Одесская трагедия: массовое убийство евреев в 1941-1942 годах.

Romanian massacre of Jews during World War II

The Odessa massacre was the mass murder of the Jewish population of Odessa and surrounding towns in the Transnistria Governorate during the autumn of 1941 and the winter of 1942 while it was under Romanian control. It was one of the worst massacres in Ukrainian territory. Depending on the accepted terms of reference and scope, the Odessa massacre refers either to the events of October 22–24, 1941 in which some 25,000 to 34,000 Jews were shot or burned, or to the murder of well over 100,000 Jews in the town and the areas between the Dniester and Bug rivers, during the Romanian and German occupation which took place following the massacre. As of 2018, it was estimated that up to 30,000 people, mostly Ukrainian Jews, were murdered in the actual massacre, which occurred October 22–23, 1941. The primary perpetrators were Romanian soldiers, Einsatzgruppe SS and local ethnic Germans.

Before the war, Odessa had a large Jewish population of approximately 200,000, or 30% of the city's total population. By the time the Romanians had taken the city, between 80,000 and 90,000 Jews remained, the rest having fled or been evacuated by the Soviets. As the massacres occurred, Jews from surrounding villages were interned in Odessa and Romanian concentration camps set up in the surrounding areas. On October 16, following a two month siege of Odessa, the Germans and Romanians captured the city.

On October 22, 1941, in the building of the NKVD on the Marazlievskaya street where the Romanian military commander's office and the headquarters of the Romanian 10th Infantry Division had settled to occupy the city, a radio controlled mine exploded. The mine had been planted there by the sappers of the Red Army before the surrender of the city by Soviet troops. The building collapsed, and under its rubble, 67 people were killed, including 16 officers, among whom was the military commander of the city, Romanian General Ioan Glogojeanu. Responsibility for the explosion was placed on the Jews and Communists.

In response to the explosion at the commandant's office, General Nicolae Tătăranu received a direct order from Marshal Ion Antonescu, ordering "immediate reprisals" be carried out on the Jewish population. The Romanian troops and the German "Einsatzgruppe" arrived in Odessa on October 23 to kill from 5,000 to 10,000 hostages, many of whom were Jews. Across the Marazlievskaya street, occupiers broke into the apartments of Odessa citizens and shot or hanged all residents found, without exception. They raided the streets and markets of the city and suburbs, and people who knew nothing of the bombing were shot on sight against fences or the walls of houses. Nearly 100 men were seized and shot at the Big Fountain, about two hundred people were executed in the Slobodka neighborhood near the market, 251 residents were shot in Moldavanka, Near and Far Windmills and in Aleksandrovsky Prospekt about 400 townspeople were executed. The columns of the captured hostages were driven to the area of artillery warehouses on Lustdorf Road, where they were shot or burned alive.

In the early 1990s in Odessa's Prokhorovsky Square, where the "road of death" to the extermination camps for Odessa's Jews and Gypsies had begun on the outskirts of the city in 1941, a memorial commemorating the victims of the Holocaust was created. A memorial sign was installed, along with the "Alley of the Righteous Among the World", featuring trees planted in honor of each Odessa citizen who had harbored and saved the Jews. The complex was completed in 2004 with the erection of a monument to the victims of the Holocaust in Odessa by sculptor Zurab Tsereteli.

The Museum of the Holocaust in Odesa was created in accordance with the decision of the Council of the Odesa Regional Association of Jews, former prisoners of the ghetto and Nazi concentration camps. The chairman of the association is Shvartsman Roman. The opening of the museum took place on June 22, 2009.

In January 2015, the authorities of the Italian town of Ceriano Laghetto, in the province of Monza e Brianza in the Lombardy region, named a city square "Martyrs Square of Odesa" in memory of the victims of the occupation regimes in Odesa: Jews killed October 22–24, 1941, as well as anti Maidan activists, rescuers and accidental victims who died on May 2, 2014, in the Odesa Trade Union House. On May 2, 2015, the first anniversary of the events in the House of Trade Unions, a commemorative monument dedicated to the "Martyrs of Odesa" was opened at this square. The monument is a tongue of flame with a silhouette of a dove, a symbol of the world, inside. The 2018 tragicomic Romanian film I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians deals with the massacre and historical memory among modern Romanians.