 Statement of Herbert Wollenweber dated January 12, 1968, BAL, B 162/1063, 3357–59. 35 At the beginning of the occupation, the Wehrmacht installed a head of the community in each village or town, who was named the starosta (elder) or burgermeister (mayor). See Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 582; and Umansky, “L’extermination,” 118–19. 36 Statement of Hermann Schmitt dated October 12, 1966, BAL, B 162/1060, 2798–800. 37 Statement of Herbert Wollenweber dated May 14, 1970, BAL, B 162/1068, 4312–13. 38 YIU, 324R, June 12, 2012.

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Residents of Belaia Glina, such as Demian Sidko, related to ChGK investigators that the Jews were regularly transported on trucks to the extermination site:39 During the occupation, I lived in a small house that was located 3km [1.86 miles] away from the village, not far from the ravine No. 2. In the beginning of August, a few days after the invasion of the village of Belaia Glina, I often saw a black covered truck passing by. It always drove in the direction of the ravine No. 2. A few minutes after it passed by, I heard automatic gunfire. Only later I learned that the Gestapo men had been transporting the arrestees in order to shoot them. That van passed by every day or every other day, either early in the morning at about 4 a.m. or late in the evening between 8 and 9 p.m. A car carrying officers on board always accompanied the van.

The ChGK report noted that “almost the entire Jewish population and those who had worked at the Soviet institutions were rounded up and killed by shooting. People from all over the district and from some other districts of Krasnodar krai were gathered at the Gestapo, and several days later they were shot.”40 One of the witnesses interviewed by YIU mentions that the Germans, along with the local policemen, collected the victims’ clothes and then exchanged them with the locals for food. For this purpose, a small shop was opened close to where the Germans lived.41 Shootings took place in the southern part of the village, in the area with a grove and a ravine. Klavdiia was born in 1925. She was interviewed by a YIU team on June 12, 2012. She recalls about the execution day, During the war, I worked at a kolkhoz. There were between ten and twelve of us there… . A brigadier sent us there. He gave us a cart and two boys. Those two boys had to transport the corn that we, the girls harvested. Out of a sudden, we saw a van coming from the direction of Belaia Glina. There was nothing but the van on the road! Someone guessed those were the Germans! We got scared that we had been noticed! But the van began moving backwards to the buffer strip. We had already known that some shootings took place in that buffer strip, so we understood that people were to be killed! And that’s what happened! Soon after we heard a shot, then a second one and the third. Then I heard a woman 39 Statement of Demian Sidko dated December 27, 1943, GARF, 7021-16-435, 268. 40 GARF, 7021-16-435, 265. 41 YIU, 325R, June 12, 2012.

130  ❧  chapter five screaming, “Aaaaah!” It was heartbreaking! I guess it was a woman who tried to escape.42

In December 1943, the local ChGK commission found a total of twentyfive pits full of undressed corpses. Fourteen of those pits measured three meters (nine feet, ten inches) in length, width, and depth. The corpses lay as deep as two meters (six and a half feet). The eleven remaining pits were four meters (thirteen feet) long, four meters wide, and three meters deep.43 The pits were dug according to a plan and were parallel to one another. Klavdiia related in her testimony that local villagers were forced to watch the executions and cover the pits afterward. Some witnessed the executions because of the site’s location close to a field that was cultivated by a local kolkhoz. Peasants could approach the pits that were not yet covered.44 We can conclude that Belaia Glina was an extermination site where Jewish evacuees of the district were killed. In contrast to a singular execution site where only one action took place, the one in Belaia Glina was reused several times by the perpetrators. YIU research has shown that this general aspect of the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union is much more important than presumed by scholars previously. In a large number of cases, the killers used the same extermination site over and over again, but the reasons varied. Sometimes it was due to a step-by-step approach to exterminating local Jews; in other cases it was caused by a topographic or meteorological complication—for example, the first executions were carried out before winter prevented future actions.45 Belaia Glina was not the only such multiuse extermination site in southern Russia.46 As for the high number of victims, 42 43 44 45

YIU, 326R, June 12, 2012. GARF, 7021-16-435, 265. YIU, 326R, June 12, 2012. An exemplary case for an extermination site at a smaller level can be found in the Ukrainian town of Busk in eastern Galicia; see Desbois et al., Neue Ergebnisse, 181. The largest extermination site researched by the YIU is located in Bronnaia Gora, a small Belorussian town in Brest oblast. Several thousand Jews were brought by train from cities across the region and shot in 1942; see Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944 [Calculated murders: The German economic and extermination policy in White Russia 1941–1944] (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), 722–23. 46 For example, the extermination site near the glass factory in Mineralnye Vody, to which Jews were brought by train from Mineralnye Vody itself as well as

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there is no evidence yet found that can corroborate it; that leaves a victim number of at least three thousand, as supposed by Il’ia Al’tman.47

Petropavlovskaia A month after the Belaia Glina executions, and 160 kilometers (99.4 miles) to the south, the second largest execution took place in Petropavlovskaia. According to ChGK documents, on September 16, 1942, under the pretext of an evacuation to a less populated region, almost three thousand Jews in the district and from adjacent districts were gathered in a building at 9 Krasnaia Street48 that had served as the village club and was occupied by the local police. Among the Jews were many women with newborns and teenage children. The entire group was eventually killed near a brickyard 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) east of the village and the “Stalin” kolkhoz. Their corpses were thrown into a pit and a well.49 Raisa Nimikskaia, who survived and told her story to the local commission in 1943, was sixteen at the time of the events. She had arrived in Petropavlovskaia with her family from Rybnitsa, Moldova. The family stayed for three days in the building at 9 Krasnaia Street. Afterward, her mother and brother were put on a van that took them to a kolkhoz, where they were shot. Their corpses were thrown into a well. Raisa was spared by a Russian police officer who subsequently raped her in the police administrative office. Later, he let her go, and she lived with the Chikalov family in Petropavlovskaia. In her testimony, Raisa was firm about the shooting of “about three thousand Soviet civilians, women, children, and babies.” She continued, “Among them were my mother, brothers, and sister. Inhabitants from other villages and

from the nearby cities Piatigorsk, Kislovodsk, Essentuki, and Zheleznovodsk. In total, at least sixty-three hundred Jews were shot and gassed there between September 1 and 10, 1942: see Feferman, Holocaust, 197–98, and Umansky, “L’extermination,” 410–70. 47 Al’tman, Entsiklopediia, 60; Zhertvy, 281. 48 In a later ChGK draft report, probably from the end of 1943, Petropavlovskaia was mixed up with Temirgoevskaia (GARF, 7021-148-164, 103). 49 Report of the commission of Temirgoevskaia, August 25, 1943, GARF, 702116-8, 139; GAKK, 897-1-2, 185.

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districts were brought to Petropavlovskaia to be killed. The vast majority of the victims were Jewish.”50 The recollections of the Chikalov couple’s son, Alexander, that were recorded in 2007 confirm Raisa’s story: I was seven years old back then. I remember those events very well. Raia—that’s what we called her—had been living with us for a while until her aunt came for her from Tashkent. She was looking after my younger siblings and me. She was like a sister to us. She would have remained our sister if her aunt and father hadn’t reappeared in 1944. When the policemen let Raisa go—because she had fair hair and light skin—she was disoriented. The policemen had mistreated her for two days, and she had no idea where to go. No one would accept her. She hid herself in my grandmother’s garden, on the other side of the stanitsa, but the neighbors noticed her. So my grandmother came for her at night and took her to our place when it was still dark. My parents were also scared. If the policemen had found her, they would have killed us all. My father dug a pit under the stove which was in the yard under an apple tree… . Raia remained in that pit until our troops came back. She could only go out at night. Several times, the policemen came looking for her. But there were only dishes in the stove. They searched but not too deep. They also tried to scare us by lining us up as if they were going to shoot us. But my parents did not betray her. They told us to keep quiet about it.51

In 2011 Alexander’s parents, Anna and Vladimir Chikalov, were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.52 Apart from this 50 Statement of Raisa Nimikskaia dated August 24, 1943, GARF, 7021-16-8, 153; GAKK, 897-1-2, 191. 51 Iurii Teitel’baum, “Spasiteli i spasennye” [Rescuers and the rescued], Sud’by Kholokosta 9 (2014): 56. See also the letter from another inhabitant from Petropavlovskaia from April 27, 2005, sent to the Jewish community of Krasnodar, in which Raisa’s story is confirmed as well. The Chikalov family made a hiding place under the oven and managed to keep Raisa safe until the liberation of the stanitsa in January 1943. Vera Cherepnina, “Evrei iz Petropavlovskoi ne zabyty” [The Jews from Petropavlovskaia are not forgotten], Agenstvo evreiskikh novostei, April 17, 2005, http:// www.aen.ru/index.php?page=brief&article_id=31667&PHPSESSID= ck98cb703feeba8v00ilsiu4b2. 52 “Chikalov Family,” Database of Righteous Among the Nations, Yad Vashem, 2017, http://db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language=en&itemId= 8712491.

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remarkable episode of rescue, another important aspect of extermination of Jews in Petropavlovskaia deserves our attention—the large number of Jewish victims: three thousand. As in other cases, Petropavlovskaia is not mentioned in the German archives. YIU research has helped fill this gap, however. In April 2012, a YIU team carried out its investigation in Petropavlovskaia and interviewed seven witnesses. Raisa was born in 1924. She recalls that a kolkhoz continued working after the Germans occupation. First, the communists were killed. They were taken out of their homes and then executed in a forest.53 Dmitrii, who was born in 1928, confirms this execution. Seven other communists who had not been evacuated were killed too. They were grabbed by the Russian policemen and then executed next to a brickyard.54 Valentina, born in 1936, talked about her mother, who was head of the Voskhod kolkhoz and a Communist Party member. All executives had been able to flee except for her mother, who was on a list of communists that the Germans had. Her mother was arrested, but she was rescued by a friend who worked for Germans and who let her escape. Valentina and her mother hid in the woods for a week before going back to the village.55 Then the Germans began to prepare the killing of the Jewish inhabitants. First, they made a radio announcement, and then they entered homes looking for Jews and Roma.56 In the autumn, the Jews were gathered near the kolkhoz club (also referred to as the “palace of culture”) located next to a park. Four Germans and six local policemen carried out a raid. The policemen pointed out Jewish-inhabited buildings to the Germans. Then they went for them on carts. Once all the Jews were gathered in the park, the Germans arrived on horseback. A German officer announced through his translator that a train was waiting for the Jews at the Kurgannaia station, to take them to their country of origin. Not suspecting a thing, the Jews took their belongings, stood in a column, and left.57The Jews spent three days in the park under the guard of Russian policemen. Some villagers managed to bring food. The Roma were later brought to a kolkhoz and were forced to participate in the harvest.58 53 54 55 56 57 58

YIU, 264R, April 1, 2012. YIU, 265R, April 1, 2012. YIU, 267R, April 2, 2012. YIU, 266R, April 2, 2012. YIU, 265R, April 1, 2012. YIU, 264R, 265R, April 1, 2012, and 266R, April 2, 2012.

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Ivan, born in 1927, recalls that on the execution day, the roads were closed and all that could be seen was a passing column of Jews that was guarded with dogs.59 The Jews were then massacred in wells by the buildings of the third brigade of the kolkhoz where Raisa worked. The Jews were brought to the execution site in a van. Raisa saw two vans. Then she heard shots. She lay down, fearing for her life. Afterward, the corpses were thrown into two water wells. The smallest well was filled up; the second well was half-full.60 Some victims were still alive in the wells.61 Another witness, Nadezhda, born in 1929, learned about the shooting from an intermediary of one of the brigadiers. It would seem that the local administration and kolkhoz knew about the execution of Jews.62 She remembers that one of the local policemen picked a good-looking girl and took her with him.63 Dmitrii also saw this execution. With others he was in the field sowing when he saw a van coming from the direction of Temirgoevskaia. It stopped by the water well, and Jews got out of the van. Dmitrii wanted to approach, but a German yelled at him to leave. Afterward, the perpetrators shot the victims and threw their corpses into the well, which was sixteen meters (fiftytwo and a half feet) deep. Some Jews fell down still alive; but given the depth, they had no chance to survive. There was a river right next to this well, and one of the Jews managed to escape.64 In Petropavlovskaia, as in other places in Krasnodar krai, according to Valentina’s testimony, poison was used to kill children. What is surprising in this testimony is that a person responsible for poisoning Jewish children was a policeman. While there is no trace of poison use either in German wartime documents or in the criminal proceedings after the war, the ChGK archives and YIU interviews point to several dozens of locations. Most of the incidents took place in the eastern Ukraine, Crimea, and southern Russia, in the operation area of the Einsatzgruppe C and D. Usually, witnesses remember a German officer or medical personnel applying the poison. In this case, the findings of YIU’s research become crucial in confirming or challenging ChGK information. Valentina recalls during the interview the poisoning 59 60 61 62 63 64

YIU, 266R, April 2, 2012. YIU, 264R, April 1, 2012. YIU, 264R, April 1, 2012. YIU, 293R, April 10, 2012. YIU, 264R, April 1, 2012. Also see YIU, 292R, April 10, 2012. YIU, 265R, April 1, 2012.

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procedure applied by the perpetrators: “A local man was putting poison under children’s noses. He had a stick that he plunged into a small bottle and then he applied that under children’s noses or on their lips. That severe man was a policeman, and the locals despised him.”65 The kolkhoz area was not the only place of execution. Dmitrii, mentioned above, was unafraid and inquisitive about where else the killings were taking place. That led him to seeing the second shooting by the brickyards: The Jews had to stand in rows. Germans armed with submachine guns, guard dogs, and local policemen guarded the column. Two of the policemen were our neighbors, Volkov and Kovalenko… . We were young and curious, so we followed the column up to the execution site. This was a time of war and famine, so our parents were rather easy on us. We just hung out around the place. Also, my father was at the front and my mother raising five children alone, so she didn’t have much time to watch over us. The guards noticed us, but paid no attention. We were just curious kids running along behind. They got to the brickworks. There was a clay quarry that was rather deep. We were young and curious so we followed them. The Germans separated children from adults and ordered the Jews take their clothes off. When they approached the quarry, they were ordered to put their belongings on one side and the children on the opposite side. Everything was calm. I don’t know if they were scared but the children didn’t cry and their parents said nothing. First, the adults were shot, although one Jew succeeded in escaping. Reed bushes surrounded the quarry. When the Germans opened fire, he threw himself into the bushes and escaped. Then it was children’s turn. They sat close to one another along the edge of the pit. A German approached each one of them, quickly swept some kind of a red stick across the face, and the child fell down stone-dead. After that, a German pushed with his foot the body down into the quarry. One German on horseback left to get a cart while the others were finishing off those who were still alive. Two policemen—my neighbors—helped loading the victims’ belongings onto the cart. They took some part as payment for their services… . When the Germans and the policemen were finishing off those who were alive, they took away all the valuables. A German carried a sack where the policemen put pieces of jewelry that they found. The execution lasted for three to four hours. First the shooting, then the poisoning, and finally they verified that all the Jews were dead and collected valuables. The Germans left right after the execution without even covering the pit. Sometime later, people covered the pit with soil and erected a cross.66 65 YIU, 267R, April 2, 2012. 66 YIU, 265R, April 1, 2012. Cf. 266R, April 2, 2012, and 293R, April 10, 2012.

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Another execution site is located on southeast of the village, where the Jews and communists were shot.67 It is also worth mentioning that Valentina confirmed that Raisa survived the war. She gave gold and jewelry to a woman who saved her.68 At the same time as in Petropavlovskaia, the Jews from the neighboring villages were also killed—as, for instance, in Sukhoi Kut, three kilometers northwest of Petropavlovskaia. Rather than being brought to Petropavlovskaia, they were killed locally. Aleksandr, born in 1930, provided many details about the killing of the Jews in Sukhoi Kut in his 2012 interview: It was fifteen days or a month after the Germans arrived. One morning, at about nine o’clock, I went out of the house. I saw a column of seven or nine empty carts arriving from the direction of Temirgoevskaia. There was a young man on the first cart. He was a German. When he saw me, he gestured for me to stop and asked me where the Jews were. I answered him that they lived near the barns. He told me to go with him, I refused, but he insisted and finally forced me to jump onto the cart. I then asked him who he was. I was curious because he wore a yellowish uniform with lieutenant epaulets, but he spoke in Russian without an accent. He told me he was German, but had lived with Russians for a long time. And at the moment his work was to take the Jews to the ghetto. Meanwhile, we arrived at the area where the Jews were housed. I was quite curious to see what he was going to do. He entered the houses, one after another, and asked if there were Jews. He only had a notepad and a pencil. I checked out if he had a gun, but couldn’t see one. In his pad, he noted names of the Jews as well as the names of the people who lodged them. He verified with a list the names of all the Jews there, and told them to load all their belongings onto the carts. He also said that they were going to the ghetto and that their departure was scheduled for 5 p.m. So we went around all the houses with the Jews, and they started to load their belongings. A list of Jewish names was in the pad. In the afternoon, the carts were already loaded. The German said there was an order from the German Kommandantur [headquarters] to gather all the Jews and to take them to the ghetto. He called their names one by one, but crossed out nothing on his pad. There were three to five Jews on each cart. They took all their belongings because they thought they were just moving to the ghetto. There were about thirty Jews here. The German counted them. He got into the first cart and gave the order to depart. About thirty village boys including me climbed onto the carts with the Jews, just for fun. The column of carts left in the direction of Temirgoevskaia. The carts left the village and about a hundred meters [one hundred nine yards] 67 YIU, 266R, April 2, 2012. 68 YIU, 267R, April 2, 2012.

mass executions in krasnodar krai  ❧ 137 further the German stopped the column and told us that he had kept his promise to take us for a ride, but now we had to go home. The column left and we remained on the spot to play “Whites and Reds.” The column disappeared from our sight. It was dusk. We suddenly heard women’s voices, then German voices, and then we heard the noise of the breechblocks. We heard a crowd screaming, but we couldn’t see anybody and then bursts of shooting and women screaming. We got scared and ran toward the village.69

This very moving story provides several important pieces of information. As in other places, Jewish refugees were lodged in the village. The Germans had an access to the refugees’ names and systematically searched for the Jews, even in a small village like Sukhoi Kut. It is a rather striking example of a case where a German soldier without hesitation used a witness who was only twelve at the time and also requisitioned a local man to transport the Jews. We observe the same cunning approach toward the Jews as in Petropavlovskaia. In this way, the Germans needed only one person to organize transportation. This work was evidently entirely routine for the German soldier, who was able to interact calmly with the local children. Another less known detail is an order forbidding the villagers to bury the Jews. As for the urban area of Petropavlovskaia, we notice that large parts of the information collected by ChGK match that of YIU witnesses’ testimonies recorded in 2012. The latter provide details on how the executions were prepared and unfolded. Additionally, we learn of a special method for killing children: poisoning. Also of note is the different treatment of Jewish and Roma victims: the latter were kept alive at least for several weeks and used for labor. To conclude, YIU found no confirmation of the large number of victims estimated by ChGK. It is most likely that there were roughly one thousand Jewish victims in the Petropavlovskaia conurbation.

Ladozhskaia The third important mass execution, in Ladozhskaia (Ust’-Labinsk district), took place much later than the first two described. In October and November of 1942 there had been a downward trend in executions in the North Caucasus, with several delayed actions. The Ladozhskaia execution was one of the last to take place, in December 1942. A comparative analysis 69 YIU, 294R, June 22, 2012.

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of the surrounding district shows that some Jews were killed very early on. Thus, in August 1942, 75 women and children were shot in the village of Bezlesnyi, just north of Ladozhskaia,70 while all the Jews (over 200 people) found in another small village, Tbilisskaia, twenty-five kilometers (fifteen and a half miles) to the east, were also killed in the same month.71 On the other hand, the execution in the district center, Ust’-Labinsk, took place at the end of 1942, just as in Ladozhskaia. The total number of victims at Ust’Labinsk is not quite clear. Some sources claim 352 or 370 victims,72 others 400 or even 3,000.73 Some of the victims had initially managed to hide themselves in the buildings of the kolkhoz’s brigades. But as cold weather settled in in November, they were forced to go back to the accommodations that had been assigned during evacuation.74 In the case of Ladozhskaia, we can first analyze the reports from the local commission and the Red Army. According to these two sources, on December 17, almost three thousand Jews were killed in Ladozhskaia. The majority of Jews drowned in the Kuban River.75 The number seems surprising, especially since only seven Jewish inhabitants were registered there in 70 Report no. 2 about the crimes committed in the Kuban territory, April 2, 1943, Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense (TsAMO), fond 52, op. 958, d. 52, 163, published in Zverstva nemetsko-fashistkikh zakhvatchikov: Dokumenty [Atrocities of the German-fascist invaders: Documents], ed. F. Potemkin et al., vol. 6 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1943), 42. 71 Statement of Anna Suzdalenko dated May 10, 1944, in GARF, 7021-16-464, 231; YIU, 323R, June 11, 2012. 72 See the inscription on the memorial in Ust’-Labinsk. 73 Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 589; Feferman, Holocaust, 516. Based on the statements, the local commission established that more than 400 Soviet citizens (116 men and 194 women older than fifteen years) were shot northeast of the kolkhoz Krasnyi Forshtadt; 35 victims were Russians and the rest Jews. We can conclude that at least 365 Jews were killed, based on the information of the ChGK: GARF, 7021-16-8, 161. See also the statements of Nadezhda Polushchkova dated July 30, 1943, GARF, 7021-16-8, 163; and Lida Ermakova, same day, 162. 74 Al’tman, Entsiklopediia, 1006–7. 75 Report of the commission of Ladozhskaia, September 4, 1943, GARF, 702116-8, 5–6; GAKK, 897-1-2, 301–2; report, February 1, 1943, TsAMO 52-958-52, 96. Notable is the fact that the Red Army report contains the typed number “300” that is modified afterward in blue ink to “3,000.”

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1939. Even the large number of refugees who had arrived by summer 1942 could hardly justify this high figure.76 Moreover, none of ChGK’s witnesses in Ladozhskaia proved to be a direct witness to the execution. It is also surprising that an execution of this size has no trace in the German archives. An analysis of the commission’s documentation and comparison with YIU’s investigation allow us to shed more light on events in Ladozhskaia. The report of the local commission states that in the first days of occupation of the Ladozhskaia district, the Germans began the methodological extermination of the Jewish population. German executioners dragged thousands of civilians into the Kuban River. Babies held on to their mothers, who jumped down into the water. Inhabitants of the village of Ladozhskaia witnessed this tragedy. Corpses of hundreds of woman, children, and elderly people (most of the younger men had been drafted) floated down the river. According to witnesses’ depositions, German executioners shot, drowned in the Kuban River, and tortured almost three thousand Jews. The report concludes that during the occupation of the Ladozhskaia district, “over three thousand innocent Soviet citizens were physically exterminated. This includes hundreds of children, women and the elderly.”77 The ChGK report confirmed these findings and total death toll.78 For its report, the local commission interrogated several witnesses in 1943. They provide a certain amount of information on the acts of violence committed by the Germans against the villagers, particularly against members of the Communist Party. But only a few elements on the extermination of Jews can be found. A Jewish survivor, Leon Kavarkov, had simply noted in his statement, “The entire Jewish population of Ladozhskaia district was gathered and exterminated. The number of people, who were tortured, shot and drowned, amounts up to 3,000. The fascist monsters attached babies to their mothers whom they threw into the Kuban River. Hundreds of corpses floated in the river.”79 76 An evacuation list from July 2, 1942, states 402 Jews from a total of 1,040 persons, USHMM, RG‐22.027M, reel 129 [from GARF, A-327-2-160], 290– 315. The ChGK mentions that evacuees from Belarus and Ukraine arrived in Tbilisskaia, a nearby city: report of the commission of Tbiliskaia, May 10, 1944, GARF, 7021-16-464, 230. 77 Report of the commission of Ladozhskaia, September 4, 1943, GARF, 702116-8, 5–6; GAKK 897-1-2, 301–2. 78 Potemkin, Zverstva, 34, 60; See also Arad, Holocaust, 292. 79 Statement dated September 3, 1943, GARF, 7021-16-8, 7. Almost identical in content are the statements of Iakov Vasiutin (9) and Dimitri Kiselev (11), dated

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An interrogation of a witness, Vera Sidarova, provides details about several smaller killings of Jews, but no more information about the main execution.80 Another Jewish survivor, Leonid Borukhovich, who arrived with his family as an evacuee from Moldova, told ChGK how he managed to survive: On December 17, 1942, in the village of Ladozhskaia, the Germans arrested my mother, Riva Ikhalevna Borukhovna (48), my sister Emma (30) as well as my cousin’s parents Iakov and Leia Gertsman (60 and 57) and my cousin’s children Roza and Feliks. The same day, they were shot to death on the other side of the Kuban River. I managed to survive because I’d run away and had been hiding until the Red Army arrived. After their arrival, the pit with the corpses was dug up. I recognized my parents’ corpses. The victims were undressed and thrown into vans before my eyes. The Germans had no mercy. Loud cries were heard, screaming came from the inside of the vans, the arrestees were beaten up with whips and rifle butts. The victims were not only Jewish but also local inhabitants.81

The local commission’s results take up only ten pages in the official file of eight different districts of Krasnodar krai, leaving more questions than answers. Thus it is very important to look into the research results of a YIU team that visited Ladozhskaia in March and April 2012 and interviewed four local witnesses. Nadezhda was born in 1931. She recalls that, upon their arrival and after establishing a Kommandantur, the Germans began persecuting the Jews. A radio announcement ordered all Jews to gather on a central square and bring their jewelry and valuables. Otherwise, there would be roundups. Many inhabitants received the message, because a lot of them had radios at home. Also, a big loudspeaker was installed on a central square repeating the order. Nadezhda remembered well that when the Jews went to the gathering, they knew they would be shot.82 She confirms that some of the Jews were shot on the banks of the Kuban River, while some of the victims, such as children, were thrown into the river alive. A second execution site was located northeast of the village. There was a natural ravine, right in front of an orphanage.

September 3, 1943, and of Maria Ivanina (12), dated September 2, 1943. 80 Statement dated September 3, 1943, GARF, 7021-16-8, 8. Ladozhskaia. 81 Statement dated September 3, 1943, GARF, 7021-16-8, 10. 82 YIU, 261R, March 31, 2012.

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Viktor, born in 1937, tells in his testimony first about the existence of two prisoner of war camps.83 As for the execution, he and other boys approached the pit when the execution was over. He did not go there earlier because he was afraid the Germans were still there. The killing was carried out in a gulch that the villagers called the “Jewish Ravine.” Viktor mentions 200 Jewish victims—entire families, including children. Out of fear of partisan attacks, the Germans did not cover the pit after the shooting. The victims were shot to death. The witness saw blood on their corpses. Viktor, like many other witnesses, led the YIU team to the execution site. At the location, he explained that “a few people remained alive. It was in the summertime, flies were buzzing around, and we saw occasionally that people moved their hands to get rid of annoying flies. But it was very rare as there were few wounded. The majority was already dead. Some lay face down, others on their backs. I think they had to stand in a line; they fell down after they were shot.” His answer to a question about the estimated number of victims was that “there certainly was not a thousand. One hundred, perhaps 150 people, up to two hundred. There were not so many Jews in our stanitsa.”84 Valentina, born in 1930, saw with her own eyes part of the execution. She and other people were working in a field next to the ravine. She saw the Jews being aligned by the executioners. Russian policemen started killing children by beating their heads with a shovel. Bullets immediately killed the Jewish adults who moved toward the children. Then a mounted police officer captured Valentina and her colleagues. They escaped and went back home by going through backyards. In all, twenty to thirty Jewish children were killed. As for drowning the Jews, she recalls that execution took place in a hamlet, Semenov, south of the village: “I saw three Jewish girls swimming. German soldiers fired at them. The girls dove. They swam for a while. Then they were shot. Those who couldn’t swim were drowned. The river was full of corpses, many of them. They floated on the water surface. Later, the villagers took some of them out of the water and buried them.”85 Brigadiers of the kolkhoz brigades hid some of their Jewish workers while the Germans searched for them, recalls Mikhail, born in 1929. The hideout was located in the brigade No. 1. Mikhail confirms the execution in the ravine:

83 YIU, 262R, March 31, 2012. 84 YIU, 262R, March 31, 2012. 85 YIU, 263R, March 31, 2012.

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Figure 5.1. Viktor M., eyewitness to an execution of Jewish refugees in Ladozhskaia. © Yahad—In Unum/Markel Redondo. Russian policemen with armbands shot them. The Jews had some gold, and the policemen took it. I saw the shooting from far away. A brigadier had sent me to do some work. On my way, I saw the Jews were positioned along the edge of the ravine. The German SS soldiers were there too. A German on a motorbike almost crashed into me. The policemen, not the Germans, carried out the execution. The policemen threatened to shoot the children so the Jews would give up their gold. A German arrived; he got mad with the policemen for their behavior. At that moment, the policemen stopped threatening the children and began shooting all the Jews.86

These stories allow us to reconstruct part of the events that took place in Ladozhskaia. Some Jews were drowned in the Kuban River, south of the village. Those who could swim were killed by bullets from the bank of the river. Other Jews were killed in two different places. Some two hundred were shot southeast of the village, several hundred meters from the edge of the Kuban River. A second killing site was the natural ravine between the road and railway tracks northeast of the village. Here, we can estimate a comparable number of victims. We conclude that the number of 3,000 Jewish victims is not 86 YIU, 307R, April 14, 2012.

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credible, even though it has been repeated in academic works.87 This number was stated in the report of the local commission without verification. A more credible estimate is that not more than 500 Jews were killed in Ladozhskaia during the German occupation. This number correlates with the results of Jewish institutions’ efforts to find corpses of the victims in Ladozhskaia. By 1997, 386 corpses had been reburied.88 On the other hand, it was confirmed that some Jews were drowned in the Kuban River, which is still very turbulent in Ladozhskaia. Also, it has to be mentioned that according to YIU’s research results, it is possible that another shooting took place in the woods of the neighboring village of Novonikolaevka, three kilometers southeast of Ladozhskaia. The time frame of the extermination of Jews in Ladozhskaia, however, remains unclear. All witnesses interviewed by YIU mention that the events happened in the autumn, when temperatures were still relatively warm. How can this be reconciled with the testimonies concerning December 17, 1942? Based on the fact that a number of executions were carried out in Ladozhskaia, why did the last one take place so late? Most of the Jews were killed after the harvest, especially those who were living in the kolkhozes. Their labor was no longer needed in the autumn of 1942. This analysis has highlighted certain aspects of the Holocaust in Krasnodar krai. First, there is the systematic extermination of Jewish evacuees, as throughout occupied southern Russia. The victims were killed either in a single execution or, as in the case of Belaia Glina, in several executions in the same place. The executioners had been part of the killing machine for over a year and easily adjusted themselves to the local topography and situation. As to why some executions were delayed, neither archival documents nor local witnesses were able to clarify. By cross-referencing different sources, such as written documents and oral history, we can reconstruct the facts for most events. In the majority of cases, as in the microstudies of Belaia Glina, Ladozhskaia, and Petropavlovskaia, we can establish a timeline and an accurate description of events. While we have 87 Arad, Holocaust, 292; Al’tman, Zhertvy, 283; Feferman, Holocaust, 516 (also rape and severe maltreatment). 88 Nikolai Kirei, “Evrei Krasnodarskogo kraia” [The Jews of Krasnodar krai], Biulleten’ tsentra sodeistviia razvitiiu i pravam rasovykh, etnichestkikh i lingvisticheskikh menshinstv [Bulletin of the center for assisting the development and rights of racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities] 2 (1997): 143.

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proved that massive killings took place in those three places, the numbers given by ChGK had to be reviewed. While in Belaia Glina it has not been possible to corroborate ChGK’s estimate of thirty-eight hundred victims or to provide an alternate number, in the other two cases the evidence provided here suggests a much lower number of victims than reported. At least one thousand Jews were killed in Petropavlovskaia and some five hundred in Ladozhskaia, rather than the figure of circa three thousand victims that ChGK or a local Soviet commission indicated for both places. Nevertheless, the ChGK information can be considered in large measure credible in terms of the description of executions and proves, in corroboration with other sources, that despite the lower victim numbers, these were indeed large-scale execution sites compared to others in this region. We can also establish that the German perpetrators set up a routine system of killing that could be applied anywhere: in a city as well as in a kolkhoz. The perpetrators had access to the lists of evacuees and would use the Soviet requisition system as in the other occupied territories.89 This means that in the three examples a high number of Jewish evacuees would lead to high victim numbers as well.

89 On the requisitions, see Desbois, Holocaust by Bullets, 81–98.

Chapter Six

In the Shadow of “Mass Treason”: The Holocaust in the Karachai Region Crispin Brooks1 It was August 1942. Traveling desperately for two weeks by horse and cart, Leonid Zozovskii’s family made a last-ditch attempt to escape the approaching Germans on an unforgiving mountain road in the Karachai region of the North Caucasus: You could hear rifle and machine-gun fire as we were going along the road… . Some people overtook us. A car went by with some soldiers in it. But I remember we’d been told the day before we had to get through the mountains. Carts wouldn’t make it, so we had to load up the horses. Somehow we were supposed to get through with the horses all loaded up. A total fantasy—why we went on, I don’t know… . It started getting dark. We didn’t come to a dead end. The mountains were simply too steep and the horses stopped. We tried to goad them 1 This chapter benefited from discussions at Wolf Gruner’s “Holocaust, Genocides and Race Relations in World History” speaker series (University of Southern California, November 2013) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum workshop “New Directions in the Use of Oral Testimonies: Soviet Experiences of the Holocaust” (August 2016). Kiril Feferman, Peg LeVine, and Jared McBride commented on earlier drafts, while Jared McBride and Andrej Umansky helped track down hard-to-find materials. Aziza Kasumov and Martin Gruber assisted with German translations, and Kursat Pegkoz with Turkish.

146  ❧  chapter six on with some food, some hay, but they refused to go any further. So there we were in the middle of the road—on one side a river, on the other mountains— and that’s where we stopped.2

The German advance reached the region on the 13th–14th of the month. A week later, a unit of the “Edelweiss” division dramatically placed the Nazi flag on top of Elbrus, considered the highest mountain in Europe, and by early September the Germans had captured all the major passes of the northwest Caucasus Mountains. Hastily formed Soviet partisan groups assisted the Red Army’s retreat, but, poorly coordinated and supplied, they were soon destroyed by the Germans with the help of collaborating local militias. By late September, however, the German advance had stalled because of supply problems and fuel shortages, the arrival of Soviet reinforcements, and the onset of winter, which rendered the mountain roads impassable. By the same token, the refugees were also stuck, only a few miles from safety. As brief background of this historical region, Karachai is located in the mountains and valleys northwest of Mount Elbrus. Today it is part of Karachaevo-Cherkessia—a constituent republic of Russia, bordering Georgia to the south. In 1942, the area was known as the Karachai autonomous oblast, an ethnoterritorial region of the Soviet Union designated by the authorities for its indigenous people, the Karachais.3 The Germans occupied the Karachai region for almost five months. In that time, they shot and gassed hundreds of civilians, mostly Jews, making this the only known location where large numbers of Jews were killed in the highlands of the North Caucasus. The violence did not end when the Germans retreated from the region in January 1943. First, the Soviets subdued a German-supported revolt that broke out in what was then the rear area of the Red Army. Then, in October, Soviet authorities abolished the Karachai autonomous oblast. Among other things, they charged that “many Karachais” had acted treacherously,

2 Leonid Zozovskii, Visual History Archive, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation (hereafter USCSF), interview 47479, segments 51–52. 3 The Karachai autonomous oblast was within Ordzhonikidze krai, part of the Russian republic (RSFSR) of the Soviet Union. In this chapter, the terms “Karachai autonomous oblast,” “Karachai oblast,” and “Karachai region” are used interchangeably.

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joined German units to fight the Soviets, and betrayed Soviet citizens.4 In November 1943, the entire Karachai people was deported to central Asia, resulting in thousands of deaths during the journey and in exile.5 This was the Soviets’ first such action after recapturing southern Russia and the North Caucasus, but not the last. In the following months, the same charge of mass treason and the same fate of mass forced resettlement befell the Kalmyks (December 1943), Chechens and Ingush (February 1944), Balkars (March 1944), and Crimean Tatars (May 1944), among others. For the peoples in question, these are some of the most painful and controversial episodes in their recent history. Did the Karachais really collaborate en masse with the Germans during World War II? Indeed they did, according to a number of works drawing on the reports of German security forces and the Soviet NKVD, a view also bolstered by Cold War–era propagandists.6 For Karachai historians, how4 5

6

Nikolai Bugai and Askarbi Gonov, Kavkaz: Narody v eshelonakh (20–60-e gody) [The Caucasus: Peoples in echelons (1920s–60s)] (Moscow: INSAN, 1998), 127–28. The final death toll has not been established. Around 70,000 Karachais were deported in November 1943, but by October 1946 only 60,139 were still being held in exile: Stephen Wheatcroft, “The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–45,” Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 8 (1996): 1339, 1341. German security forces: Alexander Dallin, War Documentation Project, The Soviet Partisan Movement in the North Caucasus, 1942–43 (Washington, DC: Published for Air Research and Development Command, Human Resources Research Institute by Headquarters, United States Air Force, 1954). NKVD: Vladimir Gneushev and Andrei Poput’ko, Partizanskii zaslon [The partisan barrier] (repr., Stavropol: Stavropol’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1985); Andrei Poput’ko and Iurii Khristinin, Imenem VChK: Dokumental’naia povest’— Khronika o stavropol’skikh chekistakh [In the name of the VChK—A documentary tale and chronicle of the Stavropol Chekists] (Stavropol: Stavropol’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1988); Nikolai Bugai, Iosif Stalin—Lavrentiiu Berii: “Ikh nado deportirova’”; Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii [Joseph Stalin to Lavrenty Beria: “They must be deported”; Documents, facts, commentaries] (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1992); Bugai and Gonov, Kavkaz. Propagandists: M. Aslanbek [Mahmut Duda], “The Extermination by the Soviets of the Karachai People,” The Caucasus (Der Kaukasus): Monthly Organ of the Committee for Caucasian Independence 2, no. 7 (February 1952): 9–15; Mahmut Aslanbek [Mahmut Duda], Karaçay ve Malkar Türklerinin faciası [The disaster of the Karachai and Balkar Turks] (Ankara: Çankaya Matbaası, 1952); Nicholas

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ever, the mass treason charge was “fictitious, groundless and a dirty falsification of reality” that was “fabricated against the Karachai people by Beria and Suslov.”7 They object to the persisting stigma of the “traitor nation,” and some have called for the deportation of the Karachais to be classified as a genocide.8 Sergei Linets is rare among Russian historians in acknowledging these arguments, at least in part.9 Western scholars like Terry Martin highlight long-standing ethnic conflict and Karachai hostility to Soviet policies as the fundamental motivations for the Soviets’ actions in the region, rather than collaboration.10 This body of scholarship almost entirely avoids reference to the Holocaust, other than the occasional assertion of its irrelevance. “Not one Karachai took part in the shooting of Jews,” writes Kazi-Magomet Aliev.11 As we shall see, this is not entirely true. Poppe, Reminiscences (Bellingham: Western Washington University Center for East Asian Studies, 1983), 159–68. 7 “Fictitious, groundless and a dirty falsification of reality”: I. M. Shamanov and Respublikanskaia komissiia po reabilitatsii karachaevskogo naroda, Karachaevtsy: Vyselenie i vozvrashchenie; 1943–1957; Materialy i dokumenty [The Karachais: Resettlement and return; 1943–1957; Materials and documents] (Cherkessk: “PUL,” 1993), 12. “Fabricated against the Karachai people by Beria and Suslov”: Askerbii Koichuev, Karachaevskaia avtonomnaia oblast’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 [The Karachai autonomous oblast in the years of the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945] (Rostov-onDon: Izd. Rostovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1998), 6. See also two works by Kazi-Magomet Aliev: Svet i teni partizanskoi voiny [The light and dark of the partisan war] (Moscow: Ileksa, 2003) and V zone “Edel’veisa” [In the “Edelweiss” zone] (Moscow: Ileksa, 2005). In Aliev’s view, Mikhail Suslov, the wartime regional Communist Party chief (and later Politburo hardliner), blamed the Karachais to cover up his failed leadership of the local partisan movement. 8 Shamanov et al., Karachaevtsy, 18, 44. The same claim was earlier made by Duda; e.g., R. Karcha [Mahmut Duda], “Genocide in the Northern Caucasus,” Caucasian Review 2 (1956): 74–84. 9 Sergei Linets, Severnyi Kavkaz nakanune i v period nemetsko-fashistskoi okkupatsii: Sostoianie i osobennosti razvitiia (iiul’ 1942 – oktiabr’ 1943 gg.) [The North Caucasus before and during the German-fascist occupation: The situation and specifics of development (July 1942–October 1943)], 2nd ed. (Piatigorsk: Piatigorskii gosudarstvennyi lingvisticheskii universitet; RIA-KMV, 2009). 10 Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (December 1998): 859. 11 Aliev, Svet i teni, 25.

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The debates around collaboration are very significant for Holocaust history. A growing body of work has demonstrated the prominent role of collaborationist local police, local administrations, and nationalist organizations—motivated by anti-Semitism, ethnopolitics, pragmatic considerations, or some combination thereof—in assisting German killing operations in Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic states.12 If the Karachais did in fact commit treason on a mass scale, therefore, we might expect to see this reflected in local participation in the Holocaust. In Crimea, a closer equivalent, some of the indigenous (and subsequently deported) Crimean Tatars did help in the Germans’ second and third sweeps of the peninsula to find Jews, but so too did Slavic locals. Nevertheless, the scale of their activities and the motivations of those involved are less clear, and the German occupation of Crimea lasted far longer (two and a half years).13 The few Holocaust works that refer to the Karachai region have sought to establish the prewar Jewish population numbers, three or four massacre locations, and victim numbers.14 Because they refer instead to the modern-day region of Karachaevo-Cherkessia and hence include Cherkessk (capital of the Cherkes autonomous oblast during the war), however, these 12 Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Markus Eikel and Valentina Sivaieva, “City Mayors, Raion Chiefs and Village Elders in Ukraine, 1941–4: How Local Administrators Co-operated with the German Occupation Authorities,” Contemporary History 23, no. 3 (August 2014): 405–28. Anton Weiss-Wendt, Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009); Leonid Rein, The Kings and the Pawns: Collaboration in Byelorussia during World War II (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Jared McBride, “Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN–UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944,” Slavic Review 75, no. 3 (2016): 630–54. 13 Kiril Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016), 392–400, 408–16. 14 “Zelenchukskaia,” “Karachaevo-Cherkessiia,” “Mikoian-Shakhar,” and “Teberda,” in Il’ia Al’tman, ed., Kholokost na territorii SSSR: Entsiklopediia [The Holocaust in the USSR: An encyclopedia] 2nd ed. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011), 330, 388, 588, 973–74; Andrej Umansky, “L’extermination des Juifs dans le Caucase du Nord pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (1942–1943)” [The extermination of Jews in the North Caucasus during World War II] (PhD diss., University of Amiens, 2016), 551–62. Both works include discussions of Cherkessk, then capital of the Cherkes autonomous oblast, which is outside the scope of this study.

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numbers are high (fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred). Furthermore, this approach dilutes other local contexts that are important to understand the Karachai autonomous oblast: the ethnic composition, the (comparative lack of ) local Jewish population, the single specific killing unit, the timing of the massacres, and the issues of wartime collaboration and subsequent Soviet deportation. Hence, the goal of this study is to present a contextually grounded picture of the Holocaust in the Karachai region with a focus on the issue of local collaboration.15 As an alternative to the prevailing all-guilty–all-innocent framework found in the debates about the role of the Karachais, the study presents an analysis based on the region’s historical and cultural background. Drawing especially from demographic information makes it possible to chart the existence of a very small prewar Jewish population in the region, to show where the Soviets assigned wartime Jewish evacuees, and to indicate where the Germans later killed them. The same approach helps to demonstrate that collaboration was a rather more multiethnic activity than generally thought as well as to estimate the numbers involved. The study adds to the known information about where Jews in the region were killed, the German unit that killed them, and the handful of Karachais, Russians, and others who assisted in the process. Moving beyond the ethnic focus, consideration is also given to factors affecting the behavior of those locals who participated in killing Jews. Finally, contexts and connections are explored in relation to how some Jews were able to survive the German occupation and in relation to the help given them by local people. This study contributes not only to knowledge of the Holocaust in an unfamiliar region but also to the local debates around wartime collaboration and the Soviet treatment of ethnic minorities during World War II. My research is based on three main groups of primary sources. First, there is Soviet documentation: materials from the 1939 census, the Main Resettlement Administration (1941–42), the Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) from 1943, the NKVD’s Main Directorate for the Struggle against Banditry (GUBB) from 1944, NKVD investigations from 1945–46 and 1966 provided to West German prosecutors, and investigations of Soviet citizens exiled to Kazakhstan (1948).16 Second are recent eye15 I define collaboration as the personal participation of local people in security or administrative roles supporting the occupying forces of Nazi Germany. 16 Federal’naia arkhivnaia sluzhba Rossii and Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki, Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1939 goda; Vsesoiuznaia perepis’

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witness accounts: interviews with Jewish survivors recorded by the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation in 1997–98 and 2019, interviews with local residents recorded by Yahad-in Unum in 2017, and the 2011 manuscript of a survivor held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.17 Third is a smaller group of documents from United Kingdom naseleniia 1937 goda [All-union census of 1939; All-union census of 1937], microfilm (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, an Imprint of Primary Source Media; Moscow: Federal Archival Service of Russia, 2000); hereafter 1939 Soviet census. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Record Group 22.027M, “Glavnoe Pereselencheskoe Upravlenie pri Sovete Ministrov RSFSR [Main resettlement administration under the council of ministries of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic] (GARF Fond A‐327), 1942–1956,” reel 179, 172–230. ChGK: Relevant reports are found in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (henceforth GARF), 7021-17, delo 7 (Teberda), delo 8 (Karachai autonomous oblast), delo 10 (includes Zelenchukskaia district, Mikoian-Shakhar), delo 11 (includes Pregradnaia district), and delo 12 (includes Ust’-Dzheguta district). GUBB: Especially GARF, 9478-1-63, “Doklad na imia rukovodstva NKVD o rezul’tatakh bor’by s banditizmom, dezertirstvam, s ukloneniem ot sluzhby v Krasnoi Armii za 3 goda VOV s 01.07.41 po 01.07.44 g.” [Report to NKVD leadership on the results of the struggle against banditry and Red Army desertion and draft evasion for three years of the Great Patriotic War from July 1, 1941, to July 1, 1944]. NKVD investigations: Bundesarchiv, Aussenstelle Ludwigsburg, “Russische Protokolle, Einzatzkommando 12” [Russian protocols, Einsatzkommando 12] B162/1288 (hereafter “BAL, EK 12, B162/1288”). Soviet citizens exiled to Kazakhstan: Relevant materials on the Karachai region can be found in Fol. 1, 1242–338. USHMM, Record Group RG-74.001, “Selected Records from the War Crimes Trial Cases of the Nazi Collaborators Tried in Kazakh SSR (1943 – 1950),” Folder 47, “Khubiev Khusey Machukovich” (Fiche #22). On this collection, see Claire Kaiser, “Betraying the Motherland: Soviet Military Tribunals of Izmenniki Rodiny in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, 1941–1953,” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 41 (2014): 57–83. 17 USCSF: Klavdiia Kniazhevskaia, 25767 (b. 1928), interviewed in Kyiv on January 20, 1997; Efim Ivanov, 30924 (b. 1930), New York, July 2, 1997; Inessa Smirnova, 30528 (b. 1940), Saint Petersburg, Russia, April 16, 1997; Leonid Beshenkovskii, 31665 (b. 1929), Odessa, Ukraine, May 18, 1997; Leonid Zozovskii, 47479 (b. 1936), Kyiv, August 3, 1998; Efim Tigai, 47288 (b. 1933), Simferopol, September 15, 1998; Nelly Finkelstein, 57212 (b. 1937), and Yuri Prizov, 57211 (b. 1935), New York, March 27, 2019. Yahad-in Unum (YIU): 695R (b. 1931), interviewed in Zelenchukskaia on May 10, 2017; 696R (b. 1928), Zelenchukskaia, May 10, 2017; 699R (b. 1929),

152  ❧  chapter six

and United States national archives or declassified by the author from United States government agencies. Some cautiousness is in order, the more so in the light of the controversial collaboration topic. Despite some questions of inflated numbers, the 1939 Soviet census is now thought to be generally reliable.18 The Extraordinary Commission reports of specific executions are largely trustworthy, notwithstanding the overall propagandistic intent.19 The reports of the GUBB and postwar Soviet investigations should certainly be treated with some caution; in the latter case, however, there is consistency between the statements taken when the Karachais were being targeted (1945–46) and when they were not (1966), and among the witnesses are several perpetrators of different ethnic backgrounds (Russian and Ossetian, as well as Karachai). The accounts of survivors, often young children during the war, are certainly subject to the vagaries of memory and subsequent interpretation but nevertheless provide not only corroboration but also a wealth of information not captured in official documents. Where relevant, I highlight particular issues of reliability and have tried to resolve them though corroboration.

Background The Karachais have inhabited this region of the North Caucasus since at least the fourteenth century. Sharing a Turkic language derived from the Kipchak people and a cultural heritage derived from the Alans, the Karachais and Karachaevsk, May 11, 2017; 700R (b. 1927), Karachaevsk, May 12, 2017; 701R (b. 1925) and 702R (b. 1929), Nizhniaia Teberda, May 12, 2017; 703R (b. 1930), Teberda, May 12, 2017; and 709R (b. 1936), Kurdzhinovo, May 17, 2017. 2011 manuscript: Yuri Prizov (b. 1935), “The Reminiscences of a Young Holocaust Survivor,” undated manuscript, 2011.337.1, USHMM Collection. 18 R. W. Davies et al., “The Soviet Population and the Censuses of 1937 and 1939,” in The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, vol. 7: The Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 129– 155; Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1998), 5–6. 19 Kiril Feferman, “Soviet Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR: Documenting the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 4 (2003): 587–602; Marina Sorokina, “People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (2005): 797–831.

the holocaust in the karachai region  ❧ 153

their neighbors to the east, the Balkars, consider themselves to be a single people. Both have been Sunni Muslims since the late eighteenth century. In 1828, Russian forces defeated the Karachais and Balkars in the Battle of Khasauka and incorporated the region into the Russian Empire. Cossack settlers began arriving and, by the 1860s, had established several large villages (stanitsy): Zelenchukskaia, Kardonikskaia, Ust’-Dzheguta, and Pregradnaia. At around the same time, settlements of Greeks, Estonians, displaced Ossetians, and Abazas also emerged, and even a Jewish village. Around three hundred Mountain Jews who had fled from Dagestan during the Caucasus War formed Dzhegonasko-Evreiskii (Jewish Dzhegonas), which became home to the only settlement of Jews in all of the northwest Caucasus (Kuban oblast) at that time. They lived in close proximity to the Cossacks of stanitsa Ust’-Dzheguta.20 Dissatisfaction with Russian rule and the devastation of the Caucasus War caused a wave of Karachai emigration to the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s–70s. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Karachais were to be found in three main settlements—Kart-Dzhiurt, Uchkulan, and Khurzuk. Administratively separated from the Balkars, they shared territory in Kuban Oblast with Circassians and newly arrived settlers. Over time, however, the region’s economy developed in trade and mineral mining and, in the early 1900s, with the building of a prominent mountain spa resort in Teberda.21 During the Russian Civil War (1917–21), pro-czarist White forces under General Anton Denikin attempted to reestablish the previous regime’s power 20 E. S. Mosolova, “Dzhegonasskii,” Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia [Russian Jewish encyclopedia], July 9, 2009; Dmitrii Sen’, “Novye materialy o gorskikh evreev Kubanskoi oblasti (Dzhegonassko-Evreiskii poselok)” [New materials on the Mountain Jews of Kuban oblast (the village of Dzhegonassko-Evreiskii)], in Felitsynskie chteniia IX: Materialy mezhregional’noi nauchnoi konferentsii (g. Krasnodar, 1 oktiabria 2007 g.) [Felitsyn readings IX: Materials of the interregional research conference (Krasnodar, October 1, 2007)], ed. S. Kiriushin, V. Kolesov, and D. Sen’ (Krasnodar: A-Adams, 2007), 117–30. 21 Zarema Kipkeeva, Karachaevo-Balkarskaia diaspora v Turtsii [The KarachaiBalkar diaspora in Turkey] (Stavropol: Stavropol’skii gos. universitet, 2000); Michael Khodarkovsky, Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011) 109–15; K. T. Laipanov, R. T. Khatuev, and I. M. Shamanov, Karachai s drevneishikh vremen do 1917 goda: Istoriko-etnograficheskie ocherki [Karachai from ancient times to 1917: Historical-ethnographic essays] (Cherkessk: IKO “Alanskii Ermitazh,” 2009).

154  ❧  chapter six

structures in the Upper Kuban region, but mobilization and requisitions were met with local resistance. In March 1920, the communist Reds met no open opposition when they took control of the region, but their political violence, overzealous requisitioning, disrespect of local customs, and failure to address local concerns resulted in an anti-Bolshevik revolt by Karachais and Cossacks in September–October 1920. Soviet control of the region was established as much through negotiations led by Karachai communist Umar Aliev as by military force.22 In the 1920s, following a policy of nativization (korenizatsiia), the Soviet authorities not only officially enshrined the Karachais’ homeland as an autonomous region but also encouraged Karachai culture, bringing new schools, higher literacy rates, and several new settlements, including the region’s capital, Mikoian-Shakhar (today Karachaevsk), founded in 1927.23 Like the czarist authorities before them, however, the Soviets struggled to deal with disputes between Karachais, Russians, and other groups over the perennial issue of access to viable agricultural land as well as over representation in the newly formed local administration.24 As in virtually every region of the Soviet Union, significant unrest was spurred by a series of violently imposed Soviet campaigns—against the Cossacks and the kulaks, against religion, and to impose collectivization. In March 1930, the Karachai region was the site of a major anticollectivization revolt involving between one thousand and five thousand participants;

22 Aslan Gainulin, “Stanovlenie i funktsionirovanie belogvardeiskoi administratsii v Karachae i Cherkesii (sentiabr’ 1918–mart 1920 goda)” [The establishment and functioning of the White Guard administration in Karachai and Cherkessia (September 1918–March 1920)], Nauchnye problem gumanitarnykh issledovanii 12 (2010): 47–53; Aslan Gainulin, “Vosstanie gortsev Verkhnei Kubani osen’iu 1920 g.” [The revolt of the Upper Kuban highlanders in autumn 1920], Nauchnye problem gumanitarnykh issledovanii 6 (2011): 25–32. 23 Map based on Skhema ugodii Karachaevskoi avtonomnoi oblasti R.S.F.S.R. inzhenera Lovyreva P. L. [Land scheme of the Karachai autonomous oblast of the RSFSR of engineer P. L. Lovyrev] ([Mikoian-Shakhar:] Izdanie Oblispolkoma Karachaevskoi avtonomnoi oblasti, 1938), via etomesto.ru, accessed October 3, 2018, http://www.etomesto.ru/map/base/23/karachaevskaya-ao-1938.jpg. 24 Grigorii Nikolaevich Sevost’ianov et al., eds., “Sovershenno sekretno”: LubiankaStalinu o polozhenii v strane (1922–1934 gg.) [“Top secret”: The Lubyanka to Stalin on the situation in the country (1922–1934)] (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2001–8), vol. 1, pt. 1, 721; vol. 4, pt. 2, 930–31.

the holocaust in the karachai region  ❧ 155

KRASNODAR KRAI CHERKES AUTONOMOUS OBLAST

ORDZHONIKIDZE KRAI

KABARDINO BALKAR ASSR

1. Pregradnaia district 2. Summer pastures assigned to Cherkes autonomous oblast 3. Zelenchukskaia district 4. Mikoian district 5. Ust'-Dzheguta district 6. Uchkulan district 7. Summer pastures assigned to Ust'-Dzheguta district 8. Malyi Karachai district

GEORGIAN SSR

Mountain Town Village Jewish killing site

Map 4. The Karachai autonomous oblast in 1938

collectivization continued to lag thereafter.25 Between 1936 and 1938, Soviet authorities launched a wave of arrests targeting both the older generation of Bolsheviks and newly groomed intelligentsia. These shifting policies are reflected in administrative changes. While keeping the region within autonomous republics or oblasts of the Russian republic, Soviet authorities repeatedly redesignated it as either just Karachai or as shared with a different ethnic group, the Circassians (Cherkes). In 1921–22, it was the Karachai national okrug (Mountain ASSR) before being reorganized as the Karachai-Cherkes autonomous oblast (South-Eastern oblast; later, North-Caucasian krai) in 1922–26. In the period discussed in this 25 See Sevost’ianov, “Sovershenno sekretno,” vol. 8, pt. 1, 762–63; vol. 8, pt. 2, 1347–49; and vol. 8, pt. 2, 1374–76; Viktor Danilov et al., eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie; Dokumenty i materialy v 5 tomakh, 1927–1939 [The tragedy of the Soviet village: Collectivization and dekulakization; Documents and materials in 5 volumes, 1927–1939], vol. 3 (Moscow: “Rossiiskaia polit. entsiklopediia,” 2001), 125, 127, 425–26; Jeronim Perović, “Highland Rebels: The North Caucasus during the Stalinist Collectivization Campaign,” Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 2 (2016): 234–60.

156  ❧  chapter six

study, 1926–43, it became Karachai autonomous oblast (North-Caucasian krai; later, Ordzhonikidze krai). During the Karachais’ exile (1943–56), their abolished region was given over to the Georgian SSR—fueling local claims of Stalin and Beria’s Georgian expansionism—as well as to the Stavropol and Krasnodar krais. After their release, the Karachais never regained single ethnic autonomy: in 1957, the Karachai-Cherkes autonomous oblast (Stavropol krai, RSFSR) was reinstated, becoming a republic in 1990.26 Despite the legacy of Russian colonization and Soviet repression, the great majority of Karachais of military age, some 15,600, either volunteered or were drafted into the Red Army with the outbreak of war with Germany,27 while others joined the region’s Soviet partisan movement.28

Local Population Between 1926 and 1939, the Karachai autonomous oblast’s population more than doubled, and its basic ethnic ratio shifted dramatically, as a comparison of those years’ censuses shows. While the Karachais remained the region’s largest group, there was a huge influx of Russians, who increased to close to the same number.29 This was the result of the incorporation into the region

26 Karachaevo-Cherkessia remains a republic today, within the Russian Federation since 1991. 27 Kazi Laipanov, [untitled letter], Knizhnoe obozrenie 40, 1989, 5. 28 Koichuev, Karachaevskaia avtonomnaia oblast’, 255–58; Aliev, Svet i teni, 91–104. One can count the names of over 5,200 Karachais killed or missing in E. Kh. Dzhegutanov et al., Kniga pamiati: Rossiiskaia Federatsiia; KarachaevoCherkesskaia Respublika [Memory book: Russian Federation; Republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia] (Cherkessk: Adygeia, 1995). 29 See Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravlenie SSSR, Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926 goda: Osnovnye izdaniia. Otdel I: Narodnost’, rodnoi iazyk, vozrast i gramotnost’. Tom V: Krymskaia ASSRL: Severo-Kavkazskii krai; Dagestanskaia ASSR [The all-union census of 1926: Basic publications. Section I: Nationality, native language, age, and literacy. Volume 5: Crimean ASSR. North Caucasian krai. Dagestani ASSR] (Moscow: Izdanie Ts. S. U. Soiuza SSR, 1928), 112; RGAE 1562-336-274, “Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1939 goda. Osnovnye itogi: Karachaevskaia avt. oblast’ (Svodnye tablitsy N. 1–29)” [The all-union census of 1939. Basic totals: Karachai aut. oblast (summary tables 1–29)], table 11, 6 (1939 Soviet census, microfilm reel 16).

the holocaust in the karachai region  ❧ 157 Table 6.1. Prewar ethnic composition of the Karachai autonomous oblast 1926 Census

1939 Census

Karachais

52,503 (81%)

Karachais

70,801 (47%)

Ossetians Ukrainians Abazas Kabardians Russians Greeks Estonians Kumyks Georgians Nogais

3,088 2,824 2,738 1,182 1,120 (2%) 370 148 144 58 57 347 (incl. 30 Jews) 64,579

Russians Abazas Ossetians Ukrainians Kabardians Nogais Greeks Adyghes and Cherkes Tatars Roma

64,596 (43%) 3,893 3,578 2,297 1,154 713 623 505 429 380 1,834 (incl. 159 Jews) 150,303

Others 1926 Total

Others 1939 Total

Source: Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravlenie SSSR, Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926 goda. Osnovnye izdaniia. Otdel I. Narodnost’, rodnoi iazyk, vozrast i gramotnost’. Tom V: Krymskaia ASSR. Severo-Kavkazskii krai. Dagestanskaia ASSR [The All-Union Census of 1926. Basic Publications. Series I. Nationality, Native Language, Growth and Literacy. Volume 5: Crimean ASSR. North Caucasian Krai. Dagestani ASSR] (Moscow: Izdanie Ts. S. U. Soiuza SSR, 1928), 112; 1939 Soviet census, microfilm reel 16 (RGAE 1562-336-274, “Osnovnye itogi: Karachaevskaia avt. oblast’ (Svodnye tablitsy N. 1–29)” [Basic Results: Karachai Aut. Oblast (Summary Tables 1–29), table 11, 6].

of two Russian-majority districts (Pregradnaia and Zelenchukskaia) during the 1930s as well as the expanding Soviet infrastructure. By 1939, Karachais remained in the majority in the east and center of the oblast: Uchkulan district, Malyi Karachai district, Mikoian district, and Ust’-Dzheguta district. Russians were the majority in the west— Pregradnaia district and Zelenchukskaia district—and in the regional capital, Mikoian-Shakhar. Unlike what what was the case in many other areas of the Soviet Union that the Germans occupied, the numbers of the two ethnic populations the Germans sought to destroy in Karachai were tiny. What happened to the region’s 380 Roma during the war remains unclear. The local Jewish

Table 6.2. Ethnic composition of the districts and major settlements of the Karachai autonomous oblast in 1939 Location

Population

Malyi Karachai district

20,134—Karachais 64%, Russians 16%, Abazas 15%

Mikoian district

34,990—Karachais 60%, Russians 23%, Ossetians 9% (28 Jews and 88 Roma)

Verkhniaia Mara

5,229—Karachais 96%, Russians 2% (1 Jew)

Im. Kosta Khetagurova

4,163—Ossetians 65%, Russians 31% (5 Jews)

Teberda resort

3,211—Russians 55%, Karachais 35% (7 Jews)

Ordzhonikidzevskii

1,583—Russians 77%, Ukrainians 10% (3 Jews)

other locations

20,804—Karachais 70%, Russians 17% (12 Jews and 88 Roma)

Mikoian-Shakhar

5,919—Russians 66%, Karachais 19%, Ukrainians 5% (49 Jews)

Pregradnaia district

13,759—Russians 93%, Karachais 1% (7 Jews and 48 Roma)

Pregradnaia

4,583—Russians 95%, Karachais 2% (2 Jews and 11 Roma)

other locations

9,176—Russians 92%, Ukrainians 4% (5 Jews and 37 Roma)

Uchkulan district

14,690—Karachais 93%, Russians 5% (11 Jews and 4 Roma)

Uchkulan

5,609—Karachais 92%, Russians 6% (9 Jews and 1 Roma)

other locations

9,081—Karachais 94%, Russians 4% (2 Jews and 3 Roma)

Ust’-Dzheguta district

26,593—Karachais 57%, Russians 38% (14 Jews and 65 Roma)

Dzheguta

7,898—Karachais 91%, Russians 5% (5 Jews and 9 Roma)

—(continued)

the holocaust in the karachai region  ❧ 159 Table 6.2—concluded Ust’-Dzheguta

6,398—Russians 95%, Ukrainians 2% (5 Jews and 7 Roma)

other locations

12,297—Karachais 63%, Russians 30% (4 Jews and 50 Roma)

Zelenchukskaia district

34,218—Russians 75%, Karachais 20% (37 Jews and 174 Roma)

Zelenchukskaia

12,629—Russians 95%, Ukrainians 2% (27 Jews and 38 Roma)

Kardonikskaia

7,836—Russians 98%, Ukrainians 1% (1 Jew and 42 Roma)

other locations

13,753—Karachais 48%, Russians 45% (9 Jews and 94 Roma)

Source: 1939 Soviet census, microfilm reel 277 (RGAE 1562-329-972, “Razrabotochnye tablitsy [Forma No. 15-A. Natsional’nyi Sostav] itogov perepisi naseleniia 1939g. raspredeleniia naseleniia po natsional’nomu sostavu, RSFSR, po Krasnodarskomu, Ordzhonikidzevskomu kraiam” [Development tables (Form 15-A. National Composition) of the 1939 census results showing population distribution by national composition for the Krasnodar and Ordzhonikidze Krais of the RSFSR], 531–64.

population was even smaller. A pogrom by White forces during the Russian Civil War apparently decimated the community of Mountain Jews in Karachai.30 By the mid-1920s, most of the remaining population had left to form a new agricultural community, Bogdanovka, some two hundred miles farther east.31 The 1926 census counted only 30 Jews in the entire Karachai region. By 1939, the official Jewish population had grown but amounted to only 159 people (0.1 percent of the total population).32 Jews seem not to

30 Prizov, USCSF, 57211, segments 25–26. 31 On the massacre of Bogdanovka’s Mountain Jews in 1942, see Al’tman, Entsiklopediia, 94, and Sufian Zhemukhov and William Youmans’s chapter in the present volume. 32 By comparison, Jews were the eleventh largest group in Ordzhonikidze krai as a whole: 7,791 people, or 0.4 percent of the territory’s population (RGAE 1562336-274; 1939 Soviet census, microfilm reel 16).

160  ❧  chapter six

have had any major role in the administration.33 By the time the Germans arrived, the Jewish men of military age had been conscripted, but some of the rest stayed in the region.

Refugees The majority of the Jews who found themselves in the Karachai autonomous oblast in 1942 were more-recent arrivals: refugees fleeing conflict and extermination in Ukraine, Crimea, and northern and central Russia. As the table below shows, by March 1942 the Karachai region had taken in over twentyeight hundred evacuees, close to half of whom were Jewish. The refugees mostly arrived in family units: typically, young mothers with children, sometimes accompanied by elderly parents. The local Soviet authorities generally assigned the newcomers to places with a Russian-majority population (Mikoian-Shakhar, the Teberda resort, Ust’-Dzheguta, Zelenchukskaia) but placed some groups in Karachaimajority villages (Nizhniaia Teberda, Kamennomost). In the regional capital, Mikoian-Shakhar, and other larger settlements, most were accommodated in homes and apartments together with local residents. In stanitsa Zelenchukskaia and the surrounding district, they were housed on collective farms. Severely ill children and adults poured into the region from farther west. According to Feferman, of the seventeen sanatoria or children’s homes evacuated from Crimea to Stavropol krai, ten came to the mountain resort of Teberda because of the already existing infrastructure there.34 The actual number may have been even greater. One witness puts the number of bone tuberculosis sanatoria evacuated to Teberda at fifteen, amounting to around two thousand patients and staff in total.35 Other children’s homes went to Nizhniaia Teberda and Nizhnii Arkhyz. 33 “Spravochnik po istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii i Sovetskogo Soiuza 1898 – 1991” [Guide to the history of Communist Party and the Soviet Union 1898–1991], knowbysight.info, accessed September 14, 2016, http://www. knowbysight.info/1_RSFSR/12086.asp. 34 Feferman, The Holocaust, 218, 524–25. 35 Statement of Striljajewa Maria Jakowlewna dated September 25, 1946, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1310; statement of Chorolskaja Maria Grigorjewna dated September 25, 1946, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1313.

Table 6.3. Jewish evacuees in the Karachai autonomous oblast in March 1942 Location

Total Evacuees

Jewish Evacuees

Malyi Karachai district

31

6

Krasnyi Kurgan

13

1

Krasnyi Vostok

6

1

Pervomaiskii

3

3

“Ullu-Kol” mines Mikoian district

3

1

1,450

at least 470

Kamennomost, aul

68

64

Kamennomost, hamlet (khutor)

134

129

Im. Kosta Khetagurova

12

1

Nizhniaia Teberda (evacuated Rostov Children’s Home)

502

n/a

Nizhniaia Teberda

187

66

Teberda hamlets 1, 2, and 3

98

64

Teberda resort (esp. the Krupskaia and “Proletarian” sanatoria)

449

146

Mikoian-Shakhar

586

273

Pregradnaia district

14

6

Pregradnaia

14

6

Uchkulan district

16

1

Uchkulan

16

1

Ust’-Dzheguta district

420

345

Ust’-Dzheguta

380

314

Krasnogorskaia

40

31

Zelenchukskaia district

342

169

“18th Party Conference” collective farm

38

10

­—(continued)

162  ❧  chapter six Table 6.3—concluded Budennyi collective farm

41

22

Kardonikskaia rural council (sel’sovet)

59

33

Kirov collective farm

25

23

Marukha rural council

18

10

“Red Partisan” collective farm

58

21

“Shock Worker” collective farm

60

31

“Worldwide October” collective farm

43

19

Total

2,849

at least 1,270 (45%)

Source: USHMM, RG‐22.027M, “Glavnoe Pereselencheskoe Upravlenie,” reel 179 [from GARF A-327-2-221], 172–230.

The figures in the table provide a snapshot of the situation in March 1942 but are incomplete. Some refugees moved out of the region to safety, such as the two groups in the Karachai villages Nizhniaia Teberda and Kamennomost,36 while in the final weeks and days before the German occupation, others arrived—such as the ethnic German scholar Nicholas Poppe, who came in July,37 or the family of the survivor quoted at the start of this article. The exact number the Germans found in the Karachai autonomous oblast is unclear. It appears, however, that the majority of the Jewish refugees assigned to Mikoian-Shakhar, Zelenchukskaia, and Teberda would be killed in the same location as, or very close to, where they had been evacuated.

36 Elena Nadtoka, “Zhenshchiny i deti” [Women and children], March 18, 2015, gorodskoi informatsionnyi portal novocherkassk-gorod.ru, http://novocherkasskgorod.ru/na_article/62413/; YIU, 699R, 27:45–32:44. 37  Poppe, Reminiscences, 159.

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German Occupation and Local Collaboration As war with Germany broke out in 1941, the GUBB reported unrest and the existence of a few “bandit” groups in the Karachai region; in May 1942, the Germans failed in an attempt to make contact with one of them.38 While there were cases of draft evasion and desertion, the GUBB numbers are for the whole of Ordzhonikidze (Stavropol) krai, not for Karachais or the Karachai autonomous oblast specifically.39 The Germans captured the Karachai autonomous oblast on August 13–14, 1942. Some Karachais formed local militias almost immediately, helping the Germans with reconnaissance and rooting out Soviet partisan groups who were both underequipped and cut off from leadership.40 Such efforts were appreciated: “The cooperation of the [indigenous] militia and the population must be stressed particularly,” a German military police report states, on helping to destroy one of the region’s main Soviet partisan units.41 From the occupiers’ perspective, the Karachai region remained quiet for the duration of their stay. In September, an oblast police force was created with a Karachai, Muratbi Laipanov, at its head. In October, police forces were officially instituted for each of the major settlements.42 In the same month, collaborators presented to the Germans a volunteer Karachai cavalry squadron—around one

38 GARF, 9478-1-63, 14–17 (18–21 handwritten); Linets, Severnyi Kavkaz, 272–73. 39 GARF, 9478-1-137. 40 Dallin, Soviet Partisan Movement, 85–86, citing Feldgendarmerie Trupp 418, “Bericht ueber die Vernichtung und Selbstaufloesung der Partisanen-Bande des Oblastes Karatschaj” [Report on the destruction and self-dissolution of the partisan group of the Karachai oblast], dated September 14, 1942, among others; Joachim Hoffmann, Kaukasien 1942/43: Das deutsche Heer und die Orientvölker der Sowjetunion [Caucasus 1942/43: The German army and the oriental peoples of the Soviet Union] (Freiburg: Rombach, 1991), 446; Zozovskii, USCSF, 47479, segments 57–58. Koichuev, Karachaevskaia avtonomnaia oblast’, 263– 76; Aliev, Svet i teni, 39–61. 41 Dallin, Soviet Partisan Movement, 20, citing Felgendarmerie-Trupp 418, “Bericht ueber die Vernichtung,” dated September 14, 1942. 42 Interrogation of Solowjew Fedor Pawlowitsch dated November 24, 1966, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1283–84; interrogation of Jaroschenko Wassiliji Jeffimmowitsch dated November 24, 1966, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1304.

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hundred horsemen—during an official celebration of the Muslim religious holiday Uraza Bayram (Eid al-Fitr) in neighboring Kislovodsk.43 At the administrative level, collaboration meant first the appointment of a Russian mayor in Mikoian-Shakhar and around sixty village elders (starosty) selected from the local communities.44 In October 1942, German Army Group A sanctioned the establishment of a local government body, similar to other such administrations in the North Caucasus.45 The National Committee for the Karachai Region consisted of twenty to thirty locals—mostly Karachais, like its chief, Kady Bairamukov, but also some Russians and others.46 The National Committee enjoyed considerable leeway to reverse Soviet policies. Following the dissolution of the region’s collective farms, the Germans assigned it all of the region’s Soviet state 43 David Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 142–48. Images of the cavalry squadron and the Uraza Bayram celebration can be found in the photographs section of Albert Jeloschek et al., Freiwillige vom Kaukasus: Georgier, Armenier, Aserbaidschaner, Tschetschenen u.a. auf deutscher Seite; Der “Sonderverband Bergmann” und sein Gründer Theodor Oberländer [Volunteers of the Caucasus: Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Chechens, etc. on the German side; The “special unit Miner” and its founder Theodor Oberländer] (Graz: L. Stocker, 2003). On the Soviet infiltration of the cavalry squadron, see Koichuev, Karachaevskaia avtonomnaia oblast’, 423, citing ADNISK (The Archive of Recent History of Stavropol Krai) 1-2-481, 31. 44 This estimated number assumes one starosta for each of the fifty-three rural councils (sel’sovety) that existed in the Karachai autonomous oblast in 1940: Komissiia po administrativno-territorial’nomu deleniiu pri SNK RSFSR, RSFSR, administrativno-territorial’noe delenie na 1 aprelia 1940 goda [RSFSR, administrative-territorial divisions on April 1, 1940] (Moscow: Izd-vo “Vedomostei Verkhovnogo Soveta RSFSR,” 1940), 53–54. 45 For example, the National Committee of Kabardino-Balkariia under Selim Shadov (Hoffmann, Kaukasien, 448) or the Cherkes Uprava headed by A. Iakubovskii, M. Dyshekov, and others: A. Bezugol’nyi, N. Bugai, and E. Krinko, Gortsy Severnogo Kavkaza v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, 1941–1945: Problemy istorii, istoriografii i istochnikovedeniia [Highlanders of the North Caucasus in the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945: Problems of history, historiography, and sources] (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2012), 304. 46 GARF, 9478-1-63, 57 (61 handwritten); Aliev, V zone “Edel’veisa,” 56; Bugai and Gonov, Kavkaz, 123–24; Shamanov et al., Karachaevtsy, 14; Koichuev, Karachaevskaia avtonomnaia oblast’, 419; Linets, Severnyi Kavkaz, 277–78; Poput’ko and Khristinin, Imenem VChK, 283.

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property “in trusteeship” in late November. The committee even attempted to address a deeper historical grievance, drawing up paperwork to create a new Karachai-Balkar state with Kislovodsk as its capital. Owing to the brevity of the German occupation, however, such plans were thwarted; nor did the Germans have to face the longer-term regional consequences of such economic and ethnic reorganization.47 Contrary to Christopher Simpson’s claims,48 the National Committee could not have been involved in the registration of Jews in late August or early September. Nevertheless, the committee was in place in December when the major mass killings of Jews occurred in the Karachai region. The direct participation of three of its members—Petr Magkaev (Dzutov); Muratbi Laipanov, the oblast police chief; and Abaikhanov, head of the criminal police—will be discussed in the following section.49 It is, however, important to note another connection to Kislovodsk: as mayor of that city, Madzhir Kochkarov, later a deputy of the National Committee, had issued the order for the Jews in Kislovodsk to register and was present at the shootings of around two thousand in September 1942.50 Those who collaborated with the Germans were not only Karachai but reflected the ethnic composition of each district and settlement of the region. 47 Interview with Dr. Otto Schiller, Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, Schedule B, vol. 10, Case G-2 (interviewer A.D.), Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online, accessed August 20, 2016, http://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/ manifests/view/drs:5489155$5i; Hoffmann, Kaukasien, 446–47. The redistribution of kolkhoz property under the Germans is mentioned in YIU, 700R, 16:30–18:00, 41:27–42:58; and YIU, 702R, 16:43–17:00. 48 Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 118. 49 Interrogation of Lajpanow Murabaj Mursabekowitsch dated June 11, 1946, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1333–38; GARF, 9478-1-63, 58 (62 handwritten); Poput’ko and Khristinin, Imenem VChK, 283; Poppe, Reminiscences, 163. Magkajew (Dsutow), BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1271, 1273, 1276, 1278, 1280; and Lajpanow, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1336; Poput’ko and Khristinin, Imenem VChK, 283, 297. 50 I. Erenburg and V. Grossman, The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 220; Poput’ko and Khristinin, Imenem VChK, 283; Bugai and Gonov, Kavkaz, 123; Al’tman, Entsiklopediia, 414. Note that, according to ChGK, the massacre of 48 “Soviet citizens” at Kol’tsevaia Gora outside Kislovodsk was carried out by “German butchers and traitors of the Karachai people” (GARF, 7021-17-8, 7).

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Hence, while Karachais occupied the main positions in the east, these roles were taken by Slavs in the center and west. For example, in the Cossack settlement of Zelenchukskaia, the mayor, police chief, head of gendarmerie, as well as the local police force were all Cossacks.51 The chief of police in stanitsa Ust’-Dzheguta was of Slavic origin, judging by his surname, Bordunov.52 In Mikoian-Shakhar, the regional capital where two-thirds of the population was Russian, the mayor was, as previously mentioned, a Russian (Fedor Tolmachev), as were his assistant and two key Gestapo informers.53 A Karachai bookkeeper claimed to have been the town’s police chief, although this is disputed.54 One of the main local perpetrators was Petr Magkaev (Dzutov), an Ossetian from Im. Khosta Khetagurova. There is at least one known case of an evacuee who collaborated: the aforementioned Nicholas Poppe admitted he worked as an interpreter for the Germans, while Soviet claims that he actively betrayed people and was involved in Gestapo interrogations and beatings remain uncorroborated.55 Overall, the two main

51 Mayor: interrogation of Tatarenko Georgij Kirillowitsch dated November 18, 1966, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1288–95. Police chief: interrogations of Stepanenko Fedor Nikolajewitsch dated January 28, 1945, and June 19, 1945, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1320–22 and 1322–30; court testimony of Stepanenko Fedor Nikolajewitsch dated December 3–9, 1945, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1330–33. Head of gendarmerie: Solowjew, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1282–87. Police force: Smirnova, USCSF, 30528, segments 12, 16–19. 52 GARF, 7021-17-12, 51. 53 Mayor: Magkajew (Dsutow), BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1270; Poppe, Reminiscences, 164; K. Chomaev, Nakazannyi narod [A punished people] (Cherkessk: “PUL,” 1993), 63. Assistant: Chomaev, Nakazannyi narod, 63. Informers: Aliev, Svet i teni, 26; Poput’ko and Khristinin, Imenem VChK, 295. 54 National Archives and Records Administration, US Army CIC (RG 319), Investigative Records Repository: “Borlak, Mahmut” XE612729 (declassified by the author through a Freedom of Information Act Request, 2014). Poput’ko and Khristinin state that the Mikoian-Shakhar police chief was Burashnikov, probably a Russian: Imenem VChK, 296. 55 Poppe, Reminiscences, 163–68. Letter from Colonel General Kurochkin to Lieutenant General Sir Bryan Robertson (Deputy Military Governor, British Military Government in Germany), Berlin, July 29, 1946, TNA, FO 371/56871, “Report on leading personalities in the Soviet Union,” Code 38 File 3365, 1946.

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groups, Karachais and Russians, seem to have participated to close to the same degree, but with Karachais assuming more of the leadership positions.

Numbers Involved in Collaboration The main source of information about how many collaborated in the Karachai autonomous oblast is the NKVD’s Main Directorate for the Struggle against Banditry (GUBB), but one should be careful not to accept their numbers at face value. For example, according to the GUBB, there were “15–45 policemen per aul.”56 While there were around one hundred populated places in the Karachai autonomous oblast,57 many were tiny and likely had no local police at all; so these numbers are only plausible for around thirty-five settlements with populations of over 1,000 people—of which no more than twenty were Karachai villages. Other sources suggest rather more modest numbers. A photograph shows 15 local police in Verkhniaia Teberda.58 According to postwar interrogations, Muratbi Laipanov’s regional police detachment numbered at least 20 people, possibly more; while the chief of police of the Cossack stanitsa Zelenchukskaia—by far the region’s largest settlement (12,629 people in 1939)—recalled commanding a force of around 20.59 Hence, the number of local police during the occupation can be estimated at around 500–800, of whom approximately 250–380 were Karachais and 210–330 were Russians. Arguments still rage about the scale of the 1943 anti-Soviet revolt in the Karachai region that took place after the German retreat. “In total,” reported 56 Bugai and Gonov, Kavkaz, 123, citing GARF, 9478-1-299. 57 For example, the smallest of the oblast’s five districts, Pregradnaia district, had twenty-one settlements alone: V. I. Balin et al., Kniga pamiati: Karachaevo-Cherkesskaia Respublika, Urupskii raion [Memory book: Republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Urup district] (Cherkessk: “PUL,” 1995), 4–5. 58 Erich Sommer, “Achmad Abeichanow mit seiner Miliz in Dorfe WerchnijTeberda August 1942” [Achmad Abeichanow and his militia in the village of Verkhniaia Teberda, August 1942], photograph, Voennyi auktsion REIBERT, accessed September 1, 2016, https://reibert.info/media/img_205539_1jpg.137063/ (note that Sommer was the head of Feldgendarmerie Trupp 418 during the German occupation). 59  Muratbi Laipanov: interrogation of Magkajew (Dsutow) Petr Danilowitsch dated October 19, 1966, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1273. Zelenchukskaia: Solowjew, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1284.

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the GUBB, “in 1943 in Stavropol krai, [the NKVD] liquidated 134 bands with 2,905 participants—280 killed, 1,276 arrested, and 1,349 amnestied.” This is quite misleading, however. The unavoidable (yet unstated) implication is that all were Karachais, because the preceding and subsequent sections of the report describe only Karachai participation in the revolt and their later deportation. The same juxtaposition makes numbers relating to all of Stavropol krai seem to apply to the Karachai autonomous oblast alone.60 Recent scholarship drawn from other archival sources, however, suggests that only around 200–300 people were involved and that the rebel groups were ethnically mixed.61 The entire collaborationist apparatus established during the German occupation can be estimated at around 900–1,200 people, including 500– 650 Karachais. According to Mahmut Duda, 1,000 Karachais left the region with the retreating Germans in January 1943—not only the collaborators but their family members too, as well as those who may have gone for other reasons.62 Thereafter, perhaps around 200 Karachais joined the 1943 revolt. In subsequent years, Soviet authorities only convicted 283 Karachais of treason or collaboration;63 the remainder were either killed in the war or escaped to the West. Ultimately, while such numbers presented a problem for Soviet authorities in a sensitive region, they are not those of a “mass,” or an exclusively Karachai, phenomenon.

Killings The German occupation brought two parallel killing campaigns that happened with, at the very least, the tacit approval of German military commanders. Broadly defined antipartisan operations were handled by the Gestapo and German military police. This work involved uncovering 60 GARF, 9478-1-63, 57–61 (handwritten 61–65). 61 Aliev, Svet i teni, 22–31; Linets, Severnyi Kavkaz, 273–75. 62 Aslanbek [Duda], Karaçay ve Malkar, 70. Khamit Botash, Prokliataia poliana (Roman-khronika) [The cursed meadow (a novel-chronicle)] (Moscow: AKTsEPT, 1993). Research into US Citizenship and Immigration Services files of Karachais such as Kadi Bayramoglu (Kady Bairamukov), Mahmut Borlak, and others declassified by the author through Freedom of Information Act requests confirm that the collaborators’ family members, and others for unknown reasons, also left with the Germans. 63 Shamanov et al., Karachaevtsy, 13; Aliev, Svet i teni, 31.

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and apprehending Soviet soldiers and partisans, NKVD operatives, local Communist Party officials, and kolkhoz workers, as well as their family members. The victims were mostly Karachais and Russians,64 who were killed, often after horrific torture, in multiple, sporadic, individual (or very small group) executions. These executions took place especially at the start of the occupation but continued over the entire duration. At least 213 to 263 were killed in this way.65 Local collaborators actively assisted the Germans, in some cases settling personal scores.66 The treatment of the Jews was quite different, yet entirely consistent with German policies elsewhere in the occupied Soviet Union. Across the Karachai region, Jews were registered in August and September and subsequently kept apart from the rest of the population. In Zelenchukskaia, around 180–200 Jews were gathered from nearby collective farms and other locations and brought to a shed in the “Shock Worker” collective farm in late October and early November. There they were held in unsanitary conditions with insufficient food under local police guard, and all able-bodied prisoners were forced to work repairing roads.67 In Mikoian-Shakhar, the Jews were concentrated in two locations. A group of sixty was held on the premises of a former children’s clinic, in a small barn in the courtyard of 14 Ordzhonikidze Street. Elena Kipnis, a judicial investigator, was brutally tortured there and killed, along with her parents and

64 Three exceptions are Jewish Komsomol gorkom member Sima Teplitskaia and her parents, who were maimed and killed on the road from Mikoian-Shakhar to Teberda: GARF, 7021-17-8, 6. 65 Numbers compiled from three ChGK reports: GARF, 7021-17-8, 7021-1711, and 7021-17-12. 66 Aliev, Svet i teni, 26; Bugai and Gonov, Kavkaz, 123; Koichuev, Karachaevskaia avtonomnaia oblast’, 270; Poput’ko and Khristinin, Imenem VChK, 294–95; Aleksandr Statiev, “The Nature of Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942–44: The North Caucasus, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, and Crimea,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 2 (2005): 298. For example, in the aul Novyi Karachai, “Karachai traitors” captured and helped the Germans kill Karachai and Ossetian Soviet partisans: GARF, 7021-17-8, 6. 67 Stepanenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1323–25; Solowjew, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1284–85; Tatarenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1290–91; Jaroschenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1305; Umansky, “L’extermination,” 556.

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one-year-old child.68 A second de facto ghetto was established on August 29 or 30, when sixty-seven Jews were moved into a specially assigned barracks on the banks of the Teberda river. The Jews were made to wear Star of David armbands and to work cleaning streets and toilets and mending roads. The prisoners were beaten, and one woman was raped.69 In the sanatoria of the Teberda resort, local police guarded the premises, while the German authorities denied food and medical treatment to the patients. Many died of hunger. In late November or early December, the Jewish bone-tuberculosis child patients were separated from the non-Jewish ones and held in a separate wing of the “Proletarian” sanatorium.70

“SD-12” The task of killing the Jews in the Karachai autonomous oblast was given to a specific unit, named in postwar Soviet interrogations as “SD-12.” Under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Herbert Weber, this was a Teilkommando sent from Einsatzkommando 12’s headquarters in nearby Kislovodsk to the Karachai region in September or October 1942.71 According to Soviet investigations, Weber’s team was small, consisting of only seven other people: two Germans (Weber’s unnamed deputy and a driver named Alfred Maiwald), two ethnic German interpreters from Kherson and Leningrad (Karl [unknown last name] and Kira Wladimirowna Schell), and three local policemen—one Ossetian (Petr Magkaev/Dzutov) and two Karachais (Deiu Abaikhanov and Magomed Laipanov). They were assisted by Muratbi Laipanov and the fifteen to twenty members of the oblast police force he 68 GARF, 7021-17-10, 195–96 (report), 196–200 (Tamara Iatskikh witness statement), and 201–3 (Tsitsiliia Tsirul’nik witness statement). 69 GARF, 7021-17-8, 3–6; GARF, 7021-17-10, 195–96, 204–7; Lajpanow, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1334; Guy Miron, ed., The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009), 472; Al’tman, Entsiklopediia, 588. 70 Statement of Mussina Galina Antonowna, dated November 22, 1966, BAL, EK 12, B 162/1288, 1265–68; statement of Kalinitsch Lidija Nikolajewna, dated September 25, 1966, BAL, EK 12, B 162/1288, 1318. 71 22Js 206/61 der Staatsanwaltschaft München I, affidavit Karl Kotzendorfer, vol. 10, 2238 (Andrej Angrick, email to the author, April 26, 2014). Note that the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission reports identify him as Otto (rather than Herbert) Weber. On Einsatzkommando 12, see also the chapters by Angrick and Stephen Tyas in the present volume.

the holocaust in the karachai region  ❧ 171 Table 6.4. Mass killings of Jews in the Karachai autonomous oblast Location

Number Killed

Date

Mikoian-Shakhar (14 Ordzhonikidze Street)

60

September 12, 1942

Zelenchukskaia

180

December 6 or 9, 1942

Mikoian-Shakhar (barrack)

62

December 10, 1942

Teberda (health resort)

285

December 14, 1942

Teberda (“Proletarian” sanatorium)

54

December 22, 1942

Nizhnii Arkhyz (children’s home)

20

n/a

Nizhniaia Teberda (children’s home)

65

n/a

Pregradnaia district

150–180

n/a

Total

876–906

commanded.72 Both Laipanov and Magkaev (Dzutov) were members of the National Committee for the Karachai Region. Together with a detachment of local police in each location, this group of under thirty people carried out most, if not all, of the mass killings of Jews.

Mikoian-Shakhar, Zelenchukskaia, Teberda The first large-scale killing took place on September 12, when the sixty Jews held at 14 Ordzhonikidze Street in Mikoian-Shakhar were shot. As this first massacre may have occurred before the formation of SD-12, it is unclear precisely who carried it out.73

72 See especially the statement of SD-12’s assistant and cook, Chetagurowa Tamara Wassilijewna, dated December 1, 1966, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1298–304; and also the interrogations of Magkajew (Dsutow), Solowjew, and Lajpanow, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1269–82, 1282–87, 1333–38. 73 GARF, 7021-17-10, 195–96 (report), 196–200 (Tamara Iatskikh witness statement), and 201–3 (Tsitsiliia Tsirul’nik witness statement); Knazhevskaia, USCSF, 25767, segment 26. These same premises were also used to imprison,

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Whereas in the occupied Soviet Union as a whole (including the North Caucasus) the Germans’ typical pattern was to kill most of the Jews shortly after arriving and temporarily retain smaller groups for labor, in the Karachai region they kept large groups of Jews entirely intact. For reasons that are not entirely apparent, it was not until December 1942 that the Jews were killed, part of the very last “mopping-up operations” in the North Caucasus before the Germans retreated.74 Once underway, the executions in Zelenchukskaia (December 9), Mikoian-Shakhar (December 10), and the Teberda resort (December 14) followed a very similar pattern.75 Each one was conducted away from public view, in the early hours of the morning, and under conditions of strict secrecy: a local witness recalls that a German soldier told her that SD-12 would shoot her if they learned she knew of the killings.76 Working together with the local police, SD-12 and the Karachai oblast police escorted the Jews from the buildings in which they were being held to nearby predug trenches on the outskirts of each location. There, the Jews were made to form a line next to the trench and were ordered to undress. The Soviet investigation accounts are consistent in portraying the interpreter, Karl, and driver, Alfred Maiwald, as the actual killers, shooting the victims with pistols under torture, and execute a number of non-Jewish Soviet officials, captured Soviet partisans, and others, for the entire German occupation of Mikoian-Shakhar. 74 Feferman, The Holocaust, 198. 75 Zelenchukskaia: GARF, 7021-17-8, 6–9; GARF, 7021-17-10, 120; Magkajew (Dsutow), BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1272–75; Solowjew, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1285–87; Tatarenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1291–93; Jaroschenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1305–7; Stepanenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1321, 1325–28, 1330–33; Smirnova, USCSF, 30528, segments 12–14; Umansky, “L’extermination,” 557–59; YIU, 695R. Mikoian-Shakhar: GARF, 7021-17-8, 3–6; GARF, 7021-17-10, 195–96, 204–7; Lajpanow, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1334–37; Ivanov, USCSF, 30924, segments 47–48; Kniazhevskaia, USCSF, 25767, segments 22–24; Miron, Yad Vashem Encyclopedia, 1:472; Al’tman, Entsiklopediia, 588. Note that one source (GARF, 7021-17-8, 3) incorrectly dates this massacre as January 14, 1943, several days after the Germans had retreated and Soviet power had been restored. Teberda: GARF, 7021-17-7; GARF, 7021-17-8, 3; Magkajew (Dsutow), BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1276–78; Koichuev, Karachaevskaia avtonomnaia oblast’, 59–60; Al’tman, Entsiklopediia, 973–74; Umansky, “L’extermination,” 560–62; YIU, 703R, 30:34–39:00. 76 Umansky, “L’extermination,” 562.

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Weber’s supervision; the other members of SD-12 and the police herded the victims and prevented escapes but apparently did not themselves kill. This may not be the full picture, however: one witness claims he saw a policeman shooting Jews, while another remembered four to five killers.77 At the end of each operation, the local police covered over the trenches containing the bodies with earth. The shootings were accompanied by alcohol, both before and after. A few lucky ones survived the massacres: the night before the killing in Zelenchukskaia, around five people had managed to escape, while five escaped the second massacre in Mikoian-Shakhar (three children and two adults).78 Finally, it was time to clear out the Jews in the sanatoria of the Teberda health resort, the largest operation. On December 12, 1942, the Germans and local police rounded up 287 Jews—bone tuberculosis patients (including 100 children), medical specialists, doctors, nurses, and sanatorium workers—and held them for two days in a separate building. During this time, two female doctors committed suicide. At 5:00 am on December 14, the 285 remaining Jews were marched to pits dug nearby and shot in groups of around 20, which took Weber and his assistants three and a half hours. Ten days later, SD-12 returned to the “Proletarian” sanatorium, selected fiftyfour Jewish children from the other child patients, and killed them using a gas van. A nurse who worked there recalled: When I went to work in the sanatorium… . I immediately noticed that a large, windowless truck of metal construction stood in the courtyard. Next to it was a German car. A police officer screamed at me as I entered the courtyard. He asked me why I was going into the courtyard. I told him that I was going to work, he ordered me to go inside the building, close the door and not show up again.79

The Germans and police ordered the children to get into the back of the truck. Those who were too sick to walk were loaded in on stretchers by

77 Ivanov, USCSF, 30924, segment 47; YIU, 695R, 29:48–30:02. 78 Smirnova, USCSF, 30528, segments 16–19; Stepanenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1329, 1332. Ida Novikova, one of the two adults, was released by the Germans right before the shooting because her husband was Russian (GARF, 7021-17-10, 204–7). The three children who escaped included two sisters and a boy (Kniazhevskaia, USCSF, 25767, segments 22–24). 79 Kalinitsch, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1318.

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medical staff. After running its engines for a while, the truck departed and dumped the bodies in a ravine.80

The Nizhniaia Teberda Controversy In 1946, seven Karachais from Nizhniaia Teberda (then in exile in Kazakhstan) were charged with collaborating with the Germans and murdering sixty-three children and two teachers of a children’s home evacuated to Nizhniaia Teberda. An MVD (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del [Ministry of Internal Affairs]) investigation found the seven guilty of collaboration but no evidence that they killed anyone. These findings were not made public, however, until 1989; meanwhile, in the 1970s, a commemorative plaque appeared, blaming the murders on the Karachai locals. Hence, Karachai historiography regards the claim of Karachai involvement in these killings as yet another slander in the broader campaign to discredit them and justify their mass deportation.81 The ire was such that the locals in Nizhniaia Teberda actually removed the remains and reburied them in another location. While the Extraordinary Commission mentions Nizhniaia Teberda only in passing,82 the limited evidence suggests that the Germans killed the children and teachers at the very start of the occupation. The victims may have

80 GARF, 7021-17-7; statement of Polupanowa Matriena Iwanowna dated 22 November 1966, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1258-62; statement of Subenko Galina Antonowna dated 22 November 1966, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1262-64; Mussina, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1265–68; Magkajew (Dsutow), BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1281–82; Chorolskaja BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1312–16; Kalinitsch, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1317–20; International Military Tribunal, The Trial of German Major War Criminals: Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany, vol. 7 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1947), 544; Ramazan Tebuev, Deportatsiia karachaevtsev: Dokumenty rasskazyvaiut [Deportation of the Karachais: the documents speak] (Cherkessk: Karachaevo-Cherkesskii institut gumanitarnykh issledovanii, 1997), 59–60; Koichuev, Karachaevskaia avtonomnaia oblast’, 423–24; Al’tman, Entsiklopediia, 973–74. See also the chapter by Stephen Tyas in the present volume. 81 Shamanov et al., Karachaevtsy, 27. 82 GARF, 7021-17-8, 2.

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been from the same group of Leningrad evacuees as those rescued in Beslenei, but they had continued on, attempting to escape through the mountains.83

Other Locations Nor is much known about two other killing sites. The Extraordinary Commission briefly mentions that twenty Jewish evacuee children at the Nizhnii Arkhyz children’s home were asphyxiated in gas vans, with one survivor hidden by Russian children.84 Another source, however, states that children who were held in a former monastery in Nizhnii Arkhyz were actually brought to Zelenchukskaia and shot there.85 In Pregradnaia district, the Extraordinary Commission reports, “Jews suffered unspeakable humiliations. The Germans wiped out all the Jews living on the territory of [the] district. Before shooting them, the Germans took their things and divided them up among themselves.”86 The provisional assessment is that 262 “peaceful Soviet citizens” were killed by the “German barbarians and their agents.”87 At least 80 named victims were Slavic— local agricultural workers, Soviet officials, captured partisans, and others. It is quite possible that the remaining 150 to 180 were Jews, but questions remain, given that there were only 7 Jews living in Pregradnaia district in 1939 and only 6 Jewish evacuees there in early 1942. It is possible that there were other killings, not covered by the Extraordinary Commission. For example, one witness remembered that in Urup, just south of Pregradnaia, the Germans shot the “Bolsheviks, commissars, Jews, Gypsies, and POWs” that collaborators helped them uncover shortly after they arrived.88 83 Ismail Aliev, “Shleif bed i stradaniii: Zametki o ‘karachaevskom voprose,’” [A trail of grief and suffering: Notes on the “Karachai question”], in Tak eto bylo: natsional’nye repressii v SSSR 1919–1952 gody [Thus it was: National repressions in the USSR 1919–1952], ed. Svetlana Alieva, vol. 2 (Moscow: Rossiiskii Mezhdunarodnyi fond kul’tury Insan, 1993), 17–18; YIU, 701R and 702R. For analysis of the rescue of children in Beslenei, see the chapter by Sufian Zhemukhov and William Youmans in the present volume. 84 GARF, 7021-17-8, 2. 85 Stepanenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1327–28. 86 GARF, 7021-17-11, 89. 87 GARF, 7021-17-8, 8. 88 Tigai, USCSF, 47288, segments 44–48.

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The commission presents no evidence that any Jews were killed in the Karachai-majority districts of Malyi Karachai, Ust’-Dzheguta, or Uchkulan. In the latter case, the main report states, “In Uchkulan district, the German fascists and Karachai traitors shot several Soviet people” but names only four Soviet officials tortured and killed. It ends, “The local population of Uchkulan told of terrible atrocities by traitors, agents of the German fascists,” but offers no further information.89 Outside of the framework of organized executions, local police dealt with an unknown number of Jewish stragglers. Near the village of Sary-Tiuz (Ust’-Dzheguta district), for example, a forty-six-year-old Karachai policeman, together with other police, found and shot a Jewish couple, their adult daughter, and their two young children, and took their possessions.90 How many more Jews were uncovered and killed in this manner is not known.

Total Killed A minimum of 641–906 Jews were killed in the Karachai autonomous oblast, out of around 1,100 victims identified by the Extraordinary Commission. The large range of Jewish victims is because there is detailed corroborated information on three sites (Zelenchukskaia, Mikoian-Shakhar, and Teberda) but considerably less on three others (Nizhniaia Teberda, Nizhnii Arkhyz, and Pregradnaia district). Although the Extraordinary Commission attempts to present the Germans as equal-opportunity killers, intending “the extermination of the peoples of Karachai irrespective of nationality,”91 at least half and probably three-quarters of the victims were in fact Jews. While the figures cited above represent the number of victims one can actually count in the various reports, the commission’s report for the Karachai autonomous oblast concludes with a strikingly larger total: “According to preliminary reports for all of the Karachai oblast, the German cannibals and the local police tortured and killed more than 4,500 entirely innocent Soviet citizens.”92 Subsequently, there were even greater estimates of 6,000 and 89 GARF, 7021-17-8, 9–10. 90 USHMM, KAZAKHSTAN, RG-74.001, Acc. 2004.456, Selected Records from the War Crimes Trial Cases of the Nazi Collaborators Tried in Kazakh SSR (1943 – 1950), Folder 47, “Khubiev Khusey Machukovich” (Fiche #22) [Rg-74.001*47], 16–17, 33–34. 91 GARF, 2017-17-8, 1. 92 GARF, 7021-17-8, 12–13. The report was dated June 9, 1943.

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9,000.93 To date, however, there has been no further corroboration of these higher numbers, in terms of who the victims were or the circumstances and locations of their deaths.

Motivations? While for other parts of the Soviet Union that the Germans occupied it may be possible to speak of longstanding traditions of anti-Semitism, this is far less possible in the North Caucasus. Among would-be North Caucasian collaborators in general, the Germans reported “no clear or conscious anti-Semitism could be found.”94 On the part of the Karachais, who had comparatively little contact with Jews, there is little that points to any widespread hatred of Jews. Even during the German occupation, the National Committee’s newspaper, Svobodnyi Karachai (Free Karachai), lacked the anti-Semitism found in other, especially Cossack, collaborationist newspapers intended for local consumption in the North Caucasus.95 This suggests that anti-Jewish persecution was neither a central concern nor a rallying cry for the Karachai collaborators and their intended audience. It was, of course, not impossible to encounter anti-Jewish attitudes. One survivor remembered hearing antiSemitic comments from Russians in Zelenchukskaia: “[They] started saying things like ‘… We’ll tell the Germans where all the Jews and communists are. We’ll kill you ourselves.’ This was the locals—… Cossacks, Ukrainians, Russians.”96 But there is no great evidence to suggest that anti-Semitism was a major factor in encouraging people in the region to collaborate. Whether we choose to believe them or not, the locals who participated in the killings explained their involvement as a combination of fear and obedience and said that they simply complied.97 The mayor of Zelenchukskaia managed to excuse himself from attending the massacre in Zelenchukskaia 93 Six thousand: A Stavropol krai party committee telegram dated June 26, 1943; see Koichuev, Karachaevskaia avtonomnaia oblast’, 428. Nine thousand: Nekrich, Punished Peoples, 42, citing Ch. Kulaev’s 1968 dissertation. 94 Dallin, Soviet Partisan Movement, 19. 95 Iu. Boldyrev, Khudozhestvennaia kul’tura Severnogo Kavkaza v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny [Artistic culture of the North Caucasus in the years of the Great Patriotic War] (Saint Petersburg: Nestor, 1996), 93–94. 96 Ivanov, USCSF, 30924, segment 40 (also 56–58, 65, 67). 97 Magkajew (Dsutow), BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1272; Stepanenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1327, 1332.

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by claiming he had a weak heart.98 The assertions by some that they were deceived into participating in the killings are not very plausible, especially as another admits he had ten to fifteen days’ advance warning.99 For collaboration in general, a far more pressing motivation was hostility toward Soviet rule. The arrival of the Germans presented an opportunity for those marginalized and suppressed over the previous twenty years to reexert themselves and, potentially, exact revenge. From a Soviet perspective, those who joined the local militias, police, and the National Committee were “anti-Soviet elements”: kulaks, former princes, those repressed by the authorities, mullahs, deserters, and German henchmen.100 National Committee chief Kady Bairamukov, for example, had been a commander in the 1930 anticollectivization revolt.101 Virulent anti-Soviet attitudes and experience in committing violence are ways one can understand the comments of Petr Magkaev (Dzutov), who explains that he was recommended for a job in SD-12 by the mayor of Mikoian-Shakhar on account of his being “trustworthy and able to carry out services in the SD.”102 Being a Holocaust perpetrator had material benefits. According to a woman who worked as an assistant to SD-12, “they brought back different things from different places—blankets, coats, fur coats, clothing, as well as women’s and men’s shoes and even children’s shoes. They also brought valuables. Watches, rings, gold items, and a large amount of money.”103 SD-12 kept the best items for themselves. In Zelenchukskaia, the remaining things were left at the disposal of the village elder Tatarenko, who then distributed them to the local police.104 A survivor with personal experience of the local 98 Tatarenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1292–93. The “weak heart” story is corroborated in Stepanenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1321. 99 Deceived: Magkajew (Dsutow), BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1274; Jaroschenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1306. Warning: Stepanenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1325. 100 Bugai and Gonov, Kavkaz, 123. 101 GAKChR (State Archives of the Republic of Karachevo-Cherkessia) R306-1-33 via Susana Uzdenova, “Uchrezhdeniia iustitsii i pravookhranitel’nye organy Karachaia 1917–1943” [The institutions of justice and law-enforcement bodies of Karachai, 1917–1943], Karachaevtsy i balkartsy, accessed December 7, 2018, http://karachai.ucoz.ru/publ/m/ obshhie_1/2_2_silovye_struktury_v_borbe_s_oppoziciej/28-1-0-1721 102 Magkajew (Dsutow), BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1270. 103 Chetagurowa, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1302–3. 104 Stepanenko, BAL, EK12, B 162/1288, 1328–29, 1333.

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police in Mikoian-Shakhar remembered that “they wanted to prove themselves and earn some kind of rank in the police so they’d get given a cow, or a house, or something. And they were brutal.”105

Survival and Local Help For the Jewish refugees who survived in the Karachai region, the most important thing—as everywhere under German occupation—was to be able to pass as non-Jews. Those with naturally fair hair could try to present themselves as Russian.106 Jewish boys who were not circumcised—because a parent was an ardent communist, for example—were also at an advantage.107 According to one survivor, he, his siblings, and their mother “weren’t obviously Jewish-looking, especially because we looked poor. We didn’t have any money, belongings, or anything” (because of their rushed evacuation from Kiev), hence defying popular stereotypes of wealthy Jews.108 For those with darker hair and eyes, the multiethnic North Caucasus opened additional avenues. Some survivors managed to pass as Armenians, plausible both in terms of appearance and the presence of an Armenian population in the North Caucasus.109 One mother told the Germans she and her son were Tatars, providing an additional alibi for the latter because, as Muslims, Tatars also practice circumcision.110 As can be seen, the adult (almost always the mother of children) in these Jewish refugee family groups played a huge role, not only in her own but also her children’s survival. Known to the population, local Jews instead had to rely on personal connections. A family of Mountain Jews with relatives in the Karachai region (but who returned as evacuees) were hidden from the Germans both by Russians in Zelenchukskaia and by Karachais in an unnamed aul near 105 Ivanov, USCSF, 30924, segment 50 (tape 2, 0:20:32–0:20:58). 106 Zozovskii, USCSF, 47479, segments 58–59, 63–64; Ivanov, USCSF, 30924, segments 47–48; Smirnova, USCSF, 30528, segment 20. 107 Zozovskii, USCSF, 47479, segment 80. 108 Ivanov, USCSF, 30924, segment 65. 109 Albeit one not so numerous in the Karachai region that local translators would easily be able to check. Kniazhevskaia, USCSF, 25767, segments 27, 35–37; Prizov, USHMM, “Reminiscences of a Young Holocaust Survivor”; Prizov, USCSF, 57211. 110 Tigai, USCSF, 47288, segment 46, 49.

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Mikoian-Shakhar.111 In Teberda, a Russian family hid a local accountant, an Ashkenazi Jewish man, who escaped the Germans’ attempt to shoot him, came to the family’s door, and begged for help.112 The Abaza residents of the village of Krasnyi Vostok hid a Jewish woman and her son out of recognition for her work there as a doctor before the war.113 Personal connections even enabled some Jews to get help from collaborators. The reason the Cossack chief of police in Zelenchukskaia allowed a Mountain Jewish woman and her children to escape the mass shooting was because he was indebted to her for raising him after his parents’ deaths.114 The Karachai starosta of Dzheguta and his deputy hid members of another local family of Mountain Jews.115 The Jewish doctor in Krasnyi Vostok successfully pleaded with the local police not to kill her and her son: “‘Why are you doing this to me? I saved your parents’ lives. I have done nothing but good to you. You can take us away and shoot us. But your parents aren’t leaving. Why spill our blood and cause problems for your parents and family?’ I remember he waved his whip and off they rode.”116 Although the Jewish refugees found themselves in an unstable region without the potential benefit of such local ties, there were cases of local

111 Prizov, USHMM, “Reminiscences”; Prizov, USCSF, 57211; Finkelstein, USCSF, 5721. 112 YIU, 703R, 11:18–12:37, 30:34–31:28, 57:50–58:30. 113 Beshenkovskii, USCSF, 31665, segment 65. 114 Frida Iusufova, “Sem’ia Kisheevykh” [The Kisheev family], Gorskie.ru, February 14, 2013, https://gorskie.ru/juhuro/in-memory/item/3061-semyakisheevykh; Stepanenko, BAL, EK 12, B162/1288, 1329, 1332. An Ashkenazi Jewish woman and her two children escaped with Kisheeva: Smirnova, USCSF, 30528, segments 16–19. 115 Koichuev, Karachaevskaia avtonomnaia oblast’, 437–38; interview with Gennadii Pinkhasov, in Davydov, Voina i mir Karachaia, 22:52–23:15. See also A. Koichuev and Z. Berdiev, “Karachaevtsy v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny spasali evakuirovannykh detei-evreev i vzroslykh, no ne schitali eto za podvig” [Karachais in the Great Patriotic War rescued evacuee Jewish children and adults but did not consider it an act of bravery], in Vklad karachaevskogo naroda v Pobedu v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945 gg. [The contribution of the Karachai people to victory in the Great Patriotic War], ed. Askerbii Koichuev et al. (Karachaevsk: Karachaevo-Cherkesskii gos. universitet, 2011), 156–65. 116 Beshenkovskii, USCSF, 31665, segments 75–77 (tape 3, 10:29–12:40).

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people giving help. These were not just passing incidents.117 Some Karachais helped evacuee children in orphanages escape over the mountain passes in the very first days of the German occupation.118 There is at least one case of a Karachai family adopting and raising a Jewish evacuee.119 Another Karachai family has been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations for hiding three sisters from Kiev for the entire occupation.120 Finally, there is an example of a collaborator rescuing refugees too: the Karachai starosta in Teberda, Abdul-Malik Dzhanibekov, apparently arranged for several Jewish children to be hidden in the local community.121 Further research is required into these and other cases, however, as the sources tend simply to state the events without much explanation or detail. Nevertheless, these examples are evidence that, despite lacking any longstanding bonds with them, there were locals in the region who were willing to jeopardize their own safety to help nonlocal Jewish refugees. In the space of little over a year, two states instigated two events of large-scale violence against two different civilian populations in the Karachai autonomous oblast. The first of these, the killing by the Germans of all the Jews in the region (August 1942–January 1943), was followed by the Soviets’ 117 Kniazhevskaia, USCSF, 25767, segment 27; Zozovskii, USCSF, 47479, segments 53–56, 59–60, 148–59; Zozovskii, USCSF, 47479, segments 71–72, 81–82. 118 Vadim Shvetsov, Svet pogasshikh zvezd: Povest’ [The light of extinct stars: A tale] (Stavropol: Stavropol’skoe knizhnoe izd-vo, 1977), 81–84; Davydov, Voina i mir Karachaia [The war and peace of Karachai], Kinostudiia TONAP, 2011, YouTube, accessed April 20, 2020, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dy4VxSXRmUM, 14:00–19:00. 119 Davydov, Voina i mir Karachaia, 48:20; “Tragediia Karachaevskogo naroda: Proshloe i nastoiashchee” [The tragedy of the Karachai people: Past and present], FGBOU VO Karachaevo-Cherkesskii gosudarstvennyi universitet imeni Umara Dzhashuevicha Alieva, last modified October 29, 2012, http://кчгу. рф/?p=6975. 120 “Khalamliev Family,” Database of Righteous Among the Nations, Yad Vashem, 2013, accessed 22 Feb. 2013, http://db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html? language=en&itemId=4045060; Arad, Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 437; 605n21. 121 Iurii Loginov, “Bol’ moia, Karachai” [My pain, Karachai], Elbrusoid, March 23, 2011, http://www.elbrusoid.org/articles/karachay-balkar/359242/. The article was originally published in Sotsialisticheskaia industriia, July 14, 1989.

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deportation of the entire Karachai people on charges of mass collaboration in November 1943. Despite the proximity in time and place, both events have hitherto been studied entirely separately. Nevertheless, given the central importance to the Germans of local help in achieving their goals, including exterminating Jews, it makes sense to examine the extent and nature of this, ostensibly Karachai, collaboration. Analysis of the history and demographics of the region, however, creates a rather different and more complex picture than the one usually presented in the historiography. The ethnic composition of the Karachai region began to change drastically with the violent Russian conquest (1828 on). By 1939, the Karachai region was majority non-Karachai, with the Russian population close to the same size as the Karachai one. While colonization and more-recent crackdowns on religion, private farming, and local communists stoked anti-Russian and anti-Soviet resentments, the majority experience for Karachais during World War II was nevertheless that of serving in the Soviet army and in partisan movements. The Jewish population of the Karachai region was tiny. While the region was once a refuge for around 300 Mountain Jews fleeing the Caucasus War, by 1939 the remaining Mountain Jews and some Ashkenazi Jewish newcomers comprised only 159 people. The big change came after the outbreak of war with Germany, when large numbers of Jews—over 1,200 by early 1942—were evacuated to supposed safety in the region. During the 1942 occupation, the Germans killed 641–906 Jews at a minimum of three, and probably in fact six, sites in the Karachai autonomous oblast. Jews comprised between one-half and three-quarters of all those reported killed during the German occupation (the rest being Red Army POWs and local pro-Soviet activists), a fact de-emphasized by the Extraordinary Commission and in subsequent Russian and Karachai histories of the region. Two factors undermine the Soviets’ rationale for deporting the Karachais. First, those who collaborated were not only Karachais but also Russians and others. Karachais collaborated in Karachai-majority locations, and Russians collaborated in Russian-majority locations. Second, the numbers of those who collaborated were not especially high: approximately 900–1,200 people, around 55 percent of whom were Karachais. Although higher than the numbers cited by Karachai historians, these findings tend to support their view that the mass treason charge was more a weapon of political control wielded by Soviet authorities than a reflection of reality.

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It is nevertheless no contradiction to point out that an active core of collaborators did assist the Germans during their five-month occupation. The local militias and police helped the Germans successfully pacify the region. Furthermore, despite Aliev’s claims to the contrary quoted earlier, there were indeed Karachais among the small number of collaborators who participated in killing hundreds of Jews in the region—if not as shooters, then as guards making sure the victims could not escape. The subunit of Einsatzkommando 12 that did conduct the killings included—along with five Germans—two Karachais and one local Ossetian. The Karachai chief of the oblast police was also present. Of course, Russians were also very much involved (e.g., the entire local police force that assisted the mass shooting in Zelenchukskaia), something often overlooked in a priori assumptions about the region. On the part of the Karachais, there is no evidence of traditional anti-Semitism or indication that the Germans succeeded in connecting the collaborators’ anti-Bolshevism with a hatred of Jews. There was no local history of failed statehood, as there was in the Baltics or Ukraine, for which the Jews might be blamed. Limited survivor evidence suggests some anti-Semitism in the Russian districts. For the few locals involved in killing Jews, however, the lure of the Jewish refugees’ imagined riches was evidently strong. Furthermore, it may also have been easier for them to regard their victims as necessary collateral to assist the Germans in replacing Soviet rule and to secure their own position in relation to the new regime. In that sense, the inherent impermanence of the refugees and their lack of roots and connections in the region (compared to the few local Mountain Jews) made them especially defenseless. The same context, however, makes the examples of other locals helping Jews that much more remarkable. The examples where individuals both collaborated with the Germans and helped local and nonlocal Jews also highlights the complex and shifting factors involved in their decision-making. Why and under what circumstances they did so is a topic that deserves further exploration. Furthermore, this analysis prompts research into equivalent areas such as Crimea and Kalmykia, in which large numbers of Jews were killed during the German occupation, and the indigenous peoples were subsequently deported by the Soviets. An approach grounded in the deeper history and local contexts is essential for understanding the Holocaust in zones otherwise overshadowed by claims of wartime mass treason.

Chapter Seven

Rescue and Jewish-Muslim Relations in the North Caucasus Sufian N. Zhemukhov and William L. Youmans As extensive as Nazi Germany’s program of extermination was during the Holocaust, a close look at the North Caucasus highlights some notable exceptions, where communities or small groups of Jews were rescued, were spared, or otherwise found ways to survive. This chapter proposes several unique factors, including the agency and customs of local groups, the slightly varied approach of a genocidal bureaucracy in fostering local relations, and the Nazi war machine’s dependence on conflicted collaborators. The aim here is to emphasize the confluence of informal cultural and formal institutional influences particular to the North Caucasus in these rare cases. This study explores cases of rescue and survival that reveal how local circumstances deviated from the prevailing patterns of Holocaust liquidation in other parts of Nazi-controlled Europe. In the following sections, we analyze three cases of Jewish survival in the North Caucasus: (1) the survival of Mountain Jews based on the efforts of their community leaders and their cooperation with the local population, Nazis, and a collaborationist government; (2) the organized group rescue of children in the village of Beslenei in Cherkessia; and (3) the survival of local Jews in Mozdok, a town close to the front, in a leather factory organized through their efforts.

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The Occupation of the Caucasus and Victims of Holocaust in South Russia During the German military’s 1942 summer offensive directed at southern Russia, the primary aim was capturing the oil-rich Caucasus. As Hitler pronounced to General Friedrich Paulus, he would have to end the war, without “the oil of Maikop and Grozny.” Starting in July 1942, Germany advanced into the Caucasus. As of mid-November 1942, they occupied six regions of southern Russia, including Rostov oblast, the Krasnodar and Stavropol krais (the latter including Karachai and Cherkessia), Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, and a small part of Chechnya. By January 1943, however, the tide had turned. The Sixth Army was destroyed during the defeat at Stalingrad. Fearing Soviet encirclement, the remaining forces began retreating from the Caucasus. In a departure from Nazi Germany’s typical treatment of occupied subjects, German forces in the North Caucasus changed their “tactical concept of occupation authorities.” The Wehrmacht’s “Caucasus experiment” included “propaganda tactics of promising ‘freedom and prosperity’ to the population, immediate restoration of private peasant property [expropriated by the Soviet kolkhozes], and creation of ethnic state institutions.”1 The designated Reich Commissar of Caucasus, Arno Schickedanz, sought to foster friendly relations with the local population and instructed the Wehrmacht to treat them accordingly. In order to demonstrate his friendliness to Caucasian Muslims, General Eberhard von Mackensen converted to Islam and attended prayers at the mosque.2 Hitler authorized the Wehrmacht to give self-administration to certain territories, including Kabardino-Balkaria.3 A former local lawyer, Salim Shadov, became the head of the collaborationist government, which also included Dolatgeri Tavkeshev, Kasim Beshtokov, Blita Shakov, and Alikhan Pshukov. The collaborationist 1 2

3

Norbert Miuller, Vermakht i okkupatsiia (1941–1944) [The Wehrmacht and the occupation, 1941–1944] (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1974), 266. Khadzhi M. Ibragimbeili, “Krakh gitlerovskogo okkupatsionnogo rezhima na Kavkaze” [The collapse of the Hitlerite occupation regime in the Caucasus], in Narodnyi podvig v bitve za Kavkaz: Sbornik statei [The people’s bravery in the battle for the Caucasus: Collected articles], ed. Aleksei Basov and Georgii Kumanev (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 272. Bernhard Kroener, Rolf-Dieter Muller, and Hans Umbreit, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 5, pt. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 50.

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government, together with the Kadi (Islamic judge) of Kabardino-Balkaria, Hajji Koze Khotekov, issued proclamations to the local population condemning Bolsheviks and welcoming the Germans, who “brought a great and sacred gift of freedom for the Kabardian and Balkar people.”4 This softer policy did not extend to the Jewish population in the Caucasus, neither to the refugees nor to the locals the Germans first encountered. In total, the Holocaust in the Caucasus obliterated at least thirty thousand and (according to Russian scholars) perhaps as many as seventy thousand Jews in the six southern Russian regions in 1942–43. The higher number would represent more than half (56.3 percent) of all victims on the territory of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Nazi forces moved to immediately execute Jews during the first weeks of occupation.5 Comparing the Jewish population statistics in the 1939 census with the numbers of eventual Holocaust victims shows that, in some provinces, the numbers of Jews killed far exceeded the registered Jewish population.6 Hence, the majority of Jewish fatalities in the region were refugees who arrived from elsewhere. A surprisingly low proportion of Jews was reported killed in Kabardino-Balkaria—1 percent (40 out of 3,414).

The Nalchik Jewish Community The survival of the Jews of Nalchik, the capital of the Republic of KabardinoBalkaria, during the German occupation from October 28, 1942, through January 3, 1943, presents the most prominent case of Jewish survival. Nalchik Jews are known in the literature under various names, including 4 5

6

Ibragimbeili, “Krakh,” 271; David Shabaev, Pravda o vyselenii balkartsev [The truth about the deportation of the Balkars] (Nalchik: El’brus, 1994), 16–17. One exception was in the city of Essentuki in Stavropol krai, where the murder of five hundred Jews was delayed for a month and a half. Il’ia Al’tman, Kholokost i evreiskoe soprotivlenie na okkupirovannoi territorii SSSR [Holocaust and Jewish Resistance on the occupied territory of the USSR] (Moscow: Fond Kholokost, 2002), 173–96. For example, there were 7,791 Jews living in Ordzhonikidze (Stavropol) krai in 1939 but 25,000 Jewish Holocaust victims in 1942; 7,351 Jews in Krasnodar krai yet 20,500 victims; and 1,714 Jews in North Ossetia but 3,000 victims. Al’tman, Kholokost i evreiskoe soprotivlenie, 173–96. Note that the numbers of Jewish victims in the North Caucasus vary greatly depending on the sources used: see the introduction to the present volume for a discussion on this point.

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Mountain Jews (gorskie evrei), Tats, Juhuro, Juvuro, the “Little Jewish quarter” (evreiskaia kolonka) of Nalchik, and Jewrt.7 Mountain Jews are native to the Caucasus, as opposed to the Ashkenazi Jews, who were transplants relocated during World War II. Although they had a longer presence in Nalchik, many Mountain Jews or their recent ancestors moved there from other parts of the Caucasus where they were native.8 Some of the previous research on the survival of Mountain Jews in Nalchik gives attention to gauging the extent to which they were genuinely Jewish.9 This question reproduces the objectives of the Nazi investigation into their “Jewishness.” While the Nazis may have eventually determined that the Mountain Jews were not Jews and spared them from mass annihilation, continuing to pursue this same question neglects the extent to which they exercised agency in their efforts at survival. The Mountain Jews strategically decided to assert themselves as a non-Jewish ethnic group in order to influence Nazi decision-makers, instead of simply obeying initial orders that would have brought on their demise. What were the conditions, decisionmaking processes, and actions that secured Mountain Jews’ survival? The following sections present five factors. The first was the ability of the Nalchik Jewish community to organize. The second was their strategic decision to seek official recognition as a different racial identity than the one demarcated for extermination. Third, friendly relations between Nalchik Jews and the local Muslim Kabardian population won them the support of the collaborationist government. Fourth is the Bierkamp factor; the governing SS officer of that name allowed himself to be persuaded about the Mountain Jews’ non-Jewish identity. Last, German scientific research was ultimately conflicted about the Mountain Jews’ race. 7 8

9

Juhuro = Jew in the dialect of Dagestani Mountain Jews; Juvuro = Jew in the dialect of Azerbaijani Mountain Jews; Jewrt = Jew in Kabardian. For more on this, see Mordechai Altshuler, Yehudei mizrach Kavkaz: Toldot ha-yehudim ha-harariim mireshit ha-mea ha-19 [Jews of the Eastern Caucasus: The history of the Mountain Jews from the beginning of the 19th century] (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1990). Kiril Feferman, “Nazi Germany and the Mountain Jews: Was There a Policy?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 96–114. Valeri Dymshits, ed., Gorskie evrei: Istoriia, etnografiia, kul’tura [Mountain Jews: History, ethnography, culture] (Jerusalem: DAAT; Moscow: Znanie, 1999), 88.

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While some of these factors were ultimately more central than others, they all were requisite. The absence of any of them would probably have made the survival of the community impossible. As crucial as the friendliness of the local population was, it did not work in other cases, as when Ashkenazi Jews faced execution. For example, the Nazis did not spare fiftyseven Jewish refugees from Crimea who were staying in a Kabardian village, Kyzbrun. They were locked in a building and burned alive. After the war, their remnants were moved to the yard of the local school.10 While Walther Bierkamp was pliable when it came to the Mountain Jews, he commanded units that killed thirty thousand Jews in the Caucasus. He would have just as easily ordered the slaughter of the Mountain Jews if he were not convinced of their non-Jewishness. As for the scientific factor, Nazi researchers continued studying the Mountain Jews even after they were spared. Svetlana Danilova hypothesizes that the Nalchik Jewish community would have been massacred eventually if the Germans had not retreated from the Caucasus so rapidly. According to a survivor, Ashurova, near the end of the occupation the Nazis took away several Jewish families.11 The survival of the Nalchik Jewish community in no way indicated a change in the Nazis’ policy toward the Jews. Rather it showed how a confluence of peculiar circumstances unique to the Caucasus led to novel failures in the Holocaust program’s agenda of totally erasing the Jews. The survival of the Nalchik Jews was also not a mere accident, while the Germans executed all other Mountain Jews communities, including those in Crimea, Bogdanovka, and Menzhinskoe.12

10 Svetlana Danilova, “Gorskie evrei” [Mountain Jews], in Evrei bukharskie, gorskie, gruzinskie v vodovorote istorii [Bukharan, Georgian, and Mountain Jews in the vortex of history], ed. Robert Pinkhasov, Svetlana Danilova, and Semyon Krikheli (New York: Kaykov Media, 2017), 197–98. 11 Bisirit Ashurova, Visual History Archive, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation (hereafter USCSF), interview 38626, July 1, 1997, tape 2, 17:25–18:40. 12 Michael Chlenov, Oriental Jewish Groups in the Former Soviet Union: Modern Trends of Development (Cincinnati: Department of Judaic Studies, University of Cincinnati, 1998), 23.

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Factor 1: Collective Organizing and Leadership The capacity of the Nalchik Jewish community to self-organize and act in their own interests collectively was the most important factor in their survival. Shortly after the occupation of Nalchik, SS-Oberführer Einsatzgruppe D Dr. Walther Bierkamp ordered all local Jews to register, begin wearing a Star of David, and perform forced labor.13 Under the leadership of Markel Shabaev, the Nalchik Jewish community chose to approach the German authorities to plead their case that such orders did not apply to them. Instead of blindly following the orders or challenging them on other grounds, they sought to have their noncompliance sanctioned. Shabaev’s role was the most crucial in leading the community on this course. He and other leaders of the community developed a plan to approach Nazi commanders with a claim that Mountain Jews were indigenous people. Nalchik Mountain Jews recognized the danger of the German invasion. Shortly before the German occupation, the Soviet authorities organized a meeting of the Mountain Jewish population in Nalchik on October 9, 1941. At the meeting a seventy-year-old speaker, Shamilov, stressed the special danger for the existence of the Mountain Jews: “Our Jewish brethren have become Hitler’s victims; it is ordered to kill, to plunder, or to bury them in the earth… . The hangman desires to destroy all Soviet Jews and to enserf Slavs. This won’t happen! Alongside the Russians, the sons of the Jewish people will destroy the Fascists.”14 Nalchik Mountain Jews took a different course of action to avoid the fate of others. Unlike in many other Jewish communities, where the leadership (“elders”) cooperated with the Nazis owing to their deceptive promises, the community leaders did not fall for the trickery of Nazi propaganda, which pledged security to Jews in return for their registration. The elders refused to facilitate the deportation of their community. They figured out that survival required noncooperation. This was a marked contrast from the tragic stories of other Jewish communities, who relied on the Nazis’ false pretenses. According to a survivor, when the Nazis announced that all Jews should gather at the Nalchik hippodrome, Jewish activists ran from house to house 13 Pavel Polian, Mezhdu Aushvitsem i Bab’im Iarom: Razmyshleniia i issledovaniia o Katastrofe [Between Auschwitz and Babi Yar: Reflections and research on the Holocaust] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), 143. 14 Kiril Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016), 295.

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warning people not to go. The dozen people who gathered at the Nalchik hippodrome were executed.15 According to another source, this incident took place in the middle of November 1942, and it was Markel Shabaev who personally visited every Jewish household during the night, warning everyone and advising them to ignore the order. According to this source, Germans ordered that all Jews should gather at the commandant’s headquarters.16

Factor 2: Asserting Themselves as Non-Jewish The decision to question the applicability of the order rested on a new substantive claim about their ethnic identity. The Mountain Jews’ leaders asserted that they were not ethnically Jewish but Tats, a local group. Making such a claim built upon the implemented pre-World War II Soviet policy encouraging each ethnic group—even the smallest—to develop their own culture, language, and alphabet. This established the Tats as a coequal ethnic grouping, and other local ethnic minorities could easily recognize such a group if it was presented to them. For example, the Soviets divided the Circassians into half a dozen smaller subethnic groups and even split the Circassian language between two alphabets.17 The practice of separate minority ethnic identities allowed the Nalchik Jews to claim that they were Tats, or just another indigenous Caucasus ethnic group, and this diminished the perception that they were assimilated European Jews. In reality, they had multiple identities. Their first and most prominent identity was Jewish, but Nalchik Jews also were of indigenous Dagestan ethnicity. The “Mountain” in their name refers to their origin from Dagestan, the most ethnically diverse part of the Caucasus. Even though Nalchik Jews lived in a city and on the plain, they belonged to the Kaitag subgroup, one of four Mountain Jewish subgroups with roots in Dagestan. Since the 15 Ashurova, USCSF, 38626, tape 2, 13:10–14:30. 16 Yuri Murzakhanov, “The Holocaust and the Mountain Jewish Communities,” Caucaology 3 (2017): 120–27, https://kbsu.ru/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ kavkazologija_2017_3.pdf. 17 The Circassians are one of the major ethnic groups in the North Caucasus. Circassians call themselves Adyghe and speak dialects of the Adyghe language, a branch of the Ibero-Caucasus language group. The Soviet authorities divided Circassians into several regions and gave them different Russianized titles, including the Kabardians in Kabardino-Balkaria, the Mozdok Kabardians in North Ossetia, the Cherkes in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, and the Adygeans in Adygea.

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Mountain Jews’ language is close to the Tat language, they could also identify themselves as Tats. Tats, however, are Muslims and ethnically distinct from Mountain Jews.18 The latter mainly lived in three regions of Soviet Russia— Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Checheno-Ingushetia—and in Soviet Azerbaijan.19 Given their multitudinous identities and proximities to numerous surrounding groups, the Mountain Jews could easily adapt their ethnic identity when facing the risk of extermination. They asserted themselves as a local indigenous ethnicity, like Kabardians, instead of referring to their Dagestan origin or identifying themselves as Tats. According to a survivor, Markel Shabaev downplayed the Mountain Jews’ Dagestan roots. “He told [the Nazis], ‘They are not that kind of Jews, they are almost Kabardians.”20 The same witness recalled how Nalchik Jews consistently pretended to be Kabardians in situations where survival was at stake. She related an episode when a couple of German soldiers tried to take away her child. “Some of our Jews put on papakhas [local ethnic hats, in order to appear] as if they were Kabardians. They said in Kabardian, ‘what are you doing? It’s just a child.’ And the Germans somehow dropped the child and went away.”21 The collective strategic choice to present themselves as an indigenous ethnicity of Kabardino-Balkaria indicated a sophisticated process of decisionmaking. First, the Nalchik Jewish community clearly wanted to separate itself from all Jews, not just from refugees but also from other Mountain Jewish communities. Besides the Nalchik community, there were two other communities of Mountain Jews in Nazi-occupied territory, who lived as two Jewish kolkhozes in Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe, both in the Kurskaia district of Stavropol (Ordzhonikidze) krai. In both Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe, the Germans perceived the Mountain Jews as Jews and massacred them all. Had the Nalchik Jewish community failed to distinguish themselves from Bogdanovka’s and Menzhinskoe’s Mountain Jews, 18 Igor’ Semenov, Kavkazskie taty i gorskie evrei: Nekotorye svedeniia o nikh i problemy proiskhozhdeniia [Caucasian Tats and Mountain Jews: Information and genealogy issues] (Kazan: “Tan,” 1992), 10. Note that Mountain Jews posed as non-Jews also in the late Soviet period, presumably to avoid discrimnation as Jews: Dymshits, Gorskie evrei, 15–16. 19 Lukasz Hirszowicz, “Soviet Statement on the Mountain Jews,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 16, no. 3 (1986): 55–60. 20 Ashurova, USCSF, 38626, tape 2, 13:10–14:30. 21 Ashurova, 12:40–13:00.

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they would have met the same fate. Unlike Nalchik’s, the Mountain Jews of Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe had been recently settled in the kolkhoz, which the Soviets created in 1928. They had less-developed regional roots to draw upon. According to one of the survivors, almost all the Jewish population in Bogdanovka were migrants from the Karachai region.22 Second, seeing that Nazis avoided harassing Kabardians, local Jews realized that it was safer to identify as ethnically Kabardian en masse. Being Kabardian was more protected than being a Tat ethnic group. One case demonstrates the extent to which Germans tolerated Kabardians: when a Kabardian, Nanu Eziev, killed a German solder, the Germans did not execute him, though they tortured him, suspecting that he could be linked to partisans. His father, a collaborator with the Germans, was able to save him in a rare showing of leniency.23 Third, thanks to close interethnic relations, Nalchik Jews counted on the local Kabardians to confirm that they were not Jewish. Shabaev acted, during the occupation, together with two local men who “used to study with him, a Kabardian and a Balkar.”24 Ashurova described how she was sheltered by a Kabardian man whom she did not know.25 Such long-time prewar interethnic connections did not exist in Bogdanovka.26

Factor 3: Relations with Kabardians and Local Collaborators In a remote area like the Caucasus with an ethnically and religiously mixed population, the Nazis could not exclusively rely on their own experts to identify Jews. They often depended on local collaborators when documentation and German expertise were inadequate. This proved double-edged, as local collaborators in Nalchik testified in support of the Mountain Jews’

22 Sergei Amiramov, USCSF, 39735, January 12, 1998, tape 1, 5:00–5:10, 16:15– 16:20; E. S. Mosolova, “Dzhegonasskii,” Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia [Russian Jewish Encyclopedia], July 9, 2009, https://www.rujen.ru/index.php/ Джегонасский. See also Crispin Brooks’s chapter in the present volume. 23 Sufian Zhemukhov and Aleksandr Musukaev, Istoriia seleniia Kakhun [The History of the village of Kakhun] (Nalchik: Izdatel’skii tsentr “El’-Fa,” 1998), 87. 24 Ashurova, USCSF, 38626, tape 2, 16:30–17:00. 25 Ashurova, 8:10–10:00. 26 Amiramov, USCSF, 39735, tape 1, 22:00–22:40.

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arguments that they were not Jewish and helped them demonstrate their indigeneity to German officials. People in the area would be prone to help. Pre–World War II relations between the groups native to the region were relatively warm. Many Jewish survivors claimed that there were generally positive relations between Nalchik Jews and Kabardians. Kiril Feferman observes that there was antiSemitism in Russian areas of the Caucasus but that it was apparent to a “lesser extent” among non-Russian parts of the region.27 Nalchik is an example of the latter.28 Nalchik Jews were well integrated with the local Kabardians. On the state level, local Jews occupied prominent positions in Soviet institutions and the Communist Party, including Avrum Shamilov, appointed as minister of the food industry of Kabardino-Balkaria in 1938 and reappointed in 1946,29 and two mayors of Nalchik: Don Amirov, appointed before 1941, and Avino Pinkhasov, appointed in 1941 and reappointed after the war.30 On a personal level, many Nalchik Jews spoke the Kabardian language fluently and had friends among the Kabardians, and there were instances of adoption of Jewish children by Kabardian families. After their parents were killed, each of the four Shalumov children was adopted by a Kabardian family in Kyzbrun-2: the Balkizovs, the Kabardovs, the Kazharovs, and the Shigalukhovs; and one of them, Roman Shalumov, identified himself as a “Kabardian Jew.”31 There were other cases where individual Mountain Jews changed their ethnic identities and counted on being accepted by the local people. One such case was that of Shavad Elizarov, from Chechnya, who became a prisoner of war and,

27 See Kiril Feferman’s chapter in the present volume. 28 Svetlana Danilova, ed., Gorskie evrei v Kabardino-Balkarii [Mountain Jews in Kabardino-Balkaria] (Nalchik: El’brus, 1997), 5–7; Chlenov, Oriental Jewish Groups, 11. 29 David Shabaev, “My gordimsia imi” [We are proud of them], in Danilova, Gorskie evrei, 21. 30 Inessa Tashaeva, “Avino Pinkhasov – Dostoinyi predstavitel’ gorskikh evreev” [Avino Pinkhasov—A Worthy Representative of the Mountain Jews], Stmegi, October 20, 2013, https://stmegi.com/posts/16368/ avino_pinkhasov_dostoynyy_predstavitel_gorskikh_evreev_8342/. 31 Svetlana Danilova, “Ia—Adyge zhurt” [I am a Kabardian Jew], in Gorskie evrei, 60–61.

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in the German camp, identified himself as a Chechen, while other Chechen prisoners backed up this ethnic identity.32 A central figure who supported the Nalchik Jews’ claims was Salim (Semyon) Shadov. He was a Muslim and led the collaborationist National Council of Kabardino-Balkaria. After the war, Shadov told historian Aleksandr Dallin that he was contacted by representatives of the Nalchik Jewish community acting under the leadership of Shabaev.33 Presumably they enlisted his support, because Shadov said that he then approached General Ewald von Kleist to make the following appeal: the Mountain Jews were the same kind of Caucasian people as other local indigenous people, Kabardians and Balkars. In response, Kleist created a committee and, based on the investigation, on December 1942 issued an order identifying the Mountain Jews as indigenous people of the Caucasus as opposed to Jews. “That way, I managed to save from extermination the over hundred thousand strong Mountain Jewish community of Kabardino-Balkaria,” Shadov concluded. Shadov’s statement merits scrutiny since it contains unsupported claims and factual errors. His claim that he was able to personally approach the supreme German commander in the region is not confirmed by any documents. According to Joachim Hoffmann’s archival findings, the collaborationist National Committee of Kabardino-Balkaria was granted significant autonomy, but the Germans did not entirely trust Shadov.34 Kleist’s special order about Mountain Jews was never found and apparently was not documented.35 32 Mikhail Elizarov, Obshchina gorskikh evreev Chechni [The community of Mountain Jews of Chechnya] (Netanya, Israel: Mirvori, 2013), 151. 33 Quoted in Dymshits, Gorskie evrei, 92–93. 34 Joachim Hoffmann, Kaukasien 1942/43: Das deutsche Heer und die Orientvölker der Sowjetunion [The Caucasus 1942/43: The German army and the eastern peoples of the Soviet Union] (Freiburg: Rombach, 1991), 447–48. 35 Andrej Umansky, “The Mountain Jews and Their Fate during WWII,” Visions of Azerbaijan, July–August, 2012, http://www.visions.az/en/news/405/ e854ea09/. The number Shadov gave, of over 100,000 Mountain Jews, is grossly exaggerated. According to the latest census at the time, that of 1939, the total population of Nalchik was 47,970,“Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1939 goda: Chislennost’ gorodskogo naseleniia SSSR po gorodskim poseleniiam i vnutrigorodskim raionam” [The All-Union Census of 1939: The strength of the urban population of the USSR by urban settlements and intracity districts)], Demoskop Weekly, http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/rus_pop_39_3.php. while the Jewish population of all Kabardino-Balkaria, including the Nalchik Jewish community, amounted to only 3,414.“Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia

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Indeed, according to Feferman, “The Jewish theme did not figure prominently in propaganda activities in the occupied non-Russian areas of the North Caucasus. There are only scarce references to the subject, such as the following one mentioned in the declaration of the autonomous government of Kabardino-Balkaria (‘Appeal to the Kabardin and Balkar Peoples’) from November 1942: ‘The German army liberated us from Zhido-Bolshevik dominion. Upon having received from Germany’s hands this great and sacred gift of freedom, the Kabardin and Balkar People now became the master of their own fate.’”36 Nalchik’s Jewish community was better organized than other Mountain Jewish communities. In Bogdanovka, the local collaborator police reported to Germans “absolutely all Jews, guerrillas, communists, and officers’ families. And [Nazis] exterminated them almost exactly as [their names] were listed. The collaborator Polizeis were from Bogdanovka… . Only Polizeis reported the Jews, only the Polizeis.”37 The Germans executed 472 Jews in Bogdanovka on September 25, 1942.38 Only one person survived, fifteen-year-old Alisa Prizova. She was spared after she screamed, “Don’t kill me. I am not a Jew, I am a Kabardian.”

1939 goda: Natsional’nyi sostav naseleniia po regionam Rossii (KabardinoBalkarskaia ASSR),” [The All-Union Census of 1939: National composition of the population by Russian region (Kabardino-Balkar ASSR)], Demoskop Weekly, http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/rus_nac_39.php?reg=64. Still, Shadov’s statement revealed his knowledge of details about the leadership of the Jewish community, including the names of Shabaev and Khanukaev, whom he claimed were leaders of a Jewish council that “closely collaborated with my government.”Dymshits, Gorskie evrei, 93. Apart from inconsistences and likely self-aggrandizement in Shadov’s statement, the possibility remains that he supported their efforts as an interlocutor. Without local collaborationist acquiescence, they might not have been able to achieve a favorable judgment on the question of their ethnicity. 36 Feferman, The Holocaust, 453. 37 Amiramov, USCSF, 39735, tape 1, 24:10–25:00. 38 Semyon Inotaev, “Eto sluchilos’ v Bogdanovke” [It happened in Bogdanovka], in Danilova, Istoriia i etnografiia, 56; Polian, Mezhdu Aushvitsem i Bab’im Iarom, 140; “Ne zabudem i ne prostim: Selo Bogdanovka, 1942 God” [We won’t forgive or forget: The village of Bogdanovka, 1942], Stmegi, May 1, 2011, https://stmegi.com/posts/9883/ ne_zabudem_i_ne_prostim_selo_bogdanovka_1942_god_172/.

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In 1964, Prizova, testified against one of the Polizeis, Fedor Shifer, who took part in the mass killing.39 Germans occupied Menzhinskoe on August 20, 1942, and executed the Mountain Jews two months later, on October 19. The forty Jewish families who lived there were taken to the district (raion) center and executed, except for several people who escaped on the way.40 The readiness of local police to turn on their neighbors was made easier by the absence of long-lasting prewar interethnic relations and the lack of regular active connections between communities. These facts do not, however, necessarily suggest that there was such a negative attitude toward Jews as to foreclose the possibility of rescue. On the night of the mass execution, a sixyear-old, Amiramov, was rescued by two Russian neighbor widows, Klavdia and Frosia, who hid him in their hayloft.41 Still, the better-organized leadership and positive interethnic relations between Nalchik Jews and Kabardians could not always prevent individual executions. Ashurova recalled how the Ifraimov family of Mountain Jews paid with their lives for an unsuccessful attempt to rescue a family of Ashkenazi Jews: “Our Mountain Jews hid two sisters who were physicians… . [Nazis] executed both sisters with the Mountain Jews who were hiding them. Twelve souls [were killed] instantly.”42

Factor 4: Bierkamp’s Personal Views The leaders of the Nalchik Jewish community made direct contact with key figures among the Germans, most importantly SS-Oberführer Dr. Walther Bierkamp. He was appointed commander of Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol, Crimea, in June 1942. From August 1942 to January 1943, Bierkamp’s Einsatzgruppe D operated in the Caucasus, where its units executed at least thirty thousand people. His predecessor, Otto Ohlendorf, had led the executions of ninety thousand people between June 1941 and June 1942.43 After the Nalchik Jewish community declared that they were not Jews, and the local collaborationist government supported them, the German bureaucracy in Nalchik created a committee to investigate the racial/ethnic 39 Murzakhanov, “Holocaust and the Mountain Jewish Communities,” 120–27. 40 Polian, Mezhdu Aushvitsem i Bab’im Iarom, 139–40. 41 Amiramov, USCSF, 39735, tape 2, 8:30–9:00. 42 Ashurova, USCSF, 38626, tape 2, 3:50–5:30. 43 Polian, Mezhdu Aushvitsem i Bab’im Iarom, 132.

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categorization of the local Jews. In December 1942, the Nalchik Jewish community organized a reception for Bierkamp. Their leaders were well aware of Bierkamp’s committee, and they prepared to use their welcoming to persuade him that they represented an indigenous ethnic group. Demonstrating their identification as indigenous Caucasian people was more important than they knew. The Wannsee Institute, which acted under the auspices of the SD, had previously concluded that the Caucasus “Jews had not succeeded in assimilation”44 with the local population. There is no evidence that the leaders of the Jewish community knew about the Nazis’ “scientific” conclusions, however. It is possible that high-ranking local collaborators leaked that information or advised the Jewish leaders to act as if they represented an indigenous ethnic group rather than unassimilated Jewry. Bierkamp’s reception was a thoroughly staged event. The Jewish side demonstrated the highest level of hospitality that members of Bierkamp committee would recognize as consistent with the Kabardian tradition, with all its norms of hosting etiquette and associated rituals.45 The most prominent feature of Kabardian hospitality is the fact that it is highly verbalized—that is, while performing their hospitality traditions, Kabardians describe for the guests in detail what they are doing and why. The Germans would have been quite familiar with the elaborate rituals of Kabardian hospitality at that point and could therefore identify how closely they resembled the Nalchik Jews’ traditions. Furthermore, it would be easy for the Nalchik Jews to imitate Kabardian traditions since the groups were so interconnected. During the Bierkamp reception, the Jewish hosts served Kabardian food, dressed in Kabardian costumes, and performed Kabardian dances. This also was possible thanks to the close interethnic relations between Nalchik Jews and Kabardians. The community probably had to perform the “local authenticity” of the Bierkamp reception on their own. There is no evidence that they received help or advice from the Kabardians in this theatrical presentation. With Shabaev’s theater and dance background,46 however, he was capable of organizing a spectacular performance of local traditional music and dances for foreigners.

44 See Andrej Angrick’s chapter in the present volume. 45 Danilova, “Gorskie evrei,” 197. 46 David Shabaev, “Dostoinyi vklad” [A worthy contribution], in Istoriia i etnografiia gorskikh evreev Kavkaza [The History and Ethnography of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus], ed. Svetlana Danilova (Nalchik: “El’-Fa,” 1998), 15–19.

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After the Mountain Jews’ reception, Bierkamp had experience with Caucasian traditions on at least one more occasion. Two weeks before ordering the Germans’ retreat from the Caucasus, he participated in the feast for the celebration of the Muslim holiday of Kurban Bayram (Eid al-Adha) on December 19, 1942. The celebration was organized by about a hundred collaborators from the Kaukasier Kompanie in Stavropol. Bierkamp gave a short speech at the event in the manner of the Caucasus tradition of toasting. As a distinguished participant, he would have been expected to give such a speech during the festivities.47 Bierkamp’s reception proved to be crucial for the survival of the Nalchik Jewish community. They succeeded in convincing Bierkamp and his committee of their indigeneity, yet the Germans still considered the Nalchik Jews to be Jewish in theological terms. According to Nicholas Poppe, “all spectators, including the SS Obersturmbannführer (Major) Persterer, enjoyed themselves immensely and agreed to a man that the Tat were not Jews.”48 It is unclear how the committee came to the odd conclusion that the community’s religion was Judaism and that they should be spared because ethnically they were part of the makeup of the region. It indicates, however, that the leaders of the community did not successfully obscure their religiosity while deceiving the Germans about their ethnic practices. Deceit about religious beliefs would have been second nature to anyone who lived under atheist Bolshevik rule. Many religious people had to adjust in order to survive Stalin’s antireligious purges that destroyed mosques, churches, and synagogues in the Caucasus and sent thousands of believers to labor camps. The Nalchik Jews did try to show that they had religiously syncretic practices with Islam—in particular, that they were polygamists. Bierkamp’s committee was aware of this, but it is not known if they observed Mountain Jews’ polygamy directly or were just informed of it. Exposing some Jewish aspects of their religious beliefs to the Nazis would have been a fraught exercise. Yet it could have been a strategic decision. To argue credibly that they were not actually Jews when they were presumed as such, they would have had to portray some Jewishness to explain the misperceptions. If they denied having any facet of Jewishness, then even a trace of Judaism would shatter their claims. Such an accidental discovery would 47 BStU Berlin, MfS HA IX/11 KV 6/74, vol. 58, BStU 000076. See more in Stephen Tyas’s chapter in the present volume. 48 Nicholas Poppe, Reminiscences, ed. Henry G. Schwartz (Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1983), 166.

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inevitably make the Nazis suspicious and jeopardize all the community’s efforts to present themselves as an indigenous ethnicity. That some members of the Jewish community demonstrated their Judaism, while others tried to demonstrate closeness to the local Muslim practices, suggests that there may have been disagreement as to this strategy. Still, Bierkamp apparently perceived Muslim influence on local Judaic beliefs as another proof of the Nalchik Jewish community’s indigenous roots. Given the arbitrariness and ambiguities of this calculus, it appears that some personal attributes of Bierkamp, or perhaps special circumstances of his larger Caucasus strategy, played an important role in saving the Nalchik Jews. While other Nazi officers simply followed orders to exterminate Jewish communities without questioning, and Bierkamp certainly initiated this standard procedure elsewhere, his exceptional conduct here is notable. The very fact that he decided to thoroughly investigate the racial character of the Nalchik Jewish community could imply that he already doubted their “Jewishness,” which means that he was either already persuaded by local collaborators or sensed that there might be some backlash to defying their preferences. Based on his personal observations, Bierkamp concluded that Mountain Jews “had nothing in common with Jews except for their shared religion.”49

Factor 5: Splits in the Nazi “Scientific” Analysis There was not a Nazi consensus on the Mountain Jews. According to Walter Richmond, Bierkamp heard from Otto von Bräutigam, of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, who arrived to the Caucasus in December 1942. Bräutigam came to the conclusion that local ethnic groups considered the Mountain Jews as another indigenous ethnic group and not as migrants.50 He also observed that Mountain Jews resembled other local ethnicities in their culture and traditions. This was a conundrum for Nazi racialist pseudoscience. Nazi “scientists” played an important role in decision-making. This is borne out in the case of the racial identification of the Nalchik Jewish community. German scientists had contradictory findings concerning whether the Mountain Jews belonged to the Jewish race. 49 Arad Yitzhak, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 295–96. 50 Otto Bräutigam, So hat es sich zugetragen: Ein Leben als Soldat und Diplomat [This is how it happened: A life as a soldier and diplomat] (Würzburg: Holzner Verlag, 1968), fn 535.

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Before the Axis push into the Caucasus, there had been a discussion among Nazi leaders and scientific institutions about what actions should be taken with respect to the Mountain Jews. The correspondence regarding the issue went across Himmler’s desk. As the outcome of that discussion, a linguist, Nicholas Poppe (1897–1991), was sent to Nalchik to investigate whether the Mountain Jews were “really” Jews or represented another Caucasian people. Poppe was born in Russia and became well known as a Soviet scholar and a specialist in modern oriental languages. At the age of thirty-six, he was elected as the youngest associate member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Poppe was an ethnic German and was able to leave the Soviet Union with the retreating Wehrmacht. In 1949, he immigrated to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the Far East and Russian Institute at the University of Washington. He describes his work in Nalchik in his book Reminiscences, written in 1983, when he lived in the US.51 According to Poppe, the dispute over the killing of Nalchik Jews took place between the SS and the military brass. “The German occupiers were of two opinions. The SS, true to form, wanted to annihilate the Mountain Jews. The army officers, however, were opposed to this plan and called on me as a kind of expert witness in their dispute with the SS.”52 Among the army officers, Poppe names Captain Theodor Oberländer, the commandant of Nalchik, who was “very sympathetic to the Mountain Jews and opposed to the gassing of all Jews,” while the SS representative he mentions is the SS-Obersturmbannführer (Major) Alois Persterer. Indeed, Captain Oberländer also wrote that Persterer asked him to provide a regiment to execute two thousand Jews in Nalchik. According to Oberländer, he invited Persterer and Persterer’s deputy to dinner and suggested that instead of killing the Mountain Jews, they see whether their customs, dances, food, and way of life were different from those of the local Circassians. Oberländer also suggested visiting Mountain Jews personally, with Persterer and his boss, SS-Oberführer Einsatzgruppe D Bierkamp. After the visit, Bierkamp, who was the decision-maker on this issue, gave the order not to execute the Nalchik Jews, even though he had initially ordered that the Nalchik Mountain Jews wear the Star of David.53 Poppe noted that he and others “enjoyed themselves immensely”54 while watching the Nalchik Jews dancing. Indeed, the Nalchik Jews had extensive 51 See more on Nicholas Poppe in Crispin Brooks’s chapter in the present volume. 52 Poppe, Reminiscences, 166. 53 Polian, Mezhdu Aushvitsem i Bab’im Iarom, 142. 54 Poppe, Reminiscences, 166.

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experience performing dances during the prewar time. In particular, Markel Shabaev was the leader of an amateur dance group in 1929, which included Kabardians, Balkars, and Mountain Jews and performed dances of the three ethnic groups. Shabaev also wrote in the Tat language; staged his play, Slaves of Baghdad (1931), in Nalchik; and participated in the organization of the North Caucasus Olympiad in 1932. His relative Shimriil Shabaev became the first leader of Krasnyi Kavkaz (Red Caucasus), the first professional dance ensemble in Kabardino-Balkaria.55 Poppe was not the only German scholar invited to resolve the issue of the Mountain Jews. He also mentions that “in Nal’chik I met Professor [Gerhard] Deeters, a professor of Bonn University and a well-known specialist in Caucasian languages.” Apparently, Professor Deeters agreed with the conclusion that Mountain Jews were not Jews. Not every Nazi researcher agreed, however. Danilova reports that “a specialist in Iranian language” visited Nalchik on several occasions. Danilova does not mention his name but describes in detail how he summoned Shabaev and interviewed him about the history and culture of the Mountain Jews. He also met with Danilova’s grandfather, “Kamuil Giliadov, a teacher of Tat language, who was fluent in Kabardian and knew the Koran.”56 According to Danilova, he concluded that Tats were Jews. The various accounts of the German investigations of the Mountain Jews are admittedly confusing and contradictory, including the tendency of some of the participants to take credit for saving them. The debates might have continued throughout the German occupation without a definite conclusion.57 According to the narrative that gained currency among the Mountain Jews after the occupation and the war, members of the Nalchik Jewish community believed the Nazis were going to eventually proceed with rounding up and executing them, but they were spared by the German retreat after the loss at Stalingrad. Some believe that the Germans prepared to execute the Nalchik Jews on the eve of their retreat, at night on January 4, 1943, but the Soviet army’s attack the same night prevented the execution.58 We cannot know for certain that the survival of Mountain Jews was guaranteed had the Nazis remained in Nalchik for a longer time.

55 56 57 58

Shabaev, “Dostoinyi vklad,” 15–19. Danilova, “Gorskie evrei,” 197–98. See Andrej Angrik’s chapter in the present volume. Inotaev, “Eto sluchilos’ v Bogdanovke,” 56.

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Shortly after the Germans retreated, the government’s local newspaper, Kabardino-Balkarskaia Pravda, published a letter written by Mountain Jews titled “Be damned, Fascist Fiends!” that described the Nazi atrocities during “the 65 days of occupation.”59 Several people signed the letter, but Markel Shabaev was not among them. The NKVD arrested Shabaev and two other Mountain Jewish leaders for collaborating with the Germans. Several dozen Nalchik Jews signed a petition to the NKVD that, according to one source, included this statement: “If these [three] people can be accused of something, then we are also as guilty as they are. Therefore, judge us all.” Shabaev and the other two were released two months later.60

Rescue in the Village of Beslenei In August 1942, Circassian villagers in the Cherkes autonomous oblast adopted thirty-two Jewish and Russian orphans and forged official documents to show the Nazis that the children were of local descent. Popular belief has memorialized this as a case of generosity and courage. The Beslenei rescue has been documented in films, articles, and creative works.61 In 2010, a memorial was built in Beslenei depicting a Circassian mother saving a child. Popular culture dramatized the story of the rescued children and spread some inaccuracies. For example, Khasambi Kardanov wrote a play in Circassian, Gukhem Ya Khuabe (Warmth of hearts), about the Beslenei rescue. When the play was translated into Russian in 1972, some elements of the plot were changed. The translator added a dramatic scene describing a fictional execution of one of the children by a German solder. This led to 59 R. A. Shamilov, M. T. Amirova, A. A. Shamilov et al., “Bud’te prokliaty, fashistskie izvergi!” [Be damned, Fascist monsters!], in Danilova, Gorskie evrei, 51–53. 60 Il’ia Karpenko, “Evreiskaia kolonka” [The Jewish colony], Lechaim 5 (193), May 2008, https://lechaim.ru/ARHIV/193/region.htm. 61 Aul Beslenei [The village of Beslenei] (Piatigorsk: Piatigorsk TV studio, 1970); Artur Khasanov and Artur Kencheshaov, dirs., Doroga zhizni v Beslenei [The road of life to Beslenei] (Cherkessk: Telekanal Arkhyz, 2005); Viacheslav Davydov, dir., Beslenei: Pravo na zhizn’ [Beslenei: The right to life] (Moscow: Tonap, 2008); Marina Sasikova, dir., Odna Rodnia [One family] (Nalchik: ORTK Nalchik, 2010). Nikolai Chistiakov, Pamiat’ serdtsa: Leningradskie cherkesy Besleneia [The heart’s memory: The Leningrad Circassians of Beslenei] (Saratov: Privolzhskoe izdatel’stvo, 2012).

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the popular belief that there were in fact thirty-three children, instead of thirty-two.62 While the Beslenei case has been depicted in popular works, helping it acquire an almost “mythic” character, it has not received much academic attention. One of the reasons could be that there were no Circassian scholars from Beslenei who would research the primary sources. By contrast, Jewish scholars from Nalchik researched the rescue of Mountain Jews. The Leningrad orphanage the children came from was evacuated in April 1942. The displacement of these children was not unique: a total of 414,148 children were forced to flee during 1941–43.63 According to survivor Ramazan Adzinov,64 the orphans from Leningrad made their way slowly toward the Caucasus, the journey taking about four months. In the town of Armavir in Krasnodar krai, two German planes bombed a train they were on. After that, the officials divided children into groups, and they left Armavir on foot. According to the survivor Vladimir Tseev, his group reached stanitsa Kurgannaia (Kurganinsk) in Krasnodar krai three days later. The local authorities provided them with transportation, including four horse carts, so that they could continue their trip. As the German offensive reached the Caucasus, their custodians sought to move the orphans to Georgia via the Caucasus mountain range. Approximately 130 children in total traveled in the separate groups. They passed through various settlements, asking for food on their way. The smaller the groups, the easier it was for the local population to help them. Adzinov recalled that he became effective at begging for food. He recalled that he once asked for honey, and a local old man gave him some on a wooden plate. Local people offered to take him in, including an old man and two women. He said no.65 On August 13, 1942, one of the groups, riding in several carts, reached Beslenei, a village forty kilometers (about twenty-five miles) west of the town of Cherkessk. Though Beslenei was not particularly remote from bigger 62 Iair Auron and Aleksandr Okhtov, Podvig miloserdiia: Spasenie detei iz blokadnogo Leningrada v cherkesskom aule Beslenei; Vzgliad spustia sem’desiat piat’ let [A feat of mercy: The rescue of children from the Leningrad Blockade in the Circassian village of Beslenei; Seventy years on] (Moscow and Jerusalem: Iair Auron, Aleksandr Okhtov) 2018), 88. 63 Georgy Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections, 13th ed., vol. 1 (Moscow: OlmaPress, 2002), 403. 64 Davydov, Beslenei, 5:35–6:00, 7:15–8:25, 8:55–9:15. 65 Khasanov and Kencheshaov, Doroga zhizni v Beslenei, 22:00–24:10.

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towns, it was too small for the Germans to permanently station a military unit there. This is likely why the locals were able to successfully hide people. Only women, children, and older men remained in Beslenei. Its roughly 600 younger males had been conscripted at the beginning of the war. More than a quarter of them, 167, did not return. After the weakened children arrived, the kolkhoz chairman, Khusin Lakhov, arranged a meeting of the elders of eleven extended families. Some of them had determined that the children were so frail they could not survive the arduous trip through the mountains and wanted to help them. At least two elders spoke against sheltering the children. The discussion was heated. Farizat Balkarova overheard one of the elders say, “Look how many Jews are among them. Meanwhile, Germans are approaching and they will kill us all.” Another elder seconded him: “Who would risk his own life and the life of his children?” From the opposite side, elder Murzabek Okhtov suggested, “We cannot kick out those unfortunate children. Adige khabze [the moral code of Circassians, which encourages adoption of orphans and hospitality to strangers] prohibits that.”66 The council of eleven elders came to decision that the best course was to adopt thirty-two children and distribute food reserves among the adoptive parents. As those who opposed adoption pointed out, this was indeed a deliberate risk. Germans regularly shot people for hiding Jews. To cover the adoption, the local authorities—namely, the municipal chairman, Sagid Shovgenov, and kolkhoz chairman, Khusin Lakhov—forged the household record book (pokhoziaistvennaia kniga), a vital municipal document, to show that the children were previously officially registered and had Circassian surnames. One girl and thirty-one boys had to appear as the biological offspring of those who sheltered them. Soon, the Germans broke the front and occupied the territory. German forces entered Beslenei shortly after the children got there. They gathered people and questioned them through a Russian interpreter. They appointed the oldest man, Murzabek Okhtov—the elder who had proposed rescuing the children several days earlier—as the collaborationist mayor of the village. A German military commandant stayed to live in the village. He occupied the doctor’s office in Beslenei’s hospital, along with a female interpreter who was dressed as a civilian and wore a headscarf. German cars drove through Beslenei but rarely stopped. The traffic was so intense that the narrow bridge outside the village, which permitted travel in only one direction at a time,

66 Davydov, Beslenei, 11:30–11:50.

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proved insufficient. The Germans built a second bridge next to the old one to provide two-way traffic. When they retreated, they destroyed both bridges.67 Nazi officials eventually heard that some Jewish orphans had sought refuge in Beslenei. Owing to the concerted silence of most of the villagers, the Nazis managed to positively identify only one boy. According to the local accounts, the boy had been adopted by a local woman, Kabakhan, who did not have children of her own. She was obsessed with her adopted child and sought to hide him. A local collaborator traced the hiding place and informed the Germans. They killed the boy immediately. Later, the woman was found dead on the grave of her adopted son. There is a local legend that the next day, someone killed the collaborator. There was another reported death: before the Germans’ occupation, one of the rescued boys died from consuming too much food after facing starvation.68 Murzabek Okhtov and the other elders managed to convince the Germans that reports about the orphans were false, spread by neighboring villagers who had animosity toward Beslenei. By accusing them of sheltering Jews, the wise men of the village claimed, the neighbors were using the Nazis to exact revenge. During the ensuing five-month occupation, only one other local was killed: a teenage boy was executed for allegedly threatening a German soldier’s life. Okhtov intercepted a local man who tried to pass a list of communists to the Germans, claiming that the man was a pathological informer and had been providing the Soviets with similar lists of those who should be sent to the gulag.69 Nevertheless, according to a witness, the Germans arrested a local communist, Mutalib Fartov, and took him to Cherkessk, where he was either killed or died in prison.70 Articles about the case mention one Oswald, a German obergefreiter (lance corporal) who was allegedly in charge of searching for the children. Oswald checked the household record book and investigated Sagid Shovgenov, the former Soviet mayor who had forged the registrations of the adopted 67 Witness 697 R, Trip 19, Beslenei, Russia, Yahad-in Unum (YIU), May 11, 2017, 19:30–20:00, 22:00–23:00, 39:00–40:00. 68 Taisiia Belousova, “My s toboi odnoi krovi” [We are of one blood], Sovershenno Sekretno 2:225, February 27, 2008, https://www.sovsekretno.ru/articles/ id/1863/. 69 “63-letie Pobedy: Istoriia spaseniia 32 evreiskikh detei-blokadnikov v cherkesskom aule” [The sixty-third anniversary of victory: The history of the rescue of thirty-two Jewish children in a Circassian village], Regnum, May 7, 2008, https://regnum.ru/news/997125.html. 70 Witness 697 R, YIU, 38:00–39:00.

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children. Oswald was not able to find the children, however.71 His identity has not been confirmed, it should be noted. One special facet of the Beslenei case is that these informal conventions produced an outcome in the formal dimension—the documentary evidence that Nazi officials often relied upon in their sectioning off some for execution. Village authorities codified the decision to rescue by forging the documents and adding those children onto the official village papers. At the same time, these formal and traditional factors did not expunge all the risk for the rescuers. The children appeared visibly distinct from local children. They were thinner from hunger and lighter in skin tone after living in urban orphanages. The adoptive parents took extra precautions to hide the children. The Okhtovs hid Katia Ivanova (Fatima Okhtova) in their basement. During the day, the adoptive mother stayed there with the girl, and they spent the night in the house.72 According to Volodia Zhdanov (Vova Tseev), his adoptive parents told him never to go outside, and he obeyed. Viktor Voronin (Ramazan Adzinov) recalled that his adoptive parents hid him in the attic during the day and let him come downstairs at night.73 While the group of thirty-two children who stopped in Beslenei were rescued, the other approximately one hundred children traveled on a different road and reached the town of Teberda. A local sanitarium accepted the children. After the Germans arrived, they executed the orphans and their teachers.74 Later, regional authorities built a monument there to memorialize the massacre.75 After the Germans retreated, the majority of the children in Beslenei went to a Stalingrad orphanage. Four of them stayed in the village, however, living as Circassians until their old age. After the occupation, the Soviets arrested Okhtov but released him within two weeks, probably based on the locals’ testimonies that he saw his main duty as protecting the citizens of Beslenei from German forces.76 71 “63-letie Pobedy.” 72 Davydov, Beslenei, 21:50–22:10. 73 Khasanov and Kencheshaov, Doroga zhizni v Beslenei, 27:00–27:30. 74 Auron and Okhtov, Podvig miloserdiia, 105. 75 Executive Committee of Stavropol krai’s Soviet of Peoples’ Representatives, “On Approval of the List of the Historical and Cultural Sights of Stavropol krai,” Decree # 705, October 1, 1981. 76 “63-letie Pobedy.”

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Factor 1: Local Traditions The case of Beslenei resembles other stories of brave individuals hiding and protecting Jews during the Holocaust but departs in ways peculiar to the sociocultural terrain of the region. Elsewhere, particular individuals saved Jews by employing their social capital or using other means of inducement to prevent local collaborators from informing the Germans. In this case, local traditions were pivotal. Several cultural principles converged: kunak (the guest, per hospitality culture), the custom of aiding widows and their children, and the favored status of adoption in Islam. The traditionally hierarchical and tribal social structure in the village was a check on local collaborators, who would face grave customary social sanctions for undermining the village chiefs. The rescued children of Beslenei were referred to as “children of Leningrad.” Apparently, Beslenei citizens did not choose children based on their ethnicity. The facts, however, that the children were fleeing and that the citizens took elaborate efforts to hide them from the Germans indicate that they were aware of the danger of the children being identified as “Jewish.” Indeed, judging by their names, at least six of the children were probably Jewish: Marik Krolik, Volodia Zhdanov, Nikolai Verner, Alexander Isaev, Vadim Shakhtman, and Sara (last name not known). When Beslenei changed the adopted children’s first and last names, as well as their ethnic identities, it put into tension two traditions. Beslenei Circassians were Muslims and knew that the founder of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, was an orphan, was adopted, and, later, himself adopted a former slave. While encouraging adoption, however, Islam does not allow the child’s name, including the patronymic and last name, to be changed: “Call them by (the names of ) their fathers.”77 Circassian adige khabze, on the contrary, encourages giving the children the surnames of their adoptive fathers. Of course, the Circassian naming tradition was also particularly instrumental for surviving German occupation, whereas the Muslim one would have given away the scheme. In his study of the rescue of the Nalchik Jewish community, Walter Richmond suggests that adige khabze played an important role in local Kabardians’ helping the Jews.78 Richmond’s arguments also apply to the 77 Qur’an, 33:5. 78 Walter Richmond, “The Mountain Jews and the Nazi Occupation of Kabardia,” Caucasus Wars, December 21, 2018, https://caucasuswars.com/2018/12/21/the-

Table 7.1. The Beslenei orphans’ adopted names Adopted Name

Original Name

Age

Ramazan Khezhev

Sasha

6

Mussa Agarzhanokov

Marik Krolik

6

Vladimir Tseev

Volodia Zhdanov

14

Ramazan Adzinov

Viktor Voronin

6

Fatima Okhtova

Katia Ivanova

13

Alexei Patov

Alexei Sius’kin

14

Nikolai Gutiakulov

Nikolai Verner

12

Nikolai Kardanov

n/a

9

Ivan Dzantemirov

n/a

10

Semyon Murzaev

n/a

8

Boris Kambiev

n/a

9

Vladimir Okhtov

Volodia Lisitsin

8

Vladimir Dzankhotov

Vladimir Trepashko

14

Ivan Akezhev

n/a

10

Ibragim Bzhunaev

n/a

6

Nur Kardanov

n/a

12

Davlet Murzaev

Semyon Podkopaev

9

Boris Kambiev

n/a

6

Alexander Okhtov

Alexander Tishkin

13

Alexander Agarzhanokov

n/a

12

Alexander Kabardaev

n/a

14

Vladimir Kardanov

Vladimir Kolesnichenko

14

Viktor Murzaev

n/a

12

Mikhail Islamov

Mikhail Kovalchuk

14

Alexander Fortov

Alexander Isaev

12 —(continued)

rescue and jewish-muslim rel ations  ❧ 209 Table 7.1—concluded Nikolai Tseev

n/a

8

Stepan Gutiakulov

Stepan Sliusarev

10

Nikolai Dzadidov

n/a

n/a

Daniil Akezhev

n/a

8

Sara Agarzhanokova

n/a (died in 1944)

6

Sergei Agarzhanokov

n/a (died in 1943)

6

Vadim Patov

Vadim Shakhtman

6

Source: Auron and Okhtov, Podvig miloserdiia, 90–95.

Cherkes of Beslenei, who share the same ethnic identity and speak the same language as the Kabardians; the two groups were divided by Stalin’s administration. The traditions also could have played an important role in the fact that Murzabek Okhtov, the collaborationist mayor of the village, did not report the hiding children to the Germans. As already mentioned, he was the one who suggested rescuing the children during the meeting of eleven elders on August 13, 1942. His personal example as an elder was important to other villagers. Members of his extended family rescued several children. Citizens of Beslenei had had recent experience of adoption. After the Russian Civil War, the Patov, Bzhunaev, and Temizhev families adopted six homeless boys, who grew up and became Soviet army conscripts during World War II.79 Villagers also usually took care of their orphaned relatives, as was the case with Mutalib Fartov, the only local communist arrested by the Germans. After his brother was killed at the beginning of the war, Fartov adopted his brother’s son.80

mountain-jews-and-the-nazi-occupation-of-kabardia/?fbclid=IwAR2oVRtbEn_ NzX1pRcN1sN2wcc0P06JHudHQl81lxDCnFeIc71Tz5PhwEV4. 79 Chermen Kulaev, ed., Narody Karachaevo-Cherkesii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 [The peoples of Karachaevo-Cherkessia during the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945] (Cherkessk: Stavropol’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, karachaevo-cherkesskoe otdelenie, 1990), 319. 80 Witness 697 R, YIU, 38:00–39:00.

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When it came to the rescue of 1942, some of the villagers wanted permanent adoption. Kara Adzinova saw her actions purely in terms of adoption. She just wanted a son, saying, “My neighbor woman came to me and said that they are giving away boys. My husband was not at home, he was on an extended trip to the mountain alpines. I went by myself, without him. I examined every boy carefully and choose Shurik.81 I wanted to take an infant, but the woman who held him calmly told me that it was her baby and she would not give it to anyone. Shurik was small, feeble, with little nose, and narrow shoulders. I thought, ‘I’ll raise him and he will be my son.’”82 After Adzinova died, her adopted son discovered that she had concealed from him letters from his sister.83 (According this source, boy’s name was Vitya, while his adopted mother, Adzinova, called him Shurik in her testimony.) According to Rimma Patova, she heard her mother, Kulistan, saying, “I have five headscarves [meaning girls], and wish I would have at least one hat, that is a boy.”84 Kulistan adopted Alexei Sius’kin, a fourteen-year-old boy, who was the only one registered in the household record book under his own first and last names. Sius’kin lived in the family until he became eighteen years old and was conscripted into the Soviet army. He never returned to Beslenei.85 One of the rescued girls, Sara, died within a year. The other rescued female orphan, Fatima Okhtova (originally Katya Ivanova), had been separated from her sister, who had moved beyond Beslenei and was rescued by a Russian family in stanitsa Ispravnaia.86 Fatima grew up in Beslenei and married a local man. Later, Fatima discovered that her sister had been adopted and had grown up in a nearby village with an ethnic Russian family. The sisters reconnected and got to know each other but remained living in separate villages. One of the witnesses said, “While her sister remained a 81 Adzinova testified in Circassian and used the name “Shurik,” which is a domestic name for Alexander. 82 Davydov, Beslenei, 14:20–15:05. 83 Ol’ga Deriko, “Dve Bitvy Aula Beslenei” [Two battles of the village of Beslenei], Fond Adigi, May 9, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20150402113656/ http://fond-adygi.ru/page/dve-bitvy-aula-beslenej. 84 Elena Kosova, “Iz Sashi v Ramazana: Kak cherkesskii aul usynovil 32 deteiblokadnikov” [From Sasha to Ramazan: How a Circassian village adopted 32 children from Leningrad], RIA Novosti, August 12, 2011, https://ria. ru/20110812/416400593.html. 85 “63-letie Pobedy.” 86 Kulaev, Narody Karachaevo-Cherkesii, 319.

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Russian, Fatima became a Circassian.” Fatima considered herself a Muslim, but, like everybody else of her Soviet generation, she never strictly observed Islamic practices.87 Personal stories of the survivors and witnesses reveal that the adoption process was emotionally trying in many cases. Viktor Voronin (Ramazan Adzinov) said that he rejected several people who tried to take him in, including an old man and two women. Finally, he accepted a woman’s offer of food. While eating at her house, he saw for the first time in his life turkeys dancing in the yard. He liked them so much that he agreed to be adopted in order to play with the turkeys.88 When Volodia Lisitsin, an eight-year-old boy, ran toward a local woman, Tsura Okhtova, who was known for her beauty, he called her “mother.” She was moved and decided to adopt him. According to a witness, Shamisat Okhtova, “Abdurakhan approached the horse wagon and lifted up a girl, while his wife was standing aside and crying. Children did not have clothes and were shivering. Some boys had only underwear on them and no other clothes. Old people, women, and the children themselves were crying. Children were crying and calling for their mothers. Patova took the twelve-year-old Alesha. Tsura Okhtova carried away the exhausted little Volodia. Chapa Utukulova choose Kolia. Sinokh Kambieva [chose] Boria. Murzaeva, a soldier’s wife, [chose] the fair-haired Senya.”89

Factor 2: Role of Institutions Official institutions played a role in the Beslenei adoptions, working alongside the communal traditions to make them possible. All three leaders of the rescue represented authorities. The kolkhoz chairman, Khusin Lakhov, organized the meeting of eleven elders for adoption; the Soviet chairman, Sagid Shovgenov, forged the household record book. Importantly, the German tactic of appointing a local mayor mattered. Murzabek Okhtov, who had suggested rescuing the children, became the collaborationist mayor and used his position to deceive the Germans. The fact that Shovgenov and Lakhov decided to register the children in the household record book is quite remarkable. It was an established bureaucratic routine under the Soviets. Soviet authorities introduced the book in 87 Witness 697 R, YIU, 34:30–36:30. 88 Khasanov and Kencheshaov, Doroga zhizni v Beslenei, 22:00–24:10, 15:35–15:50. 89 Davydov, Beslenei, 15:20–16:00.

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1935 to the agricultural settlements. The local authorities registered each household, including members of the family and the family’s property. Why did Shovgenov and Lakhov register the children? The best explanation is that the mayor and the head of the kolkhoz wisely did it as a precaution. The official documents would have to confirm the number of family members in case the Germans made a survey of the villagers or inquired about individuals. Given the small population of Beslenei, which consisted of only eleven extended families,90 the adoptions amounted to a substantial growth in its populace. In most cases, a child’s name was just changed and added to the official List of Family Members. In those cases when the family already had children who were younger than the adopted child, however, it was necessary to forge the household record book. That was the case with Volodia Zhdanov, who was registered as Vova Tseev, as Table 7.2 shows. His year of birth was registered as 1936, which means that, at the time of adoption, he looked like a six-year-old child. He could not be simply added to the end of the list, since the family had a daughter born in 1939. The carefully crafted character of the forgery indicates that Beslenei authorities made an extra effort to make the household record book look authentic in case it received close scrutiny. Registration was beneficial for several reasons. It made permanent adoption possible, and four of the children decided to stay in the village. Registration also provided the children who did not have documents with an official status and identity that could serve them later. After escaping from the besieged Leningrad, struggling through five months of travel, and surviving bombing, it was likely that most of the children did not possess identification. The grown-ups in the group may have had some documents about the children, however. The survivor Vova Tseev mentioned in his interview that, when the group was provided with the four carts in stanitsa Kurgannaia, they “loaded our books, etcetera and etcetera.”91 One of the oddities of the Beslenei case is that it could only result from the marriage between Soviet institutions, Circassian traditions, and communal decision-making, along with the Nazis’ investing local figureheads with some authority. In case of the kolkhoz chairman, institutional factors were at play when he organized the discussion under his formal leadership and helped doctor documentation. The Soviet institutions had limited organizational abilities, however. Neither chairman Lakhov nor Shovgenov could 90 Davydov, 11:30–11:50. 91 Davydov, 9:10.

rescue and jewish-muslim rel ations  ❧ 213 Table 7.2. Entry from the Beslenei household record book, with survivor Vova Tseev #

Last name, surname, patronymic (in full)

Relation to head of family

Gender

Birth year and month

Ethnicity

A

B

1

2

3

4

1

Tseev Sagid Zakreevich

family head

m

1880

Circassian

2

Tseeva Maremkhan Asmanovna

wife

f

1884

Circassian

3

Tseeva L’olia Sagidovna

daughter

f

1923

Circassian

4

Tseev Vova Sagidovich

son

m

1936

Circassian

5

Tseeva Lel’a Sagidovna

daughter

f

1939

Circassian

organize the rescue by hiding all of the children in one place, and maybe they did not even think of such an option. The limits of the Soviet institutions can be also seen in the case of the authorities of stanitsa Kurgannaia who previously provided the same children with transportation but could not give them shelter. In this void, we saw how Circassian traditions of adoption and hosting, as directed by the respected leader who would become a collaborationist mayor, produced this concerted act of rescue. Organized rescue during the Holocaust was a dangerous endeavor. As in the tragic case of Bogdanovka, local authorities who engaged in rescue shared with Jews and communists the risks of being reported by the collaborators. One can speculate that the collective nature of Beslenei’s efforts provided an extra level of protection. Had Beslenei’s authorities rescued the children on their own, without the community’s involvement, that would have made it easier for the local collaborators to report to the Germans. A limited number of individuals would have paid the price. By contrast, reporting against eleven extended families could turn all the villagers against the collaborator-informant and result in a longer-lasting blood feud. The risk of future revenge would be greater.

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The Case of Mozdok Mozdok represents another case of Jewish survival, similar in many ways to that of Nalchik. Part of the Mozdok district of Ordzhonikidze (Stavropol) krai before the German occupation, the town had a prewar population of 19,081, including 305 Jews.92 Russians constituted the majority, while significant minorities included Kabardians and Ossetians. Some 5,812 “Mozdok Kabardians” lived in and near the town and were distinguished by their Orthodox Christian faith, unlike the Muslim Kabardians who lived in Kabardino-Balkaria.93 There is no evidence, however, that the Mozdok Kabardians played any role in helping the Mozdok Jewish community to survive, collectively or individually, as the Nalchik Kabardians did for their Jewish neighbors. Leaders of the Mozdok Jewish community who emerged during the German occupation were Mountain Jews, including Iosif Bakshiev and Viktor Shubaev, as well as elders Mikhail Solomonov and Miitul Leviev. They worked out a plan of survival, which apparently included changing their ethnic identities. Mozdok’s Jews established contact with the collaborationist mayor and strategically adjusted to the occupation regime. The Mozdok case also differs from those of Nalchik and Beslenei in that the Jews in Mozdok seemingly lived in the open, not hidden from the Germans. Mozdok remained occupied for five months, twice as long as Nalchik. One of the relevant factors delaying the killing of Mozdok Jews was the German exploitation of, and reliance upon, Jews for labor.94 The Mozdok Jews somehow survived the Germans. Later, the Soviet Extraordinary Commission did not find evidence of the mass murder of Jews or killings of any Soviet citizens in Mozdok. That is remarkable because, as Feferman observes, the Mountain Jews there were subject to registration

92 Feferman, The Holocaust, 513. 93 “Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1939 goda: Natsional’nyi sostav naseleniia po regionam Rossii (Stavropol’skii krai)” [The all-union census of 1939: National composition of the population by Russian region (Stavropol krai)], Demoskop Weekly, http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/rus_nac_39.php?reg=12. 94 A labor camp near stanitsa Rozhdestvenskaia, in Stavropol krai, represented another case in which a group of Jews were exploited by the Germans for forced labor and survived. Thirty-five Jews worked in the Rozhdestvenskaia labor camp. They remained alive after the German retreat.

rescue and jewish-muslim rel ations  ❧ 215

and forced labor—steps that often presaged extermination.95 Some luck must have intervened, but it is possible that geographic factors did as well. Between August 1942 and January 1943 the town was close to a relatively fluid front, even though it was still on the German side. According to a survivor, Samuel Matveyev, “I came to Mozdok with my family… . We were under German occupation. Many Jews there had escaped from our village, some of them to Nalchik and others to Mozdok. The Germans didn’t touch us. Mozdok was on the front line and they didn’t deal with Jews on the front line. That is how we survived.”96 As Feferman observes, however, a small command of the Teilkommando of the SK 10b— part of Einsatzgruppe D—was based in the town. He speculates that once the Germans realized that Mountain Jews were in the town, they relented until given a clear decision about their fate, a decision that did not come before their retreat.97 Many of the area’s Jews sought shelter in Mozdok, which the Germans occupied in August 1942.98 According to the Mozdok Jews’ testimonies to Soviet authorities, the collaborationist mayor of Mozdok, Tupitsin, summoned Jews and told them, “Germans will execute you if you don’t work— that is, do leather work.”99 Professional leather masters Iosif Bakshiev and Viktor Shubaev organized a leather factory and hired other Jews, including “people who had no idea about leatherwork [who] were only listed in the factory in order to avoid execution.” All the Jews who worked at the factory, and their immediate relatives, survived. In sum, thirty-eight families, including 101 children, were spared.100 Bakshiev occupied the director position and Shubaev worked as the bookkeeper. 95 Feferman, The Holocaust, 300. 96 Arad Yitzhak, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 295–96. 97 Feferman, The Holocaust, 420–21. 98 Polian, Mezhdu Aushvitsem i Bab’im Iarom, 142. 99 This account certainly makes sense. When considering it as evidence, however, it is necessary to consider that the testimony was given under duress. The Soviet authorities were seeking to justify punishing Mountain Jews for working in a factory that serviced the Wehrmacht. Under such circumstances, we cannot treat this as conclusive evidence accounting for the Mountain Jewish community’s survival in Mozdok. 100 Il’ia Alt’man, Zhertvy nenavisti: Kholokost v SSSR, 1941–1945 gg. [Victims of hate: The Holocaust in the USSR, 1941–1945] (Moscow: Fond Kovcheg, 2002), 178.

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After the war, the Soviet authorities arrested Bakshiev and Shubaev as well as their seventy-year-old relatives, Mikhail Solomonov and Miitul Leviev. The Soviet arrest of leading Jews was similar to the case of Nalchik. In Nalchik, however, the Soviet authorities released them, while the leaders of the Mozdok Jewish community received lengthy prison sentences: twentyfive years for the fifty-nine-year-old Bakshiev and ten years each for the others.101 According to the June 14, 1952, decision, Mikhail Solomonov’s defense that working in the factory was a matter of survival was refuted. Instead, the prosecution had presented evidence that the Mozdok Jews gave the German authorities documentation demonstrating that they were in fact Tats. As a result, they were not officially registered as Jews. The court inferred from this that they voluntarily collaborated with the enemy because of antiSoviet sentiments. Some defendants had testified that a letter was presented to the Germans claiming that the Soviet regime had prohibited Jews from working in certain occupations before the war and thanking the new rulers for allowing Jews to open a manufacturing workshop.102 In carrying out the Holocaust, the Nazis called upon an established set of methods to identify Jews in a population. They deceived Jewish communities into self-identifying their own members. They inspected local institutional documents.103 They deployed pseudoscientific anthropological and linguistic researchers to new areas to inform the machinery of death. Local collaborators served as informants. By the time the Germans arrived in the Caucasus, they were capable of methodically identifying the Jewish segment of the population to target for elimination. Thus, they managed to eradicate almost all of the Jewish communities in the cities and kolkhozes. By zooming in on and magnifying three cases where Jews survived, were rescued, or were spared, we have shown how the circumstances and characteristics unique to the Caucasus and the German occupation presented some variation worth examining. We do so in order to address the empirical puzzle in

101 Polian, Mezhdu Aushvitsem i Bab’im Iarom, 142. 102 Diana Dumitru, “From the Holocaust to the Gulag: Jewish ‘Collaborators’ in Stalinist Courts after World War II,” lecture, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, March 28, 2019, https://www.vwi.ac.at/index.php/en/events/vwi-goes-to-en/ icalrepeat.detail/2019/03/28/261/-/diana-dumitru-from-the-holocaust-to-thegulag-jewish-collaborators-in-stalinist-courts-after-world-war-ii. 103 In the case of Beslenei, the village authorities forged the documents.

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which Jewish survival rates were much higher in the non-Russian areas in the Caucasus than in the others. Several factors contributed to the survival of Jews from the Holocaust in the Caucasus. One was the collective countermeasures of the indigenous Jewish community, who persuaded Nazi officials that the orders did not apply to them. They also performed Karbardian cultural rituals to cloud the pseudoscientific judgment of Nazi experts and officials. Their agency may have only bought them time, however, as some suggest that had the Germans remained in control, they eventually would have been liquidated as well. In the cases of Mozdok and Rozhdestvenskaia, another factor was the Germans’ need to use Jews as laborers. This was not unique to the Caucasus. Jews sought to become reliable laborers as a means to survival in other places Germany took over, and it often failed to prevent their demise. Combined with the need for a hasty German retreat after the demolition of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and Mozdok’s proximity to the front, some Jews in normally ill-fated circumstances managed to live. Also, segments of the local population, including collaborationists, acted to aid Jews at key moments. The Beslenei villagers in particular stand out for their heroism, while a Nalchik collaborationist official’s complicity may have bolstered the Mountain Jews’ contention that they were indigenous. If true, some of the Circassian exceptionalism could be due to the relatively fleeting presence of German forces deeper into the mountainous region. Other factors included the comparative lack of anti-Semitism in non-Russian areas and traditions of hospitality toward guests. Nonetheless, these tales, while by no means representative of all the local population’s activities during the war, are particularly resonant with one of the authors of this chapter (Zhemukhov). He discovered when writing a history of his native Muslim village in Kabardino-Balkaria that “at the beginning of the war, some Jews went through Kakhun, taking flight from the advancing Germans. They were given several carts in our village.”104 Finally, it is worth considering in future research whether Kabardian collaborationist influence and the Nalchik Jews’ campaign of persuasion were heightened by the region’s strategic importance for the German war effort. Combined with a complicated, diverse ethnic composition among a population historically insurgent against Russia, it might have demanded more pragmatic delicacy, at least while solidifying control of the region.

104 Zhemukhov and Musukaev, Istoriia seleniia Kakhun, 84.

Chapter Eight

“We Were Saved Because the Occupation Lasted Only Six Months”: (Self-)Reflection on Survival Strategies during the Holocaust in the North Caucasus Irina Rebrova I remember how the war began… . My grandmother decided we should evacuate.1 My granny, my grandfather’s mother, Izochka [a cousin], and I all went. We went to my grandfather’s brother. We went by train. It was a chaos and we took only the bare essentials when we left… . I remember the city [Krasnodar] after it was occupied. Granny had an acquaintance who worked in the “Zagotskot” office. Granny went to her and said, “Valia, you have to help us.” But her husband was already working as a policeman in the Gestapo… . And her husband denounced us nevertheless. We were all summoned to the Gestapo. And we could hardly bring granny [great grandmother] Sonia, as her legs had swollen up. When we got there, they already knew all about us and granny Sonia was sent to a cell. And just as she went in, I remember her shouting: “Vera [Sofiia’s grandmother], save Sonia!” 1

The family was from Poltava, Ukraine. The six-year-old Sofiia lived with her grandmother, because her mother had died from tuberculosis, and her father was in the army.

(self-)reflection on survival strategies  ❧ 219 Then they started to torture us. But granny was very clever. She had changed my first and last names. She said that her first husband was a Russian, Geodakov, that they’d had a son Petr, and that I was Petr’s daughter. So I was registered as Sofiia Petrovna Geodakova. But she hadn’t been able to change her own name. The Germans didn’t believe her, though. Granny knew German. And she heard what they were saying: this one is not going to escape our clutches. Locals helped us. They [some acquaintances] went with us to the Gestapo and said we were Russians. But they [the Gestapo] still didn’t believe it. There was an old priest there [at the Gestapo]. They asked him to ask us to say a prayer or something, to prove we were Russian. Otherwise we’d be killed. He asked granny to say the Lord’s Prayer. She’d learned it overnight and recited it all to him. Fine. “But why is her name Isaevna?” [asked the Germans at the Gestapo]. The priest answered that there’s St. Isaac’s Cathedral in Leningrad and she’s named after it. Either the priest wanted to help us, or who knows what. So, they sent us home… . Then the priest baptized me. Granny said given that he saved us it was fine that he baptized me. So when I was eight years old in Krasnodar he baptized me in a small church, splashed me with water. And for many years after, he put a cross on me. I kept it with me. One day, we were told there’d been five thousand Jews in Krasnodar and I was the only one left alive.2

This is just one of many rescue stories of the Holocaust in the Northern Caucasus. Each story is unique, yet each is universal: all embody the terror of being Jewish during the occupation and the miracle, for some, of surviving. This interview, like many thousands of others, was recorded in the late 1990s for the USC Shoah Foundation. These testimonies represent the first attempt in post-Soviet space to track the fate of those Soviet Jews fortunate enough to have survived the Holocaust. In post-Soviet countries, the interviews were conducted not by professional oral historians but by journalists; local historians; and members of Jewish communities, which had emerged and become active at that time. Moreover, a questionnaire had been developed for the

2

Sofiia Zabramnaia (born in 1935 in Poltava), Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation (USCSF), 33735, July 10, 1997, Poltava, tape 2–3. The family of the narrator moved to Kazakhstan by the end of the war. There they met a Jewish Soviet writer, Rivka Rubin(a), who talked to the narrator’s grandmother for a long while. Then Rubina wrote and published a story, “Alone in Krasnodar,” in Yiddish about their fate in occupied Krasnodar. See Rivka Rubina, “Eine in Krasnodar,” in Jidishe Froyen [Jewish women] (Moscow: Ogiz, 1943), 3–16.

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interviews conducted in Russia, which seems to be uniform for all narrators.3 This rule disserved the story because sometimes narrators could not answer some questions, and in other cases they did not describe significant parts of their lives because they were not specifically asked about them. A large part of a successful interview in the way of understanding what the person being interviewed is talking about depends on the professional skills and psychological sensitivity of the interviewer. At the same time, I propose to use the term “narrator” in my study instead of “interviewee.” In my opinion, oral interview is a process of interacting communication between a researcher and a narrator. As American historian Barbara Allen states, the terms “interviewer” and “interviewee”—applying doer and doee—clearly define the active and passive roles in the interview: the interviewer is the actor, in the sense of initiating and directing the interaction; the interviewee is the reactor. The terms “researcher” and “narrator” happily avoid these connotations.4 Out of about three hundred Shoah Foundation interviews I have listened to, I have selected eighty conducted in Russian that were recorded in 1997–98 in Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia (today Belarus), the United States, Canada, and Israel. They were chosen because they shed light on the lives of Jewish survivors during the Nazi occupation of the studied region (North Caucasus), because the narrators spoke clearly about their past, and because the interviewers’ questions help listeners grasp what transpired during the war and the postwar period. In the interviews that I have transcribed, the number of female narrators is nearly twice that of male ones. This may be explained by the fact that the men had been conscripted. Only women, elderly people, and children could stay in the rear. Those belonging to the most representative group of narrators were born in the late 1920s and the 1930s. During the war, most of them were children and teenagers, aged six to sixteen. In this article, this group of narrators, referred to as “war children,” will be my focus. Three interviews conducted with people born after 1938 could be considered as a “post-story” of what the narrators were told but did not experience themselves. To make a relevant comparison of the sources and to track the memory work over time, I conducted my own interviews in 2013 and 2015 in the region: thirty-four interviews in the local regional 3 Interview with Il’ia Al’tman, the cochair of the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center, February 10, 2016, Moscow, Russia, Author’s Archive, 16-MEM-M02. 4 Barbara Allen, “Re-Creating the Past: The Narrator’s Perspective in Oral History,” Oral History Review 12 (1984): 5.

(self-)reflection on survival strategies  ❧ 221

Figure 8.1 Tankha Otershtein, during a 2013 interview with Irina Rebrova. Photo by author.

centers Krasnodar, Maikop, Stavropol, Cherkessk, Taganrog, and Rostov-onDon, and a further three interviews in Moscow. All narrators of the interviews selected for this study can be divided into two main groups: first, those who were born, survived, and spent all their lives in the North Caucasus; second, those who were born and lived in different parts of the former Soviet Union but evacuated and hid in the North Caucasus. Because of the goals of this article, I am not interested in the stories of local Jews who were evacuated outside the North Caucasus and who thus avoided the Holocaust in the region. I have, however, collected interviews with people evacuated through the North Caucasus. That is why the geography of residence of Jewish survivors varies in my samples. Despite ongoing discussions that conceptualize some of the memory forms, Holocaust memory has become one of the central topics in memory studies in Western scholarly discourse. According to the historian Omer Bartov, the Holocaust has generated new and particularly intense forms

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of memory.5 When people speak about “memory boom,” they are indeed speaking—though far from exclusively—of the vast terrains of Holocaust memory and other terrains of memory modeled on it.6 The researches into trauma and regret, silence and untold life experience, which have appeared at the intersection of memory and Holocaust studies,7 show the diversity and complexity of the Holocaust memory study problem. One of the main characteristics of memory is its ability to change constantly in response to political, social, cultural, and other processes over the course of time. Among the obvious results of memory as a temporal process are the reconstruction of memory politics, the rewriting of history textbooks, the avoidance of some and appearance of other memory symbols on monuments, shifting narratives and identities, the appearance of technologically new places for preserving people’s memories, and conflicts between the polarization of official state and local memory.8 Viewed from the standpoint of memory work, I will analyze the account presented at the beginning of the article, as well as other oral testimonies by narrators dealing with Jewish survival strategies during the Holocaust in the Northern Caucasus. I pay attention not to reconstructing wartime events according to the collected sources but instead to tracing the influence of narrators’ postwar lives on the plots of their stories. Since most interviews were conducted with “war children,” particular emphasis will be laid on the unique way children memorized events with further reflection,

5 6

7

8

Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). For more on the Holocaust as the central theme in memory studies, see the introduction to Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31–36. See Saul Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Manfred Gerstenfeld, “The Multiple Distortions of Holocaust Memory,” Jewish Political Studies Review 19, no. 3/4 (2007): 35–55; Jeffrey C. Alexander, Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Elena Rozhdestvenskaya et al., eds., Collective Memories in War (London: Routledge, 2016), 2.

(self-)reflection on survival strategies  ❧ 223

with an eye to the impact of Soviet propaganda and official war memory that avoids the Holocaust.9

The Place of Testimonies of Jewish “War Children” in Holocaust Memory Studies An oral history approach redresses the difficulties of representing the Holocaust through contemporary public and military narratives and allows one to build a model of civilian behavior toward the Jews during the war. It also helps to trace the channels by which an image of the Holocaust was formed in the postwar period and to show how individual and collective levels of memory interact in war testimonies. Oral history methods seek, first of all, to increase historical knowledge through the personal testimonies of witnesses and participants in ordinary events. Russian sociologists Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina refer to the “analysis of categorization” when studying biographical interviews. The goal of such a technique is to explore the way descriptions of everyday life are constructed in the texts of interviews. Narrators in their stories usually use categories that have intersubjective meaning and, therefore, provide the possibility of understanding in the frame of existing culture.10 The interview, 9

Reasons include state anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, the ideology of the “Victorious People of the Great Patriotic War” that only permits heroic portrayals, as well as the completely objective view—and one especially relevant for the Soviet Union—that “Jews were not the only ones who suffered.” In this respect, the umbrella term of Soviet propaganda, “peaceful Soviet citizens,” has become inscribed as the model for commemorating the war. See Solomon Schwarz, Antisemitizm v Sovetskom Soiuze [Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union] (New York: Izdatel’stvo imeni Chekhova, 1952); Leonid Luks, ed., Der Spätstalinismus und die “jüdische Frage”: Zur antisemitischen Wendung des Kommunismus [Late Stalinism and the “Jewish question”: Communism’s anti-Semitic turn] (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998); and Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast’ i antisemitizm [Stalin’s secret policy: Power and anti-Semitism] (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2003), 230–45. 10 Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina, “Analiz narrativa: Vozmozhnosti rekonstruktsii seksual’noi identichnosti” [Narrative analysis: Possibilities for reconstructing sexual identity], in V poiskakh seksual’nosti: Sbornik statei, ed. Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina (Saint Petersburg: D. Bulanin, 2000), 549–58.

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therefore, is a narrative that contains the categories through which the narrator describes social interactions in the specific field of study.11 By the time they were interviewed, all of the “war children” were already retired. Almost all narrators had obtained higher education and gone on to relatively successful careers. This success strongly depended on the way the postwar Soviet society accepted the Jewish nationality of the narrators. Some struggled a great deal against the system, and most of them hid their Jewish identity. After the fall of the Soviet Union, very few, in line with the general trends among Russian Jews, decided to emigrate, not wanting to uproot and start a new life elsewhere. In contrast, the next generations of the families of almost all the narrators did immigrate to the United States or Israel in the 1990s. Although subjective, partial, and frequently fragmentary, the memories of “war children” are an excellent historical source for social history and anthropology, shedding light on everyday life and permitting psychological and gendered readings of the history of World War II. Even many years later, those who survived the Holocaust as children or teenagers can talk about aspects of wartime life, the psychological climate of witnesses, and even the suffering of permanent hiding that cannot be found in archival official documents. According to the German sociologist Harald Welzer, the wartime stories of children are more emotional in their descriptions of what the narrator saw or experienced than are those of adults. Furthermore, he points out, neurological studies have shown that older men have a more stable and clearer memory of their distant past than of recent events. The memory of the distant past is more static; it is beyond change or reflection.12 Welzer’s position is strongly confirmed by the narratives of the Holocaust survivors, whose wartime past appeared to be the most significant and traumatic period of their lives. Children’s impressions of the war are quite complicated and often consist of several fragmented stories. This can be explained predominantly by the age of the narrators at the time they 11 Irina Rebrova, “Russian Women about the War: A Gender Analysis of EgoDocuments,” in Women and Men at War: A Gender Perspective on World War II and Its Aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Maren Röger and Ruth Leiserowitz (Warsaw: Einzelveröffentlichungen des DHI Warschau, 28, 2012), 263–80. 12 Harald Welzer, “Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit: Geschichte als Arena der Politik” [The presence of the past: History as an arena of politics], Osteuropa 55, no. 4–6 (2005): 13.

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are recalling; they were too young to attempt to gain a holistic conception of the events they were experiencing. Impressions of the war and knowledge of the mass killings of Jews formed directly in childhood differ greatly from those formed in the minds of the older generation. This is because of the influence of state propaganda and ideology about the war and the Holocaust on ordinary people’s consciousness. Researchers mostly agree that the enormously heroic Soviet model of war memory that excluded the uncomfortable questions of collaboration, Holocaust, and fate of the POWs from the public discussion served for justification of the totalitarian ruling practices with the “universal historical achievement of Victory.”13 Nevertheless, events fixed in children’s memories have a significant effect on both the fate of the Holocaust survivors themselves and on the mechanism by which an image of the war is formed in the collective representations of members of the social group.14 Official Soviet propaganda about the mass killings of “peaceful Soviet citizens during the war”15 and the absence of official places of memory of the murdered Jews strongly affected individuals’ images of what had happened during the war. The Holocaust survivors often kept silent even in their own postwar families 13 Roman Khandozhko, Aliaksei Lastovski, and Iryna Sklokina, Rethinking the Memory of the “Great Patriotic War” from the Local Perspective: Stalinism and the Thaw, 1943–1965 (Kharkiv: Geschichtswerkstatt Europa, Kharkiv HistoricalPhilological Society, 2012), 7. For more studies about the memory of the war and the influence of the state propaganda on it, see: Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London: Granta, 2000); Sergey Kudriashov, “Remembering and Researching the War: The Soviet and Russian Experience,” in Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Europe, ed. Jörg Echternkamp (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 86–115. 14 Irina Rebrova, “Sviaz’ pokolenii: Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina glazami ‘detei voiny’ i ee vospriiatie sovremennoi molodezh’iu” [Generations connect: The Great Patriotic War through the eyes of “war children” and as perceived by contemporary youth], in Vtoraia mirovaia voina v detskikh “ramkakh pamiati” [World War II in children’s “frames of memory”], ed. A. Rozhkov (Krasnodar: Ekoinvest, 2010), 249. 15 See Karel Berkhoff, “Monstrous Atrocities,” in Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 117–34.

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about their wartime experiences. The first testimonies about the Holocaust appeared in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union,16 at a time when special foundations and independent Jewish organizations and Jewish communities were established. More recently, the memory of Jewish survivors has become the subject of academic inquiry as well as a part of education (in the special Jewish primary schools).17 At the same time, oral stories of the Holocaust survivors have not yet become a part of the history curriculum in most Russian secondary schools and universities. Few oral histories are available online, and Russian educational institutions have avoided, or do not have the funds to subscribe to, online databases that require fees.

Representation of the Holocaust in the North Caucasus in the Narratives of “War Children” The battles for the Caucasus took place between the river Don and the foothills of the North Caucasus from July 1942 to October 1943. Wehrmacht troops occupied most of the cities and villages of the region by autumn 1942. The occupation lasted from several weeks (North Ossetia) to just over one year (Novorossiisk, although the city was never completely taken). There was a military administration, and the front line was close to the occupied zones.18 16 That is, professional interviews with Holocaust survivors about their Holocaust experiences. The first written testimonies on the mass killing of the Jews during the German occupation were written during the war and held in the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission. See, for example, the statement of Genia Golos (GARF, f. 7021, op, 40, d. 5, l. 15–16) and the statement of Faina Gulianskaia (GARF, f. 7021, op, 17, d. 4, l. 18). 17 Academic inquiry: see, for example, Svetlana Danilova, Gorskie evrei v Kabardino-Balkarii: Stat’i, ocherki [Mountain Jews in Kabardino-Balkaria: Articles, essays] (Nal’chik: El’brus, 1997); Anika Walke, Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). School education: see, for example, Valerii Stolov, “Evreiskaia istoriia v rossiiskoi shkole” [Jewish history in Russian schools], Novaia evreiskaia shkola, 1 (1998): 163–82; and Elena Petrova, “Osobennosti prepodavaniia temy ‘Kholokost’ v starshikh klassakh” [The peculiarities of teaching the Holocaust in the higher grades], Prepodavanie istorii v shkole 6 (2011): 51–54. 18 On the history of the occupation and the Holocaust in North Caucasus, see Kiril Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Jerusalem:

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The total number of Holocaust victims and other Soviet civilians killed during the occupation period is still the subject of debate among specialists, public figures, and Jewish authorities. The main source for counting the Holocaust victims is the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission, which gathered the evidence of the violence and destruction by the Germans in the North Caucasus from spring 1943 until the beginning of 1945 (in some regions). Overestimation and distortion of quantitative data, together with the fact that the final reports refer to “peaceful Soviet citizens” as the main Nazi victim group, makes it difficult for historians to approach the objective figures of Holocaust victims. Based on Soviet documentation, the lowest and highest possible number of victims for each region of the North Caucasus is given in Table 8.1, considering the analysis of available sources and literature.19 If we take into account the data on the number of Holocaust victims in Russia (only within the boundaries of the RSFSR), more than half of them are assignable to the North Caucasus.20 Yad Vashem, 2016); Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 [Occupation policies and mass murder: Einsatzgruppe D in the southern Soviet Union 1941–1943] (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 545–670; Elena Voitenko, “Kholokost na iuge Rossii v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (1941–1943 gg.)” [The Holocaust in the south of Russia during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1943)] (PhD diss., Stavropol’skii gosudarstvennyii universitet, 2005); Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 [The rule of the Wehrmacht: German military occupation and the indigenous population in the Soviet Union 1941– 1944] (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2009); Pavel Polian, Mezhdu Aushvitsem i Bab’im Iarom: Razmyshleniia i issledovaniia [Between Auschwitz and Babi Yar: Reflections and research on the Holocaust] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010); Christina Winkler, “Rostov-on-Don, 1942: A Little-Known Chapter of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, no. 1 (2016): 105–30; and Andrej Umansky, “L’extermination des Juifs dans le Caucase du Nord pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (1942–1943)” [The extermination of Jews in the North Caucasus during World War II] (PhD diss., University of Amiens, 2016). 19 See also the discussion in the introduction to the present volume on the problems of determining the numbers killed. 20 According to Al’tman’s data, from 119,210 to 140,350 people were murdered on the territory of Russia in its modern borders and without regard to the republic of Crimea. See Al’tman, Zhertvy nenavisti: kholokost v Rossii 1941– 1945 gg. [Victims of hate: The Holocaust in Russia 1941–1945] (Moscow: Fond Kovcheg, 2002), 286.

Table 8.1. Estimates of Jewish victims in the North Caucasus based on Soviet sources Administrative-territorial unit

Minimum

Maximum

Rostov oblast

22,000

26,800

16,3202

22,000

Stavropol krai3

19,700

35,0004

Kabardino-Balkar ASSR

30

5005

North Ossetian ASSR

206

3,3007

Total in the region

58,070

87,600

Total in the RSFSR

119,210

140,350

Percentage of Holocaust victims in the North Caucasus in the RSFSR Jewish population

48.7%

62.4%

Krasnodar

krai1

Source: Based on the data provided by Al’tman, Zhertvy nenavisti, 286. The numbers for each district of the Krasnodar and Stavropol krais and the Kabardino-Balkar ASSR can be found in Feferman, The Holocaust, 512–22, and Umansky, “L’extermination.” Notes: 1 Including the Adyghe autonomous oblast with 407 Holocaust victims. Umansky, “L’extermination des Juifs,” 288, 356, 361. 2 Umansky, 369. Umansky provides the German data as well: 7,000 victims, according to the indictment of Kurt Christmann of the prosecutor’s office of Munich I of September 29, 1971 (BAL, B 162/1196, Bl. 20). 3 Including the Karachai and Cherkes autonomous oblasts with 1,400 Holocaust victims in total. Umansky, “L’extermination,” 562. 4 Polian, Mezhdu Aushvitsem i Bab’im Iarom, 136. 5 Umansky, “L’extermination,” 592. 6 Umansky, 592. 7 The data given by Al’tman are incorrect, since the mass killing of Mountain Jews in the villages of Bogdanovka and Menzhinskoe took place on the territory of Stavropol krai.

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The data on Jewish survivors in the North Caucasus is not exact.21 According to the oral stories, only a few survived. Often, when narrators describe their lives in the North Caucasus during the Nazi occupation, they indicate that they remained the only Jews in the given location, as the survivor Sofiia Zabramnaia stated her testimony cited above. Most narratives are similar in the transmission of the tragedy the speakers faced and survived. The Holocaust survivors lived most of their lives grieving dead relatives and feeling simultaneously an inextricable combination of guilt and relief at the fact that they survived. The historical features of the Holocaust in the North Caucasus (among them the military-controlled zone; the late and sudden start of the occupation; a relatively high number of evacuated Jews in the region, including intellectuals and scientists who failed to evacuate farther; mass killings of Jews in the first weeks of the occupation; absence of ghettos; murder by means of bullets or gas vans)22 make it possible to speak about a special group of Holocaust survivor narratives. To survive in the temporarily occupied zones, Jewish people had to conceal their ethnicity, live in hiding places, or depend on local non-Jews for help. The main narrative lines are accounts of constant persecution and wandering, the fear of being betrayed and being captured by the occupation authorities, everyday humiliation and pain. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Holocaust survivors could for the first time talk openly 21 Kiril Feferman provides some data in his recent book, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus, 438–43. Nevertheless, we do not have the final numbers of those Jews who managed to survive in the region. One should keep in mind the complexity of statistical information in the Soviet Union during and after the war, the problems of the reevacuation, and the reluctance of many of the Holocaust survivors to save their Jewish identity in their documents. See also the discussion of victim numbers in the introduction to the present volume. 22 Ilja Altman, Opfer des Hasses: Der Holocaust in der UdSSR 1941–1945 [Victims of hate: The Holocaust in the USSR 1941–1945] (Zurich: Muster-Schmidt Verlag, 2008), 273; Voitenko, “Kholokost na iuge Rossii,” 55–67; Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus, 16–19, 173–85; Irina Rebrova, “Traumatische Kindheit: Holocaust und Überlebenspraktiken jüdischer Kinder in den besetzten Gebieten des Nordkaukasus” [Traumatic childhood: The Holocaust and survival practices of Jewish children in the occupied territories of the North Caucasus], in Kindheiten im Zweiten Weltkrieg [Childhoods in World War II], ed. Francesca Weil, André Postert, and Alfons Kenkmann (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2018), 396–97.

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about their wartime experiences. The following general themes emerge from survivor accounts.

1. Evacuation to the North Caucasus Together with the Family and Surviving the Holocaust The majority of oral testimonies of the Holocaust in the North Caucasus belong to evacuees and refugees, rather than to local Jews. The main reason is that there were few Jews in the North Caucasus in the prewar years. On the other hand, the local Jews found it more difficult to survive the occupation, since their social circle was much wider than that of the evacuated Jews. If you live in the region with a small presence of Jews, then everyone, especially in the villages, knows your ethnicity. So during the occupation neighbors could become the main perpetrators in searching for and betraying Jews for the Nazis.23 The stories of refugees to the North Caucasus about moving are less detailed than the descriptions of life in a new place. Indeed, families that survived the war in evacuation in Central Asia or the Urals found themselves in more favorable living conditions. They had to work a lot in the rear, and they survived hunger and lack of sleep. But they neither met the enemy face to face, nor did they have to live in constant fear for their lives. There was no regular reevacuation from the North Caucasus in the summer of 1942, and only a few families managed to flee before the occupation started. Such testimonies are filled with descriptions of the conditions during the evacuation and the hardships faced, and are very often accompanied by mentions of the Soviet local population who provide Jews with food and hiding places. These Soviet people, mostly from the rural regions—farmers with a basic educational background—are described in great detail; narrators name them and send greetings to them.24 I found only one testimony containing a completely negative image of Soviet citizens.25 This story is full of evidence of the ways Jews suffered traveling through the North Caucasus without water and food. Their entire 23 See the most famous study on the issue of neighbors handing Jews over to the Germans: Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 24 For example, interview with Tankha Otershtein (born in 1932 in Rostov-onDon), March 1, 2013, Taganrog; Author’s Archive, 13-X-RO11. 25 Interview with Evgenii Movshovich (born in 1932 in Rostov-on-Don), February 27, 2013, Rostov-on-Don; Author’s Archive, 13-X-RO04.

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journey took more than two months, and it seems unbelievable that anyone could stay alive without water and food for that long. This very critical portrayal of the Soviet non-Jewish population may have resulted from experiences of postwar anti-Semitism. In this particular case, the memory of postwar suppression displaced the narrator’s wartime experience as a young boy.

2. Witnessing the Deaths of Parents (One or Both) or Close Relatives For one narrator, the story of her father’s death became the main event of her life.26 She was old enough to remember the events surrounding her father’s capture, and, although she did not witness his murder, she learned about it from her mother and other witnesses. In the postwar period, this woman looked for official corroboration of her father’s murder. In time, her own memory about this event dovetailed with other testimonies and findings. Another narrator’s memory, of her mother’s killing along with other Jews in Zmievskaia Balka (Rostov-on-Don), also became the main narrative line of her testimony.27 Unlike the first narrator, however, this woman preferred to keep silent about what happened to her during the war. The loss of her mother became her personal tragedy, and for more than sixty years she was unable to speak about it, even among family members. Neither did she visit the memorial complex installed at the killing site. There is no portrait of her mother on the wall with the other family portraits in the living room of her apartment. The loss of her mother in childhood is a trauma, and she prefers to keep her mother’s memory private—her way of keeping her mother alive. I did not find any relevant testimony of a male respondent about the loss of his parents. But I believe the differences in the remembering of the traumatic past can be attributed not to the gender of the narrator but rather to personal psychology.

3. Life in the Occupied Regions of the North Caucasus The survival stories of the Jews under German occupation can be divided into two groups. First are the experiences of Jews from mixed marriages; 26 Interview with Irina Rubanova (born in 1933 in Krasnodar), Author’s Archive, 13-X-KK01, February 13, 2013, Krasnodar. 27 Interview with Evelina Ekonomidi (born in 1933 in Rostov-on-Don), Author’s Archive, 13-X-RO02, February 26, 2013, Rostov-on-Don.

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for example, a case where the father of a male narrator was Jewish and the mother Slavic.28 Before the war, the father left the family, and the mother raised the boy. When the occupation began, the mother changed their last name in their documents. Their neighbors knew the real origin of the boy, however, and threatened to betray him to the occupation authorities. But since the mother worked at a tobacco factory, she was able to provide the neighbors cigarettes, and her son was left alive. This kind of bribe became a very important symbolic capital that provided an access to other vital needs during the occupation: the cigarettes could be sold or exchanged for meals or clothes. In another example, the mother of a half-Jewish narrator29 also changed the patronymic (from Izrailevna to Nikolaevna) in her documents. In this case, a German soldier lived in their apartment, unaware of the young girl’s origin. Such stories show up more positively because the tragedy of the Holocaust did not directly affect the narrators’ close relatives or themselves personally. The image of the Nazis is not always negative in such testimonies. The narrators share the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust insofar as they identify themselves as Jews. But this kind of suffering came to them later in life, when they reflected as adults on their wartime childhoods. A second group of experiences relates to the assistance given by the Soviet non-Jewish population to Jewish children in the region. There are stories of people who hid Jews in their homes.30 There are accounts of Jewish children from evacuated orphanages who survived because Cherkes or Karachai families took them in and raised them as their own.31 These children in the post28 Interview with Iosif Kromm (born in 1937 in Krasnodar), Author’s Archive, 13-X-KK04, March 7, 2013, Krasnodar. 29 Interview with Inga Sheveleva (born in 1935 in Grozny), Author’s Archive, 13-X-MO03, March 18, 2013, Moscow. 30 Interview with Ramazan Adzinov (born in 1938 in Leningrad), Author’s Archive, 15-X-KCh01, May 15, 2015, Cherkessk. 31 The most famous example is the case of the orphans from Leningrad who were adopted and raised in the aul Beslenei, then part of the Cherkess autonomous oblast. See Nikolai Chistiakov, Pamiat’ serdtsa: Leningradskie cherkesy Besleneia [The heart’s memory: The Leningrad Circassians of Beslenei] (Saratov: OOO “Privolzhskoe izdatel’stvo,” 2012); Iair Auron and Aleksandr Okhtov, Podvig miloserdiia: Spasenie detei iz blokadnogo Leningrada v cherkesskom aule Beslenei; Vzgliad spustia sem’desiat piat’ let [A feat of mercy: The rescue of children from the Leningrad Blockade in the Circassian village of Beslenei; Seventy years on] (Moscow and Jerusalem: Iair Auron, Aleksandr Okhtov, 2018).

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war period did not identify as Jews, adopted all the traditions of their new families, and preferred not to speak about their traumatic past. They became members of the local Islamic communities and do not want to let the next generations know about their past.

4. Stories about Life in Camps and Ghettos in the North Caucasus Unlike in the Western part of the Soviet Union or in Poland, there were only a few concentration camps or ghettos in the North Caucasus, established in several locations in mid-to-late 1942.32 Their status as concentration camps or ghettos deserves further study. Usually, Jews were gathered together in small buildings for several weeks in the last period of the Nazi occupation. Sometimes, Jews were kept together with Soviet prisoners of war. According to one testimony, Jews were guarded, fed twice a day, and had a fifteen-minute daily walk in the fresh air. Survivors described the people and everyday life in the camps, as well as their joy at being liberated by the Soviet Army.33 In their descriptions of events, the interviews vary considerably in terms of depth, whether concentrating on a few central episodes or describing in great detail the daily struggle for survival. Much depends on the age at which the narrators experienced the war, their level of education, and their circle of friends in the postwar period. The younger the narrators were and the lower their educational level, the less detailed the story they produce. Many lament their inability to remember events from long ago. Certain incidents and situations that deeply affected their psyches as children are fixed in their memories, however, and have not faded with time. Obviously, this includes being rescued and surviving the Holocaust. Analyzing the theme of rescue, we can trace the following levels of discourse: stories about one’s own survival (what happened) and reflection on the how and why (interpretation of what happened, influenced by social and cultural experiences).

32 For example, one of the ghettos was established in August 1942 in Essentuki, where two thousand Jews were held. See Al’tman, Zhertvy nenavisti, 97. 33 Iulii Vaispapir (born in 1928 in Zaporozh’e), USCSF, 37626, July 3, 1997, Zaporizhzhia, tape 4.

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Survival Strategies in the Narratives of “War Children” The strategies used by Jews to survive the occupation is a retelling of one’s own history “as it was,” involving the concrete events, situations, and facts that the narrators personally experienced. These stories reveal much about daily life during the war, about the attitudes of locals toward the Jews (the majority of whom in the North Caucasus were evacuees and thus outsiders), Soviet day-to-day life, and interethnic relations during the war.34 Reflecting on the reasons for survival during the Holocaust is the way they perceive their childhood and youth. Here we can see memory at work. Judging by the end product, Shoah Foundation interviewers did not intend to make narrators reflect on their experiences and explain why they survived the Holocaust. Therefore, we have appraisals of their rescue based on the narrators’ own reflections. In contrast, in the interviews I conducted, the attempt was made to let the narrators reflect on the significance of the Holocaust for them and to estimate whether they view themselves as Holocaust survivors. Many of them were caught out by these questions, since they still do not consider their survival during the war as a Holocaust-related experience. Sometimes narrators are only aware of the term “Holocaust” in relation to reparations and other monetary support provided by various funds; they do not use it in their daily lives.

34 See Gelinada Grinchenko, “‘Ustnye istorii’ i problemy ikh interpretatsii (na primere interv’iu s byvshimi ostarbaiterami Khar’kovskoi oblasti)” [“Oral histories” and the problems of interpreting them (using the example of former Ostarbeiters from Khar’kov oblast)], in Vek pamiati, pamiat’ veka: Opyt obrashcheniia s proshlym v XX stoletii; Sbornik statei [The age of memory, memory of the age: Addressing the past in the twentieth century; Collected articles], ed. Igor Narskii (Cheliabinsk: “Kamennyi poias,” 2004), 216–19; Rebrova, “Kollektsii ustnykh interv’iu s perezhivshimi Kholokost na Severnom Kavkaze: problemy sbora i izucheniia” in Antropologiia konflikta i mira: Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina v istoricheskoi pamiati i kul’ture narodov iuga Rossii: materialy III Vserossiiskoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii, 29 maia 2015 g., g. Krasnodar k 70-letiiu pobedy v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine [The anthropology of conflict and peace: The Great Patriotic War in the historical memory and culture of the peoples of southern Russia: materials of the Third All-Russian Scholar–Practitioner Conference, 29 May 2015, Krasnodar, on the 70th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War], edited by O. Matveev and A. Zudin (Krasnodar: Kniga, 2015), 133–35.

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According to the studied testimonies of “war children,” the most widespread survival strategy was the external transformation of their behavior, including conversation and image. Here we can find the changing of Jewish first, middle, and last names to non-Jewish ones; posing as Slavs and Caucasians; and destroying one’s own documents. For example, “Mom told me that now we are Russians, that our last name is Nerovnaia, that she would be Maria Mikhailovna (this was my aunt’s name) while I was Fenia Andreevna.”35 Usually, the decision to change names was initiated by parents, but children could be actively involved in the process: “When I was a child, people called me Beba. Mom was afraid to keep calling me this and suggested I change my name. She asked what I should be called. I thought of my friend and said ‘Valia.’ So, people started calling me that from 1942.”36 Another narrator recounts how she asked her closest friends, who knew her as Rosa, to call her Nadia (the name her aunt called her).37 Changing one’s name is an external form of disguise that could lead to rescue only for those who did not look Jewish. Nevertheless, among children there was always the danger of being revealed. Families who had managed to avoid registration and the subsequent mass killing of Jews in the first weeks of the occupation then had to survive every day, depending on the local population and their own luck. Narrator Klavdiia Shcheglova gives the following example from her wartime experiences: The little boy [Shcheglova’s brother], who was only six, felt so cautious and so responsible… . we somehow made a game of it. We had children’s gasmasks, which we were all required to carry. And the gasmasks had bags. One had a K sewed on it, and the other had a Y (Yosia). When children asked us, it was obvious what the K was for, but who was Y? He said that Klava [Shcheglova] was kidding around and put the second letter of his name, Lyonia. This was so that the little boy understood and adjusted! We understood we could die if we slipped up or made the slightest mistake.38

35 Instead of Fenia Aronovna. Faina Babitskaia (born in 1933 in Simferopol), USCSF, 49602, October 8, 1998, Simferopol, tape 3. 36 Berta Gudzenko (born in 1932 in Odessa), USCSF, 44558, May 22, 1998, Odessa, tape 3. 37 Roza Lantsman (born in 1929 in Odessa), USCSF, 36391, September 10, 1997, Haifa, tape 2. 38 Klara Shcheglova (born in 1931 in Rostov-on-Don), USCSF, 35826, September 6, 1997, Saint Petersburg, tape 4.

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The oral histories show that Jews often resorted to destroying their documents. The parents, or the children themselves on their parents’ instructions, got rid of the originals, either by burying or burning, hiding them within walls, or, like Leonid Zozovskii’s mother, “rip[ping] them up and throw[ing] them in the river.”39 Because Soviet identification documents specified each person’s ethnicity, not having any evidence of being Jewish could be a significant factor in helping people to survive the occupation. Along with official papers, Jews would often also destroy other potential markers of identity such as photographs and correspondence: “Our landlord told us that if there were any issues with our documents then just burn them. He was a wise man. Mom burned everything—the documents and the photos.”40 Some resourceful narrators did not destroy documents but forged them, writing in name changes or a different ethnicity. They describe this process in detail because it became such a key aspect of their survival. Here is one such story: In Georgievsk, I managed to correct my documents, so we had only Mom’s papers. Mom changed from Il’shtein to Ilingydko. The parents of this Armenian [an acquaintance from the first year of the occupation] were shoemakers. They gave me black paint and I corrected the document at night so as not to let anyone see it. But it didn’t work with my passport, it was too visible. I only did my high school diploma. I did not have any other plan. I simply redid every letter. And this is what came out. This is a terrible last name; there is definitely no such name anywhere in the world. I deleted any extra lines. And I changed Mom to Verita Ivanovna, from Jewish to Ukrainian. But no matter how hard I tried, you could still tell. And I made spots with black paint to make it look like it had been spilled. And I had to make some temporary documents because you couldn’t use this passport too often. I buried all our documents and photos in the ground. So all we were left with was with my Mom’s passport. In Piatigorsk, I went to the police and invented a story that we were Ukrainians who were evacuated with a factory and happened to stay.41

The difficulty in moving from a village to a town could benefit Jews during the Holocaust, as most of them found refuge in the countryside. Having destroyed their original documents, evacuees and refugees could get a kolkhoznik document and become part of the kolkhoz society. 39 Leonid Zozovskii (born in 1936 in Vinnitsa region), USCSF, 47479, August 3, 1998, Kyiv, tape 3. 40 Faina Babitskaia, USCSF, 49602, tape 3. 41 Dina Ilingydko (born in 1923 in Zaporozh’e), USCSF, 33778, July 4, 1997, Zaporizhzhia, tape 4.

(self-)reflection on survival strategies  ❧ 237 At the kolkhoz directorate, we said we were refugees and we were provided with the essentials. They knew we were Jews and asked for our passports, which we showed them. They told us we should hide our passports somewhere and they would give the same documents as other kolkhozniks saying that we were so and so. I think they gave Mom one under a different name.42

Soviet Jews realized that it was not enough to get rid of compromising documents. It was also important to pass as local inhabitants: “We hid the fact we were Jews and told everybody we were Armenians. We said our last name was Prigozhii. We sewed up our passports which said we were Jewish inside pillows. We said we were from Rostov, from a working-class Armenian neighborhood.”43 In the Caucasus, it was easier for dark-haired, dark-complexioned Jews to pass as local Caucasians. Some narrators looked into external similarities between themselves and other peoples. In other cases, local people mistook Jews for their own: We stayed with Karachais… . They gave us food… . I think they knew [we were Jews], because I look Jewish. But in the Caucasus, I could be mistaken for Armenian, that’s what I was told. I was told never to tell anyone I was Jewish and to say I was Armenian, that my father was a Russian with the last name Ivanov and my mother was Armenian.44

Another survival strategy involved following Slavic religious and cultural traditions: “One time, it was Easter and someone said ‘Christ is risen’ to me. Mom quickly took me aside and told me to reply ‘He is risen indeed.’ That is how I learned it.”45 Narrator Abram Gimel’berg recalls that during the occupation his mother “immediately began to cross herself (she knew how) and said she was Russian.”46 Some narrators went beyond simply trying to pass as Russian Orthodox and changed their religion. For many Soviet Jews 42 Taisiia Pochalinskaia (born in 1932 in Vinnitsa), USCSF, 49334, October 14, 1998, Sevastopol, tape 3. 43 Ida Gerchikova (born in 1918 in Turov), USCSF, 37158, November 9, 1997, East Brunswick, New Jersey, tape 4. 44 Klavdiia Kniazhevskaia (born in 1928 in Kiev), USCSF, 25767, January 20, 1997, Kyiv, tape 4. 45 Arnol’d Ryvkind (born in 1930 in Stalino), USCSF, 49669, October 18, 1998, Donets’k, tape 2. 46 Abram Gimel’berg (born in 1927 in Gomel’ region), USCSF, 50601, January 9, 2000, Nazareth Elit, Israel, tape 2.

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this was relatively easy, as Soviet upbringing did not include a religious component. These narrators’ families were antireligious, and therefore baptism could be viewed as a sort of game to disguise oneself and merge with the local population. “What did Mom do? In Kislovodsk, she baptized herself and baptized all of us. She arranged it with a priest … he agreed apparently free of charge.”47 Being constantly on the go took its toll on the refugees. Sometimes narrators began to believe in their own invented stories. Judging by the interviews, this turned out to be a major survival strategy: Mom told us a story for us to repeat. [According to this story] we were driving cattle and not far from the stanitsa Novotroiskaia planes came down, bombed the cattle and killed our father; we buried him in the steppe, carried on on foot and reached this stanitsa. Mom said our family name was now Mishukov. I was now called Vasia… . Riva became Raia, Mom became Liubov’ instead of Tsilia… . We agreed all this while sitting in the bushes, with the Germans already close.48

To explain why they survived, narrators sometimes refer to divine forces, God, fate, and the incomprehensible. Tankha Otershtein survived the Holocaust in the Rostov region as a teenager and devoted his entire life to studying the region’s Jewish and Holocaust history. He attributes his survival to divine intervention. “Among our acquaintances I do not know anyone who would have survived.”49 While analyzing their lives during the Holocaust, narrators attribute great importance to the role of chance events that helped their parents make the only right decisions. For example, this could come in the form of a warning from local or entirely unknown people. The Iuzhelevskii family was advised by a village teacher, “Do anything you can not to go to the registration because only the Jews were registered.”50 The main reason for Jewish survival in the North Caucasus, however, is given by narrator Faina Babitskaia. She states that she, like the majority

47 Larisa Apininskaia (born in 1932 in Vinnitsa), USCSF, 45214, May 22, 1998, Kyiv, tape 4. 48 Gimel’berg, tape 2. 49 Tankha Otershtein (born in 1932 in Rostov-on-Don), USCSF, 31823, May 25, 1997, Taganrog, tape 4. 50 Maia Iuzhelevskaia (born in 1937 in Leningrad), USCSF, 37730, January 4, 1998, Braintree, Massachusetts, tape 5.

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of Jewish survivors, survived only because “the occupation of the Caucasus lasted just six months until we were liberated.”51 In any kind of personal narrative, each person speaks in his or her own individual voice, which is the voice neither of history nor of collective memory. As Samuel Hynes notes, the span of time in a narrative is not historical but personal, because very few personal narratives begin with the start of the war and finish when it ends. Rather, they tell a part of the whole story, which is that individual’s personal war, or period of Nazi occupation in the case of the narratives of the Holocaust survivors, including Jewish “war children.”52 It is clear that the experience of war is the central event in the lives of most narrators. The interviews where the narrator reflects on the reasons for his or her survival during the war are, however, comparatively fewer than the descriptions of survival strategies. The war narrative is a personal story, a part of a personal history happening in a historical reality of World War II. To describe survival strategies is to tell the story of what one lived through and the chain of events that led to liberation. This is the story and basic plot of most of the interviews with Jewish child survivors of the Holocaust. A comparative analysis of thematic and in-depth interviews with “war children”53 reveals that the stories of events that narrators survived in childhood, in all their diversity and detail, share common ground: a child’s mind commits to memory only the most striking events, fraught with strong emotional shock. Stories may not be linked: these are remarkable glimpses into the past that have been recalled in postwar life. The stories of those who were teenagers during the war are more often logically connected, but they also present only a few of the most emotional highlights. Personal narratives are the opportunity for Holocaust survivors to speak out, which became possible only decades later. The Holocaust survivor Alexandra Rosina, summarizing her testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation, stated, “My memories supressed me all the time. I had to speak 51 Faina Babitskaia, USCSF, 49602, tape 4. 52 Samuel Hynes, “Personal Narratives and Communication,” in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Emmanuel Sivan and J. M. Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 219. 53 Categories of “war children” include Slavs who remained in their villages and cities during the occupation; youth who participated in the partisan and underground movement; and Jews—evacuees and refugees—who survived the occupation.

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out so that people knew what it was like to survive [the Holocaust] being a pure-blood Jew!” This important observation is relevant for most personal narrations. Since the Holocaust-related topics were not discussed in the official Soviet memory policy of the war, one was not supposed to speak about it publicly. The untold and unreflected experience of the majority of Holocaust survivors, especially of “war children,” became a traumatic experience, one possible to overcome in the process of writing memoirs or giving interviews.54 They remember the most impressive moments of their past, and they convey their experience often without any reflection. They could reflect a lot upon the postwar period and give their assessment to the whole Holocaust history, but this part of narration does not deal with their own individual experiences.

54 There was no postwar rehabilitation program in the Soviet Union for Red Army soldiers or Soviet citizens who survived the occupation and lost family.

Chapter Nine

The Holocaust on Soviet Territory—Forgotten Story? Individual and Official Memorialization of the Holocaust in Rostov-on-Don Christina Winkler No other event serves more as a defining moment for the majority of Russians than the defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II. Ludmila Lutz-Auras defines the country’s self-perception and view of its wartime past as a constant shift between pride and humiliation.1 The immediate post-Soviet 1 Ludmila Lutz-Auras, “Auf Stalin, Sieg Und Vaterland!”: Politisierung der Kollektiven Erinnerung an Den Zweiten Weltkrieg in Russland [“To Stalin, Victory and Fatherland!”: The politicization of collective memory of World War II in Russia] (Rostock: Springer, 2012), 392–400. Other studies addressing the subject in recent years include Ilja Altman, “Der Stellenwert des Holocaust im Russischen Historischen Gedächtnis” [The significance of the Holocaust in Russian historical memory], in Erinnerung an Diktatur und Krieg: Brennpunkte des kulturellen Gedächtnisses zwischen Russland und Deutschland seit 1945 [Memory of dictatorship and war: Focal points of cultural memory between Russia and Germany since 1945], ed. Andreas Wirsching et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015); Jussi Lassila, “On the Limits of Triumph and Trauma: The Generational Challenge in the Commemoration of the Great Patriotic War in Putin’s Russia,” East European Memory Studies 2 (October 2012): 1–3; Tatiana Zhurzhenko, “Heroes into Victims: The Second World War in Post-Soviet Memory Politics,” Eurozine, October 31,

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Boris Yeltsin era was characterized by harsh disputes among pro-Soviet and reformist historians regarding the need for an entirely new historiography of the war as well as by a growing disillusionment about the widely anticipated quick changes for the better that many Russians had expected from the democratic reforms. Throughout the turbulent 1990s, the defeat of Nazi Germany remained the only event from the Soviet past that evoked positive associations among the population and stayed an inherent part of Russian memory culture. Consequently, it lacked a truly fresh approach toward the question how to assess the victory.2 Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, sensed

2012; Peter Jahn, “22. Juni 1941: Kriegserinnerung in Deutschland und Russland” [June 22, 1941: War memory in Germany and Russia], Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 49/50 (December 2011): 48–54; Andrii Portnov, “Studying Memory in the Polish-Russian-Ukrainian Triangle: Some Observations,” East European Memory Studies 8 (December 2011): 10–12; Beate Fieseler and Jörg Ganzenmüller, eds., Kriegsbilder: Mediale Repräsentationen des “Großen Vaterländischen Krieges” [Images of War: Media representations of the “Great Patriotic War”] (Essen: Klartext, 2010); Ivo Mijnssen, “Die Russische Identität und der Siegesmythos” [Russian identity and the victory myth], RusslandAnalysen 196 (February 12, 2010): 10–13; Irina Shcherbakova, Zerrissene Erinnerung: Der Umgang mit Stalinismus und Zweitem Weltkrieg im heutigen Russland [Torn Memory: Dealing with Stalinism and World War II in Russia today] (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010); Irina Shcherbakova, “Wenn Stumme mit Tauben reden: Generationendialog und Geschichtspolitik in Russland” [When the mute talk to the deaf: Generational dialogue and the politics of history in Russia], Osteuropa 5 (2010): 17–25; Elena Trubina, “Past Wars in the Russian Blogosphere,” Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media 4 (2010): 63–85; Lars Karl and Igor Polianski, eds., Geschichtspolitik und Erinnerungskultur im neuen Russland [The politics of history and the culture of remembrance in the new Russia] (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2009); Withold Bonner and Arja Rosenholm, eds., Recalling the Past, (Re)constructing the Past: Collective and Individual Memory of World War II in Russia and Germany ([Helsinki]: Aleksanteri Institute, 2008); Norbert Frieß, “Nichts ist vergessen, niemand ist vergessen? Erinnerungskultur und kollektives Gedächtnis im heutigen Russland” [Nothing is forgotten, no one is forgotten? Memory culture and collective memory in Russia today] (PhD diss., Universität Potsdam, 2008); James Wertsch, “Blank Spots in Collective Memory: A Case Study of Russia,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 617, no. 1 (May 2008): 58–71. 2 Lutz-Auras, “Auf Stalin,” 134, 396.

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the “Appeal of Communism,” as David Satter terms it,3 and his taking office on New Year’s Eve 2000 marked the beginning of a memory politics that put the defeat of Nazi Germany anew at the center of Russia’s self-image, thus consciously seeking a connection between past and present. This nearly unreflected continuation of the old conception of history bears problematic aspects, however. This particularly applies but is not limited to the role of the Holocaust that had not been part of Soviet historiography and was likewise mostly absent in its early post-Soviet version. Russian memory politics of recent years have, however, brought about a number of important changes regarding the treatment of the Holocaust. This article analyzes the local postwar and post-Soviet treatment of a mass atrocity that was committed by Sonderkommando (SK) 10a of Einsatzgruppe D in Rostov-on-Don. It discusses what narratives persist at a place where a large Jewish community ceased to exist in August 1942. Based on results of a local case study on individual memories and interpretations of the mass atrocity, this article furthermore demonstrates the role of what Aleida Assmann defines as “communicative memory”—the recollections of events and personal experiences that are shared within a community; for example, the family—of this event.4 Remembrance of it has been passed on, and knowledge about it today persists among Rostovans of various age groups. It partly confirms Irina Shcherbakova’s concept of an underground memory that reflected historical truth and coexisted with the official memorialization of the Great Patriotic War.

3 4

David Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 95. Assmann adds to Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory the concepts of communicative and cultural memory, both of which form collective memory. Communicative memory describes those recollections of events and personal experiences that are shared within a community—for example, the family. These recollections are thus bound to the people communicating them, which reduces their life span, according to Assmann, to at best three generations. A society’s cultural memory, on the other hand, is not tied to the individual or to everyday life and is thus not restricted in its life span. Cultural memory is transmitted through media, rites, memorial days, and traditions. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses [Memory spaces: Forms and transformations of cultural memory] (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009), 13.

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Nazi Occupation Rostov-on-Don is often referred to as Russia’s Babi Yar and exemplifies the largest mass extermination of Jews in Soviet Russia during the Holocaust. In August 1942, between fifteen thousand and eighteen thousand Jews were killed there. Although the city shares the fate of many other cities in the occupied Soviet territories, Rostov stands out because the annihilation of the Jewish population was the biggest mass atrocity committed on Jews on Russian territory during the Holocaust. It was witnessed in all its stages by a large number of non-Jewish locals. Rostov was vitally important to both warring parties owing to its location as the gateway to the Caucasus and the region’s oil fields. The city therefore endured particularly heavy fighting and was captured twice by the German army. On November 21, 1941, the German army took control of Rostov for a week. During the few days that the first occupation of Rostov lasted, the Germans began to identify all the Jews remaining in the city. The Jewish inhabitants of Rostov had to wear armbands with the Star of David and were obliged to register themselves. Because of the Soviet counteroffensive, there was not enough time for any further steps to be taken; but this was remedied immediately after the second capture of Rostov on July 24, 1942. On August 2, the Jewish population was ordered to register. One week later came a second notice announcing the supposed relocation of all Jews on August 11. The directive was also aimed at people with just one Jewish parent. Numerous eyewitnesses saw how the Jews arrived at six assembly points in the city center in the morning of August 11, 1942, and handed their luggage over to members of SK 10a. The SK was backed up by local auxiliary police. They calmed the anxious people and eventually loaded them onto the transport trucks. Their destination was Zmievskaia Balka, a ravine on the edge of the city. Other members of SK 10a were waiting there. As they arrived, the victims had to undress. The majority of them were shot on the edge of the ravine with machine guns. Presumably some hundreds were killed in mobile gas vans; children were either poisoned or thrown into the ravine alive. Residents of the Zmievka district were witnesses to the mass shooting and, after the liberation of Rostov, told Soviet investigators about the events of that day. Based on their testimonies as well as others, inspections of the crime scene, and exhumations, the Soviet Extraordinary Commission concluded that fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand Jews were murdered

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in Zmievskaia Balka on August 11 and 12, 1942, together with their nonJewish family members.5

Postwar Remembrance of the Holocaust in Rostov The Postwar Years and Khrushchev Era The true nature of the Zmievskaia Balka mass atrocity—and of the Holocaust per se—was silenced for decades by the Soviet authorities, even though the annihilation of the Jewish population had taken place in full view of many eyewitnesses. In its report about the events in occupied Rostov, party organ Pravda, for instance, used the common phrasing “peaceful Soviet citizens” as a paraphrase for “Jews.”6 Immediately after the war, a monument depicting two Red Army soldiers was raised at Zmievskaia Balka, thus distorting the history of the site, as the identity of the mainly civilian casualties was left unmentioned.7 During the first postwar years, living conditions in heavily destroyed Rostov were characterized by severe material hardship, which contributed to an overall distraction from the past horrors of the war and occupation.8 Often families had lost their main provider to the war, and people faced dire straits. 5 6 7

8

For a detailed description, see Christina Winkler, “Rostov-on-Don 1942: A Little Known Chapter of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, no. 2 (2016): 105–130. “Zverstva nemetsko-fashistskikh liudoedov v Rostove-na-Donu” [The atrocities of the German-fascist cannibals in Rostov-on-Don], Pravda, March 13, 1943, 3. Evgenii Movshovich, Ocherki istorii evreev na Donu [Essays on the history of Jews in the Don region] (Rostov-on-Don: Kniga, 2011), 152. At the beginning of the 1950s, two more memorials titled “kliatva tovarischchei” (comrades’ oath) were built in the area of Zmievskaia Balka. For further information, see L. Voloshinova, “Istoriia i sovremennost’ Zmievskoi balki” [The past and present of Zmievskaia Balka], in Donskoi vremennik, god 2013-I [The Don chronicle, 2013] (Rostov-on-Don: Donskaia gosudarstvennaia publichnaia biblioteka, 2012), 213, http://www.donvrem.dspl.ru/Files/article/m16/5/art. aspx?art_id=1242. For his study on everyday life and the “reconstruction,” Jones analyzed files from the former party archive that reveal dramatic conditions in all spheres

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Notwithstanding this, the events at Zmievskaia Balka did not fall into oblivion, not least because many Jews who had fled Rostov before the second capture returned to the city after liberation and were faced with the tragic truth that the third largest Jewish community in the RSFSR no longer existed. The Soviet regime did not sanction public commemoration of the crime, however. From 1949 on, the remaining Jews of Rostov were denied permission by the authorities to conduct commemoration ceremonies on the territory of the former killing site. Two attempts in 1953 and 1959 were not authorized.9 It was common Soviet practice to manipulate remembrance of World War II by focusing on the victory over Hitler’s Germany in order to deflect a critical examination of the regime’s wartime policy. A drastic aspect of manipulation, apart from concealing the fact that most Jewish communities had been annihilated throughout the occupied territories, was the falsification of the overall number of Soviet victims, particularly the civilian casualties.10 Until Gorbachev’s rise to power, remembrance of the horrors of the war and particularly the suffering of civilians in the occupied territories were not part of public commemoration and coexisted in privacy with the equally suppressed remembrance of the Stalinist terror. Stories of suffering nevertheless occasionally appeared in the local press, as in an article by S. Burmenskii, a participant in the battle of Rostov.11 In his memoirs, published in the local Communist Party’s organ Molot ten years after liberation, the author described how he witnessed Rostov’s recapture. Although focusing on the devastating material damage caused during the occupation, Burmenskii also depicts how citizens mourned their murdered relatives—about one thousand women, children, and elderly men killed by of daily life, particularly housing and food supply. Jeffrey Jones, Everyday Life and the “Reconstruction” of Soviet Russia during and after the Great Patriotic War, 1943–1948 (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2008), 47–48. 9 Movshovich, Ocherki istorii, 154. 10 Official Soviet fatality statistics first named seven million casualties; later the number was raised to ten million. It took until the mid-1980s to display the number of twenty-seven million that has applied since then. Evgeni Andreev et al., Naselenie Sovetskogo Soiuza, 1922–1991 [The population of the Soviet Union, 1922–1991] (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), 78. 11 S. Burmenskii, “V pervye dni: Vospominanie uchastnika boev za Rostov” [In the first days: Memoir of a participant in the fight for Rostov], Molot, February 14, 1953, 2.

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the Nazis and later found in a mass grave in the local prison yard. The mass atrocity in Zmievskaia Balka was not part of his article. Stalin’s death in March 1953 marked the beginning of a new era. The Khrushchev Thaw caused a profound transformation that affected all parts of life in the Soviet Union, including the view of the recent past. For the first time, the Holocaust became a public subject when poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his famous poem “Babi Yar” in 1961 and openly addressed state anti-Semitism and the silencing of the Nazi mass atrocity against Jews in Kiev. The mass killing in Rostov became a subject of the press coverage of trials of local Nazi collaborators in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when several war crimes trials of former Soviet members of SK 10a were conducted in Rostov (1959), nearby Krasnodar (1963), and Stavropol (1961). The perpetrators were charged in connection with the murder of civilians in Rostov and the Rostov oblast. Many Rostovans were charged with collaboration with the Germans after the city’s liberation, according to a study by Jeffrey Jones.12 In the Rostov region alone, 12,196 people were arrested between 1943 and 1953 and were accused of collaboration with the enemy.13 This included a large number of Communist Party members who had not obeyed the order to evacuate: in Rostov oblast between 1943 and 1945, 11,429 cases were heard involving party members who had not evacuated. Jones describes the various facets of collaboration in occupied Rostov-on-Don. Apart from the worst form of collaborationism from the party’s point of view—aiding in mass atrocities against the Soviet population—“assisting the enemy” ranged from staying in the occupied territory and the common procedure of involuntarily sharing one’s home with German soldiers to collaboration in the public administrative sector. Jones reports cases of alleged collaboration in housing organs that involved the handing over of lists of Jews and communists. Other spheres of public life affected were the city’s education, financial, and trades sectors. Owing to protectionism and a lack of qualified personnel in the immediate postliberation and postwar period, however, not all of the accused were later expelled from their positions. They remained party members, plant workers, administrative personnel, and teachers, not least because the party feared for its image had the true number of collaborators in its ranks 12 Jeffrey Jones, “‘Every Family Has Its Freak’: Perceptions of Collaboration in Soviet Russia 1943–1948,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 747–70. 13 Tanja Penter, “Collaboration on Trial: New Source Material on Soviet Post-War Trials against Collaborators,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 783.

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become publicly known. In contrast to the need for playing down the problem, the myth of the foreign agent as an inner enemy was similarly evoked by the regime straight from the immediate postliberation period: Rostov’s local press consequently reported on former collaborators as an imminent threat, thus causing an atmosphere of suspicion in which former forced laborers and prisoners of war were particularly targeted. The first articles about traitors had appeared in Molot shortly after liberation but focused especially on female collaboration.14 The large-scale collaboration of Cossacks and other peoples of the North Caucasus, on the contrary, was not addressed openly, nor were the crimes against the civilian population.15 Public discussion of the topic was also short-lived, as Jones concludes in his study on Rostov: “While collaboration remained a topic of conversation for party leaders, there was minimal discussion of it in the press after 1945.”16 In addition to that, on September 17, 1955, the Supreme Soviet had passed a statute of limitations that granted amnesty to Soviet citizens who had unwillingly collaborated with the occupying force. It did not apply, however, if collaboration included torture or the killing of Soviet citizens, as in the case of the aforementioned members of SK 10a.17 In connection with these collaboration trials Rostov’s local newspapers, Komsomolets, Molot, and Vechernii Rostov, reported on the defendants’ participation in mass atrocities against the local population of Yeysk, Rostov, Taganrog, Shakhty, and Krasnodar.18 More importantly, readers learned 14 Jones, “Every Family,” 759–60. 15 Jones, 759–60. About twenty-eight thousand Caucasians fought on the side of the Germans, among them many Cossacks who welcomed the Germans as liberators from oppression by the Soviet regime. Boris Kovalev, Kollaboratsionizm v Rossii v 1941–1945: Tipy i formy [Collaborationism in Russia in 1941–1945: Types and forms] (Velikii Novgorod: NovGU imeni IAroslava Mudrogo, 2009), 32–34. 16 Jones, “Perceptions of Collaboration,” 765. 17 Kovalev, Kollaboratsionizm, 11. 18 See, for example, V. Nesterenko, “Chas vozmezdiia nastal sudebnyi: Protsess nad gruppoi materikh ubiits” [The hour of reckoning has arrived: Trial of a group of vicious murderers], Komsomolets, July 29, 1961, 3, 4. Nesterenko reports about a trial against collaborators held in Stavropol. See also I. Iudovich, “Shakhtinskaia tragediia: Izmenniki pered sudom” [The Shakhty tragedy: Traitors on trial], Molot, July 19, 1959, 3. Other articles about the same trial appeared in the newspapers Komsomolets and Vechernii Rostov: A. Agafonov, “Vstat’! Sud Idet!” [All stand! Court in session!] Komsomolets, July 21, 1959,

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about the victims’ Jewish identity: in July 1961, Komsomolets reported that sixty witnesses from various North Caucasian towns testified against the defendants at the public Stavropol trial. During the hearing, the mass execution near the village of Zmievka was described by some of the witnesses and made public by Komsomolets.19 In the case of the Krasnodar trial of 1963, readers again heard about the mass murder of thousands of Rostovans, who were “for the most part Jewish nationals.”20 Molot quoted from various witness statements during the trial. The newspaper, for instance, referred to eyewitness En’kova, who testified about seeing the transport of Jews as she watched from her building at 60 Engels Street: “She spoke about heartbreaking scenes of fascist acts of violence against the Jewish population, about how thousands of innocent people were brutally murdered in ‘gas vans’ outside the city in the days of August 1942.”21 Other articles about the mass atrocities of SK 10a followed after the trials had ended.22 In 1966, Russian writer Lev Ginzburg published Bezdna (The Abyss)—a “narrative based on documents” about the Krasnodar trial he had attended—thus also touching on the subject of the Holocaust in Rostov.23 These examples therefore confirm

19 20 21 22

23

3, 4; and Iu. Evdokimov, “Oni ne ushli ot rasplaty … ,” [They did not escape retribution …], Vechernii Rostov, July 20, 1959, 3. For further information on Soviet war crimes trials, see Penter, “Collaboration on Trial,” 782–90. Nesterenko, “Chas vozmezdiia,” 3, 4. B. Cherkasov, “Eto prostit’ nel’zia: Pered sudom predateli, byvshie esesovtsy karatel’nogo otriada ‘SS-10-A’” [This cannot be forgiven: Traitors, former personnel of the SS-10-A execution squad, on trial], Molot, October 15, 1963, 4. M. Andriasov, “Palachi derzhat otvet” [Executioners hold the answers], Molot, October 24, 1963, 4. In April 1964, Molot reported about a former collaborator who had lived in Siberia under a false identity until he was traced by the KGB: I. Iudovich, “Pod chuzhim imenem” [Under another’s name], Molot, April 19, 1964, 4. The following year Molot published two articles dedicated to the German debate over the limitation period of National Socialist crimes: A. Gerasimov, “Gnevnyi golos protesta” [The angry voice of protest], Molot, February 20, 1965; and 1. V. Molozhavenko, “Ne budet proshcheniia palacham!” [There will be no forgiveness for executioners!] Molot, February 20, 1965, 3. Lev Ginzburg, Bezdna: Povestvovanie, osnovannoe na dokumentakh [The abyss: A narrative based on documents] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1967).

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Kiril Feferman’s and Karel Berkhoff’s findings on occasional deviations from the ban on addressing the Jewish victims.24

Cult of Remembrance The removal of Nikita Khrushchev as Communist Party first secretary and chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union in 1964 brought an end to the reform process and a return to authoritarian ideology. Under Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, remembrance of the Great Patriotic War and particularly the heroic victory over Hitlerite Germany were turned into a national cult, implemented by standardized patterns of commemoration. In the 1960s and 1970s, 126 monuments and memorial sites were built all over the Soviet Union.25 Dozens of memorials connected to the Great Patriotic War were also erected in postwar Rostov,26 yet it was only in 1975 that the Zmievskaia Balka tragedy was addressed with a monument dedicated to the victims of fascism. Great effort was devoted to a series of commemoration events organized to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the defeat of fascism, which culminated in the ceremonies surrounding the opening of the memorial complex on May 9. Citizens of all age groups attended the forty-nine political, cultural, academic, social, and sporting events from October 1974 to May 10, 1975, that had been meticulously planned by the gorkom, the city’s Communist Party committee.27 The new memorial complex was erected near the site where the mass killing took place. It included a monumental Soviet-style sculpture in the shape of five partly kneeling victims—a child, a woman, and three men—who show gestures of fear, admonishing, and fright. The Jewish identity of the majority of victims was not mentioned, 24 Kiril Feferman, Soviet Jewish Stepchild: The Holocaust in the Soviet Mindset, 1941–1964 (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2009), 43–63. Karel Berkhoff, “‘Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population’: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–45,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 1 (2009): 61–105. 25 Peter Jahn, Triumph und Trauma: Sowjetische und postsowjetische Erinnerung an den Krieg 1941–1945 [Triumph and trauma: Soviet and post-Soviet memory of the war 1941–1945] (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2005), 13. 26 G. Belen’kii, Rostov-na-Donu: Gorod u tikhovo Dona [Rostov-on-Don: The city on the gentle Don] (Rostov-on-Don: Sigma, 2005), 167–168. 27 Tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii Rostovskoi oblasti (TsDNIRO), fond 13, opis’ 14, delo 11, 16–22.

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nor was the fact that it was a memorial honoring the thousands of civilians who were executed in occupied Rostov in 1942. A permanent exhibition that was displayed in a museum next to the monument, however, informed visitors about the history of the site. The exhibits included documents from the Soviet Extraordinary Commission in which the course of events was described, though again without mentioning the victims’ ethnicity. In several interviews conducted by the author in Rostov in 2011, respondents who were in their forties and fifties at the time of the interviews referred to the memorial and the exhibit. They described how they were taken there in their youth either as Komsomol members, on a school excursion, or even, as in one case, during nursery school. All recall learning there about the mass killing, including its victims, contrary to the usual Soviet practice of silencing the victims of the Holocaust.28 Between 1975 and 2004, the memorial site contained no explicit information on the mostly Jewish victims.29 It was not until the post-Soviet era that the true history of Zmievskaia Balka first became an object of public interest.

Post-Soviet Remembrance of the Holocaust in Rostov The perestroika era and finally the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the beginning of a new approach to the past in each of the former republics. Consequently, remembrance of the Holocaust was no longer taboo, along with other topics that had previously been muted such as Soviet forced laborers and prisoners of war. The newly attained freedom of speech inevitably also became a source of conflict, however. In Rostov, the city’s Jewish community strove for the long overdue acknowledgment that Jews were indeed the main victim group of the Zmievskaia Balka crime. With the opening of the archives, new source material appeared about the mass execution of August 1942. In 1992, the Jewish filmmaker Iurii Kalugin made a documentary about the annihilation of the Jews in his hometown of Rostov. Judenfrei—Svobodno ot Evreev (Judenfrei— Free of Jews) is based entirely on eyewitness accounts and documents from 28 For more information on the interview study, see Christina Winkler, “The Holocaust in Rostov-on-Don: Official Russian Holocaust Remembrance versus a Local Case Study” (PhD diss., University of Leicester, 2015), accessed March 8, 2019, https://lra.le.ac.uk/handle/2381/37247. 29 Movshovich, Ocherki istorii, 153.

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the FSB (Federal’naia sluzhba bezopasnosti [Federal Security Service]) archives that were accessible at the time.30 It took another five years until a first public commemoration ceremony was held at the memorial on August 11, 1997—fifty-five years after the mass execution. According to Rostov ofitsial’nyi, the event was attended by former eyewitnesses, veterans, and—a novelty—representatives of the local and regional administration.31 The following year, the memorial complex was declared a monument of local historical importance by the governor of Rostov oblast. The borders of its territory were officially defined and have since then been guarded.32 Yet given the fact that it still lacked any information as to the true history of the site, the Jewish community urged the city council to attach a memorial plaque that would emphasize the Jewish identity of the victims. In 2004, such a plaque was finally installed with the approval of the mayor.33 Its inscription read, “At this place on August 11 and 12, 1942, more than 27,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis. This is the largest Holocaust memorial in Russia.” Between 2007 and 2011, the memorial complex was reconstructed with public means, which included a revision of the old exhibition.34 While parts of it still displayed Soviet posters and slogans, it now distinctly informed the viewer about the extermination of the Jews in Rostov as part of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Archival materials and photos of victims were presented as well as personal belongings found during the memorial’s construction in the 1970s.35 30 31 32 33 34 35

Iurii Kalugin, Judenfrei—Svobodno ot Evreev [Judenfrei—free of Jews], accessed April 10, 2020, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r15tVdzkRyw&feature=player_ embedded. “V pamiat’ o proshlom” [In memory of the past], Rostov ofitsial’nyi 31 (140), August 17, 1997, 1. Voloshinova, “Istoriia i sovremennost’,” 213. Galina Kozlova and Anna Dunaeva, “Evrei protiv mirnykh grazhdan” [Jews against peaceful citizens], 161.ru, December 14, 2011, https://161.ru/text/ gorod/467076.html. Voloshinova, “Istoriia i sovremennost’,” 213. The museum only seldom opens for the public, however. The author made several attempts during a two-month stay in 2011 but managed to visit the exhibition only in 2012 and 2017 during the ceremony on the occasion of the seventieth and seventy-fifth anniversaries of the mass execution.

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A highly controversial incident, however, occurred in November 2011, after the refurbishment, when the city’s cultural administration had the memorial plaque removed and replaced by a new one that referred to the victims in Soviet style, speaking of “peaceful Soviet citizens” without mentioning their ethnicity. The administration’s main argument was that proof that the victims were indeed mainly Jews was missing. The matter prompted an outcry among the local and national Jewish community and received attention in the local and even foreign press.36 It was taken to court, where the question whether the Zmievka ravine is actually a Holocaust site was processed by an expert commission. Regardless of the commission’s conclusion that the majority of victims of the mass execution were Jews, the court announced a decision in favor of the city administration. Triggered by the trial, a public debate arose over Rostov’s and, for that matter, Russia’s treatment of its past. On the local level, various interest groups discussed the question of whether or not it would be correct to refer only to the Jewish victims of the mass execution.37 The local Council of Veterans argued that the memorial should not have been renamed, whereas the regional office of the Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments noted that the first plaque should never have been removed.38 The matter was also debated on one of Russia’s most prominent radio stations, Ekho Moskvy, where Iurii Kanner, head of the Russian Jewish Congress, and Tamara Pletneva, vice-chair of the Duma’s Committee on Nationality Matters, responded to questions regarding the

36 For Russian articles, see Kozlova and Dunaeva, “Evrei protiv mirnykh grazhdan.” For international media responses, see, for example, “Russia Row over Nazi Massacre Site in Rostov-on-Don,” BBC News, January 24, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16697485; Alex Rychin, “Revisionism Not Remorse,” Jerusalem Post, February 17, 2012, http:// www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Revisionism-not-remorse; and Palash Ghosh, “Russian Holocaust Memorial Removes Mention of Jewish Victims,” International Business Times, January 24, 2012, http://www.ibtimes.com/ russian-holocaust-memorial-removes-mention-jewish-victims-400060. 37 Mariia Zolotareva, “Geroev postavili v ochered’” [They put heroes in a queue], in Donskoi vremennik, god 2013-i, 211. 38 Dariush Korvel’, “Zmievskaia Balka ushla ot evreiskogo voprosa” [Zmievskaia balka left behind the Jewish question], 161.1 ru, January 18, 2012, https://161. ru/text/gorod/476300.html.

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removal of the memorial plaque.39 Pletneva offered insights into the twisted, albeit still widespread, perception of the war on Russian territory when she pointed out that even in a city like Rostov a memorial should honor all victims, not just specific nationalities. This was the sentiment that underlay the removal of the memorial plaque. The Jewish community’s protest against that removal prompted an intense response, and not only in Rostov. Pletneva’s point of view was shared by many, as a roundtable discussion titled “Remember us!” (“Pomnite nas!”) at Rostov’s public state library demonstrated. The talk was organized by the library and the regional society of local historians and took place only a few days after Victory Day in 2012. It brought together Jewish and non-Jewish historians, architects, lecturers, and other people interested in the question of how to shape future public commemoration of World War II victims. A heated but inconclusive discussion ensued among the participants as to whether it is necessary to point to the Jewish victims in connection with the plaque at the memorial.40 The seventieth anniversary of the mass execution three months later was characterized by a unique ceremony when about one thousand participants—citizens of Rostov and visitors from other parts of Russia and abroad—performed a “March of the Living” along the same route the victims took to the execution site. Many of them wore armbands with a yellow Star of David to indicate the Jewish nationality of the victims. Former chief rabbi of Israel Meir Lau attended the march along with international guests from thirteen countries, including Belarus, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.41 The participants in a subsequent international conference organized by the Russian Research and Educational 39 “Skandal s memorialom zhertv Kholokosta v Rostove-na-Donu” [Scandal surrounding the memorial to victims of the Holocaust in Rostov-onDon], Ekho Moskvy, January 24, 2012, http://echo.msk.ru/programs/ razvorot-morning/851833-echo/. 40 Zolotareva, “Geroev postavili,” 211. 41 See, for example: “Russian March Marks 70 Years since Nazi Pogrom,” Haaretz, August 13, 2012, http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/ russian-march-marks-70-years-since-nazi-pogrom-1.457916; “Rabbi Lau’s Historical Visit to Rostov’s Community,” Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, accessed April 10, 2020, https://fjc-fsu.org/rabbi-laus-historicalvisit-to-rostovs-community; and Sergei Petukhov, “Spor o Kholokoste v Rostove-na-Donu ili beda iz razdeleniia na etnosti” [Debate on the Holocaust in Rostov-on-Don or a calamity resulting from ethnic divisions], Ria novosti, August 13, 2012, http://ria.ru/analytics/20120813/722742997.html.

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Holocaust Center adopted a resolution, signed by representatives of the above-mentioned thirteen countries, that called on the governments of those post-Soviet states who had not yet implemented the United Nations resolution on Holocaust remembrance (A/RES/60/7, November 1, 2005) to do so in order to promote Holocaust education.42 The resolution also appealed to the local administration of Rostov to revise the text of the newly attached memorial plaque. The city’s legal authorities were not impressed, however. After nearly a year, on October 15, 2012, the Kirov district court announced its decision not to remove the new memorial plaque, arguing that not only Jews were murdered at Zmievskaia Balka and thereby reconfirming the neutral text of the new plaque. The fact that the maintenance of the memorial was financed through the city’s budget was mentioned as one of the main criteria used to judge the complex not an official Holocaust memorial.43 Soon after the court announced its decision, representatives of various social groups approached the governor of Rostov oblast with a resolution to officially rank the memorial as a monument that commemorates the Soviet civilians who were murdered at Zmievskaia Balka—regardless of their nationalities. The members of “Boevoe bratstvo” (Fighting Brotherhood), “My—russkie” (We Are Russians) and other local organizations also called on the regional Ministry of Cultural Affairs to intensify media coverage of the topic.44 The Jewish community, on the other hand, was accused of hav42 For the full Russian text of the resolution, see “Rezoliutsiia VII Mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii ‘Uroki Kholokosta i sovremennaia Rossiia,’” [Resolution VII of the international conference “Lessons of the Holocaust and contemporary Russia”], Tsentr i fond “Kholokost,” August 14, 2012, holocf.ru/ резолюция-vii-международной-конференци/. 43 Olesia Dianova, “Sud v Rostove-na-Donu rassmatrivaet isk o vozvraschenii nadpisi o zhertvakh Kholokosta na memorial v Zmievskoi balke” [Court in Rostov-on-Don considers claim concerning the return of the inscription about Holocaust victims to the memorial at Zmievskaia balka], Kavkazskii uzel, July 27, 2012, http://www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/210333. 44 The memorial plaque was displayed in the exhibition hall of the museum after its removal: Olesia Dianova, “Rostovskaia evreiskaia obschchina namerena ustanovit’ pamiatnyi znak u memoriala v Zmievskoi balke, predstaviteli chasti NPO vystupaiut protiv etogo” [The Rostov Jewish community intends to put a commemorative sign on the memorial at Zmievskaia balka, some NGO representatives protest against it], Kavkazskii uzel, December 7, 2012, http://www. kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/216637.

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ing incited ethnic tensions by demanding the return of the memorial plaque to its former place. Months before the verdict was reached, the Jewish community of Rostov oblast had decided to put up its own Holocaust memorial and turned to the regional authorities for approval.45 The request was endorsed in November 2012, although it could not be implemented on the local level. In April 2013, Rostov’s Commission for the Definition of Communally Significant Places and Installation of Memorial Signs did not grant an area for the construction of a subsequent memorial on the territory of the memorial complex.46 This brought a temporary end to the public dispute. On August 11, 2013, the seventy-first anniversary of the mass execution, the Jewish community conducted a commemoration to honor its victims, whereas the cultural administration opted for a separate ceremony dedicated to the memory of the “peaceful citizens and prisoners of war” (as announced on the city’s website) that was arranged prior to the community’s event on the same day. In September 2013, the Federal Fund for the Promoting of Public Housing announced a competition for the acquisition of building rights for an area right next to the memorial. To date (2018), however, this has not been followed by any building activities.47 An unexpected turn occurred in December 2013 when the aforementioned Commission for the Definition of Communally Significant Places and Installation of Memorial Signs announced that the memorial plaque would once more be replaced. The new and presumably final version presented a revised inscription that sought to appease all conflicting parties— without, however, mentioning the Holocaust: “Here, at the Zmievka ravine, in August 1942, more than 27 thousand peaceful citizens of Rostov and 45 Dianova. 46 The Jewish community had requested a territory opposite the memorial, which, according to the commission, was adjacent to the memorial’s protected area and was therefore rejected: Anastasia Nastia, “Rostovskie chinovniki otkazalis’ vydelit’ zemliu pod pamiatnyi znak zhertvam Kholokosta” [Rostov officials refused to grant land by the memorial sign for victims of the Holocaust], Newsland, April 20, 2013, https://newsland.com/community/5031/content/ rostovskie-chinovniki-otkazalis-vydelit-zemliu-pod-pamiatnyi-znak-zhertvamkholokosta/1947251. 47 “Pod Zmievskoi balke postroiat zhiloi kompleks” [A residential complex is being built by Zmievskaia balka], Rostov-dom, September 16, 2013, http:// rostov-dom.info/2013/09/pod-zmievskojj-balkojj-postroyat-zhilojj-kompleks/.

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Soviet prisoners of war were murdered by the Hitlerite occupiers. Among the victims were representatives of many nationalities. The Zmievka ravine is the biggest site of a mass extermination of Jews by the fascist aggressors on Russian territory during the Great Patriotic War.”48 This decision brought a temporary end to the discussion and was welcomed by Jewish organizations throughout Russia. Five years on, the Jewish community’s archivist has identified more than four thousand names of Jews who perished in the ravine. The Russian Jewish Congress approached the city administration for permission to attach the names to the stelae that surround the memorial, but it now needs to prove first that the names that were detected in archival documents truly belonged to Holocaust victims and not to forced laborers who were taken to Germany.

Post-Soviet Holocaust Commemoration in Russia The recent treatment of Holocaust remembrance in Rostov, and particularly the dispute over the Zmievskaia Balka memorial complex, can be interpreted as a local example illustrating the state of Holocaust commemoration in Russia as a whole. It was put on the political agenda only recently and in a narrow framework that is reduced to the hero narrative that characterizes overall Russian cultures of World War II remembrance. In 2012, the Russian Ministry of Education announced it would include Holocaust education in the national curriculum and make it an obligatory part of the national exams. The inclusion of the Holocaust in a draft of the official Russian Standard of History Education in 2003 was a first step toward making the Holocaust a mandatory topic in history textbooks.49 In 2005, Russia had adopted the aforementioned UN resolution 60/7; therefore, the 2012 announcement was a consistent next step and a signal toward the country’s Western partners, in terms of what Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have defined as globalization of Holocaust remembrance. They argue that Western cultures of remembrance have been subject to globalization and, as a result, are based on similar conclusions drawn from the 48 Ia. Chevelia, “Sila slova” [The power of the word], Rostov ofitsial’nyi, December 19, 2013, http://rostovnadonu.bezformata.com/listnews/sila-slova/16345320/. 49 Ilya Altman, “Holocaust Education in Russia Today: Its Challenges and Achievements,” The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, 2012, https://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/paper19.shtml, 121.

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Holocaust that have led to a moral imperative to prevent the world from repeating genocide.50 The remembrance of the Holocaust functions as a unifying link to which Western cultures have committed themselves, and it has helped to create an international (Western) community of shared values. Regarding memory politics, the Russian Federation has only just begun to participate in this process. Russian Holocaust remembrance mainly focuses on the liberation of Auschwitz because it corresponds with the overall narrative of the Great Patriotic War. The focus on the heroic past in which the country fought and defeated fascism has been the main political guideline during Putin’s presidency, to the near exclusion of remembrance of subjects that do not fit into this narrative—for example, collaboration or the suffering of Red Army soldiers in German captivity. Nonetheless, the Russian government has demonstrated its will to promote Holocaust remembrance and education. For the past three years (2015–18), the “Week of Remembrance” that is conducted annually around January 27 has received state support. It was initiated by the Russian Jewish Congress and the country’s first Holocaust research institute, Tsentr Kholokost, founded in 1992 by Mikhail Gefter and Il’ia Al’tman. It has to be considered an achievement of the long-term effort these civil society organizations devoted to establishing a greater public awareness that during the last fourteen years (2004–18) Holocaust remembrance is also on the agenda of Russian memory politics. The political guideline, it seems, is yet twofold and allows only small deviations from the focus on remembrance of the Great Patriotic War. A suggestion by the head of the Russian Jewish Congress to make January 27, the day Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, a national holiday was rejected by then president Dmitry Medvedev. He argued that Russia already had June 22, remembering the attack of Hitler’s Germany and its victims. Another conflicting circumstance is that January 27 also marks the end of the Siege of Leningrad and is therefore linked to this event in the Russian collective memory. Hence, Russia’s official treatment of the past is stuck in the narrative of the Great Patriotic War and shows few signs of reform. The case of Rostov and the highly emotional debate over the Zmievskaia Balka memorial illustrate that even in a multiethnic city that became the largest Holocaust site in Russia, it is still perceived as breaking a taboo to focus on other victim 50 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust [Memory in the global age: The Holocaust] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 149.

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groups than the ones usually honored in connection with the Great Patriotic War.

Holocaust Remembrance Survey in Rostov A surprising result of the aforementioned qualitative interview study on individual memories and narratives about the Holocaust that the author conducted in Rostov just weeks before the removal of the original memorial plaque was, therefore, how the interviewees perceived the state of collective memory of the war. The majority of respondents argued that remembrance of the Great Fatherland War was a mainly political construct of decreasing importance to society as ever fewer eyewitnesses are still alive.51 Regarding the mass atrocity at Zmievskaia Balka, the study interestingly revealed a clear tendency toward remembering the mass murder as a crime against Jews. Nearly all respondents said that Jews were murdered in August 1942, but many of these respondents pointed out that there were also other victims, whereas some said Jews were the only victims. Perhaps the most interesting result of the interview study is the fact that the majority of the respondents had both a broad general knowledge about the Holocaust as well as about the annihilation of the Jews of Rostov. In terms of general knowledge about the Holocaust, this included an understanding of the racist anti-Semitism of the Nazi ideology and knowledge of other victim groups such as and Sinti and Roma, as well as knowledge of other places in the previous Soviet Union where mass atrocities comparable to the one in Rostov were committed or of the overall victim numbers.52 Even the youngest among the participants, 51 The collection of relevant data is based on field research conducted in the city of Rostov-on-Don in September and October 2011. The criteria for the recruitment of interviewees were non-Jewishness, age, place of residence and birth, and employment status. Respondents were chosen with reference to the time period in which they experienced their socialization: (1) Stalinism, (2) post-Stalinism and pre-Perestroika, (3) Perestroika and post-Soviet. Winkler, “The Holocaust in Rostov-on-Don,” 49–56. 52 A sociopsychological study carried out in 2008 on the correlation of tolerance and level of knowledge about the Holocaust among Russians came to strongly deviating conclusions. The analysis was carried out on a national level, including 874 participants. Its findings show that about half of the respondents knew what the term “Holocaust” stands for and that Jews were its victims. More than 91 percent of the respondents said they did not learn about the Holocaust

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not to mention the middle-aged and older interviewees, deplored the downturn of the educational system and consequently of young Russians’ history awareness. Many spoke of a loss of national values in today’s Russian society and identified capitalism and a youthful generation ignorant of the country’s history as the main problems. As one of the youngest respondents commented, aghast, “They conduct surveys in Rostov, ask teenagers: ‘Who won World War II?’ They say: ‘The Americans.’” Even though the study represents only the personal knowledge and opinions of its participants, its results are interesting insofar as they partly contradict Russian politics of memory. Paralleling the results of Harald Welzer’s study Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi53 on German family memory of the war and the Holocaust, these interviews illustrated a similar disparity between official and communicative memory. Regardless of age, respondents addressed subjects that proved the existence of a parallel memory based on communication within the family and other social groups. The aspect of local collaboration, for instance, proved to be a highly ambivalent subject throughout the sample. While the official narrative stresses the role of Russians as rescuers of Jews, the interviews in many ways illustrated the opposite. The respondents perceived collaboration as a problematic aspect in the city’s wartime history, as it challenged the general self-image by being a central element in facilitating the Holocaust in Rostov. The deviation between what Welzer terms “basis narrative”—in this case, the official narrative of the Great Patriotic War—and communicative memory is characterized by an essentially different aspect when compared to the findings of the German study that also demonstrated differing official and communicative memories. While young Germans tended to create their private family memories that partly deviated strongly from historical truths, the countermemory detected in the Rostov interviews reflected perceptions of anywhere, and over 80 percent reported they never talk about the genocide. Igor’ Berno-Bellekur, Social’no-psikhologicheskii analiz vzaimosviazi tolerantnosti i informirovannosti o katastrofe [A social psychological analysis of the correlation between tolerance and awareness of the Holocaust] (Jerusalem: Open University of Israel, 2008), 4, 19, 27, 28. 53 Harald Welzer, Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi: The Holocaust in German Family Remembrance (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2005); Harald Welzer et al., eds., Opa war kein Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis [Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi: National Socialism and the Holocaust in family remembrance] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2012).

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the past that are free of such a bias. In other words, the private memories and respondents’ interpretation of history bear more relation to what we know are historic truths than does the Russian basis narrative, which leaves out vital elements of the civilian experience of war and occupation and yet continues so far to remain unquestioned by the majority of the Russian public. Similar to Welzer’s findings on remembrance of World War II and the Holocaust in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway,54 this “success” of the Russian basis narrative might, however, also originate in the fact that respondents in the Rostov study could integrate deviating aspects of their personal or family memories into it while the overall narrative of the heroic fight against evil remained intact. A broader analysis in the form of a representative study comparable to Welzer’s in Germany will be needed to see if the conclusions made on Rostov are merely a local phenomenon, since the population of areas that were not under German rule may not perceive the difference between the basis narrative and local forms of remembrance as significant and may present different results regarding knowledge and remembrance of the Holocaust. An important aspect for such future research on communicative memory is, however, Russian demography. From the 1960s until the 2010s, life expectancy had been sinking in Russia, which explains why the number of people aged over fifty-nine today amounts to only 16.3 percent of the total population.55 Keeping in mind the short life span of communicative memory, remembrance of the Great Patriotic War is obviously already in the process of transition from communicative to cultural memory; but so is remembrance of the Holocaust. The lower life expectancy of Russians permits the observation that in their country, unlike other European countries with higher life

54 Harald Welzer, ed., Der Krieg der Erinnerung: Holocaust, Kollaboration und Widerstand im europäischen Gedächtnis [The war of remembrance: The Holocaust, collaboration and resistance in European memory] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2007). 55 According to a study by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, life expectancy suddenly began to sink in the 1960s after a period of rapid population growth between the 1950s and 1970s. Stephan Sievert, Sergey Zakharov, and Rainer Klingholz, “The Waning World Power: The Demographic Future of Russia and the other Soviet successor states,” accessed January 14, 2019, https://www.berlin-institut.org/en/publications/studies-in-english/the-waningworld-power.html.

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expectancy rates, the process of memory transition has begun earlier.56 In Rostov, the majority of protagonists in the public dispute about the memorial plaque were people who had been socialized in the Soviet Union; no youth organization took part in the initiative that approached the governor of Rostov oblast. The case of Rostov therefore demonstrates that it is all the more important to promote Holocaust education in Russia in order to prevent future generations from unlearning their history.

56 For example, “the average Russian life span is … almost 13 years shorter than in Germany.” The difference between Russia and France is even bigger. Sievert, Zakharov, and Klingholz, “The Waning World,” 27.

Glossary aul

North Caucasian (non-Russian) village

Einsatzgruppe

Mobile killing unit of the Schutzstaffel/Sicherheitsdienst, a “deployment group”

Einsatzkommando

Subunit of an Einsatzgruppe, a “deployment commando”

Hiwis

An abbreviation of Hilfswilliger, noncombatant auxiliaries serving in the German army

khutor Hamlet krai

Administrative division of Russia or the former Soviet Union that subordinate to a republic; a territory

kolkhoz

Soviet collective farm

kulak

Well-off Soviet peasant

oblast

Administrative division of Russia or the former Soviet Union that is subordinate to a republic; a province or region

okrug

Administrative division of Russia or the former Soviet Union similar to an oblast

Ortskommandantur

Regional headquarters of the German Army

raion

Administrative division that is subordinate to a krai, or oblast, or autonomous oblast; a district

Reichskommisariat

Largest administrative unit in the German-occupied Soviet territories

Schutzstaffel

“Protection squads” of Nazi Germany, the SS

sel’sovet

Soviet rural council, a subdivision of a raion

Sicherheitsdienst

Security Service of Nazi Germany, the SD

Sonderkommando

Subunit of an Einsatzgruppe, a “special commando”

sovkhoz

Soviet state farm

stanitsa

Cossack settlement

264  ❧  gloss ary starosta

Village elder

Teilkommando

Subunit of an Einsatzkommando or Sonderkommando

Volksdeutsche

Ethnic German

Wehrmacht

German Army

The titles of ranks in the SS have the following equivalents: SS-Hauptscharführer

Sergeant major

SS-Oberführer

Brigadier general

SS-Obersturmbannführer Lieutenant colonel SS-Obersturmführer

First lieutenant

SS-Standartenführer Colonel SS-Sturmbannführer Major SS-Untersturmführer

Second lieutenant

Bibliography Archives Bundesarchiv Berlin (BA Berlin) Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BA Koblenz) Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg (BAL) Bundesbeauftragter für die Stasi-Unterlagen (BStU) Derzhavnyi arkhiv Avtonomnoi respubliky Krym (DAARK) Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Krasnodarskogo kraia (GAKK) Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Department of Oral History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (ICJ) Militärarchiv Freiburg (MA Freiburg) National Archives and Records Administration, United States (NARA) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (RGAE) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) Staatsanwaltschaft München I (StA München I) The National Archives, United Kingdom (TNA) Tsentral’nyi arkhiv ministerstva oborony (TsAMO) United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) University of Southern California Shoah Foundation (USCSF) Yad Vashem Archive (YVA) Yad Vashem Hall of Names (YVHN) Yahad-In Unum (YIU)

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Contributors Andrej Angrick is a historian at the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur in Hamburg. He is author of several books about the Holocaust, his most recent being “Aktion 1005”—Spurenbeseitigung von NS-Massenverbrechen 1942–1945 [“Aktion 1005”—Tracing Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945] (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018). He is currently working on the 1961–89 siege of West Berlin. Crispin Brooks is the curator of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. His publications include “Visual History Archive Interviews on the Holocaust in Ukraine,” in The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, Conference Presentations (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013), and studies of Russian avant-garde poetry. Georgi Derluguian is a professor of sociology at New York University Abu Dhabi. His professional interests are in macrohistorical sociology and the evolution of human societies. Derluguian’s works include Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (London: Verso, 2004); Kak ustroen etot mir [The way this world works] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo instituta Gaidara, 2012); and “What Communism Was,” in the volume Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), cowritten with Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, and Craig Calhoun. Kiril Feferman is a senior lecturer and the head of the Holocaust History Center at Ariel University. His scholarly interests include the history of the Holocaust and the Soviet Union. He has written on these topics in leading scholarly journals such as Modern Judaism, Cahiers du monde russe, Europe-Asia Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Nationalities Papers, and War in History. His book The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus was published by Yad Vashem Publications in 2016. Irina Rebrova is a researcher at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University, Berlin, where she defended her PhD thesis, “Re-constructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus,” in September 2018. She is also a researcher at the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. She has published a number of articles on the oral history, gender history, and social

294  ❧  contributors memory of World War II in Russian, English, and German academic journals and edited collections. Her current project deals with the history and memory of the people with disabilities and Jewish doctors who became Nazi victims in the North Caucasus (https://nsvictims.ru/). Stephen Tyas is an independent scholar whose research is centered on German security police operations in Eastern Europe. He has written extensively on German police decodes (e.g., the “Hoefle telegram”), Gestapo personnel, and SS-Einsatzgruppen. His most recent work is SS-Major Horst Kopkow: From the Gestapo to British Intelligence (Stroud, UK: Fonthill, 2017). He is currently writing a history of Einsatzgruppe D. Andrej Umansky is a historical adviser at Yahad-In Unum, Braman Endowed Fellow of the Forensic Study of the Holocaust at Georgetown University, and lawyer. He received his PhD from the University of Amiens, France, in 2016, with a dissertation on the extermination of the Jews in the North Caucasus during World War II. His most recent work is La Shoah à l’Est: Regards d’Allemands [The Shoah in the East: The views of Germans] (Paris: Fayard, 2018). Christina Winkler received her PhD in Holocaust studies at the University of Leicester in 2015. She is a research associate at the University of Potsdam and the Russian State University for the Humanities and is conducting a joint research project about the killing of psychiatric patients in occupied Soviet Russia. William Youmans is an associate professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. He is broadly interested in questions of transnationalism, power, and communication, and his primary research interests include global news, technology, law, and politics. He wrote Unlikely Audience: Al Jazeera’s Struggle in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Sufian Zhemukhov is an associate research professor of international affairs at George Washington University. He studies ethnic politics, nationalism, and religion. His book with Mikhail Alexseev, Mass Religious Ritual and Intergroup Tolerance: The Muslim Pilgrims’ Paradox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), received the 2019 ISA Best Book Award in Religion and International Relations.

Index Abaikhanov, Deiu, 165, 170 Abazas, 153, 157, 158, 180 Abinsk, 122 Abkhazia, 43 Abwehr, 73, 95, 96, 97 Achmeteli, Michael, 83 Adygea (Adyghe autonomous oblast), 1, 2, 45, 190n17 Al Masoudi, 28 Al’tman, Il’ia, 258 Alekseevskaia, 121 Alexander II, Czar, 9 Aliev, Umar, 154 Alushta, 102 Amirov, Don, 193 Anan’ev, 72 Anapa, 79, 111, 116, 122 anti-Bolshevism, 19, 22, 23, 63, 73–74, 96, 98, 114, 178, 182, 183 anti-Semitism, 3, 19, 22, 51–52, 61–63, 114, 149, 177, 183, 193, 217, 223n9, 230–31, 247, 251 Arkhangel’skaia, 121, 122 Armavir, 3, 85, 86, 104, 106, 116, 117, 122, 123, 128, 203 Armenia (Armenian SSR), 2, 30n13 Armenians, 27–31, 34, 39, 42n39, 46–47, 98, 112 Artvin, 46 Arzgir, 91 Ashkenazi Jews, 13, 51–52, 203–13 Astrakhan, 3, 70, 74, 103 Auschwitz, 97, 258

Azerbaijan (Azerbaijani SSR), 2, 30, 30n13, 31, 75, 97, 99, 103, 110n22, 191 Azerbaijanis (Azeris), 19, 30, 31, 42n39, 75, 96, 98, 112, 114 Bairamukov, Kady, 164, 168n62, 178 Bakhchisarai, 102 Bakshiev, Iosif, 214, 215, 216 Baku, 3, 15, 30, 30n13, 42n39, 43n39, 70, 71, 74, 103 Balkars, 1, 11, 17, 147, 153 Beck, Oberstleutnant von, 89 Belaia Glina, 3, 85, 119n4, 121, 123, 126–31, 143, 144 Belinsch, Moses, 87 Belorechensk, 121, 122 bereavement, 231 Beresanskaia asylum, 115 Beria, Lavrenty, 29, 45, 148, 156 Berlin, 15, 71, 86, 97, 98, 100, 106, 109 Beshtokov, Kasim, 185 Beslenei, 3, 14, 175, 184, 202–13, 216n103, 217, 232n31 Bezlesnyi, 121, 138 Bezskorbnaia, 122 Bierkamp, Walther, 78, 82, 84, 93, 99, 103, 104, 110, 112, 187, 188, 189, 196–99, 200 Black Sea, 1, 31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 46 Blagodarnoe, 115, 117 Blagodatnoe, 82

296  ❧  index Bogdanovka, 13n30, 159, 188, 191–92, 195–96, 213, 228n7 Bolte, Heinrich, 107, 108 Bordunov, 166 Bratkovskoe, 122 Braune, Werner, 71 Bräutigam, Otto von, 199 Brezhnev, Leonid, 30, 250 Buddhism, 8, 27n6, 45–46 Budennovsk, 59n38, 65, 90–91, 93 Burashnikov, 166n54 Caspian Sea, 1, 15, 27, 70, 83, 90, 103 Catherine the Great, 40 Caucasus Mountains, 1, 2, 3, 9, 15, 27, 28n6, 29, 31, 34, 145–46, 203 Chapell, George. See Chapodze, Yuri Chapodze, Yuri, 113 Checheno-Ingush ASSR, 2, 10n5, 11, 15, 191 Chechens, 1, 10, 11, 26, 34, 38, 43, 45, 147 Chechnya, 1, 9, 15, 35, 38, 43, 45, 185, 193 Cherkes (Circassian) autonomous oblast, 2, 11, 149, 202, 228n3 Cherkes, 11, 155, 157, 164n45, 190n17, 209, 232. See also Circassians Cherkessk, 85, 115, 116, 149, 203, 205, 221 ChGK. See Extraordinary State Commission children’s homes, evacuation of, 54, 160, 161, 174, 181, 203, 232 Christianity, 8, 20, 28, 29, 30n13, 36, 38, 214 Christmann, Kurt, 71, 78, 79, 119n6, 228n2 Circassia, 31, 35, 38, 39, 43 Circassians, 1, 9, 14, 32, 34, 36, 38–39, 43n39, 45, 153, 155, 190, 202–207, 211–13, 217

collaboration, 18–20, 149, 195–96, 215; in Kabardino-Balkaria, 164n45, 185–86, 194; in Karachai region, 19, 147–48, 163–68, 170–71, 177–79, 182–83; in Rostov oblast, 247–48, 260; of Cossacks, 19–20, 22, 163, 167, 180, 248, 248n15. See also Kaukasier Kompanie collective farms. See farms (kolkhoz, sovkhoz) collectivization, 45, 154–55, 164–65, 165n47, 178 concentration camps, 233 Cossacks, 9, 12, 40–42, 45, 46, 52, 58, 63, 153, 154, 177. See also collaboration, of Cossacks Crimea (Crimean ASSR), 2, 7, 13n29, 14, 16, 18, 60, 71, 72, 73, 84, 92, 95–97, 101, 102, 103, 111, 134, 147, 149, 160, 183, 188, 196 Crimean Tatars, 74, 147, 149 Dagestan (Dagestani ASSR), 1, 2, 9, 10, 10n5, 10n6, 11, 13n26, 27, 31, 34, 35, 38, 153, 190, 191 Deeters, Gerhard, 201 Denikin, Anton, 41, 43, 153 deportation of ethnic groups, Soviet, 1, 4, 5, 21, 23–24, 45, 146–48, 168, 174, 181–83 Derluguian, Ter-Karapet, 46 Dinskaia, 122 Dnepropetrovsk, 3, 92, 127 Dneprovskaia, 121 drownings, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143 Dudaev, Dzhokhar, 45 Dyshekov, M., 164n45 Dzampayev, Urusbek, 105n14 Dzhanibekov, Abdul-Malik, 181 Dzhegonasko-Evreiskii, 153 Dzheguta, 155, 158, 180 Dzhiginka, 66, 123

index  ❧ 297 Dzutov, Petr. See Magkaev (Dzutov), Petr Edigaj, Sergei, 98, 112 Einsatzgruppe D, 16, 71–73, 93, 96–100, 103–4, 106, 110–12 Einsatzkommando 10a (EK 10a), 80 Einsatzkommando 11a (EK 11a), 103, 104 Einsatzkommando 11b (EK 11b), 99, 115, 116, 117, 127 Einsatzkommando 12 (EK 12), 71, 80–82, 86–91, 93, 99, 103–4, 106– 8, 115–17, 170 Elbrus, Mount, 70, 146 Elisbarischwili, Wasso, 98, 112 Elista, 3, 70, 91–92, 92n58, 113 Essentuki, 3, 56, 86, 89, 108, 109, 131n46, 186n5, 233n32 ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), 19, 41, 82, 98, 99, 111, 113, 127, 162, 170, 200 evacuees, Jewish, 14, 52–55, 68, 230–31; access to food, 56; access to information, 55–56, 64–67; antiSemitism experienced by, 61–63, 230–31; children, 203–13; distribution of, 58, 160–62; employment of, 57; in Karachai region, 160–62, 180–81, 183; in Krasnodar krai, 118–19; personal circumstances of, 56; relations with Soviet authorities, 59–61; relations with local population, 61, 230. See also children’s homes, evacuation of; sanatoria, evacuation of Evpatoria, 95, 102 Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), 5, 17–18, 21, 123, 124– 25, 134, 137, 139–40, 144, 176, 227 Eziev, Nanu, 192

farms (kolkhoz, sovkhoz), 15, 129, 130, 138, 141, 164–65, 165n47, 185, 204, 211, 212, 236–37; as destination for evacuees, 65, 119, 120, 127n30, 160, 161, 162; as incarceration/killing sites, 13n30, 105, 120, 121, 131, 133, 134, 143, 144, 169, 191–92 Feldgendarmerie, 163n40, 167n58 Feodosia, 95, 102 Fischer, Karl, 108 Fürst Urach Cavalry Regiment, 76n21 Füßlein, Werner, 85n43 gas vans, 16, 86–87, 89, 93–94, 99, 105–6, 110–11, 244, 249; operation of, 100–102; to kill hospital patients, 104, 106, 107, 109, 115; to kill prison populations, 106, 116, 117; to kill psychiatric patients, 104, 106, 107, 115; to kill sanatoria patients, 106, 109, 117, 173–74 Gefter, Mikhail, 258 Geheime Feldpolizei, 73 Geldiashvili, David. See Tzinaridze, Georgii genocide, 2, 22, 38, 39, 46, 69, 148, 258, 260n52 Georgia (Georgian SSR), 2, 29, 75, 89, 97, 146, 156, 203 Georgian Jews, 13n29, 83 Georgians, 19, 26–31, 42, 75, 83, 96, 97, 98, 110n22, 112, 113, 114 Georgievsk, 86, 90, 236 German invasion of the North Caucasus, 69–71, 185 German relations with local population, 15, 185 Gestapo, 71, 99, 106, 107, 129, 166, 168, 218, 219 ghettos, 169–70, 233 Ginzburg, Lev, 249

298  ❧  index Gorbachev, Mikhail, 38, 246 Goriachevodsk, 86 Gostagaika, 116 Görz, Heinrich, 109 Götzfried, Alfons, 113–14 Great Patriotic War memory. See World War II memory Greeks, 27n6, 28, 29, 31, 39, 153, 157 Grozny, 3, 13n26, 43, 44, 45, 70, 74, 84, 185 Gul’kevichi, 121 Gypsies. See Roma Heimbach, Lothar, 77, 78 help. See rescue Himmler, Heinrich, 72, 73, 100, 200 Hitler, Adolf, 62, 69, 70, 71, 73, 106, 185, 189 Holocaust education, 257 Holocaust memory, 21–24, 221–23, 233, 257–58; in monuments and memorials, 250–57; Jewish victimhood obfuscation, 245–47, 250–51, 253–57; Jewish victimhood recognition, 248–50, 251–52, 257, 259; of war children, 224–25, 239–40; through commemoration ceremonies, 254, 256. See also victim numbers; World War II memory hospitality traditions, 33, 36, 197, 204, 207, 209 Husak, Anton. See Pardzhanadze, Avtandil Iakubovskii, A., 164n45 Ilinskaia, 121 Imam Shamil, 9, 36–38, 39 Ingush, 1, 11, 43, 45, 98, 147 Ingushetia, republic, 1, 9, 10n26 Iran. See Persia Islam, 6, 8, 9, 12, 28, 31, 35–38, 37, 44, 75, 83, 185, 198, 207, 211

Jews. See Ashkenazi Jews; Georgian Jews; Karaites; Mountain Jews Jews, half-, 77, 88, 231–32 Judaism, 10n6, 13, 35, 84, 198–99 Kabardians, 10, 11, 157, 186, 188, 190n17, 191–196, 197, 207, 209, 214 Kabardino-Balkaria (Kabardino-Balkar ASSR), 1, 2, 10n26, 11, 17, 52, 185–86, 190n17, 191, 193, 194, 195, 201, 214, 217, 228 Kalmykia (Kalmyk ASSR), 2, 27n6, 90–91, 113, 183 Kalmykian Cavalry Corps, 76n21 Kalmyks, 1, 8, 27n6, 34, 46, 147 Kalnibolotskaia, 122 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst, 93 Kalugin, Iurii, 251 Kamyshevatskaia, 122 Kanevskaia, 122 Karabagh, 30n13 Karachaevo-Cherkessia (Karachai-Cherkes autonomous oblast, KarachaiCherkes ASSR), 1, 146, 149, 155, 156, 156n26 Karachaevsk. See Mikoian-Shakhar Karachai (Karachai autonomous oblast), 2, 10n3, 11, 14, 17, 21, 145–83, 192 Karachais, 1, 19, 146–50, 152–59, 163–69, 170, 174, 177, 179–83, 232, 235 Karaites, 13n29 Karl, 170, 172 Kaukasier Kompanie, 18–19, 73–75, 95–96, 110–11; participation in mass killings, 99–110; postwar trials, 112–14; recruitment, 97; training, 97–99 Kehrer, Walter, 98, 99, 106, 110, 112, 114

index  ❧ 299 Kerch, 3, 95, 103, 111 Khadyzhenskaia, 85 Khakurate, Shakhan-Girei, 45 Khalamliev family, 181 Khotekov, Hajji Koze, 186 Khrushchev, Nikita, 45, 46, 245, 247, 250 Kiev (Kyiv), 65, 92, 179, 181, 247 Kipnis, Elena, 169 Kirov, Sergei, 44 Kislovodsk, 3, 86, 87–89, 108, 109, 131n46, 164, 165, 170, 238 Kleber, Werner, 81, 82, 107 Kleist, Ewald von, 194 Koch, Richard, 90 Kochkarov, Madzhir, 165 Kol’tsevaia Gora, 165n50 kolkhoz. See farms (kolkhoz, sovkhoz) Kolkhoz Ordzhonikidze, 105 Kolkhoz Proletarskii, 116 Konjewitsch, Grigorij, 89 Kopanskaia, 122 Korenovsk, 121 Korenovskaia, 80, 115 Korsemann, Gerret, 73 Kossiakinskaia, 123 Kotzendorfer, Karl, 81 Kovalenko, 135 Krasnaia Slobodka, 86 Krasnodar krai, 1, 2, 9, 10n3, 11, 14, 16, 17, 20, 52, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 97, 104, 118–44, 156, 186n6, 228. See also Kuban (Kuban oblast) Krasnodar, 3, 41, 47, 56, 62, 65, 74, 78–80, 84, 93, 96, 101, 103, 105, 105n14, 109, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 120, 125, 126, 218, 219, 219n2, 221, 247, 248, 249 Krasnyi Vostok, 161, 180 Kropotkin, 85, 104, 106, 121 Kuban (Kuban oblast), 9, 10, 10n3, 41, 153, 154

Kuban river, 45, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143 Kubiak, Erich, 85 Kugulta, 82, 116 Kurban Bayram, 110, 110n22, 198 Kurgannaia, 121, 123, 133, 203, 212, 213 Kushchevskaia, 105 L’vov (Lemberg, Lwów, L’viv), 13n27, 65, 111 Labinsk, 121, 122 Labinskaia, 85 Ladozhskaia, 3, 123, 137–43, 145 Laipanov, Magomed, 170 Laipanov, Muratbi, 163, 165, 167, 170, 171 Lakhov, Khusin, 204, 211, 212 Lakoba, Nestor, 45 languages, North Caucasian, 28 Lau, Meir, 254 Lemberg. See L’vov Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 30, 44 Leningrad (Petrograd, Saint Petersburg), 29, 33, 37, 40, 44, 56, 60, 79, 119, 127, 170, 175, 203, 207, 212, 219, 258 Lermontov, Mikhail, 26 Leviev, Miitul, 214, 216 Lublin, 111 Lukianov, Yermak, 113 Lurje (Lurie), Dr., 77 Magiramow, Musa, 98, 112 Magkaev (Dzutov), Petr, 165, 166, 170, 171, 178 Maikop, 3, 71, 74, 84–86, 93, 103, 104, 106, 116, 185, 221 Maiwald, Alfred, 170, 172 Majdanek, 113–14 Makhachkala, 3, 65–66 Makhoshevskaia, 122

300  ❧  index Malgobek, 15 Manstein, Erich von, 97 Maurer, Rolf, 91 Menzhinskoe, 13n30, 188, 191–92, 196, 228n7 Mikhailovskaia (in Krasnodar krai), 121 Mikhailovskoe (in Ordzhonikidze krai), 82, 115 Mikoian-Shakhar, 90, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 164, 166, 169– 73, 176, 178, 179, 180 Mikoyan, Anastas, 30 Mineralnye Vody, 3, 65, 86, 88–90, 104, 105, 106, 108–9, 115, 117, 130n46 Minsk, 13n27 mixed marriages. See Jews, halfMoscow, 26, 29, 43, 44, 47, 70, 221 Mountain Jews, 13–14, 51, 184; executions of, 188, 191–92, 195–96; in Karachai region, 153, 159; in Mozdok, 214–16, 217; in Nalchik, 186–202, 217; Nazi investigations of Jewishness, 83–84, 187–88, 196– 201; relations with local population, 179–80, 183, 192–96 Mozdok, 3, 13, 20, 70, 92, 184, 190n17, 214–16, 217 Müller, Erich, 71, 80, 81, 86, 90, 106, 107, 108 Nalchik, 3, 13, 13n26, 16, 20, 70, 84, 92, 93, 110, 186–202, 203, 207, 214, 215, 216, 217 Neelinskii, 121 Nizhniaia Teberda, 160, 161, 162, 171, 174–75, 176 Nizhnii Arkhyz, 160, 171, 175, 176 NKVD, 17, 63, 74, 75, 78, 81, 82, 85, 86, 167, 168

North Ossetia (North Ossetian ASSR), 1, 2, 10n5, 11, 52, 185, 186n6, 190n17, 226, 228 Novodereviankovskaia, 122 Novopavlovka, 121, 127 Novopiatigorsk, 86 Novopokrovskaia, 122 Novorossiisk, 3, 15, 16, 79, 118n1, 123, 123n12, 226 Novoshcherbinovskaia, 122 Oberländer, Theodor, 200 Odessa, 3, 29 Ohlendorf, Otto, 72, 98, 99, 103, 104, 112, 114, 196 Okhtov, Murzabek, 204, 205, 206, 209, 211 Oktiabr’skii, 121 oral history, 223–24 Ordzhonikidze (Vladikavkaz), 3, 13n26, 15 Ordzhonikidze krai (Stavropol krai), 1, 2, 9, 10n4, 10n5, 11, 11n1, 52, 58, 60, 62–63, 64, 146n3, 156, 159n32, 160, 163, 168, 185, 228 Ordzhonikidze, Sergo, 29, 44, 45 orphanages, evacuation of. See children’s homes, evacuation of Ossetians, 10, 11, 42, 98, 105n14, 152, 153, 157, 158, 166, 170, 183, 214 Oswald, Obergefreiter, 205–6 Otradnaia, 122 Ottoman Empire, 8, 28, 29, 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 43, 153 Pardzhanadze, Avtandil, 113 Peredovaia, 122 Persia (Iran), 27, 28, 30, 37, 75 Persterer, Alois, 71, 92, 198, 200 Pervomaisk, 121 Petrograd. See Leningrad

index  ❧ 301 Petropavlovskaia, 3, 122, 123, 131–37, 143, 144 Petrovskaia, 116, 117 Piatigorsk, 3, 74, 82, 86–87, 89, 93, 108, 116, 131n46, 236 Pinkhasov, Avino, 193 Pletneva, Tamara, 253–54 poisonings, 134–35, 137, 244 Poliakovka, 105 Poltavskaia, 121 Poppe, Nicholas, 162, 166, 198, 200, 201 Pregradnaia (Pregradnaia district), 153, 155, 157, 158, 161, 171, 175, 176 Prikumsk. See Budennovsk Pripet marshes, 111 Prizova, Alisa, 195–96 Prokhladnyi, 92 Proletarskaia (Ordzhonikidze krai), 82 Proletarskii (Krasnodar krai), 121 Pshukov, Alikhan, 185 Pushkin, Alexander, 26 Putin, Vladimir, 242–43, 258 refugees. See evacuees, Jewish religion, 8, 35n22, 154, 182. See also Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism rescue, 179–81, 217, 232; by collaborators, 180, 181, 211; due to local customs, 204, 207, 209; through document falsification, 211–13; through local adoption, 181, 204–6, 207, 210–11, 232–33; through name changes, 207–9. See also evacuees, Jewish, relations with local population; Mountain Jews, relations with local population; survival, Jewish “Righteous Among the Nations,” 132, 181 Roma, 72, 83, 105, 125n22, 133, 137, 157, 158, 159, 259

Rostov oblast, 1, 2, 10n1, 11, 16, 119, 185, 228, 238, 247, 252, 255, 256, 262 Rostov-on-Don (Rostov), 3, 9, 10, 11, 15, 21, 51, 60, 63, 66, 67, 70, 71, 76–78, 79, 84, 101, 103, 104–5, 110, 111, 115, 161, 221, 231, 237, 243–62. See also Zmievskaia Balka Rozhdestvenskaia, 214n96, 217 RSHA, 83, 93, 96, 97, 98, 100 Russian Civil War, 9, 41, 42–44, 153– 54, 159 Russian imperial expansion, 8–9, 29, 30, 40, 153 Russian Revolution, 43–44 Sadovoi, 121 Saint Petersburg. See Leningrad sanatoria, evacuation of, 160. See also gas vans, to kill sanatoria patients Sary-Tiuz, 176 Schell, Kira, 170 Schmitt, Hermann, 127, 128 Schultz, Paul, 71 SD, 15, 71, 74, 96, 97–98, 108, 114, 178, 197 SD-12, 170–74. See also Einsatzkommando 12 Seetzen, Heinz, 78, 104 Sergievskaia, 121 Sevastopol, 3, 67, 84, 97, 126 Shabaev, Markel, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195n35, 197, 201, 202 Shadov, Salim (Selim), 164n45, 185, 194, 195n35 Shakov, Blita, 185 Shamilov, Avrum, 193 Shifer, Fedor, 196 Shovgenov, Sagid, 204, 205, 211, 212 Shubaev, Viktor, 214, 215, 216 Simferopol, 3, 71, 84, 96, 98–99, 101, 102, 107, 196

302  ❧  index Sinti and Roma. See Roma slave trading, 32–33, 34 Solomonov, Mikhail, 214, 216 Solov’ev, Fedor, 166, 167 Solowjow, Ivan, 98, 112 Sommer, Erich, 167n58 Sonderkommando “Astrachan,” 90–91, 93n64 Sonderkommando 10a (SK 10a), 71, 76–80, 93, 10a, 97, 100–101, 103– 5, 107, 109–11, 115–17, 120, 243 Sonderkommando 10b (SK 10b), 71, 92–93, 103, 215 Sonderkommando 11a (SK 11a), 71, 93, 120n7 Sonderkommando 11b (SK 11b), 71, 84–86, 93, 103, 116, 120n7 Sonderverband Bergmann, 73, 76n21 South Caucasus (Transcaucasia), 8, 19, 63, 71 South Ossetia, 42 Sovetskaia, 122 Soviet prisoners of war, 95, 233, 257 Sovkhoz Timachevets, 121 sovkhoz. See farms (kolkhoz, sovkhoz) Spitsevka, 82, 117 SS, 71, 75, 95, 96, 99, 100, 104–9, 113, 127, 142, 150, 187, 200 Stalin, Joseph, 23, 26, 29, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 112, 156, 198, 247 Stalingrad, 3, 43, 70, 206 Stalingrad, battle of, 15–16, 110, 111, 185, 201, 217 Stalingrad oblast, 2 Starodereviankovskaia, 122 Starominskaia, 116, 122 Stavropol. See Voroshilovsk Stavropol krai. See Ordzhonikidze krai Stepanenko, Fedor, 166, 180 Stepnovskoe, 86 Strohschneider, Walter, 90, 91, 108 Sukhoi Kut, 136–37

survival, Jewish, 20, 187–88, 234; as Armenians, 179, 237; as Chechens, 193–94; as Cherkes, 202–13; as forced laborers, 214–16, 214n96, 217; as Kabardians, 191–92; as Slavs, 179, 235, 237–38; as Tatars, 179; as Tats, 190–91, 216; in family units, 235–38; through community organizing, 189–90; through displays of Christianity, 237–38; through document destruction, 236–37; through document falsification, 236; through name changes, 235. See also evacuees, Jewish, relations with local population; Mountain Jews, relations with local population; rescue Suslov, Mikhail, 148 Svoboda, 86 Taganrog, 3, 16, 48, 84, 100, 101, 103, 104, 110, 221, 248 Tatarenko, Georgii, 166, 177, 178 Tavkeshev, Dolatgeri, 185 Tbilisi, 3, 29, 71 Tbilisskaia, 121, 138 Teberda, 3, 109–10, 117, 153, 158, 160, 161, 162, 170, 171, 172, 173– 74, 176, 180, 181, 206 Temirgoevskaia, 121, 134, 136 Temriuk, 79, 92, 111, 123 Tiflis. See Tbilisi Tikhoretsk, 121 Timashevsk, 121 Tolmachev, Fedor, 164, 166 Tolstoy, Leo, 26, 36 torture, 139, 169, 176 Transcaucasia. See South Caucasus trials. See war crimes trials Trimborn, Kurt, 105 Tupitsin, 215 Turkey, 38, 39, 39, 47, 75, 83, 99. See also Ottoman Empire

index  ❧ 303 Turkin, 121 Tzinaridze, Georgii, 113 Uchkulan (Uchkulan district), 153, 155, 157, 158, 161, 176 Ukraine (Ukrainian SSR), 2, 13, 14, 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, 52, 70, 74, 88, 91, 98, 107, 108, 111, 119, 124, 126, 134, 149, 160, 183, 220 Uraza Bayram, 164, 164n43 Urup, 175 USC Shoah Foundation, 219–20, 234 Uspenskoe, 121, 122 Ust’-Labinsk, 117, 121, 138 Varenikovskaia, 79 victim numbers, 17–18, 186, 227–29; in Karachai region, 171, 176–77; in Krasnodar krai, 119–23; in Rostov, 244–45. See also Holocaust memory, Jewish victimhood recognition; Holocaust memory, Jewish victimhood obfuscation Vilnius. See Wilno Vladikavkaz. See Ordzhonikidze Volgograd. See Stalingrad Volkov, 135 Volksdeutsche. See ethnic Germans Vorontsov, Prince Mikhail, 29 Voroshilov, 121 Voroshilovsk (Stavropol), 3, 13n26, 71, 71n8, 74, 80–83, 93, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107–8, 110, 115, 116, 198, 221, 247, 249

Vyselkovskaia, 63 Wannsee Institute, 83, 197 war crimes trials, 112–14, 247–49 Warsaw, 111, 112 Weber, Herbert, 90, 170, 173 Wenzel, Kurt, 81, 87 Wiens, Heinrich, 89, 98, 99, 107, 108, 112 Wilno, 13n27 Winokurow (Vinokurov), Nikolaus, 78 Wollenweber, Herbert, 128 World War II memory, 241–43, 250, 258, 260–62 Wölbing, Fritz, 108 Yahad-In Unum, 117, 125–26, 125n22, 130, 133, 134, 137, 139–41 Yalta, 102, 112 Yeltsin, Boris, 242 Yeysk, 3, 79, 109, 116, 122, 248 Zapp, Paul, 71 Zelenchuk-Mostovoi, 122 Zelenchukskaia (Zelenchukskaia district), 153, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183 Zheleznovodsk, 3, 89, 116, 131n46 Zmievskaia Balka, 78, 104, 231, 244–57, 258, 259. See also Rostov-on-Don Zubov, 123