Between 1941 and 1944, thousands of executions took place across seven Soviet republics (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia), in the lands from Eastern Galicia to the rivers of the Baltic, from the Muscovite Forests to the borders of Caucasus. If you consider solely the official territory of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, researchers estimate the number of Jews exterminated to be at least 2.2 million. This number includes 1.6 million victims in Ukraine, at least 500,000 in Belarus and at least 120,000 in Russia.

More than 80% of the victims were shot; the rest were deported and assassinated in the death camps or in gas vans. Other extermination practices included poison as well as the practice of burying victims alive, or the killing of victims in the mines and wells. The death of Soviet Jews is not called the “Holocaust by Bullets” for nothing. This criminal “methodology” of murder by shooting, was used during the entirety of the Holocaust in the East regardless of the victim count; whether it be for the extermination of a Jewish family in a small town, or tens of thousands in a large Soviet occupied city. Throughout the summer of 1941, just as later in 1944, the perpetrators followed the same process: extermination of a Jewish population by shooting men, women and children, often just outside a village or town.
On the 22nd of June, 1941, Hitler began Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union. The war carried out in the East by the Third Reich was an ideological battle, conquering of a Lebensraum (or living space), a war about total extermination of “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

Right from first days of the invasion, the pogroms were in full swing in the Baltic countries, in Eastern Galicia – notably in Lviv – in Volhynia (Ukraine), often in response to the discovery of an assassination of a local nationalist from a NKVD prisons[1]. The first victims of the Einsatzgruppen were Jewish men, in places like Ternopil or Zhytomyr. The rest of the Jewish population, the women, children, and elderly, were confined to ghettos with abysmal living conditions leaving the Jews to starve, to freeze and fall ill – as they had, for example, in the Minsk ghetto in Belarus, created on the 20th of July 1941, or all the small Jewish neighborhoods scattered throughout the countryside.

Between August and September 1941, the process of genocide carried out by the occupying German force intensified. Men were no longer the only ones being shot, but, now, women and children as well. In Belaya Tserkov (Ukraine), 90 Jewish children were shot dead. On the 27th and 28th of August 1941, more than 23,000 Jews were executed by Nazis and their collaborators at Kamenets-Podolskyi (Ukraine). The widespread and exhaustive extermination of Jews throughout the occupied territories was carried out by the Romanian Army and gendarmes, Hitler’s allies. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were assassinated in Bessarabia and Bukovina. The majority of them were murdered as early as July 1941, while the rest were concentrated into ghettos, in places like Czernowitz, or in camps, as is the case in Mărculeşti and Vapniarka.

Very often the shootings carried out by the Nazis occurred in broad daylight, on the outskirts of the town. The perpetrators regularly requisitioned locals to dig and fill in the pits, sometimes even to transport the victims or their belongings.

One of the most consequential shootings occurred in Kyiv and obliterated one of the main Jewish communities of the USSR. On September 19th, 1941, the German troops entered Kyiv as explosions rang through the city generated by the distant retreating Soviet forces and a raging fire was engulfing the city. The flames had just barely been extinguished when more than 33,000 Jews from Kyiv were shot in the ravine at Babyn Yar, on the 29th and 30th of September 1941, by the Einsatzkommando 4a, police battalions and the local militia.

The massacres intensified in the autumn of 1941 as persecution persisted from the Baltic countries all the way to Crimea. The shootings were incessant on the outskirts of Kaunas, Minsk, and the Paneriai Forest (also known as Ponary) near Vilnius. Thousands of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews were also deported to the ghettos of the northeast, and were victim to the same fate as the local Jews. Another one of the biggest Jewish massacres occurred in Bogdanivka, a small town in southern Ukraine, where more than 40,000 Jews (mostly native to Odesa and Bessarabia) were executed by Romanian forces and German colonists over the course of just 10 days. Another method of extermination came about towards the end of 1941: gas vans. Soon, Jews were no longer the only victims of the Einsatzgruppen and other mobile killing units: communists, Soviet POWs, partisans, “Gypsies,” mentally handicapped people, etc.

In 1942, Jews living in Russia and, notably, thousands of Jews evacuated from the northern Caucasus were either shot, or killed in gas vans. At the same time, in Belarus and in Ukraine, the ghettos were “liquidated,” a word used by Nazis to describe the extermination of all Jews that were not considered useful as laborers.

Up until spring 1944, the shootings would occur throughout the occupied Soviet territories, specifically for the Jews interned in labor camps and Jewish families that were caught by local police while in hiding.



[1] NKVD (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del): People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Political secret police during the USSR that was created in 1934 and replaced in 1946 by the MVD (Ministry of the Internal Affairs).