German troops massacred Soviet civilians at a mass grave in Kraigonev, Soviet Union, in the summer of 1941 after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Einsatzgruppen, a German mobile massacre squad, shot Soviet civilians kneeling by the mass grave and dropped their bodies into the mass grave.

　　German troops massacred large numbers of Soviet civilians at the mass grave in Kraigonev, Soviet Union, in the summer of 1941 after the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. German mobile massacre squads, the Ansatzgruppen (Einsatzgruppen), shot Soviet civilians kneeling by the mass graves and dropped their bodies into the mass graves. Soviet civilians suspected of being Communists were selected for execution along with Soviet Red Army officers and male Jews. The Anzacruppen consisted mainly of German SS and police officers. They killed suspected racial and political enemies behind the German lines in the occupied Soviet Union.

  The main method of killing was mass shooting. Anzacruppen rounded up suspected victims. Often in the middle of the night, he marched or drove them to the outskirts of towns and villages. Victims were stripped of their clothes, walked in small groups to graves that were dug and shot. Suspect victims were turned upside down and shot in the back of the neck with a pistol. They made the Jews descend into the ditch and lie on top of the bodies of those already shot, adding more and more bodies to the pile. Jews who lived near wide rivers were put on barges and towed away from land, then drowned. Einsatzgruppen also reported having Jews dig mass graves and burying them alive, and in October 1941, a German military response unit in Romania gathered some 19,000 Jews in Odessa in a fenced-in square and set them on fire with gasoline, burning them to death.

　In the last week of July 1941, Soviet resistance increased and the German advance began to slow down; in late summer 1941, Einsatzgruppen launched a genocidal campaign to slaughter as many Russian Jews as they could get their hands on; in May 1941, a violent extermination of racially inferior Jews and others Brainwashed by ideology, some 3,000 Ansatzgruppen were dispersed into four main groups and began hunting Jews. The mobile massacre squads committed atrocities against the Jews that occurred in Poland during the first approximately 22 months of the German occupation, when the Germans quickly occupied large tracts of land. They made the most of the genocide, which was undisclosed by the Soviet authorities. Ansatzgruppen obtained lists of Jewish residents of towns and villages from the leaders of the Jewish community. There was often an initial killing of community leaders to reduce the possibility of organized resistance. Local Jews were recruited to participate in the capture and killing of their Jewish neighbors. The Germans occupied the Ukrainian city of Kiev on September 19, 1941, and seized more than 650,000 prisoners of war. Einsatzgruppen troops mass-shot approximately 33,000 more Jews in the Babi Yar Valley on September 29 and 30.