The Einsatzgruppen

Why this Chapter exists

The Holocaust by Bullets.

From June 1941 onward, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Jews were murdered in shooting operations across the occupied Soviet lands. The campaign began before the killing centers at Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau existed, and it ran alongside them to the end.

The French Catholic priest Patrick Desbois named these killings the “Holocaust by Bullets.” The Einsatzgruppen and the wider network around them carried them out at thousands of sites, most of them near villages, in sight of local people, and documented only later.

What the Einsatzgruppen were

Mobile killing units of the SS.

The Einsatzgruppen (German for “task forces” or “deployment groups”) were mobile units of the SS Reich Security Main Office, the Nazi regime’s central security apparatus under Reinhard Heydrich. Earlier task forces had followed the German takeovers of Austria (1938), the Sudetenland (the border region Germany annexed from Czechoslovakia, 1938), and Poland (1939). They carried out arrests and executions of people the regime called political enemies. In Poland they shot tens of thousands of members of the Polish elites and thousands of Jews.

The Einsatzgruppen sent in for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union that began June 22, 1941, were different in scale and purpose. The four groups (A, B, C, and D) together numbered about 3,000 men. Their mission took shape in stages: Heydrich’s written instructions of late June and early July 1941 ordered the killing of Jews in party and state positions, and within weeks the orders widened to entire Jewish communities. The targets also included Soviet political officers, Roma, the educated class, and others the regime branded enemies. The killing of Jewish men of military age began within days of the invasion. The killing of women and children was systematic by August 1941. By the autumn of 1941, killing entire Jewish communities had become the norm.

The men of the Einsatzgruppen came from the SS (the Nazi Party’s security and paramilitary corps), the SD (its intelligence service), the Gestapo (the secret state police), the Criminal Police, and the Order Police. Several of the senior officers, among them Walter Stahlecker and Otto Rasch, held doctorates.

The four groups

The four groups and their commanders.

Einsatzgruppen A, B, and C moved alongside the three German army groups, with Einsatzgruppe D attached to the Eleventh Army in the south, and each was split into smaller sub-units (Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos). The commanders:

• Einsatzgruppe A: northern sector, into Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and toward Leningrad. Commander: Dr. Walter Stahlecker (killed fighting Soviet partisans on March 23, 1942), then Heinz Jost and others. Group A produced the Stahlecker Report of October 15, 1941, which recorded 135,567 killings in the first three and a half months (see the documentary record below).
• Einsatzgruppe B: central sector, into Belarus and toward Smolensk and Moscow. Commander: Arthur Nebe (formerly head of the Reich Criminal Police), then Erich Naumann and others. Its record covers the major killings in Belarus, including at Minsk and Mogilev.
• Einsatzgruppe C: southern sector, into Ukraine. Commander: Dr. Otto Rasch, then Max Thomas and others. Group C carried out the killings at Babyn Yar in Kyiv and at many other Ukrainian sites.
• Einsatzgruppe D: far southern sector, into Bessarabia (a region the Soviet Union had seized from Romania in 1940, with its capital at Kishinev), southern Ukraine, and Crimea. Commander: Otto Ohlendorf, then Walther Bierkamp and others. Ohlendorf is the best-documented of the commanders because he testified at length at the postwar trials about how the killing was organized. His testimony at Nuremberg and at the later Einsatzgruppen Trial remains one of the fullest sources on how the operations were run. He was executed at Landsberg Prison on June 7, 1951.

The invasion

The invasion that changed the Holocaust.

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began around 3:15 a.m. on Sunday, June 22, 1941, along a front of roughly 2,900 kilometers from the Baltic to the Black Sea. About 3 million German troops, with hundreds of thousands of Axis allies (Romanian, Finnish, Italian, Hungarian, and Slovak), took part. The Soviet Union held about 5 million Jews. After flight and evacuation, roughly 2.5 million remained in the zones the Germans occupied, most of the European Jewish population that had not already fallen under Nazi control in 1939–1940.

The invasion pushed the Nazi anti-Jewish project from its earlier pattern (forced emigration, ghettos, slave labor, worsening conditions) into direct mass killing. Many historians see the move toward genocide across mid-1941 as a radicalization in stages rather than one single decision. Among them are Christopher Browning (The Origins of the Final Solution, 2004) and Saul Friedländer (The Years of Extermination, 2007). The Einsatzgruppen began killing as soon as they entered Soviet territory, and the escalation traced above, men first, then women and children, then whole communities, unfolded across that summer and autumn.

In this view, the decision to pursue full, systematic genocide, the “Final Solution,” came together in the late summer and autumn of 1941, well before the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942. Wannsee coordinated the killing program across the German bureaucracy. It did not start the killing. SS officer Adolf Eichmann kept the minutes, which survive in one copy of the thirty made, found after the war in German Foreign Office files. They hold a table of 11 million Jews by country and the euphemism “evacuation of the Jews to the East.”

Thousands of sites

Thousands of killing sites.

The killing was spread across the occupied Soviet lands. Most sites lay just outside a town or village: a ravine, a forest clearing, an abandoned anti-tank trench, or another spot chosen for mass shooting. The research group Yahad-In Unum, whose work is described below, is still locating them village by village. The sites of the largest single operations are documented and widely commemorated:

• Babyn Yar (Kyiv, Ukraine, September 29–30, 1941). At least 33,771 Jews killed in two days. Covered in its own section below.
• Ponary / Paneriai (near Vilnius, historically called Vilna, in Lithuania, 1941–1944). About 70,000–75,000 Jews killed over the period, along with smaller numbers of Polish and Soviet civilians.
• Rumbula (near Riga, Latvia, November 30 and December 8, 1941). About 25,000 Jews, among them roughly 1,000 Jews deported from Germany to Riga, killed in two operations run by forces under Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader for the region.
• Kamianets-Podilskyi (Ukraine, August 27–28, 1941). About 23,600 Jews killed in two days, including 14,000–16,000 Hungarian Jews who had been expelled into German-occupied Ukraine that July. Historians, including Christopher Browning, mark this as a turning point in the expansion of the killing to whole communities, women and children included.
• Iași (Romania, June 28–30, 1941). The Iași pogrom, carried out by Romanian forces with German participation, killed at least 13,266 Jews, the number Romania’s wartime intelligence service itself acknowledged (a census by the city’s Jewish community counted 14,850). Many were killed in sealed “death trains,” where people died of heat and thirst.
• Odessa (Romanian-occupied Ukraine, October 22–26, 1941). At least 25,000 to 30,000 Jews killed by Romanian forces in the city and its suburbs, on the orders of Romania’s dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, after an explosion at the Romanian military headquarters. It is not clear who caused the explosion, but the authorities blamed Jews and Communists.
• Bogdanovka (Transnistria, December 1941). Transnistria was the land between the Dniester and Bug rivers, given to Romania to rule in 1941. About 48,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews killed by Romanian gendarmes and Ukrainian auxiliaries.
• Maly Trostenets (Belarus, 1942–1944). A killing site near Minsk where about 60,000 Jews from Belarus, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere were killed, by shooting and by gas vans.
• Drobytsky Yar (Kharkiv, Ukraine, December 1941). About 15,000 Kharkiv Jews killed by Einsatzkommando units.

Babyn Yar

The ravine at the edge of Kyiv.

Babyn Yar (Ukrainian for “Grandmother’s Ravine”) is a large ravine in the northwest of Kyiv. German forces entered the city on September 19, 1941, after the Soviet defeat at the Battle of Kiev. On September 24–28, explosions in central Kyiv, set by Soviet demolition charges before the retreat, wrecked much of the city center, including the German military headquarters.

The German occupation authorities used the explosions as a pretext to kill the city’s Jews. They included the city commandant, Kurt Eberhard, Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln, and the commanders of Einsatzgruppe C under Otto Rasch, among them Paul Blobel of Sonderkommando 4a. The decisions are recorded in the postwar trial records and in Blobel’s own later testimony.

On September 28, 1941, posters went up across Kyiv ordering the Jewish population to assemble the next morning, bringing documents, money, valuables, and warm clothing. The posters gave no reason, but the list of what to bring suggested resettlement, the cover story for what came next.

On September 29 and 30, 1941, the killers shot at least 33,771 Jews at the ravine, according to their own report of October 2, 1941. The victims were led in groups down a path, ordered to undress and hand over their belongings, and shot at the ravine’s edge by SS men and German Order Police. The operation ran across two days, the shooters working in relays.

Dina Pronicheva survived. Before the war she was an actress at the Kyiv Young Viewers’ Theater. She had two small children, and her husband was at the front. On the road to the ravine she walked beside an old man in a prayer shawl who, she remembered, “prayed the same way as my father did when I was a child.” She fell into the pit before the shots, pretended to be dead until dark, and climbed out. She testified about the massacre before a Soviet court in January 1946.

The killing at Babyn Yar continued over the next two years. In all, between about 70,000 and 100,000 people, most but not all of them Jewish, were killed there between September 1941 and the German withdrawal from Kyiv in November 1943. In the final months, the regime ordered the killings covered up: a forced-labor unit of about 300 prisoners was made to dig up and burn the bodies. A few prisoners escaped during an uprising in September 1943 and survived to testify. Among them was Ziama Trubakov, who later wrote a memoir and gave detailed postwar accounts.

For decades, Soviet policy avoided naming the Jewish victims of Babyn Yar. The first memorial, put up in 1976, made no specific reference to them. Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s 1961 poem “Babi Yar,” which opens “No monument stands over Babi Yar,” drew Soviet and international attention to the site. In 1991, the year Ukraine became independent, a menorah-shaped monument to the Jewish victims was put up at the site. The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, founded in 2016, now carries out commemoration and research there.

Ponary and Rumbula

The pits near Vilnius, the forest near Riga.

Ponary (Paneriai in Lithuanian, about 10 kilometers from Vilnius) had been a Soviet construction site: large pits, dug and lined with concrete for fuel tanks, sat ready when the invasion interrupted the work. The Germans turned them into a killing site. From July 1941 to July 1944, about 70,000–75,000 Jews from Vilna and the surrounding region were killed there, along with thousands of non-Jewish Poles, about 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and others. The killings were carried out by Einsatzkommando 9 at first, then by the Vilna SD and a Lithuanian auxiliary unit. The record at Ponary rests heavily on survivor testimony (some witnesses escaped from the site itself), gathered in the immediate postwar period by Avraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, poets who had survived the Vilna ghetto.

Rumbula (a forest about 12 kilometers from Riga) was the scene of two operations, on November 30 and December 8, 1941, run by about 1,700 men under Friedrich Jeckeln. The purpose was to kill nearly the entire Riga Ghetto, about 24,000 Latvian Jews, plus about 1,000 German Jews deported to Riga days earlier. German Jews deported east were among the murdered, days after the first such shootings at Kaunas. Jeckeln used a method he had developed at earlier operations, forcing victims to lie face-down in layers in the pits, each layer shot before the next, a technique recorded in SS communications and at the postwar trials.

The wider machinery

The Einsatzgruppen were the core, not the whole.

The Einsatzgruppen numbered only about 3,000 men, far too few, on their own, to kill 1.5 to 2 million people. The killing required a much larger network, which historians have documented in detail:

• The Order Police. German uniformed police battalions sent east for “security” work carried out killings of Jewish civilians. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992) traced how one such unit came to shoot at least 38,000 Jews in Poland in 1942–43 and to send about 45,000 more to their deaths at Treblinka. Its roughly 500 men were middle-aged Hamburg police reservists, not selected for the task, though roughly a quarter were Nazi Party members. The study became a standard work on how ordinary men became killers.
• The Waffen-SS. SS combat formations took part in killings across the occupied territories, including at major sites.
• The Wehrmacht. The German Army’s role has its own section below.
• Local auxiliary units. The occupation recruited large numbers of local personnel, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Belarusian, and others, into police and auxiliary units. They included formal police (the Schutzmannschaften), volunteer groups often drawn from anti-Soviet networks, and Soviet prisoners of war recruited under heavy coercion (the Trawniki training camp trained many of them).
• Romanian, Hungarian, and other Axis forces. Germany’s Axis allies, Romania under Antonescu above all, carried out large-scale killings of their own, often alongside German forces. Hungary expelled the Jews later murdered at Kamianets-Podilskyi, and in 1944 its authorities rounded up and deported the country’s Jews. The International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel, concluded in 2004 that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered or died under Romanian authority. The toll includes Iași, Odessa, and Bogdanovka. It also includes the Jews of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, the two regions Romania had lost to the Soviet Union in 1940. Romanian forces deported most of those who survived the first killings across the Dniester to camps and ghettos in Transnistria. Of at least 155,000 Romanian Jews deported there, only 47,000 were still alive in the fall of 1943.

The German Army’s role

The German Army’s role in the killing.

For decades after the war, a standard story held that the Wehrmacht, the regular German armed forces, had been separate from the SS and the killings. It was built in the 1950s through the memoirs of senior German officers and the self-presentation of West Germany. That story was overturned in the 1980s and 1990s, partly through scholarship and partly through two large public exhibitions on the Wehrmacht’s crimes, organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which displayed soldiers’ own photographs, orders, and unit records.

Since the 1990s, the scholarly consensus has been that the army cooperated with the killing apparatus on a large scale. It is laid out in Omer Bartov’s work, in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann’s War of Extermination (2000), in Wolfram Wette’s The Wehrmacht (2006), and in much else. That cooperation included logistical support for the killings (transport, fuel, food, ammunition) and the military operations that trapped the Jewish populations later killed. It included shootings carried out by army units themselves under “anti-partisan” and “security” labels, and the army’s permission for Einsatzgruppen operations in territory it controlled.

Specific orders show the policy in writing. The Reichenau Order of October 10, 1941, was issued by Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau. It told German soldiers to show “full understanding for the necessity of harsh but just revenge against Jewish subhumanity,” and was circulated across the army as a model. General Erich von Manstein, commander of the Eleventh Army, issued a similar order on November 20, 1941. The Commissar Order of June 6, 1941, ordering the killing of captured Soviet political officers, set the precedent for killing whole categories of people on capture.

Local participation

The question of local participation.

The killings were often carried out with the help of local auxiliaries and, in some cases, local civilians. How wide that participation was, and what drove it, has been studied hard and remains sensitive:

• Auxiliary forces. The occupation recruited large numbers of locals into auxiliary police and other units, roughly 300,000 across the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, and the occupied territories. The motives were mixed: anti-Soviet politics, antisemitism, opportunism, and coercion (especially for Soviet prisoners of war, who otherwise faced near-certain death under Nazi policy).
• Civilian participation. The record shows local civilian involvement in some killings, especially the pogroms of the first weeks after occupation, the Lviv pogroms of June–July 1941, the Jedwabne massacre of July 10, 1941 in eastern Poland, and killings in other towns. Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors (2001), on Jedwabne, set off a wide reckoning in Poland over local participation. The question remains contested in Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian historical debate.

Why the camps followed

Why the mobile killing was supplemented by the camps.

The Einsatzgruppen method, face-to-face shooting at improvised pits, created problems for the regime that the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 and the decisions around it addressed:

• Speed. Killing 1.5 to 2 million people by shooting, site by site, took enormous manpower and time. The dedicated killing centers, Chełmno (from December 1941, using gas vans), then Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, and the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, let the regime kill far more people, faster, with fewer staff.
• The effect on the killers. After Himmler watched a killing operation in Minsk on August 15, 1941, the Nazi leadership worried about the psychological toll on the SS men doing the shooting. The camps removed most individual SS men from the moment of killing.
• Concealment. The shootings were visible to many local people and left a documentary trail. The camps, hidden behind fences and run by smaller crews, left far less.

The mobile killing did not stop when the camps opened. It continued across the occupied Soviet lands throughout the war, especially where Jewish communities had survived the first wave and where transport to the camps was difficult. Einsatzgruppen-style killings went on into 1944 in parts of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states.

The documentary record

How we know what we know.

The Einsatzgruppen left one of the most extensive perpetrator records of any phase of the Holocaust, much of the evidence base for postwar Holocaust scholarship. The main sources:

• The Operational Situation Reports USSR. The units sent regular reports to Berlin with killing figures by location and date. There are 195 in all, covering June 1941 through April 1942. Captured by Allied forces at the end of the war, they have been published in scholarly editions (Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, eds., The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 1989). Their tallies for the first nine months of the war run to more than half a million people shot.
• The Stahlecker Report (October 15, 1941). Einsatzgruppe A’s report on its first three and a half months, describing the killings as “cleansing,” documenting cooperation with the army and local auxiliaries, and giving figures for the Baltic states. It is one of the central documents of the Holocaust and is held in the captured German records at the U.S. National Archives.
• The Jäger Report (December 1, 1941). The report of Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, listing his unit’s killings in Lithuania from July 2 to December 1, 1941, the document in the Object Spotlight below.
• The captured photographs. Many killings were photographed by army and SS men, sometimes officially, sometimes as personal souvenirs. These are held at the U.S. National Archives, USHMM, Yad Vashem, and other archives.
• The postwar trials. The Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial (1947–48) tried 22 defendants. Fourteen were sentenced to death, and four of them, Otto Ohlendorf, Erich Naumann, Paul Blobel, and Werner Braune, were hanged on June 7, 1951. The Ulm trial of 1958 (a turning point in West Germany’s own prosecutions, which led to the founding of the investigative center at Ludwigsburg that year) and later trials followed. More in the Postwar Trials Chapter.
• Survivor and eyewitness testimony. Accounts from the few survivors of the killing operations, and from non-Jewish local eyewitnesses, the large body of testimony Yahad-In Unum has gathered since 2004.

Locating the sites

Locating the sites, since 2004.

The most important recent effort to document the Holocaust by Bullets is the work of Yahad-In Unum (a Hebrew-Latin phrase meaning “together in unity”), a research organization founded in 2004 by Father Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest. Based in Paris, it conducts fieldwork across the former Soviet lands where the killings took place.

Its method is unlike earlier Holocaust research. Teams go village by village across Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, and elsewhere, finding elderly local residents, most of them children at the time, who saw the killings as bystanders. They interview each witness on video, locate the killing sites with their help, and then document the sites with maps, photographs, and physical traces such as cartridge cases, without disturbing the graves. By its own count, the project has identified more than 3,000 execution sites and recorded more than 7,000 testimonies since 2004.

The archive of video interviews, numbering in the thousands, is held at the organization’s Paris headquarters and is open to researchers and educators. The research produced Desbois’s book The Holocaust by Bullets (2008), which gave the phenomenon its name. The work goes on, documenting the sites and working with the communities that live among them today.

Contested elements

What historians still debate.

The scholarship on the Einsatzgruppen and the Holocaust by Bullets carries several open questions:

• When the decision came. When exactly the systematic killing of 1941 was decided has been argued for decades. Intentionalist scholars (Lucy Dawidowicz among them) placed the decision early in the regime’s history. Functionalists (Karl Schleunes, Hans Mommsen) saw improvisation hardening into policy. More recent scholars (Christopher Browning, Saul Friedländer, Peter Longerich) place its consolidation in the summer and autumn of 1941. The question is still live.
• What drove the killers. Whether the perpetrators were moved mainly by ideology, by situation and peer pressure, by careerism, or by antisemitic conviction has been debated across many positions. Browning’s Ordinary Men stressed situation and group dynamics. Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners stressed antisemitic belief. The consensus is that the motives were mixed and that no single explanation covers the whole perpetrator population.
• Local participation. The role of local people, especially in Lithuania, Ukraine, and Poland, has been contested both in the postwar decades and today. How to weigh local participation alongside German command of the killings, and alongside the many locals who did not take part or who helped Jews, remains debated in each national case.
• The Wehrmacht. Since the 1990s, research has shown that the army cooperated in the killings on a large scale.
• The scale. The figure of 1.5 to 2 million is an estimate. The records, trials, testimony, and field research support the range but do not yield a single exact number, and the estimates have been refined over the decades.

Key takeaways

• As many as one in three Jews murdered in the Holocaust was shot in the open, before and alongside the death camps: the Holocaust by Bullets.
• The Einsatzgruppen were four mobile SS units, about 3,000 men, that followed the German army into the Soviet Union from June 22, 1941.
• Babyn Yar in Kyiv and Ponary outside Vilnius are the most documented of thousands of killing sites across the occupied Soviet lands. Dina Pronicheva survived Babyn Yar and testified, and the poets Avraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski gathered survivors’ testimony about Ponary.
• Three thousand men could not kill 1.5 to 2 million people alone. Order Police battalions, the army, and local auxiliaries were part of the machinery.
• The Wehrmacht’s claimed separation from the killings was a postwar myth, overturned by the documentary record.
• The killers reported their own numbers to Berlin. The Operational Situation Reports and the Jäger Report are among the most complete perpetrator records of the Holocaust.
• Since 2004, Yahad-In Unum has located the killing sites village by village, interviewing the last living witnesses.

Object Spotlight

The Jäger Report.

Nine typed pages, dated December 1, 1941, and signed by Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3. Down the pages run columns: a date, a town in Lithuania, and numbers of men, women, and children, each day’s killings entered in its own row.

The report is among the most detailed surviving day-by-day accounts of the shootings written by the men who carried them out. Its columns run to at least 137,346 people killed, by its own count, in some five months, nearly all of them Jews.

The original is held in the Lithuanian Central State Archives in Vilnius. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum holds a microfilm copy.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. Examines the Holocaust by mass shooting during Operation Barbarossa and the evolution of Nazi genocide.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • compare mass shooting with the camp system as methods of killing
  • evaluate the documentary record, including perpetrator reports
  • read the Jäger Report as a primary source
  • locate the killing sites on a map.
• International Classroom Relevance. Supports Holocaust education, genocide studies, forensic history, and source-based historical inquiry.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.5 (Unresolved Global Conflict, 1914–1945).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction through the study of mobile killing units, perpetrator documents, eyewitness testimony, and forensic evidence.
• Common Core RH.11–12.6 & RH.11–12.9. Students analyze operational reports, maps, photographs, testimony, and trial records.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1, D2.His.14. Students investigate historical causation, geographic evidence, and interpretation of multiple historical sources.