January 31: Einsatzgruppe A

On this date in 1942, Franz Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A — the bloodiest of four mobile Nazi killing squads that rounded up and shot dead approximately 1.5 million Jews in less than two years in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States and the Soviet Union — reported to SS leader Reinhard Heydrich that Estonia’s small Jewish community of 4,000 had been completely eliminated while Lithuania’s 160,000 Jews had been reduced to a few thousand. (In fact, some 3,000 of Estonia’s Jews had previously fled to the USSR — or been arrested and deported there — after the Red Army occupied the country in August, 1940. Of the remaining thousand, less than a dozen Estonian Jews survived the war in their own country.) The Einsatzgruppen, with only 600 to 1,000 members in each squad, murdered 90 percent of all the Jews in the Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — often with the collaboration of local paramilitaries who associated Jews with communism and the USSR. Stahlecker was killed in a battle with Soviet partisans in March, 1942.

“... [T]he hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least for a thousand years.” —Adolf Hitler, January 30, 1942