Where the Iron Crosses Grow

The Soviet amphibious landings at Kerch, Feodosiya, and Yevpatoriya temporarily put Einsatzgruppe D’s activities on hold. After the landing at Yevpatoriya was crushed in January 1942, teams from Einsatzgruppe D and the SD were sent into the city to make an example of civilians who had assisted the Soviet landing force. About 1,300 civilians were rounded up – Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians – and executed. Thereafter, Einsatzgruppe D continued with its ethnic-cleansing operations in the Crimea, but AOK 11 increasingly called upon these professional executioners to inflict punitive measures upon non-Jews who cooperated with either the partisans or the Red Army. Terror became part of the Wehrmacht’s panoply of tools, just like Karl or Dora, to crush all forms of resistance in the Crimea. In the last two weeks of February, Ohlendorf claimed that his group shot 1,515 people, including 729 Jews, 271 communists, 74 partisans, and 421 Gypsies or other “anti-social elements.” Although the Holocaust would continue in the Crimea until the Soviet liberation in 1944, the SS confidently reported on April 16, 1942 that, “Die Krim ist judenfrei” (the Crimea is Jew-free). Only Sevastopol remained to be cleansed of enemies of the Reich. In fact, the SD killed 1,029 Jews and 11 communists in Kerch in July 1942, and was still finding holdouts months later.⁷

Ohlendorf left the Crimea before the fall of Sevastopol and most of Einsatzgruppe D followed the army into the Caucasus, but the SS and SD retained a strong presence in the occupied Crimea. Although the Wehrmacht established military Ortskommandantur (OK) in each occupied city in the Crimea, the real power was SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Polizei Ludolf von Alvensleben. A scion of Saxon aristocracy, Alvensleben had been an early adherent to the Nazi cause, joining the party and the SA in 1929, then the SS in 1934. He rose quickly in the SS hierarchy and took to the ethnic-cleansing mission with relish; he helped to orchestrate the first large-scale murder of civilians in Poland in October 1939. In 1941, Alvensleben was involved in organizing forced labor in Ukraine in an effort to get the region working for the Third Reich. When he arrived in Sevastopol in August 1942, Alvensleben was put in charge of all SS-Police units in the Crimea and was responsible for rooting out any remaining enemies of the Reich. Forced labor and “special actions” were his tools of choice. It was also part of his mandate to begin adapting the Crimea for German colonization.