Did you know?

As millions of able-bodied Germans were drafted from fields and factories to fight on the Russian front, millions of Christian civilians were sent from the occupied countries to Germany to work as slave laborers. When they became too ill or too feeble to work, they were shipped to the new model concentration camps to be disposed of. An unending stream of such slave labor poured into Germany - 7,500,000 in five years. Here, in the one thousand camps which had mushroomed in Germany and adjacent territories, several million Russians, Frenchmen, Poles, Belgians, Yugoslavs, Dutchmen and other European nationals died horrible deaths from starvation, disease and torture.

Though a few hundred thousand East European Jews were sent as slave laborers to Germany, and then disposed of in the same manner as Christian slave laborers, most were "liquidated" (to use the language of dehumanization) by the four Einsatzgruppen assigned to the four German fronts in Russia. Each Einsatzgruppe consisted of 500 to 900 men commanded by a general. Their mission was to round up civilians, Christians as well as Jews, and shoot them. Most Einsatz troops were Nazi party members who had volunteered for this dangerous job.

Their procedure for mass murder as as follows: Jews, Czechs, or Poles, or Russians were rounded up, marched to a deserted area and forced to dig pits or trenches, after which they were forced to undress, lined up in front of the trenches, and machine-gunned. Those that fell along the edges, dead and wounded, were shoveled by soldiers or bulldozers into the pits, and dirt was thrown over all, the dead and the living, the adults, the children and the infants. Altogether, the Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the murder of several million Christians and a million Jews.

Max I. Dimont - Jews, God and History