One Day University

On June 22, 1941 at 3:00a.m. the Wehrmacht swept across the Soviet frontier. Each Army Group had a team of SS murders, the so-called Einsatzgruppen, assigned to exterminate the 5 million Soviet Jews. This Holocaust in the great Russian plain had a different character. Many Soviet Jews lived in villages. Distances in Russia made factory-style murder (the gas chamber, the crematoria, the death trains) impossible. The Jews were marched to the edge of their village where the able-bodied among them had dug a huge mass grave. They took off their clothes, climbed down crude steps, lay down next to and on top of each other and an SS man sprayed them with his machine gun. Ninety-five percent of the Jews of Lithuania, White Russia and Ukraine died this way. The SS needed help and got it from volunteer militias who rounded up and organized the murder. This lecture tells the story one such person, a Ukrainian militiamen, tried in 1992 in an Australian court for war crimes and how Professor Steinberg used his work as a historian to reconstruct the crime—101 Jews murdered in the village of Gnivan in Ukraine.