The Holocaust by bullets, shootings in Ukraine - M Holocaust 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, at first, 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 vital 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 to kill the Jews, let them starve or reduce to conditions of misery and forced labor "the Slavs" and install "German settlers" in one of the richest agricultural lands in Europe.

In conquered Poland, the Jews were gathered from autumn 1939 into huge ghettos. Hunger and epidemics caused the death of tens of thousands of them. Meanwhile, from September 1939, the Einsatzgruppen massacred more than 70,000 Poles and Jews in a matter of 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 later killed. 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 into 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, Ambulance – police in charge of maintaining order) gradually passed to systematic genocide. Now, what the Nazis called the "treatment of Jews" in Ukraine was included in planning for the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe".

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

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