In a small town named Hranivka in western Ukraine between Rivne and Lviv is a common grave in which 2,500 Jewish victims were undressed, shot/killed by the Nazis, and then stacked like cordwood in massive pits before being buried, sometimes while still breathing. While European Jewry went up in smoke in death camps located in various part of Poland which emptied the ghettos of Europe, in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics, more than one million Jews were shot and buried in common graves scattered across the western Soviet Union in any number of places which still scar the landscape today.

At the forefront of this operation at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 was the infamous Einsatzgruppen, which were mobile death squads that fanned out all across the Baltics, Byelorussia, western Russia and Ukraine behind the advancing German front. In the wild East, the Einsatzgruppen hunted Jews wherever they could be found, and then murdered them in forested areas which provided green cover for their colossal crimes. Yet ironically enough, as holocaust historian Dr. Raul Hilberg points out, "The great majority of the officers of the Einsatzgruppen were professional men. They included a physician, a professional opera singer, and a large number of lawyers. These men were in no sense hoodlums, delinquents, common criminals or sex maniacs. Most were intellectuals.” In other words, they were steeped in the science of social Darwinian biology, the ecological intellectualism of Romanticism together with philosophical existentialism and the anti-biblical natural theology - all of which dominated the German academy for well over a century before World War II exploded on the European continent. The mind had been pretty much ruined by this time, overeducated with many destructive doctrines and heresies.

While I have visited the Krakow Ghetto, Treblinka and Auschwitz, and have seen the memorial at Babi Yar in Kyiv where some 100,000 Jews were shot during the war, this was my first time seeing one of these common graves that I have read so much about in my holocaust research. I was very surprised to see how it was a mound. The common grave was filled up to overflowing as they killed more Jews than the pit was dug for.