MASTERS OF DEATH: THE SS-EINSATZGRUPPEN AND THE INVENTION OF THE HOLOCAUST by Richard Rhodes (2002, 335 pages)

When most people think of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” (the plan to exterminate all Jews), they think of the gas chambers.

But the gas chambers were only Part II of the Final Solution.

Part I of this grotesque plan was a wholly different form of mass murder, performed by the SS-Einsatzgruppen.

The SS-Einsatzgruppen (special operations units) were killing squads that traveled from village to village (or town to town or city to city) in Eastern Europe, immediately behind the advancing Wehrmacht (German army), with the sole purpose of mass-murdering most or all of the Jews in each locale.

It was only after months of this process that the Nazis decided they needed a less traumatic (for the perpetrators) and less public way of killing. Thus, the gas chambers and crematoria were born only after hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been murdered in their own villages, towns, and cities by the Einsatzgruppen and its henchmen. And even after the gas chambers and crematoria were put into operation, the Einsatzgruppen kept working. In all, of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, fully 1.5 million were killed by the Einsatzgruppen.

*

Early in the World War, there was some dissension within the Nazi party about whether mass extermination of the Jews was an advisable strategy. But the Nazis’ propaganda machine worked tirelessly, especially on its SS members.

Here we have the words of Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, succinctly stating the Nazis’ rationalization of the desire (or, as the Nazis would call it, the need) to murder the Jews, in either a speech or a letter (Rhodes does not make it clear which) to the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen:

Be clear about it, in the battle which will decide if we are defeated there will be no [mercy] for the Germans, all will be starved out and butchered [at the hands of the Jews]. That will face everyone, be he now an enthusiastic supporter of the Third Reich or not—it will suffice that he speaks German and has a German mother….

Then it is a matter of indifference if in a town one thousand [Jews] have to be put down. I would do it, and I would expect you to carry it out. About that there is no doubt.

Rhodes points out in a different section of the book:

Characterizing a victim group as a relentless threat to a perpetrator group is the fundamental mechanism of genocide. It allows perpetrators to interpret their violence as defensive and therefore both justified and unavoidable….

*

There were four or five Einsatzgruppen at any given time, each consisting of up to 3,000 men. The leaders of the Einsatzgruppen tended to be highly educated—many with Ph.D.’s or law degrees. Each Einsatzgruppe was responsible for a particular geographical region.

There was tension between the German army and the SS-Einsatzgruppen, at high levels and lower levels, especially early on. At high levels, the leaders of the Wehrmacht believed that the strategy of mass-murdering Jews in their towns and cities was ill-advised, especially in terms of world public opinion. At lower levels, the German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, who were of course risking their lives to serve their country, were resentful of the SS-Einsatzgruppen members who fancied themselves soldiers but spent their days risklessly murdering unarmed, defenseless civilians.

*

One of the most notorious Einsatzgruppen leaders was Franz Jeckeln, who, through a process of trial and error over a series of mass killings, developed a process that the Nazis called Sardinenpackung:

[Sardinenpackung] involved forcing victims to lie together face down and side by side [in deep mass graves] and killing them with Genickschussen [shots to the back of the neck], then forcing the next group of victims to lie down on top of the torn, bleeding corpses of the victims who [had] preceded them to form another layer, ignoring the victims’ terror and horror in the interest of efficiently filling up the killing pit.

This process would continue, layer upon layer, according to the depth of the particular mass grave.

In this way, according to an internal SS-Einsatzgruppen report, 33,771 Jews were executed in Kiev on September 29^th and 30^th, 1941. Thus, in units of thousands at a time, in locations throughout Eastern Europe, the SS-Einsatzgruppen murdered its 1.5 million Jews, plus Slavs, Gypsies, mentally and physically handicapped people, and others.

Eventually, the horrors of this violent mass killing—horrible even for the perpetrators themselves—led the Nazis to experiment with gas vans, in which victims were killed through the introduction of the van’s own carbon monoxide exhaust into the van’s cabin. These gas vans eventually led to the infamous gas chambers, which were more efficient than the gas vans in two ways: (1) Of course the gas chambers were much larger than the gas vans—with the largest gas chambers having a capacity of 2,000 people; and (2) The gas chambers employed the pesticide Zyklon B, which killed more quickly and reliably than carbon monoxide.

Not only were the gas chambers less traumatic for the perpetrators than were the mass shootings in the victims’ hometowns; but also the gas-chamber killings could presumably be hidden from the world, while the local mass-murders could not.

*

Rhodes offers detailed graphic descriptions of many mass murders perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen.

However, far from being a simple blow-by-blow description of the gory events, this book also offers theoretical analysis…

The control of violence is a fundamental responsibility of government. Governments control violence by monopolizing it. They authorize military and police forces to use violence but deem criminal any other individual or institutional use. From this basic division, which evolved across five centuries in the West as governments enlarged and centralized, the common belief has emerged that government violence is rational (or at least deliberate and intentional), while private violence is irrational, aberrant, the product of psychopathology rather than deliberate intention. In fact, [however,] violence is violence, whether public or private, official or unofficial, legal or illegal, good or bad.

…and empirical synthesis…

The notorious gas chambers and crematoria of the death camps have come to typify the Holocaust, but in fact they were exceptional. The primary means of mass murder the Nazis deployed during the Second World War was firearms and lethal privation. Shooting was not less efficient than gassing, as many historians have assumed. It was harder on the shooters’ nerves, and the gas vans and chambers alleviated the [psychological] burden. But shooting began earlier, continued throughout the war and produced far more victims if Slavs are counted, as they must be, as well as Jews. “The Nazi regime was the most genocidal the world has ever seen,” writes sociologist Michael Mann. “During its short twelve years (overwhelmingly its last four) it killed approximately twenty million unarmed persons…. Jews comprised only a third of the victims and their mass murder occurred well into the sequence…. Slavs … were the most numerous victims—3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens and 3.3 million Soviet POWs.” Even among Jewish victims, Daniel Goldhagen estimates, “somewhere between 40 and 50 percent” were killed “by means other than gassing, and more Germans were involved in these killings in a greater variety of contexts than in those carried out in the gas chambers.”

Richard Rhodes is a Pulitzer-winning historian (having won the Prize for his 1986 book The making of the atomic bomb). In the exhaustively-researched Masters of death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the invention of the Holocaust, Rhodes has written, I believe, the definitive history of this not-widely-known but important chapter in the history of the Nazis’ killing machine.