Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust

Written by Richard Rhodes

Narrated by Neil Hellegers

In Masters of Death, Richard Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen's role in the Holocaust. These "special task forces," organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar.



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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Mar 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781541470378

Richard Rhodes

A Seattle, Washington-based sculptor, stonemason, entrepreneur, and scholar of stonework worldwide, Richard Rhodes apprenticed as a stonemason in Siena, Italy, after graduate studies at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. As the first non-Italian admitted into Siena’s medieval masonic guild (the operative branch of the Freemasons, heirs to the cathedral builders of Europe) in 726 years, he is known throughout the sculpture and stone community as the “last apprentice” since the guild collapsed in the mid-1990s. It was during his guild training that Rhodes first encountered the ancient rulesets called Sacred Geometries and the Sacred Rules of Bondwork, foundational knowledge from the 5,000-year tradition of stone expression. Though now branching into other media such as cast bronze, Rhodes credits his guild training as the major influence in his sculpture practice.

Reviews for Masters of Death

[Staggo Lee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent narration of a good book. It's a worth-read.

[meggyweg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is definitely not for the faint of heart! Little has been written about the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads, in large part because their story is so gruesome. One passage that stood out particularly in my mind was a story about how a bunch of Jews, including women and children, were pushed into a pit and then slaked lime was poured over them. Slaked lime is a powerful corrosive and these people essentially dissolved while fully alive. Their sufferings were so awful that not even the Einsatzgruppen tried that again.

This is a very well-researched and -written book, thorough but fairly short, and the author has some interesting theories about how "ordinary men" were driven to kill unarmed civilians over and over. I would recommend, but with the caveat that it's not for the squeamish.

[johngorski · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a truly horrible and difficult book that needs to be read by everyone, especially those young people who glibly label as a “Nazi” anyone who holds an opposing view, or equates Reagan, Thatcher or Trump with Hitler.

Subtitled, “The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust”, Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Richard Rhodes’ concise account of the SS death squads’ actions throughout eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is a major contribution to the history of the Holocaust.

The Einsatzgruppen were specially selected and trained SS cadres who followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union from the outset of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Their job was to secure the occupied territories in advance of the civilian administrators. In Poland and the other occupied territories they confiscated weapons, gathered incriminating documents and tracked down and arrested people the SS thought were politically unreliable. They killed; they murdered the political, intellectual, educational and religious leadership as well as anyone they deemed a threat. After a July 1941 mandate from Hitler and his hand-picked Reichsführer-SS*, Heinrich Himmler, a new plan was initiated. It was now the function of the Einsatzgruppen to make the east Judenfrei, free of Jews. This book is a detailed and uncompromising account of how, between 1941 and 1943, the Einsatzgruppen made their way through Byelorussia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine murdering 1.5 million men, women and children by shooting them into killing pits. Rhodes documents these previously largely overlooked massive crimes from their inception and planning to their execution.

Who were the men that carried out these unthinkable actions? What type of people could lead 350 children under the age of seven to a pit at the edge of a cemetery, thrown them in, machine gun them and walk away while some of them are still sobbing as the dirt is being shoveled over them? Professional men, many of them; doctors, lawyers, architects, economists; some of them products of the most prestigious universities. Rhodes goes into some detail describing the parallels between the violent training process used by the SS and the four-stage violent development process studied by criminologist Lonnie Athens. Still, the face-to-face killing so traumatized the perpetrators that Himmler needed to develop a “less personal” means of killing which lead to the gas chambers and crematoria.

But the true horror lies in the numbers, the vast scope of the atrocities. Some people, I think, have been inured and desensitized to the horrors of the Holocaust. But what do you do when confronted with the fact that at Babi Yar 33,771 people were shot in two days. If the Nazis worked 14 hour a day that’s still 20 people shot every minute. That’s 20 lives snuffed out every minute. In many cases there were entire families; mothers with infants and toddlers, grandparents. For days afterward, some who were only wounded managed to dig themselves out and try to crawl to safety only to be shot again. This is only one incident of many hundreds. Rhodes does not spare the reader at all. To read this book is to be brought to the edge of the killing pit and made to look down. It is a very hard read and can only be taken in small doses at a time.

But it is an important read. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor are all names we are familiar with and rightfully so. These places still stand as monuments to the impersonal, mechanical Nazi killing machine that were the death camps. But there are no monuments, no memorials at the hundreds, no, thousands of unmarked mass graves of the killing fields of the Einsatzgruppen.

“Masters of Death” should be required reading in all secondary schools throughout the world.

*SS National Leader, a title unique to Himmler

[cpg_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For as long as I can remember, being buried alive has been near the top of my list of things I'd prefer not to have happen to me. One of the weird outcomes of my having just read this book is that it has slid down that list. The SS-Einsatzgruppen were the people that followed the German army as it moved east during WWII, and organized and participated in the killing and mass burial of about one and a half million Jews. It seems that a substantial portion of what we know about these atrocities is due to intended victims who managed to crawl up through the layers of people piled on top of them and escape these graves before they were closed up.

Let me make 4 other comments about this book:

(1) The Washington Post said this book was "graphic and sometimes lurid". The Jerusalem Post said it "graphically and chillingly details the work of the special killing battalions of Himmler's SS". I was prepared to be shocked and sickened by what I read in Masters of Death, and certainly it describes terrible, terrible actions perpetrated against innocent people. Perhaps I've been reading too many books on the Holocaust lately, but I didn't find reading this book to be quite as wrenching as I'd anticipated.

(2) The Denver Post said this book is "a pointed reminder that all of us . . . are capable of horrendous acts of violence." Well, certainly that's true in some trivial sense. Those of us who have control of our muscles can move those muscles and thereby hurt people in terrible ways. But would all of us have done what so many of the Latvian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian peasants did--take part in the mass murder of our Jewish neighbors? Periodically throughout the book, Rhodes tries to put these murders in context, talking about what Americans did to the American Indians, what the British did to the Asian Indians, what Stalinists and Maoists did to their fellow citizens, and even what meat-processing plants do to animals. His analysis seemed rather shallow, however. What the U.S. Cavalry did to the Indians differed from what the Einsatzgruppen did to the Jews in some fundamental ways; the analogy shouldn't have been raised unless the author was willing to carefully compare and contrast.

(3) I may be wrong, but I think that I've heard people put forth Christian non-violence not only as a great sign of one's faith but also as a model for an effective way for the secular nation that is the United States to conduct its foreign policy. If we as a nation turn the other cheek, the argument goes, the hearts of our enemies will be softened. The fate of the Jews in the Holocaust seems to be a counterexample to that line of reasoning. With few exceptions, the Jews submitted to the will of their persecutors, and they were slaughtered. The SS personnel who shot hundreds and thousands of Jews apiece were often psychologically affected by their work, but as often as not it turned them into brutes. The gas chambers were the solution to these psychological problems: The slaughter continued, but the perpetrators were able to distance themselves from the details.

(4) Richard Rhodes has won a Pulitzer and lots of other literary awards, but I was not impressed by his writing in this book. He's written another book called Why They Kill, which presents a theory
of how violent people become violent, and I got the feeling that Masters of Death was just an extended case study for that theory. Sometimes I'm hesitant to buy books by university professors out of
fear that they'll be dry as dust, or that they'll be the result of publish-or-perish pressures and not of having something significant to say. But academics like Robert Jan van Pelt and Richard J. Evans who've devoted their lives to trying to understand Hitler's Germany write a lot more convincingly than Rhodes did in this book.

[GuilloHerrera · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hate knows no bounds; it is a chilling book that is probably difficult to read for many people due to the atrocity of the crimes committed by the extermination squads on the Eastern Front, which followed the troops that invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and preceded, so to speak, the extermination camps. If you are interested in this terrible topic, I would like to recommend the film "Idi i Smotri" (Come and See) from 1985, directed by Elem Klimov, which was made in the Soviet Union to mark the 40th anniversary of the conclusion of the Great Patriotic War, as they call it, where the arrival of the Nazis in the villages and the ensuing wave of terror are told through the eyes of a child. (Translated from Spanish)

[shanetierney_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a glorified highschool essay. Almost the entire book consists of strung-together quotes of other historians' work. If it is well-written it is because other authors and memoirists wrote well.