Narrator: Marchand Steenkamp.
About the story: In August 1941, the German Sixth Army seized the town of Bila Tserkva in Ukraine. What followed was one of the most disturbing massacres of the early Holocaust. As Einsatzgruppe C moved in behind the Wehrmacht, its members – alongside local collaborators – began systematically murdering the town’s Jewish population. Over just a few days, thousands of men, women, and children were rounded up, shot, and dumped into mass graves. But the most horrifying moment came after the adults were gone: nearly 90 Jewish children, some just infants, were left behind crying in a school building. German chaplains reported the children’s condition – starving, crying, and covered in filth – but their pleas to save them were overruled by Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau. The children were dragged to pre-dug pits and shot by trembling Ukrainian auxiliaries. According to SS officer August Häfner, who witnessed the massacre, the children’s screams were “unimaginable,” and some had to be shot multiple times before they died. The massacre was supported logistically by the German army, and the killings were carried out under the direct command of Einsatzkommando officers. While not all perpetrators were brought to justice, Paul Blobel, who ordered the children’s execution, was later tried at Nuremberg and hanged in 1951. Others, like von Reichenau, died before facing trial. Helmuth Groscurth, a Wehrmacht officer who tried to stop the killings, would later perish in Soviet captivity at Stalingrad. The massacre at Bila Tserkva illustrates the systematic brutality of Nazi occupation, the complicity of the Wehrmacht, and the ultimate cost of human indifference. It is a haunting chapter of the Holocaust in Ukraine, a story of atrocity, silence, and the murder of the most innocent.
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