Download or read book Himmler s Death Squad written by Ian Baxter and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This WWII pictorial history offers an unsettling up-close account of the Nazi death squads committing mass murder on the Eastern Front. The murderous activities of Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen – or death squads—rank high among the horrors of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. As the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht advanced into Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, these hand-picked groups followed in their wake, committing mass murder of civilians. Their killing in occupied territories will never be accurately quantified but is likely to have exceeded two million people, including some 1.3 million of the 6,000,00 Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The graphic and shocking photographs in this Images of War book show Einsatzgruppen operations, including the hunt for and rounding up of civilians, communists, Jews and Romani people. It also shows the active support given to the Einsatzgruppen by SS and Wehrmacht units. The latter strenuously denied any collusion, but the photographic evidence here refutes this.

Download or read book Himmler s Death Squad Einsatzgruppen in Action 1939 1944 written by Ian Baxter and published by Pen & Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-10-30 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The murderous activities of Himmler's Einsatzgruppen - or death squads - rank high among the horrors of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. These hand-picked groups followed in the wake of Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht units advancing intro Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia. Their mass murder of civilians in the occupied territories will never be accurately quantified but is likely to have exceeded two million people, including some 1.3 million of the 6,000,00 Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The graphic and shocking photographs in this Images of War book not only show the hunt for and rounding up of civilians, communists, Jews and Romani people but the active support given to the Einsatzgruppen by SS units and Wehrmacht units. The latter strenuously denied any collusion but the photographic evidence here refutes this.

Download or read book Masters of Death written by Richard Rhodes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Masters of Death, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These “special task forces,” organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar. These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaign’s architects as well as its “ordinary” soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II.

Download or read book Hitler s Death Squads written by Helmut Langerbein and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "After the war, the German government investigated 1,770 former Einsatzgruppen members and brought 136 of these men to trial. Helmut Langerbein has systematically examined the trial evidence in search of characteristics shared by these mass murderers. Using a much broader data base than earlier studies, Langerbein identifies a number of factors that could explain their actions, illustrating each with a particular person or group of officers." "Given the extent of its data, its detailed analysis and its careful conclusions, Hitler's Death Squads: The Logic of Mass Murder will push historians and psychologists toward a reappraisal of the Nazi killing machine, the behavior of the men behind the battle lines, and the overwhelming power of circumstances."--Jacket.

Download or read book The Horror of Himmler s Death Squads written by Norman Ridley and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2024-09-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Second World War, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were occupied on three separate occasions – twice by the Soviet Union and once by Nazi Germany. The signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 allowed the Soviets to dominate the Baltic states without fear of German reprisals, causing many in the German-Baltic populations to flee to Poland. Soviet rule of the Baltics was brutal with the purging of political elites and deportation of many tens of thousands in a bid to turn them into vassal states. Consequently, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, many Balts saw it as a liberation from Soviet cruelties. The reality was, however, that it turned out to be the beginning of something much worse. During their occupation of Poland prior to Barbarossa the Nazis had decimated the Polish political elites, and the Jews there had been herded into ghettos in preparation for deportation to the east where they would serve as slave labour in the Nazi economy after the conquest of the Soviet Union. Similar policies were to be adopted in the Baltics when Heinrich Himmler's murder squads, the Einsatzgruppen, were allowed to move into the newly-occupied territories. Operating behind the advancing German forces Einsatzgruppen A, B, C, and D – four special mobile killing units, each made up of about a thousand men from the security police and the German intelligence service – proved to be more than willing to carry out Himmler's orders. He had called for the removal of every vestige of opposition to Nazi rule, which primarily meant complete elimination of the ‘inferior’ races who were unfit for work and the ghettoization of others in preparation for their economic exploitation. On foreign soil, away from scrutiny and free of all constraint, the Einsatzgruppen discovered that through the mass shootings of communists, Jews and gypsies it was possible to accelerate the pace of the Holocaust, slaughtering men, women and children in their tens of thousands. The Einsatzgruppen were assisted by local ‘volunteers’ who helped to identify victims as well as kill them; in places whole Jewish communities were swiftly eliminated. Many of the killers and victims had known one another as neighbors and colleagues. This massive slaughter of civilians convinced Heydrich and Himmler that complete extermination of Jews was within their grasp and before very long, in the death camps, new industrial methods of killing would be devised.

Download or read book SS Einsatzgruppen written by Gerry van Tonder and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Provides important details about the Einsatzgruppen’s leadership . . . Numerous photographs illustrate the text. A grim read, but a necessary one.” —The Washington Times In June 1941, Adolf Hitler, whose loathing of Slavs and Jewish Bolsheviks knew no bounds, launched Operation Barbarossa, throwing four million troops, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft into the Soviet Union. Operational groups of the German Security Service, SD, followed into the Baltic and the Black Sea areas. Their orders: neutralize elements hostile to Nazi domination. Combined SS and SD headquarters were set throughout Eastern Europe, each with subordinate units of the SD, the Einsatzgruppen, and lower echelons of Einsatzkommandos. Communist and Soviet federal agents were targeted, and from August 1941 to March 1943, 4,000 Soviet and communist agents were arrested and executed. In addition, far greater numbers of partisans and communists were shot to ensure political and ethnic purity in the occupied territories. In the early stages of the operation, Einsatzgruppe A, under Adolf Eichmann, executed 29,000 people listed as Jews or mostly Jews in Latvia and Lithuania. In the Einsatzgruppe C report for September 1941, 50,000 executions are foreseen in Kiev. In five months in 1941, Einsatzkommando III commander, Karl Jger, reported killing 138,272, 34,464 of them were children. The Einsatzgruppen were death squads, their tools the rifle, the pistol and the machine gun. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen executed more than 2 million people between 1941 and 1945, including 1.3 million Jews. Drawing on translated memos, operational reports from the field as well as other primary and secondary sources, historian Gerry van Tonder provides a comprehensive look at one of the darkest periods of human history.

Download or read book Himmler s Nazi Concentration Camp Guards written by Ian Baxter and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2013-01-19 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A chilling study of the . . . recruitment, indoctrination and performance of those responsible for the guarding of concentration camp inmates.”—Inscale.org The conversion of human beings into murderers and individuals routinely carrying out appalling acts of cruelty are bound to be shocking. But it happened under the Third Reich on a massive scale. This book follows the development of concentration camps from the early beginnings in the 1930s (Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen etc.), through their establishment in the conquered territories of Poland and Czechoslovakia to the extermination camps (Dachau, Auschwitz). In parallel, it describes, using original source material, the behavior of the guards who became in numerous cases immune to the horrors around them. This is well borne out by the conduct of the guards during the Liberation process, which is also movingly described using numerous personal accounts of shocked Allied personnel. Of the 55,000 Nazi concentration camp guards, some 3,700 were women. The book studies their behavior with examples along with that of their male counterparts. “These are everyday pictures of sadistic murderers. Ian Baxter should be commended on this book. The concentration camps of the Second World War should never be pushed to the back of our minds. It happened and we should remember it so that it can never be allowed to happen again.”—WW2 Connection

Download or read book Hitler s Death Camps in Occupied Poland written by Ian Baxter and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-04-28 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers the six principal extermination camps in Nazi occupied Poland; a sobering reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. Nearly 80 years on, the concept and scale of the Nazis’ genocide program remains an indelible, nay almost unbelievable, stain on the human race. Yet it was a dreadful reality of which, as this graphic book demonstrates, all too much proof exists. Between 1941 and 1945 an estimated three and a half million Jews and an unknown number of others, including Soviet POWs and gypsies, perished in six camps built in Poland; Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdenak, Sobibor and Treblinka. Unpleasant as it may be, it does no harm for present generations to be reminded of man’s inhumanity to man, if only to ensure such atrocities will never be repeated. This book aims to do just this by tracing the history of the so called Final Solution and the building and operation of the Operation Reinhard camps built for the sole purpose of mass murder and genocide.

Download or read book Nazi Concentration Camp Overseers written by Ian Baxter and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nazis’ vast concentration camp network and, later, the ‘Final Solution’ programme made heavy demands on the SS whose responsibility it was. The use of ‘overseers’ minimised costs and enabled the camps to run with fewer SS personnel. As this well researched book describes, there were three principal groups of ‘helpers’: Sonderkommandos, Kapos and Trawniki. The Sonderkommandos’ duties included unloading Jews from trains, collecting their possessions and allocating work details. Under SS supervision, they also ran the gas chambers and crematoria. The Kapos oversaw the Sonderkommandos. Many were originally prisoner functionaries recruited from violent criminal gangs and had a well-deserved reputation for brutality. The third group, known as Trawniki or Trawnikimänner, were Central and Eastern European collaborators recruited from Russian POW camps. While some served in a military capacity, others played an instrumental role in the Holocaust programme, rounding up and transporting Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps. The graphic images and text of this Images of War series work demonstrate that the ‘overseer’ system was extensive and effective as its members competed without scruple to maintain the favour of their SS masters while pitting victim against victim.

Download or read book Himmler s Double written by David Isherwood and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hitler s Death s Head Division written by Rupert Butler and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 1990-12-31 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Formally published as The Curse of the Death Head, this book is the story of the infamous SS Totenkopf Division. The soldiers wore the sinister silver insignia of the Death's Head on their collars, and they were feared, hated and respected as one of the premier devisions on the Waffen-SS. In the early days of the war in Russia, the division covered itself in glory, but in defeat the men of the Totenkopf crashed to shame and ignominy, leaving behind a legacy of loathing unique in the annals of the battlefield

Download or read book Nazi Concentration Camp Commandants 1933 1945 written by Ian Baxter and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-11-30 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using many rare and unpublished images this book identifies and delves into the characters of the notorious men who were instrumental in one of the greatest crimes against humanity in World history.Through words and pictures the chilling truth emerges. In many respects these monsters were all too normal. Rudolf Hess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, was a family man and hospitable host and yet while there is no record of his committing acts of violence personally he presided over a regime that accounted for over a million deaths. Others such as Amon Goeth and Josef Kramer personally promoted violence and terror and took pleasure from ever more brutal practices. They were competitive in obtaining 'results'. While following orders from above they did not hesitate to use their own initiative in pursuit of their barbaric objectives.Every occupied country in Europe was touched by the 'Final Solution' and despite the capture, trials and punishment of these leading perpetrators the stain of man's inhumanity to man, woman and child remains ineradicable.Justice came too late for millions but the lessons learnt must never be forgotten and this book throws new light on the managers of the murderous Holocaust process.

Download or read book Death Dealer written by Rudolf Hoss and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By his own admission, SS Kommandant Rudolf Höss was history's greatest mass murderer, having personally supervised the extermination of approximately two million people, mostly Jews, at the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Death Dealer is the first complete translation of Höss's memoirs into English. These bone-chilling memoirs were written between October 1946 and April 1947. At the suggestion of Professor Sanislaw Batawia, a psychologist, and Professor Jan Shen, the prosecuting attorney for the Polish War Crimes Commission in Warsaw, Höss wrote a lengthy and detailed description of how the camp developed, his impressions of the various personalities with whom he dealt, and even the extermination of millions in the gas chambers. This written testimony is perhaps the most important document attesting to the Holocaust, because it is the only candid, detailed, and (for the most part) honest description of the Final Solution from a high-ranking SS officer intimately involved in carrying out the plans of Hitler and Himmler. With the cold objectivity of a common hit-man, Höss chronicles the discovery of the most effective poison gas, and the technical obstacles that often thwarted his aim to kill as efficiently as possible. Staring at the horror without reacting, Höss allowed conditions at Auschwitz to reduce human beings to walking skeletons - then he labelled them as subhumans fit only to die. Readers will witness Höss's shallow rationalizations as he tries to balance his deeds with his increasingly disturbed, yet always ineffectual, conscience.

Download or read book Auschwitz and Birkenau written by Ian Baxter and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Auschwitz and Birkenau were separate from each other,by about a 45 minute walk. Auschwitz was adapted to hold political prisoners in 1940 and evolved into a killing machine in 1941. Later that year a new site called Birkenau was found to extend the Auschwitz complex. Here a vast complex of buildings were constructed to hold initially Russian POWs and later Jews as a labour pool for the surrounding industries including IG Farben. Following the January 1943 Wannsee Conference, Birkenau evolved into a murder factory using makeshift houses which were adapted to kill Jews and Russian POWs. Later due to sheer volume Birkenau evolved into a mass killing machine using gas chambers and crematoria, while Auschwitz, which still held prisoners, became the administrative centre. The images show first Auschwitz main camp and then Birkenau and are carefully chosen to illustrate specific areas, like the WomenÕs Camp, Gypsy Camp, SS quarters, CommandantÕs House, railway disembarkation, the ÔsaunaÕ, disinfection area and the Crematoria. Maps covering Auschwitz and Birkenau explain the layout This book is shocking proof of the scale of the Holocaust.

Download or read book Hitler s Hangman written by Robert Gerwarth and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chilling biography of the head of Nazi Germany’s terror apparatus, a key player in the Third Reich whose full story has never before been told. Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the twentieth century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and leading planner of the "Final Solution," Heydrich played a central role in Hitler's Germany. He shouldered a major share of responsibility for some of the worst Nazi atrocities, and up to his assassination in Prague in 1942, he was widely seen as one of the most dangerous men in Nazi Germany. Yet Heydrich has received remarkably modest attention in the extensive literature of the Third Reich. Robert Gerwarth weaves together little-known stories of Heydrich's private life with his deeds as head of the Nazi Reich Security Main Office. Fully exploring Heydrich's progression from a privileged middle-class youth to a rapacious mass murderer, Gerwarth sheds new light on the complexity of Heydrich's adult character, his motivations, the incremental steps that led to unimaginable atrocities, and the consequences of his murderous efforts toward re-creating the entire ethnic makeup of Europe. “This admirable biography makes plausible what actually happened and makes human what we might prefer to dismiss as monstrous.”—Timothy Snyder, Wall Street Journal “[A] probing biography…. Gerwarth’s fine study shows in chilling detail how genocide emerged from the practicalities of implementing a demented belief system.”—Publishers Weekly “A thoroughly documented, scholarly, and eminently readable account of this mass murderer.”—The New Republic

Download or read book The Ghettos of Nazi Occupied Poland written by Ian Baxter and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pictorial history presents a vivid and harrowing exploration of Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland during WWII. Following the 1940 invasion of Poland, the Nazis established ghettos in cities and towns across the country with the initial aim of isolating the Jewish community. These closed sectors were referred to as Judischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden (Jewish Quarters). Drawing on a wealth of historical images, this volume shows the harsh and deteriorating conditions of daily life in these restricted areas. In reality, these ghettos were holding areas where Jews were kept before being transferred to concentration, extermination, and work camps. Aware of their imminent fate, which included the threat of family separation, enslavement, and death, underground resistance groups sprung up staged numerous uprisings which were brutally and callously suppressed. The Nazis’ ultimate aim was the liquidation of the ghettos and the extermination of their inhabitants in furtherance of The Final Solution. This may seem unthinkable today but, as this book graphically reveals, they worked to achieve their objective regardless of human suffering.

Download or read book Bloodlands written by Timothy Snyder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.