AS LURID as earlier episodes appear in hindsight, the saga of the Jews who actually made it to Transnistria is the centerpiece of the Holocaust in Romania, for here hundreds of thousands perished in outright massacres—sometimes involving German participation—and as a result of deprivation. While the following chapter will describe the living—and dying—conditions that prevailed in the land sprawling between the Dniester and Bug Rivers, this chapter focuses specifically on the mass murders in this region in which tens of thousands of Romanian and German soldiers, professional executioners from the SS, and representatives of the indigenous Romanian, Ukrainian, and German populations indulged their vicious greed and their sadistic lust for blood. Not only Romanian Jewish deportees perished in these killing actions; so did a huge number of the indigenous Jews who inhabited the region on the eve of the war.
Transnistria had belonged to Soviet Ukraine before Romania was given control of the region by Germany in 1941. Thereafter the territory was governed by Gheorghe Alexianu, who directly answered to Marshal Ion Antonescu. On August 19, 1941, a decree proclaimed his administration, even though Soviet troops held on to Odessa for another two months. Soon, however, Transnistria would become what Alexander Dallin, one of the first Western scholars to consider the subject, called “the ethnic dumping ground of Romania.”1 Raul Hilberg estimated that 135,000 Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Dorohoi reached Transnistria (out of the 160,000 originally seized for deportation).2 Of the 300,000 indigenous Jews (a majority of them in Odessa), perhaps one-third failed to evacuate with the Soviets3 (though Hilberg estimated more than one-half, or over 150,000). Only fifty thousand of the Jews deported from Romania, along with an unknown though probably comparable number of indigenous Jews, lived to see the end of the war; all in all, at least a quarter of a million Jews died in Transnistria (not all directly murdered). Even excluding the participation of the SS and German soldiers, Romania was the only country besides Germany to be involved in massacres on such a grand scale.4
As we will see in what follows, only on the microscale does the true picture emerge, however; in the postwar words of the survivor Mehr Berura, who lived in Transnistria for two and one-half years, “of the 1,500 deportees with whom I arrived, only 10 percent survived.”5
In October 1941, one of the largest slaughters of civilians during World War II took place in Odessa. Romanian and German troops occupied the city on October 16, after resistance that had lasted longer than in the neighboring areas, with the last evacuations of military and civilian personnel occurring by sea since the city was by then encircled. The exasperated Romanian Military Command vented its frustration on the “guilty,” the Jews.
Relevant in this respect is the following excerpt from a reply by Ion Antonescu to Wilhelm Filderman, who begged the Conducator to show clemency toward the Jews. “In response to the generous reception and treatment granted your Jews among us,” the leader wrote, the Jews “have become Soviet commissars” and have urged the Soviet troops in Odessa into senseless resistance, “for the sole purpose of making us suffer losses.”6 According to Dora Litani’s estimates, between eighty and ninety thousand Jews lived in Odessa at the moment of its occupation, and “thousands of them, especially intellectuals, were killed during the initial twenty-four hours.”7 Dallin thought that as many as 100,000 Jews or more remained in Odessa, a figure possibly too high.8 A diplomatic note sent by Vyacheslav Molotov to all foreign legations in the USSR shortly after the fall of Odessa stated that the German occupiers had killed eight thousand Jews there, a number probably representing only the massacres of the initial days. Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s Black Book estimates that three thousand to four thousand Jews were killed during the first days of the occupation.9
On October 22, a mine left in a booby-trapped safe destroyed the building housing the Romanian Military Command in Odessa. Located as it was near the old NKVD (Narodnyĭ komissariat vnutrennikh del, or the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) headquarters, the Romanians had been warned by local civilians that the building had been mined. During his trial Ion Antonescu admitted that they had been told twice.10 The explosion killed General Glogojanu, sixteen other officers, nine noncoms, and thirty-five soldiers.
Antonescu’s responsibility for events in Odessa also emerged during his postwar trial, in the following dialogue among the marshal himself; another defendant, General Pantazi; the president of the tribunal; and the public prosecutor:
PRESIDENT: What can you tell us about the massacres at Odessa?
ANTONESCU: I was informed of those massacres much later, in July [1944]. General Pantazi’s memory is good, he must remember that. He came to me in July 1944, I think, and told me: “I took measures to make the corpses disappear.” [As the Red Army neared, the Romanians worried that the remaining evidence of the 1941 massacre would be discovered.—R.I.]
PANTAZI: That is not so.
ANTONESCU: I cannot recall by heart. The fact is that he came to me and told me about some corpses, not about the massacre, and I asked him what he meant. Pantazi did not talk to me about a massacre. In July [October] 1941, when the Odessa command went up in smoke, he asked me to approve some reprisals. I approved them. I even gave him the figures.
PUBLIC PROSECUTOR SĂRACU: Who signed the order to execute two hundred people for every officer and one hundred for every soldier?
ANTONESCU: I gave that order, because I also did it in Romania, and I promulgated many more repressive laws, as did all states during that period. . . . We did not execute any Jews, we did not execute any youth; I did give the order for reprisals but not for massacres.11
Telegram No. 561 of October 2, 1941, sent by Colonel Davidescu, head of Antonescu’s military office, indeed ordered severe reprisals in Odessa.12 This command was elaborated on October 23 (at 12:30 P.M.), in Marshal Antonescu’s Telegram No. 562 (through Davidescu), to take and execute hostages:
In view of the action at Odessa that was plotted by local Communists and because any similar type of action must be eliminated in the future, the marshal orders that severe reprisals be enacted:
a. For every Romanian or German officer who died as a result of the explosion, two hundred Communists will be executed; for each soldier who died, one hundred Communists; the executions will take place on this very day.
b. All Communists in Odessa will be taken as hostages, as well as a member of each Jewish family.13
Also on October 23, at 7:45 P.M., Colonel Stănculescu, deputy commander of the Fourth Army, reported to the Supreme General Staff in the person of General Tătăranu that he had ordered immediate reprisals, including “the elimination of eighteen thousand Jews in the ghetto and [the hanging of] at least one hundred Jews for each regimental sector.”14 At the division level similar reports were generated, for example, General Constantin Trestioreanu’s of the Thirteenth Infantry: “I hanged in the public squares of Odessa about five thousand people, mostly Jews.”15 That same evening General Ion Iacobici, commander of the Fourth Army, informed Marshal Antonescu’s cabinet (in Report No. 302827) that “a number of Jews and Communists were hanged in reprisal.”16 Several historians agree on the figure of five thousand people executed on October 23.17 Over the course of the same day the gendarmerie and the police jailed more than twenty thousand others, again mostly Jews.18 On October 24, the Romanian Military Command in Odessa received Telegram No. 563 from Colonel Davidescu:
To General [Nicolae] Macici [commander of the Second Army Corps]: Marshal Antonescu has ordered [further] reprisals:
1. Execution of all Jews from Bessarabia who have sought refuge in Odessa.
2. All individuals who fall under the stipulations [of Telegram No. 562] of October 23, 1941, not yet executed and the others who can be added thereto will be placed inside a building that will be mined and detonated. This action will take place on the day of burial of the victims.
3. This order will be destroyed after being read.19
Three days later Colonel Davidescu asked if this order had been carried out; the Fourth Army reported immediately (in Telegram No. 3218) that it indeed had been executed.20
According to Colonel Rodler, chief representative of the Abwehr in Romania, “about nineteen thousand Jews were shot that morning in a square surrounded by a wooden fence in the harbor area. Their bodies were covered with gasoline and burned.”21 Jacques Truelle of the Vichy legation in Bucharest stated that “as reprisals following the October 22 explosion (my Telegram No. 883), . . . 25,000 Jews were crammed into barracks and were shot and shelled before Romanian troops set fire to them.”22 On October 24, 1941, the Jews in the Odessa jail were escorted to the Company 2 of the Tenth Machine Gun Battalion at Dalnic. Along a three-kilometer stretch, those who lagged behind the convoys were shot. The first forty to fifty were tied to one another and executed in an antitank ditch; the others were crowded into three sheds.23 At the war crimes trial Chief Prosecutor O. A. Bunaciu summarized what ensued:
A great massacre began here. In a most horrible fashion . . . 25,000 to 30,000 peaceable residents of Odessa were murdered. As witnesses stated, those in the first rows were placed in antitank ditches . . . and were shot in the head, forty to fifty at a time. The executioners felt that the system was too slow and costly, since one bullet cost too much for each individual. The commander of the Tenth Battalion found a faster and more cost-effective solution: . . . slots were cut in the walls [of the sheds] through which machine-gun barrels would fit. You can imagine the horrible scenes there, where the young, children, women, old men, and the sick had been crammed.24
Here is a related excerpt from the deposition of Alexe Neacşu, a reserve second lieutenant from the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment:
They proceeded to machine-gun those inside the four [sic] sheds, and I think that Colonel Deleanu gave the order to fire, or perhaps it was Colonel Niculescu-Coca. The sheds were handled one at a time, and the operation lasted until nightfall. . . . On the following day the sheds where these operations had not been finished were blown sky-high, symbolically and as an example; this operation took place, I believe, at the same time [of day] as the command blew up. After having machine-gunned those sheds for several hours, the commanders of that operation . . . complained that this was the only way that they could liquidate those who were inside; they were visibly annoyed at not having found a faster way to complete these operations. They resorted to oil and gas and then sprayed and set the sheds ablaze.
When the fire broke out, those inside who had escaped the bullets or who had been lightly wounded tried to escape through the windows or by the roof. The soldiers were given the general order to shoot anyone who managed to get out. Some of those who had been inside appeared at the windows and, in order to escape the flames, begged with hand signals to be shot and pointed at their head or their heart.
[They turned] their backs [to the soldiers] in order not to see them shoot. The operation lasted till nightfall; those scenes . . . under the glimmer of the flames seemed even more horrible. The people appearing in the windows were naked, because their clothes had caught on fire. Some women threw their children through the window. I remember one particular scene: a four- or five-year-old child was thrown out of a window and convulsed for about five or ten minutes, his hands above his head, among corpses, because the Romanian soldiers refused to gun him down.25
This massacre indeed took place under the leadership of the two above-mentioned military gendarmerie colonels, Nicolae Deleanu and Mihail Niculescu-Coca.26
In addition to General Trestioreanu, temporarily in command of the Tenth Infantry as well as the Thirteenth, General Macici and General Iacobici were also implicated. Others who participated directly in the massacre were Captain Radu Ionescu and Lieutenants Eugen Bălăceanu and Eustaţiu Mărculescu (these three had taken part in the massacre at Ghidighici, Bessarabia, in August 1941).27 Lieutenant Colonel Traian Borcescu of the SSI (whose first operational echelon had participated in the Chişinău massacre as well as those of Odessa) testified to the involvement of yet others: “The file [i.e., proving his responsibility—R.I.] on the Odessa exploits was personally handed to me by Grigore Petrovici.”28 Right after the explosion Colonel Radu Dinulescu of the Supreme General Staff’s Second Section, who had been involved in many previous anti-Jewish operations, appeared in Odessa, though we cannot trace his subsequent involvement.29
As stated in Indictment No. 221/1945, which contains the deposition of witness Alexandru Răcescu, German soldiers probably belonging to SS units also participated in the massacres at the Odessa suburb of Dalnic.30 However, in his statement at the trial growing out of the indictment, Captain Ovidiu Onca maintained that SS troops had participated in the massacres only in the city of Odessa proper.31
According to survivor Izu Landau, about seven thousand Jews were spared in Dalnic and sent on to Bogdanovka (Golta District);32 the mayor of Odessa, Gherman Pintea, was behind this move.33 The number of those slaughtered in Odessa and Dalnic differs in various sources but is nonetheless appalling: Litani estimates that several thousand Jews were killed in Odessa immediately after the Germans occupied the city: 24,000 Jews were killed by Romanian troops during the morning of October 23 (19,000 in the harbor and 5,000 in the city) and 16,000 in Dalnic, which brings the total to 40,000 dead.34 The German officer Rodler referred to forty thousand Jews killed in Dalnic itself.35 During the trial of the first group of Romanian war criminals, 25,000 to 30,000 were claimed killed in Dalnic.36 The figures mentioned by Romanian officers present in Odessa vary between 19,000 and 23,000 dead.37 At his trial Eugen Cristescu, former head of the SSI, stated that 25,000 to 26,000 people had been executed in Odessa.38 Finally, the handwritten postwar testimony of one survivor also estimated the number of victims burned alive or hanged in Odessa at 35,000.39 In the final analysis it is quite likely that at least 25,000 Jews were killed in Odessa and Dalnic.
Another large-scale massacre in which the Romanian military authorities of Transnistria were implicated took place in Golta District one month after the events at Odessa. At the first Romanian war crimes trial the fact emerged that the order to exterminate the Jews interned in the Golta ghettos of Bogdanovka, Dumanovka, and Acmecetka came from the prefect of the district, Modest Isopescu; Ukrainian policemen and Romanian gendarmes under his command carried out the mass executions. Most of the victims were Ukrainian Jews, but thousands of Bessarabian Jews also perished there. According to a Romanian officer, at the end of 1941 a dog’s existence was worth more than a Jew’s life in Bogdanovka.40
To flush out any hidden money, the Jews’ captors opened a “bakery” to sell the famished victims bread at five gold rubles per loaf. As was reported in the prosecutor’s statement at the postwar trial:
Once there was no more flour, the bakery could no longer operate. But hunger could be appeased only with bread. The indigenous population that came from time to time and sold various foodstuffs to the camp inmates was prevented from selling directly to them. The food was confiscated by Gheorghe Bobei and Izu Landau and resold to the inmates for gold and valuable items at the price that we mentioned. Hence, the inmates were stripped of their belongings in a short period of time, even of the clothes that they wore.
After the looting ended, the accused, Isopescu, committed the most horrendous crime of all: the mass murder of the entire camp population of 48,000 at Bogdanovka. The order for the execution was given to the accused Aristide Pădure, the deputy prefect of Golta District, an accomplice who was just as vicious and whom Modest Isopescu could trust implicitly, [and who was] convinced that the extermination would be total and in the shortest period of time—which is what happened. . . . Pădure was known by the inmates and the district’s population for the plunder and the ferocity that he displayed during that whole period. Pădure transmitted the order for the execution to the district prefect of the Dumanovka Raion [province], Vasile Mănescu, who took the initial measures to implement this order. In order to carry out the massacre, they brought in from the city of Golta and the entire district all the policemen under the express orders of Prefect Modest Isopescu.
The massacre began on the morning of December 21, 1941. The inmates were split into two groups: in several stables [were] the sick and disabled who could not go to the forest where the execution was to take place outside the camp; those who could walk were piled into the other stables. The first lot to be massacred consisted of the sick and the disabled; after having scattered hay on the roof of the stables and in front of the entrances, they poured gasoline. The order rang out, “Light the fire!” and in several minutes the two stables and the four to five thousand inmates went up in smoke, under the watchful eye of the police sent by Modest Isopescu, to help them complete his criminal task.
It is not difficult to imagine the torment, the anxiety of 43,000 Jews locked up in the other stables, awaiting their turn. For them, the accused had chosen another site for the massacre: a ravine close to a bog in the vicinity of the camp, each area playing a specific role—the bog, for the looting from the inmates of what they held to be most precious; the ravine, for the execution itself and incineration. While the two stables burned, the ambulatory inmates were led to the execution site. Horrible scenes unfolded: mothers took their children in their arms and asked to be spared; fathers encouraged their children and their wives when the deepest feeling of despair overtook the inmates. They could still hear the desperate screams coming from the stables, which collapsed on the corpses.
In the forest, after having been robbed and stripped, they were made to kneel, naked, on the edge of the ravine: they were shot in groups of three to four hundred people, with explosive bullets. The massacre proceeded at that pace on December 22 and 23, 1941. It was interrupted from December 24 to December 28.
In view of the large number (43,000–48,000) of people who were massacred, the accused, Modest Isopescu, gave the order to cremate the corpses, hoping to erase all traces of what had happened. For that, he chose the strongest two hundred men from among the inmates. The cremation took two months: January and February 1942.
The cremation took place as follows: they formed a layer of straw and wood, upon which they laid down the corpses, then they placed on top of them another layer of straw and another layer of corpses, so that the stacks were two meters tall and four to five meters wide. The corpses were set up in the following order: a thin corpse next to a fat corpse, so that the latter’s fat helped burn the thin corpse more quickly. That is how two hundred inmates spent their time trying to erase all signs of this crime for two months. Afterward 150 of those 200 inmates were executed, the pretext being that they had not carried out fast enough the cremation of the corpses.41
Vasile Mănescu also participated in the plunder and executions at Bogdanovka, and he further ordered the murder of the Jews detained at Dumanovka. The evidence was advanced at one of the post–World War II trials. Mănescu received his directive from Deputy Prefect Pădure, who himself had received it from Prefect Isopescu. Told to exterminate the inmates of Bogdanovka, he further transmitted the order to Adjutant Vasile Melinescu, but when Melinescu refused to carry out the criminal act, Mănescu took the measures himself. The postwar trial records show that Mănescu “was personally responsible for the massacre, for the fire that was set in the two stables, and for the cremation of the 43,000 inmates after their execution. . . . Vasile Mănescu [was] guilty of the mass execution of eighteen thousand inmates at Dumanovka, for sadistically having carried out Modest Isopescu’s order, and for having been present at all times at the execution sites.”42 The executions in Dumanovka lasted for a long time from the perspective of prisoners waiting their turn. Again, the trial records bear witness to the torture:
Isopescu instructed a small group of trusted murderers and told them to conduct the operation in series: executions for a day, then rest for two or three days. That explains why the executions lasted almost two months, in groups of 100–150 people requiring two to three days per group. For “undesirable and dangerous” Jews, Modest Isopescu established a “death camp.” Acmecetka was a farm and a sort of hospital, and according to some of those tried later, the Jews who were brought there were survivors of various ghettos from Transnistria and Romania. In Acmecetka the deportees were subjected to a slow and horrible extermination.
First of all, the inmates were prohibited from getting food supplies. People remained for days on end stretched out on the ground or on beds, unable to move. Modest Isopescu would come and say, “Give them each a cup of corn flour every day” [i.e., food that could have been eaten only if cooked]. They ate it raw, because they could not light a fire.
Isopescu showed up drunk. He relished the torments of the surviving inmates and their children. He looked at them and photographed them. Isopescu took photographs, always took photographs. . . . Witnesses stated that four to five thousand inmates died at Acmecetka, deprived of any food.43
A survivor confirms in general terms the figures attributable to the first batch of Romanian war criminals—namely, 48,000 dead in Bogdanovka, 14,000 dead in Dumanovka, and 14,000 dead in Acmecetka.44 But according to the same survivor’s notes, one has to add another five or six thousand to the number given at the trial, for although the number of dead at Bogdanovka is the same, the number at Dumanovka is smaller by four thousand, and at Acmecetka the total is nine or ten thousand greater. Nevertheless, based on the trial records and the survivor’s estimates, one can state that at least seventy thousand people were exterminated in the three localities between December 21, 1941, and the end of February 1942.
The Germans’ complicity seems to have consisted of pressuring Isopescu: on the other side of the Bug River they feared a typhus epidemic if the inmates weren’t liquidated quickly. Melinescu stated during his trial that at 10:00 A.M. on December 24, 1941, Isopescu arrived at the site of what would be the massacre of Bogdanovka with two German officers.45 Basing her account on the Carp archives in Yad Vashem, Litani relays: “the order for the operation was given by the governor of the Golta District, Modest Isopescu, who acted on advice from Fleischer, a German official on the other side of the [Bug]. The executioners of the order were Romanian district administrators, the Ukrainian militia under the command of and members of the SS Volksdeutsche.”46 In the course of his own trial Radu Lecca declared that the Golta executions were carried out by the Ukrainian police under orders from the Germans, confirming Isopescu’s role. But Lecca also admitted that the valuables of the executed Jews remained on the Romanian side of the river.47 During the Antonescu trial Filderman asserted that the authors of the Golta massacres were both German and Romanian.48
A survivor said that during the massacre at Bogdanovka both Romanian and German officers looked on and that Romanian gendarmes executed the Jews aided by Ukrainian policemen. At the trial of the executioners in Ukraine on February 12, 1976, twelve former Ukrainian policemen were condemned; all but one, however, bore ethnic German names.49 But the commander of the detachment of seventy killers was confirmed as Andruşin, a Ukrainian.50 Adjutant Melinescu declared at his own trial that he had seen the order for the Bogdanovka executions, dated December 13, 1941, and signed by Deputy Prefect Pădure, in Andruşin’s possession.51 Melinescu further declared that the policeman Mihail Cazachievici (or Hazachievici) at Dumanovka personally took part in the slaughter of five thousand Jews.52 On March 10, 1942, 810 Jews remained at Bogdanovka and 1,900 Jews at Dumanovka, under the supervision of Cazachievici and six guards. Thirty to forty Jews died each day in those two ghettos.53
The extermination of the Jews in Golta District and the elimination of the surviving Jews of Odessa in Berezovka District in early 1942 followed another killing operation, one that involved Einsatzgruppe D, under the command of Otto Ohlendorf. This murder formation had operated briefly in Transnistria and Bukovina and was now attached to the Eleventh German Army under General von Schobert (the army later under Erich von Manstein). From August 9 to August 15, 1941, Einsatzgruppe D operated throughout the regions of Nicolaev and Kherson, moving east of the Dnieper River after October 1.54 More broadly, between June 1941 and June 1942, Einsatzgruppe D liquidated about ninety thousand people: Jews, Gypsies, Ukrainians, partisans, intellectuals, mental patients.55 At the same time the Romanians were quite aware of what the local ethnic Germans were doing on their territory in Transnistria under separate and autonomous SS command. According to a report from the Supreme General Staff to Antonescu in March 1942, German policemen subjected the Jewish population of the district of Berezovka to mass executions:
I. (1) In the district of Berezovka (Transnistria), German policemen executed 4,067 [sic] Jews, who had been interned in that district’s camps, specifically:
1,725 Jews on March 10;
1,742 Jews on April 20;
550 Jews on April 22;
30 Jews on April 24.
(2) Following the execution the German police burned the corpses and donated the clothes to the German population without having disinfected them, which occasioned typhoid cases in one particular town.
II. The Supreme General Staff wishes to find out if the German policemen can conduct such undertakings under Romanian administration.56
Marshal Antonescu wrote in response that “it is not the responsibility of the Supreme General Staff of the army to worry about such things.”57
A report of the Aid Committee of the Central Office of Romanian Jews indicated that by March 22, 1943, one year later, only 185 Jews still survived in southern Transnistria: 425 in the district of Berezovka and 60 in Odessa.58 A survivor’s testimony estimated that in Mostovoi District the SS and policemen from the German communities at Rastadt, Lichtenfeld, and others had killed fifteen thousand Jews.59
The status of the ethnic Germans in the new Transnistria was established through an agreement negotiated by Mihai Antonescu and Manfred von Killinger on November 14 and 15, 1941. According to this agreement, “German colonies” came under the authority of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office). Thus recognized, the colonies were allowed to form their own SS police. The head of the Mittelstelle in Transnistria was SS Oberführer (Horst) Hoffmeyer, who nominated the heads of the administration of the German settlements pending formal approval by the Romanian prefect.60
Mostovoi was the major center of extermination of the Berezovka District Jews. According to the estimates of survivors and Romanian gendarmes, at least thirty thousand were murdered there. Other mass executions took place in Balaiciuc (two thousand victims), Cihrin (two thousand), Zaharovca (fifteen hundred), and Rastadt (six hundred).61 In May 1942, Romanian gendarmes and German policemen killed forty Jews in Vasilinovo (Berezovka).62 About 31,000 Jews in Berezovka District were transferred to the Germans by a gendarme commander, Adam Popescu. As far as is known, none survived.63
Berezovka was the arrival point of almost twenty thousand Odessa Jews who had survived the Romanian army massacres of October 1941. The railroad station of the town of Berezovka, some sixty miles northeast of Odessa, was situated in the middle of a cluster of Ukrainian and ethnic German settlements. The Jews, brought there by train, were marched to the countryside and shot by ethnic German Selbstschutz [members of the “self-defense” corps]. . . . The death toll . . . was swelled by victims from smaller towns and villages. A cumulative figure was indicated by a member of the German Foreign Office in May. “About 28,000 Jews had been brought to German villages in Transnistria,” he [Popescu] wrote. “Inzwischen wurden sie liquidiert” (Meanwhile they have been liquidated).64
The same figure of 28,000 Jews liquidated by the German “colonists” in Transnistria has been given by Alexander Dallin.65 According to the testimony of the gendarme Ilie Bădoiu, thirty thousand Jews, transferred by the Romanian gendarmes to the Mostovoi Volksdeutsche SS, perished there over several months.66 Further details are available concerning some of those murders perpetrated by German troops, by Ukrainian-born Germans incorporated into the SS, and by other residents of German settlements in Transnistria: on February 12, 1942, the Jews of Ieroşinca were massacred by SS troops; on February 13, German policemen from Rastadt executed 130 in the village of Nova Umani;67 on March 9, German police at Mostovoi and Zavadovca executed 372 Jews from the Khrincihrin camp;68 also on March 9, German policemen from Mostovoi and Zavadovca killed 722 Jews from the camp at Cihrini-Berezovka; on the following day fifteen German policemen from the same villages executed 875 Jews at Balaiciuc. Three days later, on March 13, seventeen SS officers from the village of Carteica executed 650 Jews from the village of Hulievca; their corpses were burned later. On March 16, 1942, sixteen SS members of the village of Nova Candeli executed 120 Jews from the Catovska camp. On March 18, German policemen under a German officer executed 483 Jews from Odessa in the village of Bernadovka. On March 22, German police from Carteica executed 180 Jews at Staraia Balca and 370 at Zaharovca;69 on March 24, in Neu-Fredental-Berezovka thirty Jews from Balaiciuc were executed by nineteen German policemen.70
A report from the Romanian Berezovka gendarmerie stated in April 1942 that 85 percent of the Jews of Berezovka District had been liquidated by SS formations.71 A similar report of May 1942 indicated that all Odessa Jews who had been held in the Mostovoi castle had been executed in a field by the SS, which then burned the corpses.72 In early June the SS troops of Lichtenfeld executed 1,200 Jews in Suha Verba; the Transnistria Gendarme Inspectorate reported that mass murder to the government of Transnistria.73 On July 3, 1942, Romanian officials handed over 247 Jews at Brailov (Bratslav), ten kilometers northeast of Smerinka, after they had sought refuge on Romanian territory; the Germans killed them.74 Romanian gendarmes executed three hundred Jews moved from Vapniarka to Berezovka during the spring of 1942.75
On August 19, 1942, at the request of the Todt Organization and with the consent of the Tulcin District prefect, Colonel Loghin, three thousand Jews who had been deported in June from Cernăuţi and taken beyond the Bug now were handed over to the Germans. “Of those three thousand Jews almost no one returned. The elderly, [as well as] some of the women, some of the children, and the weakest, were executed in the first days. The others were gradually killed once they could no longer work.”76 Then, on June 6, 1943, again at the request of the Todt Organization, another transport of 829 Jews was sent from Moghilev to Trihati for the construction of a bridge over the Bug.77 The fate of these Jews is unknown.
The year 1942 also saw indigenous Jews in Olgopol and Jews from Odessa being handed over by Lieutenant Grigorescu to the Germans, who executed most of them right away. When eighteen young Jews escaped, Grigorescu sent them back to the Germans, who murdered them.78 Matatias Carp discovered that on or about September 15, 1942, Romanian “gendarmes from Mostovoi supported SS troops in their looting and killing operations aimed at a group of six hundred Jews from Regat and Transylvania, [Jews who had been] deported two weeks earlier on orders of the Ministry of the Interior.”79 On September 22, 1942, SS troops carried out another massacre: 598 Jews from Moldavia and Walachia were deported for having petitioned to go to the USSR in 1940; they were removed from Mostovoi and taken to Rastadt upon request of the local German police, and they were joined by 423 indigenous Jews there. All were executed and their clothes confiscated. Only sixteen Jews survived that massacre.80
On October 16, 1942, the commander of the Pecioara camp handed over 150 young girls aged fourteen to twenty to Oberfeldwebel Hans Rucker, these to be shot in the woods between Bar and Vijniţa. One of those youngsters survived.81 On October 20, north of Transnistria, twelve thousand Jews, including many children, were murdered in Bar, under German jurisdiction. Romanian officials in Balki saved several dozen Jews, doctors or other specialists, as well as several of those who were only wounded during the massacre and had managed to escape.82
On November 1, 1942, the Mostovoi station gendarmes handed ninety refugee Polish Jews to the Rastadt SS; these captives were executed on the spot.83 On November 9, a major extermination sweep got under way on the German side of the Bug. This enveloped many of those who had been deported from the Romanian bank of the river. About one thousand Jews were killed at Garisin. Another large-scale massacre took place at Brailov, but 250 Jews escaped; the 40 Jewish specialists and doctors who had been saved by Romanian officials in Balki on October 20, however, had only been reprieved: they were killed at Bar.84 On November 20, five hundred Jews from the Pecioara camp were handed over to the Germans, who transported them to the other side of the Bug and executed them.85
On December 5, 1942, the 250 Brailov massacre survivors who had sought refuge in Şmerinka were slain by the Germans.86 Weeks later, on December 24, a German officer murdered three children in Krasnopolsk.87 On January 15, 1943, two hundred Jews were slaughtered in that same town by the Germans, and three days later SS Lieutenant Robert Stolzmann executed fifteen more at Bratslav.88 On March 29, 1943, again at Bratslav, the Germans killed another six Jews.89 Romanian gendarmes had arrested them under the pretense that they were being sent to work. Those destined for extermination were taken to the nearby towns of Mostovoi and especially Vasilinovo, where, after having been tortured in a most atrocious manner, they were executed.90
Upon request of the German military authorities beyond the Bug, the new district prefect of Tulcin, Poiană Volbură, ordered the transfer of two hundred Jews to the other side of that river on August 2, 1943. Knowing what awaited them, they managed to organize, for a sum of money, the safeguarding of fifty-two children.91 On October 28, 1943, the commander of the Nicolaev labor camp, Hans Schmidt, ordered Jews to hang the ten most exhausted of their number, who could no longer work. When the third victim was being hung, the rope snapped twice, so that those other Jews who had “mishandled” the hanging were also executed. The officer shot two of them himself. On November 15, 1943, the same German officer ordered the execution of twenty additional Jews in Nicolaev.92 On December 10, the Germans massacred 438 Jews in Tarasivca, most of whom had come from Cernăuţi and Dorohoi.93
During the massive SS executions of the Jews who had been deported to the Berezovka District in the spring of 1942, Romanian gendarmes also wrought their own carnage. Among their many outrages, they killed one hundred Jews in early 1942 in Uleiovka, Berezovka.94 Six Jews were executed on March 20 along the Şargorod-Moghilev road by a Romanian gendarme (the Jews who had been deported to Transnistria were not allowed to circulate from one town to another without approval); the executions took place in the cemetery of Şargorod on orders from the military prosecutor of the district, Dindelegan. On April 2, another Jew was killed by gendarmes nearby.95 Two days later forty-eight Jews caught outside the ghetto of Râbniţa were executed on orders from the gendarme legion commander, and on April 8, another Jew was executed in Şargorod, reportedly for having stolen four pounds of flour.96 Several Jews were killed in the ghetto of Olgopol by Romanian gendarmes.97
During the spring of 1943, Iampol ghetto commander Dionisie Fotino and Gheorghe Popescu, a noncom, executed three Jews who had come to buy food from a neighboring ghetto.98 In June 1943, four young Jews were executed in Trihati—one because he had left the “dormitory,” the other three because they had received letters their parents had sent from other towns in Transnistria.99 On June 18, two gendarmes who belonged to the guard detail of the Pecioara camp executed two Jews as they were buying cherries near the camp’s fence. On July 11, a gendarme caught thirteen Jewish escapees from Tulcin in the town of Jurkovca (Tulcin District); he killed twelve, one escaped.100
Carp reports that on August 18, 1943, “in the woods of Sosnovca, near Şargorod, one Jew was executed on orders from [Major] Botoroagă. The corpse was burned. In the waters of the Dniester were floating corpses of Jews who had been riddled with bullets. Almost all of the victims belonged to the Nestervorka camp.”101 On August 25, in Sumovka, gendarmes executed two Jews who were begging and threw their bodies into the Bug; a day later sixty mental patients deported from Cernăuţi were executed at the stone quarry of Ladijin.102
On September 9, a Jew was executed in the Trihati camp when the authorities determined that one hundred grams of oil were missing. On October 10, the Capusterna gendarme chief executed at Iaroşinca two brothers whom he had caught begging. On the same day the gendarme station chief at Lucineţ executed a Crainic couple and their child, caught searching for kindling in the forest. They were buried at Grumovka.103 On November 15, 1943, a Jew caught outside the ghetto of Berşad was executed. Second Lieutenant Ghineraru terrorized the Jews in the ghetto, as he did the Ukrainians from that locality. Ghineraru killed a Jewish child, whom he dragged behind his motorcycle. Then, in January 1944, Ghineraru executed 320 Jews and several Ukrainians after torturing them for two weeks.104 The local military command lodged a written protest against Ghineraru’s atrocities.105 On November 18, 1943, eighty-three Jews were executed in Balta; and on December 8, the gendarme station chief at Capusterna executed two Jewish children caught fleeing to the other side of the Bug.106
During the retreat of 1944, several Jews were executed by Romanian gendarmes and German troops in Balta.107 On January 20, 1944, in the town of Derebcin, the Germans executed 11 Jews; and in Berşad, on January 25, Romanian gendarmes and the German police arrested 148 Jews, all of whom were executed after eight days of torture.108 Romanian and German troops massacred eighty more Jews in Berşad on February 7, 1944.109 On March 15, in the town of Slobodka, Balta District, Romanian gendarmes executed four Jews.110 In the prison of Râbniţa Romanian and German soldiers executed fifty-two Jewish inmates; four survived.111 Finally, between March 5 and 20, 1944, Soviet troops liberated Transnistria.
How many Jews perished in the massacres at Transnistria? At least 123,000 Romanian Jews had crossed the Dniester River in 1941 and 1942; only 50,741 remained alive as of 1943. About 25,000 Jews were killed in Odessa, at least 28,000 Jews were killed by the Germans in Berezovka, and 75,000 were killed in Golta, not to mention up to 19,000 Romanian Gypsies killed in Transnistria. Julius Fisher estimates that 87,000 Romanian Jews died in Transnistria along with 130,000 indigenous Jews.112 The Germans bear direct responsibility for the deaths of about fifty thousand, mostly in the districts of Berezovka and Bar. The majority of them were handed over to the Nazis by the Romanians. The final result of all the efforts of the Romanians, the Germans, and their collaborators was the victimization of more than a quarter million innocent people.
Although, as we have seen, the murders continued after 1942, the zeal of Romanian officialdom began to abate in that year as the changing course of the war suggested to them to replace fanaticism with opportunism in Jewish matters. If outright mass murder occurred less frequently, however, soul-numbing persecution and grinding day-to-day oppression would continue, with widespread fatal results.