The early days of Operation Barbarossa were heady ones for the German Wehrmacht, and hapless ones for their Red Army opponents. The Soviet military had been caught in a pretty bad state of preparation by the well-oiled machine that was their enemy, and they could do little but fall back, die, or surrender.
The small city of Vitebsk fell rather quietly on July 11th, less than 3 weeks after hostilities had begun. Situated about 250 miles straight west of Moscow, Vitebsk was (at the time of the Second World War) a modest-sized town or small city. But it played host to a significant Jewish population. Those unable to escape the German nets were rounded up and placed in a “ghetto district” inside the town, and there they lived for several months…in pretty lousy conditions.
It doesn’t take a doctor’s skills to realize that, once the weather turned, bad things would start to happen. All these people, in overcrowded conditions, with a poor diet, suspect hygiene, and a dearth of medical supplies, would serve to become a breeding ground for disease.
The Germans recognized this, although they somehow overlooked the fact that it was they who were the creators of the ghetto and its conditions. And while they did nothing to prevent this from happening, they were the first to take action after the fact.
Keep in mind that while there was some sickness and malnutrition in the Vitebsk Ghetto, it certainly hadn’t reached epidemic proportions or even become a serious problem…at least not in the sources I consulted.
So the Germans responded to the potential problem by increasing the food supplies to the Ghetto, by sending in medical teams to treat disease, and providing additional clothing to the Jews living there.
That’s what you’d like me to write…but I can’t.
On October 8, 1941, the Germans (using the pretext of squalid living conditions and rampant disease) began the systematic liquidation of the Vitebsk Ghetto. Over the next three days, at least 16,000 Jews would be removed and taken to the Vibte River outside of town, where they were shot and dumped.
When we consider the Holocaust, we often think of the concentration camps and the prisoners clad in stripes, their hollow faces peering from behind barbed wire. Or we think of the death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka, with their grisly “hospitals”, gas chambers, and ovens. But there were dozens of these “smaller” atrocities carried during of the Third Reich.
Recommended Reading: The Eastern Front – Day By Day, 1941-45
