During the Holocaust, more than a million Jews were not deported to death camps. They were murdered close to their homes, in forests, ravines and pits on the edge of their own towns. Much of this killing was carried out by the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units of Nazi Germany.
What were the Einsatzgruppen?
The Einsatzgruppen (German for “task forces” or “deployment groups”) were units of the SS Security Police and the SD, the SS intelligence service. They answered to Reinhard Heydrich and the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. Smaller Einsatzgruppen followed the German army into Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, where they arrested and murdered Polish leaders, intellectuals, clergy and Jews.
Their most murderous role began on June 22, 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Four Einsatzgruppen, totalling roughly 3,000 men, moved east behind the advancing army:
- Einsatzgruppe A: the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, toward Leningrad
- Einsatzgruppe B: Belarus, toward Moscow
- Einsatzgruppe C: northern and central Ukraine
- Einsatzgruppe D: southern Ukraine, Crimea and the Caucasus
Each group was divided into smaller Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos. They did not act alone. German Order Police battalions, Waffen-SS units, the Wehrmacht and local auxiliary police and collaborators took part in roundups and shootings across the occupied territories.
Stories like this, in your inbox
Survivor testimonies, history, and news from the March of the Living, once a month.
Sign upStories like this, in your inbox
Survivor testimonies, history, and news from the March of the Living, once a month.
How the killings were carried out
The pattern repeated in hundreds of towns and villages. Jews were ordered to assemble, often under the pretext of “resettlement.” They were marched or driven to a ravine, an anti-tank ditch or a pit dug in advance, sometimes by the victims themselves. There they were forced to undress, and were shot in groups at the edge of the pit or lying on top of those already killed. In the first weeks the units targeted mainly Jewish men. From August 1941 they murdered women, children and the elderly as well, wiping out entire communities.
The killers kept careful records. The Einsatzgruppen sent regular operational reports to Berlin, listing the number of people they had murdered. One commander, Karl Jäger of Einsatzkommando 3, reported that by December 1, 1941 his unit and its local helpers had killed 137,346 people in Lithuania, nearly all of them Jews.
Shooting on this scale took a toll on the shooters themselves. In the late summer of 1941, after Heinrich Himmler watched a mass execution near Minsk, the SS began looking for methods that put more distance between killer and victim. Gas vans were introduced in the occupied east that autumn, a step on the road to the gas chambers of the death camps.
Babyn Yar, Ponary, Rumbula
Some of the largest massacres of the Holocaust were carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and the forces working alongside them:
- Babyn Yar, Kyiv: on September 29 and 30, 1941, 33,771 Jews were shot in a ravine on the edge of the city. Read more: 84 Years Since Babyn Yar Massacre: Unidentified Victims Names Revealed.
- Ponary (Paneriai), near Vilnius: between 1941 and 1944, about 70,000 Jews were murdered in the forest pits outside the city once known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” Read more: Marching to Ponary: Remembering the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
- Rumbula, near Riga: on November 30 and December 8, 1941, about 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were shot in the Rumbula forest.
By the spring of 1943, the Einsatzgruppen and the units working with them had murdered more than one million Jews, along with tens of thousands of Roma, Soviet political officials, people with disabilities and others. Historians often call this the “Holocaust by bullets.”
Justice at Nuremberg
After the war, 24 Einsatzgruppen commanders were indicted at Nuremberg in what became known as the Einsatzgruppen Trial (1947 to 1948). The chief prosecutor was Benjamin Ferencz, just 27 years old, who built his case on the units’ own reports. Fourteen defendants were sentenced to death, and four, including Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, were executed in 1951. Thousands of others who took part in the shootings were never brought to trial. Read more: Remembering Ben Ferencz z”l.
Finding the graves
Because the victims were buried where they were killed, many mass graves were never marked. For decades, communities across Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Russia had no memorial at all. Researchers, including the French organization Yahad-In Unum, have spent years interviewing elderly local witnesses and documenting execution sites, so that the victims can finally be remembered by name and by place.
Why we remember
The Einsatzgruppen show that the Holocaust did not happen only behind barbed wire. It happened in the open, in daylight, in front of neighbors. Each year the International March of the Living brings students, Holocaust survivors and leaders to these sites of the Holocaust by bullets, including the march from Vilnius to Ponary on Lithuania’s National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews, so that the murdered communities of Eastern Europe are not forgotten.