Possibly the Saddest War Image Ever Made

Possibly the saddest war image ever made. Ukraine on 16th October, 1941 when Einsatzgrupen Squad 4a killed all the Jewish men,women and children in the village by shooting them at close range. Within One hour after this photograph was taken, all men, women and children depicted in the photograph were dead.

The most notorious and the best documented of these massacres took place on September 29–30, 1941, where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation. The decision to kill all the Jews in Kiev was made by the military governor, Major-General Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch.Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of a series of massacres carried out by German forces and local collaborators during their campaign against the Soviet Union.

It was carried out by Sonderkommando 4a soldiers, along with the aid of the SD and SS Police Battalions backed by the local police. The massacre was the largest single mass killing for which the Nazi regime and its collaborators were responsible during its campaign against the Soviet Union and is considered to be “the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust” to that particular date, surpassed only by the Aktion Erntefest of November 1943 in occupied Poland with 42,000–43,000 victims, and the 1941 Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews in October 1941, committed by the Romanian troops. Estimates of the total number of Jews killed at Babi Yar are between 100,000 and 150,000.

Victims of other massacres at the site included thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, communists, gypsies, Ukrainian nationalists and civilian hostages.[6] It is estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 lives were taken at Babi Yar during the German occupation.

 

 

Jerry Nelson is an American freelance photojournalist and documentary photographer. He combines his passion for social justice with his passion for photography. The stories he has produced have been seen by millions around the globe. His dream is to visit Ukraine before the end of 2014 and do a photo essay on the children caught up in the present conflict. A project of this magnitude is expensive. Please share this post with family and friends, maybe someone will see and care enough to underwrite part of the project. Contact Jerry today.