On the Eastern Front during World War II, Soviet Jews were murdered by the mobile killing units of the SS that accompanied the German army. Vinnytsia was occupied by the German army on July 19, 1941, and the Jews dug their own graves with their bare hands.

 　On the Eastern Front of World War II, Soviet Jews were killed by the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) of the SS that accompanied the German army front. They were usually massacred by a group shooting on the spot. In Vinnytsia, central Ukraine, which was occupied by the German army on July 19, 1941, Jewish victims dug their own graves with their bare hands.

　Vinnytsia was occupied by the Germans. There were more than 34,000 Jews in Vinnytsia. Only 17,000 of them survived, the rest having evacuated to the interior of the Soviet Union before the German occupation. Virtually all of the Jews who remained in Vinnytsia under Nazi Germany were killed in the Holocaust. Nazi Germany's atrocities were carried out in Vinnytsia and the surrounding area by Einsatzgruppen.

　On June 22, 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union began, and under the pretext of war, Germany shifted from the forced migration and imprisonment of Jews to genocide. The Einsatzgruppen, which were made up of Nazi SS troops and police, quickly accompanied the invading German army. Their mission was to kill the Jews they found in the occupied Soviet territories. Some of the inhabitants of the occupied territories, mainly Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians, assisted the German mobile killing units as auxiliary police.

　The mobile killing units acted quickly, entering towns and cities and rounding up all the Jewish men, women and children. They also took away many Communist Party leaders and Roma (gypsies). The victims were forced to give up all their valuables, and their clothes were taken away. The clothes were later sent to Germany and distributed to local collaborators. The members of the murder squads then forced the victims to go to a square, forest or ravine on the outskirts of the town or city where they had been conquered. There they shot the victims or gassed them to death in a gas van, and dumped the bodies in mass graves.