- Uncover the story of perhaps the most horrific chapter of the Holocaust - the two year killing frenzy of the Einsatzgruppen. Sift through the evidence left behind: photographs and one rare film that documented the inhuman attempts to carry out Hitler's Final Solution. Compared to what the Einsatzgruppen did on a daily basis, the killing chambers of Auschwitz almost seem humane. This terrible story is brought to life in one town that stands in for Einsatzgruppen's countless victims - one community where the faces and stories of the victims miraculously survived - although the men, woman and children behind the images did not.—Rodrigo Castedo
- It was the June of 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union where the Einsatzgruppen followed the German army well into the depths of the Soviet territory. The Einsatzgruppen, recruiting the local population and police support to carry out mass-murder massacre operations. The German army provided logistical support, supplies, transportation, housing, and manpower to guard and transport prisoners. Initially and early on, Einsatzgruppen shot primarily Jewish men. By late summer 1941, this policy had changed to include the Jewish men, women, and children and were buried in mass graves.
Mostly these victims were marched or transported to the sites of their death. Typically trenches had been prepared with stories where the captive victims had to dig their own graves.
All the victims were robbed of their their valuables and forced to undress. Then were shot, on the edge of the open trench, or lying face down on the still warm bloody corpses in the pit.
Einsatzgruppen main form of murder was by gun. Later in the summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler, who had noticed that shooting the victims created a psychological burden on murderers and requested that an mode of killing be developed. The 1st result was the a mobile gas chamber on the chassis of a cargo truck. Gas vans made their first appearance on the eastern front in late fall 1941, in most areas where the Einsatzgruppen operated.
The Einsatzgruppen following the German army into the Soviet Union carried out these massacres in the southern Ukraine and Crimea, Feodosiya, Kherson, Simferopol, Nikolayev, Sevastopol, and in the Krasnodar region. It was in the spring of 1943, the Einsatzgruppen had killed over a 1,000,000 Soviet Jews and thousands of partisans, Roma, Soviet political commissars, and disabled people.
One of the most horrific events in the history of Mankind, with a hope that we s a civilization have learned from and will never go down any sinilar path.
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