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Representativeness heuristic

The representativeness heuristic is used when making judgments about the probability of an event being representional in character and essence of a known prototypical event. It is one of a group of heuristics (simple rules governing judgment or decision-making) proposed by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the early 1970s as "the degree to which [an event] (i) is similar in essential characteristics to its parent population, and (ii) reflects the salient features of the process by which it is generated". The representativeness heuristic works by comparing an event to a prototype or stereotype that we already have in mind. For example, if we see a person who is dressed in eccentric clothes and reading a poetry book, we might be more likely to think that they are a poet than an accountant. This is because the person's appearance and behavior are more representative of the stereotype of a poet than an accountant.

The representativeness heuristic can be a useful shortcut in some cases, but it can also lead to errors in judgment. For example, if we only see a small sample of people from a particular group, we might overestimate the degree to which they are representative of the entire group. Heuristics are described as "judgmental shortcuts that generally get us where we need to go – and quickly – but at the cost of occasionally sending us off course." Heuristics are useful because they use effort-reduction and simplification in decision-making.

When people rely on representativeness to make judgments, they are likely to judge wrongly because the fact that something is more representative does not actually make it more likely. The representativeness heuristic is simply described as assessing similarity of objects and organizing them based around the category prototype (e.g., like goes with like, and causes and effects should resemble each other). This heuristic is used because it is an easy computation. The problem is that people overestimate its ability to accurately predict the likelihood of an event. Thus, it can result in neglect of relevant base rates and other cognitive biases.

Determinants of representativeness
The representativeness heuristic is more likely to be used when the judgement or decision to be made has certain factors.

Similarity
When judging the representativeness of a new stimulus/event, people usually pay attention to the degree of similarity between the stimulus/event and a standard/process. It is also important that those features be salient. Nilsson, Juslin, and Olsson (2008) found this to be influenced by the exemplar account of memory (concrete examples of a category are stored in memory) so that new instances were classified as representative if highly similar to a category as well as if frequently encountered. Several examples of similarity have been described in the representativeness heuristic literature. This research has focused on medical beliefs. People often believe that medical symptoms should resemble their causes or treatments. For example, people have long believed that ulcers were caused by stress, due to the representativeness heuristic, when in fact bacteria cause ulcers. In a similar line of thinking, in some alternative medicine beliefs patients have been encouraged to eat organ meat that corresponds to their medical disorder. Use of the representativeness heuristic can be seen in even simpler beliefs, such as the belief that eating fatty foods makes one fat. Even physicians may be swayed by the representativeness heuristic when judging similarity, in diagnoses, for example. The researcher found that clinicians use the representativeness heuristic in making diagnoses by judging how similar patients are to the stereotypical or prototypical patient with that disorder.

Randomness
Irregularity and local representativeness affect judgments of randomness. Things that do not appear to have any logical sequence are regarded as representative of randomness and thus more likely to occur. For example, THTHTH as a series of coin tosses would not be considered representative of randomly generated coin tosses as it is too well ordered.

Local representativeness is an assumption wherein people rely on the law of small numbers, whereby small samples are perceived to represent their population to the same extent as large samples. A small sample which appears randomly distributed would reinforce the belief, under the assumption of local representativeness, that the population is randomly distributed. Conversely, a small sample with a skewed distribution would weaken this belief. If a coin toss is repeated several times and the majority of the results consists of "heads", the assumption of local representativeness will cause the observer to believe the coin is biased toward "heads".

Tom W.
In a study done in 1973, Kahneman and Tversky divided their participants into three groups:

 * "Base-rate group", who were given the instructions: "Consider all the first-year graduate students in the U.S. today. Please write down your best guesses about the percentage of students who are now enrolled in the following nine fields of specialization." The nine fields given were business administration, computer science, engineering, humanities and education, law, library science, medicine, physical and life sciences, and social science and social work.
 * "Similarity group", who were given a personality sketch. "Tom W. is of high intelligence, although lacking in true creativity. He has a need for order and clarity, and for neat and tidy systems in which every detail finds its appropriate place. His writing is rather dull and mechanical, occasionally enlivened by somewhat corny puns and by flashes of imagination of the sci-fi type. He has a strong drive for competence. He seems to feel little sympathy for other people and does not enjoy interacting with others. Self-centered, he nonetheless has a deep moral sense." The participants in this group were asked to rank the nine areas listed in part 1 in terms of how similar Tom W. is to the prototypical graduate student of each area.
 * "Prediction group", who were given the personality sketch described in 2, but were also given the information "The preceding personality sketch of Tom W. was written during Tom's senior year in high school by a psychologist, on the basis of projective tests. Tom W. is currently a graduate student. Please rank the following nine fields of graduate specialization in order of the likelihood that Tom W. is now a graduate student in each of these fields."

The judgments of likelihood were much closer for the judgments of similarity than for the estimated base rates. The findings supported the authors' predictions that people make predictions based on how representative something is (similar), rather than based on relative base rate information. For example, more than 95% of the participants said that Tom would be more likely to study computer science than education or humanities, when there were much higher base rate estimates for education and humanities than computer science.

The taxicab problem
In another study done by Tversky and Kahneman, subjects were given the following problem:

A cab was involved in a hit and run accident at night. Two cab companies, the Green and the Blue, operate in the city. 85% of the cabs in the city are Green and 15% are Blue.

A witness identified the cab as Blue. The court tested the reliability of the witness under the same circumstances that existed on the night of the accident and concluded that the witness correctly identified each one of the two colours 80% of the time and failed 20% of the time.

What is the probability that the cab involved in the accident was Blue rather than Green knowing that this witness identified it as Blue?

Most subjects gave probabilities over 50%, and some gave answers over 80%. The correct answer, found using Bayes' theorem, is lower than these estimates:
 * There is a 12% probability (0.12 = 0.15 × 0.80) that the blue cab is (correctly) identified by the witness as blue.
 * There is a 17% probability (0.17 = 0.85 × 0.20) that the green cab is (incorrectly) identified by the witness as blue.
 * There is therefore a 29% probability (0.29 = 0.12 + 0.17) that the cab is identified by the witness as blue.
 * This results in a 41% probability (0.41 ≈ 0.12 ÷ 0.29) that the cab identified as blue was actually blue.

This result can be achieved by Bayes' theorem which states:

$$P(B|I) = \frac{P(I | B)\, P(B)}{P(I)}.$$

where:

P(x) - a probability of x,

B - the cab was blue,

I - the cab is identified by the witness as blue,

B | I - the cab that is identified as blue, was blue,

I | B - the cab that was blue, is identified by the witness as blue.

Representativeness is cited in the similar effect of the gambler's fallacy, the regression fallacy and the conjunction fallacy.

Base rate neglect and base rate fallacy
The use of the representativeness heuristic will likely lead to violations of Bayes' Theorem:
 * $$P(H|D) = \frac{P(D | H)\, P(H)}{P(D)}.$$

However, judgments by representativeness only look at the resemblance between the hypothesis and the data, thus inverse probabilities are equated:

$$P(H|D)=P(D|H)$$

As can be seen, the base rate P(H) is ignored in this equation, leading to the base rate fallacy. A base rate is a phenomenon's basic rate of incidence. The base rate fallacy describes how people do not take the base rate of an event into account when solving probability problems. This was explicitly tested by Dawes, Mirels, Gold and Donahue (1993) who had people judge both the base rate of people who had a particular personality trait and the probability that a person who had a given personality trait had another one. For example, participants were asked how many people out of 100 answered true to the question "I am a conscientious person" and also, given that a person answered true to this question, how many would answer true to a different personality question. They found that participants equated inverse probabilities (e.g., $$P(conscientious|neurotic)=P(neurotic|conscientious)$$) even when it was obvious that they were not the same (the two questions were answered immediately after each other).

A medical example is described by Axelsson. Say a doctor performs a test that is 99% accurate, and you test positive for the disease. However, the incidence of the disease is 1/10,000. Your actual risk of having the disease is 1%, because the population of healthy people is so much larger than the disease. This statistic often surprises people, due to the base rate fallacy, as many people do not take the basic incidence into account when judging probability. Research by Maya Bar-Hillel (1980) suggests that perceived relevancy of information is vital to base-rate neglect: base rates are only included in judgments if they seem equally relevant to the other information.

Some research has explored base rate neglect in children, as there was a lack of understanding about how these judgment heuristics develop. The authors of one such study wanted to understand the development of the heuristic, if it differs between social judgments and other judgments, and whether children use base rates when they are not using the representativeness heuristic. The authors found that the use of the representativeness heuristic as a strategy begins early on and is consistent. The authors also found that children use idiosyncratic strategies to make social judgments initially, and use base rates more as they get older, but the use of the representativeness heuristic in the social arena also increase as they get older. The authors found that, among the children surveyed, base rates were more readily used in judgments about objects than in social judgments. After that research was conducted, Davidson (1995) was interested in exploring how the representativeness heuristic and conjunction fallacy in children related to children's stereotyping. Consistent with previous research, children based their responses to problems off of base rates when the problems contained nonstereotypic information or when the children were older. There was also evidence that children commit the conjunction fallacy. Finally, as students get older, they used the representativeness heuristic on stereotyped problems, and so made judgments consistent with stereotypes. There is evidence that even children use the representativeness heuristic, commit the conjunction fallacy, and disregard base rates.

Research suggests that use or neglect of base rates can be influenced by how the problem is presented, which reminds us that the representativeness heuristic is not a "general, all purpose heuristic", but may have many contributing factors. Base rates may be neglected more often when the information presented is not causal. Base rates are used less if there is relevant individuating information. Groups have been found to neglect base rate more than individuals do. Use of base rates differs based on context. Research on use of base rates has been inconsistent, with some authors suggesting a new model is necessary.

Conjunction fallacy
A group of undergraduates were provided with a description of Linda, modelled to be representative of an active feminist. Then participants were then asked to evaluate the probability of her being a feminist, the probability of her being a bank teller, or the probability of being both a bank teller and feminist. Probability theory dictates that the probability of being both a bank teller and feminist (the conjunction of two sets) must be less than or equal to the probability of being either a feminist or a bank teller. . A conjunction cannot be more probable than one of its constituents. However, participants judged the conjunction (bank teller and feminist) as being more probable than being a bank teller alone. Some research suggests that the conjunction error may partially be due to subtle linguistic factors, such as inexplicit wording or semantic interpretation of "probability". The authors argue that both logic and language use may relate to the error, and it should be more fully investigated.

Disjunction fallacy
From probability theory the disjunction of two events is at least as likely as either of the events individually. For example, the probability of being either a physics or biology major is at least as likely as being a physics major, if not more likely. However, when a personality description (data) seems to be very representative of a physics major (e.g., pocket protector) over a biology major, people judge that it is more likely for this person to be a physics major than a natural sciences major (which is a superset of physics).

Evidence that the representativeness heuristic may cause the disjunction fallacy comes from Bar-Hillel and Neter (1993). They found that people judge a person who is highly representative of being a statistics major (e.g., highly intelligent, does math competitions) as being more likely to be a statistics major than a social sciences major (superset of statistics), but they do not think that he is more likely to be a Hebrew language major than a humanities major (superset of Hebrew language). Thus, only when the person seems highly representative of a category is that category judged as more probable than its superordinate category. These incorrect appraisals remained even in the face of losing real money in bets on probabilities.

Insensitivity to sample size
Representativeness heuristic is also employed when subjects estimate the probability of a specific parameter of a sample. If the parameter highly represents the population, the parameter is often given a high probability. This estimation process usually ignores the impact of the sample size.

A concept proposed by Tversky and Kahneman provides an example of this bias in a problem about two hospitals of differing size.

"Approximately 45 babies are born in the large hospital while 15 babies are born in the small hospital. Half (50%) of all babies born in general are boys. However, the percentage changes from 1 day to another. For a 1-year period, each hospital recorded the days on which >60% of the babies born were boys. The question posed is: Which hospital do you think recorded more such days?

 * The larger hospital (21)
 * The smaller hospital (21)
 * About the same (that is, within 5% of each other) (53)"

The values shown in parentheses are the number of students choosing each answer.

The results show that more than half the respondents selected the wrong answer (third option). This is due to the respondents ignoring the effect of sample size. The respondents selected the third option most likely because the same statistic represents both the large and small hospitals. According to statistical theory, a small sample size allows the statistical parameter to deviate considerably compared to a large sample. Therefore, the large hospital would have a higher probability to stay close to the nominal value of 50%.

title: Representativeness heuristic


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1775 in music

Events

 * February 23 – Première of Pierre Beaumarchais's play, The Barber of Seville, which will later provide material for more than one opera.
 * Wilhelm Hauser becomes organist at the monastery of Lavaldieu and the teacher of Étienne Méhul.

Classical music

 * Carl Friedrich Abel – 6 String Quartets, Op. 12
 * John Alcock Jr. – 8 Easy Organ Voluntaries
 * Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
 * Symphony in D major, H.663
 * Symphony in F major, H.665
 * Johann Christian Bach – Sinfonia concertante, W.C 34
 * Wilhelm Friedemann Bach – Keyboard Sonata in G major, F.7
 * Giovanni Battista Cirri – 6 String Quartets, Op. 13
 * Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf – Concerto for Oboe in D major
 * Tommaso Giordani – 6 Flute Trios, Op. 12
 * Joseph Haydn
 * Baryton Trio in D major, Hob.XI:114
 * Il Ritorno di Tobia, Hob.XXI:1 (sacred oratorio)
 * Mass in B-flat major, Hob.XXII:7
 * Joseph Martin Kraus – Requiem
 * Georg Anton Kreusser – 6 Flute Quintets, Op. 10
 * Franz Lamotte – Violin Concerto No. 2
 * Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
 * Violin Concertos No. 3, No. 4 & No. 5
 * Symphony in C major, K.102/213c
 * Serenade in D major, K.204/213a
 * Church Sonata in B-flat major, K.212
 * Misericordias Domini, K.222/205a
 * Friedrich Wilhelm Rust – Sonata in A major, CzaR 110
 * Friedrich Schwindl – 6 Quartets, Op. 7
 * Maddalena Laura Sirmen – 6 Duets, Op. 5
 * Johann Matthias Sperger – Quartet in D major, for flute, viola, cello, and contrabass, M.C III:23a
 * Carl Stamitz – 3 Quintets, Op. 11
 * John Stanley – Six Concertos for the Organ, Harpsichord, or Forte Piano, with Accompanyments [sic] for Two Violins and a Bass, Op. 10 (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by Mr Welcker)
 * Johann Adolph Hasse – La Danza

Opera

 * Johann André – Erwin und Elmire
 * Pasquale Anfossi – L'Avaro
 * André Ernest Modeste Grétry – La fausse Magie
 * Joseph Haydn – L'incontro improvviso, Hob.XXVIII:6
 * Gaetano Latilla – Antigono
 * Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
 * La finta giardiniera, K. 196 (premiered January 13)
 * Il re pastore, K. 208
 * Josef Mysliveček – Il Demofoonte (second version, first premiered in 1769)
 * Giovanni Paisiello
 * Socrate immaginario, R.1.48
 * Il gran Cid, R.1.49

Methods and theory writings

 * Andrea Basili – Musica universale armonico pratica
 * Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle – La Tonotechnie
 * Fedele Fenaroli – Regole musicali per i principianti di cembalo
 * Johann Caspar Heck – Short and Fundamental Instructions for Learning Thorough Bass
 * Jacob Schuback – Von der musikalischen Declamation

Births

 * January 21 – Manuel del Pópulo Vicente García, singer and composer (d. 1832)
 * March 24 – Muthuswami Dikshitar, poet and composer (d. 1835)
 * May 1 – Sophia Dussek, composer and musician (died 1831)
 * June 4 – Francesco Molino, guitarist and composer (d. 1847)
 * June 13 – Antoni Radziwiłł, politician and musician (d. 1833)
 * July 5 – William Crotch, composer (d. 1847)
 * July 9 – Matthew Lewis, librettist and writer (died 1818)
 * August 2 – José Ángel Lamas, composer (d. 1814)
 * August 31 – François de Fossa, guitarist and composer (d. 1849)
 * September 17 – Margrethe Schall, ballerina (d. 1852)
 * October 6 – Johann Anton André, German composer (died 1842)
 * October 15 – Bernhard Henrik Crusell, clarinettist and composer (d. 1838)
 * October 21 – Giuseppe Baini, composer and music critic (d. 1844)
 * October 30 – Catterino Cavos, organist, conductor and composer (d. 1840)
 * December 6 – Nicolo Isouard, Maltese composer (died 1818)
 * December 16 – François-Adrien Boïeldieu, composer (d. 1834)
 * December 25 – Antun Sorkočević, writer, composer and diplomat (d. 1841)
 * date unknown
 * Joseph Antonio Emidy, violinist and composer (d. 1835)
 * Andrea Nozzari, operatic tenor (d. 1832)
 * Giovanni Schmidt, Italian librettist (died c. 1839)
 * Giovanni Schmidt, Italian librettist (died c. 1839)

Deaths

 * January 15 – Giovanni Battista Sammartini, organist and composer (b. c. 1700)
 * May 1–4? — Francesco Barsanti, composer; recorder & oboe virtuoso (b. 1690)
 * May 7 – Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel, organist and composer (b. 1697)
 * May 9 – Vittoria Tesi, operatic contralto (b. 1700)
 * June 11 – Egidio Duni, composer (b. 1708)
 * July 26 – Alessandro Besozzi, oboist and composer (b. 1702)
 * November 1 – Pierre-Joseph-Justin Bernard, librettist and writer (born 1708)
 * November 7 – François Rebel, composer (b. 1701)
 * December 9 – Pietro Gnocchi, composer (b. 1689)
 * date unknown – Rosa Scarlatti, opera singer (b. 1727)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: 1775 in music


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HMS Ranee

USS Niantic (CVE-46) was a US escort carrier, that served in the Royal Navy as HMS Ranee (D03).

Niantic, originally given the designation AVG-46, was redesignated as ACV-46 on 20 August 1942. The ship's keel was laid down by the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation at their yard in Tacoma, Washington on 5 January 1943. The vessel was launched on 2 June, sponsored by Mrs. Ray V. Blanco. She was redesignated again to CVE-46 on 15 July that year and transferred to the United Kingdom under Lend-Lease on 8 November, when she was commissioned into the Royal Navy.

As one of the 38 converted C3 escort carriers transferred to the United Kingdom, Ranee joined the merchant aircraft carriers guarding the Atlantic convoy routes. Assigned to the Western Approaches, her aircraft helped to turn the tables on foraging U-boats in the North Atlantic and also assisted in operations to close their northern transit into the Atlantic and track them down in the Bay of Biscay. On 27 February 1945 she sailed from San Diego with USMC squadron VMO-7 embarked for Pearl Harbor. Serving with Training Squadron, Western Approaches, at the end of 1945, she was returned to US custody at Norfolk, Virginia on 21 November 1946. She was declared not essential to the defense of the US, and struck from the Navy List on 22 January 1947. She was sold into merchant service 9 June 1947 to the Waterman Steamship Corporation, in Mobile, Alabama as Friesland (later Pacific Breeze). She was sold for scrap in Taiwan in 1974.

Design and description
These ships were larger and had a greater aircraft capacity than all the preceding American built escort carriers. They were also all laid down as escort carriers and not converted merchant ships. All the ships had a complement of 646 men and an overall length of 492 ft, a beam of 69 ft and a draught of 25 ft. Propulsion was provided by two boilers connected to a steam turbine, which in turn drove one shaft giving 9,350 shp; it could propel the ship at 16.5 kn.

Aircraft facilities were a small combined bridge/flight control on the starboard side, two aircraft lifts 43 by, one aircraft catapult and nine arrestor wires. Aircraft could be housed in the 260 by hangar below the flight deck. The ship's armament comprised: two 4"/50, 5"/38 or 5"/51 dual purpose guns in single mounts, sixteen 40 mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns in twin mounts and twenty 20 mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft cannon in single mounts. She had a maximum aircraft capacity of twenty-four aircraft which could be a mixture of Grumman Martlet, Vought F4U Corsair or Hawker Sea Hurricane fighter aircraft and Fairey Swordfish or Grumman Avenger anti-submarine torpedo bombers.

title: HMS Ranee


text:
Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Act 2003

The Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Act 2003 (c 10) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Its core provision was to allow the Deputy Prime Minister to make orders for referendums in each of the Regions of England on the question of whether they wish to have an elected regional assembly. If the answer was "yes", this would have been implemented by further legislation; and existing two-tier local government areas (shire counties) would have become unitary authorities.

Three such referendums (the Northern England referendums) were expected in 2004, for the regions of North East and North West England and Yorkshire and the Humber. There were no immediate plans for any in the other 5 applicable regions (East of England, East Midlands, South East, South West, West Midlands). Greater London already has the London Assembly.

It contained further consequential provisions, including causing the Boundary Committee for England to make recommendations about what the pattern of unitary authorities should be; and then if a referendum was successful, the composition of the Assemblies. It was expected that the proposed assemblies would have had a similar level of representation to the London Assembly, which has 25 members, 14 of which represent constituencies, the remainder being apportioned on a top-up party list system.

Following the overwhelming defeat of the referendum in North East England, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott told the House of Commons he would not move orders for the other two referendums within the effective time limit of June 2005 permitted by the Act. The Act was repealed by the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009.


text:
Anomaly

Anomaly may refer to:

Natural

 * Anomaly (natural sciences)
 * Atmospheric anomaly
 * Geophysical anomaly

Medical

 * Congenital anomaly (birth defect), a disorder present at birth
 * Physical anomaly, a deformation of an anatomical structure
 * Congenital vertebral anomaly, any of several malformations of the spine
 * Collie eye anomaly, eye disease of dogs
 * Coronary artery anomaly, a congenital abnormality in the heart
 * Ebstein's anomaly, a congenital heart defect
 * Uhl anomaly, a congenital heart disease affecting the myocardial muscle
 * Vaginal anomalies

Biology

 * Anomalous, a species of moth in the Noctuid family
 * Chromosome anomaly, a disorder caused by a structural error in a chromosome or an atypical number of chromosomes
 * Genetic anomaly, a disorder caused by mutation
 * Teratology, the study of developmental anomalies

Physics

 * Anomalous diffusion, the movement of molecules from a region of lower concentration to a region of higher concentration
 * Anomalous dispersion (optics), when the speed of an electromagnetic wave increases with increasing frequency
 * Anomalon, a hypothetical type of nuclear matter that shows an anomalously large reactive cross section
 * Anomaly (physics), a failure of a symmetry of a theory's classical action
 * Conformal anomaly, a quantum phenomenon that breaks the conformal symmetry of the classical theory
 * Chiral anomaly, an anomalous nonconservation of a chiral current
 * Gauge anomaly, the effect of quantum mechanics that invalidates the gauge symmetry of a quantum field theory
 * Global anomaly, in quantum physics
 * Gravitational anomaly, an effect in quantum mechanics that invalidates the general covariance of some theories of general relativity
 * Konishi anomaly, the violation of the conservation of the Noether current associated with certain transformations
 * Mixed anomaly, an effect in quantum mechanics
 * Parity anomaly, associated with parity

Astronomy

 * In astronomy, an anomaly of an elliptical orbit, generally measured with respect to an apsis, usually the periapsis
 * Anomalous precession, another term for "apsidal precession"
 * Eccentric anomaly, an intermediate value used to compute the position of a celestial object as a function of time
 * Flyby anomaly, an unexpected energy increase during the flybys of the Earth by various satellites
 * Mean anomaly, a measure of time in the study of orbital dynamics
 * Pioneer anomaly, the observed deviation of the trajectories of some uncrewed space probes, and especially Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11
 * South Atlantic Anomaly, an area where the Earth's inner Van Allen radiation belt comes closest to the Earth's surface
 * True anomaly, the angle between the direction of periapsis and the current position of an object on its orbit

Fictional entities

 * Anomaly, a rift in the space-time continuum in the television series Futurama
 * Anomaly, any shortcut to hyperspace travel in Robert Heinlein's novels of the 1950s, today called wormholes
 * "Anomaly" (Star Trek: Enterprise), a 2003 episode of Star Trek: Enterprise
 * The Anomaly, a 2014 film
 * Anomaly (comics), a villain in DC Comics
 * Anomaly (Primeval), a time portal in the TV series Primeval
 * Spatial anomaly, an extraordinary disruption in the space-time continuum in the Star Trek universe
 * The Fortean anomaly, in the work of Charles Fort
 * The Tycho Magnetic Anomaly (TMA) on the Moon in the novel and in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey by Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick
 * Entities in the SCP universe, often referred to as "anomalies"

Video games

 * Anomaly: Warzone Earth, a real time strategy video game
 * Anomaly Korea
 * Anomaly 2

Publications

 * The Anomalies, a 2003 novel by Joey Goebel
 * Anomaly (series), a 2013 trilogy by Krista McGee
 * Anomaly (graphic novel), by Brian Haberlin
 * The Anomaly (novel), by French author Hervé Le Tellier

Albums

 * Anomaly (Ace Frehley album) (2009)
 * Anomalies (album) (2005), by Cephalic Carnage
 * Anomaly (The Hiatus album) (2010)
 * Anomaly (Lecrae album) (2014)
 * Anomalies, Vol. 1 (2010), by Cave In

Songs

 * "Anna Molly" (a word play on the word "anomaly"), by Incubus
 * "Anomaly", a 2004 song by Psyopus from the album Ideas of Reference
 * "An Anomaly", a 2007 song by It Prevails from the album The Inspiration
 * "The Anomaly", a 2011 song by Scar Symmetry from the album The Unseen Empire
 * "Anomaly", a 2012 song by KB from the album Weight & Glory

Technology

 * Anomaly detection, the process of detecting anomalies from the other, relevant data
 * Anomaly in software, any condition that deviates from expectation

Business

 * Market anomaly, a distortion in prices in a financial market
 * Anomaly (advertising agency), a marketing communications agency based in New York

Other uses

 * Anomalistics, the study of scientific anomalies
 * Insult, "Blake you are such an anomaly"
 * Ararat anomaly, an object on Mount Ararat in Turkey claimed to be the remains of Noah's Ark
 * Irregular (disambiguation)
 * Outlier
 * All pages with titles beginning with Anomalous
 * All pages with titles containing Anomalous
 * All pages with titles beginning with Anomalous
 * All pages with titles containing Anomalous

title: Anomaly


text:
User talk:Blizzarex

Welcome, old friend!!! --Uncle Ed 17:43, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It's really great to finally get in touch with you. I've been casually surfing Wikipedia for a looong time now without registering, but it wasn't until I did a research paper on Moonies (and checked the page history for the wiki entry) that I realized that a person calling himself "Uncle Ed" had admin and developer status here. I also googled around a bit and found out that you had been interviewed in Wired Magazine on the subject of Wikipedia.

Feel free to email me whenever, as I've left that option open. Oops, time to work on a problem set. Gotta go! Blizzarex 23:10, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

 * Hey, Godfrey, it sure has been a long time! Is your dad still a professor of ethics? Did your mom ever get her PhD? And how are Roderick and your other siblings?

 * I've been volunteering at Wikipedia since late 2001, and after a due period of paying my dues I found that being a "Moonie" was no longer a social handicap. I'm just about finished with my 8th reading of Lord of the Rings.

 * I hope you can contribute to some the articles here. Are the articles on physics and mathematics any good? Do you know anything about the Unification movement?

 * It's good to hear from you again, and I hope you stick around here, Godfrey! :-) --Uncle Ed 14:52, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hello
Welcome to Wikipedia, Blizzarex. It's about time another Delawarian showed up. I was starting to think I was the only one ;) →Raul654 03:32, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)

Hello from another
Hello Godfrey, Why is it that you have not changed your User page on Wikipedia in 2 years? Anyways, I changed it for you to reflect your current year of college. That is all. Say hello to Roderick, etc. for me. -Arjun G aka R6MaY89 23:57, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:Blizzarex


text:
HMS Trouncer (D85)

The USS Perdido (CVE-47) (previously AVG-47, later ACV-47) was a Bogue-class escort carrier laid down as ACV-47 under Maritime Commission contract by Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding of Tacoma, Washington, 1 February 1943; launched 16 June 1943; sponsored by Mrs. H. M. Bemis, reclassified as CVE-47 on 15 July 1943; and completed at the Commercial Iron Works, Portland, Oregon.

Assigned to the United Kingdom under lend lease 23 June 1943, Perdido was taken over by the Royal Navy at Portland, 31 January 1944. During the remainder of World War II, she served the Royal Navy as Ruler-class escort carrier HMS Trouncer (D85) and took part in convoy escort and ASW patrol operations. The escort carrier returned to Norfolk, Virginia, 21 February 1946. Perdido was returned to the U.S. Navy 3 March 1946, and on 25 March, the Secretary of the Navy authorized her for disposal. Her name was struck from the Naval Register 12 April 1946. She was sold to William B. St. John, delivered to her purchaser 6 March 1947 and pressed into merchant service as Greystroke Castle (renamed Gallic in 1954 and Berinnes in 1959). She was sold for scrap in Taiwan in 1973.

Design and description
These ships were all larger and had a greater aircraft capacity than all the preceding American built escort carriers. They were also all laid down as escort carriers and not converted merchant ships. All the ships had a complement of 646 men and an overall length of 492 ft, a beam of 69 ft and a draught of 25 ft. Propulsion was provided a steam turbine, two boilers connected to one shaft giving 9,350 brake horsepower (SHP), which could propel the ship at 16.5 kn.

Aircraft facilities were a small combined bridge–flight control on the starboard side, two aircraft lifts 43 ft by 34 ft, one aircraft catapult and nine arrestor wires. Aircraft could be housed in the 260 ft by 62 ft hangar below the flight deck. Armament comprised: two 4"/50, 5"/38 or 5"/51 Dual Purpose guns in single mounts, sixteen 40 mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns in twin mounts and twenty 20 mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft cannons in single mounts. They had a maximum aircraft capacity of twenty-four aircraft which could be a mixture of Grumman Martlet, Vought F4U Corsair or Hawker Sea Hurricane fighter aircraft and Fairey Swordfish or Grumman Avenger anti-submarine aircraft.

title: HMS Trouncer (D85)


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Guy Mountfort

Guy Mountfort (4 December 1905 – 23 April 2003) was an English advertising executive, amateur ornithologist and conservationist. He is known for writing the pioneering A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, published in 1954.

Biography
Born in London, Mountfort was the writer of the 1954 A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, with illustrations by Roger Tory Peterson and distribution maps by Philip Hollom. The book was the first to provide a portable, accurate, illustrated guide to essentially all birds likely to be seen in Britain, and its design influenced all subsequent field guides.

In 1961, he created the World Wide Fund for Nature (back then the World Wildlife Fund) with Victor Stolan, Sir Julian Huxley, Sir Peter Scott and Max Nicholson. In 1956, he led an expedition to the Coto Donana with the resulting Book Portrait of a Wilderness illustrated by Eric Hosking. In 1963, he led a party of naturalists and including Huxley, George Shannon James Ferguson-Lees and D. Ian M. Wallace which made the first ornithological expedition to Azraq in Jordan. The expedition's recommendations eventually led to the creation of the Azraq Wetland Reserve and other protected areas. Papers from the expedition are in the United Kingdom's National Archives. He was appointed an OBE in 1970, for services to ornithology. In 1972, he led the campaign to save the Bengal tiger, persuading Indira Gandhi to create nine tiger reserves in India, with eight others in Nepal and Bangladesh.

title: Guy Mountfort


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Boundary Committee for England

The Boundary Committee for England was a statutory committee of the Electoral Commission, an independent body set up by the UK Parliament. The committee's aim was to conduct thorough, consultative and robust reviews of local government areas in England, and for its recommendations to be evidence-based, accurate and accepted. The Boundary Committee was abolished in 2010, with its functions assumed by a new Local Government Boundary Commission for England.

The committee's responsibilities related solely to local government boundaries: responsibility for parliamentary boundaries lies with the Boundary Commission for England, a non-departmental public body of the Ministry of Justice.

History/establishment
On 1 April 2002 responsibility for electoral reviews in England transferred to the Electoral Commission. On the same day the Boundary Committee for England became a statutory committee of the commission. The committee undertook electoral reviews and made recommendations to the commission as to whether electoral changes should be made in respect of the area under review. The commission then decided whether to implement the committee's recommendations. The decision of the commission would be taken at a commission meeting comprising the Electoral Commissioners as members.

The Boundary Committee for England replaced the Local Government Commission for England, which was the body responsible for reviewing the structure of local government in England from 1992 to 2002. The equivalent bodies operating in other parts of the United Kingdom are the Local Government Boundary Commission for Wales, the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland and the Local Government Boundary Commission for Northern Ireland.

The protocol on the relationship between the Boundary Committee for England and the Electoral Commission sets out the roles and responsibilities of each body in terms of securing fair boundary arrangements for local elections in England.

Responsibilities and objectives
The Boundary Committee for England was responsible for three types of review: electoral reviews; administrative boundary reviews; and structural reviews.

Electoral reviews
An electoral review considered whether the boundaries of wards or divisions within a local authority need to be altered to take account of changes in electorate. The Electoral Commission would direct the committee to undertake electoral reviews and was then responsible for implementing them.

The committee also looked at the number of councillors, the number of wards or divisions and whether the wards or divisions should be represented by a single councillor, or jointly by two or three councillors.

Administrative boundary reviews
At the request of the Department for Communities and Local Government or of a local authority, or at the Boundary Committee for England's instigation, the committee could undertake administrative boundary reviews, which reviewed the external boundaries of a local authority.

Structural reviews
A structural review was used to establish whether one or more single, all-purpose councils, known as unitary authorities, should be established in an area instead of the district and county councils of the existing two-tier system.

Organisation
Chair and committee members

 * Max Caller CBE was appointed chair of the Boundary Committee for England in 2007. He also serves as an Electoral Commissioner.

Boundary Committee members:

 * Jane Earl
 * Joan Jones CBE
 * Professor Colin Mellors
 * Dr Peter Knight CBE DL

 * The Director of the Boundary Committee for England was Archie Gall

LDEDC Act – changes to Boundary Committee structure
The Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009, which received royal assent on 12 November 2009, provided for the establishment of the Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE), and for the transfer to it of all the boundary-related functions of the Electoral Commission and the Boundary Committee for England. This reflects the recommendations of the Committee on Standards on Public Life (CSPL), which were supported by the Electoral Commission and the Boundary Committee. This transfer took place in April 2010.

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Talk:Employment Equity

How about some neutrality? There is plenty to criticize about Employment Equity without resorting to emotive propaganda.

Employment Equity (formerly called Affirmative Action) is the description used by the South African Government to describe their policy of disadvantaging people and companies based on race.

There has to be a better description than this.

Strict policy has made it extremely difficult to employ white people, forcing employers to (in any given case) employ a "Previously Advantaged" (black) candidate regardless of skill or suitability.

Any given case? Evidence? And it should be "previously disadvantaged".

 Though the South African Constitution (implemented by the current government) states that it is illegal and unconstitutional to discriminate on the ground of race, this movement has nothing but grown, to the point of embracement (and sometimes even abuse) by the corporate sector.

IIRC, the present constitution does allow for the redress of past discrimination.

168.209.98.35

Fixing the typo complained about in the previous post
I changed the typo complained about in the pervious post, so that complaint is nullified

Affirmative action
Have redirected article to Affirmative action, as it's really just another name for the same thing. Note that the affirmative action article is also listed as an NPOV debate. Bearcat 23:10, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Merging with Employment Equity
The page in BEE should not be merged with a page in Employment Equity... BEE is an overarching process of which Employment Equity is only a part. to merge them would be to misunderstand what BEE is about.

I agree. Jesus geek 01:59, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

I also agree. I don't think Employment Equity covers BEE. They should stay separate articles Joziboy 16 March 2006, 15:39 (UTC)

I also agree. BEE includes parts of employment equity, however, merging the two topics would give a mistaken sense of what BEE is. Aviationwiz 00:24, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

EE vs BEE
Please note the following: The Employment Equity Act and the BEE Act are two totally separate pieces of legislation, with different goals and definitions. The key element of the latter being the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Scorecard, one of the seven elements of the scorecard is entitled Employment Equity, but again this has been informed by the EE Act but does not replace it, nor is it wholly subservient to it.

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Talk:Huntington

..you may include "Huntington´s disease" on this page. At least I have looked here in the first place when I looked for the disease.

bumping Huntington, West Virginia up the list
Does anyone object to moving Huntington, West Virginia up the list? It seems to be by far the largest Huntington, save Huntington Beach, California (although I figure that people looking for that city would inslude "beach" in the search) and the most likely intended target of a search for Huntington. I do stop short of moving this article to Huntington (disambiguation) at this time and making this a redirect, but it may be worth discussion at some point.  young  american (talk) 23:42, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

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HMS Thane

USS Sunset (CVE-48) (previously AVG-48 then ACV-48) was a Bogue-class escort carrier. Assigned on 23 August 1942 to MC hull 259, a modified C3-S-A1 laid down on 23 February 1943 by Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding of Tacoma, Washington; launched on 15 July and redesignated CVE-48 the same day; sponsored by Mrs. C.E. Taylor. She was transferred to the United Kingdom under Lend-Lease agreement on 19 November; and commissioned the same day as HMS Thane (D48), a Ruler-class escort carrier in the Royal Navy.

HMS Thane operated in the North Atlantic protecting convoys and ferrying aircraft for use in the European Theater. On 15 January 1945, while ferrying aircraft in the Irish Sea, she was torpedoed by the GS U-1172 and severely damaged, losing her starboard aft 5 inch gun and its sponson, disabling propulsion, and losing 10 men. Taken to Gare Loch in the Firth of Clyde, southwest Scotland, she was examined, declared a constructive total loss and decommissioned to reserve. She was returned to United States custody while in the United Kingdom on 12 May. Determined to be of no use to the United States Navy, she was slated for disposal in October; and she was subsequently scrapped.

Design and description
These ships were all larger and had a greater aircraft capacity than all the preceding American built escort carriers. They were also all laid down as escort carriers and not converted merchant ships. All the ships had a complement of 646 men and an overall length of 492 ft, a beam of 69 ft and a draught of 25 ft. Propulsion was provided a steam turbine, two boilers connected to one shaft giving 9,350 shp, which could propel the ship at 16.5 kn.

Aircraft facilities were a small combined bridge–flight control on the starboard side, two aircraft lifts 43 ft by 34 ft, one aircraft catapult and nine arrestor wires. Aircraft could be housed in the 260 ft by 62 ft hangar below the flight deck. Armament comprised: two 4"/50, 5"/38 or 5"/51 Dual Purpose guns in single mounts, sixteen 40 mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns in twin mounts and twenty 20 mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft cannons in single mounts. They had a maximum aircraft capacity of twenty-four aircraft which could be a mixture of Grumman Martlet, Vought F4U Corsair or Hawker Sea Hurricane fighter aircraft and Fairey Swordfish or Grumman Avenger anti-submarine aircraft.

The last voyage of Thane brought the first helicopters to the UK. Nine Sikorsky R-4B Hoverflys were flown on at Norfolk, Virginia on 29–30 December 1944, snowy weather delaying the loading of half of them to the following day. On arrival of the damaged Thane, seven were flown off to RDU Abbotsinch and two, thought to be damaged, were craned off.

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Einsatzgruppen

Einsatzgruppen (, lit. 'deployment groups'; also 'task forces') were Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass murder, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–1945) in German-occupied Europe. The Einsatzgruppen had an integral role in the implementation of the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish question" (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage) in territories conquered by Nazi Germany, and were involved in the murder of much of the intelligentsia and cultural elite of Poland, including members of the Catholic priesthood. Almost all of the people they murdered were civilians, beginning with the intelligentsia and swiftly progressing to Soviet political commissars, Jews, and Romani people, as well as actual or alleged partisans throughout Eastern Europe.

Under the direction of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and the supervision of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the Einsatzgruppen operated in territories occupied by the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) following the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Einsatzgruppen worked hand-in-hand with the Order Police battalions on the Eastern Front to carry out operations ranging from the murder of a few people to operations which lasted over two or more days, such as the massacre at Babi Yar with 33,771 Jews murdered in two days, and the Rumbula massacre (with about 25,000 Jews murdered in two days of shooting). As ordered by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the Wehrmacht cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen, providing logistical support for their operations, and participated in the mass murders. Historian Raul Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen, related agencies, and foreign auxiliary personnel murdered more than two million people, including 1.3 million of the 5.5 to 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

After the close of World War II, 24 officers, including multiple commanding officers, of the Einsatzgruppen were prosecuted in the Einsatzgruppen trial in 1947–48, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes. Fourteen death sentences and two life sentences were handed out. However, only four of these death sentences were carried out. Four additional Einsatzgruppe leaders were later tried and executed by other nations.

Formation and Aktion T4
The Einsatzgruppen were formed under the direction of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and operated by the Schutzstaffel (SS) before and during World War II. The Einsatzgruppen had their origins in the ad hoc Einsatzkommando formed by Heydrich to secure government buildings and documents following the Anschluss in Austria in March 1938. Originally part of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; SiPo), two units of Einsatzgruppen were stationed in the Sudetenland in October 1938. When military action turned out not to be necessary due to the Munich Agreement, the Einsatzgruppen were assigned to confiscate government papers and police documents. They also secured government buildings, questioned senior civil servants, and arrested as many as 10,000 Czech communists and German citizens. From September 1939, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office; RSHA) had overall command of the Einsatzgruppen.

As part of the drive by the Nazi regime to remove so-called "undesirable" elements from the German population, from September to December 1939 the Einsatzgruppen and others took part in Action T4, a program of systematic murder of persons with physical and mental disabilities and patients of psychiatric hospitals. Aktion T4 mainly took place from 1939 to 1941, but the murders continued until the end of the war. Initially the victims were shot by the Einsatzgruppen and others, but gas chambers were put into use by spring 1940.

Invasion of Poland
In response to Adolf Hitler's plan to invade Poland on 1 September 1939, Heydrich re-formed the Einsatzgruppen to travel in the wake of the German armies. Membership at this point was drawn from the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service; SD), the police, and the Gestapo. Heydrich placed SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Best in command, who assigned Hans-Joachim Tesmer to choose personnel for the task forces and their subgroups, called Einsatzkommandos, from among educated people with military experience and a strong ideological commitment to Nazism. Some had previously been members of paramilitary groups such as the Freikorps. Heydrich instructed Wagner in meetings in late July that the Einsatzgruppen should undertake their operations in cooperation with the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police; Orpo) and military commanders in the area. Army intelligence was in constant contact with Einsatzgruppen to coordinate their activities with other units.

Initially numbering 2,700 men (and ultimately 4,250 in Poland), the Einsatzgruppen's mission was to murder members of the Polish leadership most clearly identified with Polish national identity: the intelligentsia, members of the clergy, teachers, and members of the nobility. As stated by Hitler: "... there must be no Polish leaders; where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, however harsh that sounds". SS-Brigadeführer Lothar Beutel, commander of Einsatzgruppe IV, later testified that Heydrich gave the order for these murders at a series of meetings in mid-August. The Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen – lists of people to be murdered – had been drawn up by the SS as early as May 1939, using dossiers collected by the SD from 1936 forward. The Einsatzgruppen performed these murders with the support of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, a paramilitary group consisting of ethnic Germans living in Poland during Operation Tannenberg. Members of the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the Ordnungspolizei also shot civilians during the Polish campaign. Approximately 65,000 civilians were murdered by the end of 1939. In addition to leaders of Polish society, they murdered Jews, prostitutes, Romani people, and the mentally ill. Psychiatric patients in Poland were initially murdered by shooting, but by spring 1941 gas vans were widely used.

Seven Einsatzgruppen of battalion strength (around 500 men) operated in Poland. Each was subdivided into five Einsatzkommandos of company strength (around 100 men).
 * Einsatzgruppe I, commanded by SS-Standartenführer Bruno Streckenbach, acted with 14th Army
 * Einsatzgruppe II, SS-Obersturmbannführer Emanuel Schäfer, acted with 10th Army
 * Einsatzgruppe III, SS-Obersturmbannführer und Regierungsrat Herbert Fischer, acted with 8th Army
 * Einsatzgruppe IV, SS-Brigadeführer Lothar Beutel, acted with 4th Army
 * Einsatzgruppe V, SS-Standartenfürer Ernst Damzog, acted with 3rd Army
 * Einsatzgruppe VI, SS-Oberführer Erich Naumann, acted in Wielkopolska
 * Einsatzgruppe VII, SS-Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch and SS-Gruppenführer Otto Rasch, acted in Upper Silesia and Cieszyn Silesia

Though they were formally under the command of the army, the Einsatzgruppen received their orders from Heydrich and for the most part acted independently of the army. Many senior army officers were only too glad to leave these genocidal actions to the task forces, as the murders violated the rules of warfare as set down in the Geneva Conventions. However, Hitler had decreed that the army would have to tolerate and even offer logistical support to the Einsatzgruppen when it was tactically possible to do so. Some army commanders complained about unauthorised shootings, looting, and rapes committed by members of the Einsatzgruppen and the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, to little effect. For example, when Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz sent a memorandum of complaint to Hitler about the atrocities, Hitler dismissed his concerns as "childish", and Blaskowitz was relieved of his post in May 1940. He continued to serve in the army but never received promotion to field marshal.

The final task of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland was to round up the remaining Jews and concentrate them in ghettos within major cities with good railway connections. The intention was to eventually remove all the Jews from Poland, but at this point their final destination had not yet been determined. Together, the Wehrmacht and the Einsatzgruppen also drove tens of thousands of Jews eastward into Soviet-controlled territory.

Preparations for Operation Barbarossa
On 13 March 1941, in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler dictated his "Guidelines in Special Spheres re: Directive No. 21 (Operation Barbarossa)". Sub-paragraph B specified that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler would be given "special tasks" on direct orders from the Führer, which he would carry out independently. This directive was intended to prevent friction between the Wehrmacht and the SS in the upcoming offensive. Hitler also specified that criminal acts against civilians perpetrated by members of the Wehrmacht during the upcoming campaign would not be prosecuted in the military courts, and thus would go unpunished.

In a speech to his leading generals on 30 March 1941, Hitler described his envisioned war against the Soviet Union. General Franz Halder, the Army's Chief of Staff, described the speech:"Struggle between two ideologies. Scathing evaluation of Bolshevism, equals antisocial criminality. Communism immense future danger ... This a fight to the finish. If we do not accept this, we shall beat the enemy, but in thirty years we shall again confront the Communist foe. We don't make war to preserve the enemy ... Struggle against Russia: Extermination of Bolshevik Commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia ... Commissars and GPU personnel are criminals and must be treated as such. The struggle will differ from that in the west. In the east harshness now means mildness for the future."

Though General Halder did not record any mention of Jews, German historian Andreas Hillgruber argued that because of Hitler's frequent contemporary statements about the coming war of annihilation against "Judeo-Bolshevism", his generals would have understood Hitler's call for the destruction of the Soviet Union as also comprising a call for the destruction of its Jewish population. The genocide was often described using euphemisms such as "special tasks" and "executive measures"; Einsatzgruppe victims were often described as having been shot while trying to escape. In May 1941, Heydrich verbally passed on the order to murder the Soviet Jews to the SiPo NCO School in Pretzsch, where the commanders of the reorganised Einsatzgruppen were being trained for Operation Barbarossa. In spring 1941, Heydrich and the First Quartermaster of the Wehrmacht Heer, General Eduard Wagner, successfully completed negotiations for co-operation between the Einsatzgruppen and the German Army to allow the implementation of the "special tasks". Following the Heydrich-Wagner agreement on 28 April 1941, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch ordered that when Operation Barbarossa began, all German Army commanders were to immediately identify and register all Jews in occupied areas in the Soviet Union, and fully co-operate with the Einsatzgruppen.

In further meetings held in June 1941 Himmler outlined to top SS leaders the regime's intention to reduce the population of the Soviet Union by 30 million people, not only through direct murder of those considered racially inferior, but by depriving the remainder of food and other necessities of life.

Organisation starting in 1941
For Operation Barbarossa, initially four Einsatzgruppen were created, each numbering 500–990 men to comprise a total force of 3,000. Einsatzgruppen A, B, and C were to be attached to Army Groups North, Centre, and South; Einsatzgruppe D was assigned to the 11th Army. The Einsatzgruppe for Special Purposes operated in eastern Poland starting in July 1941. The Einsatzgruppen were under the control of the RSHA, headed by Heydrich and later by his successor, SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Heydrich gave them a mandate to secure the offices and papers of the Soviet state and Communist Party; to liquidate all the higher cadres of the Soviet state; and to instigate and encourage pogroms against Jewish populations. The men of the Einsatzgruppen were recruited from the SD, Gestapo, Kriminalpolizei (Kripo), Orpo, and Waffen-SS. Each Einsatzgruppe was under the operational control of the Higher SS Police Chiefs in its area of operations. In May 1941, General Wagner and SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg agreed that the Einsatzgruppen in front-line areas were to operate under army command, while the army provided the Einsatzgruppen with all necessary logistical support. Given their main task was defeating the enemy, the army left the pacification of the civilian population to the Einsatzgruppen, who offered support as well as prevented subversion. This did not preclude their participation in acts of violence against civilians, as many members of the Wehrmacht assisted the Einsatzgruppen in rounding up and murdering Jews of their own accord.

Heydrich acted under orders from Reichsführer-SS Himmler, who supplied security forces on an "as needed" basis to the local SS and Police Leaders. Led by SD, Gestapo, and Kripo officers, Einsatzgruppen included recruits from the Orpo, Security Service and Waffen-SS, augmented by uniformed volunteers from the local auxiliary police force. Each Einsatzgruppe was supplemented with Waffen-SS and Order Police battalions as well as support personnel such as drivers and radio operators. On average, the Order Police formations were larger and better armed, with heavy machine-gun detachments, which enabled them to carry out operations beyond the capability of the SS. Each death squad followed an assigned army group as they advanced into the Soviet Union. During the course of their operations, the Einsatzgruppen commanders received assistance from the Wehrmacht. Activities ranged from the murder of targeted groups of individuals named on carefully prepared lists, to joint citywide operations with SS Einsatzgruppen which lasted for two or more days, such as the massacres at Babi Yar, perpetrated by the Police Battalion 45, and at Rumbula, by Battalion 22, reinforced by local Schutzmannschaften (auxiliary police). The SS brigades, wrote historian Christopher Browning, were "only the thin cutting edge of German units that became involved in political and racial mass murder."

Many Einsatzgruppe leaders were highly educated; for example, nine of seventeen leaders of Einsatzgruppe A held doctorate degrees. Three Einsatzgruppen were commanded by holders of doctorates, one of whom SS-Gruppenführer Otto Rasch) held a double doctorate.

Additional Einsatzgruppen were created as additional territories were occupied. Einsatzgruppe E operated in Independent State of Croatia under three commanders, SS-Obersturmbannführer, SS-Standartenführer Günther Herrmann, and lastly SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm Fuchs. The unit was subdivided into five Einsatzkommandos located in Vinkovci, Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Knin, and Zagreb. Einsatzgruppe F worked with Army Group South. Einsatzgruppe G operated in Romania, Hungary, and Ukraine, commanded by SS-Standartenführer. Einsatzgruppe H was assigned to Slovakia. Einsatzgruppen K and L, under SS-Oberführer Emanuel Schäfer and SS-Standartenführer Ludwig Hahn, worked alongside 5th and 6th Panzer Armies during the Ardennes offensive. Hahn had previously been in command of Einsatzgruppe Griechenland in Greece.

Other Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos included Einsatzgruppe Iltis (operated in Carinthia, on the border between Slovenia and Austria) under SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, Einsatzgruppe Jugoslawien (Yugoslavia) Einsatzkommando Luxemburg (Luxembourg), Einsatzgruppe Norwegen (Norway) commanded by SS-Oberführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, Einsatzgruppe Serbien (Yugoslavia) under SS-Standartenführer Wilhelm Fuchs and SS-Gruppenführer August Meysner,  (Lithuania, Poland), and Einsatzgruppe Tunis (Tunis), commanded by SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff.

Killings in the Soviet Union
After the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen's main assignment was to kill civilians, as in Poland, but this time its targets specifically included Soviet Communist Party commissars and Jews. In a letter dated 2 July 1941 Heydrich communicated to his SS and Police Leaders that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute all senior and middle ranking Comintern officials; all senior and middle ranking members of the central, provincial, and district committees of the Communist Party; extremist and radical Communist Party members; people's commissars; and Jews in party and government posts. Open-ended instructions were given to execute "other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.)." He instructed that any pogroms spontaneously initiated by the population of the occupied territories were to be quietly encouraged.

On 8 July, Heydrich announced that all Jews were to be regarded as partisans, and gave the order for all male Jews between the ages of 15 and 45 to be shot. On 17 July Heydrich ordered that the Einsatzgruppen were to murder all Jewish Red Army prisoners of war, plus all Red Army prisoners of war from Georgia and Central Asia, as they too might be Jews. Unlike in Germany, where the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 defined as Jewish anyone with at least three Jewish grandparents, the Einsatzgruppen defined as Jewish anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent; in either case, whether or not the person practised the religion was irrelevant. The unit was also assigned to exterminate Romani people and the mentally ill. It was common practice for the Einsatzgruppen to shoot hostages.

As the invasion began, the Germans pursued the fleeing Red Army, leaving a security vacuum. Reports surfaced of Soviet guerrilla activity in the area, with local Jews immediately suspected of collaboration. Heydrich ordered his officers to incite anti-Jewish pogroms in the newly occupied territories. Pogroms, some of which were orchestrated by the Einsatzgruppen, broke out in Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Within the first few weeks of Operation Barbarossa, 10,000 Jews had been murdered in 40 pogroms, and by the end of 1941 some 60 pogroms had taken place, claiming as many as 24,000 victims. However, SS-Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, reported to his superiors in mid-October that the residents of Kaunas were not spontaneously starting pogroms, and secret assistance by the Germans was required. A similar reticence was noted by Einsatzgruppe B in Russia and Belarus and Einsatzgruppe C in Ukraine; the further east the Einsatzgruppen travelled, the less likely the residents were to be prompted into murdering their Jewish neighbours.

All four main Einsatzgruppen took part in mass shootings from the early days of the war. Initially the targets were adult Jewish men, but by August the net had been widened to include women, children, and the elderly—the entire Jewish population. Initially there was a semblance of legality given to the shootings, with trumped-up charges being read out (arson, sabotage, black marketeering, or refusal to work, for example) and victims being murdered by a firing squad. As this method proved too slow, the Einsatzkommandos began to take their victims out in larger groups and shot them next to, or even inside, mass graves that had been prepared. Some Einsatzkommandos started to use automatic weapons, with survivors being murdered with a pistol shot.

As word of the massacres got out, many Jews fled; in Ukraine, 70 to 90 per cent of the Jews ran away. This was seen by the leader of Einsatzkommando VI as beneficial, as it would save the regime the costs of deporting the victims further east over the Urals. In other areas the invasion was so successful that the Einsatzgruppen had insufficient forces to immediately murder all the Jews in the conquered territories. A situation report from Einsatzgruppe C in September 1941 noted that not all Jews were members of the Bolshevist apparatus, and suggested that the total elimination of Jewry would have a negative impact on the economy and the food supply. The Nazis began to round their victims up into concentration camps and ghettos and rural districts were for the most part rendered Judenfrei (free of Jews). Jewish councils were set up in major cities and forced labour gangs were established to make use of the Jews as slave labour until they were all dead, a goal that was postponed until 1942.

The Einsatzgruppen used public hangings as a terror tactic against the local population. An Einsatzgruppe B report, dated 9 October 1941, described one such hanging. Due to suspected partisan activity near Demidov, all male residents aged 15 to 55 were put in a camp to be screened. The screening produced seventeen people who were identified as "partisans" and "Communists". Five members of the group were hanged while 400 local residents were assembled to watch; the rest were shot.

Babi Yar
The largest mass shooting perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen took place on 29 and 30 September 1941 at Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of Kyiv city center in Ukraine that had fallen to the Germans on 19 September. The perpetrators included a company of Waffen-SS attached to Einsatzgruppe C under Rasch, members of Sonderkommando 4a under SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and some Ukrainian auxiliary police. The Jews of Kyiv were told to report to a certain street corner on 29 September; anyone who disobeyed would be shot. Since word of massacres in other areas had not yet reached Kyiv and the assembly point was near the train station, they assumed they were being deported. People showed up at the rendezvous point in large numbers, laden with possessions and food for the journey.

After being marched 2 mi northwest of the city centre, the victims encountered a barbed wire barrier and numerous Ukrainian police and German troops. Thirty or forty people at a time were told to leave their possessions and were escorted through a narrow passageway lined with soldiers brandishing clubs. Anyone who tried to escape was beaten. Soon the victims reached an open area, where they were forced to strip, and then were herded down into the ravine. People were forced to lie down in rows on top of the bodies of other victims, and they were shot in the back of the head or the neck by members of the execution squads.

The murders continued for two days, claiming a total of 33,771 victims. Sand was shovelled and bulldozed over the bodies and the sides of the ravine were dynamited to bring down more material. Anton Heidborn, a member of Sonderkommando 4a, later testified that three days later that there were still people alive among the corpses. Heidborn spent the next few days helping smooth out the "millions" of banknotes taken from the victims' possessions. The clothing was taken away, destined to be re-used by German citizens. Jeckeln's troops shot more than 100,000 Jews by the end of October.

Killings in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia
Einsatzgruppe A operated in Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia (the three Baltic countries which had been occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940–1941). According to its own reports to Himmler, Einsatzgruppe A murdered almost 140,000 people in the five months following the 1941 German invasion: 136,421 Jews, 1,064 Communists, 653 people with mental illnesses, 56 partisans, 44 Poles, five Romani, and one Armenian were reported murdered between 22 June and 25 November 1941.

Upon entering Kaunas, Lithuania, on 25 June 1941, the Einsatzgruppe released the criminals from the local jail and encouraged them to join the pogrom which was underway. Between 23 and 27 June 1941, 4,000 Jews were murdered on the streets of Kaunas and in nearby open pits and ditches. Particularly active in the Kaunas pogrom was the so-called "Death Dealer of Kaunas", a young man who murdered Jews with a crowbar at the Lietukis Garage before a large crowd that cheered each murder with much applause; he occasionally paused to play the Lithuanian national anthem "Tautiška giesmė" on his accordion before resuming the murders.

As Einsatzgruppe A advanced into Lithuania, it actively recruited local nationalists and antisemitic groups. In July 1941, local Lithuanian collaborators, pejoratively called "White Armbands" (Baltaraiščiai), joined the massacres. A pogrom in the Latvian capital Riga in early July 1941 killed 400 Jews. Latvian nationalist Viktors Arājs and his supporters undertook a campaign of arson against synagogues. On 2 July, Einsatzgruppe A commander Stahlecker appointed Arājs to head the Arajs Kommando, a Sonderkommando of about 300 men, mostly university students. Together, Einsatzgruppe A and the Arājs Kommando murdered 2,300 Jews in Riga on 6–7 July. Within six months, Arājs and collaborators would murder about half of Latvia's Jewish population.

Local officials, the Selbstschutz, and the Hilfspolizei (Auxiliary Police) played a key role in rounding up and massacring local Jews in German-occupied Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. These groups also helped the Einsatzgruppen and other killing units to identify Jews. For example, in Latvia, the Hilfspolizei, consisting of auxiliary police organised by the Germans and recruited from former Latvian army and police officers, ex-Aizsargi, members of the Pērkonkrusts, and university students, assisted in the murder of Latvia's Jewish citizens. Similar units were created elsewhere, and provided much of the manpower for the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

With the creation of units such as the Arājs Kommando in Latvia and the Rollkommando Hamann in Lithuania, the attacks changed from the spontaneous mob violence of the pogroms to more systematic massacres. With extensive local help, Einsatzgruppe A was the first Einsatzgruppe to attempt to systematically exterminate all the Jews in its area. Latvian historian Modris Eksteins wrote: "Of the roughly 83,000 Jews who fell into German hands in Latvia, not more than 900 survived; and of the more than 20,000 Western Jews sent into Latvia, only some 800 lived through the deportation until liberation. This was the highest percentage of eradication in all of Europe." In late 1941, the Einsatzkommandos settled into headquarters in Kaunas, Riga, and Tallinn. Einsatzgruppe A grew less mobile and faced problems because of its small size. The Germans relied increasingly on the Latvian Arājs Kommando and similar groups to perform massacres of Jews.

Such extensive and enthusiastic collaboration with the Einsatzgruppen has been attributed to several factors. Since the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Kresy Wschodnie and other borderlands had experienced a political culture of violence. The 1940–1941 Soviet occupation had been profoundly traumatic for residents of the Baltic states and areas that had been part of Poland until 1939; the population was brutalised and terrorised, and the existing familiar structures of society were destroyed.

Historian Erich Haberer has suggested that many survived and made sense of the "totalitarian atomization" of society by seeking conformity with communism. As a result, by the time of the German invasion in 1941, many had come to see conformity with a totalitarian regime as socially acceptable behaviour; thus, people simply transferred their allegiance to the German regime when it arrived. Some who had collaborated with the Soviet regime sought to divert attention from themselves by naming Jews as collaborators and murdering them.

Rumbula
In November 1941 Himmler was dissatisfied with the pace of the exterminations in Latvia, as he intended to move Jews from Germany into the area. He assigned SS-Obergruppenführer Jeckeln, one of the perpetrators of the Babi Yar massacre, to liquidate the Riga ghetto. Jeckeln selected a site about 10 km southeast of Riga near the Rumbula railway station, and had 300 Russian prisoners of war prepare the site by digging pits in which to bury the victims. Jeckeln organised around 1,700 men, including 300 members of the Arajs Kommando, 50 German SD men, and 50 Latvian guards, most of whom had already participated in mass-murdering of civilians. These troops were supplemented by Latvians, including members of the Riga city police, battalion police, and ghetto guards. Around 1,500 able-bodied Jews would be spared execution so their slave labour could be exploited; a thousand men were relocated to a fenced-off area within the ghetto and 500 women were temporarily housed in a prison and later moved to a separate nearby ghetto, where they were put to work mending uniforms.

Although Rumbula was on the rail line, Jeckeln decided that the victims should travel on foot from Riga to the execution ground. Trucks and buses were arranged to carry children and the elderly. The victims were told that they were being relocated, and were advised to bring up to 20 kg of possessions. The first day of executions, 30 November 1941, began with the perpetrators rousing and assembling the victims at 4:00 am. The victims were moved in columns of a thousand people toward the execution ground. As they walked, some SS men went up and down the line, shooting people who could not keep up the pace or who tried to run away or rest.

When the columns neared the prepared execution site, the victims were driven some 270 m from the road into the forest, where any possessions that had not yet been abandoned were seized. Here the victims were split into groups of fifty and taken deeper into the forest, near the pits, where they were ordered to strip. The victims were driven into the prepared trenches, made to lie down, and shot in the head or the back of the neck by members of Jeckeln's bodyguard. Around 13,000 Jews from Riga were murdered at the pits that day, along with a thousand Jews from Berlin who had just arrived by train. On the second day of the operation, 8 December 1941, the remaining 10,000 Jews of Riga were murdered in the same way. About a thousand were murdered on the streets of the city or on the way to the site, bringing the total number of victims for the two-day extermination to 25,000 people. For his part in organising the massacre, Jeckeln was promoted to Leader of the SS Upper Section, Ostland.

Second sweep
Einsatzgruppe B, C, and D did not immediately follow Einsatzgruppe A's example in systematically murdering all Jews in their areas. The Einsatzgruppe commanders, with the exception of Einsatzgruppe A's Stahlecker, were of the opinion by the fall of 1941 that it was impossible to murder the entire Jewish population of the Soviet Union in one sweep, and thought the murders should stop. An Einsatzgruppe report dated 17 September advised that the Germans would be better off using any skilled Jews as labourers rather than shooting them. Also, in some areas poor weather and a lack of transportation led to a slowdown in deportations of Jews from points further west. Thus, an interval passed between the first round of Einsatzgruppen massacres in summer and fall, and what American historian Raul Hilberg called the second sweep, which started in December 1941 and lasted into the summer of 1942. During the interval, the surviving Jews were forced into ghettos.

Einsatzgruppe A had already murdered almost all Jews in its area, so it shifted its operations into Belarus to assist Einsatzgruppe B. In Dnepropetrovsk in February 1942, Einsatzgruppe D reduced the city's Jewish population from 30,000 to 702 over the course of four days. The German Order Police and local collaborators provided the extra manpower needed to perform all the shootings. Haberer wrote that, as in the Baltic states, the Germans could not have murdered so many Jews so quickly without local help. He points out that the ratio of Order Police to auxiliaries was 1 to 10 in both Ukraine and Belarus. In rural areas the proportion was 1 to 20. This meant that most Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews were murdered by fellow Ukrainians and Belarusians commanded by German officers rather than by Germans.

The second wave of exterminations in the Soviet Union met with armed resistance in some areas, though the chance of success was poor. Weapons were typically primitive or home-made. Communications were impossible between ghettos in various cities, so there was no way to create a unified strategy. Few in the ghetto leadership supported resistance for fear of reprisals on the ghetto residents. Mass break-outs were sometimes attempted, though survival in the forest was nearly impossible due to the lack of food and the fact that escapees were often tracked down and murdered.

Transition to gassing
After a time, Himmler found that the killing methods used by the Einsatzgruppen were inefficient: they were costly, demoralising for the troops, and sometimes did not kill the victims quickly enough. Many of the troops found the massacres to be difficult if not impossible to perform. Some of the perpetrators suffered physical and mental health problems, and many turned to drink. As much as possible, the Einsatzgruppen leaders militarized the genocide. The historian Christian Ingrao notes an attempt was made to make the shootings a collective act without individual responsibility. Framing the shootings in this way was not psychologically sufficient for every perpetrator to feel absolved of guilt. Browning notes three categories of potential perpetrators: those who were eager to participate right from the start, those who participated in spite of moral qualms because they were ordered to do so, and a significant minority who refused to take part. A few men spontaneously became excessively brutal in their killing methods and their zeal for the task. Commander of Einsatzgruppe D, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, particularly noted this propensity towards excess, and ordered that any man who was too eager to participate or too brutal should not perform any further executions.

During a visit to Minsk in August 1941, Himmler witnessed an Einsatzgruppen mass execution first-hand and concluded that shooting Jews was too stressful for his men. By November he made arrangements for any SS men suffering ill health from having participated in executions to be provided with rest and mental health care. He also decided a transition should be made to gassing the victims, especially the women and children, and ordered the recruitment of expendable native auxiliaries who could assist with the murders. Gas vans, which had been used previously to murder mental patients, began to see service by all four main Einsatzgruppen from 1942. However, the gas vans were not popular with the Einsatzkommandos, because removing the dead bodies from the van and burying them was a horrible ordeal. Prisoners or auxiliaries were often assigned to do this task so as to spare the SS men the trauma. Some of the early mass murders at extermination camps used carbon monoxide fumes produced by diesel engines, similar to the method used in gas vans, but by as early as September 1941 experiments were begun at Auschwitz using Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide gas.

Plans for the total eradication of the Jewish population of Europe—eleven million people—were formalised at the Wannsee Conference, held on 20 January 1942. Some would be worked to death, and the rest would be murdered in the implementation of the Final Solution of the Jewish question (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage). Permanent killing centres at Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and other Nazi extermination camps replaced mobile death squads as the primary method of mass-murder. The Einsatzgruppen remained active, however, and were put to work fighting partisans, particularly in Belarus.

After the defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, Himmler realised that Germany would likely lose the war, and ordered the formation of a special task force, Sonderaktion 1005, under SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel. The unit's assignment was to visit mass graves all along the Eastern Front to exhume bodies and burn them in an attempt to cover up the genocide. The task remained unfinished at the end of the war, and many mass graves remain unmarked and unexcavated.

By 1944 the Red Army had begun to push the German forces out of Eastern Europe, and the Einsatzgruppen retreated alongside the Wehrmacht. By late 1944, most Einsatzgruppen personnel had been folded into Waffen-SS combat units or transferred to permanent death camps. Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen and related agencies killed more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews. The total number of Jews murdered during the war is estimated at 5.5 to six million people.

Plans for the Middle East and Britain
According to research by German historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Einsatzkommando Egypt, led by Walter Rauff, was formed in 1942 in Athens. The unit was to enter Egypt and Mandatory Palestine once German forces arrived there. According to Mallmann and Cüppers, the unit's purpose was to carry out mass-murder of the Jewish populations in those areas. Given its initially small staff of only 24 men, Mallmann and Cüppers point to the further history of the unit, when it was quickly enlarged to more than four times its original strength during its deployment in Tunisia. Furthermore they assume that the commando would have been supported in the annihilation of the Jews by local collaborators, like it happened with the Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe.

Former Iraqi prime minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini played roles, engaging in antisemitic radio propaganda, preparing to recruit volunteers, and in raising an Arab-German Battalion that would also follow Einsatzkommando Egypt to the Middle East. On 20 July 1942 Rauff was sent to Tobruk to report to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Commander of the Afrika Korps. Since Rommel was 500 km away at the First Battle of El Alamein, it is unlikely that the two met. The plans for Einsatzgruppe Egypt were set aside after the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein.

Had Operation Sea Lion—the German plan for an invasion of the United Kingdom—been launched, six Einsatzgruppen were scheduled to follow the invasion force into Britain. They were provided with a list called the Sonderfahndungsliste, G.B. ('Special Search List, G.B'), known as The Black Book after the war, of 2,300 people to be immediately imprisoned by the Gestapo. The list included Churchill, members of the cabinet, prominent journalists and authors, and members of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile.

Jäger Report

The Einsatzgruppen kept official records of many of their massacres and provided detailed reports to their superiors. The Jäger Report, filed by Commander SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger on 1 December 1941 to his superior, Stahlecker (head of Einsatzgruppe A), covers the activities of Einsatzkommando III in Lithuania over the five-month period from 2 July 1941 to 25 November 1941.

Jäger's report provides an almost daily running total of the liquidations of 137,346 people, the vast majority of them Jews. The report documents the exact date and place of massacres, the number of victims, and their breakdown into categories (Jews, Communists, criminals, and so on). Women were shot from the very beginning, but initially in fewer numbers than men. Children were first included in the tally starting in mid-August, when 3,207 people were murdered in Rokiškis on 15–16 August 1941. For the most part the report does not give any military justification for the murders; people were murdered solely because they were Jews. In total, the report lists over 100 executions in 71 different locations. Jäger wrote: "I can state today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania has been reached by Einsatzkommando 3. There are no more Jews in Lithuania, apart from working Jews and their families." In a February 1942 addendum to the report, Jäger increased the total number of victims to 138,272, giving a breakdown of 48,252 men, 55,556 women, and 34,464 children. Only 1,851 of the victims were non-Jewish.

Jäger escaped capture by the Allies when the war ended. He lived in Heidelberg under his own name until his report was discovered in March 1959. Arrested and charged, Jäger committed suicide on 22 June 1959 in Hohenasperg Fortress while awaiting trial for his crimes.

Involvement of the Wehrmacht
The murders took place with the knowledge and support of the German Army in the east. As ordered by Hitler, the Wehrmacht cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen, providing logistical support for their operations, and participated in the mass killings. On 10 October 1941 Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau drafted an order to be read to the German Sixth Army on the Eastern Front. Now known as the Severity Order, it read in part: "The most important objective of this campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its sources of power and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in European civilization ... In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of the art of war, but also the ruthless standard bearer of a national conception ... For this reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry." Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt of Army Group South expressed his "complete agreement" with the order. He sent out a circular to the generals under his command urging them to release their own versions and to impress upon their troops the need to exterminate the Jews. General Erich von Manstein, in an order to his troops on 20 November, stated that "the Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all." Manstein sent a letter to Einsatzgruppe D commanding officer Ohlendorf complaining that it was unfair that the SS was keeping all of the murdered Jews' wristwatches for themselves instead of sharing with the Army.

Beyond this trivial complaint, the Army and the Einsatzgruppen worked closely and effectively. On 6 July 1941 Einsatzkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C reported that "Armed forces surprisingly welcome hostility against the Jews". Few complaints about the murders were ever raised by Wehrmacht officers. On 8 September, Einsatzgruppe D reported that relations with the German Army were "excellent". In the same month, Stahlecker of Einsatzgruppe A wrote that Army Group North had been exemplary in co-operating with the exterminations and that relations with the 4th Panzer Army, commanded by General Erich Hoepner, were "very close, almost cordial". In the south, the Romanian Army worked closely with Einsatzgruppe D to massacre Ukrainian Jews, murdering around 26,000 Jews in the Odessa massacre. The German historian Peter Longerich thinks it probable that the Wehrmacht, along with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), incited the Lviv pogroms, during which 8,500 to 9,000 Jews were murdered by the native population and Einsatzgruppe C in July 1941. Moreover, most people on the home front in Germany had some idea of the massacres being committed by the Einsatzgruppen. British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper noted that although Himmler had forbidden photographs of the murders, it was common for both the men of the Einsatzgruppen and for bystanders to take pictures to send to their loved ones, which he felt suggested widespread approval of the massacres.

Officers in the field were well aware of the killing operations being conducted by the Einsatzgruppen. The Wehrmacht tried to justify their considerable involvement in the Einsatzgruppen massacres as being anti-partisan operations rather than racist attacks, but Hillgruber wrote that this was just an excuse. He states that those German generals who claimed that the Einsatzgruppen were a necessary anti-partisan response were lying, and maintained that the slaughter of about 2.2 million defenceless civilians for reasons of racist ideology cannot be justified.

Einsatzgruppen trials
Most of the surviving perpetrators of Nazi war crimes were never charged, and returned unremarked to civilian life. The West German government only charged about 100 former Einsatzgruppen members with war crimes. As time went on, it became more difficult to obtain prosecutions; witnesses grew older and were less likely to be able to offer valuable testimony. Funding for trials was inadequate, and the governments of Austria and Germany became less interested in obtaining convictions for wartime events, preferring to forget the Nazi past.

1947–1948 trial
After the close of World War II, 24 senior leaders of the Einsatzgruppen were prosecuted in the Einsatzgruppen trial in 1947–48, part of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials held under United States military authority. The men were charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in the SS (which had been declared a criminal organization). Fourteen death sentences and two life sentences were among the judgments; only four executions were carried out, on 7 June 1951; the rest were reduced to lesser sentences. Four additional Einsatzgruppe leaders were later tried and executed by other nations.

Several Einsatzgruppen leaders, including Ohlendorf, claimed at the trial to have received an order before Operation Barbarossa requiring them to murder all Soviet Jews. To date no evidence has been found that such an order was ever issued. German prosecutor Alfred Streim noted that if such an order had been given, post-war courts would only have been able to convict the Einsatzgruppen leaders as accomplices to mass murder. However, if it could be established that the Einsatzgruppen had committed mass murder without orders, then they could have been convicted as perpetrators of mass murder, and hence could have received stiffer sentences, including capital punishment.

Streim postulated that the existence of an early comprehensive order was a fabrication created for use in Ohlendorf's defence. This theory is now widely accepted by historians. Longerich notes that most orders received by the Einsatzgruppen leaders—especially when they were being ordered to carry out criminal activities—were vague, and couched in terminology that had a specific meaning for members of the regime. Leaders were given briefings about the need to be "severe" and "firm"; all Jews were to be viewed as potential enemies that had to be dealt with ruthlessly. British historian Sir Ian Kershaw argues that Hitler's apocalyptic remarks before Barbarossa about the necessity for a war without mercy to "annihilate" the forces of "Judeo-Bolshevism" were interpreted by Einsatzgruppen commanders as permission and encouragement to engage in extreme antisemitic violence, with each Einsatzgruppen commander to use his own discretion about how far he was prepared to go.

1958 trial
The crimes of the Einsatzgruppen came into wider public awareness with the Ulm Einsatzkommando trial in 1958. At the trial, ten former members of Einsatzkommando Tilsit were on trial accused of murdering around 5,500 Jewish men, women, and children in the German-Lithuanian border area in mid-1941. Among them were the heads of the Tilsit task force Hans-Joachim Böhme (SS member), Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, and the head of the Tilsit SD section Werner Hersmann. The responsible senior public prosecutor, Erwin Schüle, used as evidence documents from the American Einsatzgruppen trial in Nuremberg, existing specialist literature, SS personnel files, and surviving "USSR event reports".

title: Einsatzgruppen