Mariupol history - Nazi occupation

Thank you Old Mariupol for all of this great history information from the founding of the modern day Mariupol by Orthodox Greeks (resettlement refugees from the Khanate on the Crimea) up to the founding of the present country of Ukraine (post-Soviet to oligarchy).  For the most part that is time before our boy’s lives but well I’m interested and it is the backdrop to present day Mariupol.

Mariupol by European city standards is just a baby as the Greeks only showed up here in 1778.  Before that it had also been a Cossack stronghold and before that there are several burial mounds from prehistory.  But modern Mariupol for being so young (just a bit older then Salt Lake City) has a long history, most of it I have found to be tragic.

There a many monuments in this city to the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet People.  There are as many monuments to “Great Soviets” as was well like Lenin.  The Soviets are the flip side of the same coin as the then invading National Socialist but the winner gets to keep the statues.  For as terrible as WWII was for the US we never experienced the horror of occupation by Nazi forces.  Nazi’s ran Mariupol for two years from October 8, 1941 when their Panzer tanks rolled up The Avenue of The Republic  (now Lenin Avenue) until they retreated in 1943 burning the town behind them.  And yes there really is an eyewitness description of a Bureau City Party Committee meeting somewhere near where Mama Mia’s (house with a spire) now is and how someone looked out the window to see a SS officer walking up the avenue next to a tank with the painted iron cross.

One of the pictures in the below link shows the corner market where Becky and I have been buying our daily treats for the boys each morning.

http://old-mariupol.com.ua/okkupaciya-mariupolya-v-fotografiyax/

The first thing on the Nazi’s do to list (and you’d think that that list would be pretty long trying to win a war on two fronts plus Africa) was the extermination of the Jews of Mariupol.  I say it was the first thing because if you look at the timeline from Old Mariupol the extermination happens within days after capturing the city.

Near the village of Ahrobaza (Агробаза) about seven miles from Mariupol center on Lenin Avenue there was an anti-tank ditch.  Somewhere between six to eighteen thousand Jews – families were rounded up and walked west six to seven miles to that tank ditch and shot.  All of them.

To Ahrobaza

There was a memorial placed in remembrance by the Jewish community of Mariupol in October of 2004.  I rode out to Ahrobaza the other day and tried to find the memorial but I was unable to locate it along the main road north through the village.  I figured out today why I couldn’t find the memorial – it is in Mariupol at the Priazovsky Technical University where the Jews were first gathered by the Nazi’s prior to the march.  I am going to try to find the memorial tomorrow.