The Holocaust deniers claim: “Israeli military actions are comparable to the Einsatzgruppen. Both involve organised killing of civilians by armed units operating with state authority. The structural parallel between Israeli military operations in the West Bank and Gaza and the Nazi mobile killing squads is clear.”
This is the specific case of the broader Holocaust-inversion argument: the comparison of a particular Israeli military formation or operation with a particular Nazi formation. The Einsatzgruppen comparison appears regularly in the more inflammatory anti-Israel discourse and has, on at least one occasion, been used by an Israeli scholar (Avi Shlaim, in some published comments) and by a number of international commentators. The comparison is structurally false. The Einsatzgruppen and the Israeli military are not comparable in their composition, purpose, command structure, operational pattern or relationship to civilian populations. Knowing what the Einsatzgruppen actually were, in detail, is the necessary precondition for evaluating any such comparison.
What the Einsatzgruppen were
The Einsatzgruppen were four mobile killing units of the SS, designated A, B, C and D, deployed behind the advancing Wehrmacht into the occupied Soviet territories from June 1941. They were under the command of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), led nominally by Reinhard Heydrich and, after his assassination in 1942, by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The four group commanders in 1941 were SS-Brigadeführer Walter Stahlecker (A), SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe (B), SS-Gruppenführer Otto Rasch and Otto Ohlendorf (C and D). Each Einsatzgruppe was approximately 500 to 1,000 men strong, divided into smaller Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, plus auxiliary units of local collaborators (Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Belarusian) recruited in the field.
Their purpose was the killing of Soviet civilians categorised as enemies of the Reich, with Jews as the principal target throughout the operation, and with Roma, communist political functionaries and the Soviet intelligentsia as further targets. The killing was conducted predominantly by mass shooting, in pits dug or natural ravines used near the towns and villages where the Jewish populations lived. The standard procedure: arrival of the Einsatzkommando, registration and assembly of the Jewish population (often through the local Jewish council), march to the killing site, undressing, shooting, mass burial. The total Einsatzgruppen killing toll, established by the prosecution at the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg (Trial 9, 1947 to 1948), was approximately 1.5 to 2 million people, with the larger figures including the killings carried out by the auxiliary local units under Einsatzgruppen direction. The detailed Einsatzgruppen reports (Ereignismeldungen UdSSR), submitted to Berlin throughout 1941 and 1942, give the daily and weekly killing totals by location, named unit, and named perpetrator. The reports survive in their entirety in the captured German archive.
The killing was unconcealed and openly directed at the unarmed civilian population. The targets had not, in any operational sense, attacked German forces; they were the people the regime had designated for elimination. The shootings were of women, children and the elderly along with the men, with no attempt to distinguish combatants from non-combatants because there were no combatants to distinguish; the targets were a religiously and ethnically defined civilian group.
What the Israeli military is
The Israeli Defence Forces are the conscript and professional armed forces of a sovereign state, structured along conventional military lines, with a chain of command running through the elected civilian government, with formal rules of engagement, with a military justice system and a parallel civilian court system that adjudicates allegations of misconduct, and with regular oversight by the Knesset, the High Court of Justice, and (in matters of international law) by Israel’s relations with the United States, the European Union and various international bodies. The IDF’s missions include conventional state-defence operations against state and non-state armed adversaries (Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Iranian forces in Syria, occasional cross-border conflicts with the Egyptian and Jordanian armies in the past). Its operations have produced civilian casualties, sometimes substantial, sometimes the subject of credible allegations of war crimes; the IDF maintains its own internal investigation procedures, with varying credibility, and is the subject of external investigation by the ICC, the UN Human Rights Council, and various NGOs.
The IDF is not an Einsatzgruppe in any structural sense. Its operations are conducted under stated military objectives against armed adversaries who themselves engage in combat. Its rules of engagement, however imperfectly applied, formally distinguish combatants from non-combatants. Its operations are conducted in territories that include populations whose presence is acknowledged in international law and whose status is the subject of formal political and legal processes. Its operations have ends; the units involved return to garrison or to other duties. None of this makes the IDF immune to criticism, including criticism of its specific conduct in specific operations; it does mean that the comparison with a unit whose sole and explicit purpose was the mass murder of unarmed civilians is structurally unsupportable.
The comparison’s actual content
When the comparison is examined for its actual content rather than its rhetorical force, what remains is the proposition that Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territories have produced civilian casualties on a substantial scale. This is true but does not establish the comparison. The Soviet Red Army produced civilian casualties on a substantial scale in eastern Germany in 1944 to 1945; it was not an Einsatzgruppe. The American military produced civilian casualties on a substantial scale in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan; it was not an Einsatzgruppe. The British military produced civilian casualties in many of its colonial wars; it was not an Einsatzgruppe. The category of operations that produce civilian casualties is large and includes most of the wars of the past century; the category of operations whose stated and exclusive purpose was the mass killing of unarmed civilians of a specific religious or ethnic group is narrower and includes very few formations beyond the Einsatzgruppen and their direct analogues (the Operation Reinhard staff, the Soviet NKVD’s national-deportation units in some operations, the Hutu Power militias of 1994, the Bosnian Serb VRS at Srebrenica). The Israeli military does not fit into the second category by any structural measure.
The propaganda use of the comparison
The Einsatzgruppen comparison, when made by sophisticated rhetorical actors, is not making an analytical claim; it is making an emotional claim, in the hope of attaching to Israeli conduct the moral discredit of the Nazi formation. The emotional claim works on listeners who have a vivid sense of the Einsatzgruppen as terrible and a vague sense of Israeli conduct as bad; it does not work on listeners who know the structural details of either. The proper response to the comparison is to ask for the specific structural features that make it apt, and to address those specific features on the evidence. In almost all cases, the specific features either do not match (composition, command, purpose, target definition) or match in features so generic (any military operation in a populated area produces civilian casualties) that the comparison adds no analytical content beyond the rhetorical force.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim is harmful because it borrows the moral discredit of an unambiguously evil formation and attaches it to a contemporary military whose conduct is contested but is structurally different. The borrowing is the manoeuvre; the comparison is its cover. Like the broader Gaza-Holocaust comparison on the neighbouring leaf, the Einsatzgruppen analogy serves to dilute the historical record of the Holocaust itself by making it just one instance of state violence among many, while also degrading the analytical quality of contemporary criticism by reducing it to emotional invocation rather than evidence. The proper criticism of Israeli conduct stands on its own terms; the proper memory of the Einsatzgruppen stands on its own terms; the comparison serves neither.
What were the Einsatzgruppen, in detail? What is the IDF, in detail? On what specific structural feature is the comparison being drawn?
See also
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector (eds.), The Einsatzgruppen Reports, Holocaust Library, 1989, the standard collection of the Ereignismeldungen UdSSR
- Ronald Headland, Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service 1941 to 1943, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992
- Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938 to 1942, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981
- Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992
- Father 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, on the field investigation of the Einsatzgruppen killing sites
- Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial 1945 to 1958: Atrocity, Law, and History, Cambridge University Press, 2009
- Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Trial 9 (the Einsatzgruppen Trial), Nuremberg, 1947 to 1948, with the surviving Ereignismeldungen evidence
- Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, 9 December 1948
- International Criminal Court, current proceedings on the Israel-Palestine situation, https://www.icc-cpi.int
- Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001, on the comparative analysis of genocide
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Einsatzgruppen”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org