Einsatzgruppen the wake of advancing Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS into Poland during FALL WEISS (1939), rounding up Polish Jews for summary execution by shooting Mass burials of victims were in standard anti-tank ditches There were four Einsatzgruppen at the start of the BARBAROSSA invasion of the Soviet Union in mid-1941 Like the Wehrmacht, they were ordered in the first instance to summarily execute all commissars and politruks Their core SS character also led to proactive killing of Jews Jews and Roma were also herded into ghettos where other SS and Nazi Party officials oversaw their mass starvation and death by epidemic diseases of tens of thousands The four Einsatzgruppen in the field killed probably 500,000 Jews in the western Soviet Union over the second half of 1941 Einsatzgruppen murdered well over million Jews from 1939 to 1942, and perhaps as many as 1.5 million Most were killed by shootings, some were buried alive, while others were burned alive in locked buildings, or killed inside experimental mobile gas vans or with other improvised methods We know all this because Einsatzgruppen commanders kept excellent records, filling out and fi ling in Berlin nearly 200 “Ereignismeldungen” or field reports Some of these were introduced into evidence at postwar trials Einsatzgruppe A struck into Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in June 1941, following the tank tracks of Army Group North toward Leningrad It carried out major massacres in Kovno, Riga, and Vilna Einsatzgruppe B was based in Warsaw that June It moved into Belorussia in the wake of Army Group Center, slaughtering its way through Grodno, Minsk, Brest-Litovsk, Slonim, Gomel, Mogilev, and Smolensk Einsatzgruppe C also started out from Poland, departing Krakow for Ukraine, killing all the way to Kharkov and Rostov after massive Red Army collapses at Uman and Kiev at the hands of the northern detachments of Army Group South There were large massacres of Jews at Lvov, Tarnopol, Zolochev, Kremenets, Kharkov, Zhitomir, and Kiev One two-day massacre later became infamous: the killing of 33,771 people, mostly Jews but including some Red Army prisoners, outside Kiev at Babi Yar Einsatzgruppe D followed the other wing of Army Group South into the Donbass and Crimea It conducted massacres at Nikolayev, Kherson, Simferopol, Sevastopol, Feodosiya, and at dozens of smaller sites It has long been known that local anti-Semites assisted the Einsatzgruppen in these murders or even carried out spontaneous killings and pogroms as the Red Army withdrew More recent research, including by the Bundeswehr, confirms beyond doubt that the Wehrmacht also played a key and active role in the killings It was not merely passive and certainly did not operate in ignorance of events, as was falsely claimed by its surviving generals for decades after the war It was partly to relieve SS Einsatzgruppen men of the trauma of having to shoot women and children that SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler ordered Reinhard Heydrich and other SS planners to come up with other methods of “extermination.” Gas vans proved inefficient and wasteful of fuel SS and German government authorities therefore planned, at the Wannsee Conference and elsewhere, and started to build huge death camps with permanent gassing and crematoria facilities, located along rail links near large Jewish ghettos That began the mass extermination stage of the Showa From 1942 the SS employed poison gas—culminating in Zyklon-B pellets—in huge gas chambers at several death camps, disposing of corpses in 339