22 June 1941. As Nazi Germany launches Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, the city of Lviv falls under German occupation. Within weeks, its 200,000-strong Jewish community is subjected to pogroms, deportations, and mass executions — carried out under the command of Fritz Katzmann, the SS and Police Leader of Galicia.

A former carpenter turned fanatical Nazi, Katzmann rose to become one of the most feared SS generals of the Holocaust. In 1943, he proudly submitted the infamous “Katzmann Report,” documenting the murder of 434,329 Jews and declaring Galicia “free of Jews.”
A chilling bureaucrat of mass murder, Katzmann remains one of the key architects of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.