ABSTRACT
Many of the Jews who fled or found themselves in Soviet territory thought they were now safe from the harsh anti-Semitism of the Germans. They soon discovered, though, that Stalinist Russia was almost as anti-Semitic as Nazi Germany. The German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, began the most horrible phase of World War II and the Holocaust. From the Nazi perspective, Stalin’s Russia was an “evil empire” because it was the center of world communism and was populated by large concentrations of Jews and Slavs. The Einsatzgruppen were to be the vanguard of Nazi Germany’s war against its racial, biological, and political enemies in Soviet Russia. Several members of the Einsatzgruppen later mentioned the order in their war crimes trial testimony after the war and said they thought it had originated with Himmler, who was fascinated with certain groups of German Roma.
