98 GERMANY TRIUMPHANT 1939 –1941
The German forces that invaded the
USSR as part of Operation Barbarossa
(see pp.90–91) were accompanied by
Einsatzgruppen—special units of the SS
tasked with exterminating the Jews who
now lived in German-occupied territory.
Four groups consisting of around 4,000
men fanned out across the Baltic States,
Belorussia, and Ukraine. The killings
began at Minsk on July 13, 1941, when
over 1,000 Jews were shot, and accelerated
as summer progressed. The death squads
often used ravines on the edge of large
towns, where Jews were shot and the
bodies pushed over the edge and buried.
On September 26, the German military
command in Kiev ordered the liquidation of the Jewish population.
Over 33,000 Jews, believing they were being relocated out of the
Kiev ghetto, were taken to the nearby Babi Yar ravine. There, an
Einsatzgruppe, aided by Ukrainian collaborators, machine-gunned
them down. It was the worst single massacre of a campaign that
killed between 800,000 and one million Jews by the end of the year,
when shootings were replaced by mobile gas vans and extermination
camps using either carbon monoxide or hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon B).MASSACRES
IN THE EAST
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941
brought millions more Jews under Hitler’s control. Within
weeks, special German units had begun to massacre the
Russian Jews, killing up to one million in only five months.
△ Head of the SS
Heinrich Himmler was in charge
of the Einsatzgruppen, and in 1941
he was tasked with implementing
Hitler’s “Final Solution” to
exterminate all European Jews.△ Operation Barbarossa
A German armored unit moves forward during the early stages of Operation Barbarossa—the
military invasion of the Soviet Union. The rapid advance of the German army trapped hundreds
of thousands of Jews in Nazi-controlled territory.US_098-099_F_Massacres_in_the_East.indd 98 04/03/19 10:47 AM