# Introduction to the Thematic Section
## “Kamianets-Podilskyi”

Marie Moutier-Bitan, Eleonore Lappin

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To cite this version:

Marie Moutier-Bitan, Eleonore Lappin. Introduction to the Thematic Section “Kamianets-Podilskyi”. Eastern European Holocaust Studies, 2025, 3 (2), pp.4. 10.1515/eehs-2025-0031 . hal-05297987

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## Editorial

Marie Moutier-Bitan* and Eleonore Lappin

# Introduction to the Thematic Section
## “Kamianets-Podilskyi”

https://doi.org/10.1515/eehs-2025-0031

Published online October 6, 2025

On August 27–29, 1941, approximately 23,600 Jewish men, women, and children were shot on the outskirts of the city Kamianets-Podilskyi. This was the first massacre of this scale of entire Jewish families, two months after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany and its allies like Hungary. Some of the victims were Jews from the territories under Hungarian administration, in particular from Transcarpathia. Budapest had expelled them from July 15, 1941 as “alien” Jews: The National Central Authority for the Control of Foreigners (KEOKH) had been responsible for verifying the Hungarian nationality of Jews living in Hungary and the territories under its control. Many Jews from Transcarpathia then had a Polish or no passport at all and were therefore deported as foreigners, or “aliens”. However, the deportation was not limited to Jews from this region but also affected Jews from Budapest and other parts of Hungary who were considered “alien” or “unwanted”. The Jews were expelled to territories in the south of eastern Galicia, which were then under Hungarian control. On August 1, 1941, the entire area became part of the General Government of Poland. The Nazi authorities pushed these deported Jews further east, to the town of Kamianets-Podilskyi, which was occupied by German and Hungarian military forces. With a view to setting up a civil administration as of September 1, and on the pretext that the influx of Jewish deportees caused the deterioration of sanitary conditions, the OKH [Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, High Command of the Army] organized a meeting on August 25. The participants decided to execute the deported Jews from Hungary. The shootings were to be carried out under the command of Friedrich Jeckeln, HSSPF Russland-Süd [Higher SS and Police Leader Russia-South], by mobilized German police battalions as well as local Ukrainian police. Bomb craters outside the city were to be used as mass graves. On August 27, approximately 11,000 Hungarian Jews – men, women and children – were massacred. Then more than 10,000 local Jews were killed. At the end

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<footnote>*Corresponding author: Marie Moutier-Bitan, ERLIS, University of Caen Normandy, Caen, France, E-mail: marie.moutier@gmail.com. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5558-8206

Eleonore Lappin, Center for Jewish Studies, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Graz, Austria</footnote>
of the shootings, villagers from the surrounding area were requisitioned to fill the pits with earth.

This massacre represents a turning point in the extermination of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. This was the first time that a mass shooting of such scale took place in occupied Soviet territory, involving large numbers of Jewish women and children. After this date, entire Jewish families were systematically murdered. Historians specializing in the Holocaust in the East, such as Dieter Pohl (Pohl, 2011), or in Nazism, like Klaus-Michael Mallmann (Mallmann, 200), agree by identifying this event as a significant milestone in the evolution of the Nazi genocidal policy, yet the massacre itself has been the subject of relatively little in-depth scholarly study. Similarly, Friedrich Jeckeln has not yet been the subject of a dedicated biography.

This brings us to the question of borders and their representations. The Hungarian and Romanian governments implemented converging policies of expelling Jews from territories that they had recently annexed. These deportations shared the characteristic that the victims were pushed beyond the Dniester, into eastern zones perceived at the time as spaces of relegation through distance, and later as sites of annihilation.

What all these victims had in common was that they had been declared stateless (in other words, falling under no jurisdiction) or “foreign” and cast onto the roads by the new authorities, left to the responsibility of other administrations, which repeatedly pushed them further east – ultimately to annihilation. Wherever they came, they were unwanted, and their displacement caused logistical and administrative problems, which hastened their mass murder.

These expelled Jews were immediate targets for extermination by regional and local perpetrators: they moved as families, were quickly stripped of all their belongings as they were passed from one authority to another, and were particularly vulnerable as they had limited command of the local language or knowledge of geography. Their vulnerability made them easily identifiable and left them with no possible way to escape, such as fleeing or hiding with locals. As a result, there are few testimonies from Jewish survivors of this mass shooting.

Nevertheless, the available sources are relatively substantial. The testimonies of former members of Pol. Reg. Süd [police regiment south] provide valuable information on the organization of the shooting. On the Hungarian archival side, the sources are substantial, as evidenced by the valuable work of Tamás Stark who granted us an interview. Yet this massacre remains poorly documented in historiography. The thematic section we intended to devote to this event ultimately received little attention. How can we explain this historiographical gap? How can we engage scholars specializing in the Holocaust in Ukraine and Hungary? The issue of language may be one of the explanations. It would also seem necessary to promote an interdisciplinary approach: the shootings in Kamianets-Podilskyi compel us to shift
our perspective and to break down the compartmentalization of Holocaust research along administrative or linguistic borders.

There is for instance the question of responsibility. The murders were committed by Germans and Ukrainians, however the Hungarians expelled the “foreign” or “stateless” Jews by force and abandoned them in Galicia. Later, when the massacre of Kamianets-Podilskyi took place and even afterwards, they prevented Jews from returning to Hungary causing them to become victims of later massacres. The same is true of the Romanian government that also expelled Jews to the area of Kamianets-Podilskyi where they were murdered. This brings us to the aspect of forgotten groups of victims, such as the Jews from Bukovina and Transnistria, but also Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, and other countries that were either occupied by the Germans or collaborated with it. This shows how much more research is necessary in order to fully understand the tragedy of this massacre.

Another question is why countries like Hungary and Romania expelled stateless or “foreign” Jews to Galicia. While the reasoning and the development of the genocidal policies of the Germans are well researched, these expulsions as methods to reduce the number of Jews in newly founded nation states are rarely dealt with. It is the strength of Tamás Stark’s research to show that the deportation of “foreign Jews” by Hungary were not acts of collaboration with Nazi Germany. They were rather the result of decades of anti-Semitic propaganda and policies. The German attack of the Soviet Union did not only accelerate the Shoah, but also presented a possibility for the Hungarian and Romanian allies to realize the policies of the expulsion of Jews they had been propagating since the end of World War I. That the Germans killed the deportees was not part of a Hungarian or Romanian master plan, but a side effect that was willingly accepted. This attitude also sheds new light on the willing cooperation of the Hungarians during the mass deportations of 1944.

Although the massacre is under-researched and on the margins of holocaust historiography, over the years traditions of Ukrainian as well as Hungarian commemoration developed. At the killing site, there is a fenced-in rectangle with four independent memorials. According to the research of Arkadi Zeltser, the first memorial was erected in the late 1940s by survivors of the massacre. On the front there is an inscription in Russian and on both sides there are inscriptions in Soviet Yiddish. The inscriptions resemble the text on another memorial in the Jewish cemetery of Kamianets-Podilskyi.<fnref n="1" /> The victims are not designated as Jews, which as Tamás Stark points out corresponds with the Soviet style of commemoration. However, the memorial was commissioned by Jewish survivors from Kamianets-Podilskyi, and the Yiddish text commemorates murdered family members and friends in a very personal manner: “[...] Here are the holy graves of/our dear and

<footnote n="1">1 The Bazalel Narkis Index of Jewish Art, https://cja.huji.ac.il/browser.php?mode set&id=14980.</footnote>
beloved fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, children and friends. [...]" The second Yiddish text commemorates the *Jahrzeit*, the date of death of the victims.

The second Ukrainian memorial was erected after the fall of the Soviet Union by the Ukrainian government. It describes in Ukrainian and English the victims as Jews from Kamianets-Podilskyi and Hungary who were murdered in 1941. In addition, there are two Hungarian memorials. The first one was erected by the Hungarian Evangelical Brotherhood community, led by pastor Gábor Ivány in 2009. The plaque reads in English, Hungarian, and Ukrainian: "In memory of our Jewish brothers and sisters who were Hungarian or sought refuge in Hungary in 1941. They were ostracized and persecuted to death by the Hungarian state and the inhuman Nazi hatred of the time. May their memory be blessed." The second memorial was erected by the Hungarian government in 2015. The plaques in Hungarian, Hebrew, English, and Ukrainian commemorate "the thousands of Jewish victims deported from Hungary in 1941 to the territories under German occupation and murdered on this place." As Gábor Ivány is an outspoken critic of the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, Tamás Stark assumes that the second Hungarian memorial was erected by the Hungarian government in competition with the older one. Despite these memorials, the killing sites in Kamianets-Podilskyi look peaceful. Photographs of Yad Vashem show the area with a pair of lovers kissing.