Explaining History Podcast

Einsatzgruppen

Explaining History Podcast

Einsatzgruppen

Reading time:

1–2 minutes

Full Description

Mobile killing units of the SS and SD that followed the German army into the Soviet Union from June 1941, murdering Jews, Roma, Soviet commissars, and other designated enemies. By the end of 1941 the Einsatzgruppen had killed approximately 500,000 people; by the end of the war, over 1.5 million. The most notorious single massacre was at Babi Yar, near Kyiv, where 33,771 Jews were shot in two days in September 1941.

Critical Perspective

The Einsatzgruppen demonstrated that systematic mass murder could be conducted by relatively small numbers of men without specialist killing facilities. Christopher Browning’s research on Reserve Police Battalion 101 showed that ordinary middle-aged German policemen — not ideological fanatics — carried out massacres on a mass scale, with minimal coercion to participate. This has profoundly disturbing implications for our understanding of human capacity for organised violence.

Explaining History

Explaining History Podcast

For more than a decade, the Explaining History Podcast has helped listeners around the world make sense of modern history. What began in 2012 as a simple experiment—short, accessible episodes explaining major historical events—has grown into a long-running library of carefully researched, thoughtful explorations of the 20th and 21st centuries.

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