Based on present-day borders, one in every four Jewish victims of the Holocaust was murdered in Ukraine.
In the history of the Holocaust, the summer and fall of 1941 are especially significant because they represent a period of critical escalation. In a matter of months mobile Nazi killing units, which had begun shooting all adult male Jews during the invasion of the Soviet Union, expanded to include a genocide targeting women, children, and entire Jewish communities.
On January 20, 1942, top Nazi officials and representatives of the Reich authorities met in Wannsee, a suburb outside of Berlin. At this meeting, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Security Main Office formed the extermination plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The Wannsee Conference, as it is now called, led to the creation of a network of extermination camps designed to systematically murder the entire European Jewish population.
Before the killing centers opened at Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek, more than 1.5 million Jews had already been murdered by the Germans, their Axis allies, and local collaborators in Ukraine, Belarus, and other USSR republics. These were the first victims of the Holocaust.
They were not transported by trains to the famous killing sites in Poland, with their gas chambers and crematoria that typically characterize the Holocaust in the minds of most people. Instead, these Holocaust victims were taken from their homes, usually by foot, to the outskirts of the cities, towns, and villages where they lived and were brutally shot—face to face or in the back—often in the presence of local residents and non-Jewish neighbors.
The mass shooting of Jewish victims in the summer and fall of 1941 represents the first phase of the Holocaust, often referred to by historians as “the Holocaust by bullets.” It was during this initial phase that special German killing squads (Einsatzkommandos) coordinated the mass murder of Jews by bullets with the help of the SS, Wehrmacht troops, the Romanian military, special “operational squadrons,” order police units, and local collaborators.
Nazi Extermination Policy on the Eve of Barbarossa
Before World War II, the 1.5 million Jews living in the Soviet republic of Ukraine constituted the largest Jewish population within the Soviet Union, and one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. Between 1939 and 1941, when Stalin occupied Galicia, western Volhynia, northern Bukovina, and southern Bessarabia (see map below), the number of Jews in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic (UkrSSR) rose to 2.45 million people, increasing the percentage of Jews from five to six percent.
