In late 1941, the German 11th Army under General Erich von Manstein began its offensive to seize Crimea. After months of brutal fighting, German forces gained total control of the peninsula by July 1942. During the occupation, Jews in Crimea faced systematic persecution, including beatings, torture, and mass executions.
At the time of the German invasion, Crimea was home to approximately 65,000 Jews. By the time Soviet forces liberated the peninsula in May 1944, only 499 Jews remained alive.
The most heinous massacre of Jews in Crimea was carried out by Einsatzgruppen commander Werner Karl Rudolf von Braun. He was born on April 11, 1909, in the village of Meth, then part of the German Empire. He completed high school in 1929 and studied law at the universities of Jena, Bonn, and Munich.
In July 1931, at age 22, von Braun joined the Nazi Party. In November of the same year, he became a member of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary force also known as the Storm Troopers. In November 1934, he became a member of the SS and began working for the SD, the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party.
In 1936, he became an officer of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. By 1938, he was deputy head of the Gestapo in Münster.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In 1940, von Braun became Gestapo chief in Koblenz, then at the state police office in Wuppertal, and finally in May 1941 in Halle.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941. For Nazi Germany, this was not an ordinary military operation. The war against the Soviet Union was a war of annihilation between German fascism and Soviet communism, and a racial war between German Aryans and those the Nazis deemed subhuman.
From October 1941 to early September 1942, von Braun served as commander of Sonderkommando 11b, a unit within Einsatzgruppe D, the Nazi mobile death squad. Einsatzgruppe D operated under the command of Otto Ohlendorf, who would later be executed as a war criminal.
Von Braun was not the only member of his family involved in Nazi atrocities. His younger brother Fritz Braun commanded Sonderkommando 4b. Sonderkommandos were work units made up of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced on threat of their own deaths to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims.
As von Braun’s Einsatzgruppe D advanced through occupied Soviet territories, its operations extended across Ukraine, Moldova, and Crimea. Crimea, with more than 1.1 million citizens, was home to a significant Jewish and Krymchak population. According to the 1926 census, Crimea was home to 40,000 Jews and approximately 6,000 Krymchaks, a Turkic-speaking indigenous people closely associated with Judaism.
By 1939, the Jewish population of Crimea had risen to over 65,000. Following the Nazi invasion, evacuations from Crimea began. However, by November 1941, German occupation authorities recorded 40,000 Jews still living on the peninsula. Crimea held strategic significance for the Nazis, who envisioned it as a future part of the Reich to be entirely resettled by Germans.
Between November and December 1941, the Nazis massacred most of the Jewish and Krymchak residents in major Crimean cities. On November 25 and 26, 1941, Einsatzgruppe D executed 603 Jews near Yevpatoria, a city on the western coast of Crimea.
Several weeks later, in the city of Simferopol, Sonderkommando 11b under von Braun carried out the worst massacre in Crimea during the Nazi occupation. On December 6, 1941, the Jewish population of Simferopol was ordered to gather at four collection points across the city. They were told they would be resettled and instructed to bring enough food and clothing for eight days.
On December 9, approximately 2,500 Krymchaks were rounded up in the former Talut Tor building on Studencheskaya Street. After being stripped of their belongings and valuables, they were forcibly loaded onto trucks. On December 11, they were executed at an anti-tank trench near the 10th kilometer of the Simferopol–Feodosia road.
Between December 11 and 13, an estimated 9,500 Ashkenazi Jews, including many women and children, were gathered at three other collection points: the Pedagogical Institute, the Medical Institute, and the regional party committee building. Several Jews who failed to report on time were captured and publicly hanged in the city streets. Their bodies were left with signs on their chests that read “for not reporting on time.”
After surrendering their provisions and valuables, the Jews were loaded in groups onto large canvas-covered trucks and driven to the same execution site. The trucks shuttled back and forth, transporting more and more victims. Upon arrival, the Jews were forced to remove their outer clothing and shoes. Some were made to strip completely naked. Their clothing and personal belongings were piled near the trench and later hauled away by truck to be distributed among German forces.
The executions lasted from early morning until nightfall. Besides von Braun’s Sonderkommando 11b, the mass murder operations were also carried out by Sonderkommando 10b, Sonderkommando 11a, and the 683rd motorized military police detachment. The victims were lined up in groups of 100 to 300 at the edge of the trench and shot with machine guns and submachine guns.
Soviet prisoners of war were then forced to cover the bodies with earth. Many of the wounded fell into the mass grave and were buried alive alongside those who had been executed. According to some witnesses, small children were killed in front of their parents’ eyes. Poison was smeared under their noses and on their lips.
Along with Jewish victims, Roma residents of Simferopol were also executed at the site. Between May and July 1942, Jews who had been in hiding, children from mixed marriages often along with their non-Jewish parents, Jewish artisans and craftsmen who had been temporarily spared for their labor, as well as Communists, partisans, and other perceived enemies of the Nazi regime were rounded up and taken in groups to the city prison.
There they were beaten, forced to undress, and then loaded in groups into black gas vans by a detachment of Einsatzgruppe D’s Sonderkommando 12, where they were suffocated immediately. Their bodies were then transported to the Simferopol–Feodosia road, where they were dumped into anti-tank trenches. Several Jewish men were forced to unload the corpses from the gas vans and bury them. Once the task was completed, they too were executed.
The massacres in Simferopol were not isolated incidents but part of a broader campaign of extermination across Crimea. As Einsatzgruppe D and its collaborators continued their operations, similar atrocities unfolded in other cities and towns across the peninsula. In Yalta, 1,500 Jews were executed on December 18. Similar atrocities occurred across other towns, including Karasu Bazar, Bakhchysarai, Kerch, and Feodosia.
German reports indicate that between mid-November 1941 and late March 1942, Einsatzgruppe D carried out the execution of 3,211 Jews in Crimea, including 254 Krymchaks, within a single month. While mass executions tapered off in 1942, sporadic killings continued. Following the capture of Sevastopol in July 1942, an estimated 1,500 to 4,200 Jews were murdered.
Historians estimate that approximately 40,000 Jews and Krymchaks perished in the Nazi genocide in Crimea. By the end of the Nazi occupation, only 499 Jews and Krymchaks remained alive on the peninsula.
In September 1942, von Braun returned to Halle in Germany. In 1943, he was promoted to the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer, equivalent to lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. From 1943 to 1944, he served as leader of the German Foreign Service Academy. In 1945, he was sent to Norway as commander of the security police and SD.
After the war, von Braun attempted to go into hiding using false papers and a new identity, but he was quickly unmasked and arrested in the German city of Minden. During the Einsatzgruppen trial, held between September 29, 1947, and April 10, 1948, as part of the Nuremberg follow-up trials, von Braun was among 24 former SS leaders charged with serious war crimes.
The prosecution estimated that between 1941 and 1943, the Einsatzgruppen murdered at least 600,000 people in the Soviet Union. However, based on Einsatzgruppen reports, they argued that the actual number of victims exceeded one million. In court, von Braun placed the blame on Hitler, claiming he had no choice but to obey orders under duress, a common defense strategy used by Nazi war criminals.
When asked what had happened to the Jews arrested during raids, he responded bluntly: “They were all shot.” His statements during the trial showed no sense of wrongdoing.
On April 8 and 9, 1948, all defendants were found guilty. On April 10, 14 of them, including von Braun, were sentenced to death. The verdict was delivered one day before von Braun’s 39th birthday.
Werner von Braun was 42 years old when he was hanged on June 7, 1951, at Landsberg prison in West Germany. He was executed alongside other Nazi war criminals, including Otto Ohlendorf, Erich Naumann, Paul Blobel, and Oswald Pohl. As he was escorted down the hallway to the gallows, von Braun shouted, “Comrades, long live Germany!” While standing on the gallows, he was smiling, as if he were insane. There were no tears shed for Werner von Braun.