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Table of Contents:
Table of Contents:
The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. In preparation for the invasion, Hitler had moved more than 3 million German troops and approximately 690,000 Axis soldiers to the Soviet border regions as part of Operation Barbarossa.
Image: Elements of the German 3rd Panzer Army on the road near Pruzhany, Belarus, June 1941.
Public domain, commons.wikimedia.org
Kremenchuk's Jews 1941-1942
Kremenchuk's Jews 1941-1942
June 1941
In the first weeks after the start of the German invasion of the USSR, about two-thirds of Kremenchug’s Jews managed to evacuate or flee eastward with the retreating Red Army
September 1941
The German Army captured Kremenchug. A week later, Jews were ordered to register with the city council and to wear the Star of David on their sleeves.
125 Jews were shot by a German military unit.
About 3,000 Jews from the city and vicinity were forced to move to a ghetto in the Kremenchuk suburb of Novo-Ivanivka; all their belongings and documents were confiscated. Policemen and city residents plundered some of their empty apartments. [note]
The Germans discovered that city council chief Verkhovs’kyi had procured false certificates of baptism for Jews through a local church (allegedly in return for large bribes). He was subsequently arrested and executed.
October 1941
Approximately 2,000 Jews were removed from the city’s ghetto and surrounding countryside and murdered just outside the city on Peshchanaya Hill. About 500 Jews remained in the ghetto.
November 1941
German forces murdered 285 more Jews (147 men, 101 women, and 37 children)
Hundreds of Jewish soldiers from the Soviet army, from the local prisoner of war camp, were also murdered.
On November 24, the local military headquarters reported that Kremenchug was “almost cleansed of Jews,” although a number of Jews still lived in the ghetto.
January 1942
Some Jewish doctors and nurses had been spared in 1941 to work in local hospitals until replacements could be found for them. In January 1942, they were shot along with all the other remaining Kremenchug Jews they could find.
Altogether, about 8,000 Jews from Kremenchug and its vicinity were murdered.
Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 (has much additional detail) and Yad Vashem's "Murder Story of Kremenchug Jews at Peshchanaya Hill in the Kremenchug Area"
Memorials
Memorials
Image: Nataliya Shestakova, 2016, wikimedia.org, Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0
A monument to the Jewish Holocaust victims of Kremenchuk is located at 3 Kvartalnaya Street on the premises of the Chabad Center. It was erected with funds contributed by a local charity and the local Jewish community. The inscription includes a Star of David and a poem dedicated to the memory of the murdered Jews.
Image: Oleh Kushch, 2019, wikimedia.org, Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0
A monument and small memorial plot were constructed in 2014 on a small plot of land near 59 Kyivskaya Street. It was originally hoped that the monument would be located on Peshchanaya Hill, where 2,000 Jews were murdered in October 1941 and more in the following months, all buried in a mass grave. The intended location was changed to one within the city in order to reduce risk of vandalism on an isolated area of the hill.
There is an image of the memorial on the site of the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative (ESJF).
There is a memorial close to the site of the former Kriukiv cemetery (see Cemeteries page) dedicated to the former cemetery and the students of a Rabbi Nachman from Bratslav buried therein (not named).
Other resources
Other resources
Yad Vashem has detailed information about Kremenchuk and the Holocaaust.
Kremenchuk Holocaust Museum There is a great deal of information here about Kremenchuk during World II. Site is In Ukrainian - view with Chrome to translate. The site has, among much more, the names and profiles of Jewish soldiers from Kremenchuk who died and several who died in evacuation.
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