Niny is a village [selo] in the former Arkhangel’skoe [today Sovetskii] district of Ordzhonikidze [today Stavropol’], Russia. The Arkhangel’skoe district was captured by the Wehrmacht on 18 August 1942 as part of ‘Operation Blue’ [‘Unternehmen Blau’]. During the occupation, which lasted just under five months, Niny was located in the area of Army Group A [German: Heeresgruppe A], Army Area 531 [German: Armeegebiet 531].
According to investigations by the Extraordinary State Commission, the occupiers convened a village meeting in Niny on 1 September, at which a new village elder was appointed and the ‘new order’ was explained. At this meeting, ‘the necessity of annihilating people of Jewish and Gypsy descent’ was openly addressed and a re-registration of the entire population, ‘primarily the Communists, Komsomol members, Jews and Gypsies’, was announced.
During the meeting, five Roma (three men, a woman and a twelve-year-old girl) who had come to Niny ‘to complain to the German commander about the confiscation of their horses’ were arrested and shot the same day.1GARF, f. 7021, op. 17, d. 9, ll. 51ob and 155, citations according to the reports of the Extraordinary State Commission on the Arkhangel’skoe raion of 18 and 20 July 1943.
One day later, the 61 Jews in the village, who were evacuees and refugees, were murdered. What is remarkable about the example of Niny is that Roma were treated the same as Jews (and communists) from the very beginning.
It is not clear from the Soviet documents which German unit the perpetrators belonged to. It is highly likely that the murders in Niny were carried out by the Strohschneider sub-commando of Einsatzkommando 12 (EK 12), which moved its base from Georgievsk to Budennovsk at the end of August 1942 and apparently ‘reconditioned’ the villages in between along the connecting road for security purposes.
As a result, the villages of Starodubka or Starodubskoe (4 September 1942) and Arkhangel’skoe (7 September 1942) further down the road were made ‘free of Jews’ directly after the murders in Niny. It is possible that the murders by the EK 12 were carried out in co-operation with the von Jungschulz cavalry regiment, which was commissioned by the Commander of Rear Army Area 531 [Kommandeur des rückwärtigen Armeegebietes, Korück 531] to ‘cleanse’ the area of partisans during the same period.
According to Soviet investigations, the German occupiers planned to deport the remaining able-bodied inhabitants of Niny to Germany on 10 January 1943. However, the plan failed because of the rapid advance of the Red Army, which was able to recapture the village on 9 January.
