The book is well written and informative if not a pleasant read, the photos even though they are not good to see they are also informative and clear. The photos that are good to see are the ones in the epilogue at the back of the book showing ‘prison type’ pictures of those bought to justice. But what does stand out is how normal these men look in their trial pictures.

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UK Historian

This for me, is necessary reading for anyone interested in World War II. It is 5 stars from me for this one – not easy reading in places due to the graphic images but very highly recommended!

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Donna's Book Blog

Looking through its contents, makes the viewer confront some of the evil acts committed in the name of a greater Germany under Hitler and the National Socialist Party. The barbarity shown will leave you under no illusion as to why WWII needed to be fought, and how different it may have been if the Axis powers had won.

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Armorama

Himmler’s Death Squad by Ian Baxter – Einsatzgruppen in Action, 1939–1944 contains rare photographs from wartime archives. This is a photograph-based book, very much like another book by him that I reviewed recently on Concentration Camp Overseers. This book is filled with horrifying images, but it offers such a fantastic collection to better understand what happened during the ethnic cleansing. Not only Jews were murdered, but also Romani, communists, gays, and people with any disabilities.

Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen were death squads and these 4 groups were sent into Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia to help with the so-called Jewish problem. The members of the groups were carefully selected. It is assumed that they were responsible for killing around 2 million people, including 1.3 million Jews.

The photographs are graphic, but this is history, this is what happened, so knowing about them is incredibly important. In one of the pictures 18 SS-men are executing 6 civilians. I looked at that picture closely because it is wasteful to use 18 people to eliminate 6. Why did they do that? The only answer is because no one of them wanted to be sure that they killed another man. It could have become too personal. In another picture the victims are with their faces to the wall, at a long distance from the executioners and the executioners are kept in pairs. Again, this is wasteful and it must be the same reason, to diminish each person’s responsibility. Did this show that they were not 100% convinced by what they had to do, maybe they felt that those Jews they were killing were not sub-humans as the propaganda suggested but in fact they were fellow beings just like them? If not, why go to all this trouble? Why did the commanders felt the need to do that? Reading about these things can create a distorted image and seeing a picture like these two shows that what really happened is in fact much more complicated, more nuanced.

This is why I highly recommend this book and why I gave it 5 stars. It’s heartbreaking to see all those victims being executed and/or humiliated. It shows men, elderly, women, children and it also shows the SS and other locally recruited men in their nice uniforms, in a very stark contrast.

5/5 stars

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