Holocaust

Einsatzgruppen

task forces of the Security Police and SD

Mobile units of the Security Police and SD that followed the Wehrmacht into conquered territory. In Poland in 1939 they murdered the elites; from 1941 in the East they carried out mass shootings of Jews.

They had already operated in Austria and the Czech lands, but in Poland, as part of Operation Tannenberg, they killed on a mass scale for the first time, working from proscription lists to murder members of the intelligentsia, clergy and activists, as well as Jews. They were divided into smaller Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos and answered to Reinhard Heydrich, from September 1939 head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).

For the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 four groups, A, B, C and D, were formed, about 3,000 men in all, each attached to an army group. Supported by police battalions, SS units, the Wehrmacht and local collaborators, they murdered more than a million people, above all Jews but also Roma, communists and the sick; one of the largest massacres was Babi Yar in September 1941. Twenty-four of their commanders were tried before a US tribunal at Nuremberg in 1947–1948.