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Click on an image to see a larger, more detailed picture.
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| 1941: Mass Murder |
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pg. 262 |
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To counteract the Serbian Resistance movement, the Germans promulgated a harsh retaliatory policy: 100 Serbs would be killed for every German casualty. Many Serbian Jews joined the Resistance, and Jews became special targets of German reprisals. Here, a German soldier orders a group of Jewish and Serbian men into columns to be marched to their deaths.
Photo: ECPA Photo Cinema Video des Armees / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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Under the control of Einsatzgruppe B of the SS, these dejected Jewish men in Mogilev, Belorussia, march to forced labor or death. The large size of the Star of David on their clothing suggests that this photograph may have been intended as part of a propaganda film, designed to fuel hatred of the Jew as a subhuman threat to society. Oversized stars, signs hung around necks, degrading labor--all of these were filmed and photographed to transform human beings into the sorts of Jewish caricatures favored by Nazi cartoonists and illustrators.
Photo: Bundesarchiv / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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Otto Ohlendorf
From June 1941 to June 1942, Otto Ohlendorf commanded Einsatzgruppe D. This extermination squad operated in the Crimea-Caucasus region, where Ohlendorf ordered the slaughter of 90,000 people. Justifying his actions at his trial in 1947, he asserted his utter conviction in the "military necessity" of the killings. "Jews," he argued, "posed a continuous danger for German occupation troops and might someday attack Germany." As for murdering children, he reasoned they "were people who would grow up and, being the children of parents who had been killed, would constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents." To ease the "immense psychological burden" of personal responsibility, he ordered his executioners to shoot simultaneously at victims. During the trial, women sent flowers to the cell of the handsome defendant, who was sentenced to hang for his crimes.
Photo: Benjamin Ferencz/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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September 4, 1941: Jewish Resistance members based in Dubossary, Ukraine, and led by Yakov Guzanyatskii assassinate a German commander named Kraft. Another group blows up a large store of German arms.
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September 6, 1941: The Germans establish a "working ghetto" at Vilna, Lithuania.
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| 1941: Mass Murder |
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pg. 262 |
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The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.
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