What was the role of the Einsatzgruppen during the German invasion of Poland in September 1939?
The Einsatzgruppen were mobile death squads — a special wing of the Schutzstaffel (SS) — deployed specifically to follow the Wehrmacht into Poland with a single mission: kill civilians. Their targets were professors, landowners, politicians, and newspaper editors: anyone capable of organising Polish resistance. This was not collateral violence. It was their only job.
The deliberate targeting of Poland's intellectual and civic leadership meant that the September 1939 invasion was something far darker than a conventional military occupation. By eliminating the educated and the influential, the Einsatzgruppen sought to decapitate Polish society before it could mount any organised resistance against German forces. The invasion was, from its opening hours, a war of annihilation aimed at crushing Polish culture itself.
The term translates roughly as "deployment groups" or "task forces." In practice, these units operated as structured murder squads operating under SS command, moving through towns and villages immediately behind the advancing Wehrmacht to identify and execute pre-designated categories of civilians.
This systematic targeting of civilians stands apart from the scale of the military operation itself — which on September 1, 1939 involved 1.5 million men, 1,300 planes, and 2,750 tanks crossing the Polish border simultaneously. The sheer speed of the Wehrmacht advance, supported by the Luftwaffe, left Polish communities with almost no time to react. Into that chaos, the Einsatzgruppen moved with organised purpose. An early, documented instance of this violence occurred on September 12, 1939, in Konskie, where 22 Jewish civilians were killed by German troops during a forced grave-digging exercise that descended into a pogrom — illustrating how quickly structured murder followed the frontlines. You can hear this episode examined in full on Listenly.
"Poland has been overrun by two of the great powers which held us in bondage for 150 years, but were unable to quench the spirit of the Polish nation. The heroic defence of Warsaw shows that the soul of Poland is indestructible."
— Quoted in World War II with Tom Hanks, Episode 1: The BeginningThe SS's Einsatzgruppen represented a doctrine laid out in Adolf Hitler's ideology long before the war began: conquered peoples in the east were not to be administered — they were to be subjugated or eliminated. Poland was the first testing ground for that doctrine at scale, and the consequences for Polish civilians were immediate and catastrophic.
See also
In August 1939, just one week before Germany invaded Poland, Stalin shocked the world by signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Beyond the public pledge, this secret agreement effectively left Poland trapped between two hostile powers with no hope of Soviet support.
Hitler, a young Austrian corporal who had fought for the German army in World War I, was personally devastated by Germany's defeat and never accepted it. He channelled that bitterness into a political career that exploited economic misery and national humiliation to seize total power.
The Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of territories, populations, and raw materials, transferred the entire German merchant marine to the Allies, and imposed crushing reparations — conditions that fuelled hyperinflation and the despair Hitler exploited to build mass political support.