In just two days over 33, people were marched to a ravine outside the city where they were murdered. Over the following months other groups such as Red Army soldiers, civilians and Roma were massacred here in a similar fashion — it is estimated that around , people were murdered at this single site.
In some areas, particularly Lithuania and western Ukraine, local nationalist groups assisted with or carried out the shooting of Jewish populations. They were stripped of clothes and valuables and driven in groups to the pit. The Einsatzgruppen and their assistants either shot the victims at the edge so that they fell in, or forced them into the grave to be shot.
Friends and families often had to watch their loved ones die before them. The mass shootings were resource-intensive, requiring many shooters and escort guards as well as guns, ammunition, and transport. Concerns about the inefficiency of the shootings and their psychological impact on the shooters led to the development of special vans outfitted with engines that pumped carbon monoxide into sealed passenger compartments.
Jews were packed into the compartments, then driven to a mass grave, asphyxiating during the journey. It took much longer to kill very large groups of victims with the gas vans, however. Einsatzgruppen personnel were required to remove bodies and clean the compartments. Throughout the German occupation of seized Soviet territories, mass shootings continued to be the preferred method of murdering Jews.
At least 1. Headland, Ronald. Rhodes, Richard. New York: Knopf, Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. All the while, Himmler encouraged the butchery, sanctioning it as indispensable for the final victory over Bolshevism.
The appearance of the Einsatzgruppen was a death sentence for entire Jewish communities. As Waitman Wade Beorn has argued, the. However, it should. This was not the unprecedented, continent-wide industrialized process of mass annihilation of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Jews, Roma, and other victims were transported from all over to Europe to ultimately be gassed and cremated. The slaughter perpetrated by Ohlendorf and his fellow commanders was face-to-face, and the murdered usually perished relatively close to their homes.
It takes a special human type to shoot small children in a pit before the very eyes of their parents, themselves destined to die as well.
Using the ruse of resettlement, calls were given for Jews to assemble at a given time and place. Then the members of the Special Task Force marched them off, ostensibly to a place of transportation. Instead, the victims arrived at places where pits, ditches, trenches, or ravines awaited them. In some cases they had to dig their own graves. Forced at gunpoint to jump down into these pits, they were shot after pleading for their own lives and those of their families and neighbors.
The executioners, frequently intoxicated, became more and more numb to the end results of their deeds. While Ohlendorf never showed much empathy for the slain, he grew concerned about the toll taken on those under his commands.
Instead of engaging in the individual Genickschuss , a shot to the nape of the neck, Ohlendorf decided to have his men fire on those rounded up from a distance. The decision made it harder for the shooter to know who he killed.
This is what passed for compassion within the ranks of the SS. He could count on two streams of information. Radio transmissions were conducted weekly or bi-weekly under conditions of absolute secrecy. Only Ohlendorf, his deputy in Einsatzgruppe D, Willy Seibert, and the telegraphist, a man named Fritsch, could remain in the radio station when these happened. Either Ohlendorf or Seibert dictated every word to Fritsch. Gaps, recalled Schubert, existed in what was transmitted.
Each month, a courier brought the written reports directly to Berlin. These, in turn, were handed over to Himmler and Hitler. They access the appalling and almost incomprehensible atmosphere of the final moments of these men, women, and children—and the murderers and their auxiliaries who organized and carried out the killing. The Nazis associated Soviet communism, their ideological enemy, with Jews, their so-called racial enemy.
They also regarded most Soviet citizens as racially inferior, even if they were not Jewish. This order increased the power of the Einsatzgruppen and, in turn, their ability to carry out tasks independently.
However, the Einsatzgruppen still worked closely with the German Army. The course took just three weeks and involved lectures on Nazi racial theory and basic military training. In order to avoid soldiers being prosecuted under military law as had happened previously in Poland , and to encourage complete ruthlessness when dealing with the enemy, military personnel were given legal immunity prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union.
This action cleared the way for further escalation and more intense persecution of those deemed to be enemies. Jewish women forced to undress sit before members of the Einsatzgruppen before their execution in the early s. This report details the actions and massacre carried out by Einsatzkommando 10B, following their arrival in Czernowitz modern-day Ukraine on Sunday 6 July A post-war portrait of Paul Blobel taken at the Einsatzgruppen Trial in Blobel was an SS commander and a part of the Einsatzgruppen.
He supervised several mass executions, including the Babi Yar massacre of After the war, he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death. This affidavit was given by Blobel at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and describes some of the Einsatzgruppen massacres he was involved in. In the text, Blobel describes supervising the executions of between 10,, people. The actual figure was approximately 60, Blobel describes the typical process of an Einsatzgruppen massacre.
Towards the end of the text, Blobel describes using a gas van to murder victims for the first time. A portrait of five-year-old Mania Halef, a Jewish child from the Ukraine.
She was later killed by the Einsatzgruppen during the mass execution at Babi Yar. The mass executions of those deemed to be enemies started almost instantly after the invasion. An indication of this violence can be seen in the actions of Einsatzkommando 9 , a sub unit of Einsatzgruppe B, who, following the occupation of Vilnius on 30 June , shot Jews a day.
The Einsatzgruppen did not act alone. In many cases the German Army or local collaborators participated in the murders, either actively in the shootings , by identifying Jews or other enemies, or by assisting in security roles, such as guards for camps. One example of this collaboration can be seen shortly after the invasion in the first week of July , where Jews in the cities of Riga and Daugavpils were detained and murdered by ethnic Germans and the Lithuanian Activist Front.
This resulted in a low morale on the German home front. The Nazis blamed Jews for these shortages and this lack of military success in the Soviet Union, and suggested that Jews were not only sabotaging the war efforts through partisan activity, but were also unnecessarily draining the food supply.
Amid these growing problems on the home front, Himmler paid a series of visits to the Einsatzgruppen units across the Soviet Union in mid-August During these visits, Himmler orally issued instructions which encouraged the complete annihilation of Jews, regardless of age, gender or a proven connection to communism. After each visit, murders of Jews in that area quickly escalated.
There were few restrictions on the actions of the Einsatzgruppen, and they accordingly acted with little restraint or uniformity. In many areas, whole Jewish communities were swiftly murdered. In others, some were placed in ghettos. In others, some were spared, although in most cases this was only a temporary measure.
Exactly a month after sending this telegram, Hans died in unknown circumstances at the hands of the Nazis in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Marie-Elisabeth Schmoller 2 January — 16 May This card was assigned to Marie-Elisabeth in Theresienstadt and shows the date she was deported to Auschwitz. In the autumn of , approximately , Jews remained in Greater Germany.
Until this point, Hitler had been reluctant to deport Jews in the German Reich until the war was over because of a fear of resistance and retaliation from the German population. But, in the autumn of , key Nazi figures contributed to mounting pressure on Hitler to deport the German Jews.
This pressure culminated in Hitler ordering the deportation of all Jews still in the Greater German Reich and Protectorate between September Following the order, Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann attempted to find space for the Jews from the Greater German Reich in the already severely overcrowded ghettos in eastern Europe.
The Minsk Ghetto was full, so in order to make room for the Reich Jews, the local SD , German Army and local collaborators gathered approximately 25, of the local ghetto inhabitants, drove them to a local ravine, and murdered them. German Jews soon filled their places in the ghetto. Similar murders took place in Riga.
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