Mobile Killing Squads–world history and facts




Mobile Killing Squads

After the German army invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a new stage in the Holocaust began.

Under cover of war and confident of victory, the Germans turned from the forced emigration and imprisonment of Jews to mass murder. Special action squads, or Einsatzgruppen, made up of Nazi (SS) units and police, moved with speed on the heels of the advancing German army.

Their job was to kill any Jews they could find in the occupied Soviet territory. Some residents of the occupied regions, mostly Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, aided these German mobile killing squads by serving as auxiliary police.


The mobile killing units acted swiftly, taking the Jewish population by surprise. The killers entered a town or city and rounded up all Jewish men, women, and children.

They also took away many Communist party leaders and Roma View This Term in the Glossary (Gypsies). Victims were forced to surrender any valuables and remove their clothing, which was later sent for use in Germany or distributed to local collaborators.

Then the killing squad members marched their victims to open fields, forests, and ravines on the outskirts of conquered towns and cities.There they shot them or gassed them in gas vans and dumped the bodies into mass graves.


On September 21, 1941, the eve of the Jewish New Year, a mobile killing squad entered Ejszyszki, a small town in what is now Lithuania. The killing squad members herded 4,000 Jews from the town and the surrounding region into three synagogues, where they were held for two days without food or water.

Then, in two days of killing, Jewish men, women, and children were taken to cemeteries, lined up in front of open pits, and shot to death. Today there are no Jews in Ejszyszki.

It was one of hundreds of cities, towns, and shtetls whose Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The rich culture of most of these Jewish communities was lost forever.


The killing squads murdered more than a million Jews and tens of thousands of other innocent people. At Babi Yar, near Kiev, about 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days of shooting. Only a few people in the general population helped their Jewish neighbors escape. Most people were afraid that they too might be killed.


The massacres of innocent men, women, and children in Babi Yar and other towns were not the crimes of hoodlums or crazy men. The executioners were "ordinary" men who followed the orders of their commanding officers.

Many of the killers had wives and children back in Germany. Propaganda and training had taught many members of the mobile killing squads to view their victims as enemies of Germany.

Some killers drank heavily to dull their thoughts and feelings. In addition, when they described their actions they used code words like "special treatment" and "special action" instead of "killing" or "murder" to distance themselves from their terrible crimes.


We hope that you have enjoyed reading our blog on the world history and facts. If you enjoy this blog please let us know in the comments below. If you are interested in history, we recommend you check out our other blogs here on the world history and facts. Thank you for reading.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Death Of Tightrope Walker Karl Wallenda (video).

Image
The Death Of Tightrope Walker Karl Wallenda (video) . Karl Wallenda's final — and tragic — tightrope walk was caught on video in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He had been performing stunts since he was six years old. He was trained to walk on a high wire, cycle across a tightrope, and balance as one of a seven-man pyramid. Rarely was a safety net used. For him, it seemed, nothing was impossible. Then, on March 22, 1978, the world watched in horror as Karl Wallenda fell to his death. As he attempted to walk across a high wire strung between the two towers of the Condado Plaza Hotel, the 73-year-old Wallenda lost his balance, teetering on the wire for 30 heart-stopping seconds before plummeting 10 stories. Karl Wallenda had been performing stunts since he was six years old. He was trained to walk on a high wire, cycle across a tightrope, and balance as one of a seven-man pyramid. Rarely was a safety net used. For him, it seemed, nothing was impossible Then, on March 22, 1978, t...
Read more

The capture of brave Russian officer Rosinski

Image
The capture of brave Russian officer Rosinski This is a shocking image and I apologize in advance for sharing it, but here’s one that truly got to me… in Belarus, 1918, after WWI had already ended, the brave Russian officer Rosinski was captured by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks tortured the captain, likely to get information out of the man, which he bravely refused to give. After that, they simply continued with the torture out of some sick sense of innate cruelty. He was ‘the enemy’ and he was at their mercy, so they brutally murdered their captive. The brave captain was emasculated. And anally impaled on a tree branch. All this while still alive. Alfred Savoir, the man who published the picture and was an eye witness to the death of the brave military officer, described "M. B.", who ordered this atrocity, thus: I knew him not long ago; he was a charming teenager with an ironic wit and joker. He was rubbed with French culture, he admired the novels of Barres and he ...
Read more

“The experience I learned was that … if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed…

Image
Marina Abramovic. Rhythm 0. 1974  “The experience I learned was that … if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed… I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away.  It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.” -Marina Abramovic       The life threatening performance of Rhythm 0 featured Marina Abramovic, completely vulnerable to the will of her audience for six hours.  The participators were given an array (seventy-two) of items to utilize and do with as they please without any repercussions, such objects ranged from a polaroid camera to a gun and a single bullet.  Displaying the horrendous actions people were willing to inflict upon another just because they have been given the permission her constant focus on pushing th...
Read more

Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, is hanged next to the crematorium at the camp, 1947–world history and facts

Image
Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, is hanged next to the crematorium at the camp, 1947 Rudolf Hoess (Rudolf Höss) was the architect and commandant of the largest killing center ever created, the death camp Auschwitz, whose name has come to symbolize humanity’s ultimate descent into evil. On 1 May 1940, Hoess was appointed commandant of a prison camp in western Poland. The camp was built around an old Austro-Hungarian (and later Polish) army barracks near the town of Oswiecim; its German name was Auschwitz.  Hoess commanded the camp for three and a half years, during which he expanded the original facility into a sprawling complex known as Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. After visiting Treblinka’s extermination camp to study its methods of human extermination, Hoess, beginning on 3 September 1941, tested and perfected the techniques of mass killing that made Auschwitz the most efficiently murderous instrument of the Final Solution. He improved o...
Read more

The terror of the execution wheel

Image
The terror of the execution wheel The  breaking wheel  or  execution wheel , also known as the  Wheel of Catherine  or simply the  Wheel , was a torture method used for public execution primarily in Europe from antiquity through the Middle Ages into the early modern period by breaking the bones of a criminal or bludgeoning them to death. The practice was abolished in Bavaria in 1813 and in the Electorate of Hesse in 1836: the last known execution by the "Wheel" took place in Prussia in 1841. In the Holy Roman Empire it was a "mirror punishment" for highwaymen and street thieves, and was set out in the  Sachsenspiegel  for murder, and arson that resulted in fatalities. Those convicted as murderers, rapists, traitors and or robbers to be executed by the wheel, sometimes termed to be "wheel...
Read more

Skull wearing a medieval chainmail from a mass grave on the Island of Gotland, Sweden.

Image
Skull wearing a medieval chainmail from a mass grave on the Island of Gotland, Sweden. The Battle of Visby (1361) was a violent Medieval battle that took place near the town of Visby (Island of Gotland), fought between the inhabitants of Gotland and the Danes, with the latter emerging victorious. The battle left a lasting archaeological legacy; masses of slaughtered soldiers and citizens lay scattered across what was once a blood battlefield.  Slashed and broken bones, skeletons still in their chainmail and armor, and smashed skulls, some still with spears and knives protruding out of them. @world history and facts Photo author unknown. We hope that you have enjoyed reading our blog on the world history and facts. If you enjoy this blog please let us know in the comments below. If you are interested in history, we recommend you check out our other blogs here on the world history and facts. Thank you for reading.
Read more

On this day 2nd March 1945, Burma.

Image
On this day 2nd March 1945, Burma. Corporal Fazal Din was attacked by sword wielding Japanese soldiers after taking an enemy bunker and was run through the chest by one of them. Din led an attack on a number of entrenched enemy positions. The Japanese had repelled an earlier assault, killing many of his friends.  To provide support, a tank went ahead of them, but it continued moving forward, leaving the bunkers, Din attacked the one nearest him; destroying it with grenades.  The other two lay silent because they were empty. He wheeled toward the last bunker as bullets mowed more men down, but not Din. Then the shooting stopped; the Japanese had run out of ammo. Furious, eight soldiers burst out of the bunker, wielding swords. The two in front were officers, screaming as they made a beeline toward the Indians. A Bren light machine gun killed one of the officers and a soldier but in doing so he, too, ran out of bullets. He was immediately killed by the second Japanese officer’s ...
Read more

80 years ago today is when World War II: Rostov-on-Don, Russia is liberated.

Image
80 years ago today is when World War II: Rostov-on-Don, Russia is liberated. Rostov-on-Don  is a port city and the administrative centre of Rostov Oblast and the Southern Federal District of Russia. It lies in the southeastern part of the East European Plain on the Don River, 32 kilometers (20 mi) from the Sea of Azov, directly north of the North Caucasus.  The southwestern suburbs of the city lie above the Don river delta. Rostov-on-Don has a population of over one million people, and is an important cultural centre of Southern Russia. During World War I Rostov-on-Don was briefly occupied by the Germans and Austrians, during 1918. During the Russian Civil War, the Whites and the Reds contested Rostov-on-Don, then the most heavily industrialized city of South Russia. By 1928, the regional government had moved from the old Cossack capital of Novocherkassk to Rostov-on-Don. In the Soviet years, the Bolsheviks demolished two of Rostov-on-Don's principal landmarks: St....
Read more

Bluetooth technology was named after a Viking king by the name of Harald Bluetooth who died over 1,000 years ago.

Image
Bluetooth technology was named after a Viking king by the name of Harald Bluetooth who died over 1,000 years ago–world history and facts He unified factions of Denmark with those in Norway much like how technology we use today unifies different electronic devices. The Bluetooth logo consists of his initials, (Hagall) (ᚼ) and (Bjarkan) (ᛒ). As for how he got his nickname in the first place   The name "Bluetooth" was proposed in 1997 by Jim Kardach of Intel, one of the founders of the Bluetooth SIG.  The name was inspired by a conversation with Sven Mattisson who related Scandinavian history through tales from Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships, a historical novel about Vikings and the 10th-century Danish king Harald Bluetooth.  Upon discovering a picture of the runestone of Harald Bluetooth in the book A History of the Vikings by Gwyn Jones, Jim proposed Bluetooth as the codename for the short-range wireless program which is now called Bluetooth. According...
Read more

Evil Experiment Carried Out In History Of World War Ll–world History And Facts.

Image
Evil Experiment Carried Out In History Of World War Ll–world History And Facts. In the early to mid 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust, the Nazi’s experimented on thousands of men, women and children. Their major target populations included Romani, Sinti, ethnic Poles, Soviet POWs, disabled Germans, and Jews from across Europe. At Auschwitz and other camps, under the direction of Eduard Wirths, selected inmates were subjected to various hazardous experiments that were designed to help German military personnel in combat situations, develop new weapons, aid in the recovery of military personnel who had been injured, and to advance the Nazi racial ideology. Experiments on twins Experiments on twin children in concentration camps were created to show the similarities and differences in the genetics of twins, as well as to see if the human body can be unnaturally manipulated.  The central leader of the experiments was Josef Mengele, who from 1943 to 1944 performed experiments...
Read more