War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland(Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context)

About the Book

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This invaluable work traces the role of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, the core group of Himmler’s murder units involved in the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” during and immediately after the German campaign in Poland in 1939. In addition to relevant Einsatzgruppen reports, the book includes key documents from other sources, especially eyewitness accounts from victims or onlookers. Such accounts provide an alternative, often much more realistic, perspective on the nature and consequences of the actions previously known only through documentation generated by the perpetrators. With carefully selected primary sources contextualized by the authors’ clear narrative, this work fills an important gap in our understanding of a crucial period in the evolution of policies directed against Jews, Poles, and others deemed dangerous or inferior by the Third Reich. Supplemented by maps and photographs, this book will be an essential reference and research tool.

Table of Contents:

Part I: Introduction
The Einsatzgruppen and the Sources Documenting Their Actions
Preparing for the War on Poland
Personnel and Tasks
Escalating Violence
Part II: Documents and Context
Directives and Initial Actions
Expanding the Scope of Violence
Persecuting Jews
Establishing Long-Term Rule
Afterword: Poland, 1939–Soviet Union, 1941. Einsatzgruppen Actions in Comparison

About the Author :
Jürgen Matthäus is director of the Applied Research Division at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Jochen Böhler is a research fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg at Jena University, Germany. Klaus-Michael Mallmann is director of the Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg at the Universität Stuttgart, Germany.

Review :
This impressive series provides a sense of the depth and diversity of contemporary Jewish documents while embedding them in explanatory narratives. . . .Underscoring this point [how ‘unprecedented’ the nature of Nazi actions in Poland was even prior to the launching of comprehensive genocide] is one of the chief purposes of War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939, one of the stand-alone volumes in the series, ‘the first comprehensive English-language edition documenting and annotating Einsatzgruppen activities against the background of war and Nazi racial policy in Poland in 1939.’ This important history explains and documents an often-neglected phase of Nazi Germany's war in the east. Anyone who needs a nuanced understanding of the first phase of the Holocaust and Operation Barbarossa should first study Operation Tannenberg, which is fully explored for the first time in this fine work. For too long, histories of the Einsatzgruppen have neglected the territories bordering the German Reich. The editors of this essential collection have made available to students and scholars of the Holocaust and the Second World War a stunning array of German documents culled from U.S., German, Polish, and former Soviet archives. Carefully translated into English and usefully annotated, the reports and testimonies in this compact volume reveal that unscrupulous Nazi leaders and their subordinates in Poland were determined to wage war, ‘pacify’ the region, and initiate a program of mass murder as of the fall of 1939.