Wendy Lower, historian and author of several books on the second world war and the Holocaust, calls them “the missing missing” – the Jewish men, women and children murdered in mass open-air shootings by Nazi death squads in such large, unrecorded numbers in so many places that even finding out quite how many were killed and where – let alone such identifying details as their names – is an almost impossible task.
Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero lays out what is considered to be the beginning of the mass execution of Jews under Hitler’s regime, which would lead eventually to the industrialised murder of millions in the death camps. Ukraine’s wartorn history and instability, plus its nationalist movement’s prejudice against its Jewish population and resentment of Soviet control of the country made it ripe for Nazi picking. Under Operation Barbarossa, the Germans invaded Ukraine in 1941 and were hailed as heroes for driving out the Russians. Antisemitic propaganda flooded the country and helped smooth the passage towards the acts of genocide that would eventually mean one in four of all the Jewish people who died in the Holocaust were murdered in Ukraine in its few years under Nazi occupation.
