Among the most notorious figures of the Second World War were the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that followed the German army into the Soviet Union. These men led formations responsible for the deaths of more than a million civilians, and after the war, several were brought before Allied courts. While many received death sentences, only four were ultimately executed.
Their fate was the result of a combination of overwhelming evidence, the nature of their crimes, and the legal principles established during their trial.
The Einsatzgruppen were special task forces under the control of the SS Security Police and the SD. When Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, four main groups—designated A, B, C, and D—followed the advancing army eastward. They were divided into smaller units called Einsatzkommandos.
Initially tasked with dealing with perceived enemies of the occupation, such as partisans, their mission quickly shifted to the systematic murder of civilians.
These units operated with brutal efficiency. They would round up entire communities, march them to prepared killing sites, force them to surrender their belongings and clothing, and then shoot them into mass graves. Entire towns were erased within hours.
At Babi Yar, for example, German SS and police units killed approximately 34,000 people in just two days.
The men who led these operations were not ordinary military officers fighting for their country. They were tried because they administered organizations whose deliberate purpose was the mass murder of civilians. The scale of the killings was exceptional.
At the end of the war, the Einsatzgruppen trial was convened to bring to justice the men responsible for the deaths of at least 723,000 people. The prosecution argued the true number was over a million, and modern estimates suggest that at least 1. 5 million people were killed by these death squads in the East.
Much of the evidence against them came from the Germans themselves. The groups kept detailed reports, recording the killings, the number of victims, the categories of people murdered, and the locations of burial sites. This documentation made it nearly impossible for senior commanders to claim ignorance of what their units were doing.
One of the clearest examples of a commander who deserved death was Otto Ohlendorf, leader of Einsatzgruppe D. His forces operated in southern Ukraine, the Crimea, and the Caucasus. He became a central figure in the postwar trial because he personally witnessed many of the killings.
In his own testimony, he admitted that his group had slaughtered around 90,000 people, mostly civilians, during his time in command.
Ohlendorf did not deny the killings. Instead, he tried to justify his actions by arguing that he was following orders from superiors such as Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and that these orders were tied to the Reich’s struggle against Soviet communism. The court rejected this defense.
A soldier may obey legitimate military orders, but an order to deliberately kill unarmed civilians does not become legal simply because it comes from higher up the chain of command.
The key point in the prosecution’s case was that the victims of the Einsatzgruppen were not battlefield casualties or enemy soldiers. The victims were women, children, and the elderly, all of them unarmed. Communities were gathered through deception before being led to their deaths.
In many cases, victims were shot while lying on top of the bodies of those killed before them. Those deemed enemies of the Nazis were typically executed with a single shot to the back of the head.
The prosecution did not need to prove that the commanders personally pulled the trigger. They only needed to show that the accused ordered, organized, and participated in a systematic program of slaughter. A commander who passed down orders, arranged the killings, provided personnel, received reports, and oversaw the organization responsible for the massacres could be held criminally liable without ever firing a shot.
The Einsatzgruppen trial initially indicted 24 senior officers, with 22 ultimately standing trial. The charges included crimes against humanity, such as the murder and persecution of civilian populations, and war crimes involving killings in occupied territories in violation of the laws and customs of war. The defendants were also charged with membership in criminal organizations, including the SD, the SS, and the Gestapo.
All 22 defendants faced at least one charge.
Among the accused, one man stood out for his infamy. Paul Blobel commanded a unit involved in the Babi Yar massacre and was also responsible for Aktion 1005, a plan to destroy evidence of Nazi crimes. Prisoners were forced to dig up mass graves, retrieve the decomposing bodies, and burn the remains.
The prisoners involved in this gruesome work were routinely killed afterward so they could never testify about the original crimes. Blobel was among those sentenced to death.
After the death sentences were confirmed, the method of execution was hanging. This reflected the status of the condemned as criminals. They were not executed as enemy soldiers captured in battle.
They were arrested, indicted, represented by defense lawyers, tried before a military court, convicted, and sentenced. Hanging became the primary method used by the Western Allies for Nazi war criminals condemned to death in such proceedings. The symbolism mattered.
Execution after criminal conviction treated the condemned as convicted criminals, not as soldiers who had simply lost the war.
However, the 14 death sentences handed down by the court did not result in 14 executions. On April 10, 1948, the tribunal issued 14 death sentences, two life sentences, and five prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years. But after the trials, politics intervened.
The Cold War was intensifying. West Germany was becoming increasingly important to the Western Allies, and pressure grew to reconsider the death sentences imposed on German war criminals. As a result, many death sentences were commuted to prison terms.
In the end, only four senior Einsatzgruppen commanders were executed. They were Otto Ohlendorf, Paul Blobel, Erich Naumann, commander of Einsatzgruppe B, and Werner Braune, leader of Sonderkommando 11b. These four were the last men hanged at Landsberg Prison.
Their executions were carried out in June 1951, shortly before the prison was handed back to German authorities. Photographs taken in their final moments show the men on the scaffold.
So why were these four men ultimately executed? The most important reason was their involvement in organizing the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. The Allies did not treat the Einsatzgruppen leaders as high-ranking German officers.
They were men who gathered entire communities and killed them, and the commanders played an active role in that process.
The prosecution also possessed an overwhelming amount of evidence. There were German operational reports, captured documents, witness testimony, statements from the perpetrators themselves, and even confessions. The Einsatzgruppen trial established that issuing an order, organizing a massacre, or leading the organization that carried it out could carry the same responsibility as the men who actually pulled the trigger.
The four Einsatzgruppen generals went to the gallows not simply because they were members of the SS or because Germany lost the war. They were executed after fair proceedings that held them responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes. In the end, that meant the slaughter of millions of people.
That is why the captured Einsatzgruppen generals were executed.