They were among the most despised and vicious men of the Second World War. In the years after the fighting ended, several of them were taken to the gallows screaming and resisting, paying for crimes so monstrous that the courts needed no imagination to convict them. These were the men who commanded the death squads that followed the German army eastward. The forces under their control were responsible for the murder of millions.
The generals of the Einsatzgruppen were convicted because the evidence against them was overwhelming. Survivors testified that they had been present and watched the execution squads wipe out entire populations. So why were the Einsatzgruppen generals who were captured also executed? At the end of the war, Allied courts tried many different war criminals.
But among the worst were the men who belonged to the Einsatzgruppen. They were on a campaign of extermination to destroy the enemies of the Reich, and their victims numbered in the millions. Mass graves of those murdered by these death squads still lie undiscovered beneath the earth. The Einsatzgruppen were, in essence, mobile killing formations.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 in Operation Barbarossa, four main killing groups, designated Einsatzgruppen A, B, C, and D, followed the advancing German army eastward. They belonged specifically to the SS Security Police and the SD, the Security Service. They were further divided into smaller units known as Einsatzkommandos. Although they were initially tasked with dealing with enemies of the new German occupation, such as partisans, their mission soon shifted to the annihilation of civilians.
The Einsatzgruppen, along with police, army units, and auxiliary groups, would round up civilians, march them to killing sites, force them to surrender their possessions and clothing, and then shoot them into prepared pits that became mass graves. Entire communities were erased within hours. At Babi Yar, for example, SS and police units killed roughly 34,000 people in just two days. The men who led these operations were different from the military commanders tried at the end of the war who had fought for Germany.
They were prosecuted because they administered organizations whose operations deliberately included the mass murder of civilians. The scale of the killing was exceptional. At the end of the war, the Einsatzgruppen Trial was held to bring the men responsible for the deaths of at least 723,000 people to justice. The prosecution claimed there were more than one million victims, and today it is believed that no fewer than one and a half million people were killed by the Einsatzgruppen death squads in the east.
Much of the evidence of their crimes came from the Germans themselves. The groups prepared detailed reports, recording the killings and the number of victims. These documents included information about the categories of victims and where they were buried. This documentary evidence made it extremely difficult for senior leaders to claim they had not known what their units were doing.
One of the clearest examples of an Einsatzgruppen general who deserved death was the commander of Group D, Otto Ohlendorf. His forces operated in southern Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula, and the Caucasus region. He became an important figure in the postwar trial because he personally witnessed many of the killings. He even stated, in his own words, that Group D had slaughtered about 90,000 people, most of them civilians, during the period he commanded it.
Ohlendorf did not deny that the killings had occurred. Instead, he tried to justify his actions by arguing that he was carrying out orders received from his superiors, such as Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and that those orders were connected to the Third Reich’s struggle for supremacy over the Soviet communists. The court rejected the idea that superior orders could make mass murder legal. A soldier can ordinarily obey legitimate military orders.
But an order to deliberately kill unarmed civilian populations did not become lawful merely because it came from higher up the chain of command. The point that truly mattered was that the victims of Einsatzgruppen crimes were not ordinary battlefield casualties or soldiers. This is why so many of the leaders received death sentences. The defendants could not claim their victims were enemy soldiers or combatants.
The victims included women, children, and the elderly, and all of them were unarmed. Communities were gathered together by deceptive means before being led to their deaths. Sometimes victims were shot while lying on top of the corpses of those killed before them. If the Nazis were persecuting the category of people who had been captured, they were shot and typically dealt with by a single bullet to the back of the head.
In the trials, the prosecution did not need to prove that Einsatzgruppen leaders had personally fired the shots and taken lives. They needed to prove that they had ordered and participated in an organized system of slaughter. A commander who passed down orders, organized the killings, provided the men, received the reports, and oversaw the organization responsible for the massacres could bear criminal responsibility without ever pulling the trigger himself. In the Einsatzgruppen Trial, 24 senior officers were originally indicted, and 22 were tried.
The charges involved crimes against humanity, including the killing and persecution of civilian populations, and war crimes involving killings committed in occupied territories contrary to the laws and customs of war. There was also the need to prove their membership in criminal organizations such as the SD, the SS, and the Gestapo. All 22 defendants faced at least one charge. But one man in the dock was particularly notorious.
Paul Blobel had commanded a unit involved in the Babi Yar massacre and was also assigned responsibility for Action 1005, a plan to destroy the evidence of Nazi crimes. Prisoners were forced to dig up mass graves, recover the rotting, decomposing corpses, and then burn the remains. The prisoners involved in this work were routinely killed themselves so they could never testify about the original crimes. Blobel was one of those sentenced to death.
After the death sentences were confirmed, the method of execution for the men was hanging on the gallows. This method reflected their status as criminals. They were not executed as enemy soldiers immediately upon capture. Instead, they were arrested, indicted, represented by defense lawyers, tried before a military court, convicted, and sentenced.
Execution by hanging became the primary method the Western Allies used for condemned Nazi war criminals in such proceedings. The symbolism mattered as well. Execution after criminal conviction treated the condemned as convicted criminals, not as soldiers who had merely lost the war. But in the Einsatzgruppen Trial, the 14 death sentences did not mean 14 executions actually took place.
On April 10, 1948, the court handed down 14 death sentences, two life sentences, and five prison sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years. After the trials, politics had a significant impact on matters. The Cold War was intensifying. West Germany had become important to the Western Allies, and pressure grew to reconsider the death sentences imposed on German war criminals.
Because of this, a number of death sentences were commuted to prison terms, and only four of the senior Einsatzgruppen generals and leaders were actually executed. These included Otto Ohlendorf and Paul Blobel, along with Erich Naumann, commander of Group B, and Werner Braune, commander of Einsatzkommando 11b. These four were the last men to be hanged at the gallows inside Landsberg Prison. Their executions took place in June 1951, shortly before the prison was handed back to the Germans.
Before they fell through the execution platform, photographs were taken showing the men in their final moments. 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 had gathered entire communities and killed them, and the leaders had played an active role in doing so. The prosecution also possessed a vast amount of evidence. There were German operational reports, captured documents, witness testimony, confessions from the perpetrators, and even admissions of guilt. The Einsatzgruppen Trial demonstrated 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 being convicted by fair proceedings and held responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes, which ultimately meant the slaughter of millions of people.