Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph
The Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph is a prominent depiction of the Holocaust in Ukraine, on the Eastern Front of World War II.
Dated to 1942, it shows a soldier aiming his rifle at a woman who is trying to shield a child with her body, portraying one of numerous genocidal killings carried out against Jews by the Einsatzgruppen within German-occupied Europe.
British photographic historian Janina Struk describes it as "a symbol of the barbarity of the Nazi regime and their industrial-scale murder of six million European Jews.
[2] In 1897, the Russian Empire Census found that there were 442 Jews (out of a population of 3,032) living in Ivanhorod, a village today in the Cherkasy Oblast, central Ukraine.
[5] Poles and Jews were forbidden to own cameras, but the Polish resistance established underground workshops for developing clandestine photographs of Nazi atrocities.
[6]: 78–79 A teenage boy named Jerzy Tomaszewski worked with an underground lab called "Foto-Rys",[9] and he intercepted a photograph with the words "Ukraine 1942, Judenaktion [Jewish Action], Iwangorod [Ivanhorod]" written on the reverse.
[6]: 77 Educator Adam Muller states that while the cropped version highlights "the catastrophic intensity of the mother–child bond", it also removes the surroundings and context from consideration.
Croy claimed that the photograph had been fabricated by Communist authorities in Poland in order to falsely accuse Germany of war crimes; he alleged that the image did not depict a German soldier and that the weapons and uniforms were not authentic.
We have not forgotten, West German publishing house Verlag Kurt Desch [de] had verified the authenticity of the image by writing to Roman Karsk, professor of German literature at the University of Warsaw, and he replied that it was a faithful copy of an image held by the historical archives in Warsaw depicting 1942 mass shootings.
The flat, barren terrain was identical; one of the men bore a strong resemblance to a soldier in the previous photograph; and the words "Ukraine 1942" had been written on the back of the image in the same handwriting.
In 1965, Der Spiegel published a letter from Kurt Vieweg, a former member of a German police battalion stationed in Norway, and he confirmed that the weapons and uniforms matched those used by his unit and those of the Einsatzgruppen.
