Beginning with the Occupation of Poland in 1939, and especially after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941, between 1.5 and 2 million Jews were killed during pogroms and later by German forces and their collaborators.
These mass killings are referred to as the “Shoah by bullets.”
After Hitler’s Occupation of Poland on September 1, 1939, the country became a veritable testing ground for the extermination of Eastern European Jews. In November 1939, approximately 500 men, women, and children were executed in mass graves outside the town of Ostrów Mazowiecka.
In the wake of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, pogroms—carried out by a segment of the population—became increasingly frequent in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania.
The massacres intensified with the intensive operations of the Einsatzgruppen, Hitler’s intervention groups and commandos. Nazi propaganda made its target clear: Judeo-Bolshevism.
The Einsatzgruppen were actively assisted by numerous local volunteer units. Their actions constituted the first phase of the Shoah. This phase began with mass shootings and later involved the use of mobile gas trucks, the Gaswagen.
Initially, these militarized units of the political police accompanied the German army in eliminating Bolsheviks, potential opponents, Jews, and Gypsies.
Beginning in August 1941, the Einsatzgruppen and their local collaborators focused primarily on Jews. 23,600 Jews—men, women, and children, mainly from Hungarian Transcarpathia—were murdered near the town of Kamenets-Podolski. In Ukraine, in addition to the Babi Yar massacre (33,771 victims thrown into a ravine), 50,000 Jews from the city of Odessa and its surrounding region were exterminated in Bogdanovka.
In the Baltic States, Belarus, and Crimea, Jews were shot and buried in mass graves that they were often forced to dig themselves. In Lithuania, for example, the Jews of Vilnius, the “Jerusalem of the North,” accounted for 45% of the city’s total population. Between 1941 and 1942, in the Ponar Forest (Ponary or Poneriai), nearly all of the Jews of Vilnius, lined up naked around the pits, were killed by pistol or machine gun fire.
Nearly half of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were exterminated during the mass killings in Eastern Europe (“Shoah by bullets”).
During the industrialization of the extermination of Jews by gassing, at least 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nearly one million European Jews were murdered there (including 69,000 Jews from France), as well as Roma.
Jews accounted for 90% of the victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This camp was not the only extermination center, but it has become a symbol of Nazi barbarism.
He was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.
References:
— Raul Hilberg, 2006, *The Destruction of the European Jews*, Paris, Gallimard.
— Henri Minczeles, 2000, *Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius*, Paris: Ed. La Découverte.
