Einsatzgruppen

Path of the Einsatzgruppen

Einsatzgruppen were special mobile units alongside the German Army (Wehrmacht) on the Eastern front during World War II whose job was to locate and kill Jews, Gypsies, Soviet commissars, and others deemed "unfit" in the areas controlled by the army. These Einsatzgruppen (“special units”) were also aided by local populations in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia who felt the Germans had relieved them of Soviet occupation as well as sharing a hatred for Jews and other minorities. Making no difference between young or old, male or female, the Einsatzgruppen killed 70,000 Jews at Ponary, near Vilnius, Lithuania; 33,771 Jews were machine-gunned in a ravine known as Babi Yar near Kiev, Ukraine, between September 28–29, 1941; 9,000 Jews were killed at the Ninth Fort at Kaunas, Lithuania, on October 28, of which half of the dead were children. On November 30 in the Rumbula Forest outside of Riga, Latvia, between 25,000-28,000 were killed.

Lvov pogrom, June-July 1941.

By mid-1941, the Ukrainian SSR had the largest population of Jews in Europe. The addition of the eastern provinces of Poland in late 1939 (western Ukraine after 1945), as well as the seizure of sections of Romanian territory in June 1940, led to some 2.7 million Jews living within the borders of the newly enlarged republic. About 85% lived in cities. By 1944, 1.6 million of these Jews had died at the hands of the Germans and their allies and auxiliaries. Unlike the majority of the Holocaust's later victims who died in the industrialized mass murder of the death camps, the overwhelming bulk of Ukraine's Jews died in mass shootings during the initial stages of the war.

The killings were done in first and second waves, with the bodies buried in mass graves. When the Soviet Red Army threatened and carried out counter-offensives to reclaim lost territory, special units made up of concentration camp inmates (sonderkomandos) would return to the sites, dig up the bodies, and burn them in mass pyres, destroying the evidence of their crimes. The number of individual persons killed by the Einsatzgruppen has been estimated at a minimum of one million.