Photos of the Captured Jewish Russian Soldiers near Minsk

Seventy years ago today the Nazis invaded USSR

NYT has published parts a photo album that includes photos of the captured Russian Jewish soldiers. Significant is that the captured Soviet Army Jewish soldiers were segregated and marked with the star. This history was erased in the Soviet Union, as was the memory of these soldiers, except by the family survivors who never learned the fate of the perished men.

The story of the album itself speaks volumes: ”The album is owned by a 72-year-old executive in the fashion industry who lives in New Jersey and works in the garment district of Manhattan. He lent it to The New York Times in the hope that press coverage — and a better sense of the album’s provenance — would increase its value. He would like to use proceeds from a sale, which he hopes will be “six figures or higher,” to pay medical bills and get out of debt. He has undergone quadruple bypass surgery and has declared personal bankruptcy. Not all of his colleagues and competitors know that, or that he owns such an album, so he requested anonymity. He said the photo album and 50,000 baseball trading cards were given to him by a manual laborer of his acquaintance who had fallen on hard times and had to borrow money from the executive. The objects amounted to repayment of the cash loan. The executive said the worker told him he had received the album from an old German man whose lawn he had maintained. Because there are nine pictures of Hitler in the 24-page album, all who handled it were sure it must have some value.”

Damn Hitler, there is more than enough photos of that slime. It’s the Jewish soldiers pictures that are precious.

After sharing parts of the alum with the readers of the Spiegel, the internet came through in a couple of hours, identifying the German officer photographer as Franz Krieger. Krieger just as Hugo Jaeger left the rare record of the doomed Jews in the Bloodlands. I was able to extract few more pictures.

יזכור עם ישראל

On June 22nd of 1941 George Orwell wrote:

“The Germans invaded the U.S.S.R. this morning. Everyone greatly excited. It is universally assumed that this development is to our advantage. It is only so, however, if the Russians actually intend to fight back and can put up a serious resistance, if not enough to halt the Germans, at any rate enough to wear down their air force and navy. Evidently the immediate German objective is not either territory or oil, but simply to wipe out the Russian air force and thus remove a danger from their rear while they deal finally with England. Impossible to guess what kind of show the Russians can put up. The worst omen is that the Germans would probably not have attempted this unless certain that they can bring it off, and quite rapidly at that.”

It’s hard to imagine that we are now removed from that beginning of that war for longer than the existence of the Soviet State.

Tagged as: death, george orwell, history, holocaust, russian jews, war