Ideology and Genocide on the Eastern Front

This thesis considers one of the most widely debated topics in modern European history: why the men of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads following the Wehrmacht as they advanced into Russia) participated in massacres of supposedly “undesirable” people. Although this topic has been discussed for many years, to date there has been no definitive consensus formed. This thesis examines issues of the official SS publication Das Schwarze Korps and records from the Nuremburg Trials (contained in the Winfield B. Hale papers in the University of Tennessee’s Special Collections Library) in order to bring both new evidence and a new opinion into this debate.