At the outbreak of World War II, one of the first combat units of the Waffen-SS, the SS Division Totenkopf, was formed from SS-TV personnel. It soon developed a reputation for brutality, participating in war crimes such as the Le Paradis massacre in 1940 during the Fall of France. On the Eastern Front, the mass shootings of Polish and Soviet civilians in Operation Barbarossa were the work of special task forces known as Einsatzgruppen, which were organized by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.[6][7]