In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine

7. Life and Death in Reichskommissariat Ukraine

158 S 7 On June 22, 1941, as the first light of the second longest day of the year appeared in the east, over three million German troops stormed across the Soviet border along a line that stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Having ignored the German troops amassing on the border, the Red Army was taken largely by surprise; despite the paranoia that had led Stalin to order the murder of many of his top generals on the eve of the war, the Soviet leader had displayed an unwavering trust toward, of all people, Adolf Hitler. All references to the barbarism of fascist Germany had been purged from public discourse after the conclusion of the Soviet–German Nonaggression Pact of 1939, by which the two states had divided Poland between themselves, with the Soviet Union adding significantly to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic through its annexation of what had been eastern Poland. This pact provided the green light for Germany to invade Poland on September 1st, occupying the country up to a line roughly following the rivers Narva, Vistula, and San. Seventeen days later, the Soviet Union easily secured its half of Poland. As a result of the 1939 pact between the two states, when Germany launched its invasion in 1941, neither the military k Life and Death in Reichskommissariat Ukraine Life and Death in Reichskommissariat Ukraine 159 nor the citizens of the Soviet Union had sufficient warning of the coming cataclysm. Word of the invasion spread quickly, as the news was broadcast on radio and over loudspeakers throughout the country. The Soviet media and propaganda machine rapidly began covering German atrocities in gruesome detail; on June 25, 1941, in its first issue after the invasion began, the Russian-language photojournalism magazine, Ogonek, published a photograph of Polish prisoners being forced to dig their own graves. German armed forces, known as the Wehrmacht, with their Blitzkrieg tactics swept through the Ukrainian and Belarusian countryside at lightning speed, arriving in many towns before any preparations had been made. Within the first six days of the war the Germans had already captured the Belarusian capital of Minsk and would soon control all the territories that Hitler had ceded to Stalin in 1939. When Stalin, who remained conspicuously silent during the early days of war, finally addressed the nation on July 3rd—twelve days after hostilities began—his tone was grave, but the information he conveyed was misleading , and overly optimistic: “The best German divisions and air force units had already been smashed and had found their grave on the fields of battle,”1 he claimed. Radio announcements continued desperately to downplay the extent of Red Army losses, and the enemy’s advances were hidden from the public eye. It was only when working-age men were mobilized that the impact of the war became apparent on a local level. The murder of Jews was an integral part of the war from its first hours. Among the first units of the Wehrmacht to reach a populated town was Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist’s First Panzer Group, which captured the border town of Sokal on the morning of June 22nd. That same day, German soldiers shot eleven Jewish men suspected of being communists. As German tanks rolled across the Ukrainian plains in the first weeks of the invasion, they were followed by Einsatzgruppen, divisions of the security police entrusted by Reinhard Heydrich to “carry out certain special security-police duties which are outside the army’s domain.” These units secured the rear, provided logistical support to the army, stamped out potential resistance, and massacred Jewish civilians. Less than one week after the first executions in Sokal, Einsatzkommando 4a, a division of the Einsatzgruppen that was responsible for establishing civil order in Sokal, executed 17 townsfolk they labeled as “communist 160 in the shadow of the shtetl functionaries, agents and snipers.” The next day, they found “with the help of the Ukrainian militia” another 117 people they deemed “active Communists and agents of the NKVD,” all of whom were promptly shot. Again, the next day Einsatzkommando 4a shot another 183 individuals as “Jewish Communists.” Similar massacres took place in dozens of locales during the first weeks of the war; an Einsatgruppen operational report dated July 16th boasts of 7,000 executions within these first three weeks. In the initial killing operations, the...