ABSTRACT
The killing fields of European Jewry were Poland and Western Russia. The trains rolling in from all the regions conquered by the Germans terminated at the ghettos, at slave labor camps, and at the death camps of Poland. Transporting the victims to sites of slavery and death was not the only method of making Europe Judenrein. The eastern region of Poland and western provinces of the Soviet Union were turned into hunting grounds of the mobile killing units of the Einsatzgruppen. Here the shooting of some one and a half million Jews merely required local roundups of bewildered men, women, and children, the readiness of a small contingent of well-equipped murderers and open ditches to simplify the concealment of the dead and the dying. The shooters were drawn from units of the SS; from battalions of the Order Police, which were composed of reserve policemen; and from volunteers and recruits among the native population of conquered eastern regions; some came from the Nazi Security Service and other German semimilitary detachments.
