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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Einsatzgruppen

~11 min read · Ch. 1 of 8
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  • In the ravine of Babi Yar, northwest of Kiev, 33,771 people were murdered in two days. The Einsatzgruppen, SS paramilitary death squads operating under the command of Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, carried out that massacre on the 29th and the 30th of September 1941. They were not an improvised unit born of battlefield chaos. They were a planned instrument, bureaucratically organised, staffed by educated men, and deployed with the deliberate purpose of murdering civilians on a continental scale. Historian Raul Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 they and related agencies killed more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews. How did an organisation built to seize government papers in Austria become the machinery of the largest shooting campaign in the history of genocide? And who were the men who did the killing?

  • The Einsatzgruppen's first assignment was paperwork. Heydrich formed an ad hoc Einsatzkommando in March 1938 to secure government buildings and documents after the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria. Two units were then stationed in the Sudetenland in October 1938, where the Munich Agreement made military action unnecessary. Their work there was confiscating police records and arresting as many as 10,000 Czech communists and German citizens. From these administrative origins, the organisation moved steadily toward murder.

    When Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland on the 1st of September 1939, Heydrich reorganised the Einsatzgruppen into seven units of battalion strength, each of around 500 men, with five Einsatzkommandos of company strength beneath each. Heydrich placed SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Best in overall command and ordered that personnel be drawn from educated people with military experience and a strong ideological commitment to Nazism. Some recruits had previously been members of paramilitary groups such as the Freikorps.

    The mission in Poland was explicit. Heydrich had drawn up the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, lists of people to be murdered, as early as May 1939, using dossiers collected by the SD from 1936 onward. Their target was the Polish leadership: the intelligentsia, members of the clergy, teachers, and the nobility. Hitler had stated directly that there must be no Polish leaders, and that where they existed they must be killed. SS-Brigadeführer Lothar Beutel, commander of Einsatzgruppe IV, later testified that Heydrich had given the order for these murders at meetings in mid-August 1939. By the end of 1939, approximately 65,000 civilians had been murdered.

    Some army commanders objected. Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz sent Hitler a memorandum complaining about the atrocities. Hitler dismissed his concerns as childish, and Blaskowitz was relieved of his post in May 1940. He continued to serve but never received promotion to field marshal. That outcome sent a clear signal to every other officer considering a similar protest.

  • On the 13th of March 1941, Hitler issued guidelines specifying that Himmler would be given special tasks in the upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union, to be carried out independently of the Wehrmacht. A sub-paragraph of the directive was written specifically to prevent friction between the army and the SS during the offensive. Criminal acts against civilians by Wehrmacht members, Hitler added, would not be prosecuted in military courts.

    On the 30th of March 1941, Hitler addressed his leading generals. General Franz Halder, the Army's Chief of Staff, recorded the speech verbatim. Hitler described a fight to the finish, calling for the extermination of Bolshevist commissars and the Communist intelligentsia. Though Halder's notes make no mention of Jews, German historian Andreas Hillgruber argued that because of Hitler's repeated contemporary statements about annihilating what he called "Judeo-Bolshevism", his generals would have understood the speech as a call for the destruction of the Soviet Union's Jewish population.

    In May 1941, Heydrich verbally passed on the order to murder Soviet Jews to the SiPo NCO School in Pretzsch, where Einsatzgruppe commanders were being trained. That same spring, Heydrich and General Eduard Wagner finalised the co-operation agreement between the Einsatzgruppen and the German Army. Following that agreement on the 28th of April 1941, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch ordered all German Army commanders to identify and register all Jews in occupied Soviet territory and to fully co-operate with the Einsatzgruppen.

    In June 1941, Himmler told top SS leaders that the regime intended to reduce the population of the Soviet Union by 30 million people, not only through direct murder but by depriving survivors of food and other necessities of life.

  • After the invasion of the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941, Heydrich's instructions arrived in a letter dated the 2nd of July 1941. The Einsatzgruppen were to execute all senior and middle-ranking Comintern officials, Communist Party committee members, people's commissars, and Jews in party and government posts. On the 8th of July, Heydrich announced that all Jews were to be regarded as partisans, and ordered that all male Jews between the ages of 15 and 45 be shot. On the 17th of July he extended the order to all Jewish Red Army prisoners of war.

    The definition of who counted as Jewish was broader than Germany's own Nuremberg Laws. Where those 1935 laws defined as Jewish anyone with at least three Jewish grandparents, the Einsatzgruppen defined as Jewish anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, regardless of religious practice.

    Within the first few weeks of Operation Barbarossa, 10,000 Jews had been murdered in 40 separate pogroms. By the end of 1941, roughly 60 pogroms had taken place, claiming as many as 24,000 victims. The scope widened fast. Initially the targets were adult Jewish men. By August, the net had been cast to include women, children, and the elderly. The entire Jewish population was now the target.

    In Ukraine, an Einsatzgruppe C situation report from September 1941 noted that not all Jews were part of the Bolshevist apparatus, and raised a concern that the total elimination of Jews would harm the economy and food supply. The Nazis' response was to round surviving Jews into ghettos and exploit them as slave labour until 1942, when that postponed killing would resume.

    Einsatzgruppe D reduced the Jewish population of Dnepropetrovsk from 30,000 to 702 over the course of four days in February 1942. Historian Erich Haberer noted that the ratio of German Order Police to local auxiliaries was 1 to 10 in Ukraine and Belarus, and 1 to 20 in rural areas. Most Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews were murdered by fellow Ukrainians and Belarusians under German command.

  • Kiev fell to the Germans on the 19th of September 1941. The Jews of Kiev were ordered to report to a street corner on the 29th of September. Since news of massacres elsewhere had not yet reached the city, and the assembly point was near the train station, most assumed they were being deported. They arrived carrying possessions and food for a journey.

    After being marched roughly two miles northwest of the city centre, they encountered a barbed wire barrier, Ukrainian police, and German troops. Groups of thirty or forty were told to leave their possessions and were pushed through a narrow passageway lined with soldiers carrying clubs. Anyone who tried to escape was beaten. At the open ravine of Babi Yar, victims were forced to strip and then herded into the ravine, made to lie on top of the bodies of other victims, and shot in the back of the head. The murders continued for two days. Anton Heidborn, a member of Sonderkommando 4a, later testified that three days after the shooting ended there were still people alive among the corpses. Heidborn spent those days helping account for what he described as millions of banknotes taken from the victims. The final count was 33,771 dead.

    In November 1941, Himmler ordered SS-Obergruppenführer Jeckeln, one of the Babi Yar perpetrators, to liquidate the Riga ghetto. Jeckeln selected a site near the Rumbula railway station, about ten kilometres southeast of Riga, and had 300 Russian prisoners of war dig the pits. He organised around 1,700 men for the operation. On the 30th of November, victims were roused at 4:00 am and moved in columns of a thousand people toward the execution ground. SS men walked the columns shooting anyone who could not keep pace. Around 13,000 Jews from Riga were killed that first day, together with a thousand Jews from Berlin who had just arrived by train. On the 8th of December, the remaining 10,000 Jews of Riga were murdered in the same way. About a thousand more were killed on the streets or en route, bringing the total to 25,000 dead over two days. Jeckeln was promoted to Leader of the SS Upper Section, Ostland.

  • Nine of the seventeen leaders of Einsatzgruppe A held doctorate degrees. Three of the four main Einsatzgruppen were commanded by men with doctorates; one of them, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Rasch, held a double doctorate. The Einsatzgruppen were not staffed by the uneducated or the marginal.

    Historian Christopher Browning observed that the SS brigades were only the thin cutting edge of German units involved in political and racial mass murder. The organisation drew recruits from the SD, Gestapo, Kriminalpolizei, Orpo, and Waffen-SS, augmented by volunteers from local auxiliary police forces. Order Police formations were on average larger and better armed, with heavy machine-gun detachments that enabled operations beyond the capability of the SS alone.

    The psychological cost of the killing was real. Himmler witnessed an Einsatzgruppen mass execution first-hand in Minsk in August 1941 and concluded that shooting Jews was too stressful for his men. By November he had arranged for SS men suffering ill health from executions to receive rest and mental health care. Historian Christian Ingrao notes that the leadership tried to make the shootings a collective act without individual responsibility. Browning identifies three categories among the perpetrators: those eager to participate from the start, those who participated despite moral qualms because they were ordered to, and a significant minority who refused to take part at all. Commander of Einsatzgruppe D, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, specifically ordered that any man who was too eager or too brutal should be removed from further executions.

    Erwin Schulz, one of Ohlendorf's co-defendants at the post-war trial, testified that he had received an explicit order to exterminate all Jews only in mid-August 1941. Unlike Ohlendorf, Schulz refused to carry out the order, specifically because it included women and children. He was discharged from that duty, and the discharge had no negative effect on his career.

  • Himmler eventually concluded that shooting was an inefficient method of killing at industrial scale. It was costly, demoralising, and sometimes failed to kill victims quickly. Gas vans, which had already been used to murder psychiatric patients under Aktion T4, were brought into service by all four main Einsatzgruppen from 1942 onward. The vans were not welcomed by the Einsatzkommandos, because removing the bodies and burying them was an ordeal that fell to prisoners or auxiliaries rather than SS men.

    Plans for the total eradication of eleven million Jews across Europe were formalised at the Wannsee Conference on the 20th of January 1942. Permanent killing centres at Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka replaced the mobile death squads as the primary method. Experiments using Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide gas, had already begun at Auschwitz as early as September 1941.

    After Germany's defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, Himmler ordered the formation of Sonderaktion 1005 under SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel. The unit's task was to exhume bodies from mass graves across the Eastern Front and burn them to destroy the evidence of the genocide. The work was never finished. Many mass graves remain unmarked and unexcavated.

  • On the 1st of December 1941, SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger filed a detailed report to Stahlecker, the head of Einsatzgruppe A, documenting the activities of Einsatzkommando III in Lithuania from the 2nd of July to the 25th of November 1941. The Jäger Report listed an almost daily running total of 137,346 people killed, the vast majority of them Jews, across more than 100 executions in 71 different locations. Children were first included in the count from mid-August, when 3,207 people were murdered in Rokiškis on the 15th and the 16th of August 1941. Jäger wrote that the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania had been reached and that there were no more Jews in Lithuania except for working Jews and their families. In a February 1942 addendum, the total rose to 138,272, broken down as 48,252 men, 55,556 women, and 34,464 children.

    Jäger escaped capture when the war ended and lived in Heidelberg under his own name until his report was discovered in March 1959. He was arrested and charged, but committed suicide on the 22nd of June 1959 at Hohenasperg Fortress while awaiting trial.

    After the war, 24 senior Einsatzgruppen leaders were prosecuted in the Einsatzgruppen trial of 1947-48, part of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials held under United States military authority. Fourteen death sentences and two life sentences were handed down, but only four of the death sentences were carried out, on the 7th of June 1951. The rest were reduced. Four additional Einsatzgruppe leaders were tried and executed by other nations. The West German government ultimately charged only about 100 former Einsatzgruppen members in total, and as time went on witnesses grew older and funding for prosecutions dried up. The 1958 Ulm Einsatzkommando trial brought wider public awareness of the crimes, with ten former members facing charges for the murder of around 5,500 Jewish men, women, and children in the German-Lithuanian border area in mid-1941.

Common questions

What were the Einsatzgruppen and what was their purpose in World War II?

The Einsatzgruppen were SS paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany responsible for mass murder, primarily by shooting, in German-occupied Europe during World War II. Their central purpose was the implementation of the Final Solution, targeting Jews, Soviet commissars, Romani people, and the intelligentsia in occupied territories. Historian Raul Hilberg estimates they and related agencies killed more than two million people between 1941 and 1945.

How many people were killed at Babi Yar by the Einsatzgruppen?

33,771 people were murdered at Babi Yar on the 29th and the 30th of September 1941. The victims were Jews of Kiev who had been ordered to report to a street corner, told they were being deported, and then marched to the ravine northwest of the city where they were shot. The perpetrators included a company of Waffen-SS attached to Einsatzgruppe C and members of Sonderkommando 4a under SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln.

What happened to Einsatzgruppen commanders after World War II?

Twenty-four senior Einsatzgruppen leaders were prosecuted in the Einsatzgruppen trial of 1947-48, part of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials held under United States military authority. Fourteen death sentences and two life sentences were handed down, but only four executions were carried out on the 7th of June 1951. The West German government charged only about 100 former Einsatzgruppen members in total, and most surviving perpetrators returned to civilian life without prosecution.

What is the Jäger Report and what does it document about Einsatzgruppen killings?

The Jäger Report was filed by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger on the 1st of December 1941, documenting the activities of Einsatzkommando III in Lithuania from July to November 1941. It provides an almost daily tally of 137,346 people killed across more than 100 executions in 71 locations. A February 1942 addendum raised the total to 138,272, broken down as 48,252 men, 55,556 women, and 34,464 children.

How did the Einsatzgruppen get local populations to participate in mass killings?

The Einsatzgruppen incited and organised pogroms in newly occupied territories, releasing criminals from local jails and directing nationalist groups to participate. In Latvia, Einsatzgruppe A commander Stahlecker appointed Viktors Arājs on the 2nd of July 1941 to head the Arajs Kommando, a force of about 300 men, mostly university students, who participated in mass murders. Historian Erich Haberer noted that in rural Ukraine and Belarus the ratio of German Order Police to local auxiliaries was 1 to 20, meaning most Jews in those areas were killed by fellow countrymen under German command.

What role did the German Wehrmacht play in Einsatzgruppen operations?

The Wehrmacht cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen as ordered by Hitler, providing logistical support and participating directly in mass killings. On the 10th of October 1941, Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau issued the Severity Order to the German Sixth Army, calling for the extermination of Jews. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt of Army Group South expressed complete agreement and circulated his own version. Einsatzkommando 4b reported on the 6th of July 1941 that armed forces surprisingly welcomed hostility against the Jews.

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All sources

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