Murder Story of Kowel Jews at the Jewish Cemetery in Kowel

According to one testimony, on the second day of the first murder operation in Bachów (on June 3, 1942) a group of several hundred Jews was taken under guard to the Jewish cemetery in the city. Upon their arrival at the site the Jews were ordered by Ukrainian auxiliary policemen to strip naked and then, in groups of 5, they were taken to a pit where they were shot to death by a German unit. According to the same testimony, the Gebietskommissar of Kowel Erich Kassner, the head of the Kowel regional Order Police (Gendarmerie) Philipp Rapp, the head of the Kowel urban police (Schutzpolizei) Fritz Manthei, and the head of the Ukrainian auxiliary police of the Kowel District Shabatura personally shot Jews to death with their pistols. Ukrainian auxiliary policemen guarded the victims during this murder operation.

During the second murder operation of Kowel's Jews, which began on August 19, about several hundred Jews who had been caught in hiding in the course of the following period were held for several days in the Great Synagogue of Kowel, with no food or water and in very poor sanitary conditions. The Jews were constantly searched for valuables. During this period, according to several testimonies, Ukrainian auxiliary policemen would take out groups of young Jewish girls and rape them before returning them to the synagogue. During the days of their captivity in the synagogue many people managed to write last testimonies, wills, and requests for vengeance or pleas for life on the walls of the synagogue – these inscriptions were in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish. These writings, found after the war, were copied before they were painted over. When a sufficient number of people were gathered in the synagogue, they were led in groups, by truck to the Jewish cemetery. Upon their arrival, usually in the evening, the Jews, mainly women and children, were forced to strip naked and to step onto boards laid across the pit with their faces towards it. Then they were shot to death with machine-guns by a group of Security Police and SD men from Łuck, with the active participation of members of the Gendarmerie. Kassner, Rapp, and Manthei were personally in charge of this murder operation as well. Afterwards, Ukrainian auxiliary policemen who guarded the site during the execution loaded the belonging of the victims onto trucks and sold them to the local population in Kowel.