The 1st of September 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland, and the German Army is followed by the
Einsatzgruppen which are Nazi mobile death squads sent to Poland to kill the civilians,
mostly the Polish intelligentsia such as teachers, priests, physicians,
and other prominent members of Polish society. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union
in June 1941, these paramilitary death squads working with units of the German armed forces and
local collaborators, will conduct mass shooting operations targeting mostly Jews, Romani, Soviet
officials, and other people with disabilities. From 1941 to 1945, while operating behind the
front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, the Einsatzgruppen will murder
around 2 million innocent men, women and children accounting for one third of all Jewish Holocaust
victims. One of the main perpetrators of these atrocities is Friedrich Jeckeln.
Friedrich August Jeckeln was born on the 2nd of February 1895 in Hornberg, then part of the German
Empire. Upon the outbreak of World War I on the 28th of July 1914, Jeckeln served on the western
front first as an artillery officer and then as a pilot trainee but in 1916 he was badly wounded.
Following Germany’s defeat, he was discharged from the army and worked on a farm in the Free
City of Danzig. He married Charlotte Hirsch, a daughter of the farm’s owner and had 3 children
together but he filed for divorce in 1927 because of Charlotte father’s alleged Jewish background.
By this time Friedrich Jeckeln was a fanatical antisemite and
anti-communist. In 1929 he joined the Nazi party and one year later he joined the SS.
The SS – Schutzstaffel or Protection Squads - was originally established in April 1925 to protect
Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders and speakers and provide security for political meetings.
SS members were subject to strict military discipline and swore an oath of complete
loyalty to Hitler and those appointed by him. In January 1929 Heinrich Himmler became the
head of the SS and the organization greatly expanded in size and strength. By the time
Hitler came into power in 1933, Himmler had made the SS the dominant organization within
the Reich. From the beginning of the Nazi regime, Hitler entrusted the SS first and
foremost with the removal and eventual murder of political and so-called racial
enemies of the regime. The SS became a virtual state within a state in Nazi Germany and was
staffed by men who perceived themselves as the “racial elite” of the Nazi future.
From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for “solving” the so-called Jewish Question which
then culminated in 1941, when the leadership planned, coordinated and directed the so-called
Final Solution. This “solution” was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.; also
known as the Holocaust. SS officers were directly responsible for the management
of concentration camps, where millions of Jews were murdered by poison gas.
Jeckeln, from 1933 a member of the Reichstag - the German parliament, was known to be ruthless,
brutal, self-indulgent and hard. He relentlessly pursued political opponents,
especially communists, social democrats and the unions, and was primarily responsible for the
murders of eleven communists and labor organizers in German Rieseberg on 4th of July 1933.
These murders were carried out by SS members with extraordinary brutality.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
Nazi Germany possessed overwhelming military superiority over Poland. Germany launched the
unprovoked attack at dawn on the 1st of September with an advance force consisting of more than
2,000 tanks supported by nearly 900 bombers and over 400 fighter planes. In all, Germany deployed
60 divisions and nearly 1.5 million men in the invasion. The assault on Poland demonstrated
Germany’s ability to combine air power and armor in a new kind of mobile warfare. The world adopted
a new term to describe Germany’s successful war tactic: Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.”
Poland found itself fighting a two front war when the Soviet Union invaded from the east on
the 17th of September, sealing Poland’s fate. The Polish government fled the country that same day.
The last operational Polish unit surrendered on the 6th of October. After Poland’s defeat in early
October 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided the country in accordance with a secret
protocol to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. After the outbreak of war, Jeckeln was called up
to active duty in the Waffen-SS and served as an officer in the SS panzer division. The Panzer tank
divisions were vital to the German army's early success. In the strategies of the Blitzkrieg,
the Wehrmacht combined the mobility of light tanks with airborne assault to quickly progress through
weak enemy lines, which enabled the German army to take over Poland and later France.
These tanks were used to break through enemy lines, isolating regiments from the main force
so that the infantry behind the tanks could quickly kill or capture the enemy troops.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, which was code-named
Operation Barbarossa, deliberately breaking the nonaggression pact that the two countries
had signed two years before. The primary goal of Operation Barbarossa was to conquer the Soviet
Union, eliminate Soviet military capabilities, and acquire Lebensraum meaning living space for
the German population. From the Nazis’ point of view Operation Barbarossa was supposed to
be fought as a racial war against the Jewish and Slavic races. German military officers believed
they were not just officers but also leaders in a racial struggle against Jewish Bolshevism.
German soldiers were advised by their generals to smash Russia into rubble and this should have
been carried out with unprecedented harshness. Right after Germany attacked the Soviet Union,
Jeckeln’s front line service was terminated, and he was transferred by Heinrich Himmler to serve
as Higher SS and Police Leader of Southern Russia. In this role Jeckeln assumed control
of all SS-Einsatzgruppen mass killings and security operations in his district.
Shortly after Nazi Germany's ally Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union on June 27, 1941,
it was decided that the Jews living in Hungary who could not document their Hungarian citizenship
would be deported. Many Jewish communities, especially in the Transcarpathian Ukraine,
then under Hungarian control, were deported in their entirety. The Hungarians loaded Jews into
freight cars and took them to Korosmezo, near the prewar Hungarian-Polish border,
where they were transferred across the former Soviet border and handed over to the Germans.
By August 10, 1941, approximately 14,000 Jews had been deported from Hungary to German-controlled
territory. The Hungarian authorities transferred another 4,000 Jews later in the month. These Jews
were then taken to a hastily prepared ghetto in Kamenets-Podolsk, a city in the western Ukraine,
already occupied by Germany. At first the Nazis did not know what to do with all the
Jews because the ghetto was lacking basic sanitary services and a solution needed to
be found quickly. The solution came in the form of Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln,
who arrived in Kamenets-Podolsk on August 26, 1941, to personally conduct the coming Action.
The systematic killing of Hungarian Jewish deportees along with local Jews began on
August 27, one day after his arrival. In late August, a Hungarian transport
unit passed through Kamenets-Podolsk and a truck driver named Gyula Spitz saw what was happening.
Spitz acted quickly: Positioning his camera so that it was half-hidden behind the steering wheel,
he snapped a handful of photographs of the refugees on their final march. The Jews were
taken in groups to the outskirts of the city and executed. The victims were forced to undress,
and then were systematically shot, their bodies falling into the pits. Over the
course of just two days, the Germans and their proxies killed some 23,600 Jews,
which happened to be the first mass killing of the Holocaust to reach five digits. For
Friedrich Jeckeln, however, the massacre at Kamianets-Podilskyi was just the beginning.
On the 19th of September 1941, German forces entered the city of Kyiv,
the capital of Ukraine. Along with a large part of German-occupied Ukraine, the city
was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine which had been established on the 1st
of September with Erich Koch as administrator. Before the German invasion, some 160,000
Jews resided in Kyiv which was approximately 20 percent of the total population of the
capital. Following the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, approximately 100,000
Jews fled the city or were already serving in the Soviet military. By the time the Germans occupied
Kyiv, there were about 60,000 Jews remaining in the city. Those who remained were mostly women,
children, the elderly, those who were ill or those who had been unable or unwilling to flee earlier.
Between 20 and 28 September, explosives planted by the Soviet secret police - the NKVD - caused
extensive damage in the city. These explosions not only destroyed the German headquarters and areas
around the main street of the city center but also killed many German soldiers and officials.
The Germans used the sabotage as a pretext to murder those Jews who remained in Kyiv.
On the 28th of September, the Jews were ordered to assemble the next morning for resettlement.
Although only a participation of approximately 5-6,000 Jews had been expected at first,
more than 30,000 Jews arrived who, until the very moment of their execution,
still believed that they would be resettled, thanks to extremely clever organization.
They were made to march to a ravine called Babi Yar or Babyn Yar which at the time,
was located just outside the city. According to the testimony of a truck driver named Hofer,
victims were ordered to undress and were beaten if they resisted: '’I watched what happened when
the Jews—men, women and children—arrived. Auxiliary police led them past several
different places where one after the other they had to give up their luggage, then their coats,
shoes and underwear. They also had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There
was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly
and anyone who hesitated was kicked or pushed by the police to keep them moving. Once undressed,
they were led to the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15
meters deep. When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the SS and
made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot. The corpses were literally in layers.
A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun. I saw these
marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other. The marksman would walk
across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile laid down, and shoot him’’.
In the evening, the Germans undermined the wall of the ravine and buried the people under the thick
layers of earth. The money, valuables, underwear, and clothing of the murdered were turned over
to the local ethnic Germans and to the Nazi administration of the city. Wounded victims
were buried alive in the ravine along with the rest of the bodies. According to reports sent
to the SS headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were massacred during this two-day period and
it was one of the largest mass killings at a single location during World War II.
At least 29 survivors are known. One of them is Dina Pronicheva, who was one of those ordered to
march to the ravine, to be forced to undress and then to be shot. In one of her written postwar
testimonies Pronicheva described what she saw at Babi Yar: “Each time I saw a new group of men,
women, elderly people, and children being forced to take off their clothes, all of them were being
taken to an open pit where submachine-gunners shot them. Then another group was brought…. With
my own eyes I saw this horror. Although I was not standing close to the pit, terrible cries
of panic-stricken people and quiet children’s voices calling “Mother, mother…” reached me”.
Jumping before being shot and falling on other bodies,
Pronicheva survived by playing dead in a pile of corpses.
However, the killings at Babi Yar continued. Over the next few months, thousands more were
murdered there, including Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet prisoners of war. Those who attempted
to hide were turned over to the Germans by the Ukrainians. In all, some 100,000 people,
Jews and non-Jews, were killed at Babi Yar. Friedrich Jecklen, who organized the massacre,
was the first one to brag to Heinrich Himmler about the results of the 'successful' operation.
On November 5, 1941, Jeckeln's crew of about 50 killers and supporting personnel arrived in Riga,
the capital of German-occupied Latvia. Himmler wanted to eliminate the Latvian Jews in Riga
so that Jews from Germany and Austria could be deported to a ghetto located southeast
of the city and housed in their place. Himmler told Jeckeln to kill the entire
Riga ghetto and Jecklen himself chose the Rumbula forest, located about 15 kilometers
southeast of Riga, where the massacre was about to happen. On November 30, 1941, around
25,000 Jews were roused by the Security Police out of their houses in the ghetto and then
organized into columns of 1000 people. The killing would be done according to
the ''Jeckeln system'' or sardine packing, as Jecklen proudly called it. The killing method
had already been applied during the previous massacres in Ukraine. It basically meant that
the Jewish population was assembled, marched several kilometers to the killing fields,
stripped of their clothing and valuables and forced to lie down on the floor of the trench
to be shot. It's estimated that between 25,000 to 27,000 Jews were killed during the Rumbula
massacre. Only a small number of individuals managed to escape or hide, with most perishing
in the forest. It was reported that even some of the experienced Einsatzgruppen killers claimed to
have been horrified by its cruelty. In order to address the concerns of the horrified SS
soldiers future mass murders of Jews were carried out in gas chambers rather than by shooting.
The Soviet victory at Stalingrad, on February 2, 1943, was a major turning point in the war. It was
the first decisive defeat for the German army and signaled the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany.
2 years later in April 1945, during the battle of Berlin, the Red Army launched a massive
assault on the German capital, resulting in the capture of the city by Soviet troops.
The fall of Berlin and the subsequent suicide of Adolf Hitler were symbolic events that indicated
the imminent collapse of Nazi Germany and meant justice would be served to many Nazi
criminals . Friedrich Jeckeln, who was the General of the Waffen-SS and Police from July 1944,
was one of them. He was captured by Soviet troops near Halbe in Germany, on 28 April 1945.
Between 26 January - 3 February 1946, along with other Nazis who served in the
Riga military district, Jeckeln was tried before a Soviet military tribunal in Riga.
During the investigation, he was calm, answering questions from the investigators
and agreed to bear full responsibility for his activities resulting in deaths of over 100,000
Jews and others designated by the Nazis as "undesirables."
During his concluding speech, Jeckeln,
who looked dull and impartial in the dock, said the following:
“I have to take full responsibility for what happened in the borders of Ostland, within SS,
SD and the Gestapo. This greatly increases my guilt. My fate is in the hands of the High Court,
and so I ask only to pay attention to mitigating circumstances. I will accept
a sentence in full repentance which I will consider as worthy punishment.”
On the 3 February 1946, one day after his 51st birthday,
the tribunal found Friedrich Jeckeln guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging.
His execution was held publicly on the same day and became a theater of horror. More than 4000
people, gathered in the Riga Victory Square to witness the execution of the
man who was personally responsible for ordering and organising the deaths of
over 100,000 innocent men, women and children. There were no tears shed for Friedrich Jeckeln.
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