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

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Alfred A. Knopf, 2002 - 335 pages
A major contribution to the history of the Holocaust from the acclaimed author of the Pulitzer Prize- winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
In Masters of Death, Richard Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the part played by the Einsatzgruppen--the professional killing squads deployed in Poland and the Soviet Union, early in World War II, by Himmler's SS. And he shows how these squads were utilized as the Nazis made two separate plans for dealing with the civilian populations they wanted to destroy.
The first plan, initiated in July 1941, condemned the Jews of eastern Europe to slaughter by the Einsatzgruppen, who went on to execute 1.5 million men, women and children between 1941 and 1943 by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar--massive crimes that have been underestimated or overlooked by Holocaust historians. Rhodes documents the organizing and carrying out of this program and introduces the professional men--economists, architects, lawyers--who were the program' s commanders and officers, as well as the " ordinary men" who did most of the actual killing.
The second plan, initiated in December 1941, was directed at the Jews of western Europe. By then, Rhodes shows, the face-to-face killing of hundreds of thousands had so brutalized the SS that even Himmler was shocked into ordering the development of a less " personal" means of murder--the notorious gas chambers and crematoria of the Holocaust' s second wave. Rhodes shows, further, that Hitler and Himmler intended the Jews to be only their first victims; their plan was to open up Russia to German colonization by destroying more than 30 million Slavs and membersof other ethnic groups.
Drawing on Nuremberg Tribunal documents largely ignored until now, and on newly available material from eyewitnesses and survivors, Richard Rhodes has given us a book that is essential reading on the Holocaust and World War II.

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Contents

Eastward from Pretzsch
3
I
5
3
22
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Richard Lee Rhodes is a writer. He was born in Kansas City, Kansas on July 4, 1937. Rhodes received a B.A. from Yale University in 1959. Rhodes has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He began writing articles and essays that appeared in Harper's, Reader's Digest, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. Rhodes first book, The Island Ground, was published in 1970. He has written more than two dozen books. Rhodes' book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction. Another book, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1996.

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