On June 22, 1941, Jewish victims in the Ukrainian region of Vinnytsia dug graves with their bare hands to bury the bodies of their fellow Jews massacred by the SS Einsatzgruppen.

 　Jews in Soviet territory were usually massacred on the spot by mass shootings by the SS Einsatzgruppen, who waited behind the front lines; on June 22, 1941, in Vinnytsia, in the Ukrainian region, Jewish victims were massacred by the SS Einsatzgruppen when the bodies of their fellow Jews were They dug graves with their bare hands for burial.

　Vinnytsia is located on the banks of the South Bug in central Ukraine. During World War II, Vinnytsia was occupied by the Germans on July 19, 1941. Before the war, Vinnytsia had a Jewish population of over 34,000, but prior to the war, 17,000 Jews remained, although they were evacuated to the interior of the Soviet Union.Virtually all of the Jews who remained in Nazi-German occupied Vinnytsia were subsequently murdered in the Holocaust. Nazi German atrocities were carried out by the Einsatzgruppe in and near Vinnytsia.

　Just before and during World War II, the mass murder in Vinnytsia resulted in horrific massacres against the population, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, killing over 9,400 alleged and actual opponents of the regime in 1937 and 1938. The Germans and their collaborators murdered tens of thousands of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war in Vinnytsia between 1941 and 1943; the mass executions that took place in July 1941 were made known worldwide by The Last Jew in Vinnytsia photographs. Recent research has considered that the execution pictured was not carried out in Vinnytsia, but in Berdychiv, some 70 km away.

　In 1939, Vinnytsia was home to 33,150 Jews, 35.6% of the total population. When the Wehrmacht occupied Vinnytsia on July 19, 1941, 18,000 Jews were still in Vinnytsia. were murdered outside the city gates.Immediately after the war, 74 Jewish survivors were registered as citizens of Vinnytsia, and today only 1 percent of the population is Jewish.

　In early June 1941, the four Einsatzgruppen assembled in Bad Düben to carry out the mission of exterminating the Jews after the outbreak of war against the Soviet Union. Of the more than 5 million Jewish residents of the Soviet Union, just over 1 million were evacuated and fled. The remaining 3 to 3.2 million Soviet Jews were eliminated by the German occupying forces and the Einsatzgruppen. Large numbers of Soviet Jews were trapped, especially in the cities where 90% lived. Immediately after the conquest and occupation of the Wehrmacht, they took advantage of the ignorance of their victims and called for them by posters to assemble in central locations and buildings. Under the pretext of resettlement and labor dispatch, they were transported to the places where they would be killed. Measures of forced extermination were taken to ensure the registration of Jewish residents. Villages and individual districts were sealed off with chains and searched door to door with the help of the Wehrmacht.