A kneeling man staring into the camera as a member of Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen brings a gun to his head. Behind him, an assortment of men—Hitler Youth members, marching band musicians, off-duty rank-and-file, watch with anything between mild interest and boredom.

Amidst the current war, Channel 4’s recent documentary Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero (review here) makes a grim reminder of one of the most horrifying episodes in world history.

While the Nazi death camps have become an indelible image of inhumanity, it is far less well-known that more Jews were killed by execution than in the death camps; and that one out of four Jews who died in the Holocaust resided in what is the territory of Ukraine today.

Following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen (see e.g. here, and wiki) moved through the territories along the Eastern Front, committing open-air mass shootings, town to town, village to village. Beside Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states were also deeply scarred, their populations decimated. Commandants ordering the mass murders included monsters such as Friedrich Jeckeln.

The programme uses archive photos and footage, with commentary from well-informed scholars (and some survivors). It should lead us back to Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, which I introduced at some length here.

The mass murders began at Kamianets-Podolskyi, on to Bila Tserkva and the notorious massacre on 29–30 September 1941 at Babi Yar ravine, near Kyiv, where 33,771 people were killed over two days. Many further executions took place at sites such as Lubny.

Babi Yar.

Another appalling crime was the large-scale mass murder of Soviet POWs. War crimes trials took place in the Soviet Union as early as 1943.

For a roundup of posts on Ukraine—including its soundscapes—click here. Note Philippe Sands’ books East-West street and The Ratline, and the work of Anne Applebaum.