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The video depicts the establishment of the killing units that accompanied Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union as part of 'Operation Barbarossa'. These units, the Einsatzgruppen, played a central role in the first phase of the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust.
"Each time I saw a new group of men and women, elderly people, and children being forced to take off their clothes. All [of them] were being taken to an open pit where submachine-gunners shot them. Then another group was brought…With my own eyes I saw this horror. Although I was not standing close to the pit, terrible cries of panic-stricken people and quiet children’s voices calling 'Mother, mother…' reached me." (Dina Pronicheva)
Yitzhak Arad, ed., The Destruction of the Jews of the USSR during the German Occupation (1941-1944), Jerusalem 1991, pp. 107-111 (in Russian)
Visual Record
July 1941
Vinnitsa was occupied by the Germans on 19 July 1941. The Jews were forced to wear an identifying armband with the Star of David, and their property was confiscated. They were confined in specific areas of the city and many were assigned to forced labor. At the end of July hundreds of Jewish men were murdered in the cemetery in Vinnitsa. By the summer of 1942, most of the remaining Jews in the city had been murdered.
12 November 1945
17-15 December 1941
Educational Materials
From the Yad Vashem Art Collection
Research
This online guide includes the sites where Jews were murdered in the former USSR during World War II. The guide forms part of an ongoing research project mapping and describing the murder of Jews in this region.
Our research has provided a broad account of the Holocaust in the former USSR, and is based on sources from various databases at Yad Vashem.
On the Holocaust - a Yad Vashem Podcast
On 28 September 1941, a German edict was issued ordering the Jews of Kiev and of the surrounding areas to gather some clothes and belongings, and report at an intersection not far from a local freight train station. Instead of being deported, however, they were marched to Babi Yar and shot over the course of two days. According to a contemporary report, the German forces on hand murdered 33,771 Jews. Dina Pronicheva is one of the very few to survive this horrific event. This is her story.
Featured guest: Karel Berkhoff, Senior Researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
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Edited by David Bankier and Israel Gutman