Moskovskoye

In 1939, the village of Moskovskoye and the Izobilnensky County were part of the Ordzhonikidze Krai, which had lain outside the Pale of Settlement prior to the Russian Revolution. Therefore, no Jews lived in this area before World War II. However, in the wake of the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, the Ordzhonikidze Krai came to house a large number of civilian evacuees, including many Jews from Ukraine, Bessarabia (present-day Moldova), and Belarus. With the beginning of the German summer offensive in late June 1942, the Wehrmacht launched its invasion of the North Caucasus. The German military occupied Moskovskoye in August 1942. On August 29, 1942, Nazi mobile killing squads and their local collaborators entered the village and executed 118 civilians, the vast majority of them Jews, in an anti-tank trench five kilometers from the village. The Red Army liberated Moskovskoye in January 1943.