The task of killing the Jews of the east was assigned to special groups called “Einsatzgruppen.” These groups were under the command of SS-leader Reinhard Heydrich, a man who was deeply involved in planning the Holocaust, and whom Hitler once called “the man with the iron heart.” Heydrich’s assignment was to liquidate every Jew in the occupied territories. To the Einsatzgruppen, a Jew was anyone who had at least one Jewish grandparent. The Einsatzgruppen operated by using captured police documents, census records, or simply asking the villagers to identify Jews.
Often, the areas the Einsatzgruppen operated in had a long history of anti-semitism. And sometimes, the local populace was happy to do the Nazis’ job for them. As the Soviet Army retreated, spontaneous pograms erupted as people began attacking their Jewish neighbors. The Einsatzgruppen relied on these pograms, and even tried to instigate them if they didn’t happen on their own. Thousands of Jews were murdered by their neighbors and their houses looted in these outbreaks of violence. But the Einsatzgruppen quickly realized that they couldn’t rely on the pograms to kill their victims fast enough.
Instead, the Einsatzgruppen formed “mobile killing units.” These units moved in trucks from village to village, rounding up Jews, Roma, and the mentally disabled. These people were then taken to remote locations and forced to dig mass graves. The victims were then stripped of anything of value and lined up in front of the graves. Once their superiors gave the order, the Einsatzgruppen opened fire. In the first year of the invasion of Russia, these shootings were carried out at a frenzied pace. Hundreds of thousands of people were massacred as the Einsatzgruppen ruthlessly scoured the country for victims.
In spite of the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were killed in these mass shootings, the Nazis felt that the killing wasn’t being done fast enough. They estimated that only around 15% of the Jews in the occupied territories had been killed. This simply wasn’t enough for the Nazi leaders. And they had another problem with the shootings as well. The act of massacring hundreds of thousands of people with bullets was taking a psychological toll on the members of the Einsatzgruppen.
When forming the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis had made a special effort to pick men they thought would be able to handle the psychological burden of mass murder. Anyone who seemed to enjoy killing a little too much was quickly discharged, as was anyone who seemed to be motivated by stealing the possessions of the murdered. Sometimes, people who committed murders outside of the organized shootings were even prosecuted by the Nazi authorities. The SS saw the killings of Jews as a duty to their race. They were cleansing these territories of “subhumans” so that Germans could occupy them. They wanted their executioners to be strictly professional. And soon, they found a more “professional” method of mass execution.