Einsatz

During the Second World War, there was a particular group in the east that engaged in “the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children.”1 This group was called the Einsatzgruppen. According to Botwinick, the author of the text A History of the holocaust what made them all the more savage and evil is that “their work was not abstract, their own eyes met those of their victims, their hands held the guns that killed an estimated 1.5 million Jews.”2 The Einsatzgruppen lead a campaign of murder in the East that executed civilians for no other reason than the nazi ideology of hate. What great irony that the leaders of the mobile killing squads of the Einsatzgruppen, the Einsatzkommandos were not mindless barbarians, but “professional men with many academic degrees, who were quite at home among Germany’s cultural elite.”3 The Einsatzgruppen became an institution of death in total violation of “man’s right to live in peace and dignity regardless of his race or creed.”4
In the opening statements by the prosecution at the Einsatzgruppen trial the first task was to set out that the Einsatzgruppen under the Nazi doctrine of hate was responsible for crimes against humanity. The Nazis were responsible for “the methodical and long-range plans to destroy ethnic, national, political, and religious groups which stood condemned in the Nazi mind.”5 The Einsatz groups even went into the prisoner of war camps “selecting men for execution, denying them their right to live.”6 So in the crimes against humanity the Nazi doctrine of hate violated all international laws and treaties.
The key argument of the opening statements is that the “Nazi doctrine of a master race-an arrogance blended from tribal conceit and a boundless contempt for man himself” and it is an “idea whose toleration endangers all men.”7 The Nazi doctrine of hate then is a crime against mankind and even deeper than just a crime against humanity National Socialism becomes the new nihilism. It seeks only separation and destruction. It is ironic that a doctrine that began on a platform of law and order ends up as the doctrine of universal negation of mankind.
The Einsatzgruppen was a dark and vicious piece of the Nazi machinery of death. What they had tried to accomplish was the destruction of a part of humanity through direct murder. The victims were “arrayed, kneeling or standing near the pit to face a deadly hail of fire.”8 This was not just genocide but this became even deeper as individual murder as part of genocide. The question of shared culpability by Einsatz men is easy because the killing were done on so individual a level.