As free and educated people in the West, we are actually doing the unthinkable - we are forgetting the deeply horrifying lessons from Holocaust.
Admittedly, the facts of the Holocaust are sincerely too vast and terrible to adequately understand. But while the numbers don't lie, the narrative can be limited to soften the impact - I believe that's the trouble. Even in Russia, where Germany's invasion unleashed unprecedented destruction for civilians and military, antisemitism is on the rise, even employing the surface features of Nazi symbolism. This is a shock since Russia has attempted to craft a very different narrative (the 'Great Patriotic War'), keeping what was done by Germany very much present in mind of the public.
"Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads" is focused on one of the Holocaust's darkest truth, that at least 1.3 million Jews among the 2 million civilian victims of Nazi racial violence were shot one at a time by individuals from the SS, the Wehrmacht and German instigated anti-Semitic groups in occupied countries.
The narrative of the Holocaust which we hear about in the West characterizes it's evil nature describing the mass extermination within concentration camps by gas and ovens - there was cruelty and sadism within the camps, but those instances are few in relation to the staggering numbers of dead from that method. This film is about something extraordinarily savage, about the shooting up close of hundreds of thousands of women and children, repeatedly from 1941 until 1945.
Our western narrative is something of a double-edged sword: it frames the evil in a way which is easy to picture and understand; 'factories of death.' Yet one of the reasons the camps became so important to the Germans is that it allowed them to avoid seeing the those they were killing. The millions of dead are reduced to numbers.
On the other hand, the work being done by the Einsatzgruppen brigades were so intimate and clearly genocidal, ghastly and prolific, that it created serious psychological problems for those Germans taking part - either severe depression and alcoholism or the emergence of brutish, pathological sadism. Himmler and arch-antisemite Reinhard Heydrich were very aware of the damage this was doing to the morale of the troops involved.
This film is extremely well put together and succeeds in creating a vital and accurate picture for this harrowing chapter in Western History.
(Please read "Bloodlands" by Timothy Snyder and watch the film,"Come and See" (1985) - it is a rare and vivid depiction of the action of one Einsatzgruppen brigade). Cannot recommend highly enough.
