1 Killing site(s)
Ivan P., born in 1930 : “At this moment I was in the fields grazing my cattle when I saw a column of Jews being brought. The column was long. They were all arranged in lines of four, as if it was a military march. The column was escorted by guards. I remember they had dogs, but I will not be able to say if they were Germans, policemen or someone else. There were many more people in the column than the ones confined in the stables. They were taken to the natural pit. I couldn’t see them, because I was on another side of the river, but shortly after I heard the rattles of the machine guns. The shooting lasted for two or three hours. After the shooting, someone came by truck to pick up the shooters, and they left in the direction of Zvenyhorodka.” (Witness n°2751U, interviewed in Nemorozh, on August 22, 2020)
“[…] The German bandits carried out terrifying atrocities in the camps of Zvenigorodka and Nemorozh. They forced the Soviet citizens to perform heavy and insurmountable work and inflicted on them the inhuman pain before being assassinated […].” [Act drawn up on April 19, 1944 by Soviet State Extraordinary Commission; GARF 7021-65-241, pp.81-86]
“Investigation in the framework of a trial against Franz Becker, former Gebietskommissar of Zvenyhorodka who is accused of the following murders, held in Drotmund, on December 20, 1977:
Case n°6
Date : June 1942
Place : labor camp in Nemorozh
Victims: 3 infirm Jews
Operation mode: Shooting […]”[BArch B162-9138, p.75]
Nemorozh is located 80 km (50mi) northeast of Uman and 120 km (74mi) south west of Cherkasy. Before the war, the village was home to Ukrainians and several ethnic Germans. There were no Jews living in Nemorozh. A big Jewish community lived in the town of Zvenyhorod, located 5km away. On the eve of the war 1,957 Jews lived in Zvenyhorodka comprising 14% of the total population.
Nemorozh was occupied by the German troops on July 29, 1941. A labor camp was created in Nemorozh in May 1942. About 300-350 Jews fit to work were displaced from Zvenyhorod to the camp. The camp was created in the collective farm stables, although according to the local witnesses, they were pigsties. The territory wasn’t fenced in, but it was guarded by the police. The Jewish inmates from the camp were used as labor for the repair and construction of the Transit Highway DG-IV (Durchgangsstrasse IV). Those inmates who became ill and incapable of work were shot dead in small groups outside of the camp. The exact number of the isolated shootings is unknown. In the end of May 1942, 150 Jews were selected and taken to the camp in Smilchyntsi, where on November 2, 1942, they were shot along with other Jews in the Gubskiy forest, located between Zvenyhordka and Smilchyntsi. The remaining Jews from the Smilchyntsi camp were transferred to the Budysche camp. On May 8, 1943, the inmates were taken back to Nemorozh, where they were murdered three months later, on August 23, 1943.
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