The Einsatzgruppen emerged from the SS security apparatus as Germany prepared for the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. According to Richard Rhodes in Masters of Death, they were formed from an existing pool of police officers, security agents, and civil servants. Recruitment was highly targeted. Men with experience in policing, intelligence, and military command were sought out for their capacity to operate under orders and within a rigid hierarchy. History makes clear that these were not simply volunteer fanatics. Many were approached through professional networks, offered postings that promised status and advancement, and placed within a structure that normalized their assignments as legitimate state work.
The current ICE recruitment drive is not a historical aberration. It is a recognizable pattern in the history of state enforcement agencies preparing for expansive and potentially coercive missions.
Stefan Kühl, in Ordinary Organizations, underscores that the Einsatzgruppen operated according to the routines of bureaucratic administration. Orders were written in formal language, couched in terms of security and order maintenance. Missions were framed as operational tasks rather than moral questions. Men were told they were combating “banditry” or “partisan activity,” categories that erased the civilian status of their victims. This was a central mechanism for recruiting and retaining participation: the transformation of killing into a technical job, embedded in the standard practices of an organization.
Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust identifies this as a hallmark of modern bureaucratic violence. The Holocaust was not an eruption of irrational savagery but the product of systems designed to translate political directives into manageable administrative processes. The Einsatzgruppen were a case study in how to assemble a killing force from ordinary professionals, train them to think in technical rather than moral terms, and deploy them with minimal overt coercion.
The contours of ICE’s recent recruitment push follow a comparable bureaucratic logic. The recruitment targets a pre-screened pool of law enforcement and security professionals. Florida deputies, FEMA personnel, and retired federal agents are not random job seekers. They are individuals whose careers have conditioned them to follow formal orders, work within hierarchical structures, and frame their actions in procedural rather than purely moral language. This mirrors the Nazi recruitment strategy: draw from those already trained to execute state directives.
ICE is actively lowering entry barriers. The policy change lifting the maximum age limit above forty broadens the eligible pool in a way that signals volume as the overriding goal. In Nazi recruitment, similar expansions occurred when the need for personnel outpaced the available pool, with the result that older men or those with less ideal physical profiles were nonetheless brought into field operations. ICE is also leveraging bureaucratic legitimacy. The agency’s recruitment messages describe “enforcement opportunities” and “critical response positions” in terms that emphasize lawful authority, federal mandate, and organizational purpose. This is the same language of legitimization that Kühl and Bauman document in the Einsatzgruppen’s framing: orders presented as components of a rational plan, embedded in established institutional structures.
The campaign shows a willingness to bypass local institutional intermediaries. Florida sheriffs’ complaints that ICE directly contacted their deputies without coordination recalls historical cases in which Nazi units were introduced into territories without consulting local military or police commanders. In both cases, central authority overrode local norms in pursuit of a larger strategic objective.
The deepest similarity lies in the bureaucratic ability to render extraordinary measures administratively ordinary. Bauman warns that this capacity is intrinsic to modern organizations. The division of labor fragments moral responsibility. Language reframes acts of violence as technical assignments. In the Einsatzgruppen, mass shootings of civilians were described as “executions” or “security operations,” terms that masked the nature of the task from the participant’s own conscience.
In ICE’s case, the recruitment pitch itself functions as this kind of framing device. Potential hires are told they will be part of “national security” and “public safety” operations. In the context of an administration that has already pursued mass deportations, family separations, and expanded detention, such language situates controversial or coercive actions within the acceptable vocabulary of law enforcement.
Franklin Mixon’s concept of the “entrepreneurial bureaucrat” sharpens this point. Bureaucracies, and the officials within them, seek opportunities to expand their remit. ICE’s leadership has seized on a political moment—backed by unprecedented funding—to expand its manpower. In historical terms, the Einsatzgruppen leadership did the same within the SS apparatus, enlarging their operational scope whenever political conditions permitted.
The United States is not operating under the same conditions as the Nazi Reich in 1941, but the present safeguards are functionally nonexistent. Judicial review now functions as a rubber stamp for the Trump administration, with courts repeatedly validating executive actions that stretch or disregard statutory limits. Congressional oversight is, in practice, nonexistent, with leadership unwilling to confront or even meaningfully question enforcement policy.
The United States is not operating under the same conditions as the Nazi Reich in 1941, but the present safeguards are functionally nonexistent.
National media outlets remain cautious to the point of self-censorship, their corporate owners fearing retaliatory measures against other business holdings. In this environment, the assumption that legal and institutional checks will restrain an expanded, specially recruited force is untenable. Political leadership can and does issue directives that push beyond the law’s original intent, and the mechanisms designed to resist such directives have already shown their willingness to accommodate them. When that reality is combined with a rapidly enlarging enforcement body trained to operate under centralized command, the potential for escalation is immediate and concrete.
The modern state’s capacity for violence is not determined by the moral character of its personnel but by the institutional and political boundaries within which it functions. Ordinary organizational processes can adapt to deliver extraordinary harm when circumstances shift. The Einsatzgruppen were assembled and deployed in exactly this way, with bureaucratic procedures serving as the mechanism rather than an afterthought.
The current ICE recruitment drive is not a historical aberration. It is a recognizable pattern in the history of state enforcement agencies preparing for expansive and potentially coercive missions. Its targeting of trained law enforcement personnel, lowering of entry barriers, bypassing of local intermediaries, and reliance on bureaucratic framing are all features visible in the assembly of past forces that went on to commit atrocities. To note this is not to equate the present with the past in outcome. It is to recognize the continuity in method, and to understand that method as a warning. The Einsatzgruppen remind us that the path from “ordinary” enforcement to extraordinary violence is often paved with administrative memos, recruitment drives, and appeals to professionalism. The time to interrogate such patterns is before the mission expands and the boundaries shift.
