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The Tarnopol Ghetto (, ) was a Jewish World War II ghetto established in 1941 by the Schutzstaffel ( SS) in the prewar Polish city of Tarnopol (now Ternopil, Ukraine).Joshua D. Zimmerman (2015), The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945. Cambridge University Press via Google Books. "The Provinces of Poland on the Eve of World War II," pp. xviii, 278, 328, 347. At Teheran (1943) Churchill told Stalin that he wished to see a new Poland "friendly to Russia". Stalin replied that nevertheless, he considered the annexation of Eastern Poland "just and right" only along the frontiers of the Nazi-Soviet invasion of 1939.p.
The first week-long killing spree of 1,600–2,000 Jews occurred a few days after Tarnopol was occupied by the German army at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The ghetto was established formally two months later. Tarnopol was occupied by the Wehrmacht on . Several hundred Jews followed the Soviets in their hasty retreat to the east. Immediately afterwards, up to 1,000 dead bodies of political prisoners murdered by the NKVD were discovered at the Tarnopol prison and 1,000 more in nearby towns. In accordance with the Nazi Judeo-Bolshevism canard, the Germans declared the Jews responsible for the Soviet atrocities.
A pogrom broke out two days later and lasted from until , with homes destroyed, synagogue burned and Jews killed indiscriminately, estimated at 1,600 (Yad Vashem) at various locations including inside prison, at the Gurfein School, and at the synagogue set on fire afterwards. The killing of about 1,000 Jews was done by the SS-Sonderkommando 4b attached to Einsatzgruppe C, under the command of Guenther Hermann, IDs of SS-Men. The SS & Polizei section. Axis History Forum. Retrieved July 31, 2015. (just returning from the massacre in Łuck)Ronald Headland (1992), Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941–1943. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, pp. 79, 125. . with another 600 Jews murdered by the Ukrainian Militia – formed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – and renamed as the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police the following month. Nearly all of their Jewish victims were men. Some 500 Jews were murdered in the suburbs on the grounds of the Ternopil's Christian cemetery using weapons handed out by the German army.Cnaan Liphshiz, Talking with the willing executioners. Haaretz.com, May 18, 2009. A horrific page of history unfolded last Monday in Ukraine. It concerned the gruesome and untold story of a spontaneous pogrom by local villagers against hundreds of Jews in a town now south of Ternopil in 1941. Not one, but five independent witnesses recounted the tale, recalling how they rushed to a German army camp, borrowed weapons and gunned down 500 Jews inside the town's Christian cemetery. One of them remembered decapitating bodies in front of the church. According to interviews conducted in Ukraine by a Holy Orders, Father Patrick Desbois from Yahad-In Unum, some of the victims were decapitated.
In September 1941, the German occupation authorities under Gerhard Hager announced the creation of a designated Jewish ghetto in the city around the Old Square and the Market Square Minor, in a derelict district that occupied mere 5 percent of the metropolitan area. Population density in the ghetto was tripled, with 12,000–13,000 Jews put in it. Death penalty was introduced for leaving the ghetto illegally, and all food allowances rationed. Within a year the conditions in the ghetto became so bad that in the winter of 1941–42 the Judenrat began burying the corpses in mass graves for sanitation concerns due to rampant mortality rates. Satellite labour camps for Jewish slave workers were established by the Germans in Kamionka, Podwołoczyska, Hluboczka, and in Zagroble.
The next Holocaust train was assembled on . Some 2,500 Jews were rounded up and marched to the station, with a small Ukrainian orchestra playing on their departure to Bełżec. The ghetto area was greatly reduced; a part of it, turned into a labour camp. Between August 1942 and June 1943 there were five "selections" that decimated the Jewish prisoner population of Tarnopol. The camps were liquidated as the last. The victims were sent in Holocaust trains to the extermination camp at Bełżec, but also massacred in shooting actions at Petrykowo, or Petrykow-Wald, with the assistance of Ukrainian policemen. Estimated 2,500 Jews perished there.
A few hundred Jews from Tarnopol and its vicinity attempted to survive by hiding within the town limits. Many were denounced by Ukrainian nationalists, including some 200 people shortly before the Soviets took over the area in 1944.
A number of Jews survived the Holocaust by hiding with the Poles. Righteous Among the Nations who helped Tarnopol Ghetto's Jews included the Regent family In Polish language, with Google link to optional webpage translation in English. and the Misiewicz family. In Polish language. Israel Gutman, Księga Sprawiedliwych wśród Narodów Świata. A monument in memory of the Holocaust victims was erected in Ternopil at Petrikovsky Yar in 1996. The USSR officially ceased to exist on 31 December 1991.
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