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Mobile Killing Squads
Mobile Killing Squads
  • Looking through the belongings of massacred Jews

    Soldiers from unidentified units of Einsatzgruppe C look through the possessions of Jews massacred at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev. Soviet Union, September 29–October 1, 1941.

  • Rochelle Blackman Slivka describes the formation of the Vilna ghetto

    The Germans occupied Vilna in June 1941. In October, Rochelle and her family were confined to the Vilna ghetto, where her mother died. Her father, a Jewish council member, was killed in a camp in Estonia. When the ghetto was liquidated in 1943, Rochelle and her sister were deported--first to the Kaiserwald camp in Latvia and later to Stutthof, near Danzig. In 1945, on the sixth week of a death march that forced the sisters to protect their bare feet with rags, the Soviet army liberated them.

  • Steven Springfield describes conditions in the Stutthof concentration camp

    The Germans occupied Riga in 1941, and confined the Jews to a ghetto. In late 1941, at least 25,000 Jews from the ghetto were massacred at the Rumbula forest, near Riga. Steven and his brother were sent to a small ghetto for able-bodied men. In 1943 Steven was deported to the Kaiserwald camp and sent to a nearby work camp. In 1944 he was transferred to Stutthof and forced to work in a shipbuilding firm. In 1945, Steven and his brother survived a death march and were liberated by Soviet forces.

  • Aaron Lejzerowicz

    Aaron was one of four children born to a Jewish family in the northeastern Polish town of Zdzieciol. His father was a shoemaker and, along with a business partner, he also ran a shoe store in the town. Aaron attended a private Jewish school, where he studied the Polish language and history as well as Jewish history and Hebrew.

    1933-39: On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Three weeks later, Poland was partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union [under the German-Soviet Pact]. Aaron and his family felt lucky. Zdzieciol was in the eastern part occupied by the Soviets so they didn't see any Germans in 1939. His family heard stories about the German treatment of Jews and were elated to see the Soviets. His father advised his children that two trades needed during war were tailoring and shoemaking.

    1940-44: In June 1941 Germany invaded the USSR. In early 1942 the Germans set up a ghetto in Zdzieciol, and on August 6 decided to liquidate it. At 4 a.m., his family heard people running; Germans and drunk Lithuanians surrounded the town. Aaron and his family were marched to a cemetery and ordered to lie face down. Professions were called out: "Carpenters! Blacksmiths!" When shoemakers were called, Aaron raised his hand, never lifting his head. A soldier hit him with a rifle and ordered him up. He was among those deported to a work camp. The rest were shot.

    Later, Aaron escaped and joined the Soviet partisans. Conscripted into the Soviet army in July 1944, he was in Germany when the war ended. He immigrated to the United States in 1947.

After the German army invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a new stage in the Holocaust began. Under cover of war and confident of victory, the Germans turned from the forced emigration and imprisonment of Jews to mass murder. Einsatzgruppen, often referred to as “mobile killing squads,” were made up of Nazi (SS) units and police. They moved with speed on the heels of the advancing German army. Their job was to kill any Jews they could find in the occupied Soviet territory, along with other tasks. Some residents of the occupied regions, mostly Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, aided these German mobile killing squads by serving as auxiliary police.

The mobile killing units acted swiftly, taking the Jewish population by surprise. The killers entered a town or city and rounded up all Jewish men, women, and children. They also took away many Communist party leaders and Roma (Gypsies). Victims were forced to surrender any valuables and remove their clothing, which was later sent for use in Germany or distributed to local collaborators. Then the killing squad members marched their victims to open fields, forests, and ravines on the outskirts of conquered towns and cities. There they shot them or gassed them in gas vans and dumped the bodies into mass graves.

On September 21, 1941, the eve of the Jewish New Year, a mobile killing squad entered Eyshishok (Ejszyszki in Polish), a small town in what is now Lithuania. The killing squad members forced 4,000 Jews from the town and the surrounding region into the synagogue and the two batei midrash (places designated for Torah study), where they were held for at least three days without food or water. Then, in two days of killing, Jewish men, women, and children were taken to cemeteries, lined up in front of open pits, and shot to death. Today there are no Jews in Eyshishok. It was one of more than 1,500 cities, towns, and shtetls whose Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The rich culture of most of these Jewish communities was lost forever.

The killing squads murdered at least 1.5 million and possibly more than 2 million people. At Babyn Yar (Babi Yar), near Kyiv (Kiev), about 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days of shooting on September 29–30, 1941. Only a few people in the general population helped their Jewish neighbors escape. Many people were afraid that they too might be killed.

The massacres of innocent men, women, and children in Babyn Yar and other towns were not the crimes of hoodlums or crazy men. The executioners were "ordinary" men who followed the orders of their commanding officers. Many of the killers had wives and children back in Germany. Propaganda and training had taught many members of the mobile killing squads to view their victims as enemies of Germany. Some killers drank heavily to dull their thoughts and feelings. In addition, when they described their actions they used code words like "special treatment" and "special action" instead of "killing" or "murder" to distance themselves from their terrible crimes.

Last Edited: Sep 23, 2025
Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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