Einsatzgruppen

Historical Context

In Western and Central Europe, and in particular in Poland and Germany, it was well-known since 1918/1919 that the Bolshevists and their Red Army exhibited a savage bestiality during warfare and even in peacetime that was unparalleled in modern history. In addition, the Soviet Union rescinded any agreement of international law that Czarist Russia had agreed on, and refused to sign any new agreement, such as the Geneva Convention and the Hague Convention. The effects of this surfaced already during the war against Finland in the winter of 1939/​1940. Hence, there could be no illusion as to how the Soviet Union would conduct a war, should it ever come to a clash with Germany or any other European nation.

The National Socialists perceived Bolshevism as an ideology of atrocities based mainly on Jewish support and participation. In fact, the extraordinarily over-proportionate participation of individuals with a Jewish background in the savage Bolshevist revolution and the subsequent bloody Soviet rule in the 1920s and early 1930s was one of the main pillars of National-Socialist anti-Judaism. (See the section on “Motives for National-Socialist anti-Judaism” in the entry on Motives for details.) National-Socialism saw itself as a revolutio­nary movement directed to no small degree at coun­tering and undoing the Bolshevist revolution that Moscow was trying to spread around the globe.

This ideological confrontation set the stage for a war of annihilation between Germany and the Soviet Union, where Jewish-dominated Bolshevist atroci­ties during the 1920s and 1930s led to an irreconci­lably hostile attitude of National Socialists toward Jews and Bolshevism. This in turn stoked Bolshevist and universal Jewish desire to wage a war of anni­hi­lation against anything German, which the National Socialists reciprocated in kind. The two largest Euro­pean nations were gearing up for the ultimate con­frontation.

Soviet Warfare

Right from the beginning of the invasion of the So­viet Union in 1941, German units encountered mass atro­ci­ties: In almost every town and city that the Soviets were about to retreat from, they murdered dissidents and potential opposition leaders by the hundreds. Wher­ever possible, they applied scorched-earth tac­tics, destroying critical infrastructure, industrial facilities and food supplies, burning down crops in the fields and on occasion even entire villages and towns before retreating. If by chance they captured German soldiers, these men were later found mutilated and savagely murdered. This stiffened and brutalized German responses.

Two decades of Soviet atrocities also led to retaliations by the local population against those whom they perceived as supporters of the savage Soviet rule. Hence, pogroms against Jews were a common occurrence during the opening days and weeks of the conflict. German units sometimes intervened to suppress those po­groms, but in many cases, they deliberately looked the other way or even encouraged mob violence.

Soon after the commencement of hostilities, So­viet partisans (civilian fighters) started their illegal warfare. The number of partisans acting behind German army lines rose steadily throughout the years, from a few thousands at the beginning, to some 100,000 in early 1942 to about half a million in early 1944. The defeat of the German armed forces in the East was to a large degree a result of this guerrilla warfare. Soviet Jews played a major part in these guerilla formations. The radical National-Socialist anti-Jewish stance gave Jews little choice as to which side to take, even if they opposed Stalin’s cruel regime. Moreover, many of the Jews deported to the East by German resettle­ment operations decided to flee to the woods and join the partisans. Hence, Germany’s resettlement and deportation policies to the East backfired on them.

The German reaction to the expected guerrilla warfare was extremely harsh from the outset: With the so-called “Commissar Order,” Germany declared the Red Army’s political commissars, who enforced the cruel Soviet warfare at the front lines, as non-com­batants, hence as criminals who were to be exe­cuted when captured. In addition to that, reprisal shootings of civilians from the affected areas were conducted, which was in accordance with interna­tional law at that time, if kept within certain limits. However, in their rage, German units often exceeded those limits.

The Commissar Order, excessive reprisals, as well as mass execution of partisans, partisan suspects and those suspected of helping partisans backfired on the Germans. Recognizing this, the Commissar Order was cancelled in May 1942, and a little while later, in a unique act of gratuitous humanity, the German armed forces even recognized regular partisan groups as ordinary (legal) combatants.

Documented History

Polish Campaign

In preparation of the invasion of Poland in Septem­ber 1939, Germany created special units named Einsatzgruppen, which literally translates to “deploy­ment groups,” but is usually translated as “task forces.” Most of these units were divided into subunits called Ein­satz­kom­man­dos. The Einsatzgruppen in Poland consisted of roughly two thousand members of various German police and intelligence units. In cooperation with the German military, these units’ task was “to combat all elements hostile to the Reich and to Germans in enemy territory to the rear of the combat troops”. Altogether eight Einsatzgruppen operated in distinct areas of occupied Poland during the German-Polish War. With combat operations ceasing in late October, the Einsatzgruppen’s activities also largely ceased.

Only five wartime documents of these units have survived. They mention Jews only in the context of registering Jewish-owned enterprises, liquidating abandoned businesses of Jews who have fled, and implementing a policy of ghettoization and concentration, as well as emigration and expulsion of Polish Jews. This includes plans to resettle Jews to a “Jewish reservation” in southeastern Poland near the town Nisko. (See the entry on the Nisko Plan.) No documents refer to any executions or other extermination measures.

Orthodox authors tally the victims of executions in Poland to 16,336 victims for the time of military operations. Although there were Jews among the victims, they were not a specific target, and their share was not significantly higher than their percentage in acts of opposition to the German occupation.

Structure

When the German government prepared Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Germany’s Department for Homeland Security, the Reichssicherheits­hauptamt (RSHA), formed a new set of four Einsatzgruppen (EG), containing altogether some 3,000 men. They consisted each of several Son­der­kom­man­do subunits (SK), and were deployed in the rear of the operational area of certain German military formations as indicated in the table.

Einsatzgruppen Deployment Areas, Subunits and Successive Commanders

EG	Deployed with (in)	SKs	Successive Chiefs
A	Army Group North (northern Russia)	1a, 1b, 2, 3	Walter Stahlecker, Heinz Jost, Humbert Achamer-Pifrader, Friedrich Panzinger, Wilhelm Fuchs
B	Army Group Central (Belorussia, central Russia)	7a, 7b, 8, 9, Ad­vance Unit Moscow	Arthur Nebe, Erich Naumann, Horst Böhme, Erich Ehrlinger, Heinz Seetzen, Horst Böhme
C	Army Group South (northern + central Ukraine)	4a, 4b, 5, 6	Otto Rasch, Max Thomas, Horst Böhme
D	11th Army, Rumanian army (south­ern Ukraine, Crimea, Caucasus)	10a, 10b, 11a 11b, 12	Otto Ohlendorf, Walter Bierkamp

In addition to the Einsatzgruppen, the German occupational authorities also created police forces, which were also involved in combating individuals or groups hostile toward the German occupational authorities. They were organized in three groups, totaling some 8,000-9,000 men. These units were each commanded by a so-called Higher SS and Police Leader, as follows:

• Russia North and Ostland (Baltics), headed by Hans-Adolf Prützmann, later by Friedrich Jeckeln.
• Russia Central, headed by Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski;
• Russia South and Ukraine, headed by Friedrich Jeckeln, later by Hans-Adolf Prützmann.

Also occasionally involved in Einsatzgruppen activities were subunits of Himmler’s personal SS formation called Kommandostab Reichsführer SS. It consisted of military units (infantry, cavalry, air-defense units) comprising altogether some 25,000 men.

Mission

The official mission statement for the Einsatzgruppen does not say anything about exterminating Jews. In the non-combat zone behind the German armies, they were to identify, capture and eliminate ideological and political enemies and those who committed hostile acts against German troops or the populations of the occupied countries, starting with the partisans. They moreover were tasked with gathering intelligence on a broad variety of areas, and informing the armed forces of the political situation. They assisted in the restoration of the administrative, social and economic structure of regions devastated by the com­batants or by the Soviets’ scorched-earth withdrawal. This also included the revival of the local populace’s cultural and religious life. Meticulous reports on seizures and arrests were to be written, and records of each unit’s activities kept.

Two long reports by the first commander of Ein­satz­grup­pe A, Walter Stahlecker, testify to the broad variety of the group’s activities. The first of these so-called Stahlecker Reports (15 October 1941) has 143 pages and 18 appendices, while the second of February 1942 has 228 pages plus 19 appendices. Only very small parts of these reports deal with executions. The issues covered range from the civil population’s morale via politics, culture and public health to religious and economic topics, to name only a few. (See the entry on the Stahlecker Report for more details.)

Other summary documents created by the Einsatzgruppen testify to a similar diversity of activities, including description of an area’s cultural life during the Soviet era and at the time of reporting, listing cultural institutions, theaters, cinemas, musical life, libraries, radio and museums. They explain issues of economy, trade, labor and social affairs, labor deployment, working morale and performance, as well as procurement of manpower into the Reich, to name but a few topics. The following table shows how many reports of which Ein­satz­grup­pe dealt with which topic.

Number of Einsatzgruppen Reports Addressing a Given Topic

EG:	A	B	C	D
Propaganda	5	10	4	5
Economy	10	9	13	7
Churches	11	8	9	7
Education, Culture, Science	6	2	6	6
Press	4	/	/	/
Agriculture, Food	3	4	14	9
Jews, Jewish Question	4	5	/	6
Ethnic Groups	11	10	27	16

Being able to cover all these topics effectively required a staff that was highly educated. Hence, for a military formation, the Einsatzgruppen’s leading positions had an unusually high percentage of highly educated academics. About 40% of all EG commanders had PhDs.

The decision by the RSHA to recruit personnel with such a high degree of university training indicates that their primary task did not consist of extermination at all.

Reports

A huge set of documents related to the Einsatzgruppen’s activities was confiscated by the Allies in the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin on 3 September 1945. These consist largely of three sets of documents:

• 195 Ereignismeldungen UdSSR (EM; Event Reports USSR), which were created from 23 June 1941 until 24 April 1942 (almost 3,000 pages).
• 55 Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten (MO, Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories) created between 1 May 1942 and 21 May 1943 (some 1,700 pages).
• 11 Tätigkeits- und Lagebe­richte (TL, Activity and Situation Reports) covering larger periods of time, the earlier of which are summaries of the events laid out in the EMs of that time.
• Three individual reports: two by the head of Ein­satz­grup­pe A, Walter Stahlecker (15 October 1941 and February 1942; 143 and 228 pp.), and one by the head of Ein­satz­kom­man­do 3 (of EG A), Karl Jäger (1 December 1941, 9 pp.).

The individual reports (EM and MO) therefore consist of some 4,700 pages of typed text. Not even 10% of these pages contain informa­tion about executions, while the rest deals with many other issues, such as intelligence, interrogation of PoWs, search of enemies and informants, creating ghettos and camps, isolating Jews, as well as eliminating peo­ple disturbing normal life and productivity.

The EMs and MOs were created in a convoluted way. A clerk of each Ein­satz­kom­man­do (EK) drafted a handwritten account of his unit’s activities. This was submitted to his unit’s leader. He then created his own version of it and submitted it to the headquarters of his EG. There, the various reports of all EKs were summarized into one report, which was either mailed or communicated by radio or sometimes even by phone to the Berlin RSHA headquarters. In Berlin, those incoming reports from all EGs were again compiled into the final EM or later MO report. None of the original or various intermediary reports of this long chain have been preserved.

In Berlin, up to 77 copies of these reports were distributed to various recipients, most of them to various RSHA departments, but some also to a few outsiders. The set of EMs presumably found at the Gestapo headquarters should contain a complete set of all EMs intended for that office. However, it contains a mix of copies intended for disparate RSHA offices. Furthermore, an identical set of the same “originals” as stored in the German Federal Archives can also be found in the Russian State War Archives. Of course, both sets cannot be original. Either one or both are forgeries.

Even orthodox historians agree that the execution figures listed in these documents are highly unreliable. A thorough analysis reveals that some figures were evidently vastly exaggerated, while some events might have been invented altogether. The figures listed in various reports sometimes get repeated and counted twice. Other numbers and events claimed in one report contradict the data listed in others that should or do cover the same events.

More importantly, when a report gives a total number of executions carried out as of a given point in time, these figures usually do not agree with the individual executions reported, but are often vastly higher. For example, EM No. 88 of 19 September 1941 gives a total of 85,000 execution victims as of that date, but the individual figures only attest to some 15,000 victims, while only two executions are specifically mentioned in EMs with date/location, amounting to 4,300 victims. This is less than 6% of the claimed total.

Whenever execution figures run into the thousands or even tens of thousands per event, it is suspicious when these reports list victim counts down to the single digit, which would have required extremely accurate and meticulous bookkeeping during those claimed mass slaughters. For instance, one EM reports that within two days, 33,771 Jews were executed at Babi Yar in Kiev. All the evidence available in this case, including air photos taken in September 1943, point to this event not having occurred at all. It is quite obvious what the consequences are for the credibility of this EM, if not its authenticity.

Another red flag is the so-called Jäger Report, which lists the execution of 137,343 persons until late 1941, most of them Jews from Lithuania. However, most of the individual execution events mentioned cannot be found in the EMs of that time. In fact, the EMs “confirm” only some 2,900 of these alleged executions. That is barely over two percent! There are more issues with this report, which make its authenticity highly questionable. (See the entry dedicated to the Jäger Report.)

Death Toll

The EMs contain the main data about executions. The MOs contain hardly any information about execu­tions, be it because the “job” had already been done by May 1942, or because this set of documents is actually authentic and gives a more-realistic figure of what was going on in the temporarily German-occupied Soviet territories.

The alleged death toll resulting from the various extant documents for each EG and other units are as follows:

Unit	Death Toll
Ein­satz­grup­pe A:	240,410
Ein­satz­grup­pe B:	142,359
Ein­satz­grup­pe C:	134,260
Ein­satz­grup­pe D:	114,449
Subtotal:	631,478
Other SS units:	120,307
Overall Total:	751,785

Of these claimed killings, 274,149, or more than a third, are listed in these reports without indication of when and where these alleged executions took place.

List of Execution Locations

The EMs list many locations in the temporarily German-occupied Soviet Union where executions are said to have occurred. Instead of dedicating an alphabetical entry to many of the major claimed mass-execution sites, as mainstream encyclopedias tend to do, it seems more appropriate to prepare a complete listing of all locations, with the total number of all victims presumably killed there, and the alleged perpetrator unit(s). Note that this list does not include non-Jewish victims, and it does not include the many killing events for which no specific location is given.

 

Executioners	Location	Victims
EG A	Ariogala	27
EG D	Babchintsy	94
EG A	Bakov	100
EG A, B	Baranovichi	2,388
EG C	Belaya Tserkov	68
EG B	Belovshchina	2,726
Rumanians	Beltsy (Balti)	45
EG C, HSSPF S	Berdichev	1,674
EG B	Berezna	8
BdS GG, EG z.b.V/​EK Lemberg	Bialystok	490
EG B	Bobruisk	7,486
EG C	Boguslav	322
EG B	Borisov	962
EG B	Borovlyany	5
EG B	Bresk [?] Horsov [?]	?
EG z.b.V/​EK Lemberg, OrPo, BdS GG	Brest-Litovsk	5,306
EG D	Buyuk Lambat and Alushta	30
EG B	Chausy	31
EG B, C	Chernigov	309
Rumanians	Chernovitsy	682
EG C	Chernyakov	156
EG A	Cherven	15,000
EG C	Chmielnik	229
EG A	Daugavpils	1,171
EG C, HSSPF S	Dnepropetrovsk	10,350
EG C	Dobromil	132
EG C	Dubno	100
EG C	Dymer	120
EG C	Fastov	312
EG D	Feodosia	16
Stapo Tilsit	Gargzdai	201
EG B	Gomel, Rogachev, Korma	2,468
EG B	Gorki	2,200
EG C	Gornostaipol	385
EG B	Gorodnia	21
EG B	Gorodok	446
EG B	Grodno	96
EG A	Ilya	520
EG C	Ivankov	195
EG B	Iviniec (Ivenets)	50
Pogrom	Jelgava	1,556
HSSPF S	Kamenets-Podolsky	23,600
Lithuanian Pogroms, HSSPF N, EG A	Kaunas	10,562 + Thousands
EG A	Kedainiai	93
EG C	Kharkov	305
EG B	Khislavichi	114
EG B	Kholopenichi	822
EG C, Pogrom	Khorostov	270
EG D	Khotin	150
EG C, A	Kiev	33,776
EG D	Kishinev	551
EG B	Klimov	27
EG B	Klimovichi, Cherikov	786
EG D	Kodyma	97
EG B	Komarovka	115
EG C, Ukrainians	Korosten	628
EG C	Korostyshev	40
EG C	Kozelets	125
EG C	Kozyatin Wezerajce [?]	22
EG C	Kremenets	130
Stapo Tilsit	Kretinga	214
EG B	Krichev	1,213
EG C	Krivoy Rog	284
EG B	Krugloye	31
EG B	Krupki	912
EG B	Kuyashiche [?]	32
EG A	Leningrad area	93
EG A	Liepaja	485
EG B	Lizny [?]	165
EG B	Logoysk	929
EG A	Loknya	38
EG C	Lubny	1,938
EG C	Lutsk	2,300
EG C, EG z.b.V/​EK Lemberg	Lviv	8,154
EG B	Lyubavichi	492
EG C	Makarov	14
EG A	Mariampole	103
EG B	Maryina Gorka	996
EG A, B	Minsk	14,212
EG C	Miropol	24
EG B	Mistislav [?]	900
EG B, Pol.Regt. Mitte	Mogilev	6,318
EG B	Monastyrshchina	46
EG B	Nevel	714
EG D	Nikolayev, Kherson	22,467
EG A	Novgorod	14
EG B	Novozybkov	1
EG B	Nowe Swieciany (Svencioneliai)	169
Rumanians	Odessa	10,000
EG D	Orel	?
EG B	Orsha	43
EG C	Oster	237
EG B	Ostrava	3
EG B	Ostrovno	169
EG B	Oszmiana (Oshmyany)	527
EG A	Pagiriai	1
Stapo Tilsit	Palanga	11
EG A	Panevezys	249
EG B	Patichi [?]	1,013
EG C	Pereyeslav	537
EG D	Pinsk	4,500
EG A	Plyussa	7
EG C	Poltava	1,538
EG C	Proskurov	146
EG C, Ukrainians	Radomyshl	2,057
EG A	Raseiniai	254
EG B	Rechitsa	216
Pogrom, EG A, HSSPF Riga	Riga	46,662
EG B	Roslavl, Shumyachi	510
EG C, HSSPF S	Rovno	15,240
EG C	Rudki	15
EG B, C	Rudnya	861
EG A	Salaspils	2
Pogrom	Sambor	50
EG C	Shepetovka	17
HSSPF S	Shepetovka-Rovno	1,643
EG B	Shidov [?]	627
EG B	Shklov	84
EG C	Shuealivka [?]	16
EG A	Siauliai	44
EG D	Simferopol	10,300
EG B	Sloboda, Polotsk, Bychikha, Bislatovo [?]	286
EG B	Slonim	1,159
EG B	Slutsk	1
EG B	Smolevichi	1,401
EG C	Stalino (Dontesk)	369
EG D	Mogilev-Podolsky	1,265
EG C	Starokonstantinov	439
EG B	Stolpce (Stolbtsy)	76
EG C	Stryi	11
EG B	Szuchari [Sukhari], Yasna	11
EG B	Talka	222
EG C	Tarashcha	109
EG C, Wehrmacht	Tarnopol	2,056
EG A	Tartu	50
EG B	Tatarsk	? + 3
EG D	Tighina	155
EG C	Troyanov	22
EG C	Tsybulov [?]	78
EG A	Ukmerge	296
EG C	Uman	1,412
EG A	Utena	251
EG A	Valka	10
EG A	Valmiera	25
EG A	Vandziogala	15
EG B	Velizh	1
EG A	Venden	3
EG A, B	Vileyka	302 + ?
EG A	Vilkaviskis	50
EG A, B	Vilnius	2,231
EG C	Vinnitsa	892
EG B	Vitebsk	7,750
EG B	Voroshilov	8
EG B	Vyazma CC	117
EG C	Yagotin	125
EG D	Yampol	9
EG B	Yanovichi	1,174
EG C	Yavorov	15
EG C	Yustungrad [?]	35
EG A	Zagare	250
Waffen SS	Zborov	600
EG C, D	Zhitomir	4,843
EG B	Zhlobin	31
EG B	Zlynka	27
EG C	Zolochev	3
Abbreviations: HSSPF: Höherer SS- und Polizei-Führer/Higher SS and Police Leader z.b.V: zur besonderen Verfügung/for special use OrPo: Ordnungs Polizei/regular police BdS GG: Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei Generalgouvernement/ commander of the Security Police, occupied Poland Stapo: Staatspolizei/state police

The next table lists the locations sorted by the number of victims claimed, from the highest down to 500. This gives an idea of the most important locations judged by the number of victims claimed.

Location	Victims
Riga	46,662
Kiev	33,776
Kamenets-Podolsky	23,600
Nikolayev, Kherson	22,467
Rovno	15,240
Cherven	15,000
Minsk	14,212
Kaunas	10,562 + Thousands
Dnepropetrovsk	10,350
Simferopol	10,300
Odessa	10,000
Lviv	8,154
Vitebsk	7,750
Bobruisk	7,486
Mogilev	6,318
Brest-Litovsk	5,306
Zhitomir	4,843
Pinsk	4,500
Belovshchina	2,726
Gomel, Rogachev, Korma	2,468
Lutsk	2,300
Vilnius	2,231
Gorki	2,200
Radomyshl	2,057
Tarnopol	2,056
Baranovichi	2,007
Lubny	1,938
Berdichev	1,674
Shepetovka-Rovno	1,643
Jelgava	1,556
Poltava	1,538
Uman	1,412
Smolevichi	1,401
Mogilev-Podolsky	1,265
Krichev	1,213
Yanovichi	1,174
Daugavpils	1,171
Slonim	1,159
Patichi [?]	1,013
Maryina Gorka	996
Borisov	962
Logoysk	929
Krupki	912
Mistislav [?]	900
Vinnitsa	892
Rudnya	861
Kholopenichi	822
Klimovichi, Cherikov	786
Nevel	714
Chernovitsy	682
Korosten	628
Shidov [?]	627
Zborov	600
Kishinev	551
Pereyeslav	537
Oszmiana (Oshmyany)	527
Ilya	520
Roslavl, Shumyachi	510

Extermination Order

There is no trace that the Einsatzgruppen ever received an order to systematically exterminate the Jews as they moved east into Soviet territory behind the German army. Otto Ohlendorf, head of Ein­satz­grup­pe D, argued otherwise during the U.S.-staged Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg in 1947, but it turned out that he had devised this lie as a strategy to resort to the excuse of having received inescapable orders from higher up – which ultimately failed. (See the entry on Otto Ohlendorf.)

The documents tell a different story. The war diary of the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces states in an entry of 3 March 1941, with regard to what Hitler had said about the coming invasion of the Soviet Union:

“The Jewish-Bolshevist intelligentsia, as the ‘oppressor’ of the people until now, must be eliminated.”

A few lines later, the Supreme Command put the task ahead in its own words when stating “the necessity to render harmless immediately all Bolshevist warlords and commissars.” Hence, from Hitler, to the Supreme Commands, the Jewish nature of Bolshevism was no longer mentioned.

When this task was put in legally binding form of a directive by the same Supreme Command on 13 March 1941, it was expressed even more generally, without any reference anymore to any elimination of rendering harmless of anyone:

“[T]he Reichsführer SS is receiving special tasks for preparation of the political administration [in the soon-to-be occupied territories] by order of the Führer, which arise from the terminal strug­gle between two opposing political sys­tems.”

Two red threads run through all German wartime documents:

1. Jews (and non-Jews) who are part of the Bolshevist intelligentsia or who actively oppose German efforts to win the war will be executed, and the remaining Jews will be concentrated in camps and ghettos, and put to work.
2. Later, after a successful conclusion of the war in the East, the Jews will be deported and resettled to some location outside of Europe. (See the entries on Hitler Order and resettlement.)

Even the Einsatzgruppen documents themselves point in that direction. On 6 August 1941, hence more than seven weeks into the invasion, Walter Stahlecker, head of Ein­satz­grup­pe A, wrote in a document that the aim was to maximize the exploitation of the Jews as a labor force, and then to collectively relocate them to some “non-European Jewish reservation.” Many references to executions of Jews listed in the EMs explain why these Jews were executed. Although some of the reasons given are far-fetched or sound like cheap excuses, if there had been a general order to exterminate all Jews, not a single entry about the killing of Jews needed to have an explanation. Yet there are numerous cases where even executions of a single Jew, or only a very few, are explained at great length.

Death Toll Propaganda

Since the mid- to late-1970s, source criticism by skeptical scholars has increasingly undermined the credibility of sources upon which the orthodoxy relies when claiming the existence of homicidal gas chambers in certain German wartime camps. (See in particular the cases of Majdanek and Auschwitz.) Therefore, a shift of focus away from these camps to the murders by the Einsatzgruppen and related units occurred since the 1990s.

Several orthodox scholars have claimed since that many more Jews fell victim to massacres perpetrated by various German units in the East. One prominent example is Daniel J. Goldhagen, who investigated the degree to which German police battalions contributed to the mayhem. Much of it is conjecture, and in many cases, their contribution probably did not consist in executions themselves, but in guard duties during execution or during simple deportations of unknown purpose. Here as well, the extant documentation is of little use in illuminating the affair. Hence, Goldhagen’s speculations as to the ultimate death-toll range in which these police battalions were complicit range from over a million up to three million. Such a range of death tolls is also reflected in claims made by various orthodox scholars, a few of which are listed in the next table.

Victim Numbers Claimed for Einsatzgruppen and Related Formations

3,000,000	Solomon M. Schwarz (1951, p. 220)
≤ 2,624,500	Yitzhak Arad (2009, pp. 524f.)
2,200,000	H. Krausnick, H.H. Wilhelm (1981, p. 621)
2,100,000	Wolfgang Curilla (2006, p. 836)
1,300,000	Raul Hilberg (1985, p. 1219)

More recent studies are not much clearer either. Wolfgang Curilla, for example, managed to tally almost one million from various documents, but then claims a total of 2.1 million victims without indicating where he found the difference of over 1.1 million (Curilla 2006, p. 836). Yitzhak Arad claims up to 2.6 million victims, all based on rounded estimates for various regions of the Soviet Union (Arad 2009, pp. 524f.).

Forensic Findings

On 2 November 1942, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR decreed that investigative commissions had to be established which were to investigate crimes committed by the German occupants. Hence, as soon as the Soviets reconquered lost territory, they conducted investigations that included the interrogation of alleged witnesses as well as the exhumation of victims buried in mass graves. No international observers or experts from neutral countries were ever present during these investigations. Worse still, some of the experts involved in these commissions were identical to those who had fabricated the false Soviet expert report on the mass graves of Polish officers near Katyn.

Furthermore, in many cases, the Soviet authorities claimed, based on witness accounts, that the Germans had erased the traces of their massacres. This was allegedly done by inmates exhuming and burning hundreds of thousands of corpses from hundreds of mass graves all across the USSR. This vast effort is said to have been subsumed under the code name “Aktion 1005.” (For more information on this, see the entry dedicated to this.) This relieved the Soviet authorities from having to search and identify the size and thus potential capacity of the claimed mass graves. They instead took at face value death-toll assertions made by witnesses who claimed to have helped with exhuming and burning the corpses.

In cases where intact graves were found, the Soviet commissions usually limited their efforts to exhuming a small part of a claimed mass grave, then extrapolating from the corpses found in a small area to the claimed total size of the mass grave(s). Photographic material was rarely prepared, and where it was, it usually showed only a small fraction of the number of corpses claimed.

The next table compares the data contained in the EM with death-toll claims made about certain towns and cities across the Soviet Union by Soviet commissions or by witnesses they interviewed. The last column gives exaggeration factors. This gives the impression that the Soviets consistently exaggerated victims counts by one or more orders of magnitude, or invented them altogether.

EM Location	Documented EM Death Toll	Soviet and Witness Death Toll Claims	Exaggeration Factor
Babi Yar/Kiev	33,776	62,500 to 125,000	2-4
Białystok	490	42,800	87
Chernigov	309	52,453	170
Kaunas, Fort IX	16,013	70,000	4
Kramatorsk	none	812	∞
Kremenchuk	none	60,000	∞
Lviv	8,154	120,000 to 300,000	15-37
Mogilev	6,318	30,000	5
Novozybkov	1	2,860	2,860
Poltava	1,538	221,895	144
Ponary/Vilnius	2,231	38,000 to 80,000	17-36
Romny	none	3,000	∞
Rostov	none	15,000 to 18,000	∞
Rovno	15,240	102,000	7
Starokonstantinov	439	20,000	46
Sumy	none	5,000	∞
Vasilkov	none	1,000	∞
Vinnitsa	892	23,000	26
Voroshilov	none	1,901	∞
Zagare	250	2,402	10
Zaporozhie	none	43,000	∞

The activities of these Soviet commissions were evidently primarily propagandistic in nature. This even showed in the theatrical language used, where Germans were called “monsters,” “hangmen,” “cannibals,” “German-Fascist invaders,” etc., who always killed “peaceful” Soviet citizens for no reason at all. In such a context, there was no place for the truth, which might have been bad enough.

These Soviet reports were submitted during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT). Since they were reports issued by a government authority of one of the Allied powers, the IMT’s statute demanded that they be accepted as true without any possibility for the defense to challenge them.

During the U.S.-American Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg, no witness accounts or Soviet commission reports were used by the prosecution to make their case. They relied entirely on the documents found at the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. These documents make the alleged “Aktion 1005” look like a joke. What was the point of making this gargantuan effort of erasing the physical traces, if the documents chronicling the crimes in all details were left standing on the shelves?

During the existence of the Soviet Union, no serious efforts were made anymore after the initial postwar propaganda frenzy to locate, excavate and forensically investigate the contents of mass graves on Soviet territory. After all, it was far more likely to discover mass graves containing the tens of millions of victims of their own terror regime, and of the war itself, than it was to encounter mass graves containing the one or two million victims of claimed German atrocities.

Only one case of a serious excavation effort is known to this date. It was initiated by the Australian judiciary. They were looking for evidence regarding a claimed mass execution of hundreds of Jews in the town of Serniki in northwestern Ukraine in 1942. A forensic expert eventually found the grave. It measured roughly 40 m × 5 m × 2.5 m (ca. 500 cubic meters) and contained roughly 550 bodies. Most of them had been shot into the head. Rusty, German-made machine-pistol cartridges found in the grave, dating back to 1939 to 1941, pointed at the most likely killers. (Unless the killers used captured or imported German weapons and ammunitions, like the NKVD did in Katyn in 1940; see Margry 1996, p. 19.)

The town of Serniki is not mentioned in any German document. Hence, it is unfortunately not possible to compare the forensic results with documented claims. This comparative method would be the only way of establishing whether the figures listed in German wartime documents have any relation to reality. As it stands, the Serniki grave highlights once more that these documents are unreliable in every regard.

The packing density in this grave – only roughly 1.1 body per cubic meter – highlights that mass executioners usually do not climb into mass graves to neatly stack their victims in order to optimize the usage of grave space. If representative of most mass graves, this fact alone threatens to destroy the conventional narrative. At such low packing densities, astronomically huge graves would be required to hold all the claimed bodies.

After the dissolution of the USSR, several efforts have been made by Jewish as well as government institutions throughout the territories of the former Soviet Union to catalogue and, to some degree, locate mass graves containing the victims of the brief German wartime occupation. However, if any excavations were made in this context, they were limited to merely locating the graves and perhaps defining their perimeter. In none of these cases were any bodies exhumed and forensically examined as to their number, identity, cause of death or probable killers. (See the entry on Marijampole for one typical example.)

This is unfortunately also true for the huge efforts undertaken between 2002 and 2007 by the French priest Patrick Desbois (Desbois 2009). While he and his team located and opened 325 mass graves of various sizes throughout Ukraine, not in a single case did they even try to establish how many victims they contain, let alone who they were, how they died, and whether there is any trace enabling us to determine who or what killed them. In the end, all these efforts merely serve to create memorial sites for Jewish Holocaust victims.

The one thing these located mass graves prove for certain is that no effort was ever made by anyone to open these graves during the war, exhume the bodies, and burn them on pyres. Desbois’s results further­more proved that most of the mass graves he found are rather small, able to hold less than a hundred victims. Medium- and large-size mass graves potentially containing hundreds or thousands of victims were very rare.

If researchers were serious about finding out what exactly happened, a systematic effort needed to be made to locate, exhume, and forensically investigate as many mass graves as possible, in particular those recorded in German wartime documents. This would reveal to what degree these documents can be trusted, if at all, and it would silence doubters and dogmatists alike. But it will probably never happen.

There are very few memorial sites on mass graves containing the more than 20 million victims of Bolshevist terror. Most of them were not Jews, and their killers were not Germans. Emphasizing such victims and perpetrators is neither reputation-boosting nor career-advancing.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2015a; 2022c, pp. 11-445; Rudolf 2023, pp. 324-335.)