Task force reports

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The so-called " Jäger Report " of December 1, 1941, p. 1 of 9.

As Einsatzgruppen messages reports and messages are the Einsatzgruppen those issued by their commanders from 1941 to 1943 from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union to the Reich Security Main Office were issued (RSHA). The reports were edited in the RSHA and passed on at regular intervals as reports within the RSHA and to high officials in the NSDAP , the Wehrmacht and the Reich government . The task force reports were used for the legal processing of Nazi crimes and are still an important source for research into the Holocaust and war crimes in the occupied Soviet Union.

Assignment

The term "Einsatzgruppen reports" refers to the following series of reports and documents:

  • USSR event reports , 195 of which occurred between June 1941 and April 1942. Except for one report, all of them were retained.
  • Activity and situation reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD in the USSR , which were submitted in the same period as the USSR incident reports , but at longer intervals. These reports are of a more general nature and often deal with the same acts as the incident reports.
  • Reports from the occupied eastern territories , which replaced the USSR event reports as regular reports. Compared to the USSR event reports, these reports contain less direct statements about the murder of the Jews, but more details about the fight against partisans.
Appendix to the second report from Stahlecker to Heydrich dated January 31, 1942.

These reports were reported to the RSHA in the period from June 1941 to May 1943 by the staff of the Einsatzgruppen by radio and courier in Berlin . They contained detailed information on the numbers of murdered Jews and other Soviet citizens, on crime scenes and the units involved. The reports were kept secret; most of them were marked “ Secret Reichssache ”. Two-digit numbers of them were copied and then passed on in numbered copies. The distribution included recipients in offices of the RSHA as well as in high offices in the NSDAP, Reich government and the military. Even in the Einsatzgruppen, the number of people with access to these reports and their transmission was limited, so in Einsatzgruppe D only three officers and one radio operator had access to their own reports.

Find and transmission (after 1945)

Destroyed Gestapo headquarters (June 1949), location of the Einsatzgruppen reports

The American unit 6889th BDC ( Berlin Document Center ) secured files from the Reich and Nazi authorities in Berlin from 1945 onwards on the orders of General Lucius D. Clay . The main task was to provide the four-power administration with the necessary administrative documents. The focus on the documentation and prosecution of Nazi crimes only developed gradually with the submission of administrative documents to bizonal and then German authorities. The 6889th BDC thus formed the origin of the Berlin Document Center . On September 3, 1945, the 6889th BDC seized two tons of documents on the fourth floor of the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin (today the Topography of Terror ). The documents contained, among other things, 578 files from the holdings of the RSHA and the Gestapo. Twelve of the files (No. E316 and E325 – E335) contained an almost complete set of the incident reports from the USSR and the reports from the occupied eastern territories .

From then on, these Einsatzgruppen reports were in the possession of the Americans, but they weren't discovered until a year later: at the end of 1945 , according to estimates, more than 1,600 tons of documents were in various locations of the Document Center units in the American zone The Berlin BDC alone had eight to nine million seized documents from Benjamin Ferencz in custody. The review of the files was slow. Therefore, this part of the Einsatzgruppen reports of the prosecution in the Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals was not yet known and there was no evidence there. Some other Einsatzgruppen reports had been captured by the Soviets and were used against the main war criminals in the Nuremberg trial.

literature

  • Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10. , Vol. 4: United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al. (Case 9: “Einsatzgruppen Case”). US Government Printing Office, District of Columbia 1950. (Volume 4 of the 15-volume “Green Series” on the Nuremberg successor trials. The volume contains, among other things, the indictment, judgment and excerpts from the trial documents.)
  • The process documents are in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); the record group numbers relevant to the process are 94, 153, 238, 260, 319, 338 and 446. Essential process documents were published in the form of three microfilm series:
    • Records of the United States Nuernberg War Crimes Trials, United States of America v. Otto Ohlendorf et al. (Case 9) . NARA, Washington 1973. (National Archives Microfilm Publication M895, 38 rolls, table of contents and finding aid by the editor John Mendelsohn , Washington 1978.)
  • Hilary Earl: The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-45608-1 . ( Review on H-Soz-u-Kult.)
  • Ronald Headland: Messages of Murder: a Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941-1943. 2nd Edition. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Rutherford (NJ) 2000, ISBN 0-8386-3418-4 .
  • Peter Klein (ed.): The task forces in the occupied Soviet Union 1941/42. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-89468-200-0 . (Volume 6 of the publications of the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Education Center .)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Ronald Headland: Messages of Murder , 2nd edition. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Rutherford (NJ) 2000, pp. 12-15.
  2. ^ A b c Ronald Headland: Messages of Murder , 2nd edition. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Rutherford (NJ) 2000, p. 13.
  3. ^ Walter Stahlecker: Einsatzgruppe A - General report on October 15, 1941. (PDF retrieved from the Library of Congress) In: Vol. XXXVII, p. 677 ff. Trial of the Major War Criminals before The International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, November 14 - October 1, 1946, 1949, accessed May 19, 2020 . ( Excerpt ( memento from June 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) in English on the website of the University of the West of England in Bristol.)
    Second report by Franz Stahlecker on the actions of Einsatzgruppe A for the period from October 16, 1941 to March 31 January 1942, printed as doc. 2273-PS in IMT: The Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals ... fotomech. Reprint Munich 1989, vol. 30, ISBN 3-7735-2523-0 , p. 77.
  4. ↑ Karl Jäger leader of the Einsatzkommando 3, to the commander of the security police and the SD of December 1, 1941, about the "executions" carried out in the EK 3 area up to December 1, 1941 ( Jäger report as scan and transcription. )
  5. ↑ Ronald Headland: Messages of Murder , 2nd edition. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Rutherford (NJ) 2000, pp. 46-47.
  6. ↑ According to Heinz Schubert's statement, only their commander Otto Ohlendorf , his deputy Seibert and the radio operator Fritsch had access to their own Einsatzgruppen radio messages in Einsatzgruppe D. Schubert himself, von Ohlendorf's adjutant, received the reports for filing, although the number of victims was omitted from the reports. These numbers were handwritten by Ohlendorf or Seibert before the courier dispatch.
    Records of the United States Nuremberg War Crimes Trials , Vol. 4. US Government Printing Office, District of Columbia 1950, p. 98 Verhör Schubert .
  7. ↑ Astrid M. Eckert: Battle for the files: the Western Allies and the return of German archives after the Second World War . Steiner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-515-08554-8 , pp. 68-69.
  8. ^ Hilary Earl: The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial . Cambridge 2009, SS 75-79.
  9. ↑ IMT: The Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals ... , fotomech. Reprint Munich 1989, Vol. XX, p. 228 / Vol. XXXIII, pp. 287-296.