After Nazi Germany lost World War II, 24 leaders of the "Einsatzgruppen" were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials. Sixteen were convicted. Fourteen were sentenced to death, and two were sentenced to life in prison. Other countries later tried four other "Einsatzgruppen" leaders, convicted them, and sentenced them to death.
SS leader Reinhard Heydrich created the "Einsatzgruppen" around 1938.
At first, in October 1938, Heydrich sent the "Einsatzgruppen" to the Sudetenland. Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, wanted to take over the Sudetenland. He was ready to use the Nazi military to invade the area. However, in the Munich Agreement, world powers agreed that Hitler could have the Sudetenland. The "Einsatzgruppen" helped take over government buildings, and took all the government papers they could find. They also arrested about 10,000 Czech communists and German citizens.
From September to December 1939, the "Einsatzgruppen" took part in the Nazis' Action T4 program. The Nazis believed that people with physical, intellectual, and mental disabilities did not deserve to live. Action T4 was a plan to kill them all. At first, the "Einsatzgruppen" and other Nazis shot these people. However, by spring of 1940, the Nazis started using gas chambers so they could kill people with disabilities more quickly.
In 1939, Hitler decided to invade Poland. Heydrich decided the "Einsatzgruppen" would follow the regular German Army. Their job would be to kill the most important people in Polish society, like clergy, teachers, and members of the academia. They would also kill anyone who refused to agree with Nazi ideas or rules. Adolf Hitler said: "...there must be no Polish leaders; where Polish leaders exist they must be killed[.]" The Einzatsgruppen followed this plan by killing about 65,000 civilians by the end of 1939. These people included Polish leaders, Jews, prostitutes, Roma people, and people with mental illnesses.
Finally, the "Einsatzgruppen" forced the surviving Jews in Poland to move to ghettos in big Polish citiies. The Nazis planned to get rid of all the Jews in Poland, but they had not yet decided where to send them. With the help of the German Army, the "Einsatzgruppen" also forced tens of thousands of Jews eastward into the part of Poland that the Soviet Union had taken over.
In 1941, Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union. He called this plan Operation Barbarossa. Hitler hated communism. He wanted to take over the communist Soviet Union, and kill communism for good.
In May 1941, Heydrich gave the "Einsatzgruppen" an order to kill the Jews in the Soviet Union.
In June 1941, Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, told other SS leaders that the Nazis planned to kill up to 30 million people in the Soviet Union. The "Einsatzgruppen" would play an important part in this by murdering people who the Nazis thought were inferior. However, the Nazis would also use other strategies, like starvation, to kill other Soviets.
The "Einsatzgruppen" were divided into seven battalions. Hitler's army invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. A few weeks later, the "Einsatzgruppen" started working in eastern Poland, which was controlled by the Soviet Union. Heydrich gave them three main jobs:
The "Einsatzgruppen" did these jobs in many ways. Sometimes, they would make lists of people who they thought were enemies, and would then murder them. Other times, they would perform massacres of thousands of people over a few days. For example, at Babi Yar, one "Einsatzgruppen" battalion killed 33,771 Jews in two days; in the Rumbula massacre, another killed about 25,000 people in two days.
As the Nazis took over more and more countries, they created more "Einsatzgruppen". They also created smaller groups called "Einsatzkommando" and "Sonderkommando". These included:
After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the "Einsatzgruppen"s main job was still to kill civilians, like they did in Poland. However, this time, Heydrich ordered the "Einsatzgruppen" to kill:
Between July 8 and July 17, Heydrich also ordered the "Einsatzgruppen" to kill:
The Red Army retreated. However, Heydrich thought there were Soviet guerrilla fighters still in the area and thought local Jews were helping them. He ordered the "Einsatzgruppen" to encourage anti-Jewish pogroms in the newly occupied territories. Pogroms (some of which the "Einsatzgruppen" started) broke out in Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Within the first few weeks of Operation Barbarossa, 10,000 Jews were killed in 40 different pogroms. By the end of 1941, about 60 pogroms had happened, killing up to 24,000 people.
All of the main "Einsatzgruppen" took part in mass shootings from the beginning of the war. At first, they shot only adult Jewish men. However, by August, they were shooting all Jews, including women, children, infants, and the elderly. At first, they killed people in firing squads. When this became too slow, the "Einsatzkommandos" began to shoot larger groups next to, or even inside, mass graves. As news about these killings spread, many Jewish people ran away.
The Nazis began to send people to concentration camps and ghettos. Rural areas were mostly "Judenfrei" (free of Jews). The Nazis created forced labour gangs so they could make use of the Jews as slaves until the Nazis had killed them all. The Nazis had put off that goal until 1942.
"Einsatzgruppe A" worked in the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These countries had been occupied by the Soviet Union before the Nazis took them over. "Einsatzgruppe A" killed about 140,000 people between June and November 1941.
When "Einsatzgruppe A" entered Kaunas, Lithuania, a pogrom was happening. They let all of the criminals out of jail and encouraged them to join the pogrom. In four days, 4,000 Jews were killed in the pogrom.
The head of "Einsatzgruppe A" let a violent anti-Semitic man named Viktors Arājs start a smaller "Einsatzgruppe" called the Arājs Kommando. Together, the two groups killed 2,300 Jews in Riga, Lithuania. Within six months, the Arājs Kommando killed about half of the Jews in Latvia.
Groups like the Arājs Kommando were created in Lithuania and Estonia too. With their help, "Einsatzgruppe A" was able to kill almost every Jew in its area.
In November 1941, Himmler decided that Latvians were not being killed fast enough. He wanted to move Jews from Germany into Latvia. He ordered that everyone living in the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, be murdered.
The Nazis told the people in the ghetto they were being sent to another place to live. They told them to bring their things and valuables.
The Nazis moved people towards a nearby forest a thousand at a time. They shot people who tried to run away or could not walk fast enough. They took the things the Jews had brought with them, and made them take off their clothes. Then, fifty at a time, they made the victims lie down in a mass grave and shot them.
In two days, about 25,000 people were murdered by the "Einsatzgruppen".
After a while, Himmler realized that the "Einsatzgruppen"s methods were not the best way to kill people as quickly and cheaply as possible. He also found that many "Einsatzgruppen" had trouble killing so many people. Some had physical and mental health problems, and others became alcoholics. Himmler made a final decision after watching a mass execution in August 1941. He decided that shooting Jews was too stressful for his men.
Himmler decided that the answer to this problem was to kill Jews (and others) with poison gas. Starting in 1942, all of the main "Einsatzgruppen" began killing people using gas vans, which had been used to kill people with disabilities early on in Action T4. In these vans, carbon monoxide exhaust fumes from the vans' engines were pumped into the back of the truck, killing the victims inside. However, by September 1941, Nazis at Auschwitz concentration camp had begun experimenting with Zyklon B, a cyanide-like pesticide.