The Bogdanovka massacre

On 21 December 1941, in the camp at Bogdanovka (Ukrainian: Bohdanivka (PL)), on the western bank of the Southern Bug in the part of Ukraine occupied by Romania, the mass murder of the prisoners began. They were above all Jews from Odessa, driven out of the city after the October massacre, together with Jews from Bessarabia and from the surrounding localities. The killers were Romanian soldiers and gendarmes, Ukrainian policemen, civilians from the nearby town of Golta and armed local Germans from the self-defence formations (Selbstschutz). Several thousand people who were sick or unable to march were burned alive in stables; the rest were shot in groups at a ravine in a nearby wood. By 31 December, according to the findings of Yad Vashem, more than 40,000 people had been killed.

Some descriptions say that the prisoners were massacred “to suppress a typhus epidemic” and that about 40,000 people died. The figure agrees with the most frequently cited estimates, although these range from 40,000 to 48,000, and according to some calculations as high as 54,000. Typhus, however, was not the cause of the crime but its pretext: a few cases of the disease in a camp where people had been dying of hunger and cold for weeks served the local Romanian authorities as a justification for the decision to murder everyone. Nor was the massacre confined to a single day. It went on, with a break for Christmas, until the end of December, and individual executions and the burning of bodies continued into January and February 1942.

Transnistria and Golta county

Romania entered the war against the USSR to recover Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which it had been forced to cede in June 1940. Marshal Ion Antonescu, however, led the army further. Under agreements with Germany reached in August 1941 and concluded with the Tighina Agreement (Tighina is today’s Bender) on 30 August, the territory between the Dniester and the Bug passed under Romanian administration. It was named Transnistria. It was ruled by Governor Gheorghe Alexianu, and after the capture of Odessa in October that city was made the capital of the province.

From the outset Transnistria was conceived as the place where Romania would rid itself of its Jews. From September 1941 columns and transports from Bessarabia and Bukovina were sent there; by the end of the year, according to various studies, more than a hundred thousand people had been deported. Antonescu wanted to push them further, across the Bug, into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, but the Germans did not want this, and the Tighina Agreement provided that until military operations were over the Jews were to remain in camps on the Romanian side of the river. When the first columns reached the Bug in the autumn, the Germans on the other bank refused to take them; the local prefect, Isopescu, reported to the governor that a thousand Jews from the first convoy driven across the river had been killed by the Germans with the help of armed Ukrainians. A “bottleneck” of tens of thousands of people thus formed on the Bug, and the Romanian administration did not know what to do with them.

Most of them ended up in Golta county (Ukrainian: Holta), in the north-eastern part of Transnistria, on the Bug. Its capital was Golta, today part of the town of Pervomaisk. The county prefect was Lieutenant Colonel of Gendarmerie Modest Isopescu, a Bukovinian who had served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and in 1941 had entered Kishinev (Chișinău) with a gendarmerie battalion. In some studies, including the Yad Vashem encyclopedia, he appears as a colonel. On his orders, in October 1941 camps were set up in three villages on the Bug – Bogdanovka, Domanevka and Akhmechetka – which Yad Vashem calls extermination camps.

The camp at Bogdanovka

Bogdanovka was a village with a large state farm, a sovkhoz, where pigs had been raised before the war. The prisoners were crammed into pigsties, stables and sheds, many of them without roofs or doors. In a report of November 1941 Isopescu informed the governor that about 11,000 Jews had been placed in pigsties designed for 7,000 pigs, and that of 15,000 driven to a nearby village, called Gvozdovca in Romanian documents, 8,000 had already died. In an order of 5 November he directed that those who died on the way be buried two metres deep.

Most of the prisoners came from Odessa. From 27 October gendarmes drove columns of Jews out of the city through Berezovka north-eastwards to Bogdanovka, some 160–200 kilometres away. They walked for two weeks, in the autumn rain and then in the first frosts, without food, robbed by the guards and the local militia; those who could go no further were shot by the roadside. According to Yad Vashem, about 48,000 people arrived at the camp from Odessa and about 7,000 from Bessarabia. The last transport arrived on 1 December (according to some accounts not until 18 December), by which time there were more than 54,000 people in the camp. Some Jews from localities in the area were also brought there, which is why the English-language literature stresses that most of the victims were inhabitants of Transnistria itself.

The prisoners received no regular food. Those who had money or things to barter bought bread from the guards and the local peasants at inflated prices. People slept on dung and straw, without heating, in lice-ridden clothes. Dysentery and typhus, a disease carried by lice that killed very quickly in conditions of hunger and cold, spread. According to Isopescu’s own reports, the dead were being counted in thousands even before the massacre.

The decision

In mid-December several cases of typhus were found in the camp. According to Yad Vashem, Isopescu, after consulting a German adviser to the Romanian county administration who appears in the sources as Fleischer, decided to murder the entire population of the camp. He passed the order to Vasile Mănescu, the praetor – the Romanian official in charge of the Domanevka district, to which Bogdanovka belonged. Taking part in the operation were Romanian soldiers and gendarmes, members of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, civilians from Golta brought in specially for the purpose, and local ethnic Germans from the surrounding colonies. The whole operation was reportedly commanded by the head of the Ukrainian police in Golta, who appears in Romanian documents as Kazachievici.

The participation of the local Germans was no accident. On the Romanian-held territory of Transnistria there operated a German Sonderkommando R (Russland), subordinate to the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi), the SS office for Germans abroad, which had taken under its wing tens of thousands of descendants of 19th-century German colonists on the Black Sea and armed them in self-defence units. Recent research, including a 2022 study by Aiko Hillen, indicates that this self-defence force was one of the main perpetrators of the crime at Bogdanovka and, in the following months, in the area around Berezovka. Some older studies spoke in this context generally of a “German Sonderkommando” or even of Einsatzgruppe units, which according to more recent research needs qualifying.

Twenty-first of December

The killing began on 21 December 1941. The sick and those unable to walk were dealt with first. According to Yad Vashem, about 5,000 people were shut in two stables; straw soaked in paraffin was thrown onto the roofs and set alight, and everyone inside was burned to death. Romanian sources put the number burned at between 3,000 and 5,000.

The remaining prisoners were formed into columns of 300–400 people and led into the woods, to the steep slope of a ravine that the Romanian commanders called Gârla Mare (“the great valley”). They were ordered to undress, kneel at the edge and lean forward, and were then shot in the back of the head or had grenades thrown at them. According to the Yad Vashem encyclopedia, dum-dum bullets were also used. Successive groups were killed on top of the bodies, and some of the wounded fell into the ravine alive. Over four days, according to the same source, about 30,000 people were killed in this way.

Those whose turn had not yet come waited in the frost on the riverbank. The winter of 1941–1942 was exceptionally severe in Ukraine. People dug pits in the frozen earth with their bare hands and laid frozen corpses in them to shelter from the wind. Thousands froze to death. On 24 December, Christmas Eve, the killing was halted. It resumed on 28 December, and by the evening of 31 December, according to Yad Vashem, the remaining 11,000 or so prisoners had been murdered. According to some studies, including Romanian ones, executions of smaller groups continued into the beginning of January 1942.

The totals remain approximate, because no one kept a record of those killed, and some prisoners died of hunger and disease before and during the massacre. Yad Vashem speaks of more than 40,000 victims by the end of December. Other studies give 40,000–48,000, and calculations covering everyone who died at Bogdanovka from the autumn of 1941 onwards arrive at a figure of 54,000. It was one of the largest massacres by shooting in the entire history of the Holocaust, larger than the crime at Babi Yar and the Rumbula massacre near Riga, which was drawing to a close that same month.

Domanevka and Akhmechetka

Bogdanovka was not the only scene of crime in Golta county. According to Yad Vashem, about 20,000 Jews were held at Domanevka, deported there between November 1941 and January 1942, mainly from Ukraine and Bessarabia. In December Isopescu ordered that they too be murdered. By February 1942 Romanian soldiers and policemen, Ukrainian militiamen and a unit of local Germans had shot almost 18,000 people there in groups of about 500. The 2,000–3,000 survivors were kept in ruined stables and pigsties; only those who could work received food, and the rest died of hunger.

The third camp, at Akhmechetka, on an abandoned pig farm between Bogdanovka and Domanevka, came to play a central role only in the spring of 1942. Isopescu had Jews deemed unfit for work brought there: the old, the sick, women with small children and orphans, as well as prisoners punished for escaping. The international commission of historians that studied the Holocaust in Romania described its purpose as extermination through isolation: of the first 4,000 or so prisoners, a few hundred were still alive by May 1942. Estimates of the victims of Akhmechetka range from several thousand to more than ten thousand.

Covering up the traces

Once the massacre was over, Isopescu ordered its traces removed. In January and February 1942 about 200 prisoners who had been kept alive burned the bodies: the corpses were piled on pyres layered with straw and wood, doused with petrol and set alight. According to Yad Vashem, 150 members of this group died of cold and hunger or were shot by Ukrainian guards. A few dozen survived. Their testimonies – collected after the war by Soviet commissions, by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman for The Black Book, and by Israeli historians – are the basic source of knowledge about what happened at Bogdanovka.

The perpetrators on trial

Bogdanovka was one of the first crimes for which Romanians were tried. At the first trial before the People’s Tribunal in Bucharest, in the spring of 1945, the defendants included Isopescu, his deputy at the prefecture Aristide Pădure, the praetor Mănescu and the camp commandants. On 22 May 1945 Isopescu was found to be a war criminal, stripped of his rank and sentenced to hard labour for life; he died in Aiud prison in 1948. Some of the defendants were sentenced to death, but the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, and the others received long prison terms. Governor Alexianu and Antonescu himself were shot in June 1946 after a separate trial, in which, however, the deportations to Transnistria occupied a smaller place than the war against the USSR. Most members of the German self-defence force escaped justice.

For decades the crime was passed over in silence in Romania, while in the USSR people spoke of “peaceful Soviet citizens” without mentioning that the victims were Jews. In the West Bogdanovka long remained almost unknown, in the shadow of the German death camps. Only the report of the international commission of historians chaired by Elie Wiesel, published in 2004, described it on the basis of Romanian documents as part of the policy of the Romanian state. In the village itself a monument commemorates the victims.

Place in the war

The Bogdanovka massacre took place in the weeks when the war became truly global. At the beginning of December Great Britain declared war on Romania, and a few days later Romania, bound to Germany, declared war on the United States. The crime on the Bug had no direct connection with these decisions, but it showed what the Romanian occupation in the east meant in practice. Like Odessa, Bogdanovka was not the work of the Germans, who merely advised and supplied some of the perpetrators, but of the Romanian administration, acting within the policy of “cleansing the ground” of Jews that Antonescu’s government had been pursuing since the summer of 1941. At the same time, in the lands occupied by the Germans, the shootings were carried out by the Einsatzgruppen, as the Jäger Report from Lithuania attested, among others.

Transnistria remained the main site of the Holocaust in the Romanian zone. From January 1942 the Romanians deported the last Jews of Odessa there, most of whom were killed by German self-defence formations in Berezovka county, and in 1942 also some 25,000 Romanian Roma. According to Yad Vashem, of about 150,000 Jews deported to Transnistria from Romania, about 90,000 died, and in addition some 185,000 local Ukrainian Jews were murdered. The Wiesel Commission put the total number of victims of Antonescu’s rule at 280,000–380,000. At the same time, from the autumn of 1942, when the tide of war began to turn, Antonescu halted the deportations, allowed the Jewish communities in Romania to send aid to the survivors in Transnistria and refused to hand over to the Germans the Jews of the Old Kingdom (the Regat). For the tens of thousands of people shut in the pigsties of Bogdanovka it was by then too late. When the Red Army reached the Bug in the spring of 1944, it found, according to Yad Vashem, about 500 Jews alive at Domanevka.