Before Hamas filmed Oct. 7 attacks, Nazis recorded Holocaust massacres in Ukraine

In the history of the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets,” World War II German army chaplains protested the mass murder of Jewish children on one occasion.

After SS firing squads known as Einsatzgruppen murdered the Jewish men of Bila Tserkva, in Ukraine, four military chaplains expressed concern for children left in an abandoned building following the massacre.

“We found the 90 Jewish children, some of them infants, in a hopeless situation: packed together, whimpering, crying, hungry and thirsty in the midday heat,” wrote chaplain Ernst Tewes in his account of the massacre, which took place in August 1941.

As one of two German army chaplains to witness the plight of the Bila Tserkva orphans, Tewes observed dozens of Jewish mothers forced to watch their children through a window for days without being able to help.

“The children and their mothers, like so many others before them, were to be shot by an SS Sonderkommando,” wrote Tewes. The chaplain’s formal complaint about the massacre of orphans was sent to the Sixth Army Group commander.

This largely forgotten account of humanitarian protest features in filmmaker Michael Hewitt’s movie, “Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero,” which premiered last fall in the UK and is now available on streaming services.

In an interview with The Times of Israel, Hewitt said he knew about trains to death camps with gas chambers, but he had not known about SS firing squads (Einsatzgruppen) supported by local collaborators until recently.

This first phase of the Holocaust — now called the Holocaust by Bullets — was extensively captured in still photography as well as filmed. Similar to Hamas terrorists who recorded the torture and slaughter of Israelis on October 7, dozens of German SS officers and collaborators recorded aspects of the open-air massacres of Jews in Ukraine.

Two years ago, the Irish-born Hewitt listened to a radio program on the Babyn Yar massacre, the largest Einsatzgruppen killing, in which 33,771 Jews were murdered in two days at a ravine outside Kyiv. Dozens of photographs were taken of the massacre, beginning with Jews being marched to the ravine and ending with Germans and Ukrainians cleaning up the mass grave.

“It was personally fascinating to me. I was ignorant of this aspect of the Holocaust,” said Hewitt.

At least 1.5 million Holocaust victims were murdered in Einsatzgruppen massacres. In addition to occupied Ukraine, the model was deployed in parts of occupied Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states, and elsewhere.

“I felt compelled to find out more,” said Hewitt.

With the advent of purpose-built death camps in 1942, the Germans replaced open-air massacres with gas chambers and improvised crematoria at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

Lessons learned by the SS during the Holocaust by Bullets were implemented at these and other death camps in occupied Poland.

In the death camps, SS shooting squads would no longer have to look at their victims. There would be no need for local collaborators and therefore no potential for filming or photography. Looting would be centralized and the victims’ possessions sent to Berlin, as opposed to falling into the hands of local collaborators.

‘The constraints of normal civilization’

“Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero” opens with images of atrocities committed by Russia’s army since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The film’s historians frame Ukraine as a perennial “zone of exception” or  “imperial territory” tied to “colonization.” This history connects to how and why the Holocaust by Bullets was systematized in Ukraine, said Hewitt.

“The constraints of normal civilization were removed,” said Hewitt.

In 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, Ukrainian nationalist leaders declared independence within the Third Reich. However, Hitler viewed the so-called Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists as a sword to wield against Germany’s enemies — Jews and Bolsheviks — and not as leaders of their own state.

As Germany overran Ukraine in 1941, SS Einsatzgruppen firing squads followed each army group. In nearly all lands “liberated” from Soviet control, the SS was assisted by Ukrainian soldiers, police officers, and nationalist collaborators.

Some of the most notorious massacres took place at large craters excavated by explosions from military shells. The Germans placed a plank for small groups of Jews to walk across part of the crater, after which a firing squad murdered them.

As explained by historian Omer Bartov, Ukrainian citizens were mobilized to fill the mass graves with soil and sand. Numerous eyewitness testimonies describe the earth moving at some massacre sites for days, as many victims were not murdered outright.

‘The nature of humanity’

In Bartov’s assessment, the pivotal moment within the Holocaust by Bullets came at Kamenets Podolsk, a city in Ukraine where 20,000 Jews were murdered.

Taking place a few days after the Bila Tserkva massacre, the aktion at Kamenets Podolsk was the first time German soldiers did not have to deal with women and children left behind after the murder of Jewish men.

In the fields outside the city, for the first time in the Holocaust, Jewish women and children were murdered alongside the men.

Bartov called the Kamenets Podolsk massacre a “turning point that repeats itself again and again.”

The area’s German SS commander, Friedrich Jeckeln, pioneered the separation of perpetrators into groups to execute each massacre. The so-called “Jeckeln System” had Jews forced to lay down on top of their murdered relatives and neighbors before they were shot.

For murdering 25,000 Jews at Rumbala, Germany awarded Jeckeln the War Merit Cross with Swords.

Through the personal initiative of men like Jeckeln, the Holocaust solidified itself in German-occupied Ukraine, and that country — after liberation — was also where Soviet prosecutors first brought German Holocaust perpetrators to justice.

During the Soviet-led war crimes trial at Kharkiv in December 1943, three German defendants — members of the army, police, and the SS, respectively — were convicted and hanged after pleading guilty. Their crimes included the massacre of 15,000 Jews at Drobytsky Yar on December 15, 1941, as well as murdering 800 captured Red Army soldiers.

During the Kharkiv trial, which was filmed, the world learned about the systemization of the genocide against European Jews. However, next to nothing was done to prevent the deportation and murder of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau beginning in April 1944 — four months after the Kharkiv trial.

“This forces us to confront the nature of humanity,” said Hewitt.