A horrific photograph of an execution in eastern Europe during the second world war

 A horrific photograph of an execution in eastern Europe during the second world war can be seen in Holocaust archives and museums around the world. 

But who are the killers, who are the victims, who took it - and why? Janina Struk felt compelled to investigate

Two naked men stand on the edge of a pit, an older man several feet behind them, while a man and a boy, also naked, walk into the frame. Surrounding them are seven perpetrators, some armed, some in uniform, some not. 

A uniformed man on the far right-hand side of the picture is standing on a mound of earth, presumably dug from the pit, seemingly directing proceedings. The caption reads: "Sniatyn - tormenting Jews before their execution. 11.V.1943."

I first saw a copy of this image as I was filing through photographs in the Polish Underground Movement (1939-1945) Study Trust in west London.

 At the time I did not understand what I was looking at. I had never encountered a scene quite like it before. The pitiful sight of the hunched figures thoroughly shocked me.

 The child is still wearing a hat and the elderly man to his right appears to be wearing a shoe or a sock, as though made to undress in a hurry.

I felt ashamed examining this barbaric scene, because it seemed to make me complicit with the assassins. But I was compelled to look, as if the more I did, the more information I could gain.

It was difficult to find a context for this photograph. It was apparently taken during the second world war, but could it be defined as a war photograph? It was not apparently taken by any accredited news organisation.

 It did not show the dead strewn on battlefields, nor exactly the devastating consequences of war on civilians.

 Instead, it appeared to show four men and a boy passively awaiting their execution.

I asked the archivist if she knew who had taken the photograph. She didn't. I understood from her look that she regarded this question as irrelevant and somewhat morbid. Wasn't the existence of the image evidence enough of the barbarism of the Nazis?

But were those in the photograph Nazis? No archivist or historian I have consulted has been able to identify the uniforms or suggest who the perpetrators might have been. 

I did locate the former Polish town of Sniatyn, now in Ukraine, near its border with Romania. 

In September 1941, Sniatyn came under German administration, but had previously been briefly under Romanian and then Hungarian control. 

Between September and December, hundreds of the town's 3,000 Jews were murdered in death pits in the nearby forest.

This type of execution - groups of people lined up on the edge of pits, which they had been made to dig themselves - was not unusual dur ing the early years of the war in the east.

 The victims were often made to undress, partly to humiliate and degrade them, partly so that their belongings could be confiscated or recycled.

In April 1942, deportations began from the ghetto at Sniatyn to the death camp at Belzec, and by September almost the entire Jewish population had been transported there and murdered. So by May 1943, the date of the caption, there were no Jews in Sniatyn.

I wanted to know if those in the photographs were in fact Jews. Or Gypsies, Poles or communists. 

Were they aware that they were being photographed? Was there a lull in the proceedings so that the photograph could be taken? And why was the picture taken? Was it an official photograph for the files of the Reich or an unof ficial photograph, a memento for the album of a Nazi or sympathiser? I knew that not only Nazis but also ordinary German soldiers obsessively photographed such crimes.

There is evidence to show that the photograph was distributed among the German occupying forces in Poland. At the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) archive in Washington DC, I found a photo album donated in 1990. 

On one page were two photographs. One, part of a series, was taken in Bochnia in south-west Poland in December 1939 when 51 inhabitants were taken to a nearby forest and executed. It shows civilians digging a grave surrounded by German soldiers. 

The other is the "death pit" photograph. The only information the donor gave was that he had found the album, which had belonged to a German, in an apartment in Sosnowiec in Silesia, after the end of the second world war.

That this image appears in an album is not unusual. Making photo albums was a popular pastime among all ranks of the German forces. 

Albums before the war, which were made to depict an idealised version of family life, now became a way of celebrating a much greater ideal: the unity and purity of the nation state itself. 

The original Bochnia series was in another photo album found in the home of a former SS man in Bavaria.

 It contained a detailed police report of the "course of action" taken in Bochnia, together with the pictures. The death pit image is not among them