Portraits from a Conjoined War: The German 100th Light Infantry Division and First Contact with the Jews of Zinkiv, Ukraine—July 1941

Abstract

ABSTRACT On July 10, 1941, the German 100th Light Infantry Division rolled into the Ukrainian Jewish shtetl of Zinkiv. Over a three-day period, this division committed gratuitous acts of violence and abject terror. While the total number of murdered Jews was relatively small, the author uses the corpus of pre-invasion orders and daily military objectives and reports in official war diaries, as well as eyewitness accounts to examine how and why these frontline soldiers perpetrated the “Holocaust by Bullets”1 during the initial phase of the Operation Barbarossa campaign in “the murky world where combat and ideology meet.”2