The Einsatzgruppen leaders themselves were highly educated Nazi careerists, some with doctorates and law degrees. One was a Protestant pastor and theologian. Another had two PhDs. All were personally selected by Reinhard Heydrich, head of Reich Security under Heinrich Himmler, both for their level of education and their degree of fanaticism. The Einsatzgruppen Kommando groups worked with the German Order Police, local militia groups and collaborators as they cut a large swath across the Baltic States, Eastern Poland, the Ukraine and Soviet Union. Victims would be rounded up with the help of locals, ordered to report to a central location like a town square, marched or driven to remote sites, and, having been forced to undress, shot over ravines, cliffs, ditches, sand pits, quarries or graves they were at times made to dig themselves. All the while family and friends stood by - naked themselves - waiting for their turn to come.
Interviews conducted by French Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois with surviving witnesses - veritably neighbors of the murdered Jews - enabled him to piece together aspects of the infrastructure of execution that facilitated the murder of Jews by the Einsatzkommandos (see In Broad Daylight). While there were variations in details from community to community, Father Desbois is painfully clear that the systematic murder of Jews depended on auxiliary and local police on one hand, but importantly on the conscription and active participation of local neighbors for jobs such as grave digging, providing transport, filling the gravesite after an “Aktion,” provision of food and drink for the executioners, and even witnessing the unfolding events.
The Einsatzgruppen were ultimately responsible for the murder of more than 1.5-1.7 million Jews throughout German-occupied Baltic countries, Eastern Poland, the Ukraine and Soviet Union. Father Desbois’ evocative phrase “Holocaust by bullets” draws our attention not only to the means and methods of the mass murder of Jews, but as well to the unbearable truth of an extensive landscape of unmarked mass graves, shrouded in silence, concealing a dark history. There were more Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen squads and their minions than perished in Auschwitz, notwithstanding that Auschwitz has become a veritable metonym for the Holocaust.
--Michael D. Bulmash, K1966
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The Last Jew in Vinnitsa
2012.1.397
Front: Man sitting in front of a mass grave of many bodies. A man in Nazi uniform points a gun at the first man's head. Behind him are a number of soldiers. Along side of image is the following text: 5/2/1961: CHICAGO: Photo obtained by Al Moss, of Chicago, a former Nazi concentration camp prisoner, shows the execution of a Polish Jew by a German officer at a mass grave somewhere in Poland. Moss said he obtained the picture in Munich in May, 1945 soon after his liberation by American 3rd Army troops. He said he wanted the people of the world "to know what went on in Eichmann's time." UPI TELEPPHOTO-psh.--(CHICAGO OUT) -- Back: Handwritten 'Germany' and 'Atrocities'. One red stamp with date of May 5, 1961. One black rectangular stamp 'PLEASE CREDIT UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL PHOTO...'
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:
Iconic press photograph with commentary of what has come to be known as "Last Jew in Vinnitsa.” The original photograph was allegedly from an Einsatzgruppe D soldier’s album, and these were the words on the back of the photograph, which portrays in all of its gruesome horror the Einsatzgruppen’s preferred means of dealing with the Jews in the Ukraine prior to the industrialized murder perfected at Auschwitz. Almost 35,000 Jews - men, women and children - were murdered here over the course of three Actions, utilizing Ukrainian militia as well. This was their paradigmatic method until the Nazis were able to generalize from their experiments in mass murder in the T-4 Program utilizing more efficient, less disturbing to the delicate sensibilities of the SS men, though no less barbaric means of managing the “Jewish Problem.”