Friedrich Jeckeln was, in pure body count, one of the most prolific mass murderers of the Holocaust. As Higher SS and Police Leader for Russia-South from June 1941 and then Russia-North from November 1941, he commanded the operations that killed several hundred thousand Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, including the Babi Yar massacre at Kyiv on 29 to 30 September 1941 and the Rumbula massacre at Riga on 30 November and 8 December 1941. He was tried by a Soviet military court in Riga in January 1946 and hanged in front of around four thousand witnesses in Riga on 3 February 1946.
Babi Yar
Jeckeln commanded the SS forces that conducted the Babi Yar massacre at Kyiv in September 1941. The operation killed 33,771 Jews in two days. The figure comes from the Einsatzgruppe C report he submitted to the RSHA. He was personally present at the killing site. Survivor accounts, particularly that of Dina Pronicheva, place him at the ravine. The Babi Yar operation was the largest single mass shooting of the Holocaust before the death camps. It was Jeckeln’s.
The Jeckeln method
Jeckeln developed the standard procedure for the mass shootings in the eastern territories. The victims were marched to a pit, made to undress, marched in groups to the edge of the pit, and shot. The next group was made to lie face-down on top of those already shot. The method, which Jeckeln called Sardinenpackung (sardine packing), was more efficient than the earlier procedure of standing victims at the edge and letting the bodies fall in. The packed-corpse layout meant the killers could fit more bodies per pit and could shoot through the head from above with a single bullet. The method was adopted across the Einsatzgruppen operations from autumn 1941 onwards on Jeckeln’s recommendation, conveyed through Himmler.
Rumbula
Jeckeln was transferred to Russia-North in November 1941, partly because Himmler wanted him to apply the same methodical approach to the liquidation of the Riga ghetto. The Rumbula massacre of 30 November and 8 December 1941 killed around 25,000 Latvian Jews and around 1,000 German Jews who had just arrived from a Berlin deportation transport. The operation was personally commanded by Jeckeln. He had Soviet prisoners of war dig the pits in advance. He set the schedule for the marches. He stood at the killing site through both days. He filed his completion report to Himmler the following week.
The Rumbula operation also produced the case of the unauthorised killing of the Berlin Jews. The transport had arrived from the Reich on the morning of 30 November and Jeckeln had ordered them killed alongside the Latvian Jews without specific authorisation from above. Himmler reprimanded him by telegram for the unauthorised disposal of Reich Jews. The point was not that the Berlin Jews should not have been murdered, but that the procedural approval had not yet come down. The reprimand survives. Jeckeln received it as a procedural caution and went on with the killing.
The wider operations
Beyond Babi Yar and Rumbula, Jeckeln’s units conducted dozens of further mass killings across the occupied Soviet territories: at Kamianets-Podilskyi (where around 23,000 Jews were murdered in late August 1941, an early warning of the scale that would follow), at Berdychiv, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia and dozens of smaller operations. The total Jewish death toll under his command across the period from June 1941 to mid-1944 is estimated at around 200,000 to 300,000 people, depending on the methodology used. He ranks, on these figures, among the most lethal individual perpetrators of the Holocaust.
The Riga trial
Jeckeln was captured by Soviet forces in May 1945 and held by the NKVD. He was tried by a Soviet military tribunal in Riga in January 1946 alongside six other senior SS officers from the Russia-North area. The trial was conducted in public. He gave detailed testimony about the killing operations. He named the senior figures who had given him orders. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.
The execution took place in Riga’s Victory Square on 3 February 1946 in front of around four thousand witnesses including survivors of the Riga ghetto. He was hanged from a wooden gallows alongside the six co-defendants. The execution was photographed and filmed by Soviet propaganda units. The films and photographs were widely distributed in the Soviet Union as evidence of post-war Soviet justice. The Soviet record of the Jeckeln trial and execution is one of the most thoroughly documented post-war perpetrator prosecutions. He was 50.
What he was
Jeckeln is the case of the SS field commander as managerial mass killer. He was not a Reich-level decision-maker. He did not formulate policy. He was the man on the ground who took the orders coming from Berlin and turned them into pits full of corpses, efficiently, day after day, for three years. He invented procedural improvements to make the killing run faster. He filed reports. He met his targets. The Holocaust by Bullets that killed around a million and a half Jews in the eastern territories had a number of senior field commanders, of whom Jeckeln was the most efficient. The pile of corpses on which his career rests is one of the largest in modern history.
See also
Sources
- Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
- Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia 1941-1944, Historical Institute of Latvia, 1996
- Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press, 2009
- Soviet trial transcripts, Riga, January 1946
- USHMM: Friedrich Jeckeln