Vinnytsia has been an important trade and political center since the fourteenth century, when Fiodor Koriatowicz, the nephew of the Lithuanian Duke Algirdas, built a fortress (1363) against Tatar raiders on the banks of the Southern Bug. The original settlement was built and populated by Aleksander Hrehorovicz Jelec, hetman under Lithuanian Prince Švitrigaila. Aleksander Jelec built the fort, which he commanded as starosta afterwards.
In the 15th century, Lithuanian Grand Duke Alexander Jagiellon granted Winnica Magdeburg city rights. In 1566, it became part of the Braclaw Voivodeship. Between 1569 and 1793 the town was a part of Poland and in this period, for a short time between 1672 and 1699 was a part of the Ottoman Empire. During period of Polish rule, Winnica was a Polish royal city. On March 18, 1783, Antoni Protazy Potocki opened in Winnica the Trade Company Poland.
After Second Partition of Poland in 1793 the Russian Empire annexed the city and the region. Russia moved to expunge the Roman Catholic religion – Catholic churches in the city (including what is now the Transfiguration Cathedral) were converted to Russian Orthodox churches.
According to the Russian census of 1897, Vinnytsia with a population of 30,563 was the third largest city of Podolia after Kamianets-Podilskyi and Uman.
From Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, “Vinnytsia”
A Jewish presence in Vinnitsa is first mentioned in the early 16th century. In 1648 the Jewish community of Vinnitsa was almost completely wiped out by the Cossacks of Bogdan Chmielnitski and their Tatar allies. In the first half of the 18th century the Jews of Vinnitsa suffered greatly from attacks by the Haidamaks.
The Jewish population of Vinnitsa started to grow rapidly after the city became part of the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century. In 1897 11,689 Jews lived in Vinnitsa, comprising 38.3 percent of the total population. In the early 20th century the Jewish community in the city had a hospital, an old-age home for poor Jews, and a Talmud Torah school.
Vinnitsa was [also] birthplace of the famous Russian-Jewish avant-garde painter and sculptor Nathan Altman.
In the early 20th century Vinnitsa had branches of both Zionist parties and the anti-Zionist socialist Bund which became very active during the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the civil war. Later, under the Soviets, the authorities cracked down on those Jewish political and social activities that were not under official supervision.
Vinnitsa Jews suffered in a pogrom in October 1905 that claimed a number of Jewish lives and, especially, during the calamities of the civil war in Russia. In 1919-1922 the various warring parties repeatedly attacked Jews, injuring them and looting their homes and businesses. During this period many Jews from surrounding towns came to Vinnitsa in search of protection from the pogroms in the countryside.
Under Soviet rule the occupational structure of Vinnitsa Jews started to change. Many Jews left their former employment in commerce and crafts in order to became government clerks or factory workers. At the same time there was considerable Soviet Yiddish cultural activity in Vinnitsa. Several Yiddish schools and a Yiddish pedagogical institute operated in the city until they were reorganized into general ones by the end of 1930s. The Vinnitsa State Jewish Worker-and-Peasant Theater performed in Yiddish and there was a Yiddish chorus in the city. The city's Yiddish-language newspapers "Proletarisher Emes" (The Proletarian Truth) and "Di Royte Nodl" (The Red Needle, of the local clothing factory) were published in 1930s. From 1925 to 1936 a chamber in the local court held deliberations in Yiddish and there was also a local police station in Vinnitsa with Yiddish as the working language.
In 1939 33,150 Jews lived in Vinnitsa, where they comprised 35.6 percent of the total population. After the start of the German invasion into Poland on September 1, 1939 many Jewish refugees from Poland fled to the city. Apparently more than a half of Vinnitsa's Jews managed to leave the city before it was occupied by German forces on July 19, 1941. Immediately after the start of the occupation a Jewish council was appointed by the Germans. All Jews were ordered to wear armbands with the Star of David and their valuables were confiscated. Soon afterwards the Jews in Vinnitsa were placed under guard in several locations in the city and were forced to perform various kinds of hard labor. The mass murder of the Jews of Vinnitsa started at the end of July 1941. By mid-September 1941 about 1,000 Vinnitsa Jews, mostly men and women without their husbands, were murdered as "hostages," allegedly in retaliation for acts of sabotage. The majority of Vinnitsa's about 15,000 Jews were murdered in two large-scale murder operations, in mid-September 1941 and in mid-April 1942. About 1,000 skilled workers were spared during these massacres. Half of them were incarcerated in a Vinnitsa labor camp and the other half were deported to a Zhitomir labor camp. They were used for various works, including the construction of Hitler's "Werewolf" forward headquarters near Vinnitsa. Most of these forced laborers were murdered in the summer of 1942 after the construction of the "Werewolf" was completed.
Vinnitsa was liberated by the Red Army on March 20, 1944.
From Yad Vashem. 'The Untold Stories- The Murder Sites of the Jews in the Occupied Territories of the Former USSR: Vinnytsia'
Vinnytsia was occupied by German troops on 19 July 1941 during World War II. In 1943, the Germans exhumed 9,439 bodies, mostly male and ethnically Ukrainian, from mass graves to discredit Soviet Communist government claims that men had been sent to prison, and not executed. The majority of the executions were believed to have happened during the Stalinist Great Purge between 1937-1938 in the Vinnytsia massacre.
Adolf Hitler sited his eastern headquarters, Führerhauptquartier Werwolf or Wehrwolf, at the Wehrmacht headquarters near the town; the complex was built in 1941-1942 by Russian prisoners of war; many of them were subsequently killed. Hitler's accommodation consisted of a log cabin built around a private courtyard with its own concrete bunker but the complex included about 20 other log buildings, a power generating station, gardens, wells, three bunkers, a swimming pool, and wire; it was surrounded by defensive positions. Hitler spent a number of weeks at Wehrwolf in 1942 and early 1943. The few remains of the Wehrwolf site (described by one report as a "pile of concrete", because it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1944,) can be visited but plans to create a full-fledged museum had not come to fruition as of August 2018.
Nazi atrocities were committed in and near Vinnytsia by Einsatzgruppe C. Estimates of the number of victims often run as high as 28,000 although historian Oliver Rathkolb states that 35,000 Jews were deported from the Vinnytsia region and most of those later died.
Since the end of World War II, Vinnytsia has been the home for major Soviet Air Forces base, including an airfield, a hospital, arsenals, and other military installations. The headquarters of the 43rd Rocket Army of the Strategic Rocket Forces was stationed in Vinnytsia from 1960 to the early 1990s. The 2nd Independent Heavy Bomber Aviation Corps, which later became 24th Air Army, was also stationed in Vinnytsia from 1960 to 1992. The Ukrainian Air Force Command has been based in Vinnytsia since 1992.
From Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, "Vinnytsia"