August 28, 1941 is not a particularly notable day in the annals of World War II. There was no climatic battle, no turning of the tide, no great surrender, no alliance made or broken.
And yet, it was certainly lethal.
In my very first blog, written almost nine years ago, I quoted Josef Stalin, no naïf when it came to killing, to the effect: ”One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”
Stalin was right: it is almost harder to comprehend mass murder than it is to focus on the death of a single human being. How can we come to grips with the scale of devastation, of heartbreak, of unfulfilled potential, encapsulated in the story of World War II, and particularly of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we must try.
On August 28, 1941, 23,600 Ukrainian Jews were murdered at Kamenets-Podolsk, a city in western Ukraine. Two months earlier, Hungary, Germany’s ally, had declared war on the Soviet Union, and elected to deport all foreign Jews (Poles, Russians, and others) to Ukraine. German civil authorities in the newly conquered region demanded that Hungary take back these deported Jews, which the Hungarian Government refused to do. So, SS General Friedrich Jeckeln took matters into his own hands. According to historian Martin Gilbert:
“Marched to a series of bomb craters outside the city, and ordered to undress, the Jews were then mown down by machine-gun fire. Many of them, gravely wounded, died under the weight of the bodies that fell on top of them, or were ‘finished off’ with pistol shots.”
How does one comprehend 23,600 deaths in a single day, involving unarmed civilians? By comparison, that single day total exceeds the number of deaths, Union and Confederate, incurred in the Battles of Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, Chancellorsville, and Chickamauga, combined.
[Jeckeln would later help orchestrate the massacre at Babi Yar (September 29-20, 1941). He was captured by Soviet troops on April 28, 1945, tried, convicted, and hanged in Riga, Latvia on February 3, 1946.]
And that wasn’t all that happened on August 28, 1941.
Thousands of miles to the north of Ukraine, the Special Task Force (Einzatzgruppen) assigned to Lithuania reported its activity for August 28: 2,076 victims murdered: 710 Jewish men, 767 Jewish women, and 599 Jewish children.
Also on August 28, in Poland, according to Gilbert, Dr. Horst Schumann, director of the euthanasia center at Grafeneck, near Stuttgart, visited Auschwitz concentration camp, where he helped select 575 inmates, primarily Soviet prisoners-of-war, for medical experimentation at the medical center at Sonnenstein, near Dresden. None of those selected survived the ordeal. [Schumann fled Germany after the war, and was only extradited to Germany from Ghana in 1966. Tried in 1972, he was soon released from prison on account of ill health. Nevertheless, he lived for another 11 years, dying on May 5, 1983.]
Finally, on August 28, 1941, back in Germany itself, Pastor Bernard Lichtenburg, pastor of Berlin’s St. Hedwig’s Catholic Church, wrote to Dr. Leonardo Conti, Chief Physician of the Reich regarding Aktion T-4, the involuntary euthanasia program in Germany :
“I, as a human being, a Christian, a priest and a German, demand of you, the Chief Physician of the Reich, that you answer for the crimes that have been perpetrated at your bidding and with your consent, and which will call forth the vengeance of the Lord on the heads of the German people.”
For his troubles, Lichtenburg was arrested only two months later, October 23, 1941 and died November 5, 1943 while being transferred to Dachau concentration camp. It is estimated that perhaps as many as 300,000 adults and children were murdered under the auspices of Aktion T-4. [Conti was arrested by British forces on May 19, 1945; he died by suicide in his cell on October 6, 1945. Lichtenburg was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1996 and recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2004.]
All this in a single day.
Never forget.
