Customer Reviews

Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941-1943

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MESSAGES OF MURDER is a terse, scholarly study of the Nazi "Special Action Groups" (Einsatzgruppen) which operated in Russia from 1941 - 1943. These four small paramilitary units, composed primarily of German policemen, entered the USSR behind the invading German armies in 1941 with the aim of ripping the communist system out by its roots -- executing without trial anyone with any trace of political responsibility -- Commissars, NKVD agents, mayors, bureacrats, and so on.
As author Ronald Headland relates, the Nazis had employed a similar system in Poland in 1939 - 1940, drawing up an enormous death list of civic leaders, university professors, industrialists, clergymen, politically active nationalists, and aristocrats and systematically exterminating them in the hopes that this would prevent the growth of a Polish resistance movement, and they had hopes that a similar campaign in Russia would yield similar results.

As it happened, however, the Einsatgruppen's principal victims in Russia were Jews, who by National Socialist definition were "bacilli of the disease of communism" and therefore, a kind of informal commissar. Several hundred thousand men, women and children were thus shot summarily, either by the Germans or by volunteers recruited from the local civilian populations. Headland uses reams of Einsatzkommando documents to relay the extremely businesslike attitude of the executioners as they travelled from town to town like a murderous carnival, leaving mass graves in their wake, some numbering as many as 30,000 victims.

Headland's book packs a great deal of information into a relatively small number of pages -- for someone with such a modest historical background, he offers what may be the best examination of the huge ultracomplex German police system I've ever read, showing how Himmler absorbed the entire police apparatus of Germany into the SS, reorganized it, and systematically employed it as an extralegal killing machine. Headland doesn't dawdle on any one aspect of the Einsatzgruppen's work, but provdes a series of brief chapters outlining their background, organization, ideology and methodology -- and most importantly, their meticulous, cold-blooded record-keeping.

MESSAGES is obviously not a light read, and it is out of print and hard to find, but for anyone who wants a clearer picture of how sincerely the Nazis believed the Jews to be the guiding force behind communism, and the
cold-blooded thoroughness with which they attempted to exterminate its "ideological standard-bearers", it is an important if not vital work.

I was surprised by this book. It is far more, and far better than what the title would suggest. What I was expecting was a dry review of the imfamous "Einsatzgruppen Reports." Instead what I got was an overview, for the period mentioned, of the genocidal activities of the German security service in the east.

It has probably the best description I have ever read of how the Germans reported their activities, including the flow of communications, in the east. It does use the "Einsatzgruppen Reports" as a framework upon which the author uses to describe the process of killing and then reporting it. How the information was edited due to political rivalries was especially interesting. It never occured to me the political role Muller (Gestapo) played as the primary editor. Also, the author describe the other reports, and then explains why the numbers differed.

What was even better was the price. For what is essentially a niche subject, this book is reasonably priced. It was well written and thought out. I recommend it.