Silesia to Sinjar: The Export and Adaption of Einsatzgruppen Mobilized Killing Tactics from Eastern Europe to the Middle East

While the Nazi war machine is best known for its use of concentration camps to exterminate vast swathes of Europe’s Jewish population, more than 1.5 million other “undesirables” were executed by mobile killing squads across Eastern Europe. More recently, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) utilized similar tactics to ethnically cleanse the Levant of various racial and religious minorities, relying on an analogous form of execution. The present research note contends, building from these similarities in action, that the methods of genocide employed by ISIS are an adaptation of the tactics developed by German Einsatzgruppen in the 1940s. To argue this point, this note utilizes a comparative framework examining the mobilization, localization, preparation, execution, and burial of both groups, and posits that the similarities are the result of ideological and tactical cross-pollination between Nazis and Islamists during and after World War 2.