Documentaries about the Shoah are always harrowing, but Channel 4’s Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero is unbearable to watch. Filmed by the Nazis themselves, footage reveals the true horror of what they did to our people. It outlines the beginning of the murder Europe’s Jews under Hitler, a plan that would eventually lead to the industrialised murder of millions of men, women and children in the death camps.
The programme begins with a slightly rushed history lesson, setting the scene for Germany’s 1941 Operation Barbarossa invasion of USSR. Ukraine’s location, sitting as it does at a crucial junction between Western Europe and the East, has precipitated many conflicts including, of course, its current invasion. Land has repeatedly passed back and forth between the powers of the day, the borders in flux as the area was fought over. The other historical constant of this area has been the Jews. Along with antisemitism.
So it was that when Hitler took the rest of Poland from Stalin, many Ukranian nationalists welcome the Wehrmacht as liberators. You can see them in the footage cheering their arrival. They also shared the Nazis’ hatred of Jews. This wasn’t Denmark trying to keep the prosecution at bay, but a local population happy to help Nazis escalate their Final Solution. Some of the most brutal footage is off terrified stripped men and women in the street being beaten by the Nazis with locals enthusiastically joining in.
A series of eminent historians from across the world talk us through the images, parsing the beatings, the shootings, the naked corpses lying head to tail in the ravine at Babyn Yar where 33,700 Jews were murdered in two days. SS commander Friedrich Jeckeln invented “sardine packing: people were forced to lie down in the mass grave head to tail and shot, layer by layer.
We see close-up photographs of Jews in line awaiting their execution, of terrified people with guns aimed at their necks. Two survivors also bravely tell their stories: Janine Webber saw her little brother buried alive; Bella Chernovets recalls being shot at by a German plane as she fled east in a cattle car.
As you watch the evidence, the film and stills taken by the perpetrators feels astonishing until you remember, and are reminded by American historian Wendy Lower, that they documented their violence because they were emboldened by their sense of righteousness. They felt on the right side of the history.
As the months crept by, the death squads got busier. What began with Jewish men of military age, went on to include women, and then Jewish children. We aren’t shown images of the murder of 90 children, and orphans, in Bila Tserkva forest.
One in four Jews who died in the Holocaust were from Ukraine. Apart from a few clumsy attempts to link those events to what’s happening today, this documentary tells their story.
In the words of Ian Rich of the Wiener Holocaust Library: “These were ordinary people,” he says of the perpetrators. “It is little comfort to think these were extraordinary circumstances they were placed in. Someone has to create those situations, people have to work the machinery of destruction, and a lot of individual decisions were made about life and death.”
Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero
Channel 4
★★★★✩
