Einsatzgruppen
특수작전집단 (아인자츠그루펜)
Mobile units of the SS Security Police and SD that followed the German army into occupied territory to eliminate perceived enemies. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 they murdered well over a million civilians, above all Jews, mostly in mass shootings.
In depth
The Einsatzgruppen had already shot thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of members of the Polish elite after the invasion of Poland in 1939. When Hitler’s “war of annihilation” began in June 1941, the four groups A, B, C and D, some 3,000 men, targeted Communist Party and Soviet state officials, Roma and above all Jews of any age or gender, and organised and helped carry out the shooting of more than half a million people in the first nine months. Units of the Waffen-SS, Order Police, Wehrmacht and local collaborators aided them.
Einsatzgruppe A, which followed Army Group North into the Baltic states, was commanded by Walter Stahlecker and reported having murdered 249,420 Jews by the winter of 1941. Its Einsatzkommando 3 under Karl Jäger left the “Jäger Report”, tallying 137,346 executions in Lithuania. Gas vans were developed to spare the shooters, but mass shooting remained the main method throughout the occupied Soviet territories.