Holocaust victim

Once the German army was defeated at Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943, Nazi commanders realized that Soviet troops would soon return to Eastern Europe to dig up their mass graves.

SS chief Himmler put forward a plan called Operation 1005, which aimed to erase all traces of the Holocaust. Heinrich Himmler ordered an SS commander by the name of Paul Blobel to oversee the task. Blobel was a notorious killer who played a major role in the Babi Yar massacre, where over 33 thousand Jews were murdered in just two days.

There was an enormous challenge in terms of logistics ahead of the Nazis, as the number of bodies to burn was in the order of millions. Blobel was trying to come up with an efficient way to burn all the corpses when he came up with the idea to build enormous open-air pyres on the steel rails. People assigned to this gruesome task had to pull out the decayed bodies from the mass grave and pile them on the pyre alongside the wood. The bodies had to be singed on the fire for days until they turned to ash.

Since human bones needed to be crushed, workers had to use heavy mallets or mechanical crushers to turn them into something small enough to disappear into the river. After that, they would go through the ashes to retrieve the gold tooth caps and throw the rest of the debris into the river. Finally, workers would plant trees on the site where the bodies of the murdered once lied.

The Nazis forced Jews and POWs to work for them under horrific conditions, as all the workers had their legs shackled to one another. In addition, there was a constant risk of losing one’s life during the work, since guards regularly executed prisoners for the slightest mistake. However, in the end, a group of chained Jewish prisoners managed to escape during the night by opening their leg shackles. Several prisoners later testified at the Nuremberg trials about the atrocities committed by Blobel.

As a result, the SS commander was sentenced to death in 1951.

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