Masters of Death

Masters of Death PDF Author: Richard Rhodes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In Masters of Death, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These “special task forces,” organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar. These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaign’s architects as well as its “ordinary” soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II.

Masters of Death

Masters of Death PDF Author: Richard Rhodes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book

Book Description
In Masters of Death, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These “special task forces,” organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar. These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaign’s architects as well as its “ordinary” soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II.

SS Einsatzgruppen

SS Einsatzgruppen PDF Author: Gerry van Tonder
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1526729105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
“Provides important details about the Einsatzgruppen’s leadership . . . Numerous photographs illustrate the text. A grim read, but a necessary one.” —The Washington Times In June 1941, Adolf Hitler, whose loathing of Slavs and Jewish Bolsheviks knew no bounds, launched Operation Barbarossa, throwing four million troops, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft into the Soviet Union. Operational groups of the German Security Service, SD, followed into the Baltic and the Black Sea areas. Their orders: neutralize elements hostile to Nazi domination. Combined SS and SD headquarters were set throughout Eastern Europe, each with subordinate units of the SD, the Einsatzgruppen, and lower echelons of Einsatzkommandos. Communist and Soviet federal agents were targeted, and from August 1941 to March 1943, 4,000 Soviet and communist agents were arrested and executed. In addition, far greater numbers of partisans and communists were shot to ensure political and ethnic purity in the occupied territories. In the early stages of the operation, Einsatzgruppe A, under Adolf Eichmann, executed 29,000 people listed as Jews or mostly Jews in Latvia and Lithuania. In the Einsatzgruppe C report for September 1941, 50,000 executions are foreseen in Kiev. In five months in 1941, Einsatzkommando III commander, Karl Jger, reported killing 138,272, 34,464 of them were children. The Einsatzgruppen were death squads, their tools the rifle, the pistol and the machine gun. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen executed more than 2 million people between 1941 and 1945, including 1.3 million Jews. Drawing on translated memos, operational reports from the field as well as other primary and secondary sources, historian Gerry van Tonder provides a comprehensive look at one of the darkest periods of human history.

The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958

The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958 PDF Author: Hilary Earl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This book offers the first historical examination of the arrest, trial, and punishment of the leaders of the SS-Einsatzgruppen. The book examines recent historiographical trends and perpetrator paradigms, expounds on such contested issues as the timing and genesis of the Final Solution, the perpetrators' route to crime and their motivation for killing, and extends the discussion to the tensions between law and history.

Hitler's Death Squads

Hitler's Death Squads PDF Author: Helmut Langerbein
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585442850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
"After the war, the German government investigated 1,770 former Einsatzgruppen members and brought 136 of these men to trial. Helmut Langerbein has systematically examined the trial evidence in search of characteristics shared by these mass murderers. Using a much broader data base than earlier studies, Langerbein identifies a number of factors that could explain their actions, illustrating each with a particular person or group of officers." "Given the extent of its data, its detailed analysis and its careful conclusions, Hitler's Death Squads: The Logic of Mass Murder will push historians and psychologists toward a reappraisal of the Nazi killing machine, the behavior of the men behind the battle lines, and the overwhelming power of circumstances."--Jacket.

The Nazi Holocaust. Part 3: The "Final Solution". Volume 2

The Nazi Holocaust. Part 3: The Author: Michael Robert Marrus
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110970473
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
This edition is the first of its kind to offer a basic collection of facsimile, English language, historical articles on all aspects of the extermination of the European Jews. A total of 300 articles from 84 journals and collections allows the reader to gain an overview of this field. The edition both provides access to the immense, rich array of scholarly articles published after 1960 on the history of the Holocaust and encourages critical assessment of conflicting interpretations of these horrifying events. The series traces Nazi persecution of Jews before the implementation of the "Final Solution", demonstrates how the Germans coordinated anti-Jewish activities in conquered territories, and sheds light on the victims in concentration camps, ending with the liberation of the concentration camp victims and articles on the trials of war criminals. The publications covered originate from the years 1950 to 1987. Included are authors such as Jakob Katz, Saul Friedländer, Eberhard Jäckel, Bruno Bettelheim and Herbert A. Strauss.

Messages of Murder

Messages of Murder PDF Author: Ronald Headland
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838634189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Included among these are descriptions of the main features of the reports and the various stages in their compilation, examples and methodology of presentation of the killings, and comparisons of reporting procedures and totals of victims shot by each of the four Einsatzgruppen. The study begins by noting the post-war discovery of the reports and then assumes a roughly chronological sequence in its overall treatment. An outline of the major National Socialist agencies and general reporting practices before the war is followed by the events of the war as reflected in the reports. Then the postwar "life" of the reports is examined with particular reference to their use as legal evidence at Nuremberg as well as a consideration of their reliability as historical source material.

Himmler's Death Squad

Himmler's Death Squad PDF Author: Ian Baxter
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1526778572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This WWII pictorial history offers an unsettling up-close account of the Nazi death squads committing mass murder on the Eastern Front. The murderous activities of Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen – or death squads—rank high among the horrors of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. As the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht advanced into Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, these hand-picked groups followed in their wake, committing mass murder of civilians. Their killing in occupied territories will never be accurately quantified but is likely to have exceeded two million people, including some 1.3 million of the 6,000,00 Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The graphic and shocking photographs in this Images of War book show Einsatzgruppen operations, including the hunt for and rounding up of civilians, communists, Jews and Romani people. It also shows the active support given to the Einsatzgruppen by SS and Wehrmacht units. The latter strenuously denied any collusion, but the photographic evidence here refutes this.

Marching into Darkness

Marching into Darkness PDF Author: Waitman Wade Beorn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067472660X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
On October 10, 1941, the Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. This atrocity was not the routine work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling exposé of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis. Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement has been lacking. Marching into Darkness reveals in detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Waitman Wade Beorn unearths forced labor, sexual violence, and grave robbing, though a few soldiers refused to participate and even helped Jews. Improvised extermination progressively became methodical, with some army units going so far as to organize "Jew hunts." The Wehrmacht also used the pretense of Jewish anti-partisan warfare as a subterfuge by reporting murdered Jews as partisans. Through military and legal records, survivor testimonies, and eyewitness interviews, Beorn paints a searing portrait of an army's descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.

SS Terror in the East

SS Terror in the East PDF Author: Bob Carruthers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783462445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The SS Einsatzgruppen were the most notorious of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany. Under the leadership of the notorious Otto Ohlendorf they were responsible for the introduction of a regime of terror involving mass killings, primarily by shooting, in occupied territory of the Soviet Union during 1941 and 1942. Under the direction of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and the direct supervision of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich the Einsatzgruppen played the leading role in the implementation of the Final Solution in territories conquered by Nazi Germany, but they were also responsible for combatting partisans and eliminating Soviet political commissars, mental patients and Gypsies throughout Eastern Europe. Otto Ohlendorf and the other SS Einsatzgruppen leaders were eventually brought to justice and the 1947 Einstazgruppen trial at Nuremburg bears his name. The trial provided a wealth of primary source documents and testimony which proved the guilt of the perpetrators, but also provided a frightening insight into just how closely the SS sponsored Einsatzgruppen had co-operated with the Wehrmacht and local populations. Emmy AwardTM winning Author and historian Bob Carruthers has revisited and edited the primary source material from the trial to provide a new and chilling insight into the work of the Einsatzgruppen which draws frightening conclusions and blows away the myths with regard to the presumed lack of involvement on the part of the Wehrmacht. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in the true nature of the war on the Russian Front from primary sources.

"The Good Old Days"

Author: Ernst Klee
Publisher: Konecky Konecky
ISBN: 9781568521336
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
One of the most painfully riveting books of our time. A first hand account of the greatest mass murder in history as told by the active and passive participants in genocide. What is different about this book is that it contains carefully compiled letters, journal entries and voluminous correspondence that prove beyond doubt that more members of the German population than ever before admitted to, knew about the Holocaust while it was happening.