Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacre

Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre
Jews marched through Kamenets to their execution site on the outskirts of town
Date	August 27–28, 1941
Target	Hungarian and Soviet Jews
Deaths	Total of 23,600 men, women and children

The Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre was a World War II mass shooting of Jews carried out in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, by mobile killing squads of Nazi German Order Police Battalion 320 along with Jeckeln's Einsatzgruppen, the Hungarian soldiers, and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The killings were conducted on August 27 and August 28, 1941, in the Soviet city of Kamianets-Podilskyi (now Ukraine), occupied by German troops in the previous month on July 11, 1941. According to the Nazi German reports a total of 23,600 Jews were murdered, including 16,000 who had earlier been expelled from Hungary.

The city of Kamianets-Podilskyi (Kam'yanets'-Podil's'kyy), now in south-western Ukraine, was part of the Ukrainian SSR invaded by German forces on June 22, 1941 during the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa launched from occupied Poland. Shortly after Hungary (Germany's ally) declared war on the Soviet Union on June 27, 1941, officials of the agency responsible for the foreign nationals living in Hungary decided to deport foreign Jews; these were mostly Polish and Russian Jews, but there were also many refugees from western Europe. Jews who could not readily establish Hungarian citizenship were equally vulnerable to deportation. As a result, many Hungarian Jews who could not document their citizenship were also deported. Many Jewish communities, especially in the Transcarpathian Ukraine (then under Hungarian control), were deported in their entirety.

The Hungarians loaded the Jews into freight cars and took them to Kőrösmező (now Yasinia, Ukraine), near the prewar Hungarian-Polish border, where they were transferred across the former Soviet border and handed over to the Germans. By August 10, 1941, approximately 14,000 Jews had been deported from Hungary to German-controlled territory. Once in German hands, the Jews, often still in family units, were forced to march from Kolomyia to Kamianets-Podilskyi.