Masters of Death

Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes, Vintage, 2007. 

The Jews in Hitler's Mind

While Hitler pandered to the envy that many poor German gentiles had for the prosperous Jews, he himself seems to have been more motivated by paranoia rather than by envy. The Jews were seen by the Nazis as parasites and looters.  Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany losing WWI. Hitler also believed that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was largely the work of the Jews. Hitler thought there was a plot by World Jewry to take over the world. Even at the end, when Germany was defeated, he felt that he had left a positive legacy, because he had rescued Germany and Europe from the Jews. Instead of modernism, which the Jews represented, Hitler championed the Wehrbauern (soldier-farmer) over the people of the cities.

Rationalizations for the Killing of Non-Combatants

• Pre-emptive defensive execution of enemy partisans,

• Preventive arrest and execution of potential resistance leaders,

• Prevented women and children from seeking revenge for the killings of their men.

• The Nazis made phony claims that the Jewish partisans shot at German soldiers.

Hitler's Plan for the Slavs

Hitler believed that the sons of German farmers needed more land to farm, so that they would not need to migrate to the cities. This is the reason for the German Aryans colonizing the Slavic lands to their east. After eliminating the Jews, Hitler planned to eliminate the Slavs, so that their land could be farmed by ethnic Germans. Hitler had devised several different options for what to do with the Slavs:

• Deport them to Siberia,

• Germanize them,

• Make them serve as forced labor for German settlers, and

• Kill them (millions of non-Jewish Slavs actually were killed).

Russian POWs

The Nazis also killed 3 million Russian prisoners of war, most by starvation, disease and exposure.

The Nazi Bureaucracy

To supplement the traditional German military organization, the Wehrmacht, which contained the Army, Navy and Air Force, the Nazi Party created paramilitary organizations that were under direct party control. These were administered by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, Reich Main Security Office). They were organized as follows:

• Schutzstaffel (SS, under Heinrich Himmler)

• Waffen-SS (military wing of the SS)

• Sicherheitsdienst (SD, Security Service, under Reinhard Heydrich)

• Ordnungspolizei (Orpo, Order Police, under Kurt Daluege)

• Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo, Security Police)

• Kriminalpolizei (Kripo, Criminal Police)

• Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo, Secret State Police, under Heinrich Müller)

• Totenkopf (Death’s Head, Death Camp Guards)

Einsatzgruppen

Einsatzgruppen means special task force. Each Einsatzgruppen was made up of several Einsatzkommandos of 100-150 men each. Men were recruited from the SD, Gestapo, Kripo, Orpo and Waffen-SS. They followed the German Army into Eastern Europe. They did the killing of civilians before the death camps were set up.

Einsatzgruppe A

Einsatzgruppe A was attached to Army Group North, and was led by SS-Brigadeführer Franz Walther Stahlecker. It was in charge of annihilating the Jews of the Baltics. Stahlecker was killed by Estonian partisans in March 1942.

Einsatzgruppe B

Einsatzgruppe B was attached to Army Group Center, and was led by Arthur Nebe and Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. Einsatzgruppe C was attached to Army Group South, and was led by Otto Rasch. Much of the shooting was performed by native auxiliaries of Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians and Ukrainians.

Sonderkommando Dirlewanger

Oskar Dirlewanger and his men, the Sonderkommando Dirlewanger of the Waffen-SS, marched women and children through minefields to clear them. They released poachers and violent criminals from prison so that they could be used to hunt Jews and Polish partisans who had escaped into the forests.

Poland

Germany invaded Poland Sept 1, 1939, launching World War II in Europe. From western Poland, the Nazi SS deported the Polish intelligentsia, clergy, and nobility, further to the east. In June 1941, Hitler broke his non-aggression pact with Stalin and launched an invasion of eastern Poland, Ukraine and Russia, called Operation Barbarossa.

Methodology

Steps in Trench Killings:

• Surrender valuables

• Undress

• March to pits and antitank ditches

• Force people to lie face down side by side on previous corpses (Sardinenpackung)

• Shot in neck or head

• Dead bodies were covered with quicklime

The Jews

The Jews were more civilized than the German gentiles when it came to raising children, so the Jews were less adept at using violence, even defensively. This made them vulnerable. 

Transition to Poison Gas

As the Holocaust progressed, poisonous gas replaced bullets, not because the Nazis cared about the victims, but because it was easier on the psyches of the German soldiers. Vektor Brack devised a method to kill Jews where carbon monoxide was piped into vans full of Jews. Later, the Nazis used cyanide (Zyklon B) in the death camps.

Lithuania

In June 1941 the German Army and the Lithuanian Einsatzgruppen, lead by Stahlecker, entered Kaunas, Lithuania. They forced the Jews to march from the Jewish ghetto to the Ninth Fort, where the Lithuanian paramilitary killed the Jews with bullets. Vilnius had a large Jewish population. In fact, Vilnius was called the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” In September 1941 the Nazi Sonderkommando 7a trucked Jews from the Vilnius ghettos and prisons to the Ponary Forest, where there was an unfinished Soviet fuel storage site. More than a hundred thousand Lithuanian Jews were killed by December 1941.

Latvia

Latvian Jews were killed at the Rumbula Forest near Riga in Latvia. The Nazis marched the Jews from the ghetto to Rumbula. There were also trucks for the sick and elderly. Friedrich Jeckeln directed this operation. At Rumbula on 30 Nov 1941, the Nazis first killed one thousand Jews shipped in by train from Germany, then they killed 13 thousand Riga Jews. On 8 December 1941, the Nazis killed ten thousand more Riga Jews. During the war, two hundred thousand Lithuanian and Latvian Jews were killed.

Estonia

When the Nazis arrived in Estonia, there were few Jews for the Nazis to kill. Besides having a much smaller original Jewish population than Latvia or Lithuania, many of Estonia’s Jews had been evacuated eastward before the Germans arrived.

Belarus

Minsk, Belarus, November 1941: 6-12 thousand Jews killed by SS Cavalry Brigade. Pinsk, Belarus, August 1941: eleven thousand Jewish men killed by the SS Cavalry Brigade. Pinsk, Belarus, October 1942: sixteen thousand  Jews killed by the SS Cavalry Brigade. Pripet Marshes, Northern Ukraine and Belarus, July and August 1941: The SS Cavalry Brigade was ordered to hunt down and kill all Jewish men, women, and children. The Brigade also burned all the villages to the ground.

Ukraine

Lvov, once the capital of Galicia, was part of Poland at the start of World War II, but is now part of Ukraine. It is also called Lwow, Lviv, and Lemberg. In June 1941, Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera and his supporters rebelled agains the Soviet Union. In retaliation, the Soviet NKVD killed 3000 of Bandera’s men. In July 1941, the Germans took Lvov. The Germans publicly blamed the NKVD crime on Jewish Bolsheviks, and then Einsatzgruppe C, with help from local Ukrainians, killed 7000 Jews in retaliation.

Vinnitsa and the NKVD

When the Germans took Vinnitsa (Ukraine) in July 1941, they found nine thousand bodies of victims of a Soviet NKVD purge in 1937-1938. The Nazis blamed the Jews of the city for the Soviet massacre.

Shepetovka Massacre

Einsatzgruppen massacred many Ukrainian Jews. Shepetovka Massacre: The first order to specifically include women and children was the Shepetovka massacre of July 1941 by German Reserve Police Battalion 45 with the help of the local Ukrainian militia.

Kamenets-Podolsky Massacre

During August, 1941, 23,600 Jews were killed in 3 days at Kamenets-Podolsky in the Ukraine. Half of them were Ukrainian Jews, the other half Hungarian Jews. The Nazis were lead by SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln.

Rovno Massacre

About fifteen thousand Jews were killed in November 1941 at Rovno (also called Rivne).

Dnepropetrovsk Massacre

In October 1941 at Dnepropetrovsk on the Dnieper river, the Nazis shot ten thousand Jews.

Babi Yar

The most famous massacre of the Einsatzgruppen was Babi Yar (babushka ravine) in Kiev, where Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, under the command of Paul Blobel, killed 33,771 Jews in two days.

Odessa Massacre

In October 1941 Romanian soldiers shot ten thousand Jews, then killed several thousand more Jews by dynamiting them in a locked barn.