Holocaust The EinsatzgruppenEuropean history Hebrew Shoʾah , Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban (“Destruction”)

Entering conquered Soviet territories alongside the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) were 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen (“deployment groups”), special mobile killing units. Their task was to murder Jews, Soviet commissars, and Roma in the areas conquered by the army. Alone or with the help of local police, native anti-Semitic populations, and accompanying Axis troops, the Einsatzgruppen would enter a town, round up their victims, herd them to the outskirts of the town, and shoot them. They killed Jews in family units. Just outside Kiev, Ukraine, in the valley of Baby Yar, an Einsatzgruppe killed 33,771 Jews on September 28–29, 1941. In the Rumbula Forest outside the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, 25,000–28,000 Jews died on November 30 and December 8–9. Beginning in the summer of 1941, Einsatzgruppen killed more than 70,000 Jews at Ponary, outside Vilna (now Vilnius) in Lithuania. They slaughtered 9,000 Jews, half of them children, at the Ninth Fort adjacent to Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania, on October 28.

The mass shootings continued unabated, with a first wave and then a second. When the killing ended in the face of a Soviet counteroffensive, special units returned to dig up the dead and burn their bodies to destroy the evidence of the crimes. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen killed more than one million people, most of whom were Jews.

Historians are divided about the motivations of the members of Einsatzgruppen. Christopher Browning describes them as ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances in which conformity, peer pressure, careerism, obedience to orders, and group solidarity gradually overcame moral inhibitions. Daniel Goldhagen sees them as “willing executioners,” sharing Hitler’s vision of genocidal anti-Semitism and finding their tasks unpleasant but necessary. Both concur that no Einsatzgruppe member faced punishment if he asked to be excused. Individuals had a choice whether to participate or not. Almost all chose to become killers.