State Archive of the Odessa Region

This archive was created by decree (10 November 1931) of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (VUTsIK) as the Odessa State Historical Archive on the basis of the Odessa Territorial Historical Archive. In February 1932, with the formation of the Odessa region, it was renamed the Odessa Regional Historical Archive. During the German-Romanian occupation of Odessa, it functioned in the city of Ural’sk (Kazakhstan) (with a considerable portion of documents unable to be evacuated, and perishing). In April 1944 it took up work once again in Odessa as the State Archive of the Odessa Region. From 1958-80 it was the Odessa Regional State Archive, and since 1980, it has borne its current title. Prior to March 1939 it was subordinate to the Odessa Administration of the NKVD, and subsequently to the Archival Section of the Ukrainian NKVD (from 1946 on, the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs); from July 1960 on, to the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers Archival Administration (from 1974 on, the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers Main Archival Administration; from 1992-99, the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers Main Archival Administration; from March-December 1999, the Main Archival Administration of Ukraine, then the State Committee on Archives of Ukraine; and since 2011, the State Archival Service of Ukraine) and the Archival Section of the Odessa Regional Executive Committee; after the dissolution of the latter (1988), the State Archive of the Odessa Region took up the function of supervising archival institutions of the Odessa region The fond includes four inventories systematized chronologically and, for personal files in op. 2L, alphabetically. Included are materials (op. 1) connected with the work of archive personnel in assisting the Odessa Regional Extraordinary State Commission, in particular, the album Fascist Atrocities in the Odessa Region during its Temporary Occupation, with photographs of the ghetto near the village of Bogdanovka (Domanevka district, Odessa region) showing external and internal views of living quarters, excavations of burial sites in places of mass shootings of Jews, a medical commission’s work in exhuming the bodies of those who perished, ghetto prisoners who survived, etc. (1944); inventories and delivery and acceptance certificates for materials from archive fonds transferred to the Museum of the Heroic Defense of Odessa, including orders of the Romanian authorities on deadlines for mandatory registration of Jews, chronologies of mass killings of Soviet citizens, among them “Jews,” “Jews and partisans,” and representatives of “non-Aryan nations” in the cities of Odessa and Berezovka and in the Mostovoe district (Odessa region) (1945-46). Also housed in the fond is correspondence (1968) with the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers Main Archival Administration on collecting information for a “map of concentration and death camps created by the Nazi invaders in the temporarily occupied territory of the Soviet Union,” which was to be exhibited at an international conference planned for 1969 in Moscow on the prosecution of Nazi criminals; and correspondence (1991) with the archive of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem on continuing the work, begun in 1989, of finding and making copies of documents on the destruction of Jews in the territory of Transnistria. There are also citizens’ applications for documentary evidence of their having been interned in concentration camps and ghettos; lists and personal files of archive personnel containing data on their periods of internment in concentration camps and ghettos during the occupation; etc. The documents are in Russian, English, and Ukrainian.