...On Sunday, the 22nd of June 1941 started Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
The 3,000 personnel of four Einsatzgruppen were sent to the Eastern Front and Blobel became the commanding officer of the Sonderkommando 4A which was assigned to the Einsatzgruppe C which was under the control of Otto Rasch.
On the 10th or 11th of August 1941, Friedrich Jeckeln the Higher SS and Police Leader of Southern Russia, ordered Blobel, on behalf of Adolf Hitler, to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Bila Tserkva, Soviet Ukraine.
On the 19th of September 1941, German forces entered the city of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Along with a large part of German-occupied Ukraine, the city was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine which had been established on the 1st of September with Erich Koch as administrator.
On the 29th and 30th of September 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries, under the guidance of the members of Einsatzgruppe C, ordered the Jews to assemble the next morning for resettlement. According to reports sent to the Einsatzgruppen headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were massacred during this two-day period and it was one of the largest mass killings at a single location during World War II.
At least 29 survivors are known. One of them was Dina Pronicheva.
In June 1942 Blobel was assigned with a secret task to excavate and destroy evidence of Nazi mass murder throughout the German-occupied east. The order was only given verbally as any written correspondence had been prohibited.
This top-secret Nazi operation was called “Special Action 1005” and Sonderkommandos made up of Jewish and Soviet prisoners of war were forced to unearth and burn the bodies of Jews and other victims who had been shot or murdered earlier in the war. The Sonderkommando prisoners were often put in chains to prevent them from escaping.
Special Action 1005 officially began at the Sobibor killing center and continued until 1944.
The project was carried out at other killing centers, including the other Operation Reinhard camps Belzec and Treblinka, as well as at Chelmno.
Auschwitz had onsite crematoria, so the services of Sonderkommando 1005 were not needed there. The operation also returned to the scenes of earlier Einsatzgruppen killings, including the scenes of major massacre sites, such as Babi Yar.
After the end of the war, Paul Blobel was then finally to face justice and pay for his crimes. During the Einsatzgruppen trial which started on the 29th of September 1947, Blobel was one of the main defendants.
On the 10th of April 1948 the tribunal found Paul Blobel guilty on all three charges and sentenced him to death by hanging.
