The Odessa Massacre was the extermination of Jews and Communists in Odessa during the autumn of 1941. Even though, it is less known than some other massacres, it was the most large scale. It was to take 280 000 lives, most of them Jews.

October 16, the Germans and the Romanians marched into Odessa following the Soviet evacuation. No resistance was offered but the invaders shot indiscrimately at civilians as they marched in. During the siege, the Romanians had lost 98 000 men and were anxious to find any resistance but found none. Still, the Romanian Army and the German Einsatzkommando 11 b shot 8 000 civilians.

One week later, October 22, a bomb detonated in the Romanian HQ, killing the Romanian commander, 16 officers, 9 non-commissioned officers and public servants, and 35 soldiers.

3 hours later, the retribution campaign was started. Soldiers shot at random at civilians and at noon 5 000 Jews had been murdered.

General Ion Antonescu ordered from Bucharest that for every killed Romanian and German officer, 200 Jews and Communists were to be killed, and for every soldier, 100 were to be executed. All the Communists were to be imprisoned and one person was to be taken hostage from every Jewish family.

October 23, gallows were erected all along the streets and 5 000 Jews were hanged or shot.

In the afternoon, 19 000 Jews were enclosed on the Tobukhin square by the harbour. Gasoline was sprinkled over them. Then they were set on fire and the sound of fire was mixed with human screams.

The next day, 15 000 Jews were assembled and taken out to the gates of Dalnik. The 30 km long road was littered with shot women, children and handicapped people who couldn't keep up the pace. When they reached the gates, 50 people were moved into the trenches and shot by lieutenant-colonel Deleanu himself. The Romanians were concerned that the killing would take too long a time and moved the rest of the people inside four large storage buildings in which they made holes for machine guns.

The doors closed and the lieutenant-colonels Deleanu and Nikilescu ordered the soldiers to fire into the buildings. In order to make sure that no one had survived, they set the buildings on fire at 17:00 hours. The next day grenades were thrown into one of the buildings.

35 000 – 40 000 of the Jews that remained were moved into an enclosed area in the suburb Slobodka where most of the buildings were destroyed, and left outdoors for ten days, between October 25 and November 3.

October 28, a new massacre was performed and 34 000 Jews were killed. One month later, 10 000 were taken to a death march to the three concentration camps in Golta.

In January, the extermination was ended, by killing those who remained in Slobodka. January 12-23, the last 19 582 Jews were transported in cattle wagons to Berezovka from where they were transported to the concentration camps in Golta. 18 months later almost everyone had died. in Golta.

Although these facts are not doubted by historians, some accounts differ (often greatly) in the numbers. Many Jews had fled with the Red Army even before Odessa was surrounded, others also fled later by sea. There are sources which claim that Romanians and the German Einsatzkommando murdered no more than 2,000 or 3,000 in Odessa during the whole period of conquest and ocupation, and have deported other 19,000 to different ghettos in towns and villages north of Odessa (of the later, the majority would eventually die of poor conditions and at the hands of the retreating German special commandos in 1944). In particular, there are claims that the 100:1 and 200:1 avenge after the blowing of the former KGB building in Odessa, where the command of two Romanian divisions was situated, existed only on paper. But the truth remains that at least a few hundred people, if not more, were killed directly as a result of that incident. The truth is perhaps somewhere in the middle. Tens of thousands of people were killed. For the German Einsatzkommando they were representatives of an inferior race, for the Romanian authorities in Transnistria (the region between the rivers Dnister and Bug that had been under Romanian administration in 1441-1944) they were Communist agents. Both "crimes" were "punishable" by death.

A Personal Testimony

Grigory Plotkin, a journalist at the army newspaper the Red Star (Krasnaya Zvezda), and a future famous author, arrived in Odessa at the city's liberation. He immediately started to search for his grandmother Mindla Balshemennik.

Mindla had refused to leave Odessa when her daughter and son-in-law were to be evacuated (at the same time as the doomed Flagship Lenin was to depart). She told them that she remembered the Germans as civilised people and that no one would hurt an old lady. Still, she gave them her wedding ring as they left. The last one in the family who saw her was her daughter's son-in-law, Vasily Chernyshov, major at Sevastopol, who came searching for his daughter, not knowing that she had been evacuated.

Grigory Plotkin learnt that after the occupation of the city, Mindla's maid, Nina, had told the Romanians of where a rich old Jewish lady was hiding. The soldiers and non-Jewish Odessites stripped her off her clothes and wrote my children are Communists on her chest. She was forced to march naked on the street as people brutalized her, until death finally set her free from the torture.