‘Mobile Killing Units’

An amalgamation of the Gestapo and the Criminal Investigation Department, the Security Police assembled mobile detachments to serve in almost every foreign territory occupied by Germany from 1938 onwards, entering immediately after the Wehrmacht. These mobile units were to perform political police duties, usually tracking down, arresting and also murdering actual and alleged opponents of the Third Reich. One such unit marched into Austria during the annexation in March 1938, while the units ‘Dresden’ and ‘Vienna’ were involved in the occupation of the Sudetenland in September of that year, and I ‘Prague’ and II ‘Dresden’ took part in the invasion of the other Czech countries in March 1939. These detachments focused primarily on the confiscation of documents from local administrations and police forces, in some cases also carrying out individual investigations and arrests.

During the war against Poland, seven Security Police units bearing the numbers I-VI and also Unit ‘z.b.V.’ (special purpose) entered the country with orders to murder thousands of members of the Polish intelligentsia. They also terrorized Jewish inhabitants with the aim of inducing them to flee to Soviet-occupied territory. The mass murders committed by the ‘Mobile Killing Units’ in 1939 led to disputes with some Wehrmacht commanders. As a consequence of these conflicts, smaller units were deployed in the wars in northern and western Europe in 1940. It was not until the war against Yugoslavia in April 1941 that another unit (’Serbia’) was created.

The ‘Mobile Killing Units’ carried out their most extensive and criminal activities in the war against the Soviet Union. Precise details of their deployment as part of ‘Operation Barbarossa’ were drawn up in the spring of 1941. Special detachments were to operate in areas close to the front, remaining relatively closely linked to the respective armies. Further back, in the so-called army areas, larger units were to operate relatively independently, receiving their ‘technical instructions’ from the Senior SS and Police Leaders responsible for the regions. In May 1941, four units of the Security Police and the SD (Security Service) were set up with a total of around 3,000 men, including platoons from the Order Police and the Waffen-SS. Each unit had an administration which was structured similarly to the Reich Security Main Office (personnel/administration, SD, Gestapo, Criminal Investigation), usually also with two special detachments and two operational detachments.

Unit A operated in the area of Army Group North and was responsible for the Baltic states, the regions near Leningrad and, during certain periods, the north of Belarus. Unit B was assigned to Army Group Center and was responsible for Belarus and the central areas of the Russian Federation towards Moscow, while Unit C with Army Group South was responsible for the areas of Ukraine and the southern parts of the Russian Federation, and Unit D marched with the 11th Army from the Romanian border along the Black Sea coast, taking in Crimea and the North Caucasus. In the summer of 1941, the Security Police stations in occupied Poland (General Government) set up additional squads to operate further west in eastern Poland, since the four units had already moved to further east.

It is only possible to reconstruct the exact orders given to the ‘Mobile Killing Units’ for ‘Operation Barbarossa’ in part. One thing is certain, however: their mission was to secure the areas behind the front line by killing ‘enemies of the Reich’.

They began committing mass murders began two days after the invasion of the Soviet Union, primarily targeting Jews, and secondarily non-Jewish communists, as well as Rom*nja. The units were also involved in initiating anti-Jewish pogroms in Latvia and western Ukraine, also setting up helper groups consisting of locals who were closely involved in the crimes, particularly in the Baltic states. From August to October, the individual detachments also began to murder Jewish women and children, eventually killing all Jews in the newly conquered regions. From October 1941, the detachments also had unrestricted access to the Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war camps, where they murdered certain groups of prisoners, in particular Jews and political functionaries.

The senior command staffs of the Wehrmacht units and the military administrations worked closely with the ‘Mobile Killing Units’, requesting the detachments, supplying them with ammunition, and occasionally providing military personnel to help carry out the murder operations. Criticism of this was comparatively rare. Close cooperation between the ‘Mobile Killing Units’ and other SS and police units – especially the battalions of the Order Police and some units of the Waffen-SS – was crucial to the perpetration of the mass murders. The ‘Mobile Killing Units’ and their operational detachments were gradually transformed into permanent departments, while the special detachments and Unit D operated largely on the move up until the retreat. All in all, the ‘Mobile Killing Units’ murdered around 700,000 people in the Soviet Union, most of them Jews. Together with the local branches of the Security Police and SD, the ‘Mobile Killing Units’ were responsible for the murder of some three million people in the Soviet Union, including two and a half million Jews.

Such units were also deployed in other theaters of war, such as Operational Detachment Tunis in Tunisia in 1942, Unit E in Croatia, Unit F with Army Group South, Unit G in Hungary from March 1944 onwards, Unit H in Slovakia from August 1944, and finally Units K and L with the 5th and 6th Panzer Army during the Battle of the Bulge from December 1944 onwards.

The ‘Mobile Killing Units’ were largely made up of members of the Security Police and the Security Service: the officers involved regarded it as a kind of ‘frontline assignment’ that was less dangerous, thereby accelerating their careers. It was no problem for them to move from their desk assignments in the Reich to the execution sites in the East. Being under SS and police jurisdiction, the personnel were not subject to any legal obligations, especially in the occupied Soviet territories.

The men were from all parts of the Reich, including Munich. The leaders and officers of the murder units included the deputy head of Unit IV in the war against Poland, Josef Meisinger, and the leader of Special Detachment 10a stationed in the Caucasus in 1942/43, Kurt Christmann. Friedrich Panzinger from Munich was not only the coordinator of all ‘Mobile Killing Units’ at the Reich Main Security Office, he also headed Unit A in the Leningrad area in 1943/44. Oswald Schaefer commanded Operational Detachment 9 in the central section of the ‘Eastern Front’ before taking on the leadership of the Gestapo in Munich in March 1942. Munich residents were also among the victims of the ‘Mobile Killing Units’. All 999 inmates deported from Munich on November 20, 1941 to Kaunas, Latvia were shot immediately on arrival by members of Operational Detachment 3 on November 25.

Very few members of the ‘Mobile Killing Units’ were tried after 1945 – initially in the so-called ‘Mobile Killing Units’ trial before a US military court in Nuremberg in 1947, and subsequently from the end of the 1950s before German courts. Several criminal proceedings took place against leaders of Unit D before Munich I Regional Court from 1970 to 1980, and the head of Unit 8, Otto Bradfisch, stood trial in Munich in 1961. Only a few of the officers accused were convicted as murderers, however: most of them were merely considered accomplices.