The Einsatzgruppen were SS mobile units attached to the regular German army (Wehrmacht) tasked with the elimination of civilian elements deemed hostile to the Reich. In the Polish campaign of 1939, they executed members of Poland’s intelligentsia including political leaders, college professors and priests, as well as Jews. The scale of murder increased dramatically during Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union and the Ukraine in June 1941. Four Einsatzgruppen, each subdivided into mobile Kommando units, were to operate along the front from north to south. Their victims included Roma and Sinti, Communist party officials (Commissars), “mental defectives” and especially Jews: Jewish men, women, and children of all ages were to be executed.
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 (e.g., 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 they had known a lifetime stood by anxiously awaiting their turn.
Interviews conducted by French Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois with surviving witnesses - formerly 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 (Holocaust by Bullets; 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 providing transportation to the murder site; grave digging and filling the gravesite after an “Aktion,” and provision of food and drink for the executioners.
Holocaust historian Wendy Lower (The Ravine:A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed) also identified patterns of collusion between non-Jewish locals and the Germans. Teenage girls were conscripted into gravedigging. Ukrainian police were employed for collecting the Jews to be murdered. The presence of the Germans seemed to release years of barely suppressed rage against Jewish neighbors by the Ukrainians. Jews were assaulted and mocked even as their homes were pillaged. Jewish women-including teenagers- were raped by local militia. Even babies were not spared the monstrous barbarity.
Lower’s Ravine documents her determined probing into the background of a photograph depicting the murder of a Jewish woman and her two children on the edge of a ravine near the Ukrainian town of Miropol in October, 1941. The mother is pictured kneeling over the edge of this ravine, her head wreathed in smoke from rifles fired at point blank range-blank by a Ukrainian militia man and a German officer. She is clutching the hand of the barefoot young boy with another child-a girl-nestled in her apron, barely discernable through the plume of smoke- before falling- holding her children close- into the depths of the ravine to lay among Jewish neighbors who had already met the same fate.This photograph evokes the depthless horror of the systematic murder of Jews throughout the territory defiled by the Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators.
The Einsatzgruppen were ultimately responsible for the murder of 1.5 to 1.7 million Jews throughout German-occupied Baltic countries, Eastern Poland, the Ukraine and the. Soviet Union. Father Desbois and Dr. Lower draw 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 collaborators than perished in Auschwitz, notwithstanding that Auschwitz has become a veritable metonym for the Holocaust.
Other “atrocity” photographs in this collection include: 2012.1.397 and 2012.1.100d. The former, the “Last Jew in Vinnitsa” shows an unidentified Jewish man about to be shot by a member of Einsatzgruppen D. German historian Jurgen Matthaus places this event in Berdichev and not Vinnitsa. More than 35,000 Jews were murdered in Berdichev in 1941.The latter is a photograph transformed into a post World War II Polish postcard and shows Jews awaiting execution in the forest near the Polish town of Bochnia, circa 1942.
--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.”