The New York Times recently featured the same book as the one in the Daily Mail article in the OP. It shows the same photo except it's in black and white.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/books/review/the-ravine-holocaust-photo-wendy-lower.html
The book is called
The Ravine by Wendy Lower.
This shooting is said to have occurred in Miropol, Ukraine in October 1941. It claims that, "The boy would be buried alive, not shot, since Nazi protocol forbade wasting bullets on Jewish children." The Daily Mail article has a story about someone surviving and crawling out of the pit of bodies. The only survivor. Mm hmm.
Lower shows that it takes a lot of people to kill a lot of people. There are the Ukrainian teenage girls forced to dig the mass graves; the Nazi customs guards (including volunteers) and Ukrainian policemen who rounded up the Jews and forced them to the death site; the Ukrainian neighbors who plundered their homes and “assaulted them — throwing stones and bottles.” Then there are the Ukrainian militia who, “armed with clubs, tools and Russian rifles, chased Jews, bludgeoning some to death. … They chased young Jewish women, ripped off their clothes and raped them.”
The town rang out — who could miss this? — with gunshots, “yelling, screaming and howling.” This was not the bureaucratic killing many associate with the Holocaust. This was mass murder at its most intimate: The Ukrainians “taunted the victims by name. … The victims were known to them from the dentist’s office, the cobbler’s shop, the soda fountain and the collective farm. They grabbed small children and babies by the legs and smashed their heads against the trees.”
It sounds like Lower takes witness statements completely at face value, as is typically done in these Holocaust books. Gruesome details like babies having their heads smashed against trees are the hallmarks of atrocity propaganda. There also seems to be some desire here to establish the guilt of the Ukrainians. In a way, this is logically consistent because it would have been impossible for the Germans to have performed so many executions. For instance, if we take the photo seriously, we see 5 men there to take care of a woman and a little boy (and possibly another child). How unbelievable then are these massacres of 5,000 or 10,000 or 30,000 people? How many executioners would you need to accomplish this? Also, if they really were rampaging through the whole town as described above, how would this not have provoked extraordinary resistance?
Indeed, the big surprise of “The Ravine” is the identity of the Miropol image’s photographer: a Slovakian soldier named Lubomir Skrovina. He took the photograph with the full knowledge of his German superiors, but he did not take it in service to their aims. In fact, Skrovina was, or at least became, a member of the Resistance. He smuggled atrocity images to his wife back home as possible material for anti-Nazi forces; wrangled out of further military duty; hid Jews in his home and helped some escape; and joined the antifascist Slovakian uprising of 1944. Lower describes Skrovina’s photograph as “an expression of defiance.”
Though the Jews in the photograph remained anonymous, the names of their killers were known. West German authorities opened an inquiry in 1969, then quickly dropped it. But a Soviet K.G.B. major named Mikola Makareyvych was more determined. In 1986, his investigation yielded convictions for three of the Ukrainians in the photograph. Two were executed, one sentenced to prison. I oppose the death penalty. But I read this chapter of Lower’s book — entitled “Justice” — with deep and unshakable satisfaction.
So the photo came from an anti-Nazi named Skrovina. It does not say when the photo first surface which is a rather important detail. Quite interesting that the West Germans "quickly dropped" their inquiry but that the Soviets convicted three of the Ukrainians supposedly in the photo. I would be very curious to know what evidence what used to determine this. I don't see how you could identify any of the people in the photo even tentatively, much less at the level normally required for a legal conviction.
The photo itself looks odd to me, in particular the way the lady is bent over like that. The cloud of smoke suggests the weapons have been fired but in that case the positioning seems strange. Given that the provenance of this photo seems to be anti-fascist groups, I'm inclined to think it was probably just staged. Even if we assume it's real though, to me, it just underscores how impractical it would have been to execute MILLIONS of people this way.
Even if the photo was real, there is no evidence whatsoever that the shooters are Germans, and in fact dress in clothing that would never be worn on duty by the Einsatzgruppen or any German police organization, for that matter.
