Putin and a Tale of Two Photos
Everyone’s favorite analogy is back (as if it ever went away). To cast yourself as an innocent victim, just label your enemies Nazis. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently asserted that the West is using Ukraine as a proxy to achieve “the ‘final solution’ of the Russian question … just as Hitler wanted a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question.”
Of course Lavrov is only parroting his boss’s absurd script, deliberately using language designed to provoke Europe and the United States. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly made claims of a “Nazi threat” emanating from Ukraine to justify an unjustifiable war of aggression.
I am a Holocaust historian and, by definition, focus on the past. In my profession, you risk losing credibility if you project backwards, to “what if?” past events. But I feel confident in predicting the future for this February 24, the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.
Two photographs from Ukraine, taken 81 years apart, bookend the truth of that country’s complex Holocaust legacy — one that doesn’t square with the Kremlin’s distorted narrative. In the first, a young girl looks directly at the camera, her expression difficult to read. She sits in a crowd of people, head bundled in a scarf, hands covered by a too large coat. Someone loved her enough to dress her for the cold weather. Within a few hours, she and more than a thousand others will be gunned down into mass graves for the crime of being Jewish. This is the bloodbath that roving killers, sent by Nazi Germany, carried out in the Soviet Ukrainian town of Lubny on October 16, 1941.
We don’t know this murdered child’s name. Anyone who knew her intimately — parents, teachers, a brother or sister — who could have told us who she was or might have become was also killed. But we do know the name of the man who trained his lens on her in the moments before the guns were fired. He was Johannes Hähle, a 35-year-old Wehrmacht photographer who accompanied the German Army into Soviet territory in 1941.
Hähle was a true believer in the antisemitic ideology that fueled the German war machine, having voluntarily joined the Nazi Party in 1932, before Hitler became chancellor. He was a “photo reporter” with Propaganda Company 637 which documented the military triumphs of Operation Barbarossa. Its men were explicitly prohibited from photographing the worst violence against civilians and Hähle mostly adhered to these rules. However, in dozens of chilling images from before and after two shooting massacres, Hähle captured the faces of Ukrainian Jews and the belongings they left behind. His photos show infants and the elderly, parents cradling children, all condemned to a horrific death. There are heaps of clothing, a lone high-heeled shoe, an abandoned prosthetic leg that outlasted its owner.
Hähle did not submit this work to his superiors — 29 color slides from the Babyn Yar ravine, where more than 33,000 Jews from Kyiv were murdered; and 38 black-and-white negatives on Agfa film, his shutter opening and closing on the final day in the life of Lubny’s Jewish residents. Hähle kept these negatives to himself, perhaps out of fear of punishment, perhaps recognizing that his photos humanized the victims in ways that ran counter to the Nazi worldview.
Hähle went on to serve in General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps and later redeployed to a propaganda unit in western Europe. Four days after D-Day, he was killed in France. No one is sure who returned the negatives to his wife.
His widow hid them until in 1954, when she sold the images to Hans Georg Schulz, a West German journalist. Schulz tried in vain to have them introduced into postwar trials or published in the press. He was stymied — disillusioned by a lack of interest at best, or even a cover-up. The photos lay neglected until the 1990s when exhibitions in Germany revealed their brutal intimacy. They offer vivid visual evidence of systematic mass murder in the occupied Soviet Ukraine — at least one and a half million victims, mostly Jews, killed by Germans and their collaborators, crimes that are being exploited by Russian officials today.
Which brings me to a second photo from Ukraine, one that encapsulates with heartbreaking specificity the tragedy of the current war.
We see a bearded man with a tiny orange kitten on his shoulder. A gentle giant in the camouflaged uniform of a Ukrainian soldier. His name is Vadym Stetsiuk and he was killed in action this past November.
Stetsiuk was not a professional soldier. He was a historian at a university in the western Ukrainian city of Kam’yanets’-Podil’s’kyy. As news of his death spread, there was grief across social media. A mentor remembered him as “A decent, shy, witty person of considerable physical strength. He spoke little and quietly, but always to the point.” Before he died, Stetsiuk was working to convene a conference examining the historical diversity of life in his city — a place that had been home for centuries to people of Armenian, Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian backgrounds.
Free societies celebrate pluralism and allow the truth to breathe, even if the events of the past and the actors make us feel vicarious shame. The role of many Ukrainian collaborators in the Holocaust is indisputable; studying history is both a cautionary exercise and an aspirational act. Stetsiuk embodied so much that was promising about Ukraine before the Russian invasion. His death amplifies incalculable losses — of life and freedom, first and foremost, but also of a commitment to documenting and commemorating the past with integrity.
Beauty is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder. Is the same true of horror? When we stare back into the eyes of Vadym Stetsiuk and the nameless little girl, how do we honor their memories? One powerful way is to defend the historical record from those who abuse it. When the predictable chorus of lies is broadcast from Moscow during this week’s anniversary, we must be ready to drown it out with truth.
Edna Friedberg is a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
