Column of children, no; it was a queue of death, and it moved through the late Ukrainian afternoon with obscene quiet. A truck tractor had carried them here, to the edge of a freshly dug pit, and now they were being unloaded into the arms of the waiting auxiliaries. The men holding them were not German soldiers but local men, Ukrainian auxiliaries, and they stood at the lip of the grave trembling visibly, their hands shaking as they took the children from the vehicle. It made no sense to the SS men watching, or perhaps it made all the sense in the end.
The children were the remaining survivors of Bila Tserkva, around ninety of them, ranging from a few months to perhaps seven years old. Some had been shot four or five times before they died. The screaming, one of the killers later admitted, was unimaginable. Late August 1941, German-occupied Ukraine.
The Wehrmacht was pushing deeper into the Soviet Union under Operation Barbarossa, which had begun on June 22nd of that year. Town after town fell, and behind the front line came the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi mobile killing units charged not only with securing conquered territory but with exterminating entire populations defined as enemies of the Third Reich. In six months of war against the Soviet Union, these formations collectively murdered nearly 500,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. What began as a military campaign became a war of annihilation, moving from city to city with the assistance of local collaborators and under the watchful eye of the German army.
By that late summer, Jewish men were no longer the only targets; women and children had been marked for death as well. Bila Tserkva, a town of roughly 35,000 inhabitants, sat about 50 miles south of Kiev in central Ukraine. The German Sixth Army captured the city without resistance on July 16th, 1941, during its rapid advance toward the Ukrainian capital. The occupation brought no stability, no civilian order.
Within weeks, it opened the way for systematic murder. Shortly after the town was taken, a small SS detachment moved in. It operated as a Teilkommando, a subunit drawn from Einsatzgruppe C, one of the mobile killing formations created before the invasion by the Reich Main Security Office. Einsatzgruppe C’s task was to enforce so-called political security behind the front lines; in practice, this meant the targeted murder of Jews, communists, and anyone Nazi ideology defined as undesirable.
The unit was relatively small but composed of trained and experienced killers. The Teilkommando in Bila Tserkva was led by SS-Obersturmführer August Häfner. It consisted of members of Einsatzgruppe C, a platoon of the Waffen-SS, and auxiliary forces recruited locally from Ukrainian collaborators. The Sixth Army provided logistical support: drivers, guards, weapons, and ammunition.
Between the 19th and 20th of August 1941, Häfner and his men carried out mass executions in which nearly the entire adult Jewish population of the town was murdered. A German army officer cadet who observed these shootings later left a detailed account. He watched as nine girls or women knelt in front of a deep pit, facing it. Another nine waited nearby.
He was struck, he said, by the calmness and discipline of these people. Behind each of the kneeling women stood two SS men. On the command of the senior officer, they shot them in the head with carbines. The people fell forward into the pit.
Sometimes they turned over, and sometimes he could see the top of a skull fly off. The executioners were splattered with blood, firing from a distance of about five meters. The senior SS man stepped to the edge of the pit and fired into it with a submachine gun. It was a terrible sight.
Later, when the gates were opened, the cadet approached the grave. In front of it lay pools of blood. He did not descend into the pit. It was about seven or eight meters long, a little over two meters wide, and several meters deep.
Inside, the corpses lay in layers, covered with earth. As he stood by the pit, an SS man was still walking around it, finishing off the wounded with shots. On that first evening, he saw about 162 people shot. Each time, nine were killed while the next nine waited to be brought forward.
The ones who were to be shot moved like a procession toward the grave, quietly and calmly, meeting their death. Throughout the entire execution, he saw only two women who were crying. The shootings always took place around six in the evening. He stayed in Bila Tserkva for about six weeks and witnessed six executions in total.
Perhaps 800 to 900 people were killed in that time. Long afterward he still remembered it all. He had held in his hand a piece of scalp with gray hair that lay not far from a grave. The women were shot first.
As far as he could recall, he saw only two children during those killings. Once the adults were dead, the town’s youngest survivors remained. On August 20th, 1941, approximately ninety Jewish children, from infants a few months old to seven-year-olds, were being held in a building under guard. Their parents had been shot the previous day.
German soldiers stationed nearby heard the children crying without interruption from noon onward, and the sound troubled them enough that they drew the attention of a military chaplain. When the evangelical and Catholic chaplains attached to the 295th Infantry Division entered the building, they found conditions they later described as unbearable. The children lay or sat on the floor, covered with excrement. Flies covered the legs and lower bodies of the half-clad children.
The older ones had scraped lime wash from the walls and were eating it. The air was thick with a foul stench, and the smallest, especially infants only months old, cried and moaned constantly. Two men, apparently Jews, were trying to clean the room, but the conditions remained chaotic and degrading. In an adjacent room, several women were held, one of them carrying an infant.
The building was guarded by Ukrainian youths of about sixteen or seventeen, armed only with a stick, according to one report, or a rifle, according to another. The soldiers told the chaplains that earlier that same day, three truckloads of children had already been driven away from the building under the supervision of an SD officer. A truck driver said the children were the sons and daughters of Jews who had already been executed, as well as children who had been transported together with the adult Jews taken to be shot. What the chaplains witnessed shocked even frontline soldiers accustomed to violence.
One soldier reportedly remarked that he himself had children at home. The chaplains reported their observations to the local commandant, but responsibility lay with higher authority. Unable to find the field commandant, they submitted a written report to the head of the garrison, the commander of the 295th Infantry Division. The matter fell to the division’s chief of staff, Oberstleutnant Helmuth Groscurth, who consulted with representatives of the SD.
Groscurth tried to prevent the killings, forwarding an inquiry up the chain of command. The final decision rested with Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army. He rejected the objections of the chaplains and Groscurth and confirmed that the execution of the children would proceed. The action already begun, he stated, must be properly carried out through to its conclusion.
The murder of the children was later described in interrogation testimony given by August Häfner. He said he had been ordered by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel to have the children shot. Blobel commanded Sonderkommando 4a, a smaller killing unit which formed part of Einsatzgruppe C. Häfner testified that he had objected, questioning how young soldiers could be ordered to shoot small children, and he suggested that the Ukrainian auxiliary police should carry out the killings instead.
His proposal was accepted. According to Häfner, German soldiers had dug the pit in advance. The children were transported to the execution site on a truck tractor. The Ukrainian auxiliaries stood at the edge of the pit, visibly trembling.
The children were taken from the vehicle, positioned at the edge of the grave, and shot so that they fell directly into it. Häfner recalled the screaming as unimaginable. Some of the children, he stated, were shot four or five times before they died. The executions took place in the late afternoon, around three or four o’clock, on the day following the negotiations with the military command.
With the murder of these children, the killings in Bila Tserkva reached their final and most explicit stage. In total, it is estimated that more than 5,000 Jews were murdered in the town during the German occupation. The Sixth Army provided the logistical support for these killings, as it had from the beginning. Justice came only partially, and slowly, for those involved.
Paul Blobel, who had given the order for the children to be shot, was prosecuted after the war during the Einsatzgruppen trial, one of the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings. Convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he was sentenced to death and executed in 1951. Walter von Reichenau, the field marshal who confirmed the execution with his order to carry it through, never stood trial. In January 1942, he suffered a heart attack on the Eastern Front, followed by a fatal stroke during his emergency transport back to Germany, and he died shortly thereafter.
The Sixth Army, once regarded as the Wehrmacht’s finest field formation, met its own destruction at Stalingrad. Between January 31st and February 2nd, 1943, it surrendered to the Red Army. German losses amounted to 147,200 killed and wounded, and over 91,000 soldiers were captured, including 24 generals and approximately 2,500 officers. Of those taken prisoner, only 5,000 to 6,000 ever returned to Germany after the war.
The rest perished in Soviet captivity, dying slowly from hunger, disease, exhaustion, and exposure in prison camps scattered across the frozen interior of the Soviet Union.
