Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (Paperback)

~ (Author) "In the spring of 1941 a police academy in Pretzsch, a town on the Elbe River about fifty miles southwest of Berlin, became the site..." (more)
Key Phrases: violent socialization, violent coaching, killing pits, Soviet Union, Order Police, Babi Yar (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Masters of Death is Richard Rhodes's chronological account of the Third Reich's Einsatzgruppen (a hand-picked task force) and its death work--the executions of 1.5 million people, Jews and non-Jews--in Russia and Eastern Europe from 1941 through 1943. Rhodes sees these operations (the victims were, almost exclusively, shot) as a ghastly prelude to the subsequent (and much more written-about) horrors of the death camps. In chilling--and occasionally excessive--detail, Rhodes describes the killings and the reasons behind the Reich's cautious, rather than precipitous, escalation of the same: the military's "concern for German and world opinion"; the need to improve methodology; and finally, the need to "condition" the troops, thereby avoiding "disabling trauma." Rhodes makes good use of firsthand accounts and outlines the effects the larger war (Pearl Harbor; the failure to defeat Britain) had on Hitler's attempted obliteration of European Jewry. His chapters on the nature of evil seem hurried and not particularly fresh. --H. O'Billovich --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

This is not for the squeamish. Rhodes, a Pulitzer winner for The Making of the Atomic Bomb, has pulled together a mountain of research on the mass murders of Jews perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen special task forces organized by the SS commanders Himmler and Heydrich before the gruesome death camps industrialized the Final Solution. The catalogue of horrors, drawn not only from postwar memoirs and interrogations but also from the Nazi fanaticism for statistical detail, is profoundly appalling, even revolting: some of the malefic perpetrators were so sickened by the slaughter that Himmler set up mental hospitals and rest camps for the insufficiently sadistic. By January 1942, when the Wannsee Conference implicitly authorized the death camps, more than a million Jews crowded the killing pits, some of them later torched to conceal the massacres. Relatively few in the Nazi command structure would pay for their crimes. John J. McCloy, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, Rhodes reminds us, reduced 10 of 14 death sentences in U.S. war-crimes trials, and by 1958 all surviving Einsatzgruppen defendants had been freed. German courts were also lenient. But he also suggests that genocide is new only as a word in the dictionary: "The Final Solution...was intended to be only the first phase of a vast, megalomaniacal project of privation, enslavement, mass murder and colonization modeled on the historic colonization of North and South America and on nineteenth-century imperialism but modernized with pseudoscientific theories of eugenic restoration." Thus Rhodes holds the mirror up. 16 pages of photos and six maps not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (August 12, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375708227
• ISBN-13: 978-0375708220
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #20,405 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

88 of 96 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Read It Carefully, July 19, 2002

By	"mythbreaker" (Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (Hardcover)

Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes recounts the terrible history of the Einsatzgruppen from 1941 to 1943. At a time in which popular thinking about the Holocaust has been essentially reduced to, and sanitized as, the notion that Germans committed atrocities and approximately 6 million people died, Rhodes' book replaces faceless statistics with names, events, and places. Through the extensive use of first-person accounts by perpetrators and surviving victims, the book reflects the absolute horror and depravity of the many mass murders, which also seems to have been lost or forgotten in the popular imagination. One of the more astonishing parts of the book are excerpts of letters sent by an SS man to his family in which he alludes to his activities while taking the tone of a devoted father and husband. The book yet again dispels the notion that the Germans through the SS organization acted alone in perpetrating these crimes. Masters of Death is an awful read due to the content -- the text is easy on the eye, but brutal to the imagination. It leaves a haunting impression and could possibly give the reader nightmares. It is an important work because it focuses on, and brings attention to, a part of the Holocaust which is mostly overshadowed in Holocaust literature by a concentration on the activities in the death camps.

However, the work contains fatal flaws which the author could have avoided. One factual error is the statement that President Roosevelt declared war on Japan, Germany, and Italy, on December 11, 1941, and that Hitler responded by declaring war later the same day. The historical record indicates that Roosevelt declared war on Japan on December 8. He declared war on Germany and Italy on December 11 in response to declarations by Germany and Italy earlier that day. Rhodes also uses two excerpts from the alleged autobiography "The Black March" by Peter Neumann. Unfortunately, as I understand it, Neumann's book was long ago revealed to be a fake -- the name is a pseudonym and the author never served in military or SS. These are perhaps minor points, but one is left to wonder about the author's facts and assertions regarding shadowy and controversial matters when he does not seem to be careful about less controversial issues that are easily researched.

Rhodes also expends considerable ink to present Lonnie Athen's "violent socialization" model in an effort to explain the violent and barbaric acts of the perpetrators. In the course of the book, Rhodes fails to demonstrate the validity of the model. The best he can obtain is the ridiculous assertion that the perpetrators acted as they did because of disciplinary brutalization as children and that the victims did not generally resist because European Jews brutalized their children less than Gentiles. Rhodes also occasionally inserted what seem to be personal or sarcastic comments which detracted from the flow of the text and the presentation of information.

The latter part of the history felt rushed with a seemingly abrupt ending. This reviewer would have liked to seen more material on the SS's efforts to cover the crimes and the early efforts on the part of the Allies to discover the truth. Rhodes also does a good job of implicating various elements of the German military, police, and intelligence, agencies in the crimes of the Einsatzgruppen. He made numerous references to the role played by the Waffen SS. There is a persistent , and seemingly expanding modern trend, to present the Waffen SS as an elite band of warriors untainted by atrocities or war crimes. I applaud Rhodes' references on this score, but I would have liked to have seen more information regarding specific Waffen SS units and the number and identities of Waffen SS personnel involved in the crimes. Specificity of facts is to the deniers as direct sunlight is to mold.

I recommend that one read this book , not for the author's weak theories and observations, but rather for the story, for the brutal descriptions, and for understanding the calculated nature of the murder process. Read the book with a critical eye, and do not leave it as the first and last word on the subject. Use it as a stepping stone to other works regarding this topic. Most of all, read it to remember.

51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Horror, July 28, 2002

By	Brian D. Rubendall (Oakton, VA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (Hardcover)

Warning: Richard Rhodes's "Masters of Death" is one of the most horrific books you're ever likely to read. It details very completely the history of the roving death squads who followed Adolf Hitler's armies into the conquered territories of the Soviet Union and unleashed the opening salvos of what would later become known as The Holocaust. Many people today think of The Holocaust in terms of Auschwitz and the other death camps. What tends to be forgotten is that the Eisatzgruppen units that started the mass killings of Jews racked up a death toll at least as high as those of the camps. And in most instances, the murders by these minions were even less humane, if that's possible.

Rhodes, a fine writer and first rate historian, pulls no punches. Wherever possible, he uses the first hand accounts of both the survivors and the perpetrators to tell his gruesome story. The ghastly pictures that accompany the book only begin to hint and the true horror of the events described. Along the way, Rhodes explores the psychology of the murderers, particularly that of both Hitler and of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, the man who allowed his whole personality to be subjugated to the Fuhrer. Rhodes also provides enough of the history and ideology of Nazi Germany to set the proper context.

At just under three hundred pages of text, the book makes its point concisely. Lest the reader think that what happened has been confined to the dustbin of history, Rhodes points out that Einsatzgruppen methods were recently resurrected by the death squads in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Overall, an incredibly powerful and important book that serves as a grim reminder of the darker side of human nature.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Horrific Example of Mass Murder, December 1, 2002

By	Fred M. Blum (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (Hardcover)

Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes is one of the most difficult and disturbing books that I have ever read. It tells the story of the creation of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the formations that were created by Himmler to kill the Jews, Poles and Russians that had the misfortune to fall behind the German lines. This is book about more than the mere numbers of the dead, although the numbers themselves are horrific. What makes the book so upsetting is the description of the way in which the deaths took place.

Rhodes is not writing about civilians who were killed as part of a military exercise. The SS-Einsatzgruppen were not military fighting formations; rather, they were tasked with the job of eliminating all Jews and other undesirables from lands occupied by the Nazi's. The descriptions include thousands of men, women and children lined up like in a grocery line and walked into pits to lie down one next to another where they were shot. They also include citizens of countries that were occupied who used the opportunity to round up Jewish citizens and kill them through the use of sledge hammers. These are just two examples, but they are representative of the dozens that are described by Rhodes. As one might tell, this is not bedtime reading.

Rhodes does an excellent job in describing the formation of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, as well as the men who formed it. What appears to be the underlying premise of the book is how could the men who carried out these terrible crimes have done so and kept even some semblance of sanity. Rhodes describes the heavy drinking and other diversions used as well as the peer pressure used to extract conformance. In this case conformance meant systematic close up murder of thousands. The basic tenant is that these men were habituated through a deliberate process. However, this explanation goes only so far. The acts of the SS-Einsatzgruppen were not an isolated incident such as the barbarity of the Japanese sacking of Nanking (See The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang), but a concerted, continuos effort over several years where men were forced to participate in the slaughter of innocent men, women and children head-on.

Rhodes explanation for the acts of the SS-Einsatzgruppen is left hallow. At times the barbarity of the acts overwhelms an attempt to explain the whys. And for that matter the whys may seem irrelevant. But Rhodes attempts to explain the whys and the hows is at a minimum a noble efforts. After finishing the book one does not have the answer, but that does not mitigate against the fact that this is a book worthy of reading.