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For educational purposes

This first episode provides context for when, how and why the mobile death squads, or EZG, were established.

June 1941. Nazi Germany invades the USSR. In the wake of the German armies which progressed without incident to the gates of Russia, the mobile killing commandos, the Einsatzgruppen, shared the territory to liquidate Jews and political opponents.

In July, after the pogroms initiated by local nationalists causing several thousand victims, the decision for genocide was taken by Hitler.

The EZG organized the mass murder of Jewish populations in the conquered territories, now targeting women and children, the massacres follow one another at a frantic pace.
Transcript
01:30In 2001, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, shattering the Nazi-Soviet pact signed in Berlin in 1939.
01:37The ultimate goal of the invasion of the USSR was to empty Eastern Europe of Jews and communists,
01:44to clean out a living space, or Lebensraum, for a Great Reich destined to rule a thousand years.
01:52This was not an ordinary war. This was supposed to be a war of annihilation.
01:58And as it was planned by Hitler since late 1940, this was a war where the enemy was not to
02:06be conquered, but destroyed, annihilated.
02:09And that led to the appointment of Himmler as a special envoy for security measures in the occupied territories.
02:19The Einsatzgruppen, 3,000 strong, were quickly trained in pretsch and divided into four units,
02:25corresponding to four parts of the huge territory of the USSR.
02:29They advanced in the wake of the Wehrmacht.
02:32Each Einsatzgrupper was attached to one or more military units.
02:37Einsatzgrupper A, the Army Group North Unit, operated in the Baltic states, annexed by Stalin the year before.
02:45Einsatzgrupper B, was to clean out Bielorussia and Central Russia.
02:51Einsatzgrupper C, Northern and Central Ukraine.
02:55And Einsatzgrupper D, Southern Ukraine.
03:06Divided into four battalions called Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos,
03:11the Einsatzgruppen, literally, intervention groups, were assigned to track down and execute the foes of Nazism.
03:19In other words, Jews and communist partisans.
03:24Their initial task was, in terms of Himmler and the SS, kind of preventive security.
03:33Eliminate all potential enemies, all potential dangers.
03:37So that's a very broad mandate, which means that the Einsatzgruppen have lots of leeway as to how far they
03:44will carry that.
03:45When the documents are explicit, they will talk about killing Jews in state and party positions,
03:50as well as communist leaders and communist functionaries.
03:54Elsewhere, they talk about potential enemies, saboteurs, and using names that are often applied to Jews as a kind of
04:05symbolic way.
04:06So while there wasn't, as best we can tell, an explicit mandate to carry out total and systematic extermination,
04:12it was clear that they were going to be aiming at all Jewish leadership,
04:17at all Jews that had any connection to the state and the party,
04:22and that they were free to expand that to any Jew that was viewed as a potential men of military
04:28age
04:28who might be involved or thought possibly involved in resistance.
04:34Taken by surprise, the Red Army sustained disastrous losses.
04:39Wehrmacht troops annihilated the Soviet defence, taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war.
04:46The initial strategy of the Einsatzgruppen, shadowing the troops and discreetly moving into the cities,
04:52was to incite pogroms against the Jews, identified as communists in the Nazi imagination.
05:00The ties between Jews and communism, or Bolshevism rather,
05:06have been established early on as a consequence of World War I, basically.
05:11And they are not unique to the German setting.
05:14They were also developed in other countries and in other historical circumstances.
05:18But they really are crucial to the understanding of the ideological backdrop to what happens during Operation Barbarossa.
05:31One has to understand that the Jew is the key enemy in the minds of Germans and particularly Nazis.
05:41And it's very difficult to draw a line between the two, obviously.
05:46The Jew is seen as the wire puller behind all other enemy groups.
05:51And these enemy groups comprise from Catholicism via liberals to Bolshevists.
06:00In the prisons of the cities they conquered, the Nazis found the remains of nationalist leaders executed by the Soviet
06:07NKVD before they fled.
06:10The NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria's terrifying secret police, were hated and feared in Ukraine for having orchestrated the famine
06:19which caused the death of 5 million Ukrainians between 1922 and 1933.
06:25Local nationalist movements, to whom the Nazis promised independence in exchange for their collaboration, were hungry for revenge.
06:37They think, of course, that they're going to earn their way to greater national independence, whether it's Ukrainian or Lithuanian
06:42or Latvian.
06:43The Nazis have no intention of setting up independent states, but they don't mind giving them the illusion in that
06:50regard
06:51that along the line they'll get some reward in that way.
06:56The Eastern European lands were pervaded with age-old anti-Semitic traditions, rooted in Christian anti-Judaism, economic or ethnic
07:05competition,
07:06and the accusation that the Jews were complicit with Soviet power.
07:11Nationalist movements, informed of the German offensive before its launch, organized anti-Jewish pogroms.
07:17At the end of June 1941, thousands of Jews were savagely murdered in the streets of Vilnius, Riga, Kaunas, and
07:26Lviv,
07:27known as Lemberg in German, the capital of district Galicia.
08:17Nationalist leading create the leader in Maria的ăȘ Friarola Station.
08:17Nationalist
08:29The experience in these parts of the Soviet Union since summer 1940 with the Soviet occupation
08:35were very negative and to a large extent traumatic.
08:39That formed a large and important backdrop to the reaction of locals on the ground towards
08:45this vacuum that was suddenly ensuing with the Soviet army retreating and resulted in
08:52anti-Jewish actions being taken and then clearly not suppressed by the Germans.
08:58The Einsatzgruppen were ordered by Heydrich to make use of anti-Jewish activities that
09:08were instigated by locals.
09:11In Kaunas, Lithuania, in a carriage house courtyard, Jews were forced to use their bare hands
09:18to clean up the manure left by Soviet soldiers' horses.
09:23Lithuanians armed with clubs wearing the white armband, a nationalist emblem, then battered
09:29the Jews to death.
09:33In Kaunas that was fenced off, Germans standing around and what looked like Lithuanians beating
09:40several hundred Jews to death in a public performance that, as some witnesses say, involved women standing
09:49around and having children sitting on their shoulders, some people making music while the
09:54Jews were killed in that public square.
10:05The German role in this incident is that of an onlooker and, in fact, that of a documentor.
10:14There were Germans taking photographs.
10:16And this is why this is such a prominent case, because it's one of the rare instances of documentary
10:23material being available on these pogroms.
10:26In a week or two, several thousand people had been killed in the Kaunas pogroms.
10:33Einzad's Grupa C arrived in Lviv, now in Ukraine, on June 27th.
10:37A similar wave of violence was unleashed against a Jewish community numbering some 160,000.
10:43The Nazis publicized the discovery of Ukrainian corpses in a fortress outside the city, used
10:48as a prison by the NKVD, sparking the pogroms.
10:52The same compounds were then used to execute and beat to death hundreds of Jews.
10:57I remember that my mother told me that her friend asked my mother to go to the prison,
11:08because there was her husband, her friend's friend.
11:12And when they opened the door, when they opened the door, you understand, so there were
11:19many different troops, even to the castle.
11:24So when they opened the door, the mother, his friend, her friend, she fell in shock, because
11:29it was scary, you understand, you understand?
11:33With knives, axe, hand grenades and machine guns,
11:37these sins of the victims of the Bolshevist killing of the Bolshevist,
11:41were gravely murdered and slaughtered.
11:49On the second or third day, I go to the entrance,
11:54I'm looking at the house of this house.
11:59He was on the ground, he was on the ground, and suddenly there were two young men, and one of
12:08this barreds was on the floor, he fell on the ground.
12:12The second one began to break his sword.
12:16And then one of them also pulled it out of Sierniket and pulled him his neck.
12:25And he was like, you understand?
12:27And there was a big war, you understand?
12:30And then the mother came out.
12:31But then they fell.
12:33And so, you understand, immediately started an action,
12:36to kill the Jews.
12:38And then, to summarize, please.
12:42The Jewish murder,
12:44that worked hand-in-hand with the GPU-agents,
12:47will be delivered to the German troops to jail.
12:55A gravely reading of the Lemberger-Soviet-Type.
12:59Plunderers, murderers, in the general of the Jews.
13:03These are the Chiefs of Churchills and his plutocratic clique.
13:15The UN Service of the UKăȘん
13:27UN Service of Pyrrha
13:37A unit of the SS Viking Division joined forces with nationalist Stepan Banderas henchmen to carry out similar massacres.
13:46Members of the German Totenkopf, or Death's Head SS, took part in the killings directly for the first time.
13:56However, Einsatzgruppe commanders were not convinced that provoking these outbursts of violence was an efficient strategy.
14:19They decided it was time to end the chaos generated by the pogroms and streamline the killing procedure.
14:28Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich's Central Security Office, or RSHA,
14:32a huge tentacular organization with connections to police, investigation, security and repression,
14:39received a letter from Goering in late July 1941,
14:42ordering him to proceed with preparations for the execution of the final solution of the Jewish question in the German
14:49sphere of influence.
14:56These preparations included registering Jews, segregating them from society, marking them, crowding them into ghettos and forcing them to work
15:05as slaves.
15:06The Einsatzgruppen emerged from their relative anonymity and made their presence known.
15:11In the towns they crossed, they left grim forests of gallows.
15:19When a partisan, Jew or communist was executed on a public square in Kharkov or Odessa, here in Minsk,
15:26a morbidly cynical sign was tied around his neck.
15:31In the city of Lviv, the majority of the population was Jewish.
15:36The death commandos organized grotesque processions and passion plays leading up to the execution of the Jews.
15:44These Jews sent up to the station, which was seen by the ceremonial
16:10and they went, and there was a lot of Jewish people, and they sang this song,
16:16«Gulay, dusha, niechirusha, gulay, dusha, niechirusha»,
16:20and people said that they will be killed, killed, you understand?
16:26Well, it's just a shame, I know.
16:29You don't believe that it was like that, you understand?
16:32It was just like that, killed, you understand?
16:38It was terrible things that I know.
16:42If I didn't see, I wouldn't believe.
16:44I wouldn't believe. What happened?
16:47It was just a shame, just a shame, and everything.
16:52We are in that city, under Yanivskim.
16:57This is such a river, under the garden, which is not visible,
17:07so the Germans chose this place to make a black thing.
17:15Here, in that city, which we see, maybe 2-3 meters from where we are standing,
17:24in that city, killed Jews.
17:27When we went to visit my father, because he died for the Germans,
17:33my mother said, now they will kill Jews.
17:38And we looked at this place from the mountain,
17:41and I personally see, as we dug up such a big river,
17:47we planted two trees,
17:51and this one gave the command to go ahead,
17:54and they went through these bombs,
17:57and on the side stood with a helmet,
17:59and they were shooting.
18:00And they fell, you know.
18:02They cried and cried, who was on the right, who was on the left, and all.
18:06And, of course, these people, who then saw them,
18:09they said that they were not all killed by death,
18:15they burned their feet or their feet,
18:17so they wanted to escape, understand, and escape.
18:22Well, maybe, who helped them?
18:23Who knows?
18:24I don't know.
18:25There was such a big deal.
18:27There was a lot of people.
18:29There was a lot of people,
18:32and not only Jews,
18:34who could kill them,
18:37and they could kill them.
18:37You understand?
18:38So, they didn't really deal with them.
19:10I'll see you next time.
19:34I'll see you next time.
20:05I'll see you next time.
20:08I'll see you next time.
20:10I'll see you next time.
20:36I'll see you next time.
21:50I'll see you next time.
22:00I'll see you next time.
22:30I'll see you next time.
22:42I'll see you next time.
22:46I'll see you next time.
22:48I'll see you next time.
22:48I'll see you next time.
22:57I'll see you next time.
23:24I'll see you next time.
23:26I'll see you next time.
23:56I'll see you next time.
23:57I'll see you next time.
24:02I'll see you next time.
24:05I'll see you next time.
24:07I'll see you next time.
24:44I'll see you next time.
25:00You next time.
25:06I'll see you next time.
25:12I'll see you next time.
25:20I'll see you next time.
25:40I'll see you next time.
25:46I'll see you next time.
25:50I'll see you next time.
25:51I'll see you next time.
25:53I'll see you next time.
25:56I'll see you next time.
26:00If you don't see you next time.
26:05So I'll see you next time.
26:18That's 60 years ago. I remember that we had to remember the Jews in the past.
26:26So you had a bit of a sense of what would happen then?
26:31We didn't know what happened.
26:34That was at the beginning.
26:36And the whole Krieg, but also on the Wehrmacht side,
26:41was always a Jacht of Juden made.
26:44Also on the front.
26:45You mean that, what Himmler said, was already meant?
26:51That was meant meant.
26:53And Himmler, he knew that the army corps would send us to the Symphe,
26:59because there were no Panzers and not through.
27:06The Einsatzgruppe, that's I remember,
27:09that were special units.
27:11One of the first units, and that was the so genannte SD,
27:16what does it mean?
27:18Sicherheitsdienst.
27:20There were only 40 or 50 people,
27:23they couldn't do such a action.
27:27The Einsatzgruppen were not as big as they were.
27:37Who were these men?
27:39Although the battalions of killers were chiefly made up of German police officers
27:43from a lower class background,
27:44they were led by highly educated young men,
27:48career officers in the SS and SD.
27:51In terms of the officers of the Einsatzgruppen,
27:55they seem to have been fairly carefully selected.
27:58Many of them are intellectuals that were in the Heydrich brain trust or think tank.
28:05Of the, I think if I have my figures right,
28:08of the 21 first commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos,
28:14I think it's 10 or 11 have PhDs.
28:17Otto Rasch of Einsatzgruppen C was Dr. Dr. Otto Rasch,
28:21to make sure everybody knew he had two PhDs.
28:23So this was not a group of thugs.
28:25Ohlendorff was of course a noted economist.
28:29Others had established their record within the SS,
28:33basically as part of Heydrich's talented stable of university trained personnel.
28:39And now they were to go out in the field and prove themselves.
28:42So these men are both great professionals of rights,
28:47and especially criminal rights, racial rights,
28:50and in the same time they were absolutely convinced.
28:55Along with this group of jurists who will form the group of the Gestapo
28:58we have very young diplomats,
29:01they also recruited between 1933 and 1937,
29:05who are linguists, historians, economists, philosophers, and literary.
29:11The sociological milieu that these men represent is very homogenous,
29:15even the generational milieu.
29:16These men are practically all nés between 1900 and 1914-1915,
29:22and so they are very young when they arrive
29:26when they arrive at the positions of responsibility
29:28within the Gestapo and the USDA,
29:31and within the Einsatzgruppen.
29:35It is that little by little, they will convince themselves
29:37that this examination is an absolute necessity,
29:40and they will accompany their men
29:43more before, in this imaginaire exterminator,
29:46they convaincant d'abord de tuer des hommes.
29:49They do it with a security rhetoric.
29:51These men are either fauteurs de troubles,
29:54or partisans,
29:55or comploteurs,
29:57or affameurs.
30:00And so there is a certain categorization
30:02which legitime,
30:03in the eyes of these officers,
30:05the execution of these adult men
30:06in age of wearing weapons.
30:09And then, in août 1941,
30:14we go first to the execution of women
30:16and then to the execution of children.
30:21There are two rhetorics.
30:23One is the total war,
30:24which is they are they or us.
30:25The other is the utopia,
30:26which is they have to kill
30:27to fulfill our dreams.
30:28They will take the relay
30:31in the address of these officers
30:33of Einsatzgruppen
30:34towards their men
30:34who will take the task.
30:36And in the end,
30:37it is not so surprising
30:38that we have to send
30:39literature, linguists
30:40and philosophers
30:40who,
30:41better than these people
30:42who are trained in rhetoric,
30:44can deploy
30:44the treasures of conviction
30:46to bring those people
30:49who are not tortured
30:50to accept
30:51to kill women and children.
31:02As they had in occupied Poland,
31:04where the first Einsatzgruppe commandos
31:06had operated in 1939,
31:09the Nazis assembled the Jewish population
31:11in designated areas.
31:13In every town,
31:14ghettos were created.
31:15These confined enclaves
31:17were plagued with disease
31:18and malnutrition.
31:19they gradually became
31:21overcrowded reservations
31:22of Jews
31:23ready to be exterminated.
31:58Vilnius,
31:59long known as
32:00the Jerusalem of Lithuania,
32:02a centre of Ashkenaz
32:04and Yiddish culture,
32:05was the home
32:06of some 80,000 Jews.
32:11The first ghetto,
32:13barely visible today,
32:14was created
32:15on September 6, 1941.
32:18A committee drawn
32:20from the Jewish community
32:21by the SS,
32:22the Judenrat,
32:24was forced
32:24to supervise
32:25ghetto life.
32:29And,
32:31the Jewish community
32:32were taken
32:32and came in
32:33for all the people
32:36from the Jewish community.
32:38They all took a look.
32:39They all took a look,
32:41all of the Jews.
32:44to havent.
32:44to buy them
32:45so much,
32:45and they were stored
32:45by the Nazis.
32:47to the war.
32:48Then they
32:49all tagged
32:52like
32:52the Jewish people
32:53and then
32:55the Jews
32:56They were written on the U.T. They didn't have the right to go to the panels.
33:00They didn't have any store.
33:04They were driving to the hard work.
33:07They had to buy a little bit.
33:09They didn't have any right to go to the table.
33:12They didn't have any right to go to the table.
33:17They were like, they were just kidding.
33:19They told them to give money, gold.
33:23They gave them everything. They gave them everything.
33:27They took everything, and their fingers, and their teeth.
33:30They took everything.
33:31Who did that?
33:32Who did that?
33:33Well, who did that?
33:34It did the Germans, the Litovians, who were there.
33:38There were also Russian enemies, there were also Ukrainians.
33:42There was all this stuff that was in life.
33:46It was a pleasure to have these people.
33:51Eight kilometers south of Vilnius, a former Soviet fuel depot in Poneri forest,
33:58was chosen by Walter Stalicke's Einsatzkommando 9 as an extermination center.
34:04It featured 20 storage pits, ready to swallow the entire Jewish population of the Lithuanian capital.
34:12The first great Aktion, the euphemism used by the Nazis to designate mass killings,
34:18took place on August 31, 1941.
34:222,019 women, 864 men, and 817 children,
34:29were battered by armed men drunk on alcohol and hatred,
34:34forced to strip, and then shot.
34:36On September 12, another 3,434 Jews were massacred in Poneri forest.
34:48When I was 10 years old, I was already drinking water in the city.
34:54And the Jewish people went along the street.
34:59I can't remember now, I can't say,
35:01where or before Yod appeared, or a star.
35:08When I saw a Jewish people,
35:11I couldn't be able to push the Germans on the street.
35:17They pushed them out of the street,
35:20so they could walk along the road.
35:25Unlike the partisans, the Jews had to strip before they were killed.
35:30Alina Yankovska, whose father, a railway gate man,
35:34salvaged and sold the clothing cast off by the Jews,
35:37still lives in Poneri forest.
35:41And we were surrounded by the troops.
35:47They were fired at this took place.
35:47They were asking, they looked at it,
35:49they looked at it, they were fired,
35:51Say, Shabiev came to the carriage,
35:54he went get out of the wagon,
35:55his boy, Shinkievich,
35:56he was caught.
36:00The soldiers, that shot shot.
36:03They shot.
36:04They shot, like the Jews,
36:05the Jews.
36:06I was in the Baltic countries, the Einsatzgruppen had no trouble hiring killers from nationalist and police ranks.
36:31The Lithuanians and Latvians did the shooting.
36:34The SD and SSG were shot by the British Army.
36:35The SS men simply organized and supervised the mass executions.
36:40When they killed a lot of Jews, they killed 10,000.
36:50They started to shoot their head here,
36:55and the last leg was there.
36:59They brought them to help.
37:08Why did you call them so?
37:10Well, because they killed people.
37:14They killed people.
37:18They just called them.
37:21My mother called them so, and we called them so.
37:32They called them so, and they called them so.
37:37They called them so.
37:37They called them so.
37:38They called them so.
37:39This is our family.
37:44A parallel economy emerged,
37:46generated by the scale of the massacres.
37:49The Jews' possessions were sold.
37:52There were job opportunities in the service sector.
37:54Just out of high school, Regina Yablonska was hired as a cook in Poneri Forest, preparing meals for the Lithuanian
38:03killers.
38:24I felt like this was a work.
38:27And there was a lot of people in this shape.
38:31With the clothes on the same way.
38:35Today, they are not able to shoot.
38:38I didn't see it, but I heard it.
38:41And I heard it.
38:42When they were there, they were shooting,
38:45and the wind went from the west,
38:50and then I heard,
38:52and I listened to it,
38:52and they were like,
38:55I'm going to go there.
38:57But it only happened in the same distance.
39:04And that you had to hear,
39:05and because you were shot,
39:05and you had to get a hit.
39:08When we were here to hide,
39:11we saw a little apartment.
39:13We saw the train,
39:16and then there was a gentleman,
39:18his name was Weiss.
39:20He was sitting in the front of the chauffeur.
39:24Then they opened the door,
39:26put it there, and there was a shooting.
39:29Well, that's what I'm talking about.
39:31Everyone knows that it was a whole thing.
39:33They didn't know how to shoot the Jews.
39:37They brought them,
39:39and they were cut off,
39:42because they were cut off,
39:44and they were cut off,
39:45so they didn't have panic.
39:47They were working,
39:49and they brought them,
39:50and they ordered them to get out,
39:55and they were cut off with the car,
39:57and then the others came and cut off,
40:00and they also shot them.
40:01And so, in the front of the war,
40:05when they were cut off,
40:06they were cut off,
40:07and they were cut off,
40:08and they were cut off.
40:13When he was 11 years old,
40:14Anatoly Lipinski played the accordion
40:17for the Poneri killers every day.
40:19They gave him a little money,
40:21which helped his parents survive.
40:23They always laughed.
40:25They played one of them.
40:27Look, when they ate,
40:29look at what they took off.
40:30They were taking off,
40:31they were like,
40:32these red and silver,
40:33they were like,
40:34these red and yellow,
40:35they were like,
40:36they saw,
40:38they took off,
40:38they took off,
40:40they took off,
40:40and they took off,
40:42But one of them,
40:43they showed,
40:43and they used the bucket.
40:46They were cut off,
40:47the yellow and yellow teeth.
40:49They were killed by the victims, they were killed by the victims, I don't know how I was there, I
40:55was there.
40:55He showed up, he showed up, he was killed by the victims, and he was killed by the victims.
40:59And I was like, 15-year-old girl, I like this, a Jewish girl, with a pop of love, and
41:06I was killed by her.
41:09How did I feel in the company?
41:11I came to the door, I felt the soul, I still don't feel it,
41:15but if I go, then I will go to the house and my mother, I will be obligated to go.
41:21I will go and they say, they say,
41:23I'm very happy, my Frau, I really like it.
41:27They sit there and say, they say, they give me a meal, they give me a meal, they give me
41:33a meal, they give me a meal, they give me a meal.
41:34And once he gave me some shoes, he even gave me shoes,
41:38because I saw that I'm almost a little bit of a shoe.
41:42But it's obvious that someone had saved me, and they gave me shoes.
42:05The others were killed by the process used on the Hereros of Namibia. They were starved to death.
42:16In 1904, in his ephemeral African colony, Kaiser Wilhelm's officers had massacred the rebel Herero tribe.
42:30General Lothar von Schrötter's men kept the insurgents surrounded in the desert, cutting off all their supply lines.
42:37Of an overall population of 80,000 people, between 45 and 60,000 died of thirst and hunger.
42:46One can draw an analogy here between other instances of genocidal measures as administered by the Germans in their brief
42:56colonial episode.
42:59And the Herero uprising is clearly an analogy that comes to mind.
43:03It only works so far, because clearly you have other aspects involved here.
43:08Most importantly, the image of the enemy, that Red Army soldiers were not seen as comrades.
43:15This is what Hitler said very explicitly early on.
43:18They were seen as Bolshevists, as Asians, people who were of the wrong racial background, who were not humans.
43:28In fact, one of the propaganda brochures produced by Himmler was called Die Untermenschen.
43:33So, subhumans, and that was the label attached to Red Army soldiers.
43:41By the end of 1941, two million Soviet prisoners had perished.
43:48To escape the Gulag, the few survivors volunteered to join the units of killers.
44:03This is a commercial for the
44:04Which is a beautiful one.
44:04Which is a beautiful one.
44:09Maybe a beautiful one.
44:33Maybe you are a person?
44:33Maybe you are a person.
44:33Maybe you are an example.
44:50I don't know.
45:11I don't know.
45:41I don't know.
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