The murderous activities of Himmler's Einsatzgruppen - or death squads - rank high among the horrors of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. These hand-picked groups followed in the wake of Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht units advancing intro Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia. Their mass murder of civilians in the occupied territories will never be accurately quantified but is likely to have exceeded two million people, including some 1.3 million of the 6,000,00 Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The graphic and shocking photographs in this Images of War book not only show the hunt for and rounding up of civilians, communists, Jews and Romani people but the active support given to the Einsatzgruppen by SS units and Wehrmacht units. The latter strenuously denied any collusion but the photographic evidence here refutes this.

This WWII pictorial history offers an unsettling up-close account of the Nazi death squads committing mass murder on the Eastern Front. The murderous activities of Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen – or death squads—rank high among the horrors of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. As the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht advanced into Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, these hand-picked groups followed in their wake, committing mass murder of civilians. Their killing in occupied territories will never be accurately quantified but is likely to have exceeded two million people, including some 1.3 million of the 6,000,00 Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The graphic and shocking photographs in this Images of War book show Einsatzgruppen operations, including the hunt for and rounding up of civilians, communists, Jews and Romani people. It also shows the active support given to the Einsatzgruppen by SS and Wehrmacht units. The latter strenuously denied any collusion, but the photographic evidence here refutes this.

Covers the six principal extermination camps in Nazi occupied Poland; a sobering reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. Nearly 80 years on, the concept and scale of the Nazis’ genocide program remains an indelible, nay almost unbelievable, stain on the human race. Yet it was a dreadful reality of which, as this graphic book demonstrates, all too much proof exists. Between 1941 and 1945 an estimated three and a half million Jews and an unknown number of others, including Soviet POWs and gypsies, perished in six camps built in Poland; Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdenak, Sobibor and Treblinka. Unpleasant as it may be, it does no harm for present generations to be reminded of man’s inhumanity to man, if only to ensure such atrocities will never be repeated. This book aims to do just this by tracing the history of the so called Final Solution and the building and operation of the Operation Reinhard camps built for the sole purpose of mass murder and genocide.

“Provides important details about the Einsatzgruppen’s leadership . . . Numerous photographs illustrate the text. A grim read, but a necessary one.” —The Washington Times In June 1941, Adolf Hitler, whose loathing of Slavs and Jewish Bolsheviks knew no bounds, launched Operation Barbarossa, throwing four million troops, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft into the Soviet Union. Operational groups of the German Security Service, SD, followed into the Baltic and the Black Sea areas. Their orders: neutralize elements hostile to Nazi domination. Combined SS and SD headquarters were set throughout Eastern Europe, each with subordinate units of the SD, the Einsatzgruppen, and lower echelons of Einsatzkommandos. Communist and Soviet federal agents were targeted, and from August 1941 to March 1943, 4,000 Soviet and communist agents were arrested and executed. In addition, far greater numbers of partisans and communists were shot to ensure political and ethnic purity in the occupied territories. In the early stages of the operation, Einsatzgruppe A, under Adolf Eichmann, executed 29,000 people listed as Jews or mostly Jews in Latvia and Lithuania. In the Einsatzgruppe C report for September 1941, 50,000 executions are foreseen in Kiev. In five months in 1941, Einsatzkommando III commander, Karl Jger, reported killing 138,272, 34,464 of them were children. The Einsatzgruppen were death squads, their tools the rifle, the pistol and the machine gun. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen executed more than 2 million people between 1941 and 1945, including 1.3 million Jews. Drawing on translated memos, operational reports from the field as well as other primary and secondary sources, historian Gerry van Tonder provides a comprehensive look at one of the darkest periods of human history.

“A chilling study of the . . . recruitment, indoctrination and performance of those responsible for the guarding of concentration camp inmates.”—Inscale.org The conversion of human beings into murderers and individuals routinely carrying out appalling acts of cruelty are bound to be shocking. But it happened under the Third Reich on a massive scale. This book follows the development of concentration camps from the early beginnings in the 1930s (Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen etc.), through their establishment in the conquered territories of Poland and Czechoslovakia to the extermination camps (Dachau, Auschwitz). In parallel, it describes, using original source material, the behavior of the guards who became in numerous cases immune to the horrors around them. This is well borne out by the conduct of the guards during the Liberation process, which is also movingly described using numerous personal accounts of shocked Allied personnel. Of the 55,000 Nazi concentration camp guards, some 3,700 were women. The book studies their behavior with examples along with that of their male counterparts. “These are everyday pictures of sadistic murderers. Ian Baxter should be commended on this book. The concentration camps of the Second World War should never be pushed to the back of our minds. It happened and we should remember it so that it can never be allowed to happen again.”—WW2 Connection

The Nazis’ vast concentration camp network and, later, the ‘Final Solution’ programme made heavy demands on the SS whose responsibility it was. The use of ‘overseers’ minimised costs and enabled the camps to run with fewer SS personnel. As this well researched book describes, there were three principal groups of ‘helpers’: Sonderkommandos, Kapos and Trawniki. The Sonderkommandos’ duties included unloading Jews from trains, collecting their possessions and allocating work details. Under SS supervision, they also ran the gas chambers and crematoria. The Kapos oversaw the Sonderkommandos. Many were originally prisoner functionaries recruited from violent criminal gangs and had a well-deserved reputation for brutality. The third group, known as Trawniki or Trawnikimänner, were Central and Eastern European collaborators recruited from Russian POW camps. While some served in a military capacity, others played an instrumental role in the Holocaust programme, rounding up and transporting Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps. The graphic images and text of this Images of War series work demonstrate that the ‘overseer’ system was extensive and effective as its members competed without scruple to maintain the favour of their SS masters while pitting victim against victim.

Auschwitz and Birkenau were separate from each other,by about a 45 minute walk. Auschwitz was adapted to hold political prisoners in 1940 and evolved into a killing machine in 1941. Later that year a new site called Birkenau was found to extend the Auschwitz complex. Here a vast complex of buildings were constructed to hold initially Russian POWs and later Jews as a labour pool for the surrounding industries including IG Farben. Following the January 1943 Wannsee Conference, Birkenau evolved into a murder factory using makeshift houses which were adapted to kill Jews and Russian POWs. Later due to sheer volume Birkenau evolved into a mass killing machine using gas chambers and crematoria, while Auschwitz, which still held prisoners, became the administrative centre. The images show first Auschwitz main camp and then Birkenau and are carefully chosen to illustrate specific areas, like the WomenÕs Camp, Gypsy Camp, SS quarters, CommandantÕs House, railway disembarkation, the ÔsaunaÕ, disinfection area and the Crematoria. Maps covering Auschwitz and Birkenau explain the layout This book is shocking proof of the scale of the Holocaust.