The Holy Bible
The Book of Psalms
Psalm 10

By 1938, persecution, violence, and murder broke out across Germany against the Jewish populations, a foretaste of what was to come.

Jewish people who had not fled Nazi Germany by then were rounded up and marched straight off to the Schutzstaffel (SS) concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, after the November 1938 ‘Crystal Night’.

In pre-war Germany, the estimated Jewish population of nearly six hundred thousand people was the largest found in central Europe.

Yet of those who had not fled Germany before the Jewish Holocaust commenced, only around a tenth survived through to the end of the Second World War.

On the outskirts of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, there is a ravine known as Babi Yar.

Over the course of two days, September 29-30, 1941, the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen massacred a staggering 33,771 Jewish civilians in the ravine at Babi Yar. This event is widely regarded as the largest single massacre to take place during the Jewish Holocaust of WWII.

This photograph was likely taken as a trophy image by one of the Nazi perpetrators present at this vile act of inhumane, brutal, and murderous barbarity.

The Einsatzgruppen executioners are shooting innocent Jewish civilians from Kiev in cold blood at the edge of an open trench. The dead bodies of those already murdered lay at the bottom of the trench below.

This innocent Ukrainian Jewish man cuts a saddening, haunting figure as he waits, silent and unresisting, for his own swift death.

This iconic, eternal image was captured in time by one of the Nazis present, as this hapless Jewish man kneels helplessly, poised in his last brief moment of life. The Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen executioner standing over him with his pistol is about to coldly dispatch him with a single shot to the back of the head.

Among onlookers in the background are boys of the Hitler Youth movement, who were no doubt being initiated into the hardened blood-letting that would be required of them in their service to the regime of Hitler’s Germany. Also present are members of the German Security Service, the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst), a particularly murderous and brutal branch of the German SS that played a key pivotal role in the Soviet Jewish holocaust.

This incident apparently took place at the end of a mass execution of Jews outside Vinnitsa in Ukraine in 1941. The image is titled ‘The last Jew in Vinnitsa’, the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album among the belongings of a dead German soldier.

Although this scenario appears horrific in peacetime, yet it is but one of many thousands of such occurrences that were happening on a daily basis at that time in the German-held territories of the then war-torn former Soviet Union.

In total, the brutal and murderous Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) Einsatzgruppen death squads killed more than 1.3 million innocent Jewish people, and two million people in total in the six years that they operated behind German lines across eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1945.

Jewish women peer through the barbed wire from inside a cattle wagon of the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway system (German national railways).

They are ‘resettlement’ deportees: captive Jewish prisoners of the Nazis. They are on a Holocaust train transporting them across Europe to one of the Nazi SS forced labour, concentration, or death camps during the Second World War.

During the war, around four million people, mostly Jews, were cruelly mass transported to the Nazi camps this way.

Crammed inside the locked, fully enclosed, and windowless cattle wagons, eighty to as many as one hundred and thirty persons per wagon, the Jewish deportees did not know where they were going to, how long the horror journey would take, or what would happen to them when they arrived at their destination. The SS usually told the deportees that they were being resettled in labour camps in Ukraine.

Armed guards were present on all of the Holocaust trains, and anyone attempting to escape was shot.

Many Jewish inmates died in the appalling conditions inside the cramped wagons, particularly in winter and the heat of summer. The German wartime railway system was severely overloaded, and delays were frequent. These hold ups made the sufferings of the Jewish inmates being transported much worse.

Penned in, unable to sit down, and without food, water, or decent sanitation, their horror journeys across Nazi Europe in the stinking and unbearable conditions of the boxcars to the Nazi camps could take several days.

Sometimes the wagons would also be held up for a few days at siding spurs, until the deemed more important military transports passed, or at overloaded railway junctions while slow and arduous marshalling operations were carried out, and their death journey resumed.

Jewish families from Hungary disembark from the railway cattle cars that had transported them across Europe to an almost certain death at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland during World War II.

Mass transport of Hungary’s Jewish population of 450,000 to Auschwitz began by rail on the 15th of May, 1944 at a rate of 12,000 people a day, most of whom were sent straight to the gas chambers on their arrival.

In fact, the Hungarian Jewish people shown here were most likely murdered by gassing within two to three hours of this photograph being taken.

In memory of the 1.1 million innocent Jewish people who perished without justifiable cause or reason at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland between 1940 and 1945, and the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Many brutalized, traumatized, and broken-hearted Jewish prisoners in the Nazi SS forced labour, concentration, and death camps who were already severely weakened, sick, and unable to endure any more suffering, ended their own lives by suicide.

Some, unable to keep going any longer, deliberately finished their own lives by getting themselves beaten to death, or shot, or gassed by the Nazi SS guards for attacking a guard, or for non-compliance, direct disobedience, arguing back with a guard, or some other similar misdemeanour.

Others, in a final act borne of sheer despair and utter desperation, even flung themselves on the electrified barbed wire fences of the Nazi SS forced labour, concentration, or death camps. For all of them, death was more merciful than continuing in their agonizing affliction as the brutally mistreated slaves and prisoners of the Nazis.

As such, they were completely dehumanised and treated with absolute cruelty, and every day they were forced to endure the intense suffering inflicted on them by the knowledge of the deaths of all of their own family members, and the total loss of everything they owned. Each day they were mercilessly tortured with grueling slave labour for twelve, fourteen, or even sixteen hours a day, coupled with harsh maltreatment, starvation, frequent beatings, severe exhaustion, disease, murder, and death.

It is impossible to understand or justify the unhinged mentality of the Schutzstaffel (SS) guards, officers, and personnel in their abject psychopathic indifference to the intense suffering of the Jewish prisoners that these montrous people witnessed every day in the Nazi forced labour, concentration, and death camps during the Second World War.

While they all hated, shunned, and despised the Jewish prisoners, many of the Nazi SS personnel, both men and women, regularly practised vicious and abandoned bestial acts of extraordinary cruelty and extreme brutality towards the predominantly Jewish prisoners under their jurisdiction.

A reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz.

It is estimated that 500,000 people, most of whom were Jews, were gassed inside the Crematorium 2 gas chamber at the Auschwitz death camp.

Tragically the Nazis murdered more than six million Jewish people during the six horrendous years that the Second World War raged across the earth.

The Jewish Holocaust was a terrible and major eternal crime: against God, against the Jewish race, and against mankind as a whole, and it also carried severe repercussions.

Many of the pre-war European business leaders, professionals, and intellectuals were themselves Jews. And with the loss of the pre-war Jewish populations, Europe was left without the professional and intellectual human resources vital for sound national economic recovery, management, and growth.

Consequently after the war was over, many nations such as Poland experienced severely impaired economic, social, and cultural recovery from the devastation caused by the Second World War.

That is because without the administrative, financial, cultural, and professional services of the pre-war Jewish populations, most of post-war Europe suffered from a critical shortage of educated and competent professionals in all areas of education, politics, commerce, science, and industry.

In fact, essential infrastructure reconstruction, as well as vital social, cultural, and economic recovery and economic growth were all significantly stiffled in post-war Europe for several decades by the loss of the Jewish sector from European civilization.

Considerable evidence remains of the vast number of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War by the SS Einsatzgruppen death squads, and at the SS forced labour, concentration, and death camps, such as Auschwitz.

The vast array of evidences includes the thousands of suitcases, enormous volumes of human hair, piles of civilian clothing, thousands upon thousands of shoes, tens of thousands of pairs of spectacles, and the Nazi camps themselves, as well as eyewitness accounts of the Einsatzgruppen mass executions.

Photographs, film clips, and footage of reliable, independent eyewitness accounts from hundreds, if not thousands of people who lived through the period when the Jewish Holocaust took place, also abound across the world.

Some who were interviewed for the cameras were themselves former Jewish inmates who had survived the Holocaust; others were former SS or Einsatzgruppen personnel, soldiers from the various armies, or conscripted slave workers who had directly witnessed or been involved in the atrocities and mass murders; while many others who were interviewed reported the loss of the Jewish communities who had previously lived in their villages, towns, and cities before the Nazi invasion and conquest during WWII.