Murder Story of Kazatin Jews at the Talimonovka Shooting Range

…Jews who were transferred to the quarter [i.e. the ghetto] I mentioned above, numbering about 250 (I do not know how many of them were men, women and children) lived in this quarter about 2 or 3 months and, afterwards, on the orders of Gebietskommissar Shtoydel [sic, Steudel] and Gendarmerie Chief Berents [sic, apparently SS and police chief of Kazatin Heinrich Behrens], they were transorted by truck to the prisoner of war camp located one kilometer outside the town of Kazatin. One part of this camp was occupied by prisoners of war and another by 20 Gypsies and the latter were joined by the Jews brooought from the quarter mentioned above… All the Jews transported to the camp stayed there for only one day, I do not remember the month when this was, and the next day Gendarmerie Lieutenant Berents called us [a group of] 12 policemen to the Gendarmerie [office] and [we] went by truck to the camp where the Jews and Gypsies were. Those who went were: I myself, Aleksandr Vlasenko, Aleksei Chaykovskiy, Vasili Maksimchuk, Yakov Korneyuk, Anton Plisak, Aleksandr Shepelev, Vasili Boychuk, Dmitri Kravchuk, Nikolai Razikhovskiy, Dmitri Mostipan, and Aleksei Kozlovskiy; the Jews were guarded by policemen Ivan Gaidash and Baglai, whose first name I do not know, and two more policemen whose names and addresses I do not know, who guarded the camp. Together with us but in a separate vehicle came Gebietskommissar Shtoydel [Steudel] and Gendarmerie Chief Berents [Behrens?], accompanied by 20 Gestapo men and 10 gendarmes. Upon arriving at the camp, Berents stationed guards around the camp and a covered truck approached the doors [of the barracks], 50 people entered it and were taken 1 kilometer from the camp and shot. On this day Jews and Gypsies were shot. When the Jews were being loaded, Gebietskommissar Shtoydel [Steudel] selected the younger ones, who were spared temporarily in order to work. The shooting of the 250 Jews and 20 Gypsies was carried out by Gestapo men and, since I was close to that pit, [I can tell that] it proceeded as follows: The pit was dug on the same day but not by Jews, but by Russian and Ukrainian civilians of Kazatin and Kazatin County who were arrested for various "crimes," such as failing to show up for work. After that the truck took the Jews to about 100 meters from the pit and Oberleutnant Berents [Behrens?] ordered [the victims] to undress and ordered one person at a time toward the pit and, when that person, now naked, approached the pit, the Gestapo man standing at the pit shot him with a submachine-gun. The person fell [into the pit] and in this way all [the Jews], except for 30 of them, were shot. QUESTION: Specify the role you and the rest of the policemen played during the shooting of the Soviet civilians. ANSWER: The role played by all the policemen I have mentioned was as follows: 1) Guarding the Jews and preventing them from running away. This is why, when we arrived at the covered trucks in the camp and they [the Jews] knew [everything], though they had not been told that they were going to be shot, we were ordered to reinforce the guards. 2) After the truck was loaded, policemen accompanied it to the place where the shooting was carried out. I, Vlasenko, Chaykovskiy, Maksimchuk, Karniyuk, and all the others who had been guarding the camp went there. When I had accompanied the truck to the murder site, I was joined by the policemen Anton Plisak, Vasili Maksimchuk, and three German gendarmes and when we came close to the pit some of the Jews did not want to go to it. Then one of the gendarmes whose assignment was "to hurry them up," as it was called, took a long rod and with it struck the heads or the backs of those who lagged behind. On the way to the shooting site all the Jews begged to be spared and to be allowed to escape but their pleas went unheeded and no Jew escaped being shot… QUESTION: When were those 30 people who were spared by Gebietskommissar Shtoydel [Steudel] shot and [what] was your role [in this]? ANSWER: Those 30 people which were spared by the Gebietskommissar were shot later, i.e. in December 1942, but that time I was not present at the shooting, but was on duty at the Gendarmerie headquarters. The policemen Vasili Maksimchuk, Stepan Khmelevskiy, Aleksandr Vlasenko, Vasili Boychuk, Nikolai Razikhivskiy [or Razikhovskiy], Anton Plisak, Aleksandr Shepelev, and Dmitri Mustipanov were present [at the shooting]. The pit was dug near the one where the shooting was carried out in the summer of 1942. I cannot say who buried them [the Jews who had been shot] or who took their clothes away since I was not at that place. Regarding the shooting of children, during the first time [operation], most of them were thrown alive into the pit by the Gestapo men, who afterwards shot them from submachine-guns, while some children, especially the infants, who were being held in the arms of their mothers, fell into the pit together with them….

…In the course of their occupation of the town of Kazatin, the German occupiers committed the following atrocities: …a German SS murder squad summoned to the place by Gebietskommissar Steudel [and] assisted by the German Gendarme-butchers Mayster [sic], Tsimmel [? ], Filtz [sic], Milk [?] and others, shot and buried 724 people in early June 1942 in four pits near the town of Kazatin, in the area of the village of Talimonovka, in a ravine between the village and the road [leading] from the town of Kazatin to the village of Sokolets in the area of a former shooting range. …In the first pit, that was 7 meters long and 2.3 meters wide, 292 bodies of the Jews were buried at the edge of the ravine's slope. In the second pit, that was 7 meters long and 3 meters wide and that ran parallel to the first one at the distance of 2 meters, were buried the bodies of 216 civilians….