The Eichmann Kommandos [Illustrated Edition]

Book excerpt: Includes 204 photos, plans and maps illustrating The Holocaust “Fourteen officers of the SS (Elite Guard) were sentenced today to hang for at least a million killings. The sentences wound up the biggest murder trial in history. The men were leaders of the “Einsatz Kommandos”...special extermination squads sent...to do away with peoples classified by the Nazis as racially undesirable.”—NUREMBERG, APRIL 10 (1948)—(ASSOCIATED PRESS) After the first Nuremberg trials of the remaining Nazi leaders in 1945-6, the Allies spent much time and effort in searching out the men responsible for the Holocaust, the full scale of which was only then becoming apparent. In the most important case of his career, Judge Michael A. Musmanno (Captain USN), presided over the trial of the leaders of the Einsatz Kommandos, death squads trained to hunt and kill “Untermenschen” or those deemed undesirable by Hitler. Blazing a bloody trail across the conquered areas of Poland, the Ukraine, White Russia and the Baltic states, the Einsatzgruppen shot innocent men, women and children by the tens of thousands. Finding that shooting was an inefficient way to complete their horrendous executions, the Einsatz Kommando leaders pioneered the use of mobile poison gas trucks which would lead to the evolution of the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor and the industrialised murder of the Holocaust. In this riveting and horrifying book the author looks back on a trial that serves as a testament to the depths of man’s inhumanity; at times almost surreal in its horror it is a story that should be read and re-read.