War Documentary hosted by Paul Bandey, published by France Televisions in 2009 - English narration
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-- French title "Les Commandos de la mort" --
In June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, throwing 4 million troops, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft into the Soviet Union. Operational groups of the German Security Service, SD, followed into the Baltic and the Black Sea areas. Their orders: neutralize elements hostile to Nazi domination. Combined SS and SD headquarters were set up in Riga (northern), Mogilev (middle) and Kiev (southern), each with subordinate units of the SD, the Einsatzgruppen, and lower echelons of Einsatzkommandos.
Communist and Soviet NKVD agents were targeted, and from August 1941 to March 1943, 4,000 Soviet and communist agents were arrested and executed. In addition, far greater numbers of partisans and communists were shot to ensure political and ethnic purity in the occupied territories. Einsatzgruppe A, under Adolf Eichmann, executed 29,000 people in Latvia and Lithuania in the early stages of the operation. In five months in 1941, Einsatzkommando III commander, Karl Jaeger, reported killing 138,272 (48,252 men, 55,556 women and 34,464 children).
The Einsatzgruppen were death squads - their tools the rifle, the pistol and the machine gun. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen executed more than 2 million people between 1941 and 1945, including 1.3 million Jews.
Who were the men who organized and practiced the mass murder of Jews, Gypsies and Soviet prisoners? Where did they come from? What were their motives? What was their fate after the destruction of the Jews of Europe and the German debacle? "Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads" relies on archival footage filmed by the Nazi propaganda machine in the Baltic countries and in Belarus, Ukraine and Romania, on the memories of witnesses of these public executions, on the words of survivors and also, for the first time, on the confessions of the executioners that were found in Germany.
Written and directed by Michael Prazan ; KUIV Productions with the participation of France Televisions, Planete, RTBF, SRC Radio Canada, TSR and TV5 Monde
1) Mass Graves (June-August 1941)
This first episode provides context for when, how and why the mobile death squads, or EZG, were established.
June 1941. Nazi Germany invades the USSR. In the wake of the German armies which progressed without incident to the gates of Russia, the mobile killing commandos, the Einsatzgruppen, shared the territory to liquidate Jews and political opponents. In July, after the pogroms initiated by local nationalists causing several thousand victims, the decision for genocide was taken by Hitler. The EZG organized the mass murder of Jewish populations in the conquered territories, now targeting women and children. The massacres follow one another at a frantic pace.
Video Codec: x264 CABAC High@L4 Video Bitrate: 3 484 Kbps Video Resolution: 1920x1080 Display Aspect Ratio: 16:9 Frames Per Second: 25.000 fps Audio Codec: AAC (LC) Audio Bitrate: 112 kb/s VBR 44.1 kHz Audio Streams: 2 Audio Languages: english RunTime Per Part: 42 min 19 s - 48 min 48 s Number Of Parts: 4 Part Size: 1.06 GB - 1.30 GB Source: WEB DL Capper: DocFreak08
