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

Richard Rhodes

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Aug 12, 2003 - History - 368 pages

In Masters of Death, Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These “special task forces,” organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar.

These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaign’s architects as well as its “ordinary” soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II.

What people are saying

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

User Review  - Nancy Bielski - Goodreads

This was a really good, detailed account of the Einsatzgruppen's destruction of the Eastern Jewish population. I liked how instead of just giving accounts of what happened, Rhodes looked at the ...

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

User Review  - Kaarthik Anebou - Goodreads

This books provides a lot of excerpts that happened in east/west Germany with regard to the "resettlement" of Jews. Very good and concise history of how Jews were treated. If you had read "Commandant ...

About the author

Richard Rhodes is the author of nineteen books. His The Making of the Atomic Bomb won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowships, and lectures frequently to college and professional audiences. Rhodes and his wife live in California.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust; Vintage Series
• Author: Richard Rhodes
• Contributor: Richard Rhodes
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2003
• ISBN: 0375708227, 9780375708220
• Length: 368 pages
• Subjects: History / Europe / Germany; History / Holocaust; History / Jewish