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Andrew Harris

Mr. Neuburger

English Composition 101

11 March 2011

Holocaust Research Paper

Extermination Methods

Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) were squads generally composed of German SS

and police personnel that would round up innocent groups of people packing them into train cars.

When the trains would finally arrive at these concentration camps German SS would order them

to immediately form lines. Right away Jews went through a selection process. The German SS

would point each individual Jew to go left or to the right. Little did the Jews know that this

would determine life or death. The healthy were immediately forced to labor and the weak were

chose to die. ³These victims included Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and officials of the Soviet state and

the Soviet Communist Party. The Einsatzgruppen also murdered thousands of residents of

institutions for the mentally and physically disabled.´ (Mobile Killing Squads) Eventually the

Nazi¶s came up with ³The Final Solution.´ This act ordered the extermination of all European

Jews. This was comprised of mass shootings, gas vans, gas chambers, and crematoriums.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM.org) explains the first

extermination method was mass shootings. Einsatzgruppen had many tasks with the heaviest one

being the murder of those perceived to be racially inferior people found behind enemy lines in

the Soviet Union. During the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 the Einsatzgruppen

often worked off civilian and police support to help carried out mass murder operations. Within

these methods the deportation of Jews from their own towns and ghettos directly to killing
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centers were later implemented. Einsatzgruppen would travel to home communities and

massacre Jews. The German army supplied the Einsatzgruppen with everything needed from

supplies, transportation, housing and occasionally manpower in the form of units to guard and

take prisoners. (Mobile Killing Squads) ³Often with the help of local informants and interpreters,

Jews in a given locality were identified and taken to collection points. Thereafter they were

marched and transported by trucks to the execution sites where trenches had been prepared.´

(Mobile Killing Squads)In some cases Einsatzgruppen made their victims dig their own graves.

Before shooting men, women, and children they ordered all their valuables and clothing.

Shooting was the most common form of extermination used by Einsatzgruppen.

Furthermore, USHMM describes by the summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler decided the

ordering of mass shootings were hard on his soldiers¶ moral. This eventually led to the new,

more efficient way of mass murdering people. The result of this was a gas van where the exhaust

pipe was rigged to enter the back of the box truck where Jews were grouped. This released

carbon monoxide into the van slowly killing all of them. Gas vans with developed around the

period of late fall and were eventually more utilized along with the mass shootings.

Einsatzgruppen were made up of four battalions. Each group controlled a particular section

spanning throughout Europe and some in parts of Asia. Famously in western Ukraine

Einsatzgruppe units 4a managed to massacre 33,771 Kiev Jewish people in only two days. Even

though every mission was completed this was still an inefficient way of killing. While

Einsatzgruppen were occupying areas throughout Europe and Asia, the German authorities were

back home beginning construction of special stationary gassing facilities. These facilities were

set up for one reason and one reason only, to kill mass amounts of Jewish people in the most

efficient way possible.

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In addition the USHMM explains how, unlike concentration camps as far as labor

centers, gassing facilities or ³extermination camps´ were primary built strictly for the murder of

innocent Jews. German SS and police managed to murder 2,700,000 people. ³In 1942 the

Generalgouvernement (a territory in the interior of occupied Poland), the Nazis opened Belzec,

Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers (known collectively as operation Reinhard camps) to

systematically murder the Jews of Poland.´ (Killing Centers) In these centers SS killed

approximately 1,526,500 people between March 1942 and November of 1943. Almost

immediately deportees were gassed after arriving in these camps. A small amount were

experimented on by SS doctors who performed grisly surgeries such as castration, sterilization,

and removal of live fetuses. They also performed organ transplants. Auschwits-Birkenau was the

largest facility by 1943 with four gas chambers using Zyklon B poison gas. At the extent of the

deportations in this particular camp up to 6,000 Jews were gassed each day in Poland. ³Over a

million Jews and ten thousands Roma, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war were killing by

November of 1944.´ (Killing Centers) The SS believed these gassing operations to be top secret,

so to dispose of all the bodies they put all the lifeless bodies in crematoriums to erase all traces

of evidence. These facilities were camouflaged to hide the murder of millions.

Millions of Jewish and other innocent people were violently murdered for nearly a

decade. They were killed in many different ways by the same group of people. There was no

reason for the mass killings of the innocent people, it just happened. The Germans did not care

who it was because it happened to men, women, children, and the elderly. The Jews were killed

by shootings, gas chambers, gas vans and even crematoriums.

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Work Cited

"Einsatzgruppen (Mobile Killing Units)." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web. 11

May 2011.

"Killing Centers: An Overview." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web. 11 May

2011.

"Killing People Through Gas In Extermination and Concentration Camps." Jewish Virtual

Library - Homepage. Web. 11 May 2011.