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The Holocaust of the Krymchaks

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Krymchaks were among the most ancient inhabitants of the Crimean Peninsula1. The first Jews probably arrived there in antiquity. In the Middle Ages, the community was reinforced by Jewish immigrants from the Mediterranean Basin, and later also by a smaller number of Ashkenazi Jews. Thus, the Krymchaks were an offshoot of the Jewish people – and, in terms of religious affiliation, they adhered to full-fledged Rabbinic Judaism. They adopted the local variant of the Tatar language – Judeo-Crimean Tatar as their vernacular, while retaining Hebrew for sacral purposes.

1. On the Krymchaks’ history, see Igor Achkinazi, Krymchaki, Istoriko-etnograficheskii ocherk (Simferopol, 2000) (Russian); Wolf Moskovicz and Boris Tukan, “Edat hakrymchakim: toldoteihem, tarbutam uleshonam,” Pe'amim, 14 (1982), pp. 5–31 (Hebrew); Michael Zand, “Krymchaks,” in Gershon David Hundert, editor-in-chief, The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, vol. 1 (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 948-951.

Until the 20th century, the Krymchaks did not intermarry with Ashkenazi Jews. Twenty years of Soviet rule resulted in a certain blurring of the ethnic, linguistic, and religious segregation of the Krymchaks, and cases of intermarriage – not only with Ashkenazi Jews, but also with the linguistically close Crimean Tatars – were registered2. The Krymchak population numbered 6,383 in 19263, and according to a later scholarly estimate, some 6,500 Krymchaks lived in the USSR on the eve of World War II4. During the 1920s and 1930s, more than a quarter of the Krymchaks shifted from Judeo-Crimean Tatar to Russian5.

In the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of the Crimea in mid-October 19416, the Krymchaks were exempted from Nazi anti-Jewish measures. However, the SS forces operating in the peninsula carried out research into the Jewish background of the Krymchaks, completing it in early December 19417. Its conclusions underscored the Jewish ethnic origin of the Krymchaks, while also citing the Krymchaks’ own assertion that they were “a branch of the Tatar people.” The report emphasized that they had kept their faith, which was not referred to as Jewish. Also, the group tended to intermarry with the Tatars. The SS researchers gave the decision-makers in Berlin sufficient leeway for any verdict. Sometime between December 5 and 8-9, 1941, Himmler ordered the extermination of the Krymchaks.

The first killing operations against the community were carried out in the first week of December 1941, shortly after the murder of most of the local Ashkenazi Jews8. In those cases, the whole procedure of registering, assembling, and then exterminating the Krymchaks did not differ from the treatment meted out to the Crimean Ashkenazim. However, in other instances, the roundup of the Krymchaks would not be announced until much later (in Feodosia, there was a delay of twelve days; in Karasubazar, the corresponding period lasted as many as forty-five days; in Kerch, it lasted thirty-five days), which gave them more time to learn the fate of their Ashkenazi brethren, who had been ‘resettled’ (the Nazi euphemism for ‘murdered’) earlier9. The longer interval between the roundups of the Ashkenazis and the Krymchaks may be attributed to the shortage of German manpower and to the protracted investigation of the Krymchaks in Kerch.

The available documents enable us to reconstruct the organized activity of the Krymchak community only in the town of Kerch. Its Krymchak inhabitants were exempted from the special ‘Jewish’ registration introduced in mid-November 1941. However, very soon the policy was reversed, and the Krymchaks were ordered to register on November 28, 194110. 826 people complied with this order11.

By that time, the local German commanders had already received the order to kill the Krymchaks in Kerch, in line with the policy applied to this group elsewhere in the peninsula at this point. In the meantime, five Krymchak intellectuals, who had learned about the ongoing extermination of the Ashkenazi Jews, gathered on November 25-26 and decided to present the occupying authorities with printed materials and a handwritten article titled “Krymchaks” by Isaac Kaia, a Krymchak scholar and educator. These texts were supposed to prove the community’s non-Jewish origins. That decision was carried out; the manuscripts were examined, and the head of the employment center was instructed to register the Krymchaks like the rest of the non-Jewish residents12.
As a result, the local German command suspended the discriminatory measures against the Krymchaks in Kerch and forwarded the inquiry to Berlin. This renewed investigation lasted several weeks, but by the end of December 1941, the old policy vis-à-vis the Krymchaks was reiterated. They were ordered to assemble on January 3 or 4, 1942, with the obvious purpose of extermination13. However, in late December 1941, Soviet marines landed in the area and liberated the town. Thanks to them, hundreds of local Krymchaks were spared from annihilation. However, only 200-300 of the Krymchaks evacuated; the Jews who were left in Kerch perished after the Germans had retaken the town in May 194214.

In 1942, the persecution and extermination of the Krymchaks extended to the rural areas15 and the POW camps16. During the final wave of the large-scale extermination operations carried out by the Germans after the seizure of the remaining Soviet enclaves of Kerch (May 1942) and Sevastopol (July 1942), there was no trace of the former special treatment of the Krymchaks (in contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews). The remaining members of both groups, the Ashkenazis and the Krymchaks, were gathered at the assembly points and then killed en masse at the same time and in the same places17.

The great majority of the Crimean Krymchaks perished during the German occupation of the peninsula. According to calculations made by the Krymchaks themselves, more than 5,500 members of their community were killed by the Germans. Since the Crimea was home to most of the world's Krymchaks, this means that more than 70 percent of their prewar population was exterminated in 1941-194418.

2. Achkinazi, Krymchaki, p. 115.
3. Anatoly Khazanov, The Krymchaks: A Vanishing Group in the Soviet Union (Jerusalem: The Marjorie Mayrock Center for Soviet and East European Research, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1989), p. 19.
4. Michael Zand, “Krymchaks,” p. 950.
5. Ibid.
6. On the fate of the Krymchaks during World War II, see Achkinazi, Krymchaki, pp. 121–123; Shmuel Spector, “Sho'at hayehudim hakrimchakim bitkufat hakibbush hanatzi,” Peamim 27 (1986), pp. 18–27 (Hebrew); Rudolf Loewenthal, “The Extinction of the Krymchaks in World War 2,” The American Slavic and East European Review 10 (1951), pp. 130–136.
7. Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, eds., The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selection from the Dispatches of the Nazis' Death Squads Campaign against the Jews (July 1941 – January 1943 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989), p. 250.
8. Statement of the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission of the town of Yevpatoria, May 9, 1944, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF, State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. 7021, op. 9, d. 57, l. 30.
9. Kiril Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016), p. 286; see also Untold Stories: Murder Sites of Jews in Occupied Territories of the USSR: Feodosia, Karazubazar, and Kerch.
10. German Security Police, November 26, 1941. Order No 3, Derzhavnyi arkhiv Avtonomnoi respubliky Krym (DAARK, State Archive of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea), f. P-156, op. 1, d. 24, pp. 9, 13.
11. Achkinazi, Krymchaki, p. 123.
12. Ibid., p. 122.
13. Crimean District Committee of the VKP(b), Zverstva nemetskikh fashistov v Kerchi: Sbornik rasskazov postradavshikh i ochevidtsev (Sukhumi: Krasnyi Krym, 1943), p. 18.
14. Achkinazi, Krymchaki, p. 123.
15. 3 Feldgendarmerie Abt. (mot.) 683. Activity report for the period May 9–25, 1942, copy Yad Vashem Archives (YVA), O.51/185.1, p. 8.
16. Near Yevpatoria (?) Strafsache gegen Schlupper. Der Untersuchungsrichter 115 Ks 6a-c/71. Vernehmung des Angeschuldigten Rudolf E. December 21, 1971, Zentrale stelle, Ludvigsburg B. 162/1021, copy YVA, TR.10/1081, p. 91.
17. OSR USSR No 190. CSPSS. Berlin. April 8, 1942, see Arad, Krakowski, and Spector, eds., The Einsatzgruppen Reports, pp. 325–326.
18. According to calculations by Evsei Peisakh and Isaac Kaia, see Evsei I. Peisakh, Soobschenie v redaktsiiu Bolshoi Sovetskoi Entsiklopedii o narodnosti Krimchaki (k stat’e dlia BSE), Leningrad, 1970, manuscript, p. 173, cited in Khazanov, The Krymchaks, p. 23.