Accompanies the documentary How the Holocaust Began
On 24 June 1941, SS officer Hans-Joachim Bohme stood in front of a group of 200 people from the Lithuanian border town of Gargždai. The majority were Jewish. Raising his ceremonial sword in the air he ordered their execution by gunshot for “crimes against the Wehrmacht on the order of the führer”. This incident took place some 48 hours after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It was the Nazis’ first massacre of Jewish people in Soviet territory.
Böhme’s claim about “crimes” was of course nonsensical. It was however tightly bound to the Nazis’ obsessive belief that Jewishness and communist-Bolshevism were inextricably linked. Over the following 18 months, at least 1.5 million Jewish people would be murdered in similar ways and based on a similar rationale. All of this happened miles away, literally and figuratively, from the death camps that would come to define the Holocaust in the popular consciousness. And yet it is because of the mass shootings that happened in these places - many of them long forgotten - that the course of events that followed happened as it did.
Hitler had always imagined a world without Jews, but he had no meaningful idea at the outset about how this would be achieved. Most of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies in the prewar period were designed to make existence for Jewish people untenable within Germany’s borders in order to force them to seek refuge in other countries. When the war broke out this remained the plan - although in a considerably more direct and violent way, in what they described as a “territorial solution”. It was not
