The Holocaust in Russia

Despite the chaos of the Soviet retreat, some effort was made to evacuate Jews, who were either employed in the military industries or were family members of servicemen.

The "Holocaust by bullet" was the task of SS death squads called Einsatzgruppen, under the overall command of Reinhard Heydrich.

The Black Book of Soviet Jewry contains a section on occupied Russia, with testimonies about the Holocaust in Smolensk, Rostov-on-Don, Yessentuki, Kislovodsk and Stavropol among others.

[4] The YIVO encyclopedia places the number of Holocaust victims in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic at over 119,000.

The Nazi Genocide of the Jews carried by German Einsatzgruppen, and Wehrmacht along with local collaborators resulted in almost complete annihilation of the Jewish population over the entire territory temporarily occupied by Germany and its allies.

While outside observers viewed the proceedings as a show trial, they did not doubt the severity or the extent of the crimes themselves, nor the guilt of the defendants.

January 1942 German map titled "Jewish Executions Carried Out by Einsatzgruppe A ". Number of Jews murdered in the Russian SFSR is shown as 3600. Map reads at the bottom: "estimated number of Jews still on hand is 128,000".
The official response to the 1946 inquiry by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee about the military decorations of Jews during the war (1.8% of the total number). Some antisemites accused Jews of lack of patriotism and of hiding from military service .