Einsatzgruppen

             "You're doing your paper on what?" The Einsatzgruppen. "What is that?" Mobile killings units set up by the Nazis to solve the Jewish problem on the Eastern front.
             I knew the Einsatzgruppen was not very well known, but as I told people about my research paper and they inquired further, I was shocked at how little, if anything, people knew. I knew it was a great paper topic to inform people when I was at the library and the librarian, who had never ceased to answer a question, asked me what the Einsatzgruppen was. This was a woman, who when I was a working on an obscure paper, knew about the orphanages in revolutionary France and where to find primary sources on them! And yet, she did not know about the mobile killing units who were responsible for the death of over 1,500,000 people, the majority being Jews (Edeiken). The Einsatzgruppen played a key role in the murder of Eastern Jews. So much in fact, that an Einsatzgruppen trial was held at the famous Nuremberg War Crime trials. This report will examine the origins, methods of killing, problems, and the Einsatzgruppen trial in hopes that more people will be aware of one of the mos!
             t important parts of the Nazi killing machine.
             The beginnings of the Einsatzgruppen can be traced back to the Polish campaign of September 1939. An order of the Eighth Corps stated their function as "particularly counterespionage, arrest of the politically unreliable, confiscation of weapons, gathering of evidence important for police intelligence activities, etc" (Arad ii). Headland describes the duties of the Einsatzgruppen in a more realistic light when he said, "the primary tasks of the Einsatzgruppen was the deliberate annihilation of the Jews, gypsies, communist official, and others who were considered enemies of the Nazi regime" (11). Although the Einsatzgruppen of the Polish campaign took the lives of tens of thousands, the Einsatz...

More Essays:

APA     MLA     Chicago
Einsatzgruppen . (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 09:54, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/69527.html