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Einsatzgruppen (Nazi mobile killing units)

Einsatzgruppen were special SS and police detachments in Nazi Germany that carried out mass shootings and related atrocities in occupied territories; they were central to early stages of the Holocaust and wartime mass murder.

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Overview

The Einsatzgruppen were specially organized mobile units within the security and police apparatus of Nazi Germany. Formed under the direction of senior SS leaders, including Reinhard Heydrich, they operated as part of the broader Schutzstaffel and cooperating security services. Often described as a paramilitary formation, their remit combined security duties, counter‑insurgency operations and the systematic murder of groups the regime identified as enemies. Historians place their activity at the core of the early phase of the Holocaust, particularly in territories overrun during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

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Einsatzgruppen murder Jews in Ivanhorod, Ukraine, 1942
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Formation and organization

The units were organized into smaller detachments that followed advancing German forces, attached to army groups or occupying administrations. Their personnel included SS, police officers and administrative staff, and they frequently collaborated with Wehrmacht units, local police and auxiliary formations. Operational orders combined security tasks with directives for the removal or execution of perceived political opponents and targeted civilian populations. In practice, their principal instruments were arrests, mass shootings and other forms of execution; contemporaneous reports and later investigations documented many of these operations as systematic mass shootings and executions.

Methods and operations

Deployed in occupied areas, Einsatzgruppen units typically conducted actions such as the roundup of entire communities, selection of victims, and mass shootings at prepared sites—trenches, ravines or pits. Killings were often carried out in public or in secluded places with victims forced to undress and shot in groups. In some locations, specialized equipment such as gas vans was used. The units kept reports and telegrams describing their activities; these administrative records and orders later proved crucial in establishing the systematic nature of the killings.

Targets and victims

The victims of the Einsatzgruppen were overwhelmingly non‑combatant. Primary targets included Jewish communities, but also political opponents, suspected partisans, prisoners of war and other civilian populations. They murdered many inhabitants of occupied territories, including communities across Europe. Contemporary research and postwar documentation indicate that the victims included a large number of Jewish civilians, along with Roma people, Polish civilians, and Soviet civilians. Almost all of those killed by these detachments were civilians, and many communities were annihilated in single operations.

Scale and notable massacres

The scale of killings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and associated mobile killing units has been the subject of detailed historical research. While exact totals remain the subject of scholarly refinement, these units were responsible for hundreds of thousands of murders and are estimated to have been directly responsible for the killing of very large numbers of Jews and other civilians in occupied territories, especially in the Soviet borderlands and occupied Poland. One of the most notorious single massacres was at Babi Yar, near Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jewish civilians were shot over a short period in 1941. Similar mass shootings occurred in many towns and rural areas across Eastern Europe, leaving long‑term demographic and social devastation.

Postwar prosecutions

After World War II, surviving leaders and members of the Einsatzgruppen were investigated and prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Several trials in the immediate postwar years and later proceedings brought indictments and convictions. Some cases were heard as part of the sequence of military and international trials frequently associated with the Nuremberg Trials, while other national courts conducted separate trials and appeals. Documentary evidence compiled in investigations and trial records has contributed to the historical record and to legal judgments on responsibility.

Historical research and legacy

Research into the Einsatzgruppen draws on a wide range of sources, including wartime orders, operational reports, testimonies by participants and survivors, and field investigations conducted after the war. Scholars study how these units implemented genocidal policy in the field, how they coordinated with military and civil authorities, and how ideology, bureaucracy and wartime conditions combined to enable mass murder. The history of these units remains central to broader discussions of the Holocaust, state‑sponsored violence, and the mechanisms by which societies carry out large‑scale atrocities.

  • Command and structure: SS and police coordination under senior leadership (see SS references)
  • Primary victims: Jews, Roma, and wide civilian populations
  • Geographic focus: occupied territories, notably in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union
  • Documentation and accountability: wartime reports, postwar trials and legal records

Understanding the Einsatzgruppen requires attention to both the operational detail of their actions and the larger policies that directed them. For further study consult archival collections, documented trials and scholarly surveys that analyze orders, field reports and survivor testimony to reconstruct how these mobile units carried out mass murder in the course of the conflict.

Shooting of Jews by Einsatzgruppen near Ivanhorod (Cherkassy Oblast) in Ukraine (probably 1942).
Shooting of Jews by Einsatzgruppen near Ivanhorod (Cherkassy Oblast) in Ukraine (probably 1942).

Einsatzgruppen before the Second World War

Since his appointment as "Reichsführer SS" (1929), Himmler had begun to develop the SS, a sub-organization of the NSDAP, into an armed, paramilitary elite force. To this end, Reinhard Heydrich had founded the "Security Service of the Reichsführer SS" (SD) since 1931, which was given a central, Germany-wide organization in the spring of 1933. After the Röhm putsch in 1934, Himmler also became head of the political police, and in 1936 also of the other German police. Together with Heydrich he aimed at a close connection of SS, SD and police. For special tasks prior to almost any territorial expansion, Himmler had special "Einsatzkommandos", also called "Sonder-" or "Spezialeinheiten", set up from the ranks of the organizations under his command since 1938. Until 1940, SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Best was responsible for their formation. These groups were to take over the "fight against the enemies of the Reich" immediately after the respective invasion of German troops into a new territory, mainly by investigations and arrests. Until September 1939, they had no orders to kill, but they had considerable room for maneuver in carrying out their orders. Their deployment marked the transition to a systematic persecution of all actual and perceived opponents of the Nazi regime in these areas.

When Austria was annexed by the German Reich, the Einsatzkommando Österreich, founded in 1938, was deployed. It consisted of SD members and was led by SS-Standartenführer Franz Six. Its task was the arrest of opponents of the Anschluss with prepared wanted lists.

During the incorporation of the Sudetenland in September 1938, the term Einsatzgruppe appeared for the first time in Nazi administrative language: It referred to Einsatzgruppe Dresden, which consisted of five Einsatzkommandos under SS-Standartenführer Heinz Jost, and Einsatzgruppe Wien, with two Einsatzkommandos under SS-Standartenführer Walter Stahlecker. Both were set up and dispatched by the Gestapo, which claimed jurisdiction because the Sudeten Germans were defined as Reich citizens. The commandos were to carry out relatively independently all Gestapo tasks in their area in a "special operation", i.e. to arrest "Reich-enemy" persons by means of a "special wanted list" and reports from Sudeten Germans, to confiscate their documents, to dissolve their establishments, to occupy Czechoslovak police stations and to monitor postal and telephone traffic. They were strictly forbidden to mistreat and kill arrested persons and to harass uninvolved persons, because this prohibition seemed necessary. They arrested about 10,000 people and, together with Sudeten German organizations, expelled numerous Czechs from their residential areas.

Einsatzgruppe I Prague and Einsatzgruppe II Brno were set up for the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia (the "rest of Czechia") in March 1939. They were in turn divided into several Einsatzkommandos: Budweis, Prague, Kolin, Pardubitz, Brno, Olmütz, Zlin, Einsatzkommando 9 Mies under SS-Hauptsturmführer Gustav vom Felde and Sonderkommando Pilsen. They too arrested about 10,000 people.

Balkan

Serbia

In connection with the planning for "Operation Barbarossa" (the invasion of the Soviet Union planned since July 1940 for May/June 1941), the Balkan campaign was planned at relatively short notice and carried out in April 1941. In addition to the Einsatzgruppen for the Russian war, the Einsatzgruppe Serbien with two Einsatzkommandos was set up and trained in March 1941. Its leader from April 1941 to January 1942 was SS-Oberführer and police colonel Wilhelm Fuchs. He was followed by SS-Oberführer Emanuel Schäfer in January 1942. Their tasks and subordination were regulated between the Army High Command and the Chief of the Security Police and SD: They were to fight "emigrants, saboteurs, terrorists", but above all "communists and Jews". In January 1942, the Einsatzgruppe was disbanded and the police tasks were transferred to the HSSPF SS-Gruppenführer and Lieutenant General of Police August Meyszner.

Croatia

In Croatia (NDH), Einsatzgruppe E became active from 2 August 1941: until 24 April 1943 under SS-Obersturmbannführer Ludwig Teichmann, until October 1944 under SS-Standartenführer Günther Herrmann, from November 1944 under SS-Oberführer and Oberst der Polizei Wilhelm Fuchs. Other groups active there were:

  • Einsatzkommando 10b (Vinkovci or later Esseg) under SS-Obersturmbannführer and Oberregierungsrat Joachim Deumling (15 March 1943 to 27 January 1945), then SS-Sturmbannführer Franz Sprinz (27 January 1945 to 8 May 1945)
  • Einsatzkommando 11a (Sarajevo) under SS-Sturmbannführer and Regierungsrat Rudolf Korndörfer (15 May 1943 to 9 September 1943), then SS-Obersturmbannführer Anton Fest (9 September 1943 to 1945)
  • Einsatzkommando 15 (Banja Luka) under SS-Hauptsturmführer Willi Wolter (12 June 1943 to September 1944)
  • Task force 16 (Knin)
    • SS-Obersturmbannführer and Oberregierungsrat Johannes Thümmler (3 July 1943 to 11 September 1943)
    • SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Freitag (11 September 1943 to 28 October 1944)
  • Zagreb task force
    • SS-Sturmbannführer and Regierungsrat Rudolf Korndörfer (from 9 September 1943)

Questions and answers

Q: Who created the Einsatzgruppen?

A: The Einsatzgruppen were created by the Nazi SS-Gestapo Officer Reinhard Heydrich.

Q: What was the purpose of the Einsatzgruppen?

A: The purpose of the Einsatzgruppen was to help make The Holocaust happen by murdering about 12 million people throughout Europe.

Q: How many people did they kill?

A: They killed between 5 and 6 million Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of Polish people, Soviets, and Roma people in Eastern Europe.

Q: How did they usually carry out their killings?

A: Sometimes, the Einsatzgruppen would kill only a few people at once. Other times, they would kill thousands of people in a few days. For example, at Babi Yar, the Einsatzgruppen killed 33,771 Jewish people in two days.

Q: What happened to some of the leaders after World War II ended?

A: 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 who were convicted and sentenced to death.

Q: Where did most of their victims come from?

A: Most of their victims came from Jews; however they also killed hundreds of thousands of Polish people, Soviets and Roma people in Eastern Europe as well.

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