Biography: Maayan Armelin is a Doctoral Candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. In 2020/2021 she was a junior fellow at the Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies in Vienna, and a doctoral fellow of the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation. She was awarded fellowships from the Claims Conference, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), and the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalisation (OeAD). Armelin Holds an MA in Social Psychology from the University of Haifa, Israel, where she worked at the Strochlitz Institute for Holocaust Research and on the editorial board of The Journal of Holocaust Research.
Research Project: In her dissertation project she studies the SS-Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads who massacred Jewish and non-Jewish civilians in the Soviet Union between 1941-1944. Armelin integrates historical and psychological perspectives in analyzing how leadership styles, peer relations, and professional hierarchies encouraged Einsatzgruppen members to perpetrate mass murder. Mass executions across Nazi occupied Soviet Union marked the first stage of systematic annihilation during the Holocaust. The SS-Einsatzgruppen, mobile paramilitary units, murdered over a million and a half civilians, shooting them in the margins of cities, local castles, forests, and fields. Armelin’s research studies the historical, social, organizational, and situational factors that shaped Einsatzgruppen officers’ leadership styles and peer relations between rank and file members. Utilizing historical and social psychological methods, Armelin explores how vertical and horizontal social relations encouraged individual Einsatzgruppen members to perpetrate mass murder.
Spotlighting three units, Einsatzgruppen members’ postwar testimonies reveal their officers practiced some of the Third Reich’s most prevalent leadership principles. The military tradition of Auftragstaktik (mission command), patron relations, and masculine ideals, among others, pushed Einsatzgruppen officers to initiate and expand mass executions. Armelin characterizes the differences and similarities between several officers and assesses how they encouraged followers to participate in mass shootings.
Armelin also studies how the Einsatzgruppen operational structure and professional composition shaped members’ peer relations. The units comprised of members of all SS and Security Police institutions put together in small, mixed backgrounds, isolated squads. To prove worthy and loyal to those new groups, members adopted new standards of brutality, and were less inclined to defy orders. Armelin’s research clarifies how the interaction between leadership styles, peer relations, and particular settings in the Soviet Union encouraged Einsatzgruppen members to engage in mass violence. Understanding how social relations facilitated genocide serves to analyze past, current, and future groups of perpetrators.
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