The Einsatzgruppen Reports Were Forged

The Einsatzgruppen reports are among the best-documented archival series of the Third Reich. They consist of approximately 195 numbered reports (Operational Situation Reports USSR, designated Ereignismeldungen UdSSR) prepared by Reinhard Heydrich’s Reich Security Main Office between June 1941 and May 1942, plus a continuation series (the Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories, Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten) running from May 1942 to May 1943. The reports were drafted from the field reports submitted by the four Einsatzgruppen commanders (Walter Stahlecker for Einsatzgruppe A, Arthur Nebe for B, Otto Rasch for C, and Otto Ohlendorf for D), processed at the Berlin headquarters, and circulated to a distribution list of approximately 100 senior officials. They are authentic captured German documents, with paper, ink, typewriter forensics, distribution lists, recipient annotations and chain of custody all on record.

Capture and authentication

The Einsatzgruppen reports were captured by US Army intelligence at the Reich Security Main Office records depot in Berlin in late 1945. The capture was made through standard occupation procedures: the building was secured, the files were inventoried in situ by US Army document teams, and the relevant series was shipped to the document processing centre at Fürstenhagen. The chain of custody from capture to courtroom was sworn to by US Army document officers (notably Major Walter H. Rapp and his team) and entered as exhibits at Nuremberg under accession numbers in the NO and PS series.

The reports were used as evidence at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal of 1945 to 1946 and centrally at the Einsatzgruppen Trial of 1947 to 1948 (one of the twelve subsequent Nuremberg proceedings), where Otto Ohlendorf and twenty-three other Einsatzgruppen commanders were tried by an American military tribunal under Telford Taylor’s prosecution office. At the Einsatzgruppen Trial the reports were the primary documentary evidence; Ohlendorf and his co-defendants did not allege forgery; they argued (unsuccessfully) that they had acted under superior orders. Ohlendorf testified at length about the operations he had commanded; his testimony is consistent with the reports. Fourteen of the twenty-four defendants were convicted; four were sentenced to death and executed. The reports were the operational record of an organisation whose commanders had testified to its operations.

What the reports describe

The Operational Situation Reports cover the period of the Einsatzgruppen’s most intensive killing in the occupied Soviet territories from June 1941 to spring 1942. They are written in standard German military report style and contain numbered tables of operations, with location, date, the units involved, the categories of people killed, and the totals. The categories are explicit: “Jews”, “Bolshevik officials”, “agents and saboteurs”, and others. The total Jewish dead recorded across the series is approximately 700,000, with the operations continuing into 1942 to add several hundred thousand more. The reports describe the methods (mass shootings into prepared pits at the edge of villages and towns), the units (Einsatzkommando 9 at Vilnius, Sonderkommando 4a at Babi Yar, and so on), and in some cases the named officers responsible.

The reports are corroborated at every level. The local-population testimony at the killing sites (gathered by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission in 1944 to 1945, by Israeli investigators preparing the Eichmann case in the late 1950s, by the Yahad-In Unum project under Father Patrick Desbois from 2004 onwards) describes the same operations at the same sites on the same dates. The German military reports from the Wehrmacht units operating in the same areas reference the SD operations and sometimes describe witnessing them. The post-war German criminal proceedings against the Einsatzgruppen members (the Ulm Einsatzkommando Trial of 1958, the various Einsatzgruppen-related proceedings before the Central Office in Ludwigsburg) used the reports as evidence and treated them as authentic. The Soviet criminal proceedings against captured Einsatzgruppen personnel (notably the Krasnodar Trial of July 1943, which dealt with Sonderkommando 10a’s gas-van operations in the Caucasus) also corroborate the reports.

The Yahad-In Unum corroboration

The most recent and most extensive independent corroboration is the work of Father Patrick Desbois and his Yahad-In Unum team, which since 2004 has interviewed local non-Jewish witnesses at the Einsatzgruppen killing sites across the former Soviet territories (Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, parts of Poland that were under Soviet rule in 1939 to 1941). The team has located and interviewed several thousand witnesses, almost all in their eighties or nineties, who as children or young adults had seen the killings or had been forced to participate in the burials. The witnesses describe the operations in detail that matches the reports: the same dates, the same units, the same locations, the same numbers of killed where the witnesses can give numbers. The methodology is described in Desbois’s The Holocaust by Bullets (2008). The convergence is strong; the operations described in the SS reports are described from the other side by people who had no contact with the documentary record.

Specific forgery allegations

The deniers have not produced specific forensic evidence of forgery in any individual report. The Institute for Historical Review and similar denier organisations have, in various publications, asserted the reports to be forgeries on general grounds (the figures are too high; the German bureaucracy could not have killed that many people; the reports were prepared after the war by Allied investigators) without producing any forensic analysis of any specific report. The general grounds do not survive contact with the document forensics, the chain of custody, the corroborating evidence from independent sources (Wehrmacht reports, local witness testimony, Soviet investigations, post-war German prosecutions, the Yahad-In Unum work, the perpetrator testimony at trial), and the simple physical reality of the killing sites, where mass graves containing the remains of the people the reports record having been killed have been identified, exhumed, and forensically examined repeatedly across eighty years.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that the Einsatzgruppen reports are forged is harmful because it requires the listener to dismiss a heavily corroborated body of contemporaneous SS documentary evidence in favour of a forgery thesis with no specific evidence behind it. The reports are real, they were written by the people whose names are on them, the killings they record happened at the locations and on the dates they record, and the survivors and witnesses to those killings have given convergent testimony. The denial is the position of asserting forgery as a default and refusing to engage with any specific document or any specific corroborating source.

Where were the reports captured? Where are the originals held? What does the local witness testimony at the killing sites describe?

See also

• The Einsatzgruppen
• The Einsatzgruppen Trial
• Ordinary People Who Became Killers, Reserve Police Battalion 101
• The Sonderkommando
• Reinhard Heydrich
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

---

Sources

• Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector (eds.), The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews, July 1941 to January 1943, Holocaust Library, 1989, with the original document references in the Nuremberg NO series
• Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Andrej Angrick, Jürgen Matthäus and Martin Cüppers (eds.), Die “Ereignismeldungen UdSSR” 1941: Dokumente der Einsatzgruppen in der Sowjetunion, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011, the standard German edition
• Telford Taylor, Final Report to the Secretary of the Army on the Nuernberg War Crimes Trials Under Control Council Law No. 10, US Government Printing Office, 1949, on the Einsatzgruppen Trial
• Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, vol. 4 (the Einsatzgruppen Trial), US Government Printing Office, 1950
• Otto Ohlendorf, testimony at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1947, in Trials of War Criminals, vol. 4
• Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938 bis 1942, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981
• Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941 bis 1943, Hamburger Edition, 2003
• Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992, on the parallel order police shooting operations
• Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
• Yahad-In Unum, ongoing field research project, https://www.yahadinunum.org
• Father Desbois and Yahad-In Unum, The Holocaust by Bullets in Ukraine: Documenting the Soviet Forensic Reports, on the convergence with the Soviet ChGK records
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Einsatzgruppen”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org