Einsatzgruppen Leaders: Faces of Nazi Genocide
This collection explores the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, the SS mobile killing units that operated as a core instrument of Nazi terror across occupied Europe during the Second World War. Formed under the authority of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), these units drew personnel from the SS, Security Service (SD), Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), and Order Police, following German forces into conquered territories.
Organized into major task forces known as Einsatzgruppen A, B, C, and D, they worked in coordination with the Wehrmacht (the German military) and local collaborators, using intelligence networks and precompiled lists to identify and target civilian populations. Their victims included Jews, Roma, political officials, resistance members, and other groups labeled enemies of the Nazi state.
Each film in this collection focuses on the commanders and senior officers who planned operations, issued orders, and supervised mass shootings and terror campaigns. Through biographies, archival documents, and postwar investigations, the series reveals how ideology, authority, and obedience transformed SS officers into organizers of systematic violence.
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Einsatzgruppe Killings in Yugoslavia and the Conviction of Wilhelm Fuchs
On 17 April 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia collapsed after just eleven days of fighting against the Axis invasion. In the aftermath, Nazi occupation forces moved swiftly to crush resistance in Serbia. Sabotage, ambushes, and partisan attacks spread across the country, threatening German supply l...
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Massacre Commander and Architect of the Killing Fields: Friedrich Jeckeln
From the first days of World War II, Nazi mobile death squads — the Einsatzgruppen — follow the German army into Eastern Europe, turning towns, forests, and ravines into open-air execution sites. At the center of this machinery of mass murder stands Friedrich Jeckeln, a ruthless SS and Police Lea...
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Einsatzgruppen Commander Who Brought Death to the East: Erich Naumann
1 September 1939 — as Nazi Germany invades Poland, the first waves of terror follow not with tanks, but with firing squads. Behind the advancing army come the Einsatzgruppen — mobile death squads sent to exterminate civilians, intellectuals, and Jews. Among their leaders stands Erich Naumann, a c...
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The Bureaucrat of Death: SS-General Walter Stahlecker
He looked like a model civil servant — calm, educated, meticulous.
But behind the typewriter and legal jargon, Walter Stahlecker built one of the first genocides of the Holocaust.
As commander of Einsatzgruppe A, he oversaw the annihilation of the Baltic Jews, turning Nazi ideology into systemati... -
Einsatzgruppen Commander Otto Ohlendorf: The Bureaucrat of Death
He was not a soldier of the front but of ideology.
Otto Ohlendorf, a lawyer and economist, led Einsatzgruppe D — one of the Nazi death squads responsible for wiping out Jewish life across the occupied East.
To him, mass murder was an administrative task, carried out with discipline and precision.... -
The SS Commander Behind the Babi Yar Massacre: Otto Rasch
On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland — and behind the advancing Wehrmacht marched the Einsatzgruppen, mobile death squads led by men like Otto Rasch.
An educated lawyer turned SS officer, Rasch helped design the blueprint for Nazi mass murder — from the secret executions of Polish in... -
The Nazi Jurist Turned Executioner: Karl Eberhard Schöngarth
He began as a law graduate from Leipzig — and became one of the most ruthless SS commanders of the Holocaust. As head of the Gestapo and Security Police in occupied Poland, he led Einsatzgruppen death squads that massacred Jews, Polish elites, and professors in Lwów. A participant at the Wannsee ...
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From Mass Murderer to Traitor of the Führer: SS General Arthur Nebe
He hunted Jews, Roma, and the “asocial” for the Nazi regime — yet in July 1944, this same man secretly joined the plot to kill Adolf Hitler.
Arthur Nebe, head of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police and commander of Einsatzgruppe B, personally oversaw the massacre of tens of thousands during the Holoca...
