Yes. Sonderkommando 4a, previously famous for the massacre of Babi Yar – the single biggest Einsatzgruppen massacre in which over 30.000 Jews were murdered in two days –, did operate in the Stalingrad area with the 6th Army until the fourth week of September after arriving with XXIV Panzer Corps.

Their crimes in the area included, among others, the murder of an unspecified amount of real and suspected communists and NKVD members that the 6th Army arrested in the city and duly handed over to the Sonderkommando as well as the massacre of Nizhne-Chirskaya on August 25, 1942.

The latter one is detailed in what became known as the Khrakov Trial from 15-18 December 1943, conducted by the Military Tribunal of the 4th Ukrainian Front and which also represents the first war crimes trial against Nazi defendants conducted during WWII. The defendants were Wilhelm Langheld, captain of the Abwehr with the 6th Army; Hans Ritz, SS-Untersturmführer im SK 4a; Reinhard Retzlaw, Senior Lance-Corporal of the German Secret Field Police; and Mikhail Bulanov, a local collaborator who had worked for the SK 4a as a driver, translator and general helper.

Bulanov was present and involved with the SK 4a massacre in Nizhne-Chirskaya, which targeted a children's hospital. Bulanov describes it as follows int he Trial:

Prosecution: Tell the Court what you know about the shooting of children in the Children’s Hospital of Nizhne Chirskaya.

Bulanov: On August 25 and 26, 1942, I—together with chauffeur Blokhin—was ordered to get the trucks ready. We were ordered to drive them to Nizhne Chirskaya Children’s Hospital. Upon our arrival, Gestapo men [In Soviet Trials, members of the Einsatzgruppen are often described wholesale as Getapo] began to lead the children out of the hospital and load them on the trucks. The children were ragged, and swollen from hunger. Many resisted and would not board the trucks. The Gestapo men assured them they were going to their uncles and aunts in Stalingrad. Some children yielded to persuasion and got on the trucks, while others resisted. The Gestapo men forcibly put them in and I was ordered to fasten the canvas at the back of the truck. Three to four kilometers from Nizhne Chirskaya, a pit had been prepared. Having reached the pit, I and other Gestapo men began to take the children toward the pit near which stood a Gestapo man, Alex. Point-blank he shot the children in the head with an automatic rifle and then pushed them into the pit. Seeing this, the children struggled and tried to break away, crying, “Uncle, I am afraid!” and “Uncle, I want to live, don’t shoot me!” and so on. But the Germans took no notice of this.

Prosecution: What was the age of these children?

Bulanov: They ranged in age from six to twelve years.

Such crimes were not unusual for the Einsatzgruppen, who targeted both specifically Jewish hospitals in Ghettos as was the case in the Ghettos in Maryjna Gorka and Puchowize near Minsk and also generally hospitals for people with mental illness and disabilities, whom they deemed as "useless eaters". While the specific reason this hospital was targeted is not given in the trial (Ritz claims he was not present and Bulanov wasn't aware of the specific reason it was targeted), it was most likely related to these children suffering some form disability.

Operations in the city itself, which took place in November that year are less clear. From extensive documentation both from the Germans as well as Soviet war crimes investigators, the initial wave of arrests of people in the city of Stalingrad as well as the instituion of anti-Jewish measure such as the mandate to wear a yellow star did not originate with the SK but rather with the Geheime Feldpolizei.

The Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP) was in essence, the Wehrmacht's Gestapo, meaning its political police, responsible for policing and controlling the population and fighting against real and perceived enemies in the areas the Wehrmacht directly controlled (meaning the front and rear areas) as well as within the Wehrmacht itself, managing what the SD did for the party, i.e. rooting out internal dissent and punishing those soldiers suspected of harboring such.

They were among other things, charged with fighting Partisans but also carried the responsibility as charged by the OKW (Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht) of eliminating both communists as well as the social class that supported them in the Soviet Union. E.g. From October 1941 through January 1942 GFP 721 killed at least 10,000 Jews themselves in the Ukrainian areas around Khmil’nyk, Lityn, and Brailov. But they also worked closely with the Einsatzgruppen and other SS-formations in the Soviet Union. The 6th Army GFP gained special notoriety in this regard because of the description of events in August 1941 in Kiev as described by Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth and relayed by Wolfram Wette in his book The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality. Groscuth describes how the GFP of the 6th Army handed 90 children of communists and Jews over to the SK 4a for them to be shot.

The exact number of victims of the GFP in Stalingrad is not known because of the chaos and harsh fighting in the city but the Soviet War Crimes Commission speaks of at least 3000 civilians the Germans murdered while the fighting was going on around them. Given the tenacity and harshness with which the GFP was looking for real and alleged partisans, spies and saboteurs in general and especially during the hard fighting in the town, it is very likely that the number of victims is actually higher than 3000.

Sources:

• Anthony Beevor: Stalingrad.

• Greg Dawson: Judgement Before Nuremberg.

• Wilhelm Krichbaum, Antonio J. Munoz: The Secret Field Police. Wehrmacht Geheime Feldpolizei Forces in World War II, 1939–1945.

• Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR: Nazi Crimes in Ukraine 1941-1944, Documents and Materials.