Einsatzgruppen

Einsatzgruppen (a German military term meaning "mission groups", loosely translated as "Task Force") were semi-military groups formed in Nazi Germany before and during World War II. These death squads belonged to the SS and followed the Wehrmacht in their attacks first on Poland and then the Soviet Union. Their principal task, in the words of SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski at the Nuremberg Trial "was the annihilation of the Jews, gypsies, and political commissars." According to their own records, they killed over 1 million people, almost exclusively civilians, without judicial review and later without semblance of legality (no reading of sentences of martial or administrative law), starting with the Polish intelligentsia and quickly progressing by 1941 to target primarily the Jews of Eastern Europe. The historian Raul Hilberg estimates that the Einsatzgruppen killed over 1.4 million Jews in open air shootings between 1941 and 1945.

History

A member of Einsatzgruppe D prepares to murder the last Jew in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, seen kneeling before a filled mass grave, on the Jewish New Year in September, 1941. Picture from an Einsatzgruppen soldier's personal album, labelled "Last Jew of Vinnitsa," all 28,000 Jews from Vinnitsa and its surrounding areas were massacred.

The origins of the Einsatzgruppen can be traced back to the ad hoc Einsatzkommando formed by Reinhard Heydrich to secure government buildings and documents following the Anschluss in Austria in March 1938. The task of securing government buildings, the accompanying documention and questioning senior civil servants in lands occupied by Germany was the Einsatzgruppen's original mission. In the summer of 1938, when Germany was preparing an invasion of Czechoslovakia scheduled for October 1, 1938, the Einsatzgruppen were founded. The intention was for Einsatzgruppen to travel in the the wake of the German armies as they advanced into Czechoslovakia, securing government papers and offices. Unlike the Einsatzkommando, the Einsatzgruppen were to be armed and authorized to freely use lethal force to accomplish their mission. The Munich Agreement of 1938 prevented the war which the Einsatzgruppen were originally founded for, but as the Germans occupied the Sudetenland in the fall of 1938, the Einsatzgruppen moved into the Sudetenland to occupy offices formally belonging to the Czechoslovak state. After the occupation of the rest of the Czech portion of Czechoslovakia after March 15, 1939, the Einsatzgruppen were re-formed and were again used to secure offices formally belonging to the Czechoslovak government. The Einsatzgruppen were never a standing formation; rather they were ad hoc units recruited mostly from the ranks of the SS, the SD, and various German police forces such as the Order Police, the Gendarmerie, the Kripo and the Gestapo, given several weeks’ to several months’ training and then sent into action. Once the military campaign had ended, the Einsatzgruppen units were disbanded, through generally the same personnel were recruited again if the need arose for the Einsatzgruppen units to be re-activated.

In May 1939, Adolf Hitler decided upon an invasion of Poland planned for August 25 of that year (later moved back to September 1). In response, Heydrich again re-formed the Einsatzgruppen to travel again in the wake of the German armies. Unlike the earlier operations, Heydrich gave the Einsatzgruppen commanders carte blanche to liquidate anyone belonging to groups that the Germans considered hostile.

After the occupation of Poland in 1939, the Einsatzgruppen killed Poles belonging to the intelligentsia, such as priests and teachers. The Nazis considered all Slavic people Untermenschen, or subhumans, and wanted to use the Polish lower classes as servants and slaves. The mission of the Einsatzgruppen was therefore the forceful depoliticisation of the Polish people and the elimination of the groups most clearly identified with the Polish national identity. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in May 1940, the Einsatzgruppen once again travelled in the wake of the Wehrmacht, but unlike their operations in Poland, the Einsatzgruppen operations in Western Europe in 1940 were within the original mandate of securing government offices and papers. Had Operation Sealion, the German plan for an invasion of the United Kingdom been launched, six Einsatzgruppen were scheduled to follow the invasion force to Britain. The Einsatzgruppen intended for "Sealion" were provided with a list (known as the Black Book after the war) of 2,820 personalities to be arrested immediately.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Einsatzgruppen's main assignment was to kill Communist officers and Jews on a much larger scale than in Poland. These Einsatzgruppen were under control of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) (Reich Security Main Office); i.e., under Reinhard Heydrich and his successor Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The original mandate set by Heydrich for the four Einsatzgruppen sent into the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa was to secure the offices and papers of the Soviet state and Communist Party; liquidate all of the higher cadres of the Soviet state; and to instigate and encourage pogroms against all local Jewish populations. As the Einsatzgruppen advanced into the Soviet Union, after July 1941, the Einsatzgruppen increasingly engaged in the mass murders of the local Jews themselves rather than encouraging pogroms. Initially, the Einsatzgruppen generally limited themselves to shooting Jewish men; but as the summer wore on, increasingly all Jews regardless of age or sex were shot. The most murderous of the four Einsatzgruppen was Einsatzgruppe A, which operated in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania formally occupied by the Soviets. Einsatzgruppe A was the first Einsatzgruppen that attempted to systematically exterminate all Jews in its area. After December 1941, the other three Einsatzgruppen began what Raul Hilberg has called the "second sweep", which lasted into the summer of 1942, where they attempted to emulate Einsatzgruppe A by likewise systematically killing all Jews in their areas.

They murdered more than 1.5 million Jews, Communists, prisoners of war, and Roma (Gypsies) in total. They also assisted Wehrmacht units and local anti-Semites in killing half a million more. They were mobile forces in the beginning of the invasion, but settled down after the occupation. In addition, the Einsatzgruppen were often used in anti-partisan operations in the occupied Soviet Union.

Locations of mass killings carried out by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads.

Methods of murder

The standard method employed by the Einsatzgruppen was to post a proclamation ordering all the Jews and other condemned people in an occupied area to gather on a certain day. Once their victims were assembled, the squads led them to the place where they were to be killed, which was usually an open, isolated area where mass graves had been prepared. Sometimes, natural features of the landscape like the ravine at Babi Yar were used. The victims were forced to surrender their belongings and undress, after which they were positioned either on the edge of the grave or in it and shot.

The Nazis were not satisfied with shooting as a method of mass murder, however. It was costly in effort, there were too many potential witnesses to the murders, and the constant, close-quarters killing of defenseless men, women and children took a heavy psychological toll on the killers themselves. The men in charge of the Final Solution began searching for an alternative.

In some areas, the Einsatzgruppen also brought along specialized trucks called Gaswagen, or gas van, developed for the since-terminated T4 euthanasia program operated by the Reich Chancellery. Victims were forced into the backs of vehicles into which the exhaust from the engine was routed. The victims were then variably poisoned, or asphyxiated from the carbon monoxide accumulating within the truck compartment as the vehicle travelled to a burial pit. Gas trucks were subsequently employed at the Chełmno extermination camp. The stationary gas chambers of the subsequent death camps of Poland were an outgrowth of this idea, resourced by T4 staff on loan to the SS.

The Jäger Report

Map titled "Jewish Executions Carried Out by Einsatzgruppe A" from the December 1941 Jäger Report. Marked "Secret Reich Matter," the map shows the number of Jews shot in the Baltic region, and reads at the bottom: "the estimated number of Jews still on hand is 128,000."

The Einsatzgruppen kept track of many of their massacres, and one of the most famous of these officials records is the Jager Report, covering the operation of a Einsatzkommando 3 over five months in Lithuania. Written by the commander of Einsatzkommando 3, Karl Jäger, it includes a detailed list summarizing each massacre, totaling 137,346 victims, and states "…I can confirm today that Einsatzkommando 3 has achieved the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania. There are no more Jews in Lithuania, apart from working Jews and their families." After the war, despite these records, Jäger lived in West Germany under his own name until arrested for war crimes in 1959, when he committed suicide.

After the war

At the conclusion of World War II, senior leaders of the Einsatzgruppen were put before United States occupation courts, variably charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in the SS (which had been declared a criminal organization), in what became known as the Einsatzgruppen Trial of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials. Fourteen death sentences and two life sentences were among the judgments, although only four executions were carried out, on June 7, 1951, and the rest of these sentences were commuted.

Organization

• Einsatzgruppe A for the Baltic Republics with

Sonderkommandos 1 a and 1 b (German for special forces, not to be confused with the Sonderkommandos in the concentration camps)

Einsatzkommandos 2 and 3. Attached to Army Group North.

• Einsatzgruppe B for Belarus with

Sonderkommandos 7a and 7 b, the

Einsatzkommandos 8 and 9, and also

a "special force" in case Moscow was captured. Attached to Army Group Centre.

• Einsatzgruppe C for the Northern and central Ukraine

Sonderkommandos 4 a and 4 b and

Einsatzkommandos 5 and 6. Attached to Army Group South.

• Einsatzgruppe D for Bessarabia, the Southern Ukraine, the Crimea and (eventually) the Caucasus with

Sonderkommandos 10 a and 10 b and

Einsatzkommandos 11 a, 11 b and 12.

Both attached to Army Group South.

Einsatzgruppen leaders

• Group A: SS-Brigadeführer Dr.Franz Walter Stahlecker (until 23 March 1942)
• Group B: SS-Brigadeführer Artur Nebe (until Oct. 1941)
• Group C: SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Otto Rasch (until Oct. 1941)
• Group D: SS-Gruppenführer Prof. Otto Ohlendorf (until June 1942)

See also

• Babi Yar
• Rumbula
• Generalplan Ost
• Holocaust
• Odessa Massacre
• Operation Barbarossa
• Operation Tannenberg
• World War II atrocities in Poland
• The Black Book

Secondary sources

• The Origins of the Final Solution, Christopher Browning, 2004
• Masters of Death, Richard Rhodes, 2002

The content of this page is retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen under GFDL