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

Rating:
Summary: Good treatment, but not his best work
Review: Richard Rhodes quite rightfully was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his earlier The Making of the Atomic Bomb. In Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, however, he does not match the form that made that earlier work intensely engrossing.

Rhodes covers the development of the SS-Einsatzgruppen (the successor to the SA) and the subsequent deployment of the SS to deal with "the Jewish question", particularly focusing on the actions on the Eastern Front as Germany rolled into Russia. While the initial brainstorming of the group and the replacement of the SA brownshirts with the SS under Himmler and Heydrich is interesting, the remainder is a bit disjointed and ultimately not quite as interesting: Rhodes skips from place to place, gives figures more than anything else for the deportation of the Western Jewry to points east, and spends quite a long time trying to analyze the "violent socialization" of the members of the SS - both "malefic" and "malefication" are used much too often to describe men who willingly (or enthusiastically) completed their assigned tasks of murdering those not fitting Hitler's ideal Reich. True though it may be (and the inclusion of examples of killing methods and photographs of those about to meet their end could move one to understand the viewpoint presented) it moves the work more to a sociological commentary on the nature of violence that happens to use a large scale, horrifying event as the backdrop rather than a true study of the "invention" of the Holocaust and the logistics and planning that made it possible.

Overall, it is a worthy read. However, it does not stand atop other works that examine the SS and the involvement of the SS in the Holocaust.

Rating:
Summary: EVERYTHING WAS PLANNED
Review: It's amazing to think that in a brief space of years the world would see three countries rise up and try to conquer their neighbors in the name of three insane doctrines. In Japan, we had the suicidal tendencies of the emperor as god fanatacism. In Russia, we had the mass murderer elevated to state leader in the form of Stalin. Of course, in Germany we had the brainwashing of a majority of its people by a crackpot bigot who belonged in an insane asylum. I believe that the common people of these countries were just as responsible for the atrocities committed by their states as their leaders. Masters of Death is about one such long term atrocity committed by Hitler and his political allies. Namely, that of the genocide of the Jewish race.

This book basically chronicles the SS death squads assigned to kill Jews from the invasion of Poland up until Russia begins to turn the tide of the war and kicks the Germans back to their borders. Hitler was not killing Jews indiscriminately. It was all part of his gloriously foolish plan to make room for German colonists in Eastern Europe. Actually, maybe he was just killing them to suit his racist views. But this was the veil he moved under.

The book is propelled a lot by eyewitness views of the massacres perpetrated by the Germans. Rhodes does a good job of showing the viewpoints not just of the Jews, but also Germans as they face abominable killings. Basically, the German army would roll into a town, kill all the most visible opponents of their rule, and then the SS would come in after and mop up, try to win the hearts of minds of the people, and then start to kill those left by the army and the Jewish population.

Time and again we are treated to the same horrible situation in the book. The Jewish populations were at first rounded up and told they were being relocated and asked to take 3 days worth of clothes with them. They were then marched to a pit, ordered to strip sometimes and then shot, men, women, and children. Sometimes women were killed with their children in their arms. Sometimes the Jews were told to lay face down and a German came and shot them dead. Then the second group of Jews had to lay down on top of the freshly dead corpses as they were shot and son on. It's truly horrible.

I got upset just looking at the scant pictures of these atrocities availible in the book. When you see these people in the pictures, you know they were about to die and they knew it too. In one picture, there is a group of Jewish women in their underwear and there is a kid, looks about 11 or 12 hiding behind her mothers arm. I cannot even imagine what it was like to have been there. It makes you very sad and also very angry at the German people of that time.

This was a great book that needs to be read by everyone on the planet. We need to know just how barbaric the human race can get because I think we are complacent now and can no longer realize what evil is. I dont think we are capable of outrage anymore since we have been so sensitized to killing and murder thanks to television and movies. I truly believe that 9/11 and the recent Iraq war were simply rating events for the tv networks and that most people can't realize the horror of being there. This book does take you to that horror. The only thing I didn't agree with was Rhodes' attempts to explain why the Holocaust happened. He believes that most of the perpetrators had some childhood abuse or some event in their lives that legitimized violence as a means to an end. Any rational explanation of the Nazi's behavior to me is useless. To me, you had a leader in the form of Hitler who turned his whole country into an asylum. The mad leading the mad. We need to read this book to remember. We cannot forget that even the most civilized among us can revert to an animal.

Rating:
Summary: An appalling, riveting look at the Nazi killing squads...
Review: This book gives the reader a frigtening, disturbing glmipse into the actions perpetrated by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen squads during World War II. Principally, the book is concerned with the development of the killing squads and their actions at the beginning of the campaign in the East, as opposed to the large-scale murder that occurred in the gas chambers later in the war. This book is a truly horrifying look into the Holocaust from an individual or small group perspective. It is completly frightening that these events actually happened, and that people are able to do the things described in this book. Regardless, the book is a must read for students of the period, or for anyone who wants to learn of the barbarity that the Nazis perpetrated against Jews, Poles, Slavs, Gypsies, etc.

Rating:
Summary: Harrowing View of Agents of the Final Solution
Review: When the term Holocaust is mentioned, it usually conjures up images of death camps, barbed wire, and gas chambers. However, it must be remembered that the Final Solution had its beginnings elsewhere. The author has done good job in treating this subject that hasn't been touched upon in much depth before now in Holocaust literature, namely the subject of the Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen, the group that carried out the deaths of millions in the East via mass shooting, burning, and gassing, is detailed in informative and often grisly fashion. The reader will recoil in horror at how supposedly civilized men, both German and others, commit the most unspeakable acts of depravity to the most defenseless of humanity. Some did so out of sadistic glee while others did so because of the perverse belief that they were doing their duty to Germany. It was this latter view that Himmler himself tried to foster without much success. This book is an important volume for anyone interested in the Holocaust or even World War II on the Eastern Front.

Rating:
Summary: Horrific Example of Mass Murder
Review: Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes is one of the most difficult and disturbing books that I have ever read. It tells the story of the creation of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the formations that were created by Himmler to kill the Jews, Poles and Russians that had the misfortune to fall behind the German lines. This is book about more than the mere numbers of the dead, although the numbers themselves are horrific. What makes the book so upsetting is the description of the way in which the deaths took place.

Rhodes is not writing about civilians who were killed as part of a military exercise. The SS-Einsatzgruppen were not military fighting formations; rather, they were tasked with the job of eliminating all Jews and other undesirables from lands occupied by the Nazi's. The descriptions include thousands of men, women and children lined up like in a grocery line and walked into pits to lie down one next to another where they were shot. They also include citizens of countries that were occupied who used the opportunity to round up Jewish citizens and kill them through the use of sledge hammers. These are just two examples, but they are representative of the dozens that are described by Rhodes. As one might tell, this is not bedtime reading.

Rhodes does an excellent job in describing the formation of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, as well as the men who formed it. What appears to be the underlying premise of the book is how could the men who carried out these terrible crimes have done so and kept even some semblance of sanity. Rhodes describes the heavy drinking and other diversions used as well as the peer pressure used to extract conformance. In this case conformance meant systematic close up murder of thousands. The basic tenant is that these men were habituated through a deliberate process. However, this explanation goes only so far. The acts of the SS-Einsatzgruppen were not an isolated incident such as the barbarity of the Japanese sacking of Nanking (See The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang), but a concerted, continuos effort over several years where men were forced to participate in the slaughter of innocent men, women and children head-on.

Rhodes explanation for the acts of the SS-Einsatzgruppen is left hallow. At times the barbarity of the acts overwhelms an attempt to explain the whys. And for that matter the whys may seem irrelevant. But Rhodes attempts to explain the whys and the hows is at a minimum a noble efforts. After finishing the book one does not have the answer, but that does not mitigate against the fact that this is a book worthy of reading.

Rating:
Summary: Remember
Review: With newly available Russian sources, the author tells again the story of Germany's plan to open up more land for expansion. The horror that is detailed is must reading, though mind numbing. Read so it may never happen again.

Rating:
Summary: Due To Subject Matter, Tough Book to Read.
Review: "Masters of Death" by Richard Rhodes, subtitled, "The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust". Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Due to the subject matter, this is a tough book to read. Richard Rhodes has documented, in explicit detail, the killing of more than 20 million human beings by Nazi Germany. For almost all of them, their only crime was to be "Untermensch", or sub-human, according to the Nazi definition. Rhodes notes that twice as many Slavs ( 3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens and 3.3 million Soviet POWs ) were killed than were Jews. (Page 157). The Jews were, however, the main target, with grandiose Nazi plans for the elimination of 700,000 Jews in unoccupied France, 330,000 in England and the even the 4000 Jews who lived in Ireland. (page 237) The Nazi plan was to empty the eastern steppes of the indigenous Slavs and re-settle Germans there. Adolph Hitler identified "...Stalin's communism ..[as] ...a new form of Russian imperialism" (Page 86) and the resettlement of the Germans in the East would form a barrier against the ancient enemy.

The first few chapters developed a psychological theory of the bully-murderer and how that cruel personality type was not only legitimatized but also became the norm in the SS groups. The author has made Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) the central character in the book's development of the evolution of the killing methods. Himmler could not live up to his own ideals of the SS hero. The shooting of an actual person, "up close and personal", was too much for Himmler's weak stomach and, this, coupled with the economy of mass murder, led to the introduction of the gas chambers. Impersonal killing had been instituted in the Third Reich with the physician-assisted killing of the handicapped German children in the Autumn of 1939 (page 154). Some of the chapters are especially difficult with German reports, enumerating the killing of so many Jews, here in this town and in that city, and the pages flow into an accountant's recital, when it is human lives being considered. The author brings it all to life by identifying each reporting officer and noting that numbers were "absurdly precise".

Rhodes does stumble here and there. As noted in other Amazon reviews, he has the U.S. declaring war on Germany, when, historically, Germany went first and then, Congress, not Roosevelt, declared war on Germany. In the note on page 125, he applies the term, "An inflated reference to Stalin's partisan order" concerning that "... the Russian side had ordered to have the SS members and Party members shot " ... when these Germans were taken prisoner. I do not know why he terms this "an inflated reference" as all German prisoners were being shot out of hand, so quickly that Soviet officers had to give orders to hold them for interrogation. (See "The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945" by Alfred-Maurice De Zayas). Finally, SS-Gruppenfueher Max Thomas was first introduced on page 163. The author could have told us more about an individual who "...was a doctor by profession" and had such an obviously English name. All of this adds up to four stars.

Rating:
Summary: remarkably insightful into the criminal mind
Review: This book is extremely well-researched and provides pshyco-social insights into how murderers become murderers. A must read for any policeman or crminilologist

Rating:
Summary: Masterly
Review: Virtually everyone is familiar with the names and numbers associated with the holocaust - Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka and 6,000,000 murdered Jews. Those names and figures don't do justice to the terror and cruelty that the victims suffered. Mr. Rhodes does.
The stories he relates regarding the Nazi death squads during their murderous rampage through Eastern Europe and Russia truly give one perspective of the enormity and moral depravity associated with these atrocities. An indispensable book.

Rating:
Summary: Too much for me to handle.......
Review: I have read a number of books dealing with the holocaust, and the harsh, inhuman atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi's and there collaborators: But I found the graphic description's within this book far too much for me to digest.

Whilst the book is an excellent documentary, and record of the actions of the SS in occupied Eastern Europe, I was too shocked by what I read to be able to finish the book.

The harrowing descriptions of the murders of the children by the SS almost brought a tear to my eye.

I think this will be the last book I read that concerns itself with this subject matter. It really can inform the reader all that they may need to know (and some that they may wish not to know) on the depravity and bestial nature of the Nazi's final solution.

Tim Vickery.