A
German engineer and manager of a German construction firm in the
Ukraine, and his foreman, came upon an Einsatz execution squad killing
Jews from the small town of Dubno in the Ukraine.
He gave the following eyewitness account:
My
foreman and I went directly to the pits. Nobody bothered us. Now I
heard rifle shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth
mounds.
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. They had to put down their
clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and
undergarments. I saw heaps of shoes of about 800 to 1000 pairs, great
piles of under-linen and clothing.
Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other,
said
farewells, and waited for a sign from another SS man, who stood near
the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes I
stood near, I heard no complaint or plea for mercy.
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. The child was cooing with delight.
The
parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was
holding the hand of a boy about ten years old and speaking to him
softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father
pointed
to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At
that moment the SS man at the pit started shouting something to his
comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them
to go behind the earth mound. Among them was the family I have just
mentioned.
I well remember a girl, slim with
black hair, who, as she passed me, pointed to herself and said,
“twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself
confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together
and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible.
Nearly
all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some were
lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still
alive. The pit was nearly two-thirds full. I estimated that it already
contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the
shooting. He was an SS man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the
pit, his feet dangling into the pit.
He had a
tommy-gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people,
completely naked, went down some steps which were cut in the clay wall
of the pit and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the
place to which the SS man directed them. 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.
Then I heard a
series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were
twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies
that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks. The next
batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined
themselves up against the previous victims and were shot.”
He
later provided vital testimony in the Einsatzgruppen Trial, one of the
Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, invoking bitter persecution from many of
his countrymen.
To escape the hostility,
Graebe moved his family to San Francisco in 1948, where he lived until
his death on 17-04-1986, age 85. Hermann Graebe was honoured as a
‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad
Vashem. 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 Oberst Claus von Stauffenberg
and
unsuccessfully tried to kill Adolf Hitler in a suicide attack in
November 1943. Axel von dem Bussche survived the war and died 26 January
1993 (aged 73) in Bonn, Germany.
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