Odessa massacre (1941)

"Odessa massacre" redirects here. 1941 Odessa massacre.

General Ion Antonescu, the Prime Minister and de facto leader of the Romanian regime allied with Nazi Germany until 1944. Photocopy of the portrait.

The Odessa massacre was a genocidal massacre of the Jews in Odessa, Ukraine on October 22–24 1941. 30,000–100,000 Jews are estimated to have been killed within two weeks by the occupation forces of Romania, then-allied with Nazi Germany under the totalitarian rule of Ion Antonescu, who called himself Conducător in imitation of Adolf Hitler's Führer.

Background

After occupying much of Western Europe and the Balkans, Nazi Germany and some of her Axis allies 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.

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 who had fled Romanian brutality and sought refuge in Odesa. The massacre was preceded by escalating violence towards Jews by the antisemitic Romanian troops.

Prelude to massacre

On 22 October 1941, the Romanian military headquarters in Odessa was blown up mysteriously for which Jews were blamed together with communists by Antonescu, who ordered the start of the massacre.

Massacre

Within two days, at least 5,000 Jews had been hanged, while another few thousand were deported to the nearby village of Dalnyk, who 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 of the captive buildings 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.

Around 25,000 Jews who briefly survived were deported to a ghetto in Odessa's neighborhood Slobidka, where they subsequently endured cold and hunger for the remainder of the war. Holocaust experts estimated the death toll at Dalnyk alone was at least 20,000.

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. It is recorded that ethnic Germans in Odessa formed the militias Selbstschutze to facilitate the Holocaust in the area.

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 whom were ultimately slain in further mass shootings or burned alive, just as their late brethren at Dalnyk, 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.

Aftermath

Aftermath of the Odesa Massacre: Jewish deportees killed outside Birzula.

A memorial to the Odessa massacre in Prokhorovsky Square, Odessa.

A Holocaust Memorial in Odessa.

Remaining Jews in Odessa

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.

Trial

Together with Ion Antonescu, other instigators of the genocidal massacre, including Gheorghe Alexianuwere sentenced to death in 1946.

Gentiles who saved Jews

Dozens of gentile Odessans who saved Jews in the war have been recognized by the Yad Vashem as the Righteous Among the Nations.

Historical revisionism under communism (1947–1989)

A photo of the Romanian communist tyrant Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Under Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist tyranny, Romanian instigation of such genocidal massacres was denied. Instead, it was blamed entirely on the Germans and Hungarian "fascists". Romanians were taught about the "heroic anti-fascist resistance", with an emphasis on the anti-Nazi battles fought after Romanian defection to the Allies. Many former subordinates of Ion Antonescu served in the secret police of Nicolae Ceaușescu and to help him oppress Romanians. Meanwhile, Nicolae Ceaușescu believed in lies about Jews, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and even defined Jew as a "money-changer" and an "extortionist" in an official English–Romanian dictionary.

Related pages

• Jews
• Odessa
• Pogrom
• Ukraine
• Babi Yar
• Fascism
• Judaism
• Romania
• Genocide
• World War II
• Antisemitism
• Nazi Germany
• Ion Antonescu
• The Holocaust
• Karaite Judaism
• Nicolae Ceaușescu
• Operation Barbarossa
• Jedwabne pogrom (1941)
• Righteous Among the Nations
• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
• Ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust