The radicalization of genocide

Parallel to the massacres they committed in the occupied territories, the Einsatzgruppen (mobile extermination units) followed the advance of the front and systematically killed more and more Jews in eastern Ukraine.

The radicalization of the Jewish massacre is clearly visible in the many examples of killings, such as in the Zhitomir region, where 3,000 Jews were murdered in July 1941, about 10,000 in August and 27,000 in September. In the newly conquered regions, massacres were immediately widespread. In urban areas, they often killed more than 10,000 people, as the sad example of Babi Yar (33,000).

In Crimea (attributed to Ukraine by Khrushchev after the Second World War but a self-governing Soviet republic at the time of the German invasion) there lived about 65,000 Jews. When the Germans conquered the region, at the beginning of November 1941, some 35,000 Jews had fled further east. About 8,000 Jews were mobilized in the Red Army. The Germans thus found about 23,000 Jews who were quickly victims of a genocidal machine now running at full speed on Soviet territory. Killer units roamed the countryside to ensure that no designated victim escaped. Between mid-December and mid-January, gas trucks were also tested.

The personnel of the killing commandos were quickly tested psychologically by the repeated and increasingly systematic massacres they had to commit. When at the end of 1941 it was decided to kill the Jews of all occupied Europe, gas chambers were developed in the extermination centres in Poland. But in Ukraine, as in the rest of the Soviet Union, the Nazi Reich did not have the possibility, due to the proximity of the front, to install extermination centers. Most often, the railway network was inappropriate for deportation to extermination centers located in Poland. That is why the “shoah by bullets” continued in Ukraine until the end of the occupation of the country by the Wehrmacht, early 1944. Only about 20% of the Jews in Ukraine were deported to Belzec, Sobibor and Auschwitz. The remaining 80% of victims were killed by SS commandos or their auxiliaries.

Virtually all those who did not flee were killed in the space of two and a half years, between June 1941 and December 1943.

According to the Ukrainian historian Alexander Kruglov, it can be assumed that about one third of Ukrainian Jews escaped genocide, which means that, on the contrary, about one and a half million Jews died: 500,000 in 1941, more than 700,000 in 1942 and 200,000 from 1943 until the Wehrmacht finally abandoned Ukraine in 1944.

The first denial, that of the Nazis

The example of sub-Carpathian Ukraine shows that the Nazis murdered or had murdered Jews as long as they could hold a part of the country. However, as soon as the defeat of Stalingrad, the retreat had been considered and, with it, the need to erase the traces of crime. The Nazis were the first negationists. The SS loaded commandos, commanded by Paul Blobel (former leader of Einsatzkommando 4a) and grouped under the name of camouflage

“Operation 1005”, to find the sites of the massacres and make disappear the bodies of the victims. But the sites of the massacres were too numerous to be found before the Red Army arrived. The killings were not only carried out by the Einsatzgruppen but also by the Ordnungspolizei, various units of the Waffen SS and the Wehrmacht. The NKVD commissions, following the Red Army, provided the first systematic information on the genocide of the Jews.

In archival matters, the Nazis were also unable to make all traces disappear. Too many copies of the Einsatzgruppen reports had been distributed for them to be removed altogether. The British had, as early as the summer of 1941, intercepted transmissions from the Ordnungspolizei. It was from these documents as well as from the trials conducted in the Federal Republic of Germany, beginning at the end of the 1950s, against former police officers that the in 2004, the investigation conducted by Patrick Desbois and Yahad’s team to locate the mass graves of the «Shoah par balles».

The areas of action of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union.
Source: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München -Berlin, 1999

Einsatzgruppen members firing at a group of men standing in a pit. Circa 1941-1942. Location unknown. Photographer unknown.
© USHMM, courtesy of Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes

Paul Blobel (1894-1951). Nuremberg, 1948.
© Coll. CDJC/ Holocaust Memorial