When did the Holocaust begin? Who lit the fire of the Burnt Offering? The author of the book gives very definite answers to these questions: the mass extermination of Jews because they were born Jews began in the summer of 1941 after the invasion of Nazi Germany into the Soviet Union, at the origins of the genocide was the SS Obergruppenführer, the general of the SS troops and police, the highest Fuhrer of the SS and police in the south, and later in the north of Russia, Friedrich Eckeln, who became the executioner of Babyn Yar and the Riga ghetto. This is one of the greatest villains of the great war, about whom little is still known. The author had to collect information bit by bit from the archives. To the declassified materials of the Riga trial of 1946, according to the verdict of which Jeckeln was hanged, materials from American and German documentary repositories were added. Throughout the narrative, the author cites dramatic stories, sometimes indirectly related to the central character of the book. So it contained stories about the fate of the metropolitan, the creator of the Pskov Orthodox mission, of whose murder Jeckeln was accused, about a girl from the Riga ghetto saved by one of his comrades, about the illegitimate daughter of an executioner, about the monstrous Nazi project “Lebensborn”. Before us is an “archival drama” that amazingly reveals the unretouched horror of what happened.