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.
The documentary relies on academics and experts to explain the aim, politics and alliances of eastern Europe at the time, which they do clearly and accessibly. Rare is the Holocaust expert who wishes to obfuscate. Perhaps more than any other specialist they wish to spread their knowledge and increase understanding. It is an attitude – more than that, a moral stance – that most documentaries about this subject cleave to, and Ground Zero does so firmly.
Much use is made of photographs to bring home the effects of the decisions made by the German high command as the orders came that all Jewish men of military age should be disposed of and then, with appalling predictability, as the remit was widened to include women and children. We see a picture of families walking through what had been an ordinary neighbourhood street, carrying those too old or enfeebled to walk towards the woods where they would all be killed. Explosives were used to create craters big enough to hold all the bodies. By the time of the Babyn Yar massacre, in which more than 33,700 Jewish people were murdered, SS commander Friedrich Jeckeln had invented “sardine packing; people would be forced to lie down in the mass grave head to tail and shot, layer by layer.” Another photograph shows children slipping from a woman’s hands, gun smoke still lingering in the air. Another shows a kneeling man staring into the camera as a member of Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen brings the gun to his head. Behind him, an assortment of men – Hitler Youth members, marching band musicians, off-duty rank-and-file, watch with anything between mild interest and boredom.
We don’t see any pictures of the murder at Bila Tserkva of 90 children orphaned by previous death squads there, who were killed after officials realised they would otherwise have to be fed and looked after indefinitely by others. The camera pans up into the trees as we are told that two Wermacht chaplains tried to intervene to save them, marking the only time during the second world war that any of them tried to stop a death squad massacre. Ian Rich from the Wiener Holocaust Library gives voice to the thought that suffuses the hour more and more thoroughly as it progresses: “These were ordinary people,” he says of those in and around the regime. “It is little comfort to think these were extraordinary circumstances they were placed in. Someone has to create those situations … people have to work the machinery of destruction … a lot of individual decisions were made about life and death.” Janine Webber remembers finding safety with her brother at a Catholic Polish farmer’s house after their family was killed. Then the farmer’s daughter brought a German soldier to them. He spared nine-year-old Janine, but buried her seven-year-old brother alive.
Such lacerating eyewitness testimony is used sparingly. It helps to keep the focus on the vital question – increasingly vital, as neo-fascist inroads are made in more countries and into more fields of human endeavour – of how atrocities happen.
Still, and despite the coda covering the war crime trials in Ukraine – which began two years before Nuremberg and were concentrated on lower-ranking officials who carried out the killings, culminating in death sentences for many – it is the unfathomable suffering that stays with you. The quintessence of evil suddenly everywhere, tiny details opening up hitherto unimaginable worlds of pain. One in four. Sardine-packing. Burdensome orphans. The missing missing. “God keep them in paradise,” says 86-year-old Holocaust survivor Bella Chernovets. If you can still believe in God, join in her prayer.
Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero is on Channel 4.
