The Holocaust by bullets, shooting in Ukraine - Shoah Memorial

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 its enemies. They were, initially, essentially made up of SS and police cadres.

On the eve of the outbreak of war, the regime had a main objective, the conquest of «the living space in the East», and this instrument, the Einsatzgruppen, to implement, behind the Wehrmacht, the genocidal totalitarianism of the regime. Ukraine was to be the heart of the new "living space": it was about killing the Jews, letting them starve or reducing to conditions of misery and forced labor "the Slavs" and installing "German settlers" in one of the richest agricultural lands in Europe.

In conquered Poland, the Jews were gathered, from autumn 1939, in immense ghettos. Hunger and epidemics caused the death of tens of thousands of them. At the same time, starting in September 1939, the Einsatzgruppen massacred more than 70,000 Poles and Jews within a few weeks.

When the Wehrmacht entered Ukraine in June 1941, Western Jews, including refugees who had fled the invasion of Poland in the autumn 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, from the first hours of the campaign, Himmler went to the field to suggest that women and children should be killed as systematically as men. In August and September 1941, all the German units (Waffen SS, Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei – police responsible for maintaining order) gradually moved towards systematic genocide. Henceforth, what the Nazis called the «treatment of the Jews» of Ukraine was subsumed in the planning of the «final solution of the Jewish question in Europe».

Map showing the Jewish population in the current administrative regions of Ukraine (Oblast') according to the official censuses prior to June 1941

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