Battle of the Atlantic

• The Dutch steamer Vechtstroom (845t) is sunk by German bombing 2 miles northeast of 62 C Buoy. The entire crew are rescued.
• U-68 badly damages the British steamer Silverbelle (5302t) from Convoy SL-87 southwest of the Canary Islands. The steamer is taken in tow but eventually sinks on the 29th. Her entire crew of 60 are rescued by the French escort and landed at Freetown.
• In another attack on Convoy SL-87 U-103 sinks the British steamers Niceto de Larrinaga (5591t) and Edward Blyden (5003t) southwest of the Canary Islands. 2 crewmen are lost from the Niceto de Larrinaga; 53 survivors are picked up by the British corvette Gardenia and the sloop Lulworth. The entire crew of 63 form the Edward Blyden are picked up by the British sloop Bideford.
• U-562 sinks the British steamer Erna III (1590t) 275 miles east-northeast of Cape Farewell with the loss of all 27 of her crew.

Diplomatic Relations

Britain tells Finland to make peace with Russia or risk being regarded as a belligerent.

Eastern Front

Germans cut off Leningrad from the rest of the Soviet Union by reaching the southern shore of Lake Ladoga.

Hitler orders the attack on Murmansk to be discontinued.

The Germans claim to have taken 290,000 men prisoner in the Kiev pocket as Soviet resistance collapses. Farther south, the 11th Army reaches the entrance to the Crimea, the LIV Corps attacking the Perekop Isthmus. The 6 defending Soviet divisions hold up the German advance. Elements of the XLIX Mountain Corps and the XXX Corps take up positions south of the Dniepr bend and at Melitopol.

Around Odessa the Soviets launch a sharp counterattack against their Rumanian besiegers and actually expand their perimeter, advancing around Grigoryevka.

Greece, Politics

King George of Greece arrives in London.

Soviet Union, Home Front

Ukrainian militia, under SS orders, kill 6,000 Jews in Vinnitsa. This is the finale of a killing spree that has seen a further 24,000 Jews killed in the past few days. A German eyewitness reported: 'Ukrainian militia on horseback, armed with pistols, rifles and long, straight cavalry swords, were riding wildly inside and around the town park. As far as we could make out, they were driving people along with their horses - men, women and children. A shower of bullets was then fired at this human mass. Those not hit outright were struck down with swords. Like a ghostly apparition, this horde of Ukrainians, let loose and commaned by SS officers, trampled over human bodies, ruthlessly killing innocent children, mothers and old people whose only crime was that they had escaped a great mass murder, so as eventually to be shot or beaten to death like wild animals.'

Mass Shootings in Vinnitsa

A picture from an Einsatzgruppen soldier’s personal album, labelled on the back as “Last Jew of Vinnitsa”. It shows a member of Einsatzgruppe D just about to shoot a Jewish man kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1941. All 28,000 Jews from Vinnitsa and its surrounding areas were massacred at the time. There were two mass shootings in Vinnitsa, on the 16th September, and the other on 22nd September. A subsequent massacre of Jews appears to have been of Jews brought in from outside the district. This is the evidence for the date of this photograph. There was one eye witness to the procedure involved. Wehrmacht officer Lieutenant Erwin Bingel had been ordered to assist the Commandant of Uman district with men to guard the railway lines and around the airport. He was aware that ditches had been dug on the perimeter of the airfield and a number of specialist SS men had arrived by transport plane. The Jews of the area had been ordered to gather for a ‘census’. Hannah Arendt, a German-American political theorist, wrote about “the banality of evil”: The neutral expressions on the shooter and his uniformed audience pretty well encapsulate that concept: they could be watching a barber cut hair, instead of the heartless extermination of innocents. Humans can adapt to endure almost anything, but in doing so, they sometimes perpetuate incredible evil. The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.