Why The Einsatzgruppen Murders

The most notorious for the heinous deeds were the Schutzstaffel, or the SS. This paramilitary branch of Nazis, who were highly regarded by Hitler, treated the Jewish race with no respect for their own livelihood, or had any sympathy for what they were going through. As Elie describes his time in the concentration camp of Auschwitz, he mentions one of the SS officers who came into their barracks, “...with crime inscribed upon his brow and in the pupils of his eyes. He looked us over as if we were a pack of leprous dogs hanging onto our lives.” (Wiesel 47). This excerpt from the novel displays the sincere hatred he had for the malnourished and weak Jews who stood before him. These special soldiers slaughtered Jews by the thousands, without making any sort of attempt to stop what was occurring. The SS had one goal during World War II, and that was to exterminate the Jewish race from the Earth. At any moment, someone could be killed, no matter the reason. The Germans didn't care, all they wanted was the Jews

In the last few years, some publications have appeared that treats one group or another, yet the state of our knowledge about the perpetrators remains incomplete. We know little about many of the institutions of killing, little about many aspects of the perpetration of the genocide, and still less about the perpetrators themselves. As a consequence, popular and scholarly myths and misconceptions about the perpetrators abound, including the following. It is commonly believed that the Germans slaughtered Jews by and large in the gas chambers, and that without gas chambers, modern means of transportation, and efficient bureaucracies, the Germans would have been unable to kill millions of Jews. The belief persists that somehow only technology made horror on this scale possible. It is generally believed that gas chambers, because of their efficiency, were a necessary instrument for the genocidal slaughter, and that the Germans chose to construct the gas chambers in the first place because they needed more efficient means of killing the Jews. It has been generally believed that the perpetrators were primarily, overwhelmingly SS men, the most devoted and brutal Nazis. It has been held that had a German refused to kill Jews, then he himself would have been killed, sent to a concentration camp, or severely punished. All of these views, views that fundamentally shape people's understanding of the Holocaust, have been believed as though they were

From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in one of the deadliest genocides in history, which was part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazi regime. Every arm of Germany 's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics and the carrying out of the genocide. Other victims of Nazi crimes included Romanians, Ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah 's Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled. A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were used to concentrate victims for slave labor, mass murder, and other human rights abuses. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. Every person designated as a Jew in German territory was marked with a yellow star making them open targets. Thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR. Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz and many more. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust. Beginning in late 1941, the Germans

In the final years of the war, Himmler and Eichmann proposed the concept to place the Jewish people in camps and eliminate the rest of the Jewish people before the war was over; this concept was known as the “Final Solution.” These SS soldiers are the main cause of the Holocaust because they were the group that fully helped consummate Hitler’s idea to remove the Jewish people out of Germany and, in the end, they gave the orders to mass murder any Jew alive.

Adolf Hitler, chancellor and dictator of Germany from 1934 to 1945, was founder and leader of the Nazi Party. Under the leadership of Hitler, Nazi Germany created concentration camps to segregate Jews and many other minorities from German society. Though, the Jewish population was not great in Germany, individuals who had converted to another religion or had ancestors who were Jewish were also categorized by the Nazis as a Jew. The “Final Solution,” the genocide of more than six million Jewish people, consisted of gassing, shootings, starvation and random acts of terror. This is the most familiar scheme from the

During World War II, the Jews were the primary victims of Germany’s most atrocious act, the Holocaust, where thousands of Jews were senselessly slaughtered in the name of Nazism. Countless innocent Jews perished in concentration camps, while the majority of the Nazis watched and did nothing. To them, the Jews were not human beings, but rather mere animals, who deserved concentration camps. This reasoning baffled the Allied countries, as they understood that regardless of race and religion, no one should be subjected to concentration camps. Yet, the Nazis completely disregarded and violated the basic rights of humankind. The Nazis successfully propagated this anti-Semitic mentality because ordinary Germans were consumed by their ignorance

The Holocaust includes the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to approximately eleven million dead. One of the largest genocides in history. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the cause of the genocide, turning the Third Reich into "a genocidal state". Non-Jewish victims of broader Nazi crimes include Gypsies, Poles, communists, homosexuals, Soviet POWs, and the mentally and physically disabled. In total 11 million people were killed 1 million of them being children.

In World War I, the method of firing squads was used for mass killing of Armenian men after taking their property (Beecroft). The killing squads were considered to be a “Special Organization” that were made up of crazed men that would drown, shoot, cruifice, throw off cliffs, or even bury alive Christian Armenian people (“Armenian Genocide”). Likewise, the Germans used an elite group called the “death squad” or “mobile killing units” made up of German volunteers and security members to kill anyone who was not of the Aryan race. Usually, they would kill the victims by shooting a large mass of people at a time (“Genocide” and “The Holocaust”).

All through the spring and summer of 1940, the German armed force extended Hitler's realm in Europe, winning (by drive) Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Starting in 1941, Jews from everywhere throughout the mainland, and additionally a huge number of (identified with Europe) Rovers, were taken to the Clean ghettoes. The German (sudden, undesirable passage into a place) of the Soviet Union in June 1941 denoted another level of creature like savagery in war battling. Versatile slaughtering units called Einsatzgruppen would kill more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (more often than not by shooting) through the span of the German occupation.

“The shooting massacres expanded during the summer within weeks killing units devastated hundreds of Jewish communities. They slaughtered more Jews than the Nazis has murdered in the past eight years. About 1.3 million Jews were killed one by one, by the 3,000 men in the four Einsatzgruppen their support troops local police and collaborators all with assistance from Wehrmacht. Most of the 1.3 million murders occurred in 1941”(“Mass Murder”p.212). “We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter! True we are weak and defenseless, but the only reply to the murder is revolt brothers! Better to fall as free fighters than to live by the mercy of the murderers arise! Arise with your last breath” (Mass Murder p. 213). “They had a mobile killing van that gassed Jews who were being deported to the crematoria at Chelmno, Poland. Billowing smoke testifies to the fierce fighting between German troops

The Holocaust a tragic catastrophe in which six million Jews were brutally murdered by the Nazi regime. Who were the Nazi’s and what punishments were brought against these war time criminals. During the Holocaust the Nazis used a form of indoctrination that contrived others to believe that the Jews were the ones to blame for the country’s loss after WWI. This indoctrination then lead to the massive murder of the Jews. In later years to come the Nazi leaders were charged with many crimes.

Richard Rhodes. Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2002

Adolf Eichmann was a high ranking S.S. official who was infamously known as ‘the logistical mind behind Hitler’s final solution’ he was in charge of moving Jews from the ghettos from which they had been placed and transporting them to extermination camps or to be deported. In his early life Eichmann was teased for his appearance, such as his darker skin colour, classmates would often call

Did you know that the Nazis tried to hide the clues that they killed thousands of people? On September 29 and 30, 1941 the Nazis killed around 30,000 Jews. This massacre was called the Babi Yar Massacre, which took the lives of innocent people. The Massacre was designed to kill thousands of Jews and they would never forget this destructive event until they died.

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.