A Murderous Bacchanale

The Bogdanovka Massacre, perpetrator camaraderie, and psychological mediation of the Holocaust

Between December 21st and December 31st, 1941 Romanian soldiers and police with German supervision murdered more than 46,000 Jews in brutal Aktionen at Bogdanovka and the surrounding riverbanks of the Bug river.[1] The surrounding villages had been consolidated into a ghetto at Bogdanovka by the fall of 1941, and following a typhus epidemic, the Romanians and Germans decided to liquidate the entire camp by the end of the year. The brutality of these Aktionen, their enactment over weeks, and the mediation or even festivities of perpetrators parallels other mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen across the former USSR.

Mass shootings in the USSR were the precursor for later phases of the Holocaust.[2]  Systematization of murder from enlisting locals to visible murder “in broad daylight” to intentional mediation and morale building of perpetrators continued into the camp structure.The Einsatzgruppen celebrated days of murder with a bacchanalian feast and drinking and song, not sitting in stoic silence shocked and horrified by their genocidal actions.[3] The musical sadism enacted throughout the Holocaust didn’t involve forcing Jews to sing German music, but parodied religious Judaism, often conflated Jewish-ness with communism, and was nearly always enacted against Jewish men.

The massacre of Jews at Bogdanovka was one of the worst of the Holocaust, but remains largely uncommemorated compared with other sites in Ukraine such as Babi Yar. [4] This is partially due to mixed perpetration and layers of responsibility and postwar reckoning in the border regions of Transnistria between Ukraine,  Romanian, and Moldovan populations. A close read of the scarce testimony reveals the impact of sound in heightening terror and the disorganized chaos of Nazi genocide in the USSR. The massacre began on December 21st, 1941 following a typhus epidemic, first targeting the ill and infirm, cramming people into crowded stables for horses and pigs. Ghetto songs from Transnistria reveal the devastating effects of Typhus in satirical verse from the perspective of a louse or in tragic lullabies.

In Bogdanovka, the massacres began as a disorganized pogrom, where between four and five thousand people were burned in these straw-covered stables. Esther G. describes, “We heard gunshots and Roman policemen running, taking orders from the Germans. […] We got back and saw fire, unsure what was being burnt on the other side of the river. Someone burst in suddenly, fell on the floor yelling that they’re killing Jews and burning their bodies with gasoline.”[5] She describes a constant, pervasive violence, where she “walked over dead bodies as if they were stones on the ground” and when gunshots and voices began that signaled the start of more destruction and the time to hide.

A pigsty that was used as a ghetto during the occupation in Bogdanovka, Ukraine, 1944. State Central Photos and Film Archive, Kiev via Yad Vashem.

The remaining 43,000 Jews were massacred in the forest near the camp and alongside the riverbanks, leaving people freezing, abused, and covered in blood for hours or days in subzero weather waiting for their own execution.  Once on the site, they were forced to kneel on the edge of the ravine and shot in groups of 300-400 with the explosive bullets. As the crimes of the Holocaust parodically and sadistically increased over Jewish holidays, inversely perpetrators took breaks for Christmas and New Year’s as we see in the case of Bogdanovka where perpetrators took a break from December 24th to 28th, but still leaving their victims outside to build a dam to stop the blood from entering the Bug river.[6] Esther G. details the absolute chaos of the scene, with people partially wounded, rampant looting, with the disorientation and fear heightened by sound:

“As we got closer I didn’t see my mom’s body and yelled “where is my mom?” I was told to be quiet or I’ll get myself killed. There were many other bodies lying around. Struck with fear, I started searching for her body. The officer took the gold and all the money and took us. It turns out that the convoys of people heading towards the large pit had to walk around the park since it was on the other side, and there were officers waiting and raiding the bodies left there for gold and money.”[7]

Another survivor gave similar testimony to Yahad in Unum about the horror of mothers murdered with their children:

“We couldn’t see it but we could hear the screams. Because they only shot the adults, and they threw the children into the burning straw still alive. Those screams were atrocious (YIU/2462U).”

Even when Jews returned to their homes they were terrorized across these two weeks by brutal beatings and sexual violence. Once Esther G. found her mother she remembered: “I heard my mom shouting for me from the other side and shivered, women came outside to the stairs. I saw my mom with bandages calling for me and police officers arriving and hitting her. My mom cried for help and the women next to me held my arm, told me to stay put so I don’t get killed.” She also detailed the assault and later brutal murder of her friend, Pina: “The officers entered the room shouting at us to wake-up. We covered ourselves so they wouldn’t see us. They would pick the prettiest girl and take her outside. My mom must have known what she was doing when she cut my hair and put a cloth over it to avoid drawing attention. There was abuse.” By the end of the day on December 31st, the remaining Jews of the city had all been murdered, and a small group of 200 survivors were tasked with burning the remaining bodies on vast pyres from February to March of 1942.

The perpetrators at Bogdanovka, became more sluggish and less frenzied after their Christmas break.  A local resident recalled how the shooters both Ukrainian and Romanian were cooked for by Jews, and how they drank vodka all the time, “they were drunk when they shot.”[8] Testimony from the German archives also reveals that the perpetrators used music as entertainment, playing harmonica and requisitioning a gramophone to play German songs.[9] The use of music was not intended to cover the sounds of shooting as during Operation Harvest Festival, but rather for the entertainment of perpetrators alongside alcohol, food, and looting creating a carnivalesque atmosphere.[10] The vast amount of loot including rings, gold, even food taken from the murdered victims from the initial phases of the massacre were given as nice gifts and used to celebrate New Year’s for the gendarmes and their compatriots.[11] Even the Jews who had been assigned to burn the ashes found gold, and sold it to the Ukrainian population for bread. After the war, children often returned to the pit to search for gold in the ravine.[12]

A building in which approximately 1000 Jews were burned alive during the Romanian-German occupation, Bogdanovka, Ukraine. State Central Photos and Film Archive, Kiev via Yad Vashem.

From Bogdanovka, several important aspects of Holocaust studies are clarified. First is the ambiguous and multinational levels of perpetration. The antisemitism and precursors to genocide in border regions like Transnistria were more complicated than German-imposed intentionalist doctrine. Second, is the disorganization, chaos and sheer terror of Aktionen in the USSR. While small towns were liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen in a matter of days, there was also a process of ghettoization and deportation which consolidated Jews in population centers turned ersatz concentration camps like at Bogdanovka. This leads to an important element of the shootings in the East, which was the open and public execution of Jews. Sound highlights the horror and pervasively genocidal atmosphere throughout the village, from shooting and screams at the site to beatings and sexual violence throughout the town, burning buildings with people trapped inside, and even the creaking or movement of immolation pits. This sonic violence reinforces the public and visible aspect of the Nazi Holocaust in the East in contrast to the perception of the death camps in Poland – “secret” and a layer removed from society.  Finally, at Bogdanovka we get a sense of the perpetrator jubilation or certainly mediation of murder bolstered by alcohol and looting. At other Aktionen perpetrators enjoyed songs, festive picnics, alcohol, and collected souvenirs, and Bogdanovka is no exception. The murderous bacchanale at Bogdanovka is a case study for other sadism and mass shootings in the Holocaust in the USSR.                                                                                      

By Alexandra Birch

Sources

  1. “Bogdanovka,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2000).
  2. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Crown, 2015), 168.
  3. Edward B. Westermann, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). Westermann decisively links alcohol to masculine camaraderie and genocidal action from drinking games in the early phases of the war to graveside parties of the Einsatzgruppen.
  4. Chabad Lubavitch wrote specifically about this and commemoration efforts in the US: Chabad Lubavitch, “Remembering the Annihilation of Bogdanovka,” (Brooklyn, NY: May 12, 2005), https://www.lubavitch.com/remembering-the-annihilation-of-bogdanovka/.
  5. Esther G. Holocaust Testimony (HVT 3545), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.  
  6. Accusation act of the General Romanian prosecutors  Avram Bunaciu Dumitra Saracu, RG – 25.004M.0019 accessed via Yahad in Unum: https://yahadmap.org/#village/bohdanivka-bogdanivka-bogdanovka-bogdanowka-bogdanovca-mykolaiv-ukraine.24. And Aiko Hillen who cites Yahad in Unum: "“Taken to German Villages and Liquidated.” The “Selbstschutz” Organization and the Bogdanovka Massacre in 1941," Eastern European Holocaust Studies 1, no. 2 (2023): 551-587, https://doi.org/10.1515/eehs-2022-0007.
  7. Esther G. Holocaust Testimony (HVT 3545), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
  8. Aiko Hillen, “Taken to German Villages and Liquidated.” The “Selbstschutz” Organization and the Bogdanovka Massacre in 1941”.
  9. Substantial testimony reveals that music was part of the “festive” atmosphere at shootings: Father Patrick Desbois, In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures Behind the Holocaust by Bullets (New York:Arcade, 2018), Part III “The Day”. 
  10. Alexandra Birch, "‘They were drinking, singing, and shooting’: Singing and the Holocaust in the USSR," Journal of Perpetrator Research 4, no. 1 (2021).
  11. Jean Ancel, Rachel Garfinkel, and Karen Gold. Transnistria, 1941-1942: the Romanian mass murder campaigns,  (2003), 134.
  12. Ancel, Transnistria, 138.