Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads (2009)

Testimony from witnesses, survivors and Nazis themselves reveals the truth about the mass executions carried out by the Third Reich's Einsatzgruppen.

Part 1: Mass Graves (June-August 1941)
This first episode provides context for when, how and why the mobile death squads, or EZG, were established.
June 1941. Nazi Germany invades the USSR. In the wake of the German armies which progressed without incident to the gates of Russia, the mobile killing commandos, the Einsatzgruppen, shared the territory to liquidate Jews and political opponents. In July, after the pogroms initiated by local nationalists causing several thousand victims, the decision for genocide was taken by Hitler. The EZG organized the mass murder of Jewish populations in the conquered territories, now targeting women and children. The massacres follow one another at a frantic pace.

Part 2: Judenfrei (September-December 1941)
In December 1941, after the EZG's intervention, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Baltic states are declared "Judenfrei": free of Jews.
In their task, the EZG are assisted by Baltic, Ukrainian, Belarusian auxiliaries, or Soviet prisoners who, to escape death, join the killing units. After the "cleansing" of Belarus, southern Ukraine, and the terrible massacre in Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were murdered in 2 days in the "Grandmother's Ravine," the Babi Yar, Karl Jager, an officer Nazi of the EZG A, informed Berlin, in December 1941, that the Baltic countries were henceforth "Judenfre?"; free of Jews.

Part 3: Funeral Pyres (1942-1943)
Faced with the advancing Soviet troops, Nazi Germany decides to have the bodies of death camp victims dug up and burned in graves.
The year 1942 will be the deadliest for Jews in the east. Methodically, Jewish communities disappeared one after the other in the conquered territories. While the destruction by gas of Western European Jews in death camps was ratified at Wansee on July 20, 42, the Soviet counterattack gained ground after the Battle of Stalingrad. Nazi Germany, which understands that it could lose the war, tasks the Einsatzgruppen with supervising the erasure of traces of the genocide in the east. This is the beginning of "Operation 1005." At the sites of the mass executions, Jewish slaves dig up and burn the bodies of the victims before being liquidated themselves. Their revolt took place everywhere until the Battle of Berlin, which sounded the death knell for Nazism.

Part 4: Time of Reckoning (1943-1947)
After being judged at the Nuremberg trials, the majority of those responsible for the murder of nearly 1.5 million Jews would walk free in the 1950s.
The time of reckoning comes. Soviet trials continued in the east, while in Nuremberg, in 1947, some leaders of the Nazi death commandos were tried. In the new context of the Cold War, to spare German public opinion from feeling unfair, death sentences were commuted to lighter sentences. Of the 24 EZG leaders tried at Nuremberg, only 4 were executed. Most of those responsible for the murder of nearly a million and a half Jews were released in the 1950s.