Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads

The German advance continues inexorably.

The imposing Bolshevik front is breached and annihilated.

The German soldier has now proved his eternal valor,

saving Europe from Bolshevism, enemy of the world.

On June 22nd, 1941,

Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa,

shattering the Nazi-Soviet pact signed in Berlin in 1939.

The ultimate goal of the invasion of the USSR

was to empty Eastern Europe of Jews and Communists,

to clean out a "living space," or Lebensraum,

for a Great Reich destined to rule a thousand years.

This was not an ordinary war.

This was supposed to be a war of annihilation.

And as it was planned by Hitler since late 1940,

this was a war where the enemy

was not to be conquered but destroyed, annihilated.

And that led to the appointment of Himmler

as a special envoy for security measures in the occupied territories.

The Einsatzgruppen, 3,000 strong,

were quickly trained in Pretzsch and divided into four units,

corresponding to four parts of the huge territory of the USSR.

They advanced in the wake of the Wehrmacht.

Each Einsatzgruppe was attached to one or more military units.

Einsatzgruppe A, the Army Group North unit,

operated in the Baltic states,

annexed by Stalin the year before.

Einsatzgruppe B was to clean out Byelorussia and Central Russia.

Einsatzgruppe C, northern and central Ukraine,

and Einsatzgruppe D, southern Ukraine.

Divided into four battalions called Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos,

the Einsatzgruppen... literally "intervention groups"...

were assigned to track down and execute the foes of Nazism,

in other words, Jews and Communist partisans.

Their initial task was,

in terms of Himmler and the SS,

kind of preventive security.

Eliminate all potential enemies, all potential dangers.

That’s a very broad mandate,

which means that the Einsatzgruppen have lots of leeway

as to how far they would carry that.

When the documents are explicit, they will talk about killing Jews

in state and party positions,

as well as communist leaders and communist functionaries.

Elsewhere they talk about potential enemies, saboteurs,

and using names that are often applied to Jews,

as a kind of symbolic way.

So while there wasn’t, as best we can tell,

an explicit mandate to carry out a total and systematic extermination,

it was clear that they were going to be aiming at all Jewish leadership,

at all Jews that had any connection to the state and the party,

and that they were free to expand that to any Jew

that was viewed as a potential man of military age

who might be involved, or thought possibly involved, in resistance.

Taken by surprise, the Red Army sustained disastrous losses.

Wehrmacht troops annihilated the Soviet defense,

taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war.

The initial strategy of the Einsatzgruppen,

shadowing the troops and discreetly moving into the cities,

was to incite pogroms against the Jews,

identified as communists in the Nazi imagination.

The ties between Jews and communism,

or bolshevism rather,

have been established early on,

as a consequence of World War I, basically,

and they are not unique to the German setting.

They were also developed in other countries,

and in other historical circumstances.

But they really are crucial to the understanding

of the ideological backdrop to what happens

during Operation Barbarossa.

One has to understand that the Jew is the key enemy

in the minds of Germans, and particularly Nazis,

and it’s very difficult to draw a line between the two, obviously.

The Jew is seen as the wire puller

behind all other enemy groups.

And these enemy groups comprise

from Catholicism via liberals to bolshevists.

In the prisons of the cities they conquered,

the Nazis found the remains of nationalist leaders,

executed by the Soviet NKVD before they fled.

The NKVD, Lavrenty Beria's terrifying secret police,

were hated and feared in Ukraine for having orchestrated the famine

which caused the death of five million Ukrainians between 1922 and 1933.

Local nationalist movements,

to whom the Nazis promised independence in exchange for their collaboration,

were hungry for revenge.

They think, of course, that they're gonna earn their way

to greater national independence,

whether as Ukrainian or Lithuanian or Latvian.

The Nazis had no intention of setting up independent states,

but they don’t mind giving them the illusion in that regard,

that along the line they'll get some reward in that way.

The Eastern European lands were pervaded

with age-old anti-Semitic traditions

rooted in Christian anti-Judaism,

economic or ethnic competition,

and the accusation that the Jews were complicit with Soviet power.

Nationalist movements,

informed of the German offensive before its launch,

organized anti-Jewish pogroms.

At the end of June 1941,

thousands of Jews were savagely murdered in the streets of Vilnius, Riga, Kaunas,

and Lviv, known as Lemberg in German, the capital of District Galicia.

The experience in these parts of the Soviet Union since summer 1940,

with the Soviet occupation were very negative

and to a large extent traumatic.

That formed a large and important backdrop to the reactions of locals on the ground

towards this vacuum that was suddenly ensuing

with the Soviet army retreating,

and resulted in anti-Jewish actions being taken

and then clearly not suppressed by the Germans.

The Einsatzgruppen were ordered by Heydrich

to make use of anti-Jewish activities

that were instigated by locals.

In Kaunas, Lithuania, in a carriage-house courtyard,

Jews were forced to use their bare hands

to clean up the manure left by Soviet soldiers' horses.

Lithuanians armed with clubs,

wearing the white armband, a nationalist emblem,

then battered the Jews to death.

In Kaunas, that was fenced-off, Germans standing around

and what looked like Lithuanians beating several hundred Jews to death

in a public performance that, as some witnesses say,

involved women standing around

and having children sitting on their shoulders,

some people making music while the Jews were killed in a public square.

The German role in this incident

is that of an onlooker and, in fact, that of a documenter.

There were Germans taking photographs.

And this is why this is such a prominent case

because it's one of the rare instances of documentary material

being available on these pogroms.

In a week or two,

several thousand people had been killed in the Kaunas pogroms.

Einsatzgruppe C arrived in Lviv, now in Ukraine, on June 27th.

A similar wave of violence was unleashed

against a Jewish community numbering some 160,000.

The Nazis publicized the discovery of Ukrainian corpses

in a fortress outside the city,

used as a prison by the NKVD, sparking the pogroms.

The same compounds were then used

to execute and beat to death hundreds of Jews.

My mother told me a friend

asked her to go to Brygidki Prison,

to the basement,

to look for the friend's husband.

They went down the stairs, and when they opened the door,

they saw bodies piled up to the ceiling.

My mother's friend fainted

because of the awful stench.

Innocent victims cruelly tortured and killed

by the Bolsheviks,

wielding knives, axes, grenades, and machine guns.

Two or three days later, I was in our courtyard.

I saw our landlord, Mr. Barzam.

Suddenly, two young men burst in.

One of them shoved him from behind.

Barzam fell down.

The other ran up and began beating him

with a chair.

The first struck a match and lit his beard and sidelocks.

Barzam screamed.

Mama came out and the men ran away.

You see, beatings of Jews started immediately.

Homicidal Jewish scum,

who worked hand in hand with the GPU,

is given to German troops by an outraged crowd to be punished.

Here is a dreadful sample of Lemberg's Soviet faces.

Most of these looters and marauders are Jews.

See the allies of Churchill and his plutocratic clique!

In Ternopil, a unit of the SS Viking division

joined forces with nationalist Stepan Bandera's henchmen

to carry out similar massacres.

Members of the German Totenkopf, or "Death's Head" SS,

took part in the killings directly for the first time.

However, Einsatzgruppe commanders were not convinced

that provoking these outbursts of violence was an efficient strategy.

To this day in Kaunas 7,800 Jews have been liquidated, partially through pogroms,

and partially through shootings organized by Lithuanian commandos.

Report from Einsatzgruppen #24

The inhabitants of Lemberg eliminated approximately 1,000 Jews in the GPU prison

that is currently occupied by the Wehrmacht.

They decided it was time to end the chaos generated by the pogroms

and streamline the killing procedure.

Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Central Security Office, or RSHA,

a huge, tentacular organization

with connections to police, investigation, security, and repression,

received a letter from Goering in late July 1941,

ordering him to proceed with preparations for the execution

of the Final Solution of the Jewish question

in the German sphere of influence.

These preparations included registering Jews,

segregating them from society, marking them,

crowding them into ghettos, and forcing them to work as slaves.

The Einsatzgruppen emerged from their relative anonymity

and made their presence known.

In the towns they crossed, they left grim forests of gallows.

When a partisan, Jew, or Communist was executed on a public square

in Kharkov or Odessa... here, in Minsk...

a morbidly cynical sign