The beginning of the genocidal policy

During the invasion of Austria in March 1938, Himmler and Heydrich created, for the first time, «Einsatzgruppen», mobile commandos responsible for arresting and eventually executing individuals whom the regime considered as its enemies. They were, in the beginning, mainly made up of SS and police cadres.

On the eve of the outbreak of war, the regime had one main objective, the conquest of “living space in the East,” and this instrument, the Einsatzgruppen, to implement behind the Wehrmacht, the regime’s genocidal totalitarianism. Ukraine was to be the heart of the new “living space”: it was to kill the Jews, let them die of hunger or reduce to conditions of misery and forced labor “the Slaves” and install “German settlers” in one of the richest agricultural lands in Europe.

In the conquered Poland, the Jews were gathered, from the autumn of 1939, in huge ghettos. Hunger and epidemics killed tens of thousands. At the same time, from September 1939 onwards, the Einsatzgruppen massacred more than 70,000 Poles and Jews in a matter of weeks.

When the Wehrmacht entered Ukraine in June 1941, Jews from the west, including refugees who had fled the invasion of Poland in the fall of 1939, were trapped. A few tens of thousands managed to escape, who were often caught and killed afterwards. The commandos of the Einsatzgruppen first attacked «communist officials» and «members of the Jewish intelligentsia». However, in the early hours of the campaign, Himmler went out into the field to suggest that women and children be killed as systematically as men. In August and September 1941, all the German units (Waffen SS, Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei – police in charge of maintaining order) gradually switched to systematic genocide. Henceforth, what the Nazis called the “treatment of Jews” in Ukraine was included in the planning of the “final solution to the Jewish question in Europe”.

Map of the Jewish population in the present-day Ukrainian administrative regions (oblasts') from official censuses prior to June 1941

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (left) and Chief of Police Hans Adolf Prützmann (right) probably during the visit that Himmler made to the Viking SS Division. Ukraine, 1941 – 1943
Credit: © USHMM, courtesy of James Blevins