October 24, 1941: Romanian troops, overseen by the Nazis, kill between 25,000 and 34,000 Jews in Odessa, in the Ukraine. It was the biggest massacre of the Holocaust to that point.
Before World War II, Odessa had a large Jewish population of approximately 200,000, or 30 percent of the city's total population. By the time the Romanians had taken the city on October 16, following a 2-month seige, between 80,000 and 90,000 Jews remained, the rest having fled or been evacuated by the Soviets. As the massacres occurred, Jews from surrounding villages were interned in Odessa and Romanian concentration camps set up in the surrounding areas.
The order was given by Lieutenant Colonel Mihail Niculescu, of the Jandarmeria Română, Romania's national police force. (It is still called that today.)
I can find no record of what happened to Niculescu after World War II, whether he was punished for his crimes. But since Romania was taken over by Communists, it seems likely that he did not live long thereafter.
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October 24, 1941 was a Friday. Baseball season ended with the New York Yankees winning the World Series over the Brooklyn Dodgers, 18 days earlier. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season started 8 days later. So there were no scores on this historic day.
