Heinrich Himmler looks at a young Soviet prisoner of war during an official visit to the concentration camp on Shirokaya Street in Minsk, Belarus, on or about 15 August 1941.

You had to be a tough man to look Himmler in the face like that. This is a stand for what’s right; this is a single man, after losing so much, standing up and staring at Himmler himself. This image is defiance.

Shirokaya was a labor camp that housed up to 2,000 prisoners: skilled workers from the Minsk Ghetto and captured Red Army soldiers who refused to work or operate with the partisans in the forests of Belarus. Jews from Belarus who were to be deported to Sobibor or Auschwitz were also temporarily held there.

On this inspection tour, Himmler was accompanied by SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, who served as Himmler’s chief of staff. Wolff can be seen behind Himmler in this photograph, with his face partially obscured.

On the same day, Himmler ordered Einsatzgruppenführer Arthur Nebe of Einsatzgruppe B to demonstrate his unit’s technique for shooting Jews. Nebe selected 98 Jewish men and two women. According to Wolff, Himmler was present at the massacre and interrogated one of the condemned men, a blond youth. Himmler asked, “Are you a Jew?”

The man replied, “Yes.” Himmler asked, “Are both your parents Jewish?” Again he replied, “Yes.” Himmler asked, “Do you have ancestors who weren’t Jewish?” “No,” the man replied. “Then I can’t help you,” Himmler said.

The blond youth and the other 99 prisoners were shot in the back of the head. During the execution, a number of prisoners were covered with earth, and another group was brought in from such a distance that they could not hear the shots.

Himmler looked into the trench where the bodies lay and felt sick as his uniform was splattered with brain matter and blood. Wolff claims this was Himmler’s first sight of a corpse.

Most of the 90,000 Jews and 300,000 Soviet soldiers captured during the capture of Minsk on June 27, 1941, had been killed or deported by the time Minsk was liberated in 1944. All the people behind the barbed wire fence in this photo were likely killed by the Nazis before 1943.

In 2010, Telegraph Obituary published a photograph with the caption  “Greasley confronts Heinrich Himmler (wearing glasses) in POW camp  .” Joseph Horace “Jim” Greasley was a British soldier in World War II who was captured by the German Wehrmacht in May 1940 and later became famous for claiming that he escaped from his camp over 200 times, each time returning to captivity due to a secret love affair. However, this information is false; the prisoner in the photograph is not Greasley.

Historian Guy Walters categorically asserted that the soldier in the photo was not Greasley. He stated that the photo was in the U.S. National Archives and that the caption indicated that it was taken in Minsk, Belarus, in mid-1941. He also claimed that it was taken by a photographer for a propaganda film, and his cap identified the soldier as a Soviet citizen. Furthermore, the officers in the photo were the same officers seen with Himmler in the film.