...On Sunday, the 22nd of June 1941 started Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
The 3,000 personnel of four Einsatzgruppen were sent to the Eastern Front and Blobel became the commanding officer of the Sonderkommando 4A which was assigned to the Einsatzgruppe C which was under the control of Otto Rasch.
On the 10th or 11th of August 1941, Friedrich Jeckeln the Higher SS and Police Leader of Southern Russia, ordered Blobel, on behalf of Adolf Hitler, to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Bila Tserkva, Soviet Ukraine.
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.
On the 29th and 30th of September 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries, under the guidance of the members of Einsatzgruppe C, ordered the Jews to assemble the next morning for resettlement. According to reports sent to the Einsatzgruppen 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 was Dina Pronicheva.
In June 1942 Blobel was assigned with a secret task to excavate and destroy evidence of Nazi mass murder throughout the German-occupied east. The order was only given verbally as any written correspondence had been prohibited.
This top-secret Nazi operation was called “Special Action 1005” and Sonderkommandos made up of Jewish and Soviet prisoners of war were forced to unearth and burn the bodies of Jews and other victims who had been shot or murdered earlier in the war. The Sonderkommando prisoners were often put in chains to prevent them from escaping.
Special Action 1005 officially began at the Sobibor killing center and continued until 1944.
The project was carried out at other killing centers, including the other Operation Reinhard camps Belzec and Treblinka, as well as at Chelmno.
Auschwitz had onsite crematoria, so the services of Sonderkommando 1005 were not needed there. The operation also returned to the scenes of earlier Einsatzgruppen killings, including the scenes of major massacre sites, such as Babi Yar.
After the end of the war, Paul Blobel was then finally to face justice and pay for his crimes. During the Einsatzgruppen trial which started on the 29th of September 1947, Blobel was one of the main defendants.
On the 10th of April 1948 the tribunal found Paul Blobel guilty on all three charges and sentenced him to death by hanging.
The 3,000 personnel of four Einsatzgruppen were sent to the Eastern Front and Blobel became the commanding officer of the Sonderkommando 4A which was assigned to the Einsatzgruppe C which was under the control of Otto Rasch.
On the 10th or 11th of August 1941, Friedrich Jeckeln the Higher SS and Police Leader of Southern Russia, ordered Blobel, on behalf of Adolf Hitler, to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Bila Tserkva, Soviet Ukraine.
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.
On the 29th and 30th of September 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries, under the guidance of the members of Einsatzgruppe C, ordered the Jews to assemble the next morning for resettlement. According to reports sent to the Einsatzgruppen 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 was Dina Pronicheva.
In June 1942 Blobel was assigned with a secret task to excavate and destroy evidence of Nazi mass murder throughout the German-occupied east. The order was only given verbally as any written correspondence had been prohibited.
This top-secret Nazi operation was called “Special Action 1005” and Sonderkommandos made up of Jewish and Soviet prisoners of war were forced to unearth and burn the bodies of Jews and other victims who had been shot or murdered earlier in the war. The Sonderkommando prisoners were often put in chains to prevent them from escaping.
Special Action 1005 officially began at the Sobibor killing center and continued until 1944.
The project was carried out at other killing centers, including the other Operation Reinhard camps Belzec and Treblinka, as well as at Chelmno.
Auschwitz had onsite crematoria, so the services of Sonderkommando 1005 were not needed there. The operation also returned to the scenes of earlier Einsatzgruppen killings, including the scenes of major massacre sites, such as Babi Yar.
After the end of the war, Paul Blobel was then finally to face justice and pay for his crimes. During the Einsatzgruppen trial which started on the 29th of September 1947, Blobel was one of the main defendants.
On the 10th of April 1948 the tribunal found Paul Blobel guilty on all three charges and sentenced him to death by hanging.
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LearningTranscript
00:00The First of September, 1939.
00:09Nazi Germany invades Poland, and the German army is followed by the Einsatzgruppen, which
00:14are Nazi mobile death squads, sent to Poland to kill the civilians, mostly the Polish intelligentsia
00:20such as teachers, priests, physicians, and other prominent members of Polish society.
00:27After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, these paramilitary death squads,
00:32working with units of the German armed forces and local collaborators, will conduct mass
00:36shooting operations targeting mostly Jews, Romani, Soviet officials, and other people
00:42with disabilities.
00:44From 1941 to 1945, while operating behind the front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe,
00:50the Einsatzgruppen will murder around two million innocent men, women, and children, accounting
00:56for one-third of all Jewish Holocaust victims.
00:59One of the main perpetrators of these atrocities is Paul Blaubell.
01:05Paul Blaubell was born on the 13th of August 1894 in Potsdam, then part of the German Empire.
01:12He served as an apprentice with a mason and carpenter, and between 1912 to 1913, Blaubell
01:18studied architecture at university.
01:21Before the outbreak of the First World War, on the 28th of July 1914, he worked as a carpenter.
01:27During the war, Paul Blaubell served as an engineer at the front, and by the end of the
01:31war he was a staff sergeant and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class.
01:36The war ended on the 11th of November 1918, when the German leaders signed the armistice
01:41in the Compiègne forest in France.
01:45After the war, Blaubell studied architecture and in 1921 he got married.
01:50The marriage produced two sons.
01:52In 1924 he set up his own business as an architect.
01:57On the 24th of October 1929, the stock market crash marked the beginning of the Great Depression
02:02in the United States, which soon spread across the globe.
02:06Due to deteriorating economic conditions in Germany, Blaubell had no more orders and was
02:11registered as unemployed for the next four years.
02:14The Great Depression also played a role in the emergence of Adolf Hitler, the leader
02:18of the Nazi Party, which Blaubell joined on the 1st of December 1931.
02:23In January 1932 he joined the SS.
02:27While the Great Depression and German economic conditions were not solely responsible for
02:31bringing Hitler to power, they helped to create an environment in which he gained support,
02:36and on the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the
02:42German President, Paul von Hindenburg.
02:45From 1933 to spring 1935, Blaubell worked as a simple clerk in the city administration
02:51of Solingen, where he also lived.
02:55In June 1935 he joined the SS Security Service, SD, which was the intelligence agency of the
03:01Nazi Party and was considered a sister organization of the Gestapo, which was the official secret
03:06police of Nazi Germany.
03:09Over the course of the Nazi era, the SD took an increasingly prominent role in Nazi anti-Jewish
03:14policies.
03:16Blaubell quickly made a career in the SD, becoming its section leader in Dusseldorf.
03:22On the 9th and 10th of November 1938, the Nazi leaders unleashed a series of coordinated
03:27violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories.
03:33The Nazi SA and German civilians not only ransacked Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues,
03:39hospitals and schools, but the German SS and police sent almost 30,000 Jewish males
03:44to concentration camps, primarily Dachau.
03:48This event came to be called Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, because of the
03:53shattered glass that littered the streets after the vandalism and destruction of Jewish-owned
03:57businesses, synagogues and homes.
04:00During the pogroms, Blaubell coordinated the securing of materials from destroyed synagogues
04:05in Solingen, Wuppertal and Ramscheid.
04:10The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
04:16On the 27th of the same month, Heinrich Himmler established a new agency, Reich Security Main
04:21Office, which formalized the relationship between the intelligence service, the SD,
04:26and the security police which consisted of the Gestapo and the Kripo, which was a criminal
04:30police.
04:32This new agency, led by Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, was an ideologically radical
04:37and brutal institution responsible for coordinating and perpetrating many aspects of the Holocaust.
04:44On Sunday, the 22nd of June 1941 started Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet
04:51Union.
04:52The 3,000 personnel of four Einsatzgruppen were sent to the Eastern Front and Blaubell
04:57became the commanding officer of the Sonderkommando 4A, which was assigned to the Einsatzgruppe
05:02C, which was under the control of Otto Rasch.
05:06The Einsatzgruppe C was attached to the Army Group South at Kiev.
05:09Their objective was to kill the Jews and Gypsies, as well as the Soviet political commissars.
05:15In late summer 1941, Himmler assembled the leaders of the men of the Einsatzkommandos
05:21and repeated to them the order to kill all reported Jews and Romani, as well as the Soviet
05:25political commissars, and pointed out that neither the leaders nor the men who were taking
05:30part in the liquidation bore any personal responsibility for the execution of this order.
05:35Their responsibility was his and the Fuhrer's alone.
05:38Women and children were to be shot as well, in order to not have any avengers remain.
05:44On the 10th or 11th of August 1941, Friedrich Jekyll, the higher SS and police leader of
05:50southern Russia, ordered Blaubell, on behalf of Adolf Hitler, to exterminate the entire
05:54Jewish population of Byelorossiya, Soviet Ukraine.
05:59On the 22nd of August 1941, with the consent of the Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau,
06:05a commander of the Army Group South, and an avowed Nazi, Blaubell's Sonderkommando 4A
06:10of Einsatzgruppe C and Ukrainian auxiliary policemen murdered between four and five thousand
06:16Jews.
06:17Wehrmacht chaplains tried to prevent the killings of ninety Jewish children, who were then left
06:21behind in an abandoned building, but they had to be executed separately a few days later.
06:27The children were hit four or five times before they died.
06:31The heart-wrenching wailing made by the children as they died was indescribable.
06:37On the 19th of September 1941, German forces entered the city of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
06:44Along with a large part of German-occupied Ukraine, the city was incorporated into the
06:49Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which had been established on the 1st of September with Erich
06:53Koch as administrator.
06:56Before the German invasion, some 160,000 Jews resided in Kiev, which was approximately
07:01twenty percent of the total population of the city.
07:04Following the start of Operation Barbarossa, in June 1941, approximately 100,000 Jews fled
07:10the capital or were already serving in the Soviet military.
07:14By the time the Germans occupied Kiev, there were about 60,000 Jews remaining in the city.
07:19Most of those who remained were women, children, the elderly, those who were ill or those who
07:25had been unable or unwilling to flee earlier.
07:28During the first week of the German occupation of Kiev, there were two major explosions.
07:33These explosions not only destroyed the German headquarters and areas around the main street
07:37of the city centre, but also killed a large number of German soldiers and officials.
07:42Though the explosions were caused by mines left by retreating Soviet soldiers and officials,
07:47the Germans used the sabotage as a pretext to murder those Jews who still remained in
07:51Kiev.
07:53On the 29th and 30th of September, 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries,
07:59under the guidance of the members of the Einsatzgruppe C, murdered a significant number of the Jewish
08:03population who remained in Kiev.
08:06This massacre, which belongs to one of the many mass shootings perpetrated by the Nazi
08:11Germans, beginning in 1941, occurred at the ravine called Babi Yar or Babinyar, which
08:16at the time was located just outside the city.
08:19On the 28th of September, the Jews were ordered to assemble the next morning for resettlement.
08:25Although only a participation of approximately 5,000 to 6,000 Jews had been expected at first,
08:29more than 30,000 Jews arrived, who until the very moment of their execution, still believed
08:34that they would be resettled, thanks to extremely clever organization.
08:38They were made to march to the ravine.
08:41As they reached the site, they were forced to surrender any valuables.
08:44They were then made to take off their clothes and move towards the edge of the ravine in
08:48groups of ten.
08:50As they reached the edge, they were shot by Blobelsonderkommando 4A.
08:55German and Ukrainian police participated in the killing as well.
08:59At the end of the day, the bodies were covered with a thin layer of dirt.
09:03According to reports sent to the Einsatzgruppen headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were massacred
09:10during this two-day period and it was one of the largest mass killings at any single
09:14location during World War II.
09:17At least 29 survivors are known.
09:20One of them is Dina Pronicheva, who was one of those ordered to march to the ravine to
09:24be forced to undress and then to be shot.
09:28In one of her written post-war testimonies, Pronicheva described what she saw at Babi
09:32Yar.
09:33''Each time I saw a new group of men, women, elderly people and children being forced to
09:39take off their clothes.
09:40All of them were being taken to an open pit, where submachine gunners shot them.
09:45Then another group was brought.
09:47With my own eyes I saw this horror.
09:50Although I was not standing close to the pit, terrible cries of panic-stricken people and
09:54quiet children's voices calling ''Mother, Mother'' reached me.''
10:00Jumping before being shot and falling on other bodies, Pronicheva survived by playing dead
10:05in a pile of corpses.
10:07However, the killings at Babi Yar continued.
10:11Over the next few months, thousands more were murdered there, including Jews, gypsies and
10:16Soviet prisoners of war.
10:18Those who attempted to hide were turned over to the Germans by the Ukrainians.
10:23In all, some 100,000 people, Jews and non-Jews, were killed at Babi Yar.
10:29By January 1942, Blobel's Order of Commando 4A had murdered around 60,000 people, including
10:35more than 30,000 Jews massacred during the two-day period at Babi Yar.
10:40In January 1942, officially because of unspecified health problems that hid his alcoholism, Paul
10:46Blobel was removed from the post of chief of the Sonderkommando 4A and was transferred
10:51to Berlin.
10:52In June 1942, Blobel was assigned with a secret task to excavate and destroy evidence of Nazi
10:59mass murder throughout the German-occupied East.
11:02The order was only given verbally, as any written correspondence had been prohibited.
11:08Blobel travelled to the occupied Eastern Territories, with his official cover being
11:11deputy of Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo.
11:16This top-secret Nazi operation was called Special Action 1005, and Sonderkommandos made
11:22up of Jewish and Soviet prisoners of war were forced to unearth and burn the bodies of Jews
11:27and other victims who had been shot or murdered earlier in the war.
11:31The Sonderkommando prisoners were often put in chains to prevent them from escaping.
11:36Special Action 1005 officially began at the Sobibor Killing Centre and continued until
11:411944.
11:43The project was carried out at other killing centres, including the Operation Reinhardt
11:48Camps, Belzec and Treblinka, as well as at Chalmno.
11:51Auschwitz had on-site crematoria, so the services of the Sonderkommando 1005 were not needed
11:57there.
11:58The operation also returned to the scenes of earlier Einsatzgruppen killings, including
12:02the scenes of major massacre sites such as Babi Yar.
12:06In July 1943, with the Red Army approaching Kiev, the Germans embarked on a cover-up operation
12:12to conceal what had been happening at Babi Yar.
12:14Paul Blaubell supervised this action.
12:17For this operation, the Germans used prisoners who were being held at the Sirec Concentration
12:21Camp, located close to the Babi Yar ravine.
12:24The Sirec Camp, established by the Germans in May 1942, served to intern the Soviet prisoners
12:30of war, partisans and Jews who had survived the mass actions of late September 1941.
12:37To cover up the mass shootings at Babi Yar, the Germans ordered 321 prisoners from Sirec
12:43to dig up the mass graves and burn the remains of the victims.
12:46The bodies were exhumed, burned and the ashes scattered over farmland in the vicinity.
12:52Blaubell developed efficient disposal techniques such as alternating layers of bodies with
12:57firewood on a frame of iron rails.
12:59Eighteen inmates who escaped into hiding testified about these crimes to the Soviet authorities
13:04in November 1943.
13:07After the end of the war, Paul Blaubell was then finally to face justice and pay for his
13:12crimes.
13:13During the Einsatzgruppen trial, which started on the 29th of September, 1947, Blaubell was
13:19one of the main defendants.
13:21He was charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes and membership in a criminal organization.
13:27Specifically, he was accused of murdering 60,000 people under his responsibility between
13:32June 1941 and January 1942.
13:36In his defence, Blaubell argued that the number reported was too high and the Sonderkommando
13:404A under his leadership shot not 60,000 but a maximum of 10 to 15,000 people.
13:47In addition, Blaubell stated further that all his shootings were done in accordance
13:51with international law.
13:53He testified,
13:54Executions of agents, partisans, saboteurs, suspicious people indulging in espionage and
14:00sabotage and those who were of a detrimental effect to the German army were in my opinion
14:04completely in accordance with the Hague Convention.
14:07To the question of whether he believed that the killing of 1,160 Jews in retaliation for
14:13the killing of ten German soldiers was justified, his words follow,
14:17116 Jews for one German?
14:20I don't know.
14:21I am not a militarist, you see.
14:24One can only judge it from one's own human ideas.
14:27If they are enemies, and if they are equal enemies, the question would have to be discussed
14:31whether 1 to 116 is a justified ratio of retaliation.
14:37On the 10th of April, 1948, the tribunal found Paul Blaubell guilty on all three charges
14:43and sentenced him to death by hanging.
14:47Blaubell was 56 years old when he was executed on the 7th of June, 1951.
14:53His last words were,
14:55Whatever I have done, I did as a soldier who obeyed orders.
14:58I have committed no crime.
15:00I will be vindicated by God and history.
15:04God have mercy on those who murder me.
15:06I die in the faith of my people.
15:08May the German people be aware of its enemies.
15:13There were no tears shed for Paul Blaubell.