Murder story of Starodub Jews in the Belovshchina Neighborhood

From the indictment against Kurt Matschke: ...Before continuing to Trubchevsk, Rapp [head of Sonderkommando 7a] ordered the defendant Matschke [head of a unit of Sonderkommando 7a] to shoot the Jews he found in Starodub. These Jews were incarcerated in a camp and guarded by local OD [auxiliary policemen]. There were people of all ages, men, women, and children, there. Because of hunger and the cold the physical condition of these Jews was very poor. They were housed in several huts surrounded by [barbed] wire on the outskirts of the locality. About 5 to 10 bodies of Jews who had become emaciated to the state of skeletons and then died were lying in a barn near the huts. The number of victims still alive was about 200. After Rapp had left, Matschke ordered the OD [auxiliary policemen] to dig an execution pit. The defendant summoned Wehrmacht explosives experts, who used artillery shells to blow a hole in the frozen ground. Afterwards the Russians dug an execution pit that was several meters long and wide. The pit was some distance from the Jewish camp on the locality's outskirts. After the pit was prepared the shooting took place. The defendant Matschke was in charge. Squad members who had remained in Starodub and Russian order servicemen [i.e. auxiliary policemen] took part. The Jews were taken from the camp to the pit. They had to take the bodies of their relatives and throw them into the pit. Afterwards they had to move back about 50 meters from the pit. Russian order servicemen created a cordon around them. Furthermore, a line of guards was set up on the way to the pit. The OD-men [auxiliary policemen] asked the defendant Matschke to give them the still usable clothes of Jews. The defendant Matschke thereupon ordered [the Jews] to take off their still usable clothes. The shooting was carried out by members of the squad. The defendant Matschke ordered everyone to empty their magazines. He wanted by this means to ease the psychological burden for the individual [shooters] and to prevent anyone from standing out from the others by shooting wildly. The shooting proceeded as follows: the squad members assigned as marksmen approached the waiting Jews. They caught each of the victims by the arm with one of their hands while holding a pistol behind their backs in their other hand. The marksman led the victim as quickly as possible through the line of guards toward the edge of the pit. There the victim was shot in the back of the head…. A 7.65 mm PPK, a shortened police pistol, served as the murder weapon.… Directly after the shot was fired the victim was kicked or pushed so that his body fell into the execution pit. The Jews waiting to be shot saw their relatives being taken to be shot. They heard the sound of the shots. They could also see from the distance of 50 meters what was happening at the execution pit. In the course of the shooting the victims who were placed at the edge of the pit had before their eyes the gruesome picture of the mass grave with the bloody bodies of their relatives. Matschke was standing at the edge of the pit and supervising the shooting. An infant was being carried to the pit by his mother. One of the marksmen grabbed it from the woman's hands and was about to shoot it before her eyes. The defendant Matschke ordered the mother to be shot first. After this was done, the marksman caught the child by his little arm with one hand and raised it into the air. With his other hand he shot it in the back of the head. Afterwards he threw the body into the pit. Here, like in all the later cases, no medic was present. No medical investigation was carried out here, as well as in all other cases, to check whether the victims were dead. The marksmen did not always manage to fire his shot into the back of the head, as planned, in the most effective way. So it happened here too that some of the victims in the pit were still alive and moving. When there were signs of life in the pit, Matschke fired his long-barreled Mauser pistol at such [still alive] people in so-called "control shots." One squad member…felt sick at the pit shortly after the start of the shooting. He was relieved by [another] squad member. The shooting lasted about an hour or an hour and a half.