The Einsatzgruppen Reports (Ereignismeldungen)

Holocaust deniers claim there was never any Nazi policy to exterminate the Jews. They claim that no documents exist that are both unambiguous as to such a policy and unquestionably authentic. However, such documents do indeed exist: the Einsatzgruppen (Operational Group) reports filed by the units operating in the Soviet Union that carried out this extermination policy in the occupied areas. This series of questions and answers put together by Nick Terry demonstrates that the Ereignismeldungen (EM) are authentic and that the Einsatzgruppendemonstrably mass-murdered over a million Jews.

An Introduction to the Einsatzgruppen

Like every historical event, the Holocaust evokes certain specific images. When the Holocaust is mentioned most people immediately think of the concentration camps. They immediately envision emaciated victims in dirty striped uniforms staring incomprehensibly at their liberators or piles of corpses, too numerous to bury individually, being bulldozed into mass graves.

Those are accurate images. Those horrific scenes are real. They happened. But they are not all of the Holocaust. They are merely the end product of the systematization of the genocide committed by the Third Reich. The reality of that genocide began not in the camps or in the gas chambers but with four small groups of murderers known as the Einsatzgruppen formed by Himmler and Heydrich immediately before the invasion of the Soviet Union. They operated in the territories captured by the German armies during the invasion of the Soviet Union and, with the cooperation of German army units and local militias, murdered over a million men, women, and children. It was a story that did not end until 1952 when Otto Ohlendorf, the last surviving commander of an Einsatzgruppe (Einsatzgruppe D), climbed the steps of the gallows to pay for the more than 90,000 murders his command committed.

An article at the Holocaust History Project by Yale F. Edeiken introduces the Einsatzgruppen.

January 2009

January 25, 2009. Added the essay August Hirt: Deadly Collector of the Victims of the Holocaust, by Anne S. Reamey

January 17, 2009. Verdicts in several key trials in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s that contain numerous references to the Final Solution. The documents are in German and are:

• The verdict in the "Auschwitz Trial" in Frankfurt am Main of August 19-20, 1965.
• The verdict in the Belzec Trial in Munich of January 21, 1965
• The verdict in the Sobibor Trial in Berlin of May 8, 1950
• The verdict in the Sobibor Trial in Frankfurt am Main of August 25, 1950
• The verdict in the Treblinka Trial in Düsseldorf of September 3, 1965
• The verdict in the Einsatzgruppen Trial in Ulm of August 29, 1958
• The verdict in the Einsatzgruppen Trial in Munich of July 21, 1961

January 10, 2009. Updated the Klarsfeld section on the Main Page

November 2007

November 18, 2007. Added a detailed analysis of the Einsatzgruppen Reports by Nick Terry

October 2002

October 13, 2002. Added The Jaeger Report (9 pages), Written by SS-Standartenführer (Colonel) Karl Jaeger, commander of one of the "Einsatzkommandos" (EK 3), it provides a very detailed account of the murderous rampage of this "special squad" in Nazi-occupied USSR, and proudly documents 137,346 murders.

May 1998

In May 1998, the site added four new short essays as well as an Introduction to the Einsatzgruppen, and The Dachau Gas Chambers.