Odessa massacre (1941)

Background

During WWII, after occupying much of Western Europe and the Balkans, Nazi Germany and some of her Axis allies^[4]^[5] launched the Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 to invade the Soviet Union as part of Hitler's plan to colonize Eastern Europe. They made initial success by capturing most of Ukraine, Belarus and knocking on the gates of Moscow within four months.^[5]

On 16 October 1941, Romanian forces took over Odessa, when 70,000–120,000 Jews were trapped in the city, some of whom were Jewish refugees from Bessarabia.^[6] The massacre was preceded by escalating violence towards Jews by the antisemitic Romanian troops.^[1]^[3] On 22 October 1941, the Romanian military headquarters in Odessa was blown up mysteriously. Jews were blamed together with communists by Antonescu, who ordered the massacre.^[1]^[3]

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Massacre

Within two days, at least 5,000 Jews had been hanged, while another few thousand were deported to the nearby village of Dalnyk. The victims were confined to barns, sheds and warehouses, which were later sprayed with machine gunfire and set ablaze. Jews who tried to escape met their fate immediately, while some buildings with Jews were blown up by Romanian troops, causing thousands to perish instantly. Thousands more were slain in mass shootings, some of whom were also burned alive in artillery warehouses.^[1]^[3]

Around 25,000 Jews who had not been killed were deported to a ghetto in Odessa's neighborhood Slobidka, where they endured cold and hunger for the remainder of the war. Holocaust experts estimated the death toll at Dalnyk alone was at least 20,000.^[1]^[3]

Death march

By the end of October 1941, 25,000–30,000 Jewish deportees were forced on a death march to the Bogdanovka concentration camp, where the deportees were crowded in pigsties. Almost all of them were also slain in subsequent mass shootings or burned alive^[7]^[8] by the end of January 1942, when the Soviets pushed back the Axis invaders from the outskirts of Moscow. Meanwhile, Romanian forces burned the Jewish corpses to destroy evidence of the genocidal massacre. By autumn 1942, over 90% of pre-war Odessa's Jews had already perished.^[1]^[3]

Nazi German involvement

Despite Romanian forces having carried out most of the atrocities in Odessa, they were backed up by the Nazi German SS Einsatzgruppe D, who shot some Jews from the Fontans'ka Street prison and were hunting down Jews until November 1941, whose inflicted death toll numbered in thousands.^[6] It is recorded that ethnic Germans in Odessa formed the militias Selbstschutze to facilitate the Holocaust in the area.^[1]^[3]

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Aftermath

Survivors

Around 1,000 Karaite Jews survived the war as Hitler designated them as "Turks" and spared them from death. A handful of other Jews, who were either forced laborers or hiding under false identities, also survived. Vera Bakhmutskaia, an Odessan Jew who survived the war by hiding in the house of a gentile friend, said,

There were very few of us left [. ...] If they [locals] knew [of me being Jewish], they would have denounced me immediately.

The Soviets retook Odessa on 10 April 1944 and conducted a census within two months, finding that Jews in Odessa had fallen from the pre-war level of 200,000 to 2,640, a 98.7% drop.^[1]^[10]

Trial

Together with Ion Antonescu, other instigators including Gheorghe Alexianu,^[12] were sentenced to death in 1946.^[1]^[13]

Gentiles who saved Jews

Dozens of gentiles in Odessa who saved Jews have been recognized by the Yad Vashem as the Righteous Among the Nations.^[14]