Ep. 38- The Einsatzgruppen with Jürgen Matthäus

At least 2 million Jews were murdered by mass shooting in the Soviet Union.  The perpetrators responsible for most of these killings were the men of the Einsatzgruppen.  In this week’s episode, I talk with Jürgen Mathäus about the history of these units, their evolution from 1938 on, and the role they played in the Holocaust.

Jürgen Mathäus is the director of the Applied Research Program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The views expressed in this segment are those of the speaker; they do not necessarily represent the opinions of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Matthäus, Jürgen, Jochen Böhler, and Klaus-Michael Mallmann. War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (2014)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.173)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, Waitman Bourne. And today we are going to talk about the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that carried out what has sort of become known as the Holocaust by bullets, which is the mass murder of Jews, but also other groups of people that takes place, you know, shooting one by one outside of the gas chambers. And I have an incredible historian, Jurgen Matthias here.

from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to talk to us about this topic. So, Juergen, thanks so much for coming on.

Juergen Matthaeus (00:36.962)
Hi, Whiteman, thanks for having me.

Waitman Beorn (00:38.997)
So before we get into the specifics, can you tell us a little about sort of just how you got interested in the Holocaust as a, as an historical topic?

Juergen Matthaeus (00:47.682)
Yeah, sure. So this came up a little bit sideways, if you like. So I was studying on my PhD topic, which had nothing to do with Holocaust whatsoever, that related to nation building in Australia prior to World War I. But while in Australia and studying the subject, I met a historian, Konrad Kviet, who became a good friend and supporter. And he, at the time when I was in Australia in the late 80s,

was involved in the Australian War Crimes Unit. Now you might ask what are the Australians doing with war crimes World War II, but it turned out that many perpetrators during World War II made it to Australia and that was investigated for a while, for a couple of years in Australia. Conrad Crete was the chief historian and he was looking for support. So long story short, I became one of the historians working for this unit and we got into archives in Eastern Europe.

at the time when these archives were just opening. to me that was a, and I learned this only later, it was really a unique entry point into the subject at a level and at a, if you like, level of detail that few historians were aware of at the time. Prior discussions about the Holocaust tended to be abstract at the time. This was really very much driven by discussions about

decision-making in general, Hitler's role, but the forensics, if you like, of the killings weren't really looked at much. And we saw that on-site in the archives in Eastern Europe because there were the captured German records that attested to many of the German crimes. So that was my entry point. I then applied for one of the first fellowships here at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. And that was in 1994. And I guess the...

The rest is history.

Waitman Beorn (02:48.329)
And you've been there ever since doing amazing things there. What is your current job there?

Juergen Matthaeus (02:54.22)
I'm the director for applied research at the Mendel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and I've had that position since 2005. But I have been involved in activities with the museum in other areas, exhibition design and particularly archival acquisitions.

Waitman Beorn (03:11.925)
Cool. Well, so let's move in to talk a little about the Einsatzgruppen. And I think we should start with the earliest version of this. And I'm personally interested, really interested in this as well, because it's an area that I'm not super familiar with. Because I think to the extent that anyone is familiar in the general public with Einsatzgruppen, they're thinking probably about the Soviet Union iteration. But actually, the sort of ancestor of that Einsatzgruppen dates all the way back

Juergen Matthaeus (03:34.189)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (03:41.503)
to before World War II starts, right?

Juergen Matthaeus (03:44.598)
Yeah, indeed. First, think the term might need some explanation because people associate, if anything, mass violence with that term. But the term itself is in German very neutral, almost anodyne. And in this way, similar to other euphemisms or camouflage terms used by the Nazis, think of special treatment, protective custody. And they were all meant to convey a semblance of normalcy and

meant to hide the real nature of what in this case these units were doing. Einsatzgruppen are also emblematic for the most deadly events of the Holocaust outside the camp universe and that's a large chunk of Holocaust history. But they are also emblematic for the ongoing problems I think we're facing in

analyzing these events, perpetrators, the victims and the context. As a product of the specifics of the Nazi system, as well as of broader factors relevant for the perpetration of mass atrocities in general, the historic importance of the Einsatzgruppen transcends their role in executing the final solution. Now, coming back to your question as to when

They actually started, indeed it was prior to World War II. They were subordinated from the beginning to the office of Reinhard Heydrich since September 1939. That office is called Reich Security Main Office. And they were generally tasked with neutralizing actual or potential enemies by arresting, expelling them or executing them in regions newly occupied or controlled by Nazi Germany.

how they executed these tasks differed from campaign to campaign as well as over time. The Einsatzgruppen usually had a personnel range between 500 to 2500. So you can see there is quite a stretch here. They were also subdivided into smaller units. They called Einsatzkommandos or Sonderkommandos to ensure maximum mobility and speed.

Juergen Matthaeus (06:07.872)
and often formed the core of the security structure the Germans established when these mobile missions had been accomplished and the German grip on a region had stabilized. Generally, Einsatzgruppen comprised a core group of security police and Sicherheitsdienst, security service officers. So security police means a creation of the Nazi system that comprised the

criminal police and notorious Gestapo.

Waitman Beorn (06:40.553)
And is this the, is this the, cause I know they go into, for example, Czechoslovakia and Austria as well before, before the war, is it already set up this way at that period of time?

Juergen Matthaeus (06:53.208)
That's right. So these are the core groups in the Einsatzgruppen, so if you like the leadership core, but they also have a bunch of others from other organizations or units that were subordinated to Himmler, the German order police and also the Waffen SS, who were meant to fulfill logistic and support functions. There were drivers, secretaries, and there were also some women among these people attached to.

the Einsatzgruppen. Now all as you indicated all of that starts to play out in March 38 with the German annexation of Austria which then becomes labeled to the Ostmark annex to the Reich. That's followed by the annexation of the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia in September 38 and half a year later the occupation of Bohemia Moravia

in March 39. Now, none of these were mass execution missions, but they involved a great deal of violence against people seen as actual or potential enemies of the state, as they were called, and especially Jews. These early deployments also provided important know-how Himmler and his officers could draw on during the war. And it's in this sense no surprise that

Some of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen deployed in Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938-39 were in fact redeployed in 1941 for the attack on the Soviet Union.

Waitman Beorn (08:31.957)
Okay. And so then we move forward to the invasion of Poland, right? Which is again, kind of this, I guess, kind of an intermediate phase between these two sorts of missions. And how, what is the preparation for that, for the Einsatzgruppen? And then what are they doing in Poland, you know, in 39? And then how does, and then I guess the third, the third part of the question is then what are they doing between 39 and 41?

Juergen Matthaeus (08:58.958)
Right. So the concrete planning for the deployment of Einsatzgruppen in Poland or in the Polish campaign started roughly three months before the German attack in September 1939. There were guidelines by Hitler and follow-up regulations by the leaders of the SS and Wehrmacht to arrange some kind of coordinated effort here. There were five Einsatzgruppen with 16 subunits, Einsatzkommandos, roughly 120 to 150 members each.

plus three Einsatzkommandos that were created in the first days of the attack based on the needs at the moment. Their mission was to follow the advancing Wehrmacht units to fight. And here that's the term used or the terminology used in these guidelines, all elements inimical to Germany in the rear of the army. Specific tasks however,

were vaguely defined, especially who was to be arrested and executed. So that was left to the unit leaders. Target groups were mostly defined on the basis of preconceived ideological notions about the most dangerous enemies, Jews and Polish nationalists and members of the elites as seen by the Germans. Crucial were also, as I indicated already, conditions on the ground. There were some

some long-term ones that influenced the actions of the Andersgruppen and that included ethnic tensions between the groups, the people in Poland, but also some short-term ones which had to do with alleged or real crimes against Germans which were meant to be counteracted by the Andersgruppen.

So altogether the Einsatzgruppen in that Polish campaign were responsible for the killing of up to 20,000 Poles, mostly men, until late October when the military administration of Poland ended. That was, already done in conjunction with Wehrmacht units, Order Police units, and Waffen SS units. Until spring 1940, we...

Juergen Matthaeus (11:18.314)
estimate a total of between 60 to 80,000 members of Polish elites, and that included roughly 7,000 Jews that had been killed by the Germans. And there were also significant numbers of mental patients and Roma who were targeted by the Ansatzgruppen and others. These killings tied in with mass deportations and resettlements of Poles, the isolation of Jews in ghettos,

started at the time and over time grew massively. And there was also massive exploitation that marked German rule in occupied or annexed And that until the end of the war claimed the lives of up to six million Polish citizens and three million of them were Jews. Now, what did the Eindhoven Group do between 1939 and 1941? New units were formed.

and deployed with each of the German attacks following the victory over Poland. Again, with marked differences in terms of their resorting to mass violence between the West and the East or Southeastern parts of Europe. Generally, there was a much greater propensity for Eindhoven violence in the East, especially in the war against the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia in 1941. There were also ongoing attempts

by Himmler between 1939 and 41 to further expand, integrate and train the executive forces under his command that included ideological indoctrination and the forging of in-group coherence via joint missions and after action events. Now, forwarding a little bit here in the second half of 1941 after the beginning of Mars

murder actions in the occupied Soviet Union. These after action events or social gatherings as they were labeled became more important for the Nazi leadership as a means to counteract the brutalization of the men and to foster unit cohesion and efficiency. In fact, in December 1941, Himmler issued an order to promote what he saw as culturally valuable gatherings, but in reality,

Juergen Matthaeus (13:41.57)
The events usually involved excessive drinking that, as Westerman has described in a recent book titled Drunk on Genocide, and they also caused even more violence, including sexual assaults on women.

Waitman Beorn (13:55.283)
And I should note that for our listeners that Ed Westerman was one of our guests who came on. So if you want to hear more about that, you can check out the episode that he talked on. Just to go back really quickly before we get to the Soviet Union, because as someone that was interested, is interested in sort of Wehrmacht complicity, can you talk a little about the reception?

of what the Einsatzgruppen was doing in Poland in 1939 by the German military. Because that has implications moving into the planning for Barbarossa, right, in the summer of or before Barbarossa.

Juergen Matthaeus (14:29.837)
Yeah.

Juergen Matthaeus (14:39.234)
Right, so as I indicated, there were attempts by the top leadership of both the SS and the Wehrmacht to coordinate their respective missions. They looked good on paper. It turned out, however, in reality that many of the actions by Einsatzgruppen members or SS members in general were objected to by the Wehrmacht. They were seen as too excessive, too radical. Often the

The rationale for that was based not so much on the violence itself against Polish civilians and including Jews, but more on concern about unit cohesion and discipline, maintaining of the discipline, that these excessive actions of violence would present the wrong picture to the units on the ground and thus would need to be reined in.

That caused some controversy among Wehrmacht officers and that made it up the chain of command to a degree, but all of that was squashed by Hitler, who after the Polish campaign decided that none of that would have any legal consequences. I think that's one of the lessons learned for the preparation for the Soviet campaign that from the very beginning.

there were to be no legal ramifications for any of the violence that the Germans were already building massively into their campaign against the Soviet Union. So there was pushback from the German military, but it wasn't decisive and it didn't lead to any kind of system criticism or even, if you like, resignations of functions among a significant number of Germans.

army officers. went along with it, they accepted it, exposed. And I think they probably relished in the success that was so swift in Poland, followed, of course, by the much more impressive success of the German army and their accompanying units in Western Europe, where again, the Einsatzgruppen

Juergen Matthaeus (16:57.762)
did not resort to these kinds of actions of mass violence as they had in Poland and would on a massive scale in the Soviet Union.

Waitman Beorn (17:06.098)
And so would we just to put a, to tie a bow on that a little bit, you know, one of the arguments of course that, that I often make is, is this, is this comparison between East and West that's a racial, a racial element, you know, that, that the Nazis aren't as brutal in general to the populations in Western Europe based off of an idea Jews accepted, Roma accepted an idea that ultimately there is kind of a racial affinity between

Western Europeans and Germans. so they can't behave the way they do to sort of your average Eastern European in Western Europe.

Juergen Matthaeus (17:44.04)
I think that's right, but there are other elements that played a role here. First, there is the ambition, at by the Nazi leadership and also by parts of the army leadership, to reestablish German foothold in Eastern Europe. Keep in mind that some of the areas that made up post-World War I Poland had been German territory before World War I. So there is...

this element of reclaiming lost territory. And that was an easy entry point into claiming more territory in Eastern Europe. So getting back to German rule in the East, there is hardly an analog of that in the West. Of course, there were some provinces lost after World War I, Alsace, Lorraine. But the German ambition there is more muted and there is a greater acceptance to

to see these regions as being not fully German and they would need to be treated differently. The other aspect that I think plays a role with regards to German violence in Eastern Europe is that the entire region was perceived differently, not just in political terms, but also in ideological terms and that transcended the assessment of the population.

It had to do, I think, with the notion that on the one hand this was a very promising region, but it also was a very threatening region. So there are elements in the German planning that reflect this anticipation of strangeness, to say the least, of...

primitive structures, all these aspects that would make for an uncalculable enemy in a way. And I think that's much more developed vis-a-vis Eastern Europe than it the German and Nazi mind than it is with regard to Western Europe.

Waitman Beorn (20:02.397)
And of course, they're also, as you sort of alluded to, they're also planning to settle this region, right? I mean, they're planning to, know, they're planning to, you know, remove most much the population, replace it theoretically with Germans in a way that they're not planning to settle the south of France with Germans and replace the French population.

Juergen Matthaeus (20:22.176)
Absolutely, and you can see that Himmler, is via Heydrich in charge of the Ansatzgruppen, is also charged by Hitler immediately after the beginning of the war against Poland with mass resettlements. He becomes right commissioner for the protection of the German folk in a way for the resettlement of ethnic Germans on a mass scale.

first in occupied Poland, but also with the ambition to bring home, as it was seen, ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union. were negotiations with the Soviet Union. All of that was to play itself out first and foremost in occupied Poland. So there is a massive wave of resettlements, relocations that had massive negative impacts on the people affected.

Polish civilians in general and Jews in particular, who of course in some regions formed a significant part of the population.

Waitman Beorn (21:27.731)
And so then as we move into sort of the planning for, Barbarossa, how are the lessons learned in Poland applied to that? And, and how is that, how is the planning for that? suppose different because obviously the scope and scale is massively different than, than Poland and potentially the sort of demographics are, are slightly different as well.

Juergen Matthaeus (21:48.728)
Yeah, you're right.

Juergen Matthaeus (21:53.068)
Yeah, you see, think also the difference in scope with regard to the unit. So we have four Einsatzgruppen that are deployed, are meant to be deployed at the beginning of the campaign. Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union. These were roughly 3,000 men in total. There's also a difference in the radicalism of their mission, even as it was planned prior to the actual deployment.

But that wasn't specific, we have to keep in mind, to the Einsatzgruppen. Instead, this unprecedented buildup of violent potential was a function of the German plans of war against Stalin's empire and was agreed to by Wehrmacht generals when they started their planning based on Hitler's order in late 1940. They agreed that the Einsatzgruppen were to follow the advance of roughly 3 million

Wehrmacht soldiers together with some German allied troops into the Soviet Union and in a war of annihilation. The goal of that war was not defined by way of specific territorial gains, but in terms of crushing the Soviet system and eradicating its elites. As the enemy was seen first and foremost as Jewish Bolshevism, the Jews in the Soviet Union became

key targets of German violence, not only by the Einsatzgruppen, but also by the Wehrmacht and other agencies with executive powers. All this blended into a uniquely destructive German policy that claimed the lives over the course of the German occupation of more than 15 million Soviet citizens. Waitman, have looked into this in some detail with regard to Wehrmacht policy in Belarusia.

Since early in the campaign, the Einsatzgruppen assisted the Wehrmacht in screening the huge number of captured Soviet POWs and in executing Jews, communist functionaries and others deemed dangerous. Different from Western Europe, the population in the Soviet Union was regarded as inferior. We touched on this already. were degrees allocated to different ethnic groups, less inferiority.

Juergen Matthaeus (24:16.268)
with regards to people in the Baltics, more so in relation to Slavs. No group was deemed more dangerous than Jews in the Soviet Union, as they not only seemed to personify the Soviet system, but also because they stood out among the local population and often had been subjects of anti-Jewish violence that preceded the arrival of the Germans and could be used by the Germans to solidify their rule.

Waitman Beorn (24:42.897)
really quickly, before we get too far along, can you talk a little about how the leaders are selected? Because I think there's an interesting, in some ways, an interesting dichotomy between the leader and the leaders in the rank and file of the, the Einsatzgruppen as they, as they enter the Soviet Union, where you have sort of leaders that are, you know, ideal, more ideologically motivated and then sort of a lot of the junior folks seem a little bit more sort of ad hoc thrown together from different, different Nazi sources.

Juergen Matthaeus (25:12.972)
Yeah, that's absolutely right. So when we talk about leaders, we talk about highly trained professionals and most of them had an academic degree. The commander of Einheitskuppe C, Otto Rush, even claimed two PhDs. They also had quite some experience within Himmler's apparatus, especially in Heidrichs Reich Security main office. Many were in their 30s or 40s, so they knew

how the Nazi system worked and what its goal was vis-a-vis the so-called Jewish question. They also knew that the war against the Soviet Union was going to be highly destructive and that it offered unique opportunities for themselves to foster their careers and for the regime to advance its final solution of the Jewish question which had stalled since the end of the war in the West.

They were leading a rather motley group of younger officers. Some deployed fresh off a training course, others seconded from security police and SD officers throughout the Reich. And they knew that they were tasked with acting decisively on the basis of local conditions against the background of rather general guidelines. So self-motivation, competition with fellow officers, and encouragement from superiors.

drove the actions of Einsatzgruppen leaders who were all eager to prove their ability to lead and to advance the regime's goals.

Waitman Beorn (26:50.965)
And how did they, I mean, just to get a little bit more into detail, right? How were they chosen? Who was in charge of sort of the Einsatzgruppen in terms of like picking the leadership and saying, or approaching somebody and saying, want you to be in charge of an Einsatzgruppen or Einsatzkommando.

Juergen Matthaeus (27:14.956)
Yeah, that was done by officers very close to Heidrich and sometimes with Heidrich's interference as much as we know. So they were looking first and foremost at people whom they had already encountered and seen as efficient, radical and activist. And that again is a core group that has some experience.

with the Reich Security Main Office, if not coming directly from the Reich Security Main Office. One of them, Franz Sicks, was an office head in the Reich Security Main Office, the same as Otto Ohlendorf, who was the Foreign Service head in the SD. So you can see these are higher ranking officers. What they were not was kind of these brutal thugs that one would perhaps associate first and foremost

with a killing unit. They did these extremely violent actions and they sustained it and systematically planned it, but they were professionals and saw themselves first and foremost as professionals. So I think it also shows that if we think about genocidal perpetrators, you have to consider that there is also a...

likelihood of the involvement of intellectuals who, looking at their prior career, didn't have much of a background in this. And as indicated, the prior deployments of Einsatzgruppen did not involve that level of violence. And yet, the same people who did these more, if you like, benign actions in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, were then very eager and able to

to speed up the process in terms of radicalism and scope when it came to killing of alleged opponents.

Waitman Beorn (29:22.845)
And how much detail, I mean, to the extent that you can tell us, how much were they aware of during sort of the training indoctrination phase of like, this is what we're going to expect you to do in the Soviet Union? Literally, you know, the idea of literally rounding people up and murdering them.

Juergen Matthaeus (29:42.316)
Yeah, well, there has been a discussion and debate among historians and others with regard to what exactly these leaders were told before they got deployed. This issue was stressed very much after the war by those officers who were brought to trial. They claimed first and foremost, Otto Ohlendorf, that they were given pre-campaign orders.

to kill the Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. That had dominated the discourse among historians for a long time. However, it took a while and also the involvement of legal experts, not just historians, to find out that there is no evidence for this. We have not found any pre-campaign orders to the extent that the Einsatzgruppen were charged with killing all the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories.

There were orders coming from the office in the first weeks of the campaign that could be read that way. But if we're looking at pre-campaign guidelines, that's not the case. So one could speculate that given the way the high security main office particularly was organized and also how generally Himmler tended to work, these later orders weeks into the campaign reflected more what the

individual unit leaders had already done and conveyed that to the Anders Kopen in general, then kind of deciding and determining and pushing what was supposed to happen because it already had happened. So the leadership picking up on the activism and the destructive energies of their men who had already embarked on these mass killings along the front lines.

to different degrees, some units were much more advanced in terms of their killing activities than others in the first weeks of the attack.

Waitman Beorn (31:43.967)
But they certainly would have known that your job is going to be, your men's job is going to be to shoot people, essentially. That's,

Juergen Matthaeus (31:51.938)
Definitely. The question was who is going to be shot. That's also a discussion point between Göring and Heydrich. However, they don't arrive at a clearly defined list that is specified enough to be operational. Instead, and that makes much more sense given the way the Nazi system works, they leave that to the initiative.

and the decision-making power of the officers on the ground. Of course, was clear that the Jews were first and foremost the enemies. They were again seen as the impersonation of Jewish Bolshevism, the mainstay of Stalin's regime. So they were on the radar first and foremost. What was supposed to happen to them?

at day one of the campaign was not spelled out to our knowledge. has been no guidelines, order found that would indicate that the Einsatzgruppen were charged from day one with killing all the Jews in the occupied areas. And also this is not the pattern that unfolds at the beginning of the war. It takes time for units to become more radical, to move from the killing of

men, Jewish men, including women, to including children. And then of course, with that killing entire communities that takes weeks and sometimes month.

Waitman Beorn (33:27.209)
And then, and we'll get back to that because I think one of things that's important about this conversation for our listeners to put it in the context of sort of the Holocaust writ large, and I'm clearly being a bit of a Browning disciple here, but you know, is that, you know, the things that Juergens talking about, that you're talking about with regards to all the Jews versus smaller, you military-aged male, which are arguably, I'm using air quotes here, you know, arguably is a sort of enemy population.

you know, military-age people, that changes. And one of the reasons that this is significant is that it suggests that there's a change going on in the larger Nazi leadership regarding what will come to be known as the Holocaust, which is the plan to sort of murder all the Jews of Europe, and that the Einsatzgruppen and their behavior in that is kind of a signifier in a certain sense of some of those changes. But before I get to that, I want to come back really quickly to the men, because we haven't talked about the rank and file.

And I know, you know, what's, what's interesting and think interesting for listeners is also sort of the sort of ad hoc nature of some of these groups. Cause I, in my, in my book on Holocaust in Eastern Europe, just in a, an, as a, an example breakdown of Einsatzgruppen A. And you've got literally in this one organization, you've got security police, criminal police, security service, order police, Waffen SS. in some places you had like.

police cadets, mean, it's kind of a very mixed bag of people that, and I'm gonna let Jurgen answer here, that seems to be a bit more, a bit less ideologically selected than the leadership. know, that's quite like, we need warm bodies in this unit and we're gonna sort of grab them from wherever we can find them.

Juergen Matthaeus (35:11.534)
That's right. Yeah.

Juergen Matthaeus (35:21.102)
No, absolutely. I mean, also, if you're looking at the personnel of Einholdskruppe A, for example, in late 1941, you have more than 50 translators. You have drivers, 170 drivers, and all of that is part of a 990 men unit, including also 13 female staff.

So yes, there is diversity in that group. Clearly, they were not all ideologically grounded killers. They might not even have been ideologically grounded. What plays out then, of course, over time is mechanisms that influence the unit cohesion.

generally leads to greater coherence. That very much depends on the leadership capabilities of Einsatzgruppenleaders, Einsatzkommando and Sonderkommandoleaders. How were they able to integrate all the ones who are supposed to pull in the same direction to get to that goal. That marks partly the success of some of the men and

the lack of success with regard to others, their ability to integrate and make this work most effectively. We have to keep in mind that this is an extremely dynamic environment with the beginning of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Not only is the frontline advancing very quickly, but also the conditions are constantly changing. So these people need to adapt and they need to follow the goal that was

generally outlined by the leadership and to use opportunities that arise as they try to achieve that goal. And I think the way they make use of these opportunities drives to a large extent the radicalism of measures, the violence against civilians and particularly against Jews.

Waitman Beorn (37:36.487)
And I should note really quickly that the numbers that I was quoting come directly from you and Browning's, Organs of the Final Solution. That's where that table came from. So it's funny that I was alluding to that as well, but that's not my numbers. You came up with those as well. And so as we get into the Soviet Union, what is the experience, what are these guys doing on a sort of daily basis in the first couple of months of the war?

Juergen Matthaeus (38:05.784)
So we already kind of indicated that the Andersgruppen were the core group of executioners of the final solution based on their lead role in mass killings in 1941 and in preparing the annihilation of the remaining Jews in the occupied Soviet Union until the German retreat. But not only were they the key killers,

Before their withdrawal, they also installed a regime of terror and organized the systematic destruction of evidence by having a special Sonderkommando tasked with digging up mass graves and burning the bodies. Beyond executions, Einsatzgruppen were often enacting the first German anti-Jewish actions and regulations, so the marking of the Jews, the expropriation, forced labor, ghettoization in the Soviet Union.

With regard to other target groups, they screened and executed Soviet POWs as well as Roma, inmates of mental hospitals and others deemed undesirable or even useless eaters. Increasingly since 1942, coordinated the fight against a growing partisan movement that engulfed civilians of all backgrounds, led to mass deportations for forced labor and devastated entire.

regions, but.

Waitman Beorn (39:28.347)
It's important to point out really quickly as well that, and you can elaborate on this, I'm sure, that they were kind of on call as well. so oftentimes Wehrmacht units, for example, would say, we have a mental institution or we have a group of people, particularly with regards to Jewish POWs, we want them to be killed and they would be handed over to the Einsatzgruppen or the Einsatzgruppen would sort of show up and conduct those killings. So they were also available to sort of

the body i suppose one of the greatest examples of this but you know where they're they're able to sort of the invited to to come and deal with a problem that the very much to other authorities have identified

Juergen Matthaeus (40:09.634)
That's absolutely right. I think we have to be really aware of the fact that the Anderskog were not the only highly deadly German entity in the occupied Soviet Union. They were working closely, sometimes in competition, sometimes in complete synergy with German military and civil authorities in the region. An entire network of agencies existed to maintain German rule. And within it, Himmler's men played a lead executive role from the murder of Jews to the fight against

Soviet partisans. So it's true that the Einsatzgruppen were the agency of ideological warfare to kind of translate a book titled by two historians who wrote the first monograph in the early 1980s about Einsatzgruppen. But Einsatzgruppen were far from alone in perpetrating mass violence. Many agencies and many well ordinary men as Chris Browning has famously called them and some women.

were involved. And similar to those seemingly more innocuous Germans, Einsatzgruppen members after the war tried to blend into post-war normality by denying personal responsibility for German World War II crimes. But I think we're getting ahead here.

Waitman Beorn (41:24.565)
Yeah, I mean, so how does the, how does their, how does the operations change? Because it is sort of, you know, my sense of it is that we sort of have, you know, the first sweep is, kind of these targeted killings and they're, quite mobile, and they're moving around. But then as time goes on, you know, they, they, first of all, we know that they realize that there's not enough of them, you know, we have, we have various Nazi leaders saying, we don't, we don't have enough people to kill.

all the people that we need to kill. so then we have the expansion of the killing units to include the police battalions and the schutzmann shops and these kinds of groups. Once things get stable, in other words, once you don't have these sort of massive advances to new populations, what are the unsuspecting group in doing then? Because they sort of cease to become mobile killing squads anymore because they sort of cease to become mobile.

And this is an area that I'm not at all familiar with, so I'm really interested in sort of hearing more about kind of what they do when they sort of settle down.

Juergen Matthaeus (42:31.052)
Yeah, well, in a way they stay mobile because they radiate from bases, major urban centers and local offices that then are used as the basis for going out into the countryside. Generally, I think what's useful here is to keep in mind what Raoul Hilberg, the founder of Holocaust studies, had

called in the 60s already the killing waves that are relevant here. First, you indicated, Wittmann, there is a wave that comes with the German advance, but logistics matter. The logistics are not only the stalling of the German advance in the Soviet Union, but also the installation of civil administration. So the shift of...

of power from the military to civil agencies under Alfred Rosenberg, who is the designated minister for the occupied Eastern territories. There the Eindradsgruppen become incorporated into the administrative apparatus and they work more or less together, smoothly more or less together with the civil administration. That kind of marks the end of the first killing wave, which is also determined by the harsh weather.

Germany had, Nazi Germany had planned to finish the campaign before the onset of the Russian winter. Well, obviously they didn't. And so they got stuck there. There are sometimes very simple reasons why mass executions ended because they couldn't dig up enough mass graves because the soil was frozen deep enough so that they couldn't be dug up. What happens then, that's the first killing wave in 1941.

What happens then is the planning for a second killing wave starting in the spring of 1942 with changing weather conditions, with also in further advance of the German military. They go back to areas that had been worked over, if you like, and that's part of the terminology used in Einsatzgruppen reports already in 1941 and then finish off many of the...

Juergen Matthaeus (44:52.15)
the Jews that they could not kill. Earlier on, that, the ghettos are of key importance. They were seen as holding places for the local population, sometimes used for, often used for forced labor, but not to the degree that this becomes systematized as it would be in some Polish ghettos like Warsaw or Lodz. So much more improvised.

to facilitate the further liquidation of the community starting in 1942. So these kind of mobile and stationary phases go hand in hand. Key to all that, and you pointed to an important fact here by way of limited German manpower, key to that is auxiliaries. Some of these auxiliaries are recruited on site, some are recruited...

from other regions and then get deployed across the occupied territories, so-called Schutzmannschaften, units of auxiliary policemen that were attached to the Einsatzgruppen, attached also to other police units, all of them are working in unison to ensure that German order and rule is maintained across the occupied territories. That becomes increasingly difficult.

with over the course of the war as the Soviet partisan movement is growing.

Waitman Beorn (46:22.997)
And so, sort building off of that a little bit and then taking a step back to kind of the larger scale, you know, what is, where does this fit? Where does the Ansatz Group, where do the Ansatz Group fit in the sort of evolution of the final solution and of the shift to sort of the Operation Reinhardt Camp model? mean, what do they show us in that regard?

Juergen Matthaeus (46:50.86)
Yeah, well, let's keep in mind that when the attack on the Soviet Union starts, and I alluded to that earlier, the so-called final solution to the Jewish question was somewhat in flux. Steps had been taken, particularly in occupied Poland. Violence had been tried out also to significant degrees, but still there was uncertainty as to what would come next.

So what the Eingarts-Guppen experience shows is that what was originally conceived as a dystopian idea, namely that final solution of the Jewish question, was indeed possible as part of total warfare. The second half of 1941 entailed what Holocaust historian Chris Browning has called the crucial month in the evolution of anti-Jewish violence.

because the Einsatzgruppen and other German agencies used the attack on the Soviet Union to radicalize their measures and found few, if any, obstacles standing in their way. The Einsatzgruppen also were crucial in leaving us with little information about the fate of their victims. Few accounts by Jewish eyewitnesses or survivors attest to the Einsatzgruppen's actions and those accounts are dispersed across many archives.

with few published after the war. So looking at the Einsatzgruppen, we get a very lopsided, in a way sanitized picture of events. And we need to complement that picture with sources produced by Jews, other victims and witnesses of German violence. In terms of the transformation from anti-Jewish persecution to genocide, the Einsatzgruppen actions along the Eastern Front show how at a crucial stage,

in the evolution of the final solution, the command culture created and fostered by the Nazi regime worked. Incentives from above were taken up by activist men on the ground who in turn received applause from their leaders and thus helped escalate the process across the frontline. The high degree of personal initiative and upper level affirmation was particularly

Juergen Matthaeus (49:09.464)
pronounced in the SS and police, but there were similar mechanisms at work within the Wehrmacht where killings of civilians or captured Red Army soldiers were often condoned and rarely caused reprimands. Waitman, you have written about that in your work. This shows in my view the Nazi leadership's reliance on what had been a standard feature in German military training, namely the so-called Auftragstaktik, which gave

lower level officers latitude in the execution of orders based on their assessment of the situation on the ground and the best means to achieve overall goals. Instead of rigid command and compliance, even and especially in the SS, the system driving the killing process was based on interaction and a degree of openness that allowed individuals to make choices as to their cause of actions. These actions were

noticed first by other German agencies of course that were deployed nearby and second by SS leaders in Berlin. There were reports sent to Berlin and there were visits by Himmler, Heydrich and other high ranking officials to their field units and they had multiple functions. First they brought these men up to the leaders up to speed on the situation on the ground. Second

They provided the opportunity to incentivize or criticize lower level operators in face-to-face meetings. And third, they helped establish a standard operating procedure in terms of the overall expectation for more radical measures that were then adopted elsewhere, so-called.

Waitman Beorn (50:54.325)
I was going to say in regards to that, because the example that you and Browning talk about, for example, in Origins of the Final Solution of Bialystok, right, where there's sort of one pattern of killing in terms of who the victims are, and then Himmler, Daluga, other people show up, and then after they're there, the pattern changes. Can you talk a little bit more about this? Because I think it's really fascinating. Because one of the things that

Juergen Matthaeus (51:17.762)
Right, right.

Waitman Beorn (51:23.539)
people ask often, know, people interested in the Holocaust, sort of, you know, where's the order from Hitler to sort of murder all the Jews? And of course, we've never found one and chances are there wasn't one. And it seems like something similar is happening with the Einsatzgruppen because it seems like there is a quantifiable and observable change that is not reflected by sort of a written order that would have been passed around.

Juergen Matthaeus (51:49.41)
Yeah, I think that's right. I think we underestimate generally the modernity of the Nazi system. again, the ideological training, for example, was not a rigid system. In fact, there was awareness by the leadership that they shouldn't push too far, that they should leave room for adaptation and personal initiative. And I think that...

that ability to harness the activism of their most devoted officers. And here it comes back to the core killers who then also take their men along by forging unit coherence in a setting in Eastern Europe. think that goes a long way to explain what happens here. our search for...

a pre-campaign order is understandable, but I think it's also a little simplistic because by now historiography has found enough evidence for the complexity of the Nazi system. And we shouldn't expect that there is kind of a silver bullet here that helps us explain why things happen. It's understandable in a legal setting. Of course you would want to tie a perpetrator to an order in the

in conjunction with state policies that had such a massive genocidal impact. So you want to tie the perpetrator in the dock with the instructions or orders by the top leadership. And in fact, that was done by many of the defendants that they claimed there were such orders. Others were

Waitman Beorn (53:34.325)
I was going to say, isn't that something that they would want as well? Because if there's an order, they can at least claim they were obeying an order. It's much harder to sort of explain why you took initiative to do it on your own.

Juergen Matthaeus (53:37.655)
Of course.

Juergen Matthaeus (53:46.414)
Absolutely. that became a very effective defense strategy. It was elaborated by the attorneys who were defending these people, first in allied courts, but then later in West German courts. There were historians who were convinced that there had to be an order. They were testifying at court. But it took a while to really establish the insight that, well, if there was an order, we can't find it.

And if we look at the pattern that evolves over the course of the frontline, it is clear that this develops in stages, that there are regions that are more advanced based on the greater radicalism of the men involved. And that to me alone indicates that we cannot assume that there was one order and coherent executions.

This was adapted to the situations on the ground and thus evolved over time, again, starting with the murder of Jewish men and then women, children, entire communities.

Waitman Beorn (54:54.933)
And you mentioned something that I is really interesting that I'd like to talk a little bit more about, which is kind of the idea that there were some, even amongst this group of selected ideologically motivated people, there were some that seemed more motivated than others in terms of their killing or their, excuse me, relationship to the killing. And I'm curious if you can talk a little bit more about that. mean, we also have the example of Artur Nebbe who ends up

in the end kind of being part of this July 20 movement, which I always point out is a great example of how July 20th is not a bunch of amazing heroes, all of them. know, they're people that are quite awful people. But Neba, for example, claimed that, he didn't really, he inflated his numbers and things like this, and that he wasn't as bad as others. mean, were there those that were kind of, I mean, reluctant is absolutely the wrong word here, but were there those who were sort of more

more bloodthirsty and proactive than others amongst the leadership.

Juergen Matthaeus (55:55.948)
Absolutely. Yeah, but again, one has to be careful here, whether it's bloodthirstyness or adaptation to situations on the ground. And here we can only speculate. It is true that some unit commanders and most notably Eindhoven's Group A commander, Stalekker, was out there and really advanced extremely quickly to the degree that in Lithuania, 90 % of the Jewish population had been...

exterminated by the end of 1941 already. So there is a speed to some of the actions that is absolutely horrifying and can, well, we're looking for explanations here. One of them is the determination of the unit leaders, but also the situation on the ground. We have to also be aware that pogroms did take place when the Germans sometimes prior to

mostly after the Germans had occupied an area. And these indicate that the Germans were also aware of local animosities between the majority population and the Jewish population. These factors were taken into account by German planners before Operation Barbarossa.

perhaps less so in the SS, but interestingly by the civil administration. The earliest indication we have for the guidance to make use of pogrom-motivated locals comes from the civil administration and from Alfred Rosenberg's office. It is then picked up quickly by the Anderlskopen and they use this very quickly and effectively to instigate such native violence. Some of that

imagery if taken by Germans survived the war and we see to this day in Lviv and in Kaunas, for example, Lithuania and in Western Ukraine, that's quite obvious. So again, there were differences in motivation, in radicalism. We also have to keep in mind that these leaders did not see their units exclusively as killing units.

Juergen Matthaeus (58:19.128)
They were there to ensure German rule and domination over an area. And you can see in their reports that they sent to Berlin that the killing of opponents, alleged or real, it just forms a part, sometimes a small part of what they're reporting on. are pages and pages about the economic situation, about the churches in the occupied territories.

Waitman Beorn (58:40.885)
Mm-hmm.

Juergen Matthaeus (58:48.334)
the mood of the population, the economic situation. So all of that is seen as part of their mission. And that I think explains why after the war, they were in a way surprised that their executive functions were reduced to the killing of civilians, particularly Jews, when they saw themselves with a much broader portfolio and range of actions that also included some

as they perceive the positive measures in opening up churches, allowing economic activities, working with locals, of course, in the German interest and not in the interest of the locals. But all that, think, is part of the mix.

Waitman Beorn (59:31.733)
And one of the things that I just wanted to touch on, since I have you on, is there's an argument, and it's been floating around probably since, you know, for 20, 30 years, and it also gets kicked up again in current events, but an idea that the gas chambers were an innovation that was in some ways inspired by the psychological trauma of the face-to-face shooting experience in Eastern Europe. And I'm...

Just curious because I had an excellent guest on Didymere Muncheristic talking about this idea of a perpetrator disgust and the extent to which that indicates some kind of subconscious moral disagreement or whatnot. And we know about Himmler's famous speech about how he's sort of seen SS men that are destroyed by their work and shooting, cetera.

Is there really a connection in terms of the shift to killing that's anyway based on an attempt to make it more humane for the killers or was that something that's sort of a post-facto justification?

Juergen Matthaeus (01:00:44.788)
I think that's a great question. think there were such indicators that there were tensions, that there were psychological problems. But keep in mind, Wietman, that many of the accounts about that come from SS members themselves after the war. Some of them predate the end of the war. But still, think these problems, I don't think, were all that relevant. And where they existed, they were generally overcome pretty smoothly.

What's more important in my mind for the evolution of killing centers was a mix of initiatives taken by German officials in Poland, occupied or annexed Poland, and constraints caused by the ongoing fight against the Red Army. In the fall of 1941, the situation in the occupied Soviet Union became more complicated for the Germans as the first transport of Jews deported to the East arrived. Many either killed immediately

or pushed into already overcrowded and under-provisioned ghettos. Since the planning stage of Operation Barbarossa, the occupied Soviet Union had been seen by Nazi leaders as the region where new, more radical methods towards the final solution could be applied. But as German progress on the front stalled and military demands made deportations to places such as Riga or Minsk or Kaunas more complicated,

the Nazi gates shifted further west to occupied Poland where the first killing sites were established. Still, until the end of the war, Einsatzgruppen killings and other such mass shootings remained standard features of Germany's warfare and its final solution until the very...

last month if you like, there was an Einsatzgruppe Einsatzgruppe H deployed in Slovakia starting with the Slovak uprising in August 1944 and was operational until early 1945 and they were extremely efficient in deporting people. So it's not as if the Einsatzgruppen and their preferred mode of killing was suddenly becoming outdated. One aspect that

Juergen Matthaeus (01:03:03.456)
I think is often brought up with regard to the psychological effect is the invention of so-called gas vans to alleviate the stress on the shooters. They were deployed in the occupied Soviet Union to some degree, but the efficiency for the killers was not big enough. So they kept using mass shootings until the very last stage of the German occupation.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:30.323)
and so that brings a that's a good way to bring is towards the the end of the war what what happens these guys after the war and both the leadership and the and the rank-and-file

Juergen Matthaeus (01:03:43.498)
Yeah, so the Einsatzgruppen were clearly on the radar at Nuremberg and they were the subject of a special US case, case nine as it was called, the subsequent Nuremberg trial with prosecutor Benjamin Ferentz bringing together the leading members of Einsatzgruppen and in fact 17 of them were sentenced 14 to death. Only four of those sentences however were executed.

The trial proceeded almost exclusively on the basis of reports found by US authorities. So this is the bulk of the evidence produced by the Eindhoven group themselves. The victims were at that stage hardly, if at all, visible. So despite this kind of Nuremberg precedent, when we were talking 1948, it took years until large scale investigations of Eindhoven group personnel

Germany, East and West started. For the most part, former unit members managed to avoid legal scrutiny and joined their fellow Germans or fellow Austrians in building successful post-war careers, some making it into high positions in the police or even in the private sector. Increasing awareness and publicity of Eindhoven crimes in West Germany were partly the trigger for the creation of a special

central investigative office, the so-called Zentrale Stelle in the city of Ludwigsburg in the late 1950s. Subsequently, Ludwigsburg prosecutors investigated not only Eindranzgruppen members, but many of the other agencies involved in German mass atrocities in Poland and the Soviet Union. These efforts produced a massive amount of documentation that since the 1990s, historians have found extremely valuable.

In terms of judicial outcomes, however, the record is far from impressive as most accused claimed higher orders, as we already talked about, and got away with low sentences as accessories to murder or no sentence at all. Perhaps a case here that is indicative, Martin Sandberger, the leader of EINARS Commando 1A deployed in Estonia and

Waitman Beorn (01:05:58.41)
Thank

Juergen Matthaeus (01:06:09.518)
in charge of a unit that killed several thousand Jews in the region, was convicted to death at the Nürnberg Case 9. In 1948, his sentence was commuted in 1951. By 1958, he was free and never charged again until his death at age 99 in 2010.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:30.549)
Can you talk a little about, since we're in this area, the legal challenges to prosecuting these guys after the war? I think that's interesting in terms of the charges that can be filed and the legal thresholds that have to meet for murder, for example, as compared to accessory or manslaughter, these kinds of things.

Juergen Matthaeus (01:06:55.692)
Yeah, so one has to keep in mind here that the German justice system after the war decided to prosecute not on the basis of the genocide convention or any international rules and laws, but on the basis of the German criminal code. And that left them with the charge of murder. The German criminal code murder had to be...

if seen as as culpable as applicable had to be based on base motives. What happened here is that these base motives were very difficult to to identify among most of the defendants. And that is also where where the accessory comes in. If you were just an accessory and had no base motives on your own, fact, no motivation whatsoever other than following orders.

This is what usually happened here and that's what defined the cause of action. I have some figures here if you're interested. So there's a rather staggering number of investigations that were started in West Germany or Germany then between 1945 and 2005. And the number is 172,294. That is just staggering.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:00.532)
Yeah, definitely.

Juergen Matthaeus (01:08:20.718)
The reason for that is partly that entire entities were investigated, which meant that everyone who was on the roster of these units, and that could be civil administration, other such entities, and Einsatzgruppen, they were all investigated. So charged then were only 16,000, roughly a little bit more. And of those only 6,656 were sentenced and received guilty verdicts. So that is a rather...

tiny amount compared to the number that the investigation started with. So compare the 6,600 roughly to the 172,000. So that attested to on the one hand the willingness of German judicial experts, at least some of them, to dig into the scope of German crimes in the East. On the other hand to the

limits of achieving satisfactory legal outcomes. And that only changed with the de Manuc trial in 2010, when the scope of culpability was massively expanded. And it was then seen as sufficient based on historical expertise, sufficient for someone to be present in a killing center in a concentration camp to be seen as involved in the

committing of mass crimes. That was different for the longest part of these legal investigations. Of course, by 2010, we are talking about very, very few people who made it to court. In the time when most of the perpetrators were still alive and integrated for the most part well into German society, these rules were much more stringent and limited the scope of persecution.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:20.405)
And so as we sort of come towards the end, can you give us maybe a sense of where the Einstotz group in killings and, you know, maybe first with the scale, if we have a number, but also where they sit in sort of our popular consciousness of the Holocaust? Because I feel like for those of us that are people that are generally interested in Holocaust, you know, they play a bigger role now than they would have 20, 30 years ago.

First of how many people do they likely kill and then where do they, how does it fit in our sort of the general public's understanding of the Holocaust?

Juergen Matthaeus (01:10:59.778)
Right, well, let's stick with the Soviet Union. You were talking about an estimated number of 26 million Soviet dead during World War II. Of those more than 15 million were civilians. So that's the overall range of victimhood in the war, the German-Soviet war. There were up to 2.5 million Jews killed in the occupied Soviet Union, roughly 2 million by...

by mass shootings. The Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the murder of between 600,000 to 1.5 million people, the vast majority Jews. Now, there are several reasons for the broad numerical scope of this estimate of Einsatzgruppen murder victims. I just mentioned two here. First, reliable victim numbers are difficult to ascertain for mass killings in Eastern Europe in general.

Detailed statistics were either not created by the perpetrators, did not survive the war or are not reliable. Second reason as the German mass-murder campaign in the occupied Soviet Union involved many agencies, including the Wehrmacht, Order Police, Waffen SS, non-German helpers. It's not only difficult but somewhat ahistorical to specify the percentages the Einsatzgruppen were responsible for.

After the transfer of power, I think we indicated that in the Soviet Union the civil administration took over and the Einsatzgruppen became integrated into the civil administration as the regional, station units and into a broader SS network under so-called higher SS and police leaders.

Starting in late summer 1941, the offices of the commanders of the security police at SD with outposts in smaller locations played a large role and heavily relied on other agencies who could supply greater manpower. And here is where the native units, the so-called Schutzmannschaften come in. So let's go into the question that you asked with regard to the...

Juergen Matthaeus (01:13:17.922)
the significance of the Eingartsgurpen for our understanding of the Holocaust. I think generally they are ominous proof for the genocidal potential of modern conflicts, absent moral thresholds, legal limitations and other disincentives. They're also an example for professionalism gone mad as well-educated officers drove to use their initiative and realm of influence to advance

a dystopian, highly destructive and inhumane goal. And additionally, their actions shed light on what I would call the non-existence of a Führer Order, an order by Hitler claimed by many historians until the 1990s. So I think we already touched on this. But looking at the events in the Soviet Union in the first stage of operation by Barossa, if Hitler had...

issued a general order to kill all the Jews in the East, it wasn't uniformly implemented. While across the occupied Soviet Union, the number of Jewish victims grew massively, the pattern was disparate. Overall, the killings decreased in number as the start of the winter presented logistical challenges and surviving Jews were forced into ghettos or camps. The wave of anti-Jewish actions then was to resume in the spring.

of 42 and would extend until the very last days of the German occupation.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:47.989)
That's amazing. Thank you so much. I mean, this has been a really, really great discussion that sort of takes us all over the landscape of Eintracht's group history. And so I really appreciate it. Before we let you go, we always ask our guests to sort of tell us about one book about the Holocaust that was influential or important or they would recommend. And so what's yours for today, Juergen?

Juergen Matthaeus (01:15:13.442)
Yeah, there are a bunch of really interesting and amazing studies about the actions of the Eindhoven. I would want to go a different road, however, because what we have been talking about is all perpetrator oriented. Let's keep in mind Holocaust studies strives to be more integrated, to look at the fate of others, to look at broader context. So I would be inclined to not point to a specific book.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:27.498)
Right.

Juergen Matthaeus (01:15:43.362)
But to your audience, anyone interested in this history, to keep an eye on survivor accounts that often pop up in books like Christopher Browning's On the Origins of the Final Solution, and particularly in Charles Friedlander's Oeuvre, to explain the ferocity and the violence by the killers. And that not coming from the documents generated by the perpetrators themselves, but by

from observations by survivors. Some of them in fact were not survivors. They were witnesses at the time and got killed during the Holocaust. But some survivor accounts are existing and I would point listeners and readers to those and keep an eye on that and how that informs our knowledge and increased insight into the violence of perpetrating.

genocide because that's often an aspect that the killers do not want to forefront for obvious reasons.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:46.17)
Can I pin you down and ask you to suggest one or two specific ones?

Juergen Matthaeus (01:16:51.34)
Yeah, there is a book that's edited by Wendie Lauer based on the diary of a man named Goldfarb and that is very, very useful.

indication of perceptions arrived at by Jews who were in extremely violent circumstances. Samuel Goldfarb is his name. The diary attests to actions by German order police men, not the Eindradsgruppen here. And I think it's a very useful compilation. For the Eindradsgruppen, of course, the problem is that

there are very few accounts because the killings were so efficient. But for any settings where Jews were in locations where they had encounters with Germans on a more long-term basis, I think there's a chance to get more deep insights into the mentality of the killers and thus into the process at large.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:03.721)
Well, that's amazing. Thank you. And I will put that one on our website as well. For everyone else, again, thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe, give us a like, follow, and a comment. And we look forward to hearing from you. And again, Juergen, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Juergen Matthaeus (01:18:24.11)
Thank you, Wiedemann, my pleasure.