Masters of death: the SS-Einsatzgruppen and the invention of the Holocaust

Abstract

This text presents a history of the killing fields on the Eastern front of World War II. It is based on new material available from Russian and other Eastern European archives from Baltic countries like Latvia. The SS Einsatzgruppen were a few thousand members of the special German police force - the real rough guys, not the elite Waffen SS stags. They were the men who moved in just behind the German army in conquered territory and did the dirty work of stabilizing the population, a euphemism for the most ruthless killing spree of the century. The furiosity of the violence in the East, the pure sadism of it, is astonishing. This book documents the planning and execution of the programme in tragic detail, filling a gap in the history of the Third Reich and explaining motives that have seemed obscure if not incomprehensible.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 133 citations exist upstream.