Behind the Front: The Waffen-SS, the Einsatzgruppen and the Occupied East

The tank battles of July and August 1943 were fought on the steppe between Orel and Kharkov, but they were fought over ground where, for almost two years, another war had been going on behind the German lines. In the occupied Soviet Union the mobile killing units of the SS and police had shot Jews by the hundreds of thousands, villages suspected of helping partisans had been burned with their people, and millions of civilians had been rounded up for labor in Germany. Three of the divisions that attacked the southern face of the Kursk salient belonged to the Waffen-SS, the armed branch of the organization that ran the camps and the killing squads. This chapter sets out, as soberly as the evidence allows, who those divisions were and what they did, what the Einsatzgruppen did in Ukraine and Russia, how the Germans tried to burn the evidence as they retreated in 1943, how the Soviet side behaved in the same territory, and how the first trials began in Kharkov in December 1943 and ended at Nuremberg with a 27-year-old American prosecutor.

Why it mattered

Military histories of Kursk can be written, and often have been, as if the battle took place on an empty plain: minefields and antitank guns, Tigers and T-34s, the Psel and the Donets, Prokhorovka and Ponyri. The ground was not empty. The Kursk salient itself had been under German occupation from the autumn of 1941 until February 1943; Orel, Belgorod and Kharkov were still occupied when Operation Citadel began on 5 July 1943. Every German division that attacked the salient had passed through towns where the Jewish population had already been murdered, and every Soviet division that advanced in August came upon the evidence: burned villages, empty ghettos, mass graves on the edges of towns. Soviet soldiers who liberated their own home villages found their families gone, deported or dead. The war of the tanks and the war against civilians were fought in the same places by some of the same men.

The connection is most direct in the case of the Waffen-SS. The II SS Panzer Corps, which drove toward Prokhorovka in July 1943 (Chapter 4 and Chapter 6), was made up of three divisions whose origins lay in Hitler’s bodyguard, the SS’s own armed “readiness troops” and the guard units of the concentration camps. Those divisions had taken Kharkov in March 1943, and in the weeks of that battle units of at least one of them burned villages and killed wounded prisoners. After the war their veterans worked hard, and with considerable success in West Germany and the United States, to persuade the world that they had been “soldiers like any others.” The record does not support that claim, and it is worth setting out why.

The broader story matters too. The Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units of the SS Security Police and Security Service (SD), began the Holocaust by shooting in the occupied Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, months before the gas chambers of the death camps went into operation. In 1943, as the Red Army advanced after Kursk, the same organization sent special commandos back to the killing sites to dig up and burn the bodies, beginning at Babi Yar in Kiev five weeks after Citadel was called off. And the Soviet recapture of Kharkov in August 1943 made possible the first trial anywhere of Germans for crimes in the war, held in that city in December 1943, which American newsreels showed to American audiences. The line from Kharkov to the U.S. Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1947–48, where Benjamin Ferencz prosecuted the Einsatzgruppen leaders, runs straight through this chapter.

This chapter is written from the documents and from the work of historians who have studied them: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and Yad Vashem, the published record of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, Raul Hilberg and Richard Rhodes on the Einsatzgruppen, Charles Sydnor on the Totenkopf division, Jens Westemeier on Joachim Peiper, Ben Shepherd on the anti-partisan war, and Francine Hirsch and Alexander Prusin on the Soviet trials. Where the only evidence for a crime is a Soviet investigation, it is said so; Soviet commissions documented real atrocities, but they also inflated figures and, at Katyn, blamed the Germans for a Soviet crime. Where victims’ numbers vary, the range is given. Photographs here show places, documents and survivors, not the dead.

Timeline

Behind the front, 1933–1951

1. 17 Mar 1933The SS-Stabswache Berlin, 117 men under Sepp Dietrich, is formed as Hitler’s bodyguard; it becomes the Leibstandarte.
2. Autumn 1939Theodor Eicke, inspector of the concentration camps, forms the SS Totenkopf Division from camp guard units.
3. 22 Jun 1941Germany invades the Soviet Union; four Einsatzgruppen, about 3,000 men, follow the armies.
4. 29–30 Sep 1941Babi Yar, Kiev: Sonderkommando 4a and police battalions shoot 33,771 Jews.
5. Dec 1941–Jan 1942Drobitsky Yar, Kharkov: the Jews of Kharkov, confined in barracks at the tractor plant, are shot.
6. 17 Feb 1943Yefremovka and Semyonovka near Kharkov: Leibstandarte troops kill 872 villagers, according to survivors’ accounts.
7. 14–16 Mar 1943The SS Panzer Corps retakes Kharkov; wounded Soviet prisoners are reported killed in a military hospital.
8. 5 Jul 1943Operation Citadel begins; the II SS Panzer Corps attacks the southern face of the salient.
9. 18–19 Aug 1943Sonderkommando 1005 forces prisoners to begin exhuming and burning the bodies at Babi Yar.
10. 23 Aug 1943Kharkov is liberated for the last time.
11. Sep 1943Scorched-earth retreat to the Dnieper; on 7 September Himmler orders that nothing be left behind in Ukraine.
12. 29 Sep 1943Prisoners at Babi Yar break out; about 15 survive.
13. 30 Oct 1943Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin’s Moscow Statement on Atrocities.
14. 6 Nov 1943Kiev is liberated.
15. 15–18 Dec 1943The Kharkov trial; four men are hanged on 19 December.
16. 10 Jun 1944Oradour-sur-Glane: a company of Das Reich kills 643 villagers.
17. 17 Dec 1944Malmedy: Kampfgruppe Peiper of the Leibstandarte shoots 84 American prisoners.
18. 29 Sep 1947Ferencz opens the Einsatzgruppen case at Nuremberg.
19. 7 Jun 1951Ohlendorf, Blobel, Naumann and Braune are hanged at Landsberg.

The three SS divisions at Kursk

In July 1943 the II SS Panzer Corps, commanded by SS-Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser, a retired Reichswehr lieutenant general who had built the SS’s officer training in the 1930s, was the strongest German formation on the southern face of the salient. It had three divisions, each officially an SS panzergrenadier division at the time but equipped, by the summer of 1943, with a panzer regiment (in some cases of only one battalion, the other having gone to Germany to convert to Panthers) and a company of Tigers: the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, under SS-Brigadeführer Theodor Wisch; the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, under SS-Gruppenführer Walter Krüger; and the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, under SS-Brigadeführer Hermann Priess (Zamulin; Nipe). The divisions were formally renamed panzer divisions in the autumn of 1943; this collection uses the later names for simplicity. Their fighting on the road to Prokhorovka is told in Chapter 4 and Chapter 6. Here the question is what kind of organizations they were.

The Leibstandarte began as a guard. On 17 March 1933, seven weeks after Hitler became chancellor, Sepp Dietrich, a Bavarian former sergeant and Nazi street fighter, formed the SS-Stabswache Berlin, 117 men chosen to guard the Reich Chancellery. It was named the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s bodyguard regiment, in November 1933, when its men swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler personally (Stein; Weale). Its first killings were political. During the “Night of the Long Knives” on 30 June 1934, a Leibstandarte firing squad shot five SA generals and an SA colonel at Stadelheim prison in Munich, and its companies took part in further executions in the following days. In Poland in September 1939 men of the regiment were involved in the killing of Jews at Błonie and of civilians at Złoczew, and in France in May 1940 about 80 British and French prisoners were murdered at Wormhoudt (Stein; Weale). It grew into a brigade and then, in 1942, a division.

Das Reich came from the SS-Verfügungstruppe, the “special-purpose troops” Himmler raised in the 1930s as an armed SS force outside the army. Its three regiments, Deutschland, Germania and Der Führer, were trained under Hausser’s inspectorate on army lines and formed into the SS-Verfügungsdivision in 1939; renamed Reich and then Das Reich, the division fought in France, the Balkans and the advance on Moscow in 1941 (Stein). Of the three, it was the one most often held up after the war as a “purely military” formation. Its own record in 1944, in southern France, would answer that.

Totenkopf, the Death’s Head division, had the most direct link to the camps. It was formed in the autumn of 1939, assembling at Dachau, by Theodor Eicke, the former commandant of Dachau who since 1934 had been Inspector of Concentration Camps and commander of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the camp guard units. Eicke had written the regulations that made Dachau the model for the whole camp system, with its punishments, its guard posts with orders to shoot, and its training of guards to treat prisoners as enemies. About 6,500 men of the guard units were transferred into the new division, along with Eicke’s methods and many of his officers (Sydnor). The historian Charles Sydnor, in his study of the division, Soldiers of Destruction (1977), showed how men, money and equipment continued to pass between the division and the camp system during the war, and how the division’s Eastern Front record reflected the camp ethos in which it had been raised.

Totenkopf’s first crime in the West was at Le Paradis in France on 27 May 1940, when men of SS-Obersturmführer Fritz Knöchlein’s company machine-gunned 97 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment, after they had surrendered; two survived, wounded, to testify. Knöchlein was tried by a British military court and hanged in 1949 (Sydnor). In Russia the division fought in the Demyansk pocket in 1942, losing most of its men, and returned to the front for the Kharkov counteroffensive in February 1943. Eicke was killed on 26 February 1943 when his Fieseler Storch light aircraft was shot down by Soviet ground fire near the front south of Kharkov (Sydnor).

Kharkov, February–March 1943: the record of the SS Panzer Corps

The battles that created the Kursk salient are told in Chapter 1. The Red Army took Kharkov on 16 February 1943, after Hausser disobeyed Hitler’s order to hold the city to the last; in the first half of March the SS Panzer Corps, now with all three divisions, retook it in Manstein’s counteroffensive. Kharkov was declared in German hands by the end of 14 March, though fighting went on at the tractor works for two more days (Glantz and House; Zamulin). The SS renamed the city’s central square, Dzerzhinsky Square, “Platz der Leibstandarte.”

During the February fighting, as the Leibstandarte held a front south of Kharkov against Soviet cavalry and rifle units, a crime took place that is now among the best-documented atrocities of a Waffen-SS division in the Soviet Union. On 12 February 1943 men of the division occupied the villages of Yefremovka and Semyonovka, southwest of Kharkov, after Soviet troops withdrew; two SS officers had been wounded in the fighting there. On 17 February Leibstandarte troops returned and, according to survivors’ accounts gathered by Ukrainian researchers, killed 872 men, women and children in the two villages, about 240 of them burned alive in the Yefremovka church. A survivor, Ivan Kiselev, then 14, was among those who described what happened (Parker, Hitler’s Warrior, citing Ukrainian sources; Westemeier). The unit involved was the armored half-track battalion of the 2nd SS Panzergrenadier Regiment, commanded by SS-Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper, the same officer whose battle group would kill American prisoners at Malmedy 22 months later. The battalion was nicknamed in the division the “blowtorch battalion” (Lötlampen-Abteilung), reportedly because of the villages it burned in this period (Westemeier; Arnold). Peiper received the German Cross in Gold for his battalion’s actions around Kharkov in May 1943.

The recapture of Kharkov itself in March produced a second charge. After the liberation in August, Soviet investigators reported that SS troops had killed several hundred wounded Red Army soldiers in a military hospital in the city in March 1943, setting the building on fire, and that captured officers and commissars had been routinely shot. The hospital killings appear in Western histories of the Leibstandarte as well as in Soviet sources, but the figures come from the Soviet investigation and cannot be checked against German records, which are silent; it is fair to call the charge well supported in outline and uncertain in detail. The shooting of commissars, on the other hand, was German policy. The Commissar Order issued by the army high command on 6 June 1941 directed that captured Red Army political officers be shot, and although its formal application was relaxed in 1942, units across the front continued to kill them (Streit; Shepherd).

It is important to be clear about what the record does not show. There is no evidence that the II SS Panzer Corps as a formation took part in the mass shootings of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen; those were carried out by the Security Police and SD, by Order Police battalions, by the Waffen-SS brigades of Himmler’s own command staff, by Wehrmacht security units and by local auxiliaries. Nor did the army behave much better than the SS in the anti-partisan war: many of the worst village burnings in Russia and Belarus were carried out by army security divisions and police. What distinguishes the SS divisions is the ideology that formed them, their origin in organizations that were themselves instruments of terror, and a pattern of killing prisoners and civilians that followed them from Poland to Kharkov to Belgium.

The Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union, 1941–43

The Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, “task forces of the Security Police and the SD,” were created by Reinhard Heydrich’s Reich Security Main Office. Similar groups had followed the army into Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, where in 1939 they shot Polish priests, teachers, nobles and Jews by the thousands. For the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 four groups were formed, lettered A to D, with about 3,000 men in all, each attached to an army group or army: A with Army Group North in the Baltic states, B with Army Group Center in Belarus and western Russia, C with Army Group South in northern and central Ukraine, D with the Eleventh Army in southern Ukraine and the Crimea (Hilberg; Rhodes). Each group was divided into Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos of a few hundred men. Their officers were not thugs from the street: many were lawyers and university graduates, Otto Ohlendorf of Einsatzgruppe D an economist, Paul Blobel of Sonderkommando 4a an architect.

Einsatzgruppe C, under SS-Brigadeführer Otto Rasch and from October 1941 Max Thomas, covered the territory of this collection: Kiev, Kharkov and the region east toward Kursk. Its Sonderkommando 4a, under SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel until January 1942, followed the Sixth Army through Zhitomir, Kiev and Poltava to Kharkov. Einsatzgruppe B, under Arthur Nebe, operated behind Army Group Center through Belarus to Smolensk, Bryansk and the Orel region. Their task, as their orders were later described at Nuremberg, was to kill “Jews in party and state positions,” Communist officials, “agitators” and other “radical elements”; within weeks it had become the killing of entire Jewish communities, men first, then from August 1941 women and children as well (Hilberg; Browning).

They did not act alone. The Higher SS and Police Leaders, above all Friedrich Jeckeln in the south, commanded battalions of the Order Police, the uniformed German police, which carried out many of the largest massacres: Jeckeln’s men shot about 23,600 Jews at Kamianets-Podilskyi on 27–28 August 1941. Himmler’s Kommandostab, his personal command staff, sent the 1st SS Infantry Brigade and the SS Cavalry Brigade, both Waffen-SS units formed largely from concentration-camp guard regiments, into the rear areas in the summer of 1941; in the Pripyat marshes in July–September the cavalry brigade’s final report counted 14,178 Jews killed, and the historian Henning Pieper puts the real figure nearer 23,700 (Cüppers; Pieper). The Wehrmacht provided transport, guards, ammunition and in many places shooters, and local auxiliary police recruited from the occupied population took part in the roundups and the shootings.

We know as much as we do because the killers reported. From June 1941 the Reich Security Main Office compiled the reports of the four groups into a numbered series, the Ereignismeldungen UdSSR, “Operational Situation Reports USSR,” circulated to dozens of offices in Berlin. They recorded executions by place and number with bureaucratic precision. Einsatzgruppe A’s report to the end of November 1941 listed 136,421 Jews killed; Karl Jäger’s report for Einsatzkommando 3 in Lithuania, dated 1 December 1941, counted 137,346 (Hilberg). The reports were found in Berlin after the war, and an American investigator named Benjamin Ferencz made them the basis of a trial. Added together they came to more than a million dead. With the victims of the Order Police, the Waffen-SS brigades, the army and the local formations, Raul Hilberg put the total killed by shooting and gas vans in the occupied Soviet territories at more than two million people, about 1.3 million of them Jews (Hilberg).

Babi Yar, 29–30 September 1941

German troops entered Kiev on 19 September 1941. On 24 September, explosions and fires began to destroy the buildings along the Khreshchatyk, the main street, where the occupiers had set up offices; they were set off by mines and charges left by the retreating Soviet NKVD. On 26 September the military governor, Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, the Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln and Otto Rasch of Einsatzgruppe C agreed to kill the Jews of Kiev, using the explosions as a pretext (USHMM; Rhodes). Notices posted in Russian, Ukrainian and German ordered all Jews of the city to assemble on the morning of 29 September near the cemeteries on the city’s northwestern edge, with their documents, money and warm clothing. Many believed they were to be resettled.

From the assembly point the columns were led toward the ravine of Babi Yar. There they were made to give up their belongings and clothing and were taken in groups to the edge of the ravine, where they were shot. The shooting was done by men of Sonderkommando 4a under Blobel and of Police Battalion 45, with Police Battalion 303 guarding the perimeter, a company of a Waffen-SS special-duties battalion and a platoon of Police Battalion 9 in support, Ukrainian auxiliary police assisting in the roundup and the cordon, and the Wehrmacht providing logistics (USHMM; Rhodes). In two days, according to Einsatzgruppe C’s own count in Operational Situation Report USSR No. 101, 33,771 Jews were killed. It is often described as the largest single massacre of the Holocaust in so short a time.

Babi Yar went on being used as a killing site for the rest of the occupation. Jews found in hiding, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma from camps near the city, Communist officials, Ukrainian nationalists who fell foul of the Germans (among them the poet Olena Teliha, murdered there in February 1942), hostages shot in reprisal, and prisoners of the nearby Syrets concentration camp were killed and buried in the ravine. Estimates of the total number of victims at Babi Yar between 1941 and 1943 range from about 100,000 to 150,000; the Soviet prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal in 1946 spoke of about 100,000, based on the findings of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission. Because most of the bodies were later burned, the exact number can never be known (USHMM; Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center).

Drobitsky Yar and the Holocaust in the Kharkov, Kursk and Orel regions

Kharkov, the second city of Soviet Ukraine, was taken by the German Sixth Army on 24–25 October 1941. Its Jewish population had been large before the war, and although many Jews were evacuated east or left with the Red Army, several thousand remained, mostly the old, women and children. In mid-December 1941 the German authorities ordered all Jews of the city to move within two days to the barracks of the Kharkov tractor plant on the eastern outskirts. Many died there of cold and hunger in a winter with temperatures below minus 15 °C. From late December into January 1942 the inmates were taken in groups to a ravine called Drobitsky Yar, southeast of the city, and shot; some were killed in gas vans (Yad Vashem; Kharkiv Holocaust Museum). The killings were carried out by Sonderkommando 4a, which had come on from Kiev and Poltava, with the support of German Order Police.

Estimates of the number of dead at Drobitsky Yar vary. Kharkiv archives hold data on about 15,000 victims; most historians give a figure of 15,000 to 16,000; the foundation of the Drobitsky Yar memorial, which counts other victims killed at the site during the occupation, puts it as high as 30,000 (Drobitsky Yar memorial; Kharkiv Holocaust Museum). The memorial complex, built after the end of the Soviet Union, was opened by the president of Ukraine on 13 December 2002. In March 2022 its menorah monument was damaged by Russian shelling.

East and north of Kharkov, in the Russian regions where the Kursk battles would be fought, the Jewish communities were smaller and a larger share of them had been evacuated before the Germans arrived. Orel fell on 3 October 1941, Belgorod on 24 October, Kursk on 2 November. The Jews who remained were registered, marked, often confined, and then killed in the winter of 1941–42 and the first half of 1942, usually in shootings at the edge of town by small detachments of the Security Police and SD, the Secret Field Police or local auxiliaries. The killing sites in these regions are known mostly from the reports of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, compiled after liberation in 1943, and from postwar testimony; they have been mapped by Yad Vashem’s “Untold Stories” project on the killing sites of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. YIVO estimates that more than 119,000 Jews were murdered in the occupied territory of the Russian republic as a whole, most of them in the Rostov, Krasnodar, Smolensk and Bryansk regions (YIVO Encyclopedia; Arad).

In the Bryansk and Orel forests, at the base of the northern salient, the Germans tolerated an unusual experiment: the “Lokot Autonomy,” a self-governing district in parts of the Orel and Kursk regions run from November 1941 by Russian collaborators, first Konstantin Voskoboinik and, after his death in a partisan attack in January 1942, Bronislav Kaminsky. Its militia, which grew to about 10,000 men by 1943, fought the partisans alongside German units and took part in reprisals against villages. Lokot also had its own executioner, Antonina Makarova, a former Red Army nurse who shot prisoners for the district administration; she was traced by the KGB in 1978 and executed in 1979. Soviet postwar estimates of up to 10,000 civilians killed by the forces of the Lokot district are uncertain, but they included Jews shot at Suzemka and Navlya (Wikipedia, “Lokot Autonomy,” citing Dallin and Soviet sources). Kaminsky evacuated his men and their families west at the end of July 1943, as the Red Army’s Orel offensive closed in; his brigade later fought in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, and the SS shot him in August 1944.

The war against the villages

By 1943 the occupied territories behind the German front at Kursk were a second battlefield. Soviet partisans, organized from Moscow by the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement from May 1942, controlled large areas of forest in the Bryansk region and Belarus and attacked railways, depots and German garrisons. Their attacks on the railways that supplied the Orel bulge were real and growing; on the night of 3 August 1943 they began the “Rail War,” blowing rails across Belarus and the occupied west in support of the Soviet offensives after Kursk (Glantz and House; Chapter 7). The partisans also killed collaborators and their families, requisitioned food from villages that could not spare it, and sometimes provoked German reprisals on purpose. Villagers were caught between both sides.

The German answer was called Bandenbekämpfung, “bandit fighting.” From the start it was framed in terms that made no distinction between partisans and civilians. The army’s directives of 1941 called for collective measures against villages, the shooting of hostages at fixed ratios, and the treatment of anyone found in a partisan area as a partisan. In the large sweep operations of 1942 and 1943 army security divisions, police battalions, SS units and collaborationist formations encircled forest areas, shot those they caught, burned villages, carried off livestock and grain, and deported the inhabitants for labor. The historian Ben Shepherd, who studied the army’s 221st Security Division in this region, has shown how professional soldiers, not only SS men, came to accept and carry out such methods (Shepherd, War in the Wild East).

One of these sweeps was fought in the Bryansk forests in direct preparation for Citadel. In Operation Zigeunerbaron (“Gypsy Baron”), from mid-May to early June 1943, units of the Second Panzer Army, with Kaminsky’s brigade, attacked the partisan areas south of Bryansk, behind the Orel bulge, to clear the rear of the German armies in the Orel bulge before the offensive; further operations, Freischütz and others, followed in the summer (Wikipedia, “Lokot Autonomy”; Shepherd). Such operations reported large numbers of “bandits” killed and thousands of civilians “evacuated” from the operational zones. In Belarus the reprisals reached their worst form. On 22 March 1943 Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118, a police unit recruited largely from Ukrainians, and the SS Special Battalion Dirlewanger burned the village of Khatyn, northeast of Minsk, and killed 149 of its inhabitants, 75 of them children, most of them locked in a barn that was set on fire. The Khatyn memorial records 628 Belarusian villages burned with all or part of their inhabitants during the occupation.

The same logic governed the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, the largest group of victims after the Jews. Of about 5.7 million Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans between 1941 and 1945, about 3.3 million died, most of them in the first winter of the war, of starvation, exposure and disease in open camps, and by shooting (Streit). Their deaths were not a side effect of the war but a consequence of decisions made in Berlin about who would eat in the occupied East.

Ostarbeiter: the labor deportations

From 1942 the occupied territories had a new value to the Reich: as a reservoir of labor for German farms and factories. Under Fritz Sauckel, appointed Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment in March 1942, recruitment in Ukraine began with propaganda promising good wages and conditions. A first wave of volunteers went, and their letters home, and the return of the sick, ended the volunteering. From the spring of 1942 recruitment became conscription: quotas were imposed on towns and villages, age groups were called up by public notice, and when they did not come people were seized in roundups at markets, churches and cinemas and shipped west in freight cars (Herbert; Wikipedia, “Ostarbeiter”).

In Germany the Ostarbeiter, “Eastern workers,” wore a badge marked OST, lived in fenced camps, worked 12-hour days for a fraction of German wages, and were fed on rations that left many starving. Estimates of their number range from about 3 million to more than 5 million depending on how they are counted; between two-thirds and three-quarters came from Ukraine, and Ukrainian historians give figures of about 2.2 to 2.5 million Ukrainian deportees (Wikipedia, “Ostarbeiter,” citing Kondufor and others). Many were teenagers. Sauckel was tried by the International Military Tribunal and hanged at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946. More than half a century later, in 2000, the German government and German industry established the foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future,” which paid compensation to surviving forced laborers until 2007.

The roundups reached their peak in the occupied regions behind the Kursk front in the spring and summer of 1943, as the army demanded men for the front and German industry demanded workers. In the retreat after Kursk the Germans took with them not only volunteers and conscripts but whole populations, driving them west across the Dnieper to deny the Red Army recruits and labor.

Aktion 1005: burning the evidence at Babi Yar

By the spring of 1942 the SS leadership knew that the mass graves of the East were evidence, and that they could be found. In March 1942 Heydrich chose Paul Blobel, relieved of Sonderkommando 4a in January, to destroy the traces. After Heydrich’s assassination, Blobel’s orders came from Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo; the operation, known as Sonderaktion 1005, was so secret that most of its orders were given orally. Blobel experimented at the Chełmno death camp in 1942 with burning bodies, first with incendiary bombs, which set the surrounding forest alight, and then with pyres of corpses and wood stacked on iron rails, which worked; bone fragments were ground in a mill and the ashes scattered or buried (Hilberg; Spector). From the summer of 1942 the method was used at the death camps of Operation Reinhard. In 1943, as the Red Army advanced, Blobel’s commandos turned back to the shooting sites in the occupied Soviet Union.

Babi Yar was one of the first. In mid-August 1943, while the Soviet offensives after Kursk were driving toward Kharkov, a detachment of Sonderkommando 1005 arrived in Kiev. About 100 Soviet prisoners of war were brought to the ravine, and on 18 or 19 August they were ordered to begin digging up the bodies (USHMM; Wikipedia, “Syrets concentration camp,” citing survivor Efim Vilkis). The labor force grew to about 300 prisoners from the nearby Syrets camp, of whom about 100 were Jews. They were shackled with leg irons and housed in a bunker dug into the side of the ravine. They dug out the bodies in layers, searched them for gold teeth and valuables, and stacked them on pyres built on iron rails and on gravestones taken from the neighboring Jewish cemetery; each pyre held, by Vilkis’s account, about 1,500 bodies and burned for two nights and a day. Bones that did not burn were crushed, and the ashes were sifted and spread over the ground. The work went on day and night for about six weeks.

The prisoners knew that the Germans would kill them when the work was done, as they had killed the labor details at other sites. On the night of 28–29 September 1943, almost exactly two years after the massacre, they broke out. According to survivors, they had found among the possessions of the dead a key that fitted their leg irons, and had prepared for weeks. Most were shot down by the guards as they ran; about 15 escaped and survived to reach the Red Army or hide until the liberation (USHMM; Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center). Among the men whose names appear in the record as escapees are Vladimir Davydov, Yakov Kaper, Leonid Kadomsky and Fyodor Yershov. Their accounts, given to Soviet investigators after the liberation of Kiev on 6 November 1943 and in later trials, are the main evidence for what was done at Babi Yar in the late summer of 1943. Accounts vary on some details, including the number of prisoners and the exact number of survivors.

The burning was meant to defeat exactly what happened next. In November 1943, soon after the liberation of Kiev, Soviet authorities took a party of Western correspondents to Babi Yar. Among them was the American Bill Downs of CBS and Newsweek, who interviewed the escaped prisoner Efim Vilkis about the exhumations and reported his account (Wikipedia, “Babi Yar,” citing Downs). Others in the party, looking at a ravine where little could be seen but ash and disturbed earth, were cautious; the historian Deborah Lipstadt, in her study of American press coverage of the Holocaust, notes that the New York Times account of the visit stressed that the correspondents could not verify the Soviet claims for themselves (Lipstadt, Beyond Belief). Without bodies, the testimony of the survivors and the local population was the evidence. The pattern, of Soviet claims received with skepticism in the West until German documents confirmed them, would repeat itself many times.

Scorched earth: the retreat to the Dnieper

When Citadel was called off and the Soviet counteroffensives broke the German front at Orel and Belgorod (Chapter 7), the German armies began a long retreat. On 11–12 August 1943 Hitler ordered the construction of a defensive line, the “Panther” line or “East Wall,” along the Dnieper and the Desna in the south. Kharkov fell for the last time on 23 August. On 15 September Hitler authorized Manstein’s Army Group South to withdraw behind the Dnieper, and in the second half of September its armies fell back to the river crossings at Kiev, Kanev, Cherkassy, Kremenchug, Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye, pursued by four Soviet fronts (Glantz and House; Frieser).

The retreat was a deliberate destruction of the country left behind. In a zone east of the Dnieper, German engineers and special detachments blew up bridges, railways, power stations, factories, mines and public buildings, and burned towns and villages; crops, livestock, machinery and stocks were carried off or destroyed; and the civilian population, above all men of military age, was driven west across the river. The order came from the top. On 7 September 1943 Himmler instructed the Higher SS and Police Leader for Ukraine, Hans-Adolf Prützmann, that when Ukraine was evacuated not a single person, head of cattle, hundredweight of grain or railway line should be left behind; the order was put in evidence at the International Military Tribunal (IMT documents; Frieser). The army’s own orders for the “evacuation” and “destruction” of the zone east of the Dnieper were issued through Army Group South.

The Soviet armies that crossed the left-bank Ukraine in September came through a burned land. Soviet investigators and photographers recorded it, and the destruction is among the best-documented German policies of the war. After the war Manstein was tried by a British military court in Hamburg in 1949 on 17 charges, including the treatment of prisoners and the deportation and destruction carried out in the 1943 retreat; he was convicted on nine of them and sentenced to 18 years, reduced to 12, and was released in 1953. His memoir Verlorene Siege (1955), published in English as Lost Victories in 1958, said little about any of this. It became one of the most influential books on the Eastern Front for American officers, a story taken up in Chapter 9.

The Soviet side: terror, penal units and the returning population

An honest account of the occupied East cannot stop with the Germans. The Soviet state that fought them at Kursk was itself a dictatorship that had killed millions of its own people in the 1930s, through the famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine and the Terror of 1937–38, and it did not change its methods in war. As the Red Army retreated in 1941 the NKVD shot thousands of prisoners in the jails of western Ukraine rather than release them, and blew up buildings in Kiev that killed German officers and civilians alike. In 1943 it came back.

Inside the army, discipline rested in part on terror. Stalin’s Order No. 227 of 28 July 1942, “Not one step back,” created penal companies for soldiers and penal battalions for officers convicted of cowardice or other offenses, and blocking detachments behind unreliable units to stop retreats by force. Penal units were given the most dangerous tasks, such as attacking across minefields, and their men could earn reinstatement by being wounded or by “distinguishing themselves.” About 420,000 to 430,000 men served in them during the war (Krivosheev, as usually cited). On 19 April 1943 military counterintelligence was reorganized as SMERSH, “Death to Spies,” directly under Stalin as Commissar of Defense; its officers accompanied every front at Kursk, screened soldiers, hunted deserters and German agents, and in the liberated territories took part in the screening of the population.

For the people of the liberated regions, the return of Soviet power brought relief and new danger. Everyone who had lived under occupation was suspect. Those who had served the Germans as police, officials, village elders or soldiers in collaborationist units were arrested, and many were tried by military tribunals; the first public trial, of eleven Soviet citizens who had served with Sonderkommando 10a, was held at Krasnodar on 14–17 July 1943, and eight were hanged before a crowd on 18 July. Others were punished for lesser forms of collaboration, or for nothing more than having worked to survive. Former prisoners of war and, after 1945, returning Ostarbeiter passed through NKVD “filtration” camps; many were sent to labor camps or exile, and all carried the stigma of having been “in the hands of the enemy.” Whole nationalities were punished collectively for the collaboration of some: the Karachays in November 1943, the Kalmyks in December 1943, the Chechens and Ingush in February 1944 and the Crimean Tatars in May 1944 were deported in their entirety to Central Asia and Siberia, with heavy loss of life.

Soviet troops also committed crimes against prisoners. The best-documented case from the winter battles that preceded Kursk occurred at Grishino (Krasnoarmeyskoye) in February 1943, during the Soviet Operation Gallop, where troops of Lt. Gen. Markian Popov’s mobile group killed about 600 German, Italian, Hungarian and Romanian prisoners, wounded men and staff, including nurses, before the town was retaken; the killings were investigated by the Wehrmacht’s war crimes bureau, whose records were studied by Alfred de Zayas (de Zayas). Front-line killing of prisoners occurred on both sides throughout the war. None of this alters the scale or the planned character of the German crimes, but it is part of the record.

Justice at Kharkov, 15–18 December 1943

On 30 October 1943, at the end of the Moscow Conference of foreign ministers, the Allies issued a “Statement on Atrocities” in the names of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. Largely drafted by Churchill, it warned that German officers, soldiers and Nazi Party members responsible for atrocities would be sent back to the countries where their crimes had been committed to be judged and punished under those countries’ laws; the major criminals, whose offenses had no particular location, would be punished by joint decision of the Allies (Moscow Declaration, 1943).

In their words

“… they will be brought back to the scene of their crimes and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.”

Seven weeks later the Soviet Union held the first such trial, in Kharkov, before the Military Tribunal of the 4th Ukrainian Front, from 15 to 18 December 1943. There were four defendants. Three were Germans who had been captured: Wilhelm Langheld, 52, a captain of the military counterintelligence service, who admitted personally ordering or carrying out the killing of about 100 Soviet citizens; Hans Ritz, 24, an SS-Untersturmführer who had served with an SD Sonderkommando and directed shootings at Taganrog; and Reinhard Retzlaff, 36, of the Secret Field Police, accused of extracting false statements under torture and of taking part in killings with gas vans. The fourth, Mikhail Bulanov, 26, was a Soviet citizen who had driven a gas van for the Kharkov SD (Wikipedia, “Kharkov Trial”; Hirsch). They were charged under Soviet law, under the decree of 19 April 1943 on punishment of German war criminals and their accomplices, and with reference to the Moscow Declaration. All four pleaded guilty. Their defense, that they had obeyed orders, was rejected.

The trial was the first public description in a courtroom of the gas vans, the trucks whose exhaust was piped into a sealed body to kill the people locked inside, which the Einsatzgruppen had used in Ukraine and Russia since 1942. Witnesses from the city, forensic experts and the defendants themselves described the killings at the tractor plant, the shootings at Drobitsky Yar, the killing of hospital patients, including children, and of prisoners. The tribunal was open to the public and to foreign journalists, and the Soviet writers Konstantin Simonov and Ilya Ehrenburg attended and wrote about it. The defendants were sentenced to death on 18 December and were hanged on the morning of 19 December in a public square in the center of Kharkov before a large crowd; Soviet accounts put it at 40,000 or more.

The trial was filmed, and the Soviet documentary made from it was released abroad. Americans saw it. Universal Newsreel footage now in the U.S. National Archives shows Bulanov making his plea before the court, the judge reading the sentences, and the four men being led to the gallows in the square; an English-language version of the Soviet film, released in the United States as We Accuse, was narrated by the American actor Everett Sloane, who called the trial “the beginning of justice.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which holds the newsreel outtakes, has not found a complete copy of the English version in any archive (USHMM, film RG-60.1905). American newspapers carried the wire reports of the hangings in the days before Christmas 1943.

Not everyone in Washington and London welcomed it. The British and American governments, as Francine Hirsch has shown, worried that the Germans would retaliate against Allied prisoners of war, especially captured airmen, with show trials of their own, and were uneasy at a trial held before the Allies had agreed on how war criminals should be judged (Hirsch). German propaganda denounced the trial as a fraud. Soviet procedure was certainly not that of an American court: the outcome was not in doubt, the defendants’ confessions were central, and the hangings were public. But the defendants’ accounts matched what German documents later showed, and Kharkov established in practice two principles that the Allied courts would adopt at Nuremberg: that crimes against civilians in occupied territory could be tried as crimes, and that superior orders were no defense.

Nuremberg, 1947–48: the Einsatzgruppen case

After the International Military Tribunal tried the leading figures of the Reich in 1945–46, the United States held twelve further trials at Nuremberg before American military tribunals, the “Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings,” under Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor as chief of counsel. The ninth was The United States of America v. Otto Ohlendorf et al., the Einsatzgruppen case. Its evidence came from a discovery made in the spring of 1946 in Berlin, where a team of researchers working for Taylor’s office found a nearly complete set of the Operational Situation Reports USSR in the files of the Gestapo. The investigator who realized what they were, and added up the numbers, was Benjamin Ferencz.

Taylor had no staff to spare for a new trial. Ferencz offered to prosecute it himself, in addition to his other duties, and Taylor agreed. The indictment was filed on 3 July 1947 against 24 former commanders and officers of the Einsatzgruppen and their units, charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes and membership in criminal organizations. One, Emil Haussmann, killed himself before arraignment; another, Otto Rasch, was removed from the case because of illness and died in 1948. The trial opened before Military Tribunal II-A, presided over by Michael Musmanno, a judge from Pennsylvania, on 29 September 1947. Ferencz, 27 years old, in his first case, rested the prosecution’s case in two days. He called no witnesses; the documents were enough.

In their words

“It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children.”

The defendants’ answer was led by Otto Ohlendorf, the former commander of Einsatzgruppe D, who had already admitted at the International Military Tribunal in January 1946 that his group had killed about 90,000 people in its first year. Ohlendorf did not deny the killings; he argued that they had been ordered, that they were justified as a preventive measure against a Jewish-Bolshevik threat, and that he would have been shot if he had refused. Others claimed they had not been present or that their units had only shot partisans. Blobel disputed the figures reported for his commando, though his own affidavit admitted 10,000 to 15,000 killings. The tribunal rejected the defense of superior orders, finding that no defendant had shown he faced death for refusing; historians have since found no case of a member of the killing units shot for refusing to take part.

On 8–9 April 1948 the tribunal found all 22 remaining defendants guilty, and on 10 April it pronounced sentence: 14 death sentences, two life sentences, and prison terms for the rest; two were convicted only of membership in criminal organizations. The sentences were then reviewed. In January 1951 John J. McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, acting on the recommendations of an advisory board, confirmed four of the death sentences and commuted the rest. Ohlendorf, Blobel, Werner Braune and Erich Naumann were hanged at Landsberg prison in Bavaria shortly after midnight on 7 June 1951. By 1958 all the other convicted men had been released (Earl; Wikipedia, “Einsatzgruppen trial”).

The same men in the West: Oradour and Malmedy

The two SS divisions that fought side by side toward Prokhorovka in July 1943 were each responsible, within 18 months, for one of the best-known atrocities of the war in the West. In the spring of 1944 the bulk of Das Reich was rebuilt in southern France around veterans of the Eastern Front, including Kursk, and many new recruits. When the Allies landed in Normandy it was ordered north, and on the way, under its commander SS-Brigadeführer Heinz Lammerding, it waged an anti-partisan campaign in the manner of the East. On 9 June 1944 its men hanged 99 men from balconies and lampposts in Tulle. On 10 June a company of the 1st Battalion of the Der Führer regiment, under SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, surrounded the village of Oradour-sur-Glane near Limoges, shot the men in barns and burned the women and children in the church: 643 people were killed, a figure finalized only in 2020 when a last victim was identified. The ruins have been preserved as they were left. A French military court at Bordeaux tried 21 of the men in 1953; under an amnesty law passed during the trial for Alsatians who had been conscripted into the SS, most were soon released, and Lammerding, living in West Germany, was never extradited. An East German court sentenced one of the officers, Heinz Barth, to life imprisonment in 1983.

The Leibstandarte’s crime was against Americans. On 17 December 1944, the second day of the Ardennes offensive, men of Kampfgruppe Peiper, the armored spearhead of the 1st SS Panzer Division, captured more than a hundred soldiers of the U.S. 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion at the Baugnez crossroads near Malmedy, assembled them in a field and opened fire on them with machine guns; 84 were killed. It was the worst atrocity against American troops in Europe, and it is told in this site’s Battle of the Bulge collection. The battle group was commanded by Joachim Peiper, whose battalion had burned Yefremovka and Semyonovka in February 1943 and who had fought at Kursk. A U.S. Army court at Dachau tried 73 men of the Leibstandarte from May to July 1946 and sentenced 43 to death, Peiper among them. None was executed. Allegations that the defendants had been mistreated in pretrial interrogations led to a Senate investigation in 1949, in which Senator Joseph McCarthy took up the defendants’ cause; the sentences were commuted, and Peiper was released on parole in December 1956. He was killed in an arson attack on his house in France in 1976.

“Soldiers like any others”: the postwar myth

In 1951 veterans of the Waffen-SS founded an association in West Germany, the HIAG (Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit, “Mutual Aid Society”), to win pensions and rehabilitation for its members. Its argument, made in memoirs, unit histories and its own magazine, was that the Waffen-SS had been a purely military elite, a “fourth branch of the Wehrmacht,” separate from the camp guards and the killing squads, and that its men had been soldiers like any others. Paul Hausser, the commander at Kursk, made the case in two books, the second of which, published in 1966, took the phrase as its title: Soldaten wie andere auch. In the early Cold War, when West Germany was being rearmed as an ally of the United States, the argument found a hearing.

The myth had an American chapter. Waffen-SS memoirs and admiring popular histories found a large readership in the United States from the 1950s onward, and the battlefield skill of the SS panzer divisions, at Kharkov and Kursk above all, was studied by American officers looking for lessons in fighting outnumbered against the Soviet army. The spell was broken in public in 1985. President Ronald Reagan agreed to visit the German military cemetery at Kolmeshöhe near Bitburg with Chancellor Helmut Kohl as a gesture of reconciliation, and it emerged that 49 of the roughly 2,000 soldiers buried there were members of the Waffen-SS. When Reagan defended the visit by saying that the soldiers buried there were victims “just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps,” the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, receiving the Congressional Gold Medal at the White House on 19 April, asked him not to go: “That place, Mr. President, is not your place.” Fifty-three senators asked Reagan to cancel the visit, and 257 members of the House urged Kohl to withdraw the invitation. Reagan went on 5 May 1985, after first visiting the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and stayed at the cemetery eight minutes (Wikipedia, “Bitburg controversy,” citing the New York Times).

Since then historians have taken the Waffen-SS apart as a subject. George Stein’s The Waffen SS (1966) and Charles Sydnor’s Soldiers of Destruction (1977) began the work; Bernd Wegner studied its officer corps, Jens Westemeier its most famous commander, Martin Cüppers its killing brigades, and Ben Shepherd the conduct of the German forces in the East as a whole. Their conclusion is not that every man in the Waffen-SS was a murderer, but that the organization was built for a racial war, that its divisions were trained in that ideology, and that its record of crimes against prisoners and civilians was worse than that of the army as a whole, which was itself deeply implicated. Kursk does not change that picture. It only shows that the same men could fight skillfully and kill prisoners in the same campaign.

Questions readers ask

Did the SS divisions at Kursk take part in the Holocaust?

Not as divisions, as far as the record shows. The mass shootings of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union were carried out by the Einsatzgruppen, the Order Police, the Waffen-SS brigades of Himmler’s command staff, army units and local auxiliaries. But the Totenkopf division was formed from concentration-camp guards, personnel moved between the Waffen-SS and the camps throughout the war, and units of the Leibstandarte killed civilians and prisoners in the Kharkov area in 1943. The Waffen-SS as a whole was part of the organization that carried out the Holocaust, which is why the Nuremberg tribunal declared it criminal.

How many people did the Einsatzgruppen kill?

Their own reports, as Ferencz added them up for the Nuremberg trial, recorded more than a million killings. Including the victims of the police battalions, SS brigades, army units and local formations that shot alongside them, Raul Hilberg estimated more than two million people killed in the occupied Soviet territories, about 1.3 million of them Jews. Exact totals are impossible because many killings were never reported and the graves were later burned.

Was the Kharkov trial a fair trial?

Not by American standards. It was a Soviet military tribunal in which guilt was assumed, confessions were central, there was no appeal and the sentences were carried out in public the next day. But the crimes it described, including the use of gas vans and the killings at Drobitsky Yar, were real and were confirmed by German documents and later trials, and the defendants admitted them. Its importance lies in being the first, and in the principle, later applied at Nuremberg, that following orders was no defense.

Why did the Germans dig up and burn the bodies at Babi Yar?

To destroy the evidence before the Red Army arrived. The program, called Aktion 1005 and directed by Paul Blobel, who had organized the 1941 massacre, began in 1942 and was extended to the shooting sites in the Soviet Union in 1943 as the German armies retreated after Kursk. At Babi Yar prisoners were forced to exhume and burn the bodies from mid-August to the end of September 1943. The breakout of 29 September brought out witnesses, and the operation failed in its purpose.

How it connects

The winter battles in which the SS Panzer Corps retook Kharkov, and in which the crimes at Yefremovka and in the Kharkov hospital took place, are told in Chapter 1. The three SS divisions’ attack on the southern face is the subject of Chapter 4, and their battle at Prokhorovka of Chapter 6. The partisan war in the Bryansk forests behind the northern face bears on Chapter 3, and the Soviet offensives that liberated Orel, Belgorod and Kharkov, and so opened the way to Kiev and the trials, on Chapter 7. The cost of the battle and of the occupation, and the way Kursk and the SS came to be remembered in Russia, Ukraine, Germany and the United States, are the subject of Chapter 9. The Leibstandarte’s Malmedy massacre is told in the Battle of the Bulge collection.

Remembering today

For decades after the war Soviet memorials at the killing sites spoke of “peaceful Soviet citizens” and did not say that most of the victims had been Jews. At Babi Yar no monument stood at all until 1976; Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar,” published in 1961 and set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony the next year, began with the words “No monument stands over Babi Yar.” In the same year, part of the ravine, which the authorities had been filling with waste from brickworks, broke through its dam in the Kurenivka mudslide and killed an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 people. Since Ukrainian independence, monuments to the Jewish victims, to the Roma, to the children and to other groups have been put up at the site, and the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center is building a museum there. On 1 March 2022 a Russian missile strike on the Kyiv television tower nearby killed at least five people at the edge of the memorial grounds.

Drobitsky Yar at Kharkiv has had its memorial complex since 2002, and the Kharkiv Holocaust Museum keeps the records of its victims. Khatyn in Belarus has been a national memorial since 1969. The ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane stand as the French state preserved them. At the Kursk battlefields themselves, the memorials of Prokhorovka and Ponyri remember the soldiers; the victims of the occupation in the Kursk, Orel and Belgorod regions are remembered in smaller monuments at the edges of towns, many still bearing the Soviet formula. Americans can see the aerial photographs of Babi Yar, the Kharkov trial newsreel and the Einsatzgruppen trial record at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which also holds an oral history and collection of Benjamin Ferencz.

Sources

• Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, vol. IV, “The Einsatzgruppen Case” (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950), including the prosecution’s opening statement by Benjamin B. Ferencz (29 September 1947) and the judgment of 8–9 April 1948; Wikipedia, “Einsatzgruppen trial”; Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958 (Cambridge, 2009).
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia articles on the Einsatzgruppen, Kiev and Babi Yar, gas vans and Aktion 1005; USHMM film RG-60.1905, “Soviet parade; beach; Kharkov Trial verdict; US soldiers in Paris” (Universal News outtakes, narration from We Accuse, narrator Everett Sloane); USHMM photo archives (aerial photograph of Babi Yar, 26 September 1943).
• Yad Vashem, “The Untold Stories: The Murder Sites of the Jews in the Occupied Territories of the Former USSR,” and entries on Kharkov (Drobitsky Yar) and Rostov (Zmievskaya Balka); Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Kyiv; Kharkiv Holocaust Museum.
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (Yale, 2003); Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (2002); Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution (2004); Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (2009); YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe; Shmuel Spector, “Aktion 1005: Effacing the Murder of Millions,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5 (1990).
• Wikipedia: “Babi Yar”, “Dina Pronicheva”, “Syrets concentration camp”, “Sonderaktion 1005”, “Paul Blobel”, “Einsatzgruppen”, “Drobytsky Yar”, “The Holocaust in Russia”, “Lokot Autonomy”, “Ostarbeiter” and “Ben Ferencz”.
• On the Kharkov trial: Wikipedia, “Kharkov Trial”; Jewish Virtual Library, “Kharkov Trial (December 1943)”; Francine Hirsch, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg (Oxford, 2020); Alexander V. Prusin, “‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17 (2003); The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson, 1944); Wikipedia, “Moscow Declarations”.
• On the Waffen-SS: George H. Stein, The Waffen SS: Hitler’s Elite Guard at War, 1939–1945 (Cornell, 1966); Charles W. Sydnor Jr., Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933–1945 (Princeton, 1977); Jens Westemeier, Joachim Peiper: A Biography of Himmler’s SS Commander (2007); Danny S. Parker, Hitler’s Warrior: The Life and Wars of SS Colonel Jochen Peiper (2014); Martin Cüppers, Wegbereiter der Shoah (2005); Bernd Wegner, The Waffen-SS: Organization, Ideology and Function (1990); Paul Hausser, Soldaten wie andere auch (1966); Wikipedia, “1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler”, “3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf”, “Waffen-SS”, “Joachim Peiper”, “Malmedy massacre”, “Oradour-sur-Glane massacre” and “Bitburg controversy”.
• On the occupation, the partisan war and prisoners: Ben Shepherd, War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Harvard, 2004) and Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich (Yale, 2016); Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945 (1978); Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers (Cambridge, 1997); Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945 (1957); Alfred M. de Zayas, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939–1945 (1989); G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (1997).
• On the battles: David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (1999) and When Titans Clashed (1995, rev. 2015); Valeriy Zamulin, Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka (2011); George M. Nipe, Blood, Steel, and Myth: The II SS-Panzer-Korps and the Road to Prochorowka (2011); Karl-Heinz Frieser et al., Germany and the Second World War, vol. VIII (2017); Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories (1958), treated as recollection.
• On American press coverage: Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (1986); Anatoly Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (uncensored edition, 1970).

Photographs: U.S. Army Signal Corps photograph in the U.S. National Archives; a Luftwaffe reconnaissance photograph and Soviet Extraordinary State Commission and RGAKFD photographs from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; a photograph from the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War (CC0); German propaganda company and archive photographs from the Bundesarchiv (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE); Soviet photographs from RIA Novosti and the Russian Ministry of Defence (public domain and CC BY 4.0); a SMERSH document from a family archive; and a modern photograph by a Wikimedia Commons contributor (CC BY-SA 4.0); all via Wikimedia Commons. German and Soviet wartime photographs reflect the purposes of their makers, and their captions are noted where they are propaganda. No photographs of the dead are shown. The record cards are illustrations drawn for this collection, not official emblems, and show no SS insignia.