The Winds of War (The Henry Family, #1)

by Herman Wouk

the Special Action Units had no military purpose. Their mission concerned the Jews. From the time of Catherine the Great, Russia had compelled its millions of Jews to live in the “Pale,” a borderland to the west, made up of districts taken in war from Poland and Turkey. The revolution had ended the Pale, but most of the Jews, impoverished and used to their towns and villages, had stayed where they were. The border defense belt held by the Red Army, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, was therefore precisely where most of the Soviet Union’s Jews lived. The Special Action Units were travelling executioners, and their orders were to kill Russia’s Jews without warning and without regard to age or sex. These orders were unwritten; they came down from Adolf Hitler through Göring and Heydrich to the “Security Service,” Germany’s federal police, which organized the units. These squads had collateral orders to shoot summarily all commissars—political officers—of the Red Army. But these latter orders were on paper. There were four Special Action Units in all, placed to follow close on the three giant prongs of the German assault. Army Group South, composed of Germans and Rumanians, was striking into the Ukraine, south of the marshes and along the Black Sea into the Crimea. With them came two Special Action Units, for here the Jewish settlement was dense. Army Group Center was setting forth on the straight short road Napoleon took—Minsk, Smolensk, Vyazma, Borodino, Moscow. This road po...

Special Action Groups