Einsatzgruppen

On October 27, 1942, Heinrich Himmler issued an order to Hans-Adolf Prützmann, the Higher SS and Police Leader in Ukraine, commanding to “immediately clear and annihilate the Ghetto in Pinsk”. The only exemption was to be 1,000 Jewish forced laborers, who were to be handed over to the Wehrmacht. However, if their secure confinement could not be guaranteed, they too were to be “annihilated.”

In a report dated 6 March 1942, Oberregierungsrat Paul Haensel presented findings from his inspection trip to Minsk. According to prison officials and legal personnel, “approximately 280 civilian prisoners were taken from the prison in Minsk by the SD, led to a pit, and shot”, with another 30 prisoners executed shortly afterwards “since the pit’s capacity had not yet been fully used”. Haensel concluded there was “no justification for this mass shooting without any due process”. The killings were “allegedly carried out to combat typhus”, yet, as Haensel noted “there were no cases of typhus in the prison either before or after the incident”. The Minister for the Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, protested the executions to Heinrich Himmler, prompting a written response from Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), on 25 March. Heydrich claimed the situation had been misunderstood. According to him, 328 prisoners were shot on January 28, 1942 as the prison was a typhus hotspot. Heydrich closed his letter by warning Rosenberg’s deputy and Gauleiter Alfred Meyer to be cautious about believing reports coming from Minsk, also citing as example “the accusation of improper Jewish evacuations”.

The Swiss cardiologist and medical captain Robert Hegglin participated in the so-called third medical mission of the Swiss Red Cross, which took place in Riga, Daugavpils, and Pskov between 18 June and 26 September 1942. Over the course of several months, he documented his experiences in detail in his diary—from train journeys through ravaged Latvia and Russia to clinical cases in overstretched hospitals. Among his most entries is a report on the mass shootings of Jews in Nazi-occupied Latvia: “…based on the reports available to me from German soldiers, officers, and Latvians, that nearly 100,000 Jews have been shot in the Riga area alone since the German occupation. […] If the Germans truly require such bloody atrocities, then they are unfit to become the masters of Europe.”

The Event Report USSR No. 101 was issued by the Secret State Police on December 19, 1941. According to the report, over 17,000 Jews were killed in a series of so-called “special actions” by Einsatzgruppe B in November – December 1941. For example, it reported that in Bobruisk “a total of 5,281 Jews of both sexes were shot.”

The memo dated April 5, 1943, from Adolf Windecker (Representative of the Foreign Office to the Reich Commissioner for the Eastern Territories) discusses the “treatment of Jews of foreign nationality in the Eastern Territories.” It specifies that all Jews confined to ghettos cannot be deported to other countries due to “significant security police concerns.” Windecker acknowledges the large-scale killings in Riga noting that “many thousands of the local and Reich German Jews in the Riga area have been shot over time.” As a result, he questions the feasibility of using any Jews for exchange purposes, as he fears that doing so would “be exploited abroad as evidence of the executions carried out here.”

On October 2, 1941, Office IV of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) issued Event Report USSR No. 101 (Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 101). Einsatzgruppe C reported on the massacre at the Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) near Kiev that Paul Blobel’s Sonderkommando 4a “executed 33,771 Jews in Kiev on September 29 and 30, 1941”. Meanwhile, Einsatzgruppe D stated that “between September 16 and 30, 22,467 Jews and Communists were executed, bringing the total to 35,782”.

In this letter dated March 4, 1942, the Reichsarzt SS Ernst-Robert Grawitz describes the medical condition and recovery process of the Higher SS and Police Leader for the central zone in Russia Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, whose role in leading executions in the East left mental scars. Grawitz notes that von dem Bach suffered from “severe nervous exhaustion…from thoughts related to the executions of Jews that he himself oversaw”.