Masters of Death (27 page)

A young Obersturmführer in Blobel’s Sonderkommando, August Häfner, oversaw the murder of almost one hundred infants and small children by Ukrainian auxiliaries at Belaja Cerkov, south of Kiev, in August 1941.

More than half a million Soviet soldiers died defending Kiev before the Wehrmacht won the city in September 1941. Russian high explosives burned out the central city; Einsatzgruppe C used the sabotage as an excuse to order Kiev Jews to assemble for relocation. Instead of relocation, Blobel directed a massacre at a ravine on the western edge of Kiev named Babi Yar. In two days, Blobel’s few hundred men murdered more than 34,000 Jewish men, women and children, the worst single Einsatzgruppen massacre of the war. Afterward, Ukrainian workers on the floor of the ravine sorted piles of victims’ clothes, which were donated to Nazi Party charities.

One of the very few victims to survive Babi Yar, Dina Mironovna Pronicheva, testified to the atrocity after the war.

Reinhard Heydrich and Himmler (second and third from left) directed Einsatzgruppen operations and received weekly reports. By October 1941, when they reviewed troops in Prague, mass killings of Jewish men, women and children were decimating Eastern Jewry.

Himmler assigned Austrian Odilo Globocnik, here reviewing troops in Lublin, Poland, the task of exterminating 2.5 million Polish Jews to make way for Himmler’s SS
Wehrbauern
(soldier-farmer) settlements. Globocnik began experimenting with mass killing using explosives, quicklime or carbon monoxide from engine exhaust.

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (seated, left) commanded mass killing operations in Byelorussia. Himmler panicked during a mass execution Bach-Zelewski staged for his benefit. Later Bach-Zelewski himself broke down.

Friedrich Jeckeln in the Ukraine and then in Latvia, and Karl Jäger in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, were two of the most insidious Einsatzgruppen mass murderers. The infamous Jäger Report of 1 December 1941 credited 137,346 deaths in five months to one Einsatzkommando alone. “There are no Jews in Lithuania anymore,” Jäger bragged.

On a Baltic beach northeast of Liepaja, Latvia, in December 1941, an SS sergeant photographed the massacre of almost 3,000 Liepaja Jews, most of them women and children. Forced to undress in the bitter cold and to pose for photographs, the victims were driven to a trench excavated from the deep

beach sand, faced away from their executioners and shot from behind. Victims who fell wounded were then finished off by an officer who ranged through the trench administering
Genickschüssen
(shots to the back of the head at the base of the skull).