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 Leader who perfects a system of industrialized shooting designed to kill thousands in a single day.

In Ukraine, Latvia, and beyond, Jeckeln oversees some of the largest massacres of the Holocaust by bullets — including Kamianets-Podilskyi, Babi Yar, and the Rumbula Forest, where tens of thousands of Jews are stripped, marched to pits, and executed in “sardine-packed” layers. His operations help drive the Einsatzgruppen death toll toward nearly two million victims, accounting for a third of all Jewish Holocaust deaths.

As Nazi Germany collapses in 1945, Jeckeln is captured by Soviet forces. Put on public trial in Riga, he admits responsibility for the murder of more than 100,000 people. On February 3, 1946, before a crowd of thousands, the man who built the killing fields is hanged — bringing a brutal chapter of the Holocaust to its final reckoning.