Murder Story of Tatarsk Jews at the Tatarsk Hospital

October 25, 1941 Operational Situation report USSR No 124 Einsatzgruppe B Location: Smolensk Group HQ and Vorkommando Moskau undertook an action against the Jews in Tatarsk. The Jews began to leave the ghetto on their own initiative returning to their old homes, in the meantime trying to expel the Russians living there. The place was combed systematically and the Jews were herded into the market square. Some of them fled and had to be driven out of the nearby woods. As punishment for not following the orders of the German Security Police, all male Jews and three women who were in Tatarsk at that time were shot.

Waldemar Klingenhoefer, an officer of Einsatzgruppe 7b, testified at the Nuremberg Military Tribunal on July 2, 1947: At the end of September or the beginning of October 1941 [...] ordered me to go to Tatarsk in order to carry out another operation against the Jews. It was connected with the fact that [some] Jews had apparently left the ghetto, apparently without permission.… When I arrived in Tatarsk, I ascertained that the report [about Jews leaving the ghetto] was true. So I ordered all the male Jews who remained to be shot. There were about 30 of them. I did not let them join the partisans.