Summary of Richard Rhodes's Masters of Death

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 In 1941, a police academy in Pretzsch, a town on the Elbe River about fifty miles southwest of Berlin, became the site of a sinister assembly. Thousands of men from the SS, the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel, were ordered to report for training and assignment. They were not told what their assignment would be, but their commonalities suggested they would be sent to Russia. #2 By the spring of 1941, Poland had been decapitated. The Führer belabored the generals and field marshals of the Wehrmacht with an impassioned harangue about the need to destroy Poland and create a new German eastern frontier. #3 During the first weeks after the invasion, while the Wehrmacht still controlled the occupied areas, towns and villages were burned, and 16,376 people were killed by the German army and police. #4 The SS began to carry out mass killings of Jews in Poland in October 1939, just three months after the invasion. The Einsatzgruppen commanders specifically concerning the Jewish question in the occupied territory wrote that they needed to carry out measures within a shorter period of time.