Opening Shots: A Nazi Massacre, August 1941

Kamenets-Podolsk.

A place in the Western Ukraine but one

you're very likely not to have heard of.

Well, I'm going to stop this course

by talking about what happened here at the end of August,

1941.

There was a three day massacre of Jews at this place between--

in the Soviet Union, but very close to the Romanian--

so the Hungarian, so the former Czech borders,

and the Polish border too.

In this massacre, something like 24,700 Jews, men, women,

and children were massacred.

And for those of you who know something

about the early stages of The Final Solution, some of this

will be very familiar to you.

There were SS troops involved, though not very many.

There was an order police battalion, number 320

to be exact, who were just ordinary policemen who

had been drafted to be to be there as order policemen,

as reserve policemen in Russia.

There were some auxiliaries as they

were called, Ukrainian auxiliaries, because this

is the Ukraine, and these are people

who are drafted in very rapidly to participate

in this particular exercise.

And then there was somebody who is

known in the annals, the notorious annals

of The Final Solution.

In fact, recently he's been called

the outstanding entrepreneur of violence.

He's a man called Friedrich Jeckein.

And if you like, he's Himmler's right hand man

who is specially requested at this particular point in time

to come and oversee to supervise this particular destructive

process.

In fact, we find that he shows up at all sorts of places, all

over the place in the course of Operation

Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

He appears after another massacre called Babi Yar

a few months later.

Later on, he's up in the north in the Baltic

in Riga, where he organizes the massacre there.

But this one is a special one, and it's

recognized by most historians as being

very significant for the very fact that it's

the first time that there is a five figure

massacre, in which not just a five figure massacre,

but a five figure massacre of men, women, and children.

So it's recognized as a major step

change in the process, the cumulative process by which

Jews begin to be massacred.

And, of course, this process carries on

through to the point where by the following year, already

something like half a million Jews have

been killed in the Soviet Union, in the course of Operation

Barbarossa.

However, there's something else which

tends to get missed about this particular event,

because the majority of the people who

are killed in this destructive process come in hospitals

are not local Jews.

They are not even Soviet Jews.

They are Jews who have come from across other borders.

Some have come from Romania.

Some have come from--

in fact, the majority have come from Hungary.

Though, actually, technically, they

had previously been Czech Jews.

And, of course, in 1938, and then into 1939,

Czechoslovakia is partitioned and stops being Czechoslovakia.

Most of it is taken by the Nazis, but then some of it

is also taken by Hungary as well,

and then there's an independent state of Slovakia is created.

Now the interesting thing about the Hungarians,

is that a lot of the people who end up on their territory,

who formerly had been Czech Jews,

had been living there for hundreds and hundreds of years,

are determined by the Hungarian state not to be Hungarians.

They are people who the Hungarian state

says are stateless.

And this means something very interesting.

That they are people who are in effect,

they have no citizenship, and the Hungarians

feel that they can simply dump them somewhere else.

There is also, by the way, a lot of Jews

from elsewhere in central Europe who have also

lost their citizenship.

So they too find that they are in this stateless, refugee

position.

But they are not in control of their own destinies.

What happens is, whether it's the Romanian state,

or the Hungarian state, they are dumped across borders.

And in this case, what is particularly shocking,

is that they are dumped across a border into a war zone.

So rather than coming out of danger,

they are put into the immediate area of danger.

And we end up with a sort of logjam at this obscure place,

obscure to us, Kamenets-Podolsk, and the Nazis

scratch their heads and say, what are we going

to do with all these people.

And they come to the decision, very rapidly--

the SS comes to a decision very rapidly.

We are going to get rid of them directly.

And that's why you get Jeckein brought in.

He is responsible for the massacre.

These people are shot into pits in patches batches

after batches for a period of three days.

But what's important for us, is this is clearly

not just about the Nazis.

These people, as I said, are people who otherwise

would be people seeking asylum.

The Nazis eliminate the problem.

But the reason there is a problem there

at that point in the first place,

is because the Hungarians and the Romanians

have dumped them into this war zone.

So this course is not just about Nazis.

It's trying to work out why there is so much hostility,

how much desire to get rid of Jews by other European states.