Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
On September 1st 1939 the armies of Adolf Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland, following in their wake were some special purpose formations composed of SS and Police units commanded by officers of the Sicherheitdienst, the SD. These units were the Einsatzgruppen and they enforced the racial and ideological campaign against the Jews as well as Polish social elites using mass killings as their method of operations. They employed the same tactics when they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Those deemed worth of death were summarily killed, often in mass shootings and thrown in mass graves, in some places the Einsatzgruppen killed as many as 30,000 people in a single operation. That kind of brutality is not absent us in our era, today the forces of ISIS are rampaging in Syria and Iraq, and using their twisted religious ideology are killing political or religious opponents who dare resist them, or forcing conversion to their twisted form of Islam. Like the Nazis they are proud of their activities and ensure that they are filmed, although then Nazis did their filming for the historical record, not to share with the world. Unlike the Nazis, ISIS uses its recordings to spread terror and win the hearts of others to their cause. In the Ukraine there are also massacres as Ukrainian forces fight Russian backed separatists in the eastern Ukraine. It is amazing that in 75 years so little has changed. The Nazis had a few years of conquest where they sowed the wind, and they reaped the whirlwind. I believe that that is what is coming as ISIS spreads and the world finally decides to crush them. It will be an ideological war of a nature that we have not seen since World War II on the Eastern Front, where the terror spread by the Nazis was met with the unrequited terror of the Red Army.
So today I republish an article about the Nazi terror spread by the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and Russia, and its ideological and doctrinal foundations.
Peace
Padre Steve+
As part of my academic work I teach military ethics as related to the Just War Theory. In the class on jus post bellum or justice after war I deal with the implication of participating in war crimes. It is a serious subject and in the class I attempt to make my students, all relatively senior officers as uncomfortable as possible. I use a number of examples from the major war crimes trials at Nuremberg as well as the Generals Trial. I had an exceptionally good class over the past several weeks and that caused me to go back and do some revisions to a number articles that I have written in the past. I have published a version of this before but I have made some additions and expect that like my work on Gettysburg that this work too will be an ongoing project.
I think part of why…
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