Berdychiv ghetto
Mass Shooting of Berdychiv’s Jews at the Shlemarka Airfield
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The familiar figure of 20,000–30,000 hides a correction: it is an occupation-wide total for Berdychiv and nearby villages, not the toll of a single day.
The date on this entry, and the date in the archives
This entry is filed under 5 October 1941, but the institutions that document the killing place the principal massacre of Berdychiv's Jews on 15 September 1941. Yad Vashem estimates approximately 12,000 victims that day; the YIVO Encyclopedia gives more than 15,000.
Both place the main killing in September rather than October. Some summaries date the ghetto's liquidation to 5 October, while YIVO places the killing of the remaining ghetto prisoners by 3 November.
Five pits near a military airfield
On 15 September, German SS and police forces and a detachment of Einsatzgruppe C, assisted by Ukrainian auxiliary police, rounded up the remaining Jews of the Berdychiv ghetto. Yad Vashem identifies Police Reserve Battalion 45 among the units involved, within the organisation of Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln.
Approximately 400 skilled workers were separated out. The other prisoners were taken about five kilometres to a military airfield near Shlemarka and shot into five pits.
What survived the day
The operation destroyed most of the ghetto's population. Roughly 400 selected workers and an uncertain number of people in hiding remained alive temporarily, and subsequent operations killed most of them by early November.
Berdychiv's Jews were murdered in a sequence of operations running from July 1941 into 1942, of which 15 September was the largest rather than the only one. Yad Vashem preserves the survivor Nahum Epelfeld's identification of that day as the most dreadful of his life.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 4 sources 2 audit passes Date disputed
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at 1941-09-15.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The listed October 5 date is not supported for a one-day killing of 20,000–30,000 people. The best-supported date for the principal massacre is September 15, 1941.
- Institutional estimates for September 15 differ: Yad Vashem gives about 12,000, while YIVO gives more than 15,000.
- The figure of 20,000–30,000 refers to the cumulative destruction of Jews from Berdychiv and surrounding communities across multiple operations, not a single October 5 execution.
- Some summaries date the ghetto’s liquidation to October 5, but YIVO places the killing of the remaining ghetto prisoners by November 3, and archival accounts describe further operations in late October and early November.