The Einsatzgruppen Were Essentially Mobile Killing Units

“Babi Yar is a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, where Einsatzgruppen mobile squads killed at least 34,000 Jews over a one week period in September 1941 (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “This ravine was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and 15 meters deep (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “The ravine was near the town’s Jewish cemetery (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “The mass murder at Babi yar included men, women, and children systematically getting machine-gunned in a two day orgy of execution (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. The process of how these people had been murdered was very brutal. “The Jews, in their groups of a thousand, were herded into barbed-wire areas at the top of the ravine (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “These areas were guarded by Ukrainian collaborators (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “In this area they were forced to strip their clothes (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “The Jews were also getting beaten at the time of which they were taking off their clothes (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “Once they removed their clothing, it went into a certain pile (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. Each article of clothing had a certain pile to be placed in. “Subsequently, they were led down the side of the ravine (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “Once there, the first groups were forced to lie on the ground, face down, and were machine-gunned by the Germans who kept up a steady volley (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “To be shot, a police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “Once the Jews had been murdered, there riddled bodies were covered with thin layers of dirt (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “The next batch of Jews was ordered to lie over the people before them who died (Levine, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)”. “Then the killing

The mobile killing units were formed to kill any racial or political enemies of germany some of these are Jews gypsies and the handicapped many scholars believe that this could have been the first step that they used in the “final solution”. When they started using the mobile killing units they only killed jewish men but they decided to start killing men women and it never mattered what age and the bodies were just thrown in massive graves. When they were told the hiding locations of jews they would made the jews march or they were transported to the execution sites and would in some occasions have to dig their own graves. There most common way of killing was shooting the victims but they needed a more convenient way to kill them this ended

Over seventy years ago, one of the deadliest wars of human history took place named World War II. In 1933, Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. Along with the Nazi Party, he viewed Jews, mentally handicapped, gypsies, and others “undesirables” as inferior to those of Aryan blood. “The Final Solution” was the name of Hitler’s plan to kill all those deemed “undesirable”. To exterminate the many “unfit”, the Nazis set up death and concentration to slaughter the many who were forced to travel there. The Schutzstaffel, also known as the SS, was “Hitler’s personal army”, and did a lot of his “dirty work” like implementing the Final Solution (Britannica Encyclopedia 2015). The SS, was an organized, loyal and deadly group of Aryan men.

They also feared for their own lives because most of the men were young with a lot of life left to live. The soldiers were also mad at their corrupted Nazi

The persecutors believed that this was what they had to do. Because someone gave the order, they had to follow through. “Reinhard Hedrich, the head of the security branch of the SS, [authorized] the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (The Final Solution). Because one guy made a decision, six million Jews had to die. And the people doing the killing had to do it.

Einsatzgruppen, Murderers of the Innocent The Einsatzgruppen had killed a million Jewish and Soviet supporters by 1943. The Einsatzgruppen were one of the most devastating tools Adolf Hitler utilized during the Holocaust in an effort to exterminate the Jewish population: one might say the worst next to the death camps. The Einsatzgruppen were the mobile killing squads that hunted Jewish people down and murdered them in cold blood right there in front of others.

The Nazis were intent on annihilating Jewish people and certain minority groups. Millions of Jews were transported to concentration camps, forced to do hard labor, and eventually killed. Resistance against the Third Reich could mean severe retribution, “ people were oppressed and killed as they did not fit in with a dictators belief,

The Nazi party was anti-Semitic, against Jews, and in 1941 with the “final solution plan” the Jews began to be chased by the Gestapo, Hitler secret police, with the objective of killing all the European Jews. This could result strange to everyone because there is no reason for killing them at least we do not see that reason but the Germans did and they saw the Jewish as the guilty of everything that was wrong in the country so the solution was to send them to gethos, Jewish neighborhoods, and then pick them up with the train of the death which final stop were the labor camps were they were killed in many horrible ways. Although before this plan the Jewish were already being persecuted an example of this is “the night of the broken glasses “where In two days, over 250 synagogues were burned, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, dozens of Jewish people were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were looted while police and fire brigades stood by because a German general was killed in Paris.

One group administered the concentration camps and the Nazis wanted soldiers on the battlefield with the same national socialist ideals and culture of the SS, (SS-Verfügungstruppe, the SS Dispositional Troops, which later became the Waffen-SS Other SS members worked in the Sicherheitspolizei, Gestapo, and Sicherheitsdienst, all these groups were part of the SS however some member of these groups were not officially signed SS members.

They are put on trains that deport to Altai Siberia. On the train, they meet other innocent people, who also were captured for no reason. Why? Joseph Stalin made lists of those who he considered anti- Soviets. These people were mainly military officers, doctors, lawyers, business owners, teachers, librarians, even priests and children. These people were separated, men in one cart and woman and children in another, and were all taken to Siberia, Russia. This caused great pain and misery.

Additionally, a significant factor in the role of the Wehrmacht was when the army’s Chief of Staff General Franz Halder ordered the Wehrmacht, that in the case of a surprise attack, German Wehrmacht were to carry out ‘collective measures of force’ by massacring whole villages. Another role that the Wehrmacht had in completing the Final Solution was that they cooperated with the SS and Einsatzgruppen and had helped in supplying the killing squads with all the essentials, such as; ammunition, weapons, transport and even housing accommodation. The Wehrmacht also helped the Einsatzgruppen by accompanying them on missions to hunt down and exterminate the partisan fighters and Jews which were a direct threat to them. According to Kuhne, ‘An estimated 300,000 – 500,000 people were killed during the Wehrmacht’s anti-partisan war in the Soviet Union’, showing the extreme scale of crimes being committed, whilst also showing the role that they played in implementing the Final Solution. Additionally, American officials found out about the atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht when they taped conversations of POWs and ‘how some of them voluntarily participated in mass executions’. Further to this, the Wehrmacht’s prisoner of war camps for

After researching many different explanations trying to explain why the members of the einsatzgruppen were able to commit mass murder, I think it is fair to conclude that it is wrong to label the entire Einsatzgruppen has being anti-Semitic people. The men that joined the S.S were no doubt anti-Semitic and had a loyalty to do whatever the Nazi party told them to do. The S.S were responsible for giving the reserve police battalion “pep talks” before the battalion went out to round up the Jews of a town and considerable effort was made to prepare them for mass murder . This validates the point that the members of the S.S were the cold blooded killers in the einsatzgruppen because the Nazi's knew that the S.S would not have any problems carrying

One technique that truly worked for the Germans was the technique of rising hope. In other words, they rose up their hopes and lied to them in order or some work. As stated in Escape from Sobibor,” Your family will be fine, you will work and will eventually see them in the showers.” With this false hope, many Jewish people decided to do as the Nazis said and believed that in return they would see their families. The sad truth about this is that the “showers” were the place where the Jewish would be taken and killed alive so in reality these men and women who were lied to, never got to see their family.

Initially conceived in 1938, the Einsatzgruppen participated in the relatively cordial annexation of Austria and certain regions of Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich (“The Einsatzgruppen” par. 3). In consonance with Merriman and Winter, units were comprised of the Sonderkommandos, that administered in the Soviet Union near the theater of operations, or the more conspicuous Einsatzkommandos, which operated inside the battlefield. Formulated as motorized mobile units, they would be transmuted into officers of the Gestapo or the Sicherheitsdienst after several weeks of service. However, methods of recruitment were altered as the Einsatzgruppen matured. Subsequent the invasion of Poland, units were equipped with heavier artillery; this marked the deviation from security to genocidal action (par. 5). The article “Einsatzgruppen (Mobile Killing Units)”, in June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen followed the German army as they ventured deep into Soviet territory. Given objectives to persecute and murder those perceived to be racial and political opponents to the regime, they went directly to the homes of Jewish residence and massacred them (par. 3). These units motivated and provoked the beginning of the Holocaust. The anonymous writer of “The Einsatzgruppen” illustrates how the regime disposed of their adversaries:

They had already surrendered and save for the escaping and rejoining the Red Army, they posed no threat and added nothing to the myth that the Soviet would reach the families and towns of the Wehrmacht soldiers. Yet, 3,300,000 of the 5,700,000 Russian soldiers they fell into the hands of the Germans died in captivity.13 The economy of Germany depended upon the free forced labor of POWs, so why is it that the Germans so readily terminated their work force? It turns out that there were two main reasons. The first being that the Germans simply were unable to care for such an extraordinary number of POWs. The number of Russian POWs became staggering, more than half the size of the entire Wehrmacht. As a result, the Germans went to the second reason: the Russian people were filled with Jews, ‘Bolsheviks, the intelligentsia and the generally defined Untermenschen, all categories of the “enemies of the Reich”.14 Therefore, the Germans went about systematically killing them. Be it through starvation, climate, or just the standard bullet through the