Hermann Friedrich Graebe

Herman Friedrich Graebe or Gräbe (19 June 1900 – 17 April 1986) was a German manager and engineer in charge of a German building firm in Ukraine, who witnessed mass executions of the Jews of Dubno on 5 October 1942 by Nazis and in the ghetto of Rovno on 13 July 1942.

The people who had got off the trucks - men, women and children of all ages - had to undress upon the order of an SS man who carried a riding or dog whip.

I watched a family of about eight persons, a man and a woman both of about fifty, with their children of about twenty to twenty-four, and two grown-up daughters about twenty-eight or twenty-nine.

An old woman with snow white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it.

I well remember a girl, slim with black hair, who, as she passed me, pointed to herself and said, "twenty-three years old."

They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice.

To escape the hostility, Graebe moved his family to San Francisco in 1948, where he lived until his death in 1986.

[1] Another witness of the mass executions of October 1942 in Dubno was the German officer Axel von dem Bussche who, traumatised by what he had seen, in 1943 joined the German resistance around Claus von Stauffenberg and unsuccessfully tried to kill Adolf Hitler in a suicide attack in November 1943.