The Schutzstaffel (SS): Waffen-SS, Gestapo & Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppe Commander Behind the Genocide in Crimea: Werner Braune
13m
On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launches Operation Barbarossa, turning the war in the east into a campaign of racial annihilation. As German forces seize Crimea, the Jewish and Krymchak communities are marked for destruction.
At the center of this killing campaign stands Werner Braune, commander of Sonderkommando 11b, a unit of Einsatzgruppe D — one of the Nazi regime’s mobile death squads. Under his command, mass shootings, gas vans, and coordinated executions sweep across the peninsula.
In Simferopol, thousands of victims are deceived with promises of resettlement, stripped of their belongings, and driven to anti-tank trenches along the Simferopol–Feodosiya road, where entire families — women, children, and the elderly — are murdered.
By the time Soviet forces liberate Crimea in 1944, only 499 Jews remain alive from a prewar population of more than 65,000.
This film traces the path from invasion to genocide — and the postwar trials that finally bring Einsatzgruppe commanders to justice for one of the Holocaust’s deadliest chapters.
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