The Schutzstaffel (SS) - Hitler's Criminal Machine
The SS Commander Behind the Babi Yar Massacre: Otto Rasch
13m
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 intellectuals to the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews in the ravine of Babi Yar near Kyiv.
Under his command, over 80,000 people were “specially treated” — a Nazi euphemism for extermination.
When the war ended, Rasch escaped justice, declared too ill to stand trial at Nuremberg.
His story is that of an intellectual killer — a man who turned ideology into genocide.
Up Next in Season 1
-
Einsatzgruppen Commander Otto Ohlendo...
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.... -
Hitler’s First Bodyguard - The Jew Wh...
Before Himmler, before the black uniforms, there was Emil Maurice — SS member No. 2, Hitler’s driver, confidant, and friend.
A man of partial Jewish descent who stood at the very birth of the Nazi Party and helped create its most feared organization, the SS.
From the failed Beer Hall Putsch and p... -
The Bureaucrat of Death: SS-General W...
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...