Masters of Death : The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust

In Masters of Death, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These “special task forces,” organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar. These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaign’s architects as well as its “ordinary” soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II. In this narrative history of the Einsatzgruppen--killer task forces deployed in Poland and the Soviet Union early in World War II by Himmler's SS--Richard Rhodes argues that Hitler made two separate decisions to murder the Jews of Europe. The first, in July 1941, condemned the eastern European Jews to slaughter by the Einsatzgruppen, who would execute 1.5 million victims between 1941 and 1943 by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar--crimes against humanity that have largely been overlooked or underemphasized by Holocaust historians. The second decision, in December 1941, condemned the Jews of western Europe. By then, Rhodes shows, direct killing had so brutalized the SS perpetrators that a shocked Himmler had ordered the development of less personal means of murder--the notorious gas chambers and crematoriums of the Holocaust's second wave. Rhodes demonstrates further that Hitler and Himmler intended the Jews to be only their first victims; their plan was to open up Russia to German colonization, and to destroy more than 30 million Slavs and members of other ethnic groups. Drawing on newly available material, this is a book that is certain to generate debate, and expand the understanding of the Holocaust In Masters of Death, Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen's role in the Holocaust. These "special task forces," organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar. These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaign's architects as well as its "ordinary" soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II. From the Trade Paperback edition