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

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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.

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.

Rhodes is one of my favorite writers of non-fiction. His book The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the best book I have ever read on the subject. He has also written interesting books on disease and the psychology of murder. In fact, this book seems to have grown from his study of the work of Lonnie Athens, an American criminologist, who was the subject of Rhodes' last book, Why They Kill. Here Rhodes investigates the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the teams of killers in Hitler's Germany who would begin the slaughters that would become the Holocaust.

When most of us think of the Holocaust, we think of death camps like Auschwitz, the gas chambers and crematoria. What most people forget is that the earliest killings were done by groups of SS-Einsatzgruppen in the field. Literally millions of people were simply murdered through beatings, firing squads and other "basic" methods long before the construction of the first death camps. It was the effect of this "face-to-face" slaughter on the morale and morals of the men who carried it out that would lead to the more industrial, impersonal methods of the death camps in later years.

Rhodes reminds of something very important in this book: yes, the Holocaust was a horrible thing but it was conducted by human beings, not monsters. The Holocaust did not just suddenly appear as a particularly horrible idea. The development of the Holocaust was a process that can be traced and, possibly, understood. And Rhodes makes an excellent stab at trying to understand what happened. In the process, he examines the psychology of people like Heinrich Himmler and many of the other people who attempted to carry out the Final Solution. Plus, he gives a fresh look at an important part of history that gets swamped in our knowledge of the Holocaust. It is well worth the read.

Masters of Death is a raw and disturbing account of the mobile killing squads that made their insidious way through the occupied territories of the east during the early years of the war. Victims were Jews, partisans, communist officials, and anyone else who happened to get in the way.
I've read most books on nazis and the holocaust, noticing that many of them contain the same stories. Rhodes, however, seems to have uncovered rare eyewitness and perpetrator testimonies, documents, and other research. He does not give watered down versions of events; it's no holds barred in graphic detail. (The story of the infants and toddlers that were locked in that shack were the most difficult pages I've ever read).
Some critics do not like the way Rhodes tends to digress. He throws in his own theories of the nature of evil and violence, sometimes making the reader wonder if this is a book on psychology, philosophy, or the Einsatzgruppen.
These horribly evil men were not made into monsters overnight. The mindset was gradually formed over many years: the years following WW1, when Germans developed an intense hatred of Jews and Bolshevism; and during the early days of the concentration camp system within Germany in the 1930s, when the "Deaths Head" units underwent their brutalization phase. Prisoners then were mainly dissidents, criminals, and social "undesirables." No, there was no mass slaughter at this time, but torture and executions were routine.
There were truly repugnant figures here. Under Himmler, Globocnick seemed to be in charge. I've read about him in other books, and I can tell you that he was a beast in human form, along with Christian Wirth, who oversaw the euthanasia program and helped to set up the "Operation Reinhard" death camps. (Surprisingly, Wirth is never mentioned in this book). Frederich Jeckeln is another official that makes the stomach churn. I don't think his level of cruelty and sadism could be surpassed. (He was known for his "sardine" method of killing.)
The ironic thing is that the brains behind this senseless slaughter- Himmler and Heydrich- were wimps in real life and would never have been able to pull a trigger on anyone.
Members of the Einsatzgruppen were from all socioeconomic levels, and not all of them were callous brutes. Some of them were unable to cope with their grisly task. There are bizarre accounts of nervous breakdowns, suicides, and descents into insanity.
Definitely one of the most powerful and gripping books to come along in a long time.

Rhodes has written a memorial in print to the victims of the holocaust. Too often, histories of this subject devolve into numbers or catalogs of atrocities. Rhodes has been able to convey the humanity of the victims and give a searing sense of the inhumanity of the perpetrators. His use of personal accounts and documentary evidence is masterful and moved me deeply. His character studies of the perpetrators, particularly Himmler, are enlightening and chilling.

This book should be required reading.

The scale of death, terror, and utter macabre horror contain within the covers of this text document the actions of the SS Sonderkommandos and Einsatzgruppen as they rampaged through out the Eastern occupied territories implementing the first phase of Hitler's and Himmler's final solution. Mr. Rhodes has written a masterpiece that must have almost driven him insane to work on. This text will keep you awake at night and make you shudder and weep. The human feeling conveyed from the pages of this book are much more intense than "Hitler's willing executioners" and the social theory arguments tend to seem more complete but are not thoroughly defended or brought to a believable conclusion. The book ends rather weakly with a brief run down of the fates of the Einsatzgruppen leaders and a brief quote from a survivor of a "Jewish aktion". The social theory and the ending should not be used to judge the value of this book. Reading this book is incredibly hard and depressing; the only good feeling it evoked was pride for the veterans of the war against Germany for surely they were fighting against the darkest of evil. As a person of European (mostly German) heritage, I felt utter disbelief that human beings could have carried out the mass slaughters but the historical record is clear. Entire villages, cities, and countries were rendered "Judenfrei" in the personal, face to face, shooting executions conducted. Men, women, children, even diapered infants were all brutally exterminated, thousands at a time.
This book is essential to understanding the development of the concentration camp system from the actions of the death squads and the history of the Jewish Holocaust. It is a who's who of the beginnings of the Nazi extermination program and contains details that I had not read about previously ("Sardinenpackung" for one chilling example). It documents the impact of the mass murders on the killers who suffered mental breakdowns and other psychological traumas - proof in my mind that they knew what they were doing was illegal and morally indefensible. It also documents the participation of numerous auxiliary units - Romanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian etc. who aided and conducted murders on massive scales as well. The Holocaust may have been a German invention, but the participation and the guilt incorporated much of Europe as well. The social theory of brutalization explains a great deal of how the killers came to be conditioned to accept, participate and even enjoy the daily murders, it does not however satisfy every question that may be raised. I would propose that a total understanding of murder on this scale may never be understood by the civilized world, it simply lies beyond what is comprehensible.
This book damns the Einsatzgruppen with their own reports and letters home, including the infamous Jager report. Men, women, and children were all shot or dumped indiscriminately into killing pits through out Eastern Europe, murder on a massive scale became simply a logistics problem to be solved. Children were murdered in separate pits so that the adult corpses could be better arranged. Tens of thousands were shot in a single day, at a single site by a handful of executioners. The depth of the horror unleashed on the heals of Operation Barbarossa is inconceivable. The true value of this book is so that the future of millions of husbands, wives, grandparents, sons, and daughters should not have been lost in vain. Read this text and you will never be able forget.

This new book by Richard Rhodes is, in my opinion, a quite interesting attempt to exhaustively explore the terrible brutality of the S.S. Einsatzgruppen (Special Group) created under Heinrich Himmler's specific direction to carry out an loosely organized mass extermination of Eastern captive populations as the Wehrmacht pressed into Poland and the Soviet Union during the successive Eastern campaigns. I purposely have used the term "captive populations" to connote that it was a population much more inclusive of local residents, including communist collaborators, dissidents, gypsies, and other "undesirables", targeted for extinction rather than being limited strictly to Jews. It is, I believe, a demonstrable mistake to try to argue that the Third Reich was primarily interested in ridding itself of its Jewish population. Remember, the initial population of Jews so murdered were not deported German Jews, but rather indigenous Jews living in Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania, part of the captive populations. We do well to remember that the Nazis' stated purpose for conducting the entire Eastern campaign was to gain what Hitler often referred to as "Liebenstraum", or "living room" for future German expansion and colonization. Thus, the Third Reich intended from the onset of hostilities in one fashion or another to forcibly displace the native population through a combination of techniques, including extermination, sustained slave labor, and starvation.

Historical questions regarding the etiology of the resulting Nazi policy of extermination of European Jews revolve around a single question: was it Hitler's intent from the beginning to do so, or did the policy evolve from pragmatic and existential circumstance? The first line of argument, what is often called the "intentionalist"premise, is that as he stated in "Mien Kampf", the Fuhrer always intended to wipe out the Jewish peoples of Europe, and that his campaign proceeded, cautiously and tentatively at first, more due to political and logistical considerations than with anything else. The opposing argument, regarded to the "functional' premise, finds the genesis of the policy of systematic genocide of the Jews in the welter of events and circumstances that arose from the onset of the Eastern campaign as early in the fall of 1939 when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. This line of thought finds evidence in the Nazi's evolving efforts to employ ever more efficient and effective methodologies to deal with the captive populations of the East. Obviously, for either perspective to continue to have passionate adherants fifty years later indicates that both perspectives have considerable merit.

Having said this, I find the so-called "functional" argument more persuasive and more consistent with the bulk of historical record. This perspective is not an fact attempt to attempt to argue that Hitler had no premeditation or predisposition regarding the eventual fate of European Jews and other targeted populations. Rather, it is more an argument as to how the Third Reich planned to capitalize best on the evolving existential circumstances to furhter its own immediate goals and objectives; as to whether it is more useful for the regime to temporarily enslave the subject population and work them to death, or to simply kill them quickly and dispose of them. What the historical record seems to show is that Hitler had given local area political subordinates considerable leeway in managing the dislocation process, especially in the first few months of occupation of Poland. It was the circumstances that arose and the difficulties associated with marshalling sufficient resources to feed, house, and surveil the indigenous captive populations that led to many of the initial efforts at systematic extermination. Otherwise, situations like those that led to the establishment, management, and horrors associated with the Warsaw Ghetto would never have come to pass.

All that said, the book does indeed shed considerable light and detail at the devil that was the SS Einsatzgruppen. Sparing no grisly detail, Rhodes takes the reader on a horrifying busman's tour of what Hannah Arendt once described as the banality of evil. For those of us who have read widely regarding the details of the Holocaust, it is precisely this question of how seemingly civilized, educated, and humane individuals could have possibly participated in such activities. It is mind-boggling to imagine the murderous disregard many who did indeed actively engage in such crimes had toward the victims, both while they were perpetrating the murders as well as in retrospect. Many interviewed later voiced no serious qualms about having done so, and seemed to show little collective sense of shame or guilt over such brutal and wanton serial acts of mass murder. In fact, even the SS was taken aback by how little ill effect was demonstrated by the members of Einsatzgruppen, having expected many more psychiatric casualties than were noted.

This is an absorbing book, one that very carefully details and describes the horror that was put in place in order to "vacate" the conquered territories for German colonization. One reels at the revelations of how members of the group, as well as the Wehrmacht in general, was systematically conditioned to generally view all Eastern Europeans as less than human, as a subspecies deserving no humane treatment. And the savage treatment dealt out was exactly what was intended, no consideration, no quarter, and no mercy. Eventually, for this they received the whirlwind, for the invading Soviet army was equally as brutal in their treatment of Germans as they eventually swept like a nightmare unleashed all the way into Berlin. This is a book I can highly recommend, but one so serious and so frank in its details that you will likely not "enjoy" reading it.

The shelves of the literature on the Holocaust have for too long been without a volume describing the men and the operations of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile murder squads that were unleashed upon Europe in the wake of the German invasion of Poland and, later, the Soviet Union. Richard Rhodes undertook to write such a book and the result is "Masters of Death". It is not an easy book to read, and there is no reason that it should be. It is a chronicle of stunning, almost mind-numbing, cruelty and death. Significantly, and perhaps most importantly, Rhodes attempts to create a history that reaches beyond the impersonal body count of victims with which so many books on subjects such as this are concerned. Rhodes examines the perpetrators themselves, the men who served in these killing squads and those who led them. In doing so he delves into theories that have been created to account for violent behavior and he strives to apply them to these uniformed killers. It seems that he does not readily accept that many of them were, as Professor Christopher Browning described them,"Ordinary Men". I believe that Rhodes fell short of the mark here. Himmler seems to me portrayed as little more than a two-dimensional desk killer, and despite the application of behavioral theories and the examination of social and political backrounds, I completed this book still convinced that Professor Browning was, frighteningly, much closer to the truth in his characterization of the SS and Police personnel who filled out the ranks of the Einsatzgruppen. But neither this book nor Browning's compelling "Ordinary Men" should stand alone at this point. They should be read together, for in placing them side by side we have a more complete picture than we have ever had before of a time when there was an indescribable darkness upon the earth, a darkness in mens' hearts, a darkness that was spread across the sky by funeral pyres created of human beings stacked like cordwood.

'Masters of Death' by Richard Rhodes is the disturbing account of the SS-Einsatzgruppen death squads that roamed the occupied territories of the eastern front of WW2. They were tasked with the liquidation of all Jews, as well as other enemies of the Third Reich such as partisans, gypsies, and communists. These death squads preceded the death camps that usually come to mind when speaking of the holocaust. Before the gas chambers and crematoriums, victims were simply rounded up, shot, and thrown into mass graves. Rhodes concludes that over a million men, women, and children were murdered in this way between 1941 and 1943. These events are recounted in graphic detail, capturing the experiences from the viewpoint of the victims, as well as the perpetrators.

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I found Rhodes' use of the "violent socialization" theory to be compelling. He describes this four-stage development of the violent individual, and convincingly argues how this process can be essentially "industrialized" and used to turn ordinary men into murderers. He uses this theory as a counter to the "eliminationist anti-semitism" theory espoused by such authors as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. This theory essentially argues that because anti-semitism was so ingrained into German culture, that it was only a matter of time before something like the holocaust happened, and that the average German readily accepted these mass murders. Rhodes refutes this theory as simplistic, and reminds the reader that this was not your ordinary anti-semitism that manifested itself in the extermination of millions.

Overall, I found this book to be very useful and enjoyable-inasmuch as a book on such a horrific topic can be-and although it is a bit redundant at times, I think it is a valuable contribution to Holocaust and/or Third Reich studies. With that said, the subject matter is unsettling, and it really brings home the absolute horror and criminality that this regime represented. Four stars for 'Masters of Death.'

Richard Rhodes has written a fresh reconsideration of one of the worst episodes in human history: the story of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile German SS units that roamed eastern Furope in 1941 and 1942 slaughtering defenseless Jews and Slavs. Rhodes is a skillful writer and he makes this difficult material bearable and even compulsively readable. He relies on survivor testimony and confessions of perpetrators to paint an extrordinarily vivid picture of the most terrible things that people can do to each other. He makes individuals come alive again, such as Heinrich Himmler, the Reichfuhrer-SS, a "rigid, fussy pervert" who by the end of the war was collecting furniture and bookbindings made from the flesh and bones of his victims. I have always been suspicious of labeling Nazi killers as mechanically banal, and Rhodes confirms many of them weren't. As a result of the things they did, many of them became alcoholics, committed suicide or were carted off to mental hospitals. It's good to know [those individuals] suffered spiritual and psychological consequences for their acts. They knew what they were doing was evil, even as they proclaimed its righteousness. Even Himmler had a wretched emotional life, and had crippling pychosomatic stomach pain. The experience of the Einsatzgruppen was so oulandishly monstrous that it led the National Socialist leadership to develop killing methods that were more manageable for the killers--that is the extermination camps such as Auschwitz. (Small comfort for the murdered.) This book is suffused with a strongly moral point of view. Rhodes relies on a theory of "violent socialization" to explain how "ordinary men" could commit such atrocities. They weren't so ordinary; they had gone through a process of brutalization, by training or life experience, that prepared them for dealing out mass death. Rhodes convincingly demonstrates how the vast massacre of World War I prepared the way for the even greater hecatomb of World War II. But the brutalization process isn't determined: one has to *choose* to return evil for evil, to strike back at the world with your own brutality. In that sense, this is a hopeful book: despite how the world treats us, we don't have to become monsters, as the exemplary lives of many of the survivors Rhodes got to know bear out.