Belaya Tserkov Forest Related Communities
Belaya Tserkov Related Murder Sites
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Murder story of Belaya Tserkov Jews in the Belaya Tserkov Forest
Murder Site
Belaya Tserkov
Ukraine (USSR)
About 100 Jewish children whose parents were shot to death on August 19, 1941 were initially spared and locked up without food or water in a school building on the western outskirts of Belaya Tserkov. The fate of these children became a point of contention between the German military authorities and the security police. After some discussion Commander-in-Chief of the German 6th Army Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau personally decided that these children should be shot. The carrying out of this massacre was assigned to Ukrainian auxiliary policemen. On August 22, 1941 the children were taken by tractor to the woods just outside Belaya Tserkov, lined up at the edge of a pit that had been dug there, and shot dead.
Related Resources
Written Accounts
German Reports / Romanian Reports
From the article “After the Murder of the Mothers [came that of] the Children: Testimonies in the Sonderkommando Trial: On Orders of a General Field Marshal”:
…Häfner then depicts how, on the next day, he was driven by the field commandant toward a forest path where a pit had been dug. Each time the Ukrainians brought two or three children, between 2- and 7- year-old children, to the pit. An NCO oversaw the shooting. Sobbing and in a quavering voice, Häfner tells of a girl age two and a half years: “She was so beautiful, with black curls. She approached me so trustingly and grasped my hand…[She] could have been my daughter…a Ukrainian…took the girl away…” After all was finished, he looked into the pit. No, there were no control shots, they were not necessary. Several shots had been fired at every child. “A Ukrainian reported something to me - apparently the end of the killing.” The Ukrainians then left…
Darmstädter Echo, October 31, 1967 (German)
Belaya Tserkov
forest
Murder Site
Ukraine (USSR)
49.798;30.115