The Einsatzgruppen

The Einsatzgruppen were four mobile killing units of the SS that followed the German army into the occupied Soviet territories from June 1941 onwards. Their job was to find and kill Jews, Soviet political officers, Roma, the disabled, and anyone else the regime considered an enemy. Over the next two and a half years they and their auxiliary forces shot around 1.5 million Jews, almost always at the edge of the towns the army had taken, almost always into open pits dug for the purpose. The Einsatzgruppen were the killing programme of the Holocaust before the death camps existed. They are sometimes called the Holocaust by Bullets, the title of Father Patrick Desbois’s book on the subject.

Who they were

There were four Einsatzgruppen, designated A, B, C and D, each attached to one of the four German army groups invading the Soviet Union. Einsatzgruppe A worked through the Baltic states and into Leningrad. Einsatzgruppe B worked through Belarus towards Moscow. Einsatzgruppe C worked through Ukraine. Einsatzgruppe D worked through southern Ukraine and into the Crimea. Each group was around 600 to 1,000 men, divided into smaller subunits called Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos that fanned out across the assigned territory.

The men were not, in the main, fanatical SS volunteers. The unit commanders were drawn from the SS officer corps and the Security Police, and many of them were university-educated lawyers, economists or theologians. The rank-and-file were often ordinary German police drafted into the units, alongside Waffen-SS men and seconded Wehrmacht troops. The historian Christopher Browning’s study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, which carried out shooting operations in Poland and was attached to Einsatzgruppe operations, is the most-cited account of this rank and file. Most of them were middle-aged reservists, not regime fanatics. They were given the chance to step out of the shooting if they could not face it. A few took it. Most did not.

How the killing worked

The standard Einsatzgruppen operation followed a consistent pattern. Local Jewish leaders were ordered to assemble the Jewish population of a town for what was usually called registration or resettlement. The assembly point was a square or marketplace. From there the Jews were marched, usually on foot, to a site outside the town: a forest, a ravine, a quarry, an antitank ditch. They were ordered to undress and to leave their valuables. They were marched in groups to the edge of the pit and shot. The next group was made to lie on top of the bodies and shot in turn. The pit was filled in by Jewish prisoners or by local conscripts who would themselves be shot when the work was done.

The operations took anywhere from a few hours for a small town to several days for a large city. The Babi Yar massacre at Kyiv in September 1941 killed around 33,000 Jews in two days. The Rumbula massacre at Riga killed around 25,000 in two operations a week apart. The Ponary site outside Vilna killed around 70,000 over the course of the occupation. There were thousands of smaller operations across the occupied territories. The shooting was often carried out within earshot of the local non-Jewish population. The Einsatzgruppen made no real attempt to hide what they were doing.

The local auxiliaries

The Einsatzgruppen could not have killed at the scale they did without local help. In every territory they entered they recruited auxiliary forces from the local population: Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Ukrainian and Belarusian volunteers. The auxiliaries were used for the round-ups, for the marches to the killing sites, and increasingly for the shooting itself. In some places, particularly Lithuania, local pogroms had begun before the Einsatzgruppen even arrived. The men who carried out those early pogroms became the recruiting pool for the auxiliary units.

This is part of the historical record that has been particularly difficult to confront in the post-Soviet states. The Soviet line through the Cold War was that the killings had been done by the German invaders. The post-1991 record makes clear that local participation was extensive, in some places overwhelming. The pages on individual countries in this site’s Beyond the Camps section cover the local element in more detail.

The regime’s own reporting

The Einsatzgruppen filed regular reports back to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. The reports listed the operations carried out and the numbers killed. They were typed up, mimeographed and circulated to senior officials. After the war the surviving copies of the Einsatzgruppen reports were one of the most important pieces of documentary evidence at the Nuremberg trials and at the later Einsatzgruppen Trial of 1947 to 1948, in which 24 senior Einsatzgruppen officers were tried. Fourteen were sentenced to death; four were executed. The rest had their sentences commuted in the political climate of the early Cold War, and several were back in private life by the late 1950s.

What it added up to

The Einsatzgruppen killed around 1.5 million Jews. They are the bulk of the eastern half of the Holocaust death toll. They show that the regime did not need camps and gas chambers to commit mass murder. Ordinary German policemen, with rifles, in pits at the edge of every town in occupied Eastern Europe, killed millions of people in the open air. The death camps that came later were partly an industrial scaling-up of the killing and partly an attempt to reduce the psychological strain on the men doing it. Both observations are true. Neither softens what happened in the pits.

See also

Sources

  • Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins, 1992
  • Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
  • Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, Knopf, 2002
  • USHMM: Einsatzgruppen