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Murder story of Bereznegovatoye Jews in the Bereznegovatoye Ravine

Murder Site
Bereznegovatoye Area
Ukraine (USSR)
On the night between September 13 and 14, 1941 members of Einsatzkommando 12 of Einsatzgruppe D and Ukrainian auxiliary policemen assembled 112 Jews of Bereznegovatoye in the club building of Bereznegovatoye. The Jews were held overnight, guarded by Germans and local policemen. The next morning these Jews were taken in small groups to a ravine at the outskirts of the village and shot.
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Prokofiy Skryl, who was born in 1893, testified:
… On September 14, 1941 in Bereznegovatoye village a German murder squad headed by the German commandant Riempel [sic] shot 112 Jews - women, old people, and children…. During the shooting the German murder squad did not let anyone approach the shooting site except for Germans and those who buried the murder victims. I do not remember right now who they [the buriers] were….
GARF, MOSCOW R-7021-68-177 copy YVA M.33 / JM/19716
The ChGK report from Bereznegovatoye
… During the night preceding September 14, 1941 the entire Jewish population of the village of Bereznegovatoye was collected at the clubhouse building - under the pretext of being registered. They [the Jews] remained there until the morning of September 14, 1941, guarded by Germans and local policemen. The tragedy of the mass shooting of these innocent people started on September 14, 1941 at 7 a. m. On the orders of the local heads of the German occupation authorities the population of adult men and women, old people, [and] children were herded together and taken in groups of 20-30 to the outskirts of Bereznegovatoye village, to a ravine where they were shot with submachine- and machine-guns. According to the eyewitness Vasilii Titskii, the German monsters, who were exceedingly brutal,skewered some of the children on their bayonets and threw them over their heads into the ravine; others, while still alive, were covered with earth, along with the bodies of those who had been shot dead.… The Germans and local policemen who participated in the shooting checked those who had only been wounded and finished them off with their rifle butts. One of those [who was about to be] shot, Sergei Shimonovich… started to beg the murderers on his knees to spare and not to kill his little daughter Zhenya, but no attention was paid to his pleading. The sadistic barbarians, who no longer resembled human beings, shot the child. The wretched father who had lost his mind screamed: "Shoot me too!" Several policemen and Germans killed the wretched father with their submachine-guns.…
GARF, MOSCOW R-7021-68-177 copy YVA M.33 / JM/19716
Bereznegovatoye Area
ravine
Murder Site
Ukraine (USSR)
47.304;32.859