Where the Iron Crosses Grow

Ohlendorf moved first against Feodosiya and Kerch, which had only recently been cleared of Red Army units. In Feodosiya, Ohlendorf’s men began registering and then liquidating about 1,000 persons over the course of a few weeks, but in Kerch he began the Crimean Holocaust in earnest. All Jews in Kerch were ordered to report to Haymarket Square in the center of the city for registration on November 29, 1941. About 7,000 civilians went to the square and were promptly arrested. Women and girls who were particularly attractive were separated from the group and detained elsewhere; they were raped by men from the SS Sonderkommando, and then shot. The bulk of the arrested population were moved by trucks borrowed from the XLII Armeekorps to Bagerovo, 2½ miles west of Kerch, on December 1. There, the SS had set up an execution area in an abandoned Red Army antitank ditch. On a crisp December morning, with the ground lightly dusted with snow, the SS brought groups of civilians to the ditch, shot them, and tossed the bodies in. Approximately 7,000 civilians were murdered by Ohlendorf’s men at Bagerovo. As usual, there were a few survivors who escaped. By chance, this area was liberated by Soviet troops just a month later – before the Germans had the opportunity to conceal evidence – and they found the antitank ditch, “for the length of a kilometre, four meters wide and to a depth of two meters, filled with dead bodies of women, children, the elderly, and adolescents. Near the trench there were frozen puddles of blood. The area was also littered with children’s hats, toys, ribbons, torn-off buttons, gloves, bottles with nipples, shoes, galoshes, arms, legs, and other body parts. All this was splattered with blood and brains.”[2]

After Kerch, Ohlendorf concentrated his personnel for a major action against the Jewish population and communists in the Simferopol area. Ohlendorf requested military police, 25 trucks, and ammunition from Korück 553 in order to conduct the operation, and Generalleutnant Döhla provided them. A company of military policemen from Feldgendarmerie-Abteilung 683 were to help round up Jews in Simferopol and then secure the execution site, located at an old Soviet antitank ditch 9 miles northeast of Simferopol, while 20 personnel from Gruppe Geheime Feldpolizei 647 (Secret Field Police) were chosen to assist the executioners. Ohlendorf put Sturmbannführer Werner Braune and his Sonderkommando 11b in charge of the operation at Simferopol. The round-ups began in Simferopol in early December, and Braune’s unit executed approximately 1,500 Krymchaks and 600 Gypsies on December 9–10. However, the main killing began on December 13, and continued for several days. The total number of civilians murdered at Simferopol was approximately 12,000–14,000. Not only did Wehrmacht troops participate in the massacres, but army leaders described the liquidation of the Simferopol Jews as “necessary” in order to avoid famine in the Crimea.[3] Although some Jews went into hiding, they were often betrayed by Crimean Tatars or other minorities who resented the loss of farmland to OZET in the 1930s. In his report to Berlin on January 2, 1942, Ohlendorf claimed that Einsatzgruppe D had executed 21,185 people in the Crimea between November 16 and December 15, 1941.[4] In addition to Jews and Gypsies, the SS also eliminated at least 212 Communist Party members and former officials rounded up near Simferopol. Since Einsatzgruppe D had no counterintelligence capabilities or ability to sort out local loyalties, the SD dispatched 700 personnel to the Crimea in December 1941.

Once Simferopol was “pacified,” Ohlendorf moved on to Yalta, which had only a small Jewish population. Lidiya I. Chyernih, a 14-year-old girl in Yalta, remembered that the SS detachment ordered the Jews to assemble on the embankment, where they were shot. A number of Komsomol members and communists were also hanged on the embankment.[5] Chyernih noted that some of the executioners were Tatars and former Russian policemen. It is estimated that the SS murdered about 1,500 civilians in Yalta on December 18. Thereafter, Ohlendorf and his Sonderkommando appear to have taken a Christmas holiday for more than a week, while they left Feldgendarmerie to round up the Jews in Feodosiya, with help from an infantry platoon.[6] Officials from Korück 553 apparently complained to Ohlendorf about a forgotten displaced-persons camp at Dzhankoy, which was still drawing rations at a time when food was very short in AOK 11. Ohlendorf promptly sent a Sonderkommando, which shot 455 Jews at the camp. AOK 11 expressed its gratitude for the expeditious response. Ohlendorf even claimed that the executions were popular with the non-Jewish population in the Crimea: “In general, the shooting of the Jews has been positively received after the initial fear of similar treatment for the rest of the population has subsided.”