Odessa massacre (1941)

The **Odessa massacre** (Romanian: _Masacrul de la Odesa_; Ukrainian: _Голокост в Одесі_) was a massacre of Jews in Odessa, Ukraine between October 22 and 24, 1941. Estimates say that between 30,000 and 100,000 Jews were killed within two weeks by the Romanian occupation forces of Romania.

At the time, Romania was allied with Nazi Germany under the rule of Ion Antonescu. The massacre was part of the Holocaust.

## Background

During WWII, after occupying much of Western Europe and the Balkans, Nazi Germany and some of her Axis allies launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Its goal was to invade and occupy the Soviet Union as part of Hitler's plan to colonize Eastern Europe. They made initial success by capturing most of Ukraine and Belarus; within four months, they had reached Moscow.

On 16 October 1941, Romanian forces took over Odessa, where 70,000–120,000 Jews were trapped in the city, some of whom were Jewish refugees from Bessarabia. The massacre was preceded by escalating violence towards Jews by the antisemitic Romanian troops.

On 22 October 1941, the Romanian military headquarters in Odessa was blown up mysteriously.

## Massacre

Within two days, at least 5,000 Jews had been hanged, while another few thousand were deported to the nearby village of Dalnyk. The victims were confined to barns, sheds and warehouses, which were later sprayed with machine gun fire and set on fire.

Jews who tried to escape were killed, while Romanian troops blew up some buildings containing Jews, causing thousands to die instantly. Thousands more were killed in mass shootings; some of them were also burned alive in artillery warehouses.

Around 25,000 Jews who had not been killed were deported to a ghetto in Odessa's neighborhood Slobidka, where they endured cold and hunger for the remainder of the war. Holocaust experts estimated the death toll at Dalnyk alone was at least 20,000.

### Death march

By the end of October 1941, between 25,000 and 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 them were killed in later mass shootings or burned alive. by the end of January 1942, when the Soviets pushed the Axis invaders away from 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.

### Nazi German involvement

Though Romanian forces carried out most of the atrocities in Odessa, they were backed up by the Nazi German SS _Einsatzgruppe D._ They shot some Jews from the Fontans'ka Street prison, were hunting down Jews until November 1941, and killed thousands of them. It is recorded that ethnic Germans in Odessa formed the militias _Selbstschutze_ to facilitate the Holocaust in the area.

### Survivors

Around 1,000 Karaite Jews survived the war because Hitler classified 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:

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 participants including Gheorghe Alexianu were sentenced to death in 1946.

### Gentiles who saved Jews

Dozens of gentiles in Odessa who saved Jews have been recognized by the Yad Vashem as the _Righteous Among the Nations_.

## Related pages

- Babi Yar
- Iași pogrom
- Kristallnacht
- Jedwabne pogrom
- Rhineland massacres