On December 14 (or 15, according to Soviet reports), 1941, the German military commandant of Kharkov, Generalleutnant (Lt.-General) Alfred von Puttkamer, issued an order requiring all the Jews of Kharkov to move into a ghetto, which had been set up in the barracks of the former tractor and machine tool plants. Some 400 Jews who were unable to walk – mostly little children, as well as elderly and disabled people – were locked in the building of the former synagogue on Grazhdanskaya Street, on the left bank of the Kharkov River, and left there to freeze and starve to death.

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According to the testimonies submitted to the Soviet Extraordinary Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, in the fall of 1941 and the winter of 1941/1942 at least several dozen “peaceful Soviet civilians” of both sexes, apparently including both Jews and non-Jews deemed “undesirable” by the Nazis, were murdered in a ravine in a forest at the Kholodnaya Gora Hill, on the eastern outskirts of Kharkov. While the identity of the perpetrators of these shootings is not known for certain, we may assume that they were members of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, which was stationed at Kharkov at the time.

More information: Yad Vashem

According to testimonies submitted to the Soviet Extraordinary Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, in the winter of 1941/1942 at least several dozen “Soviet civilians” of both sexes, apparently including both Jews and non-Jews, were shot in a ravine in a coniferous forest near the village of Grigorovka, some six kilometers southwest of Kharkov. It is unclear who the perpetrators of these shootings were.

More information: Yad Vashem

On December 14 (or 15, according to Soviet reports), 1941, the German military commandant of Kharkov, Generalleutnant (Lt.-General) Alfred von Puttkamer, issued an order requiring all the Jews of Kharkov to move into the ghetto that had been set up in the barracks of the former tractor and machine tool plants, some 10 km southeast of the city. The plants themselves had been evacuated into the Soviet interior after the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, and their buildings stood empty. Several dozen thousand Jews from Kharkov were now crammed into them. The ghetto existed for only a few weeks, from mid-December 1941 until early January 1942. In this period, numerous Jews, both singly and in groups, were shot dead there by members of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C. The shootings took place either in the area of the ghetto itself or in the nearby anti-tank trenches and brick quarry. In December 1941-January 1942, groups of Jewish inmates of the Kharkov municipal prison were also killed in the area: after being told that they would be taken to work outside Kharkov, they were brought to the ghetto in a gas van, and their bodies were dumped into the anti-tank trenches near the tractor plant. In addition to that, some 200 Jewish patients of the mental hospitals of Kharkov were shot in the ghetto area in late December 1941. In early January 1942, when the bulk of the ghetto inmates began to be taken to Drobitskiy Yar to be shot, those inmates unable to walk to the murder site were herded into several barracks and warehouses in the area of the plant, and burned alive.

More information: Yad Vashem

According to the testimony of a Holocaust survivor from Kharkov, Rudolf Kudenko, some people, probably Jews, who had tried to evade the massacre at Drobitskiy Yar were caught and shot over trenches at the cemetery near the intersection of Mayakovskiy and Chernyshevskaya Streets. The shooters were probably members of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C.

More information: Yad Vashem