Memorial to the victims of fascism in Kranodar

Памятник 13 тысячам краснодарцев – жертвам фашистского террора

In the Russian major city of Krasnodar a memorial to the »victims of the fascists« commemorates amongst others the murdered Jews of the city. Nearby is a part of the once much larger Jewish cemetery. Some Jews who were murdered during the German occupation in 1942/43 are buried there.

History

Krasnodar, located in the south of Russia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, was founded in 1793 as a fortified town called Yekaterinodar. Jews already lived in the city in the 19th century. Most of them were soldiers and their families who were allowed to live outside the area where Jews had been given permission to settle by the Tsar. In 1926 approximately 1,750 Jews lived in the city, which had been called Krasnodar since 1920 and now had a population of more than 100,000.
The German Wehrmacht occupied the city on August 12, 1942 during its offensive in the direction of the Caucasus. It is unclear how many Jews remained in the city after the withdrawal of the Red Army, because Krasnodar, which had until then been considered safe, also hosted many Jews who had been brought into the city during the German offensive the year before. The occupiers now forced the Jews to register within a week on the pretext that they would be resettled. On August 21, 1942 Sonderkommando (special unit) 10a of Einsatzgruppe (mobile killing unit) D, under the command of SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel of the SS) Kurt Christmann, drove all Jews of Krasnodar in military vehicles to a factory north of the city centre. There they shot all the Jews in a city park called 1 May (today: Chistyakovskaya Rosha) and buried their corpses there in previously excavated trenches. Some Jews had managed to escape, but they were later caught and suffocated in a so-called gas van.

Krasnodar, undated, Historical view, public domain

Victims

On August 21 and 22, 1942 members of Sonderkommando (special unit) 10a of Einsatzgruppe (mobile killing unit) D, supported by local helpers, murdered about 2,000 Jews. Between 30 and 60 Jews were caught afterwards on the run and suffocated in gas vans. In addition, the occupying forces murdered thousands of civilians, including patients and Roma. Many of the victims, especially patients, were murdered in the gas van carried by Einsatzgruppe D during this period. The total number of murdered civilians in and around Krasnodar has been estimated at around 13,000 since the end of the war.

In the Russian Federation, the 9 May – the anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War against »Hitlerite Fascism« – is the most important public holiday to have been retained from the country’s Soviet past. On 23 August 1939 the Soviet Union, led by Josef Stalin (1878–1953), initially signed a »non-aggression pact« with the Third Reich. This pact defined the »spheres of interest« of both regimes in East Central Europe and contained the provision to divide Poland between them. On June 22, 1941 the German Wehrmacht and its allies commenced their invasion of Soviet territory. Recent research estimates that by the end of the war in 1945 there had been up to 28 million civilian and military deaths in occupied Soviet territory. The Soviet culture of memory continues to have an impact on today’s Russia. Its symbols, such as the monumental style memorials in Saint Petersburg or Volgograd, are still popular and used to stage large-scale memorial services such as on 9 May. However, these sites of memory are less places of mourning and remembrance of the victims than places to honour wartime heroes. For a long time the victims were not remembered at all, and later they were classed as »victims of fascism«. The influence of this approach to the past can be seen, for example, in the conflict surrounding a sculpture put up in 1995 in front of the Great Patriotic War Museum in the capital Moscow. Entitled »Tragedy of Peoples«, the monument is dedicated to the approximately twenty million civilian victims in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944 and was intended to bring about a turnaround in the Russian culture of memory. However, the monument had to be moved behind the building following intense criticism, also from the general public, that the message was too pessimistic. At the same time, however, there were also non-governmental human rights organisations such as »Memorial«, which deal with repressed aspects of history, for example the prisoners of war from the Red Army and forced labourers held captive in Germany during the Second World War. Upon their return to the Soviet Union, these individuals were classed as traitors, universally accused of collaborating with the Germans and again imprisoned in camps. In terms of official state remembrance, there are regular remembrance initiatives on the part of committed local departments for culture, which have succeeding in establishing specific memorials as well as a culture of remembrance that includes the victims. It is often thanks to the commitment of individuals or Jewish communities that small sites of memory have been able to emerge in a number of locations, often funded with the smallest of budgets. After 1941, some 100,000 Soviet Jews died on the territory of today’s Russian Federation, mainly as a result of mass shootings carried out by SS Einsatzgruppen and their auxiliaries. They were remembered as »peaceful citizens« in the Soviet period. It is only since the early 1990s that additional plaques have been put up at official monuments and that Jewish victims have been named or commemorated by translating the inscriptions into Hebrew. There was also rudimentary Russian research into the Holocaust. In 2012, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre was opened in Moscow, acknowledged also by international experts. At the same time, however, the political regime ruling the country has become more and more nationalistic. State propaganda is dominated by an openly revisionist historical narrative which has only turned more aggressive with the war of aggression against Ukraine. Important civil society organisations, including »Memorial«, have been repressed severely.

Remembrance

The Wehrmacht occupied Krasnodar for only a few months, the Red Army reconquered the city on February 12, 1943. For the first time it organized a public tribunal, which condemned German prisoners of war and local collaborators and had many death sentences carried out. In 1980, the former SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel of the SS) Kurt Christmann was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in the Federal Republic of Germany for the crimes committed in Krasnodar.
Today there is a monument in the grove called »Chistyakovskaya Rosha«, where up to 2,000 Jews were murdered on August 21 and 22, 1942. It was inaugurated on May 9, 1975. On a marble pedestal stands a group of sculptures depicting civilians and soldiers. An eternal fire burns next to the monument. The Russian inscription of the monument reads: »To the inhabitants of Krasnodar, tortured to death in gas vans and brutally murdered by Nazi executioners from August 1942 to February 1943«. The monument is thus dedicated to all up to 13,000 murdered civilian victims of the city of Krasnodar. After the war, the murdered Jews were reburied in the Jewish cemetery in the centre of the city. The Soviet authorities closed the cemetery in 1964 and partly released it for development. Today only a small part of the cemetery is preserved.

Krasnodar, 2013, Memorial plaque in front of the memorial, Yad Vashem, Inna Martiskovskaya

Krasnodar, 2013, Memorial to the victims of fascism, Yad Vashem, Inna Martiskovskaya

Open

The memorial site is accessible at all times.

Contact

Kolchosnaja ul., 86
350000 Krasnodar

Krasnodar, 2012, Entrance to the Jewish cemetery, myekaterinodar.ru

Krasnodar, 2018, Jewish cemetery, Gennadiy Balyshev

Krasnodar, 2018, Gravestone on the Jewish cemetery, Gennadiy Balyshev

Krasnodar, undated, Memorial to the victims of fascism, cultural office Krasnodar

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