Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaign’s architects as well as its “ordinary” soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II.
Reviews (171)
A dark time in history
There is very little enjoyable about the book. The author deliberately shows the methodical destruction and intentional killing of a people and its culture by exposing the crime in their own words. The author brilliantly does this by crafting expertly written sentences and paragraphs that need to be read several times to gain the full magnitude of their weight. Two observations regarding time in history come to mind in regards to this book. Most of all when the war was started the plan was already in effect to destroy the people of Eastern Europe. In fact, the Germans had visions of the solider who was also a farmer on the fridges of their nation. The speed at which they acted was astonishing. The same could be said about how quickly they fell. They took 90 minutes, including drinks and light snacks, at the Wannasee Conference to determine the fate of millions of people in Europe. The arrogance is astounding and the depravity shocking. Arguably the most disturbing parts of this book were how blatant the Nazi program was. They made clear from the start they felt Eastern Europe belonged to German and they had no intentions of keeping anyone alive for long who stood in their way. What was shocking to me was the massive amount of assistance they received from people who lived in these areas. Latvian, Ukrainian paramilitary units and volunteers helped them in their work and many of them never saw a day in court. And that may be the thing that stays with me the longest after reading this book. How many “volunteers” were never brought to justice for the murder and looting of a collective soul of Europe. A friend of mine once said Ireland has a history that would make a stone weep. I think the same could be said about Poland and the Ukraine. These wounds are still open. The scares can still be seen. If you would like to have more information about the Holocaust I would recommend reading, Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men, Judgement before Nuremberg by Greg Dawson and any book by Deborah Libstadt.
Like any treatment of this dark chapter in human history
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana's well-worn quotation applies to nearly all reading and writing of Holocaust history, and Richard Rhodes' Masters of Death is no different. In it, Rhodes chronicles the misdeeds of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi death squads which followed the German army's invasion of Eastern Europe and murdered over 1.3 million Jewish civilians at gunpoint (over 2 million people including non-Jewish civilians). These events were the precursors to the infamous concentration camps, but have not received the same historical attention. Like any treatment of this dark chapter in human history, it is impossible to judge Rhodes' book by the normal standards of entertainment value or overall positive impact. The best these works can do is remain faithful to the truth, educate the greater public as much as possible and pass judgement when necessary. In these capacities, Masters of Death is a success. Rhodes gives close attention to the anti-Semitic language and mythology used to attempt to justify these atrocities and offers significant insight into the psychology of the major Einsatzgruppen figures, including Heinrich Himmler, the National Leader of the Schutzstaffel (SS, the Nazi defense force), as well as many commanders and soldiers of individual Einsatzgruppen commandos. In these portraits, he draws heavily on criminologist Lonnie Athens' theory of the four stages of violent development, returning to Athens throughout the text for evidence that the individual in question had achieved a level of violent socialization. For the most part, Rhodes does well to let the sheer truth speak for itself in his accounts of the mass executions, describing the incidents in honestly graphic detail, but refraining from significant embellishment and only occasionally pausing to remind the reader that the soldiers who carried out these executions acted of their own free will, that they followed the orders of their superiors but recognized the criminality of their actions. At times, the narrator Rhodes even seems to disappear from the text, an absence that might be unwelcome for other, less weighty subjects, but one which well suits an account of an atrocity of this magnitude. The structure of the first few chapters is a bit jarring; Rhodes moves from the creation of the Einsatzgruppen to Athens' theory, back to the German army's assault on Soviet territories that prompted the Einsatzgruppen's actions, and then to a two-chapter mini-biography of Himmler, before finally settling into a chronological description of the death squads' movements through Eastern Europe about a third of the way into the text. Nevertheless, for those who wish to understand this hidden chapter of the Holocaust, Masters of Death provides a more than adequate depiction.
Grotesque and graphic, but neccessary and with purpose.
As other reviewers have pointed out: this book is graphic and certainly one of the darkest pieces of literature that I've ever read. For some, it might be too disturbing. However, if the reader can look past that, or at least digest it in small bits, it is an excellent book when it comes to shedding light on not only how the tasks of the Nazi death squads were logistically conducted, but how Nazi leaders could train their soldiers to accept and actively participate in violence of this magnitude. It's easy to disassociate the violence of the Holocaust in terms of facts you read about on paper versus the explicit, graphic and brutal nature of what it looked like through the eyes of someone who was there. It's one thing to read a statistic about how the Einsatzgruppen death squads murdered more than one million people during the course of the war in the Soviet Union. It's another thing to read witness testimony about the details of what that looks like. And this book goes the distance to display the horrors of these crimes in full. There is a demon in every man, and it stirs when you put a gun in his hand and give them carte blanche to kill under the auspices of racial superiority.
A rare history
This book is a rare find. It covers a piece of World War Two that most books gloss over at best. This book offers up a very detailed history of the infamous SS Einsatzgruppen troops. These were the special units the SS put together to go into occupied Eastern Europe to kill Jews. The book offers a great deal of information about these units. The book is full of horrific story after horrific story about the work of these units. The way the stories are told is very enlightening. They are told almost like a news story, as they unfold. That makes the story come more alive, and thus more scary. The abundance of these stories is almost overwhelming. It is told through various first person accounts with graphic detail. This book doesn't stop there. The book describes how they came together. It dives into the details of the emotional aspect of the killing on the troops. What they did as a unit did impact them as individuals. I found that very interesting. The killing toll drove the men crazy. It created a blood lust of sorts. The guilt weighted heavy on them. They either became 24/7 drunks or individual homicidal manics. The lack of speed of killing in the eyes of their Berlin HQ led them to create "the final solution". That is the death camp system. The down side of the book is the lack of the big picture. The story gets lost of the blood filled stories. The ending epilogue chapter is very interesting too. The author gives a break down of what happened to the various key personnel of the groups. I think this book has to be the only one like it or definitely one of a few.
Masters of death
Rhodes is one of my favorite authors and this is book is a reason why. It so so thorough and well laid out that I actually had trouble reading it because of the content. I haven't come across many books on this subject that were so detailed and graphic, I think I am glad for this. Reading more than a chapter of two at a time was difficult. So be ready for that
A Very Comprehensive Coverage of the Genesis of the Holocaust
I've read Browning's Ordinary Men and Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners and am still fascinated by the subject, so I picked up this highly rated book, too. The violent socialization theory that Rhodes puts forth at the onset of the book is probably pretty spot-on, but this really wasn't the strength of the book (answering the question, "How did this happen?"). Rather, the strength of the book was a comprehensive look at how the Final Solution was started, evolved and arrived to where it was in the latter stages of the war. The backdrop of how the propaganda was used to convince the general populace and the perpetrators themselves that the "dirty job" at hand was necessary was powerful stuff. My one criticism of the book is exactly what made it powerful at the end of reading. For a while in the middle of the book, it just drudges on page after page with "They entered town X, they gathered up the Jewish population, they killed Y people". Page after page. Town after town. The inserted first hand accounts at each location helped to keep the reader going flipping the pages. But several time I asked myself, "How many times do I have to read the same thing over and over?" But after a while, that starts to sink in and the magnitude of it all begins to become clearer. At points Rhodes editorializes a bit, especially when discussing Himmler, resorting to name-calling and finger pointing. Honestly, it was unnecessary and probably accomplished the opposite of what it intended. To demonize Himmler and other leaders who so willingly spurned the program onward, to strip them of their humanity and every shred of their decency only serves to insulate us and them from the full reality of what they did. Himmler WASN'T a complete bestial monster (as Rhodes evidenced in many of his anecdotes). He struggled mightily at times with what he was doing. He did feel some compassion for the victims. These facts are what makes the condemnation of him all the more stronger. He felt these things and pushed forward aggressively regardless...making his crimes all the more heinous. So, as a history book, I'd highly recommend it. For insights into those at the top of the Nazi organization, I'd highly recommend it. For insights into the men who pulled the trigger time after time, I think Browning's book is far superior.
This is the best book you'll ever hate
The scale of death, terror, and utter macabre horror contain within the covers of this text document the actions of the SS Sonderkommandos and Einsatzgruppen as they rampaged through out the Eastern occupied territories implementing the first phase of Hitler's and Himmler's final solution. Mr. Rhodes has written a masterpiece that must have almost driven him insane to work on. This text will keep you awake at night and make you shudder and weep. The human feeling conveyed from the pages of this book are much more intense than "Hitler's willing executioners" and the social theory arguments tend to seem more complete but are not thoroughly defended or brought to a believable conclusion. The book ends rather weakly with a brief run down of the fates of the Einsatzgruppen leaders and a brief quote from a survivor of a "Jewish aktion". The social theory and the ending should not be used to judge the value of this book. Reading this book is incredibly hard and depressing; the only good feeling it evoked was pride for the veterans of the war against Germany for surely they were fighting against the darkest of evil. As a person of European (mostly German) heritage, I felt utter disbelief that human beings could have carried out the mass slaughters but the historical record is clear. Entire villages, cities, and countries were rendered "Judenfrei" in the personal, face to face, shooting executions conducted. Men, women, children, even diapered infants were all brutally exterminated, thousands at a time. This book is essential to understanding the development of the concentration camp system from the actions of the death squads and the history of the Jewish Holocaust. It is a who's who of the beginnings of the Nazi extermination program and contains details that I had not read about previously ("Sardinenpackung" for one chilling example). It documents the impact of the mass murders on the killers who suffered mental breakdowns and other psychological traumas - proof in my mind that they knew what they were doing was illegal and morally indefensible. It also documents the participation of numerous auxiliary units - Romanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian etc. who aided and conducted murders on massive scales as well. The Holocaust may have been a German invention, but the participation and the guilt incorporated much of Europe as well. The social theory of brutalization explains a great deal of how the killers came to be conditioned to accept, participate and even enjoy the daily murders, it does not however satisfy every question that may be raised. I would propose that a total understanding of murder on this scale may never be understood by the civilized world, it simply lies beyond what is comprehensible. This book damns the Einsatzgruppen with their own reports and letters home, including the infamous Jager report. Men, women, and children were all shot or dumped indiscriminately into killing pits through out Eastern Europe, murder on a massive scale became simply a logistics problem to be solved. Children were murdered in separate pits so that the adult corpses could be better arranged. Tens of thousands were shot in a single day, at a single site by a handful of executioners. The depth of the horror unleashed on the heals of Operation Barbarossa is inconceivable. The true value of this book is so that the future of millions of husbands, wives, grandparents, sons, and daughters should not have been lost in vain. Read this text and you will never be able forget.
The Beginnings of the SS
Although there were anti-semitic feelings and actions well before the Nazi era, this book describes in chilling detail the beginning of the organized Nazi effort to eradicate an entire people. I would recommend "SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust" to anyone interested in WW ll, mob psychology and history of the Jewish people as well as to everyone who truly believes that NEVER AGAIN should genocide (against any group) happen.
Important
Rhodes' great and important book should be required reading for all students of history. Really, it should be required reading in schools. The level of depravity German soldiers displayed - and nearly all got away with - is mind numbing. Some have complained about the excessive details that describe the numerous executions, and the repetitiveness of them. I'm not sure I understand that complaint at all. Should truth be whitewashed or glossed over to make the reader's experience more pleasurable? Anyone who thinks so is reading the wrong book. I grew up just minutes away from "Babi Yar," the ravine in Kiev where Nazis slaughtered the largest amount of victims at a single location. For many years now there have been some random department stores just across the street from it. It no longer looks like a killing site: the ravine is no longer especially deep and in the warm months it is covered with grass. Decades after the war, me and my friends, running around the largely still undeveloped wooded area on the edge of which Babi Yar is located, we never came too close to it except to stare at the monument of writing bodies that announces it.
Understanding the Holocaust
Rhodes is one of my favorite writers of non-fiction. His book The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the best book I have ever read on the subject. He has also written interesting books on disease and the psychology of murder. In fact, this book seems to have grown from his study of the work of Lonnie Athens, an American criminologist, who was the subject of Rhodes' last book, Why They Kill. Here Rhodes investigates the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the teams of killers in Hitler's Germany who would begin the slaughters that would become the Holocaust. When most of us think of the Holocaust, we think of death camps like Auschwitz, the gas chambers and crematoria. What most people forget is that the earliest killings were done by groups of SS-Einsatzgruppen in the field. Literally millions of people were simply murdered through beatings, firing squads and other "basic" methods long before the construction of the first death camps. It was the effect of this "face-to-face" slaughter on the morale and morals of the men who carried it out that would lead to the more industrial, impersonal methods of the death camps in later years. Rhodes reminds of something very important in this book: yes, the Holocaust was a horrible thing but it was conducted by human beings, not monsters. The Holocaust did not just suddenly appear as a particularly horrible idea. The development of the Holocaust was a process that can be traced and, possibly, understood. And Rhodes makes an excellent stab at trying to understand what happened. In the process, he examines the psychology of people like Heinrich Himmler and many of the other people who attempted to carry out the Final Solution. Plus, he gives a fresh look at an important part of history that gets swamped in our knowledge of the Holocaust. It is well worth the read.
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