Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1 ‘I went to school with quite a number of Jewish co-religionists and never knew hatred for Jews’: childhood, youth and early adulthood, 1905–1932
- 2 ‘In terms of his character he is irreproachable in every respect’: Nazi Party membership and career in the SS Security Service, 1932–1939
- 3 ‘Pity that the scoundrel didn't perish’: brother's imprisonment and career stagnation, 1939–1941
- 4 ‘So, we've finished off the first Jews’: SS-Einsatzkommando 9 and deployment in the East, June–July 1941
- 5 ‘In Vileyka, the Jews had to be liquidated in their entirety’: genocide of Belarusian Jewry, July–October 1941
- 6 ‘Was it thinkable that I, a jurist and a soldier, would do such a thing?’: suspension from the Reich Security Main Office and reinstatement until the war's end, 1941–1945
- 7 ‘My son, who has not yet returned home from the war’: post-war submergence and reintegration into West German society, 1945–1959
- 8 ‘A trial of this magnitude has never previously taken place before a German court’: arrest and trial, February 1959–June 1962
- 9 ‘A limited, lower middle class, status-and-promotion seeking philistine’: imprisonment and early release, 1962–1975
- 10 ‘A chess game of egos’: Wundkanal and aftermath, 1975–1990
- Concluding thoughts
- Notes
- Sources and literature cited
- Index
4 - ‘So, we've finished off the first Jews’: SS-Einsatzkommando 9 and deployment in the East, June–July 1941
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Introduction
- 1 ‘I went to school with quite a number of Jewish co-religionists and never knew hatred for Jews’: childhood, youth and early adulthood, 1905–1932
- 2 ‘In terms of his character he is irreproachable in every respect’: Nazi Party membership and career in the SS Security Service, 1932–1939
- 3 ‘Pity that the scoundrel didn't perish’: brother's imprisonment and career stagnation, 1939–1941
- 4 ‘So, we've finished off the first Jews’: SS-Einsatzkommando 9 and deployment in the East, June–July 1941
- 5 ‘In Vileyka, the Jews had to be liquidated in their entirety’: genocide of Belarusian Jewry, July–October 1941
- 6 ‘Was it thinkable that I, a jurist and a soldier, would do such a thing?’: suspension from the Reich Security Main Office and reinstatement until the war's end, 1941–1945
- 7 ‘My son, who has not yet returned home from the war’: post-war submergence and reintegration into West German society, 1945–1959
- 8 ‘A trial of this magnitude has never previously taken place before a German court’: arrest and trial, February 1959–June 1962
- 9 ‘A limited, lower middle class, status-and-promotion seeking philistine’: imprisonment and early release, 1962–1975
- 10 ‘A chess game of egos’: Wundkanal and aftermath, 1975–1990
- Concluding thoughts
- Notes
- Sources and literature cited
- Index
Summary
Although the SS-Einsatzgruppen had been deployed in previous military campaigns, they operated during the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 for the first time officially under the title ‘Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD’. Three of the Einsatzgruppen, A to C, were assigned to each of the three Army Groups, North (for the Baltic), Centre (for Belarus) and South (for northern and central Ukraine), whilst the fourth – Einsatzgruppe D – was assigned to the German 11th Army, which was set to advance together with the two Romanian armies through southern Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus. Einsatzgruppe (EG) B, with an initial strength of 655 men, was assigned to Army Group Centre (see Figure 13). In accordance with the agreement reached between the High Command of the Army (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH) and the RSHA in the spring, its two Sonderkommandos (SK), 7a and 7b, would operate in the army rear areas (rückwärtige Armeegebiete), where they would be responsible for securing specific materials and card indexes as well as important individuals (‘leading emigrants, saboteurs, terrorists etc.’), whilst its two larger Einsatzkommandos (EK), 8 and 9, would be deployed further back in the army group rear areas (rückwärtige Heeresgebiete), where they would investigate and tackle movements hostile to Germany – to the extent that these movements did not constitute part of the enemy's armed forces – and provide information to the Wehrmacht on political developments. An Advance Commando Moscow (Vorkommando Moskau), which was to fulfil special tasks in the Soviet capital, was also part of EG B.
At the time of its departure from Pretzsch, Einsatzkommando 9 contained a total of 144 people. Of these, fifteen were SS officers. A further eighty-three were officials of non-officer rank in the Gestapo, the Criminal Police, the SD or the Waffen SS, of which fifty-one were non-commissioned officers (NCOs). As many as forty-six drivers and baggage personnel also belonged to the commando. This contingent included a platoon of Waffen SS reservists. A platoon of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) – the 3rd platoon of the 2nd company of Reserve Police Battalion 9 – also joined the commando in Warsaw. This platoon totalled forty-two men, of which fourteen were NCOs and twenty-eight from the rank and file. The addition of the police platoon took the strength of EK 9 to a combined total of 186 men.
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- Information
- The Making of an SS KillerThe Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905–1990, pp. 43 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016