Martin Dean
IT IS WIDELY assumed that the Einsatzgruppen of the German Security Police dealt fairly rapidly with the Jews of the occupied Soviet territories and that by the time of the liquidation of the Smolensk ghetto in the summer of 1942, there were almost no more Jews to be found behind the German front lines, especially in those parts of the Soviet Union that remained under German military administration.1 A few exceptions to this assumption have been the subject of research since the partial opening of the Soviet archives to Western researchers. These include the camps for Jews established in southern Ukraine (under German civil administration) in 1942–1943, along the so-called Transit Highway (Durchgangsstrasse, or DG) IV, where Romanian Jews were brought in to supplement the dwindling numbers of Ukrainian Jews. There was also a network of concentration camp sub-camps in Estonia, which held thousands of Jews sent there for the extraction of shale oil, including even some brought in from Hungary in the summer of 1944.2 The historian Christian Gerlach identified several transports of Polish Jews from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 that were sent to destinations including Minsk, Bobruisk (now Babruysk), Mogilev (now Mahiliou), and Smolensk, mainly for skilled labor deployments.3
One fairly well documented example of Jews being sent into occupied Russian territory from the German Reich for use as labor is the so-called Osteinsatz, or deployment to the east, of Jews from Silesia in the winter of 1941–1942. This concerned a group of more than 300 Jews taken mostly from the Reichsautobahn (RAB) camps at the end of 1941. They were deployed to Sebezh and several other places in western Russia for the purpose of converting the railway lines to a narrower gauge behind the German front lines. Surprisingly, the survivors were sent back to Silesia after only three months, following an outbreak of typhus among the group. This story has been told by Bella Guttermann in her article “Jews in the Service of the Organisation Todt,” but she characterizes it as a unique experiment that was not repeated.4
This essay will discuss briefly again the main features of the Osteinsatz to Sebezh, described by Guttermann, but will also look at several other similar labor deployments of Jews from the Warthegau, Warsaw, and other parts of pre-1939 Poland (some via the Baltic States) in 1942–1943. These case studies will be examined in conjunction with German policies on the establishment of forced labor camps in the occupied Soviet territories and the use of Jewish labor in those regions. It seems that the ad hoc use of available Jewish labor in occupied Russian territory occurred on more than one occasion and was even practiced by the Central Construction Office (Zentralbauleitung) of the Waffen-SS, which, for example, brought skilled Jewish craftsmen from Warsaw and Minsk to work in Smolensk and at other sites. Due to the paucity of contemporary German documentation, evidence of these labor deployments is drawn mainly from survivor testimony, including more recent video testimonies collected by the University of Southern California’s (USC) Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. In some cases, additional corroboration can be found in postwar German trials and also the reports of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK). Of particular value in recreating these events has also been the opening of the International Tracing Service (ITS) archives, which contain information on the paths of persecution for a large proportion of Jewish survivors.
The existence of more than three separate construction projects in occupied central and northern Russia in 1942–1943, requiring the importation of Jewish labor from the West, might appear rather surprising. Yet it demonstrates that certain aspects of the German war economy did receive temporary priority over the general policy of destruction directed toward the Jews. In particular, the useful nature of these Jewish workers probably also explains why those who survived were generally evacuated, rather than killed, once these tasks were completed or cut short by the advancing Soviet front. Indeed, we know about these camps mainly from the reports of Jewish survivors.
There was in fact a widespread policy of ghettoization in German-occupied eastern Belorussia and Russia in the second half of 1941 and the first months of 1942. The German authorities established more than a hundred ghettos in eastern Belorussia and around fifty ghettos on occupied Russian territory. Most of these ghettos only existed for a few weeks or months before they were liquidated by units of Einsatzgruppe B in mass shooting operations. However, due to the severe winter of 1941–1942, shortages of personnel, and the effects of the Soviet winter offensive before Moscow, the elimination of these ghettos dragged on into the spring and summer of 1942.5
These mass shootings reflected a policy of complete annihilation toward the native Jewish population in these regions, which was more or less completed by the summer of 1942. In eastern Belorussia, the last ghettos to be liquidated were in Khotimsk on September 3–5, and, according to local research, in Sloboda, in October 1942. The last ghettos on Russian territory west of Moscow were liquidated in the summer of 1942, including those in Rzhev and Smolensk in July. Only in very few places were a limited number of skilled workers retained after the ghetto liquidations. For example, in Petrovichi, a few Jewish specialist workers were kept alive at the time of the ghetto liquidation, but these people were subsequently shot.6 Given the thoroughness of these extermination operations behind the central and northern sectors of the Eastern Front, it might be reasonable to assume that these regions would remain judenrein (purged of Jews) for the remainder of the occupation.
Despite the German emphasis on excluding Jews from the skilled labor force in the occupied Soviet territories, which was enforced quite rigorously in occupied eastern Belorussia and Russia under Wehrmacht occupation, there was some Jewish forced labor in the short-lived ghettos in these regions.7 In Smolensk in particular, hundreds of Jews from the ghetto performed forced labor for almost one year. Smaller forced labor camps for Jews existed, for example, also in Chashniki (eastern Belorussia) and at Oster near Roslavl.8 However, for certain specific construction projects, the relevant German offices decided to use Jewish laborers who had already been assembled (and to some extent also selected and trained) in the forced labor camps for Jews (ZALfJs) and ghettos that still existed further to the west. In Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien, for example, a number of larger ghettos and/or ZALfJs existed well into 1943, including those in Głębokie (Hlybokaye), Krasne (Krasnae), Lida, Minsk, and Nowogródek (Navahrudak).9
This importation of Jews for labor purposes into the military-occupied areas of eastern Belorussia and Russia raises the question of whether it was part of a deliberate policy of “destruction through work,” or if urgent military-related construction may have temporarily overridden Himmler’s plans for complete annihilation. Recent scholarship has become more nuanced and is careful to avoid interpreting all Jewish labor deployment simply as “destruction through work.” As Christopher Browning has cautiously put it: “the German use of slave labor was not a matter of consensus and varied so much according to time and place that no single phrase (such as ‘destruction through labor’) can capture some presumed consistency and essence of Nazi ideological policy.”10 The examples described below tend to confirm the view that the treatment of Jewish forced laborers, even in the east, varied considerably according to the German organizations in charge and the nature of the labor assignment. First to be examined will be the Osteinsatz of Silesian Jews in Russia, which was among the initial labor deployments to the east. In January 1942, a group of around 350 Jewish forced laborers sent from the Gross Masselwitz forced labor camp for Jews in Breslau, Upper Silesia, arrived by train in Sebezh (located about 170 kilometers, or 106 miles, south of Pskov) in order to work on narrowing the gauge of the railway line between Sebezh and Velikie Luki under the supervision of the Organisation Todt (OT).
The men had been selected in the ZALfJs of Sakrau, Brande, Eichtal, and Auenrode, where they had worked for the Reichsautobahn on road construction. They were placed in quasi-uniforms of the OT, prior to their deployment to the east and were even given some marching drills, under the command of an older Jew, who had served as an officer in the Austrian army, Julius Siegel. On the day of their departure, the Jews marched twelve kilometers (seven and a half miles) under the escort of ethnic German guards from the Gross Masselwitz camp to the railway station in Breslau (Wrocław), where they boarded freight cars and departed. As Bela Guttermann has noted: “the men’s identity was masked in order to conceal the decision [by the OT] to include Jews in the task force to the East.”11
The outward rail journey lasted more than a week, passing through Königsberg, Kaunas, and Vilnius to reach Sebezh. Max Borenstein recalled that in the boxcars they received just one bucket of coal to last twenty-four hours and were allowed out only briefly each morning to answer the call of nature.12 In Sebezh, the OT had set up a collection and transit camp at this railway junction. Although conditions were thirty degrees (Celsius) below freezing, the Jews were put to work straight away, clearing snow and relaying track to the narrower German gauge. Max Borenstein recalled that here the Jews still slept in the boxcars, where they received straw and a blanket. Due to the extreme conditions, people were dying every day. David Fischel remembered working from seven in the morning to around three or four in the afternoon, when it got dark. Probably at the end of the trip, Fischel became sick with typhus in Sebezh and was seen there by the Jewish doctor Wolf Leitner, who, however, had no real medicines with which to treat him.13
According to Guttermann’s analysis, based on testimonies at Yad Vashem, around fifty men were selected in Sebezh and remained working there throughout the period of the deployment, while the main group traveled on to Chikhachevo and from there to Idritsa (twenty-four kilometers, or fifteen miles, east of Sebezh).
Max Borenstein recalled that in Idritsa, the Jews were accommodated in a former Russian military camp. On arrival, they had to clean up the camp, as the corpses of some previous inmates (probably Soviet POWs) were still lying in the bunks; other corpses were reputedly lying under a huge mound of snow and ice. The main problem was that the entire camp was still infested with “typhoid” [sic this should be typhus, carried by lice, MD]. Here the Jews again worked along the railroad changing the gauge. From Idritsa, Borenstein recalls moving further east to another small town named Mayevo (eighty kilometers, or fifty miles, east of Sebezh).14 Other than in Idritsa, the Jews generally remained in the boxcars to sleep. The very cold weather and problems with typhus meant that increasing numbers of Jews became sick. Dr. Leitner encouraged them to keep moving all the time, so as not to freeze up and die in the snow.15
The main group passed through at least one more site near Velikie Luki, before being sent north to the village of Chikhachevo (140 kilometers, or 87.5 miles, north-northeast of Sebezh). According to Guttermann’s summary, “in Chikhachevo . . . they received better treatment, as the entire task force—soldiers, civilian workers, forced laborers, and Jews—shared the same living conditions. The terrible winter blunted the antipathy, and the anti-Jewish abuse stopped. Only those doing sloppy work were punished.”16
By this time, however, after several weeks, among the Jews the typhus infections had begun to produce a number of fatalities. Soon the OT decided to reunite the Jews at Chikhachevo with the initial group in Sebezh,17 where Dr. Leitner tried to treat those who had become sick and separate them from the healthy, to stop the spread of the disease. However, now only around half of the men were still capable of working. Not long after the entire group was gathered in Sebezh, a German doctor recommended that they be returned to Germany, even though the OT commander wanted them to continue their work. Initially, the OT officials in charge issued instructions only to evacuate the healthy Jewish workers, but after protests by Dr. Leitner, the Wehrmacht doctors were so scared that the epidemic might spread, they decided to send them all back by rail as a group.18
The healthy workers literally dragged the sick men some three kilometers (1.8 miles) to board the railroad cars. The Jews received small rations for the journey, but suffered especially from a lack of water along the way. More prisoners died during this trip back and the group was disinfected twice along the route in Vilnius and Kaunas. In March 1942, after ten days of traveling, only between 120 and 150 men returned to Breslau and the Gross Masselwitz camp. “Upon their arrival, the other prisoners stared at them in astonishment, finding them shaggy and bearded, dehydrated and pale.” A few days later, they were transferred to the St. Annaberg camp to be treated by Dr. Shmuel Mittelmann of Sosnowiec. Another twelve men died here, but the remainder recovered and were dispersed among ZALfJs Gräditz, Markstädt, and Bunzlau, where they earned a degree of respect from the other prisoners for having survived the Osteinsatz.19
Even before this deployment by the OT to narrow the gauge of the Russian railroads, there had been an earlier transfer of Jews into the newly occupied Soviet territories, shortly after the start of Operation Barbarossa. The first group of Jews to arrive in ZALfJ Palemonas in Lithuania in the summer of 1941 consisted of Polish Jews, who had already been working for the OT on road construction for several months. These Jews had worked first in Praust (Pruszcz Gdański) near Danzig before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and then were sent to Palemonas together as a group with the same OT supervisors from the Praust camp. Albert Kowit from Ozorków, who was among this initial group, worked first around Palemonas clearing the forests, in preparation for converting a single-track railroad into double tracks.20
Then in the spring of 1942, additional Polish Jews were sent to Palemonas from various RAB-camps in Danzig-West Prussia.21 Boris Kot, who was sent to Palemonas in the summer of 1942 from the Kaunas (Kovno) ghetto, recalls that there were Jews from the Litzmannstadt (Łódź) and Vilnius (Vilna/Wilno) ghettos in the camp. Some sources indicate that at times there were as many as three hundred, or even five hundred Jews in ZALfJ Palemonas. The barracks were very overcrowded with people sleeping in three-tiered bunk beds.22 For example, Jews were also sent in May 1942 to Palemonas from the Borowensee (aka Owśnice) camp in Danzig-West Prussia, where they had been engaged in road construction and clearing snow from the highway.23
From Palemonas, the Jews from the Warthegau were then sent on to a series of more than ten separate smaller camps in Latvia, where they were mainly employed cutting railway ties from the forests or performing railroad construction work. Information about these camps in Latvia comes almost exclusively from a handful of Jewish survivors. For example, Jewish survivor Irving/Ignatz Kurek was sent from his hometown of Ozorków via Sdroien (Zdroje) and then Palemonas on to camps in Latvia in Saunags and Mazirbe. Regarding Saunags, Kurek stated that he was there with only a small group of Jews, building a camp for others. He stayed there for a couple of months and also mentions that the work involved preparing railroad ties.24
A more detailed description of the camp has been given by survivor Mendel Sznajder. In Saunags, the Jews were used by the Germans to cut down trees for making wooden railroad ties. It was a small camp for just over fifty people, who were housed in two buildings that were surrounded by just a small amount of barbed wire. While in Saunags, Sznajder, who learned some Latvian, came into contact with local Christians, who belonged to a sect of Pentecostalists. As he was trusted by the German foreman, he was even able to attend a service there in April 1943, at which Mrs. Sandbergs offered prayers for all the congregation and also specifically for the Jews in their midst, that they would be freed and allowed to join their families. Mendel Sznajder was very moved by this solidarity expressed by these Latvian Christians. From Saunags, Sznajder was transferred to Mazirbe, where his group did the same thing, cutting railway ties. From there, he was sent on to a collection camp in Talsen, before going on to another camp in Gawesen, where the Jews again did the same kind of work in the forests.25
Another similar OT camp for Polish Jews was located in Roja in Latvia. David Grabin explained that in Roja the Jews were used by the Germans to make wooden railroad ties from trees. Grabin’s job was to decide what size of railroad tie could be made from a particular tree trunk and then saw it into the appropriate size chunks. The work was supervised by Germans from the OT and the Jews were guarded by Lithuanians. The food rations were never enough, he continued, but generally the treatment was fair. At the end of 1942, he was sent on to another camp on the coast in Plensums (Plieņciems). These lumber camps in Latvia were not large, consisting of groups of maybe fifty to hundred Jewish men. Men would leave the work site or the camp at times to beg for food from the local farmers.
Regarding the aforementioned camp at Gawesen in southwestern Latvia, Mendel Sznajder recalled that a senior OT official named Forster came to Gawesen to conduct an investigation into conditions there. At that time, there were about one hundred sick Jews among the group of just a few hundred men. Sznajder told Forster that the reason for so many people getting sick was the lack of food. At that time Sznajder had made a deal with the guards, so that people could sneak out of the camp to beg for extra food from the local population. However, one of Sznajder’s friends, named David, was shot by a Ukrainian camp guard while returning to the camp from one of these foraging trips.
Jews from the Warthegau passed through the following camps run by the OT in Latvia: Engure, Eleja-Meitane, Gawesen, Kaltene, Mazirbe, Mērsrags, Plieņciems, Roja, Saunags, and Upesgrīva. Conditions were comparatively better than in many other ZALfJs or concentration camp subcamps, as the men had some access to additional food from the local population and relatively good relations with the OT officials that supervised the work, scattered in smaller groups. But when they were concentrated again at the Eleja-Meitane camp for railroad construction work in 1943, an outbreak of typhus occurred and the death rate went up. This may have been because they were joined here by other Jews from the Baltic States, who had previously been in the Riga ghetto. Almost all of the Polish Jews that survived these Latvian camps were evacuated by the SS to Germany in 1944, via the Riga-Kaiserwald and Stutthof concentration camps.
These transfers of Polish Jews from the Warthegau, first to Danzig-West Prussia and then on into Lithuania and Latvia for various construction projects, are of particular interest, as it appeared quite logical for the same OT work group to take with them their Jewish workers when deployed into Lithuanian and Latvian territory following the invasion of the Soviet Union. A few of these Jews survived the war, as the German authorities in Lithuania and Latvia had decided by 1942 that a certain amount of Jewish labor was still required for the sake of the war effort,26 which meant that some of these Jews were eventually also evacuated from the Baltic States in 1944, when the advance of the Red Army threatened to cut them off from further retreat. Although the survival rate was not high, these men were among very few people who survived at all from some of the ghettos in the Hohensalza region of the Warthegau.
In early 1942, the Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS established a forced labor camp for Jews in the city of Smolensk. The camp was based in the western part of the city on the territory of the unfinished Soviet Railway Workers’ Hospital. The Jewish inmates built and renovated the hospital for use as a rest and recuperation hostel for members of Einsatzgruppe B.
SS-Untersturmführer Johannes Weizenhöfer, the head of the local branch office (Aussenstelle) in Smolensk of the Zentralbauleitung, was also in charge of work at the camp. In January 1942, he had been transferred from the offices of the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) for Central Russia in Mogilev to work for Einsatzgruppe B in Smolensk. Initially, he used Russian workers and Soviet POWs for the construction projects, but due to a shortage of labor, soon he received permission from SS-Brigadeführer Erich Naumann, the head of Einsatzgruppe B, to collect a group of Jewish workers from the Minsk ghetto. Therefore, Weizenhofer brought about 250 to 300 skilled Jewish craftsmen (including masons and carpenters), as well as twenty Jewish women for office cleaning, from the Minsk ghetto to Smolensk by truck. He also requisitioned about another 150 Jewish workers from the Smolensk ghetto, so that about 400 prisoners were interned in the camp by the spring of 1942.
The camp was guarded by local Russian auxiliary police, who had been trained at the police leadership camp in Orsha. Every morning the Jewish camp elder, a rabbi, was required to submit a list of the sick and disabled prisoners. Those people unfit for work were then shot by members of the Security Police or by the police auxiliaries on the territory of the Railway Workers’ Hospital. Weizenhöfer, in his postwar interrogation, noted that at least thirty to forty Jewish inmates were shot during his time at the camp, up until early September 1942. He added also that on the authority of Naumann, the Jews in the camp were excluded from the liquidation of the Smolensk ghetto on July 15, 1942, which was carried out in part using gas vans. Some of the remaining clothing and shoes from the ghetto were taken to the camp, to be used by the Jewish workers. When Weizenhöfer was transferred from Smolensk in September 1942, SS-Untersturmführer Behr succeeded him in charge of construction work for the SS in Smolensk.27
During the summer of 1942, additional Jews were brought to ZALfJ Smolensk as most of the ghettos in Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien (White Ruthenia / western Belorussia), further to the west, were being liquidated. Dr. Pavel Kesarev, who worked in the hospital for the civilian population in Smolensk during the occupation, recalled that in the summer 1942, more than a thousand Jewish craftsmen were brought from the former territory of Poland. Some of the sick were brought to his dispensary. He said that the Jewish prisoners were rebuilding the Smolensk Railway Workers’ Hospital for the Gestapo.28
Testimonies and other documentation from at least eight survivors reveal that Jews were brought to ZALfJ Smolensk from a variety of other camps and ghettos, including from Dworzec and Slonim in Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien,29 and also from Grójec, via the Warsaw ghetto. The precise dates of these transfers are hard to determine from the testimonies, but most seem to date from the summer of 1942, although it is possible that some Jews selected from ghettos outside Minsk were included in the initial batch of workers in early 1942. As the testimonies diverge somewhat regarding the work conducted, it is conceivable that there was more than one ZALfJ in Smolensk, but more likely the Jews were split up into various groups performing different kinds of work.
For example, Joseph Himmelstein-Stone recalls being sent from the Dworzec labor camp to ZALfJ Smolensk in June 1942, via the Minsk ghetto. He traveled by rail from Dworzec to Minsk with his father, but they did not work there, it was only a transfer station. In Smolensk, he and his father worked as tailors fixing the uniforms of dead German soldiers and cleaning barracks. His father fell ill and died in December 1942, and Joseph recalls that at some point control of the camp was transferred from the Wehrmacht to the SS. He says at least one high-ranking officer showed some kindness and gave him some bread, probably because of Joseph’s young age. In June 1943, Joseph was transferred to another camp in Mogilev, where he also cleaned the barracks.30
Another survivor transferred from Dworzec, Jacob Fishkin, also recalls being sent to Smolensk by rail in the summer of 1942. On the journey, the Jewish workers received some food, as they were needed as laborers. In Smolensk, he worked with his father repairing the boots of German soldiers. After some time, a new group of guards entered the camp, and regular selections were conducted of those who could not work properly, so the number of workers continually declined. He notes that of around seven hundred Jews in the camp when he arrived, only one hundred were still alive when he left. From Smolensk, he was also transferred to a camp in Mogilev, sometime after the German defeat in Stalingrad.31 Izak Levit reported that there were groups of tailors, furriers, and cobblers working for the Wehrmacht in the camp, which held around 250 Jews altogether and was surrounded with barbed wire, guarded by the SS and Russian auxiliaries.32
Another group of Jewish workers was selected at the Umschlagplatz (collection point) in the Warsaw ghetto, probably in September 1942, and sent from there to Smolensk. The group contained around eighty Jews from Grójec, who had been kept in a labor camp there as skilled craftsmen working for the Wehrmacht, after the transfer of the other Jews from the Grójec ghetto to the Warsaw ghetto, in February 1941. Three survivors of the Grójec group have reported on their experiences in ZALfJ Smolensk.33
They traveled at least five days in cattle trucks before arriving in Smolensk. Henry Silberstein worked there as a skilled craftsman, completing the tin roof of a large unfinished Soviet hospital. He slept in a three-tiered bunk in barracks and received coffee and bread for breakfast, and a soup for lunch. He recalled an SS officer, who was an engineer, commenting that the Jews from Warsaw did better work than the locals.34
In the joint account of the Hamer brothers from Grójec and also in Silberstein’s testimony, there are reports of numerous killings of Jews in the camp. Sometimes at night, German SS and their Russian auxiliaries would enter the barracks and select mostly sick workers, subjecting them to abuse or demands for money, before taking them out and shooting them. Silberstein recalls that one night the guards found money in a jacket he had been given and then took away his badge with a number, which was effectively a death sentence. Through the intervention of a respected Jewish carpenter, Hershel, Silberstein managed to retrieve his badge. Then the next night two other Jews were hanged following a similar selection. Other prisoners were taken out and shot in a ditch located near the barracks and one man had his head split open. On another occasion, the Hamer brothers note that the SS requisitioned Jewish girls from the camp for a banquet, which meant that they would be raped and then killed. A girl named Mania managed to avoid this fate by getting her German drunk till he was unconscious, so she could escape; but her father in the meantime had committed suicide, choosing to go with eighteen others selected to be killed, as he feared the worst for his daughter. The few survivors of the Grójec group were sent via Minsk on to Lublin in the second half of 1943. Only three of them reportedly returned to Grójec at the end of the war.35
According to the testimony of a local inhabitant, who lived on Red Navy Street, in the fall of 1942 many of the prisoners were killed and buried on the hospital grounds. A Soviet exhumation, conducted on October 22, 1943, after the city’s liberation, uncovered an estimated 1,500 corpses on the territory of the Railway Workers’ Hospital in Smolensk.36 ITS records indicate that only a handful of Jews survived the war, although more were evacuated from ZALfJ Smolensk via Minsk to various concentration camps and subcamps further west, where a number perished in turn.
The last major labor deployment of Jews into occupied Russia originating from Polish ghettos was from ZALfJ Schischmaren (aka Žiežmariai) in Lithuania in the spring of 1943. As many as a thousand Jews had been collected here, both men and women, mainly from the ghettos located southeast of Wilno/Vilnius, including Oszmiana, Holszany, and Smorgonie, which had survived into late 1942 thanks to their transfer from Generalkommissariat (Gk) Weissruthenien to Gk Litauen (Lithuania) in the spring of 1942, that is after the clearing of the countryside (das flache Land) of Jews in Gk Litauen, which had been completed by the end of 1941. In Schischmaren, the male and female Jewish workers had been doing highway construction work for the OT.37
In the spring and summer of 1943, there were several deployments from ZALfJ Schischmaren to places including Pskov (then in Gk Estland, now in Russia) and also Mokrovo, which is located in northern Russia about 120 kilometers (75 miles) northeast of Pskov. From the spring of 1943 until the fall of that year, the occupying German forces operated a ZALfJ in Mokrovo. Information on this little-known camp comes mainly from four female Jewish survivors interviewed in the 1990s by the USC Shoah Foundation (VHF).
Rachel Lendzin recalled the journey from Schischmaren to Mokrovo: “The [Jewish] workers were taken first by truck, and then by rail cars to Mokrovo . . . it took about two days and one night, there were about 100 people in each railcar, we couldn’t move. Every eight hours or so, they would open the doors and there would be two pails of water for the entire car, so everyone got a spoonful of water.” Halfway through the trip, there was an explosion under Rachel’s railcar and several people fell on top of her. The Germans unloaded the Jews from the car, and the Jews thought that the SS officers were going to shoot them. Russian partisans had placed a bomb under the rail lines. Within four hours, the rail lines were fixed and they were loaded back onto the train and taken to Mokrovo.38
The Mokrovo camp consisted of four sleeping barracks and a kitchen located between two forests. The men and women were quartered separately. They wore the clothes they still had from home bearing Jewish stars. They slept in bunk beds and each day received four slices of bread and a good soup. The food was put in a metal can and they would eat wherever they could sit down. There was a place outside where the workers could wash themselves.39
According to Miriam Lederman, the camp was always in need of fresh water, which was delivered to the camp in huge trucks, like gasoline trucks. The Jewish workers sometimes would go with the Germans to help fill up the trucks with water. Liza Pariser recalled that it was a new camp when her group arrived and that it was a very marshy area with lots of mosquitoes.40
Liza noted that the workers had to cut down trees to prepare the land for a railroad. According to the ITS’s Verzeichnis der Haftstätten, the work was supervised by the OT. Rachel Lendzin states that at Mokrovo the workers were not treated badly. Everyone had a different job, and the group Rachel was in also cut down trees. The group after her, made up of boys, put dynamite under the roots. Another group’s job was to unload sand from wagons. Five or six girls would lift a rail and put it in place, then carry the wood over. “It was hard labor,” Rachel said, “but they didn’t beat us . . . when we came back from work they counted us . . . then they didn’t bother us.” The Jews also had Sundays off. After work, they would sit and talk, reminiscing about home and school, but never about their families. Sara Engor reports that the workers were laying rail lines and ordinary soldiers from the Wehrmacht supervised and guarded them. Sara Benusiglio (née Riebstein), however, recalls there being Estonian SS guards. Miriam Lederman was fortunate to get a job in the kitchen, where the work was less arduous.41
The survivors mention an internal Jewish hierarchy within the camp, naming Motel Mirski as having been in charge. Rachel Lendzin recalled that three people were killed during her time at Mokrovo. A friend of hers was bitten by a snake, but a Russian doctor drained the poison out, so she was able to recover. One of the victims was the father of Liza Pariser. After an accident, his leg became infected, but initially the Germans took him to a nearby hospital where his leg was amputated. Liza even managed to visit him by traveling on the water trucks with the Germans, but eventually she heard from her aunt, who also visited him from the camp, that he had been forced to dig a ditch and then was shot.42
Survivors mention occasional exchanges of fire between the German soldiers and Soviet partisans at night near the camp and also on the journeys to collect water. Miriam Lederman recalls that one night Russian partisans came to the barracks and said they would come back later to take out as many people as they can. “But nobody trusted each other,” Miriam says, “and the Judenrat said the partisans could never take all of the people, so they didn’t agree to it, and that was the end of it.”43
In the fall of 1943, after around six months in the camp, the Jews were transferred to other camps further to the West. Rachel Lendzin recalls being sent to Petschur in Estonia (aka Petseri or Pechory, now in Russia). Other survivors mention being transferred to a camp in Kūdupe, Latvia. Almost all of the known survivors (all women) subsequently passed through Kaiserwald concentration camp in late 1943 or early 1944.44
Pskov (Pleskau in German) is located about 272 kilometers (170 miles) southwest of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) on the Velikaia River. At the start of 1942, authority was transferred from the Wehrmacht to a German civilian administration. Pleskau became part of Gebiet Petschur and was incorporated into Generalkommissariat Estland, within Reichskommissariat Ostland.
According to the contemporary diaries of Herman Kruk (Vilnius/Vilna/Wilno ghetto) and Avraham Tory (Kaunus/Kovno ghetto), reports were circulating in May and June 1943, that a number of healthy workers from the “Zezmer” camp (ZALfJ Schischmaren) were being transferred to Pskov on the orders of the road construction company that ran the Zezmer camp.45 At that time, more than a thousand Jews were reportedly in ZALfJ Schischmaren, and it seems likely that at least one hundred were transferred to the labor camp in Pskov. What is known about the camp is derived mainly from fragmentary survivor testimonies, but postwar compensation claims from more than six survivors, who were all sent to ZALfJ Pskov from Schischmaren, serve to firm up a rough outline of the camp’s history.
Cypa Gutman made a report to the ITS in 1951, which outlined several key details. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by members of the SS. According to Gutman, the camp held around five hundred people, of whom about half were women. The work conducted there consisted of construction work on the railroad.46
Syma Freund recalled in the 1990s being in ZALfJ Pskov for about six months. She was taken to the camp by train and worked, while living in the camp, more than eight hours a day. She recalled that the Russians bombed the trains, but not the camp, where she slept in bunk beds (pritches) within the barracks. The camp had SS guards and she recalled there were many mosquitoes that made her scratch their itching bites. From Pleskau, she subsequently was sent to Kaiserwald concentration camp in Riga.47
Syma Schwarz (née Golub) recalls that on her arrival in the camp many people were completely exhausted from the journey and some died soon afterward. She said that she worked on a farm while staying in the camp and could get some extra food at her work on the sly. Her mother and sister stayed in the barrack as they were sick with typhus. All their belongings had been taken away on arrival. The soup she ate had potatoes or bread in it and tasted good, but there was not enough. In the camp, some prisoners heard from listening secretly to the radio that the Russian forces were not far away.48
The prisoners of the Pskov camp give a variety of subsequent destinations. It seems that most were sent on from Pskov either to ZALfJ Kudeb (Kūdupe), on the eastern border of Latvia, or to ZALfJ Petschur (Pechory), still in Estonia, although some mention both of these places. Most were then sent on via Riga-Kaiserwald or other concentration camps to the Stutthof main concentration camp in the summer of 1944.49
The time period given by survivors for their stay in Pskov varies quite a bit, but it seems likely that they all arrived as one group from Schischmaren in around June 1943, and departed a few months later. The chronology given by Fruma Schkop (b. 1927 in Krewo) appears to be roughly correct. She was transferred from Zezmary (Schischmaren) to Pskov in June 1943, and then on to Pechory (Petschur) in October 1943.50
Similar examples of forced labor camps for Jews that existed in 1942 and 1943 can be documented also for eastern Belorussia. As noted above, some Jews from ZALfJ Smolensk were sent on to ZALfJ Mogilev and were also evacuated from there. Jews were also sent in 1942 from the Warsaw ghetto to the Waldlager in Bobruisk, where they remained until October 1943. There are additional reports of Jews from the Szczuczyn ghetto (near Lida) being sent to a ZALfJ near Borisov in September 1942, although it seems very few of these people survived.51
Several aspects of these deployments are of interest, although the experiences of surviving prisoners do not differ very much from those of Jews in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Baltic States, more than twenty thousand of which were evacuated to Stutthof concentration camp in the summer of 1944.52 Those working directly for the OT or the Wehrmacht appear to have been treated better than those directly subordinated to the SS, notably those working on construction in Smolensk or Bobruisk, where sick prisoners were regularly shot, and arbitrary brutality and murder were daily events. In Bobruisk, for example, reportedly only 90 out of 1,500 Jews survived the deployment of just over one year.53
From the deployment in May 1942 of 403 Jews from Slonim to work in Mogilev, we know from detailed survivor testimonies that skilled workers or those with functions within the camp had much better chances of survival than those performing manual labor. On arrival in Mogilev, the Slonim Jews were taken “to a labor camp in a bombed-out military installation called ‘Dimitrov.’” The Germans separated the Slonim Jews into two categories. Sixty of the prisoners were put to work as craftsmen. Here the work conditions were tolerable. They were not beaten by the guards and were given a little extra food. The other 343 prisoners were sent to work on a construction project known as the Government House. They traveled each day to a worksite outside the camp in trucks. These laborers were abused severely by the guards and were subjected to starvation and periodic selections. Due to these conditions, by late 1943, only 29 of the 403 Jews from Slonim were still alive in the camp. After evacuation to camps in Minsk, Lublin, and Radom, where most died of typhus, the few still alive were then transferred to the Ebensee sub-camp of Mauthausen concentration camp. Only a handful of the 403 Slonim Jews sent to Mogilev survived the war.54
Against this high rate of attrition, conditions in the brief Osteinsatz around Sebezh in early 1942, but also those experienced by the Jews working for the OT at Mokrovo and Pskov in northern Russia in 1943, appear to have been less dire. The Osteinsatz still lost about half of its number in just over two months, but this was mainly due to the extreme weather conditions, poor food, accommodation, and clothing. It was especially due to the outbreak of a typhus epidemic. It seems the doctors decided in this case not to conduct selections, and even the sick were transported home. In Pskov and Mokrovo, where death rates were low, the few fatalities that are known resulted mainly from accidents and disease, rather than the systematic brutality of the overseers and guards, as was the case in the SS-run camps in Smolensk, Bobruisk, and Mogilev. By the time of the deployments from ZALfJ Schischmaren, in May or June of 1943, it must have been clear to many Germans that they desperately needed any laborers doing key infrastructure work, as the fortunes of war had certainly turned against them after Stalingrad.
The main explanation for why most of these camps have remained largely unknown until now lies in the sources. Most relevant German documentation has not survived and there was clearly little incentive for the responsible offices to stress their dependence on Jewish labor, as indicated by the efforts of the OT to put the Jews into uniforms. Most of the details about these camps have been pieced together from Jewish survivor testimony. A few of these accounts have been available for some time, but given the notorious effectiveness of the Einsatzgruppen in rapidly cleansing the East, few historians even thought to look for examples of Jewish labor being utilized behind the Eastern Front in 1942–1943.
The availability of many more testimonies in the last few years, thanks to the USC Shoah Foundation collection, and especially also to the summaries of compensation claims, now accessible from the ITS archives, has made it possible to trace more completely the paths of these Jews deployed to the east. The number of survivors was in most cases literally just a handful, but they serve as key witnesses to the inevitable complexity and inherent contradictions of German labor policies with regard to Jewish workers behind the Eastern Front, which cannot be adequately described by the phrase “destruction through work.”
MARTIN DEAN worked from 1992 to 1997 for the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit in London. His publications include Collaboration in the Holocaust (2000), Robbing the Jews (2008) and, as volume editor, The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, vol. 2: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe (2012).
1. The opinions stated in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum or the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Council. Much of the information for this chapter was collected as part of the research for forthcoming volumes of The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, which is a project of the Mandel Center at the USHMM under the direction of Geoff Megargee. Special thanks go to Alexander Kruglov, Hermann Weiss, Rachel McNellis, and many other people who have assisted with this project in a variety of ways.
2. See Andrej Angrick, “Annihilation and Labor: Jews and Thoroughfare IV in Central Ukraine,” in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2008), 190–223; and Anton Weiss-Wendt, “The Business of Survival: Baltic Oil Ltd. and Jewish Forced-Labor Camps in Estonia,” Yad Vashem Studies 36, no. 2 (2008), 45–71.
3. Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), 762–763.
4. Bella Guttermann, “Jews in the Service of Organisation Todt in the Occupied Soviet Territories, October 1941–March 1942,” Yad Vashem Studies 29 (2001): 65–109, see 106.
5. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, vol. 2 Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe, vol. ed. Martin Dean, series ed. Geoffrey P. Megargee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2012), 1640–1644 (Eastern Belorussia Region) and 1782–1788 (Occupied Russian Territory).
6. Guttermann, “Jews in the Service of Organisation Todt in the Occupied Soviet Territories, October 1941–March 1942,” 1681 (Khotimsk), 1733–1734 (Sloboda), 1811–1812 (Petrovichi), 1819 (Rzhev), and 1820–1824 (Smolensk).
7. See, for example, Martin Dean, “Ghetto Labor in Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien and the Military Occupied Territories of Eastern Belorussia and Russia,” in Arbeit in den nationalsozialistischen Ghettos, ed. Jürgen Hensel and Stephan Lehnstaedt (Osnabrück: fibre, 2013), 265–271. On the overall labor policy regarding Jews in eastern Belorussia, see Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 584–585.
8. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, vol. 2 Ghettos, 1658 (Chashniki); Report “Korück 559,” report on antipartisan actions, May 25–31, 1942, in Yad Vashem Archives, M-29, FR/38, 7 (Oster).
9. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, vol. 2 Ghettos, 1190–1193 (Głębokie), 1217–1218 (Krasne), 1225–1228 (Lida), 1233–1237 (Minsk), and 1247–1251 (Nowogródek).
10. Christopher Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside A Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 153.
11. Guttermann, “Jews in the Service of Organisation Todt,” 83–87.
12. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (hereafter VHF), # 29907, Testimony of Max Borenstein.
13. VHF, # 12911, Testimony of David Fischel. “ZAL Sebesz” is mentioned also in International Tracing Service (hereafter ITS), 6.3.3.2, TD 247966, by a former inmate of the Eichtal RAB camp.
14. VHF, # 29907, Testimony of Max Borenstein.
15. VHF, # 29907, Testimony of Max Borenstein; ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD 161458, Samuel Grinbaum; Guttermann, “Jews in the Service of Organisation Todt,” 91.
16. Guttermann, “Jews in the Service of Organisation Todt,” 95.
17. Guttermann, “Jews in the Service of Organisation Todt,” 95–97.
18. Guttermann, “Jews in the Service of Organisation Todt,” 97–98.
19. Guttermann, “Jews in the Service of Organisation Todt,” 98–103.
20. Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), 1091–1092; VHF, # 16707, Testimony of Albert Kowit.
21. ITS, CNI, Abram DOBRZYNSKI (b. January 23, 1929 in Ozorkow); VHF, # 33275, Testimony of Abraham Dobin (aka Dobrzynski).
22. Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, 1092, gives the figure of 300 Polish Jews in the OT camp; VHF, # 33275, gives the figure of 500.
23. ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD 360709, David Grabinski; VHF, # 30601.
24. VHF, # 14966, Testimony of Irving Kurek.
25. VHF, # 46107, Testimony of Mendel Sznajder.
26. See Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, 1009–1011 (Lithuania); Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, Die “Endlösung” in Riga: Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941–1944 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 202.
27. USHMM, RG-14.101M, fol. 2000, fr. 353–377 (Bundesarchiv Aussenstelle-Ludwigsburg (BA-L), B 162/25005), 6–20, Interrogations of Johannes Weizenhofer on March 12, 1960 and October 12, 1962.
28. State Archives of the Russian Federation (hereafter GARF), 7021-44-15, 63 (verso), statement of Dr. P.I. Kesarev on October 4, 1943 to Medical General–Lieutenant Prof. N. N. Burdenko.
29. Re: Dworzec, see notes 26 and 27. ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD 529840, Meir Kulisewski (Slonim); TD 405892, Schlomo Schuchotowicz (Slonim).
30. VHF, # 20123, Video testimony of Joseph Himmelstein-Stone; ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD 510449, Joseph Stone (or Himmelstein), b. January 1, 1930.
31. VHF, # 11294, Video testimony of Jacob Fishkin.
32. ITS, 1.1.0.7, fol. 76, 459.
33. Josef Hamer and Abram Hamer, “Di lezte Oyszidlung,” in Megilat Gritse, ed. I. B. Alterman (Tel Aviv: Gritse Association in Isreal, 1955), 294–298; VHF, # 12115, Video testimony of Henry Silberstein; see also ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD 299593, Josef Hamer; TD 299591, Abram Hamer; and TD 498091, Henry Silberstein. These sources give conflicting dates for the period in Smolensk, but since the Hamer brothers report being there for around eleven months, the period from summer 1942 until summer 1943, just before the Soviets recaptured the city, seems likely. It is not clear from the yizkor book whether other Jews came from Warsaw with the Grójec group, as they were selected among four hundred Jewish workers at the “Umschlagplatz,” but the other Jews are not mentioned subsequently.
34. VHF, # 12115.
35. VHF, # 12115; I. B. Alterman, Megilat Gritse (Tel Aviv: Gritse Association in Isreal, 1955), 294–298; Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw (AŻIH), 301/4802, Testimony of Adam Bitter, 1950. The rape of Jewish women by German personnel was clearly against Nazi racial laws, nonetheless, it took place in dozens of different locations in the occupied East; see, for example, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, vol. 2 Ghettos, 1139, 1180, 1199, 1368, 1381, 1450, 1471, 1475, 1546, 1561, 1655, 1679, 1727, 1765, 1789, 1798, 1801, 1812, and 1822.
36. GARF, 7021-44-15, 63 (verso); and 7021-44-1083, 2. This figure may be too high, as probably not more than a thousand Jews passed through the camp.
37. VHF, # 24713, Testimony of Liza Pariser; VHF, # 3411, Testimony of Tania Rozmaryn.
38. VHF, # 10678.
39. VHF, # 10678.
40. VHF, # 40439, Testimony of Miriam Lederman; VHF, # 24713, Testimony of Liza Pariser.
41. VHF, # 24713; # 10678; # 39994, Testimony of Sara Engor; ITS, 1.1.0.7, fol. 76, 284; # 40439.
42. VHF, # 10678; # 24713.
43. VHF, # 40439.
44. VHF, # 10678; ITS, 1.1.0.7, fol. 76, 284; ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD 495273; TD 13653, Rachel Traurig.
45. Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. Benjamin Harshav (New Haven, CT/London: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research/Yale University Press, 2002), 558; Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 320–321, 328, and 372.
46. ITS, 1.1.0.7, fol. 76, 338.
47. VHF, # 18162, Testimony of Syma Freund; see also ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD 412790, Syma Freund, b. November 11, 1925.
48. VHF, # 18162, Testimony of Syma Schwarz (née Golub); see also ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD 971072, Syma Schwarz.
49. ITS, 6.3.3.2, TDs 412790, 971072, 339822, 266124, 289657, 762096, 382086.
50. ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD 339822, Fruma Szkop, b. September 15, 1930 in Krewo.
51. Mario Wenzel, “Zwangsarbeitslager für Juden in den besetzten polnischen und sowjetischen Gebieten,” in vol. 9: Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, ed. Wolfgang Benz und Barbara Distel (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008), 146; C. E. Volochinsky, Y. Shwartz, S. Poliaczek, et al., eds., Sefer Zikaron li-Kehilot Shts’uts’in, Vasililishki, Ostrin, Novidvor, Roz’anke (Tel Aviv: Irgun Yots’e Ostrin be-Yisra’el, 1966), 88. See also Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 762–763; and http://rememor.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/p06_therkel_straede_EN.pdf (re: Waldlager Bobruisk).
52. Geoffrey P. Megargee, ed., The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, vol. 1: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009), 1420.
53. Wenzel, “Zwangsarbeitslager für Juden in den besetzten polnischen und sowjetischen Gebieten,” 146; see also ITS, 6.3.3.2, TD 277274.
54. Nachum Alpert, The Destruction of Slonim Jewry (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989), 135; ITS, CNI, Israel Judelewicz (b. April 6, 1905); VHF, # 1553.