How long does it take to read Masters of Death?
The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes takes about 6 hours 36 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 36 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2002. 360 pages, about 99,000 words.
14 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 11 hours |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 36 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 8 minutes |
The page count is the median across 7 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In Masters of Death, Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen's role in the Holocaust. These "special task forces," organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar. These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaign's architects as well as its "ordinary" soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II. - Publisher.
Subjects: Secret service, History, Germany, armed forces, Jews, persecutions, Holokaust, Służba bezpieczeństwa
