Bloody Sunday in Stanisławów

On Sunday 12 October 1941 German police in Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk) drove thousands of Jews into the market square, and from there in columns to the new Jewish cemetery on the edge of the town. In the cemetery, surrounded by a high wall, pits dug the previous evening were waiting. From midday until dusk officers of the German Security Police, the Order Police and the railway police shot men, women and children at the edge of the pits. When darkness fell, SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger, who was directing the operation, halted the shooting, and the survivors were driven out of the cemetery. According to witness accounts and the scholarly literature, between 10,000 and 12,000 people were killed. The Jews of Stanisławów called the day “Bloody Sunday” (Blutsonntag). It was the largest massacre of Jews to date in the General Government and – together with the shootings in Nadwórna six days earlier – the beginning of the murder of all Jews, and not merely of selected groups, in the lands of occupied Poland.

Some tallies give 8,000 to 12,000 victims and state that the Jews were shot by the “SIPO (Ukrainian police)” together with “German uniformed SS men”. This needs correcting. The Sipo, or Sicherheitspolizei, was the German Security Police – in Stanisławów its outpost, in practice the Gestapo, was headed by Krüger. The shooting was done above all by its officers, supported by the German Order Police: Reserve Police Battalion 133 and railway policemen. The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police dragged people out of their homes, escorted the columns and guarded the cemetery; it was not, however, the same thing as the Sipo. The figure of 8,000 appears in some studies, but most commonly, following witness accounts, the number of dead is put at 10,000 to 12,000.

Preparations

Krüger arrived in Stanisławów at the end of July 1941, as the town was passing from Hungarian administration to German rule, and set up an outpost of the Lwów command of the Security Police and SD there. After Eastern Galicia was incorporated into the General Government as the District of Galicia, he began by murdering the town’s Jewish and Polish intelligentsia in the Black Forest near Pawełcze. Until the end of August, however, according to the German historian Dieter Pohl, there was no question yet of killing the entire Jewish population, women and children included.

The change came in September. In Lwów the SS and Police Leader of the district, Fritz Katzmann, and the new commander of the Security Police, Helmut Tanzmann, discussed the “Jewish question” with the heads of the outposts. According to Pohl it was decided at that point that the heads of the outposts in the southern part of the district – Krüger in Stanisławów, Hans Block in Drohobycz and Peter Leideritz in Kołomyja – would set about murdering entire Jewish communities. Exactly who gave the order – Katzmann, Tanzmann or the earlier head of the Security Police, Eberhard Schöngarth – remains unclear. After the war Krüger and other witnesses pointed to the planned ghetto: it was to be as small as possible, and the Jews who could not fit into it and were unfit for work were to be shot. Historians also point to the proximity of the border with Hungarian-held Carpathian Ruthenia, from where in the summer the Hungarians expelled thousands of Jews without Hungarian citizenship into Galicia; most of them were killed at the end of August in the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre.

Stanisławów was then one of the largest concentrations of Jews in Galicia. In 1931 almost 25,000 Jews lived there, and in the autumn of 1941 – including the refugees of 1939 and those expelled from Hungary – between 40,000 and more than 50,000 in the town and its surroundings, according to various estimates. Krüger’s outpost usually numbered about 25 Germans. For a large operation it therefore needed other forces. Stationed in the town were two companies of Reserve Police Battalion 133 and a detachment of the Viennese Schutzpolizei (protection police), which supervised the Ukrainian auxiliary police.

On 6 October Krüger carried out an operation in Nadwórna, a few dozen kilometres south of Stanisławów, later described as his “dress rehearsal”. The Jews of the small town were herded into the market square, the members of the Judenrat and their families were separated out, and the rest were taken to a nearby forest and shot. Pohl gives some 2,000 victims; the court in Münster established at least 1,200. According to that court’s findings, Krüger told his men that morning that a “difficult task” awaited them, because “the Führer has ordered the extermination of the Jews”.

On 11 October Krüger’s deputy, Oskar Brandt, arranged with the commander of Battalion 133 for his men to take part. That same day Krüger met the town commissioner, Emil Beau, who drew new, reduced boundaries for the future Jewish quarter. The other authorities, including the commander of the Viennese policemen, were summoned to a briefing only on the morning of 12 October. Krüger also secured the participation of a railway police (Bahnschutz) detachment.

Sunday 12 October

In the morning units of the Security Police, the Order Police and the Ukrainian police, who knew the town, began emptying Jewish homes one after another – from the railway line through the town centre to the district where the ghetto was later set up. People were told to bring their valuables. In the market square (Ringplatz) they were formed into columns of about two hundred and marched to the new Jewish cemetery; the sick and infirm were taken by lorry. Survivors described how Ukrainian and German policemen beat and humiliated them along the way.

At the cemetery people were made to sit down under guard. Then they had to hand over their valuables, show their papers and undress. They were led to the pits in groups. According to reconstructions based on testimony at post-war trials, the victims had to step onto a plank laid across the pit, and officers shot them with rifles and pistols, working in rotating groups of a dozen or so. The first to be killed were reportedly some 400 Jews who had fled to Hungary, been sent back across the border and were being held in the Stanisławów prison. Krüger himself was among the shooters. A recurring image in survivors’ accounts is of tables laden with vodka and food, at which the shooters rested as they took turns.

When the people trapped in the cemetery realised what was happening, panic broke out. The crowd pressed against the gate, but the cemetery was a trap. The shooting went on without a break until dusk. The policemen tried to continue by the light of searchlights, but in the end Krüger halted the executions. The gates were opened and those who had survived were driven back into the town under blows. Many of them no longer had anywhere to return to: the homes of those killed and of those driven to the cemetery had already been taken over by neighbours. To prevent unrest, another company of Battalion 133 was brought in from Lwów. That evening, according to witnesses, there was a celebration at Gestapo headquarters.

Victims and perpetrators

No document gives an exact number of those killed. Pohl, the author of the fundamental study of the crimes in the region, speaks of 10,000–12,000. The same figure is given by witness accounts and most studies. The Münster regional court, which tried Krüger in the 1960s, cautiously accepted at least 6,000 victims – only that many did it consider proven beyond all doubt.

Bloody Sunday is linked to a story passed down in survivors’ accounts and repeated in studies of the Stanisławów ghetto. According to it, Krüger offered a member of the Judenrat, Dr Tenenbaum, his freedom, but he replied that he would accept nothing from a murderer and wished to die together with his brothers. He was shot. The story comes from survivors’ accounts and cannot be confirmed in German documents. The chairman of the Judenrat since July had been Izrael Seibald, and his deputy was the lawyer Michał Lamm.

Bloody Sunday showed how a handful of officials could organise a massacre on a scale comparable to the largest operations of the Einsatzgruppen behind the front. Krüger’s outpost supplied the plan and the shooters, but without the Order Police, the railway police, the Ukrainian police and the cooperation of the German civil administration it could not have done it. The district head (Kreishauptmann) Heinz Albrecht and the town commissioner Beau were, as Pohl writes, convinced antisemites.

After Bloody Sunday

The massacre in Stanisławów was not an isolated one. On 16 October the police began murdering Jews in the Carpathian towns of Delatyn and Jaremcze; at the end of October Krüger’s men shot several hundred Jews in Bolechów, and in the following weeks the killings spread to Rohatyn and Kałusz, among other places. The shootings were suspended only in December, when the frozen ground made it impossible to dig pits. The day after Bloody Sunday, on 13 October, Heinrich Himmler met the SS and Police Leader in Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, in Berlin. Historians link this meeting to the decision to build the first extermination camp in the General Government – at Bełżec. In Galicia, however, the Germans did not wait for the camps. Pohl points out that only here, unlike in the other districts of the General Government, did the murder of entire Jewish communities begin before the gas chambers existed – by bullet.

The Jews of Stanisławów who remained alive, some 20,000, were shut into a ghetto in December, sealed off from the rest of the town on 20 December 1941.

Place in the war

Bloody Sunday in Stanisławów took place two weeks after Babi Yar and belonged to the same autumn wave of killings in which the Germans in the occupied eastern territories moved from killing men and selected groups to murdering entire communities. Its particular significance lies in the fact that it was carried out on the territory of the General Government, in a town that had been under Hans Frank’s civil administration for two months, and not in the rear of the front. Historians regard it, together with the massacre in Nadwórna, as the beginning of the Holocaust in the General Government, several months before the camps of Operation Reinhard began operating.

In 1942 the Stanisławów ghetto was destroyed in a series of operations. On 31 March, on the eve of Passover, thousands of people were deported to Bełżec; others died in the Rudolf mill, where the old and the sick were locked up; and in August the Germans publicly hanged the chairman of the Judenrat, Mordechai Goldstein, and members of the Jewish police. In February 1943 the police surrounded the ghetto and shot most of its last inhabitants, then declared the town “free of Jews”. According to Pohl, in the space of sixteen months the small outpost in Stanisławów organised the shooting of some 70,000 Jews from the whole region and the deportation of another 12,000 to extermination camps. At the beginning of 1944 a special unit opened the mass graves and burned the bodies to cover up the traces. When the Red Army entered the town on 27 July 1944, around a hundred Jews who had survived in hiding were there to see it.

Most of the perpetrators went unpunished. In 1966 two Viennese policemen from Stanisławów were tried in Salzburg and Vienna and sentenced to eight and twelve years in prison. On 6 May 1968 the Münster regional court sentenced Hans Krüger and two other officers of the Stanisławów outpost to life imprisonment, and six more to long prison terms. Krüger was released in 1986.