German soldier shoots a woman with a child in her arms, Ivanograd, 1942.
Executions of Kyiv Jews by mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) of the German army near Ivanograd, Ukraine. The executioner appears to be standing over the body of a person already executed. The rifle barrels of other executioners can be seen at the left edge of the photo.
The photo was sent by mail from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted in a Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance who was collecting documents on Nazi war crimes.
The original print was owned by Tadeusz Mazur and Jerzy Tomaszewski and is now housed in the Historical Archives in Warsaw. The original German caption on the back of the photo reads: ” Ukraine 1942, Jewish Action [Operation], Ivanograd.”
This photograph is considered, in the words of British journalist Robert Fisk, “one of the most striking and convincing images of the Nazi Holocaust.” It has been featured in numerous books and at photography exhibitions in Poland and Germany as “valuable and horrific evidence” of “Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe.”
In 1964, at the height of the Cold War, the prominent German weekly newspaper “Der Spiegel” (No. 49/1964) published the photo along with a diatribe naming several disgruntled readers, claiming it was a Russian forgery. The most incriminating evidence, however, came from official German records.
Confronting society with photographic evidence of one’s own war experience is almost as old as photography itself, wrote historian and reporter Janina Struk, who covered this image in her book “Private Pictures: A Soldiers’ Inside View of War.” In extreme situations, “possession of such private images could lead to court-martial,” and yet soldiers continue to take them.
Between 1941 and 1945, approximately 3,000,000 Ukrainians and other non-Jewish victims were killed as part of the Nazi extermination policy, including between 850,000 and 900,000 Jews living in the territory of present-day Ukraine.
Original plans for genocide called for the extermination of 65% of the 23.2 million Ukrainians, with the remaining population to be treated as slaves. Within ten years, the plan actually called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization, or enslavement of most or all Ukrainians.
