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.