Ukraine

Ukraine is both a route across which the German army advances and a place where the consequences of that advance remain visible. In Hans Reiter’s wartime story, its villages, fields, rivers, and abandoned homes connect military movement to destruction and mass murder; the country is not a backdrop to the campaign so much as the terrain through which its violence becomes legible.

Invasion and military advance

After Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, Reiter’s 79th Division crossed the Prut with the Romanian army corps and moved through Bessarabia. It crossed the Dniester, reached the outskirts of Odessa, and continued across the Bug into Ukraine. The account follows the division’s progress as a sequence of crossings and battles, while noting that its light infantry depended on soldiers and mules to move equipment and advance on foot.

The march through Ukraine leaves a trail of burned villages, granaries, and woods. Reiter and the soldiers around him see woods burning like dark islands amid wheat fields, but the source of the fires remains uncertain. His comrades deny that their unit set the woods alight, while speculating that other German formations may have encountered resistance there. The scene preserves that uncertainty rather than resolving it: the division moves through a landscape marked by fire, but the soldiers do not know, or do not establish, who caused each blaze.

Kostekino and the aftermath of occupation

After Reiter is wounded and can no longer speak, he is sent with three other wounded men from his division to Kostekino, a sparse settlement on the Dnieper. The village consists of scattered houses, decaying fences, two rotting granaries, and a dirt road that becomes impassable in winter. An abandoned Soviet farm lies nearby, where five Germans attempt to restart operations. The houses stand empty; explanations initially vary between flight ahead of the German advance and conscription into the Red Army.

A different account explains the village’s depopulation: a detachment of Einsatzgruppe C physically eliminated all the Jews in Kostekino. Unable to speak, Reiter asks no questions, but spends the next day examining the empty houses. Finding no object that identifies the former residents’ origins or religion, he nevertheless suspects that one house belonged to a Jewish family after discovering books in Russian and German in a large chest. He settles near Sweet Spring. The killings are disclosed through a delayed explanation, while the absent residents remain present in the narrative through the emptied homes and the books left behind.

A landscape of movement and loss

Ukraine’s rivers and settlements shape both the military chronology and the more intimate story of Reiter’s displacement. The army’s crossings carry him farther east; his wound then leaves him stranded from his division in a village emptied by murder. His inability to speak limits his immediate response to what he learns, while the houses offer only incomplete traces of those who lived there.

The narrative therefore sets the scale of military advance against the small, material details of abandonment: an impassable road, a chest of books, and homes whose occupants have been killed. Ukraine becomes a space where the movement of armies and the disappearance of civilians intersect, and where a later discovery cannot restore the people erased from the village.