Nandhitaa Satya
Mrs. McClain
Honors Literature
27 March 2017
The Shutzstaffel, Einsatzgruppen, and Gestapo
The Holocaust was the systematic killing of Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany and other countries in Europe. Although many groups were created by the Nazis, three of the most well known ones are the Shutzstaffel, Einsatzgruppen, and the Gestapo. These groups were created in and were active during Hitler’s rule over Germany. Many question if these groups had any effect the Holocaust and they did by killing minorities, sending people to concentration camps for no apparent reason, and helping direct the Final Solution, which was the plan to eradicate Jews from Germany and other places.
The Holocaust was a genocide that targeted many minorities, including but not limited to Jews and gypsies (Introduction to the Holocaust). After the Nazis gained rule over Germany, concentration camps were established and Hitler, the head of the Nazi party, preached hate against Jews and others, who were minorities in Germany. For this reason, the people began to despise Jews and prejudice was directed against them. Eventually, many had to go into hiding to protect their family and remain alive. Jews also had to remember to never tell anybody where they were hiding because the other German citizens would tell these different groups where the hidden people are, leading to these Jews being gassed or put into concentration camps. Many times though, the persecuted were shot and killed by mobile killing squads.
Mobile Killing Units, or the Einsatzgruppen, were comprised of members of the SS, Nazis, and policemen. The group was created in 1941 by Hitler and his subordinates, and executed the first attack on Jewish New Year in the city of Ejszyszki in Lithuania. In this incident, the Einsatzgruppen took 4,000 Jews from three different synagogues and rounded them up. After gathering the persecuted, the Nazis swiftly gathered the worshippers together and briskly escorted them into trucks. The organization always followed a specific set of steps while murdering the victims. The United States Holocaust Museum article about the Einsatzgruppen states,”…hereafter they were marched or transported by truck to the execution site, where trenches had been prepared. In some cases the captive victims had to dig their own graves. After the victims had handed over their valuables and undressed, men, women, and children were shot, either standing before the open trench, or lying face down in the prepared pit” (Einsatzgruppen). Once a person was killed, he or she would fall into the deep mass grave. Then, the next person would be ushered to the place where the last person was kneeling, and the process was repeated for each abductee. The scene was so gruesome for some of the members that every single operation, they would heavily drink so that the memory of killing the people and seeing the dead bodies would be erased or blurry. Because of the Einsatzgruppen, around two million Jews died in the Holocaust. However, the organization did not work alone. Another group, called the Gestapo, assisted the mobile killing squads and brought many targets to concentration camps.
The Gestapo was an independently organized police unit of the Nazis, and was created in 1933 by Hermann Goring, who was a part of the Nazi party and was an acquaintance of Hitler. The fascist government assisted the Gestapo heavily and helped the group rise to high power (Gestapo). Eventually, as the Nazis ruled Germany, Heinrich Himmler was appointed as head of the Gestapo in 1934. The Gestapo always showed loyalty toward the Nazi party and the leaders. As the United States Holocaust Museum’s article states, “it functioned not just as a police force but as a force inseparable from the Nazi Party” (Gestapo). During the time of Hitler’s reign, the Gestapo worked to get as many Jewish people possible into concentration camps and kill them or send them off with mobile killing squads. For this reason, many minorities hid inside the safe people’s homes and were sometimes successful, while other times, one or more family members were taken after someone had told the Gestapo the family’s hiding place. Jeannine Burk says, “One morning at 5:00 o’clock the Gestapo went through the neighbor’s house, jumped over the brick wall and pounded on the room where my parents were sleeping. They broke down the door. The Gestapo took my father and threw him in the truck” (Holocaust Survivors: Jeannine Burk’s Story). During a Nazi parade, a citizen suspected the protector of the family of hiding Jews. Her father was taken, and if the author was there as well, she would have been taken as well. Her mother was safe because she fit the stereotype of the perfect race and her sister was as well because she was in a body cast and the Gestapo officers assumed that the sister would die anyways. The remaining members had hope that eventually, they would know the fate of the father. Near the end of the Holocaust, this family searched for the father undyingly, but soon found out he was gassed after being taken. The Gestapo had a huge impact on the Holocaust as the group helped murder many minorities, but the Shutzstaffel definitely aided the Gestapo in doing this.
The SS, or Shutzstaffel, was an establishment of different people who were to head the population control. They often were seen as the racially elite, with blonde hair and blue eyes. The creator of this organization was none other than Adolf Hitler, which he fabricated in 1925, quite earlier than the other two groups discussed. The leader of the Gestapo also became the head of the SS under Hitler’s commands. A way Himmler contributed to the SS was that he gave Hitler the idea of the racially elite having blonde hair and blue eyes (with the exception of Nazi officials), and transferred the idea of national security to him so that nobody can see what is occurring in Germany during the process of the “Final Solution” (SS). Because of these ideas, Hitler supported Himmler in creating marriage decrees for couples that express whether the marriage is pure, which means it is between two spouses that both have blonde hair and blue eyes, or if it is impure, which means that one spouse does not have this combination or both of the people do not. This helped the Nazis keep track of who is superior and who is inferior in reference to appearance. In short, Hitler let Himmler carry out ideological principles that the state may not permit (SS). The SS assisted all other groups with the killings by manipulating people into believing that if a person does not have a certain look to him/her, then they are inferior to the rest of the population. This lead to many people telling the officials the locations of the hidden because of the notion that those people are not fit to live, which shows that because people could not fit a racial principle, they were caught by the Gestapo, gassed, put in concentration camps, or shot by mobile killing squads.
These three groups majorly impacted the Holocaust for many reasons, such as establishing a racial ideology like the SS did, detaining people who were minorities and sending them off to suffering like the Gestapo, and directly killing the Jews quickly like the Einsatzgruppen did. Quickly after the Holocaust, the key leaders such as Hitler and Himmler. As mentioned before, the underlying scheme and reason why the Holocaust came to be was, “The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were ‘racially superior’ and that the Jews, deemed ‘inferior,’ were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community” (Introduction to the Holocaust). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a building to commemorate the events that occurred at the Holocaust and prevent such incidents from occurring again. The USHMM states, “By studying the choices made by individuals and institutions during the Holocaust, professionals from the fields of law enforcement, the judiciary, and the military, as well as diplomacy, medicine, education, and religion, gain fresh insight into their own responsibilities today” (About the Museum). Because of the Holocaust, major supranational organizations like the United Nations were established to prevent such massive genocides from ever occurring again. These associations create international laws that all countries must abide by to shy away from war. Since the initiation of these conglomerates, internal disputes within countries based on any characteristic of a group of specific people have severely decreased.
The Holocaust, in short, was a large-scale massacre that affected many minorities in Germany the rule of Adolf Hitler. These three groups, which were the Shutzstaffel, Gestapo, and the Einstazgruppen, helped facilitate this event from occurring. Because of the involvement of these groups in the Holocaust, they will forever be known as the catalysts behind the deaths of six million people part of minorities in Germany.