Johannes Hürter
FROM 1933 ONWARD, the radical antisemitism of Adolf Hitler and his supporters was the state doctrine of the German Reich and led to the persecution and murder of those European Jews who fell within the German sphere of control. This doctrine penetrated all state institutions, including the Wehrmacht and its leadership. After the war, those responsible, outside of the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel (SS), claimed to have had nothing to do with these crimes. The initial depression and uncertainty in view of the impending tribunal was quickly overcome. Even during the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals in 1945–1946, the German functional elites regrouped in order to defend themselves against all valid accusations. Although they were deeply compromised, the elites succeeded, together with a broad front of political and journalistic supporters in an unprecedented act of historical and political manipulation, in establishing the power to interpret their Nazi past and in anchoring the myth of the “clean” ministerial bureaucracy and the “unsullied” Wehrmacht in the historical consciousness of the German Federal Republic.
The former generals of the Wehrmacht were particularly successful in shaping this myth.1 In court and in countless memoirs and other publications, they claimed a strict separation of the good military aspects and the bad political aspects. They were helped in this by the fact that not only West German society but also the Western Allies had considerable interest in liberating the Wehrmacht from the stigma of their crimes. The generals were representing all German soldiers, if not the entire nation, which was rehabilitated in order to allow its integration into the Western defensive alliance. West German rearmament required the know-how of experienced professionals from Hitler’s armed forces. Remembrance of the Wehrmacht was distorted to focus solely on military achievements. Responsibility for defeats and crimes was transferred to Hitler, the SS, and a very few black, or should one say brown, sheep among the generals, such as those who had been hanged in Nuremberg, namely the Wehrmacht generals Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl. In this exculpatory narrative, the highly professional military elite, which had remained “decent” to the last, and “our brave soldiers” were uncoupled from the policies of the Nazi regime and the crimes committed “in Germany’s name.” This was particularly so for the greatest crime of all, the Holocaust. A general like Erich von Manstein, who was highly regarded until his death in 1973 and for a long time thereafter, succeeded in making the grateful German public and his numerous Anglo-Saxon admirers believe that in 1941–1942 he had known nothing about the murder of around thirty thousand Jews under his jurisdiction on the Crimean Peninsula, let alone shared any kind of responsibility for this mass murder.2
The position of the generals within the Nazi system of rule had, in reality, nothing in common with the retrospective construction of an unblemished foreign body.3 The military elite was the most important and most influential of the traditional elites who supported the National Socialist regime. These men were initiated at an early stage into Hitler’s radical plans and played a central role in the project of a “Greater German Reich,” which could only be realized by means of war. The generals willingly allowed themselves to be harnessed by a regime that aimed with extreme militancy for a racially homogeneous “national community,” hegemony in Europe, and “living space” in the east. They did this not only from opportunism, egotism, and a thirst for glory or other base motives but also because Hitler’s policies were compatible with the thinking in power-political, militaristic, and racist categories that were prevalent in this elite. Even without being Nazis, the overwhelming majority of the generals placed their professional expertise to the last at the service of the Nazi dictatorship—the resistance of a few officers against Hitler was ultimately a completely isolated phenomenon among their comrades. The 3,191 generals and admirals of the Wehrmacht4 thus contributed decisively to the successes and the resilience of Nazi tyranny. The catalog of involvement in the criminal policies is long and eclipses any crimes known to have been committed by the other traditional elites. The generals—namely the Wehrmacht leadership (High Command of the Wehrmacht, or OKW), the army leadership (High Command of the Army, or OKH), and the most senior troop command at the front—contributed significantly to the planning, preparation, and implementation of illegal wars of aggression, racial-ideological campaigns of annihilation, and brutal occupation regimes. Even in their professional core area, namely the operational conduct of the war, they were responsible for numerous mistakes with catastrophic results.
The Holocaust did not take place without the Wehrmacht, either. This is clear from the facts alone.5 A central site of the Holocaust was the German-occupied Soviet Union. It was here that the systematic murder of all Jews began. Approximately 2.5 million Jews fell into the territory controlled by the Wehrmacht, even if a large part were there only for a short length of time. During the first wave of killings until March 1942, around six hundred thousand Jews were murdered in the occupied Soviet territories, of which at least 450,000 were in territory under military administration. The second wave of killings from April 1942 to October 1943, which claimed the lives of around 1.5 million people, targeted above all the ghettos in territory under civilian administration. By contrast, about fifty thousand Jews who were murdered in 1942 during the German offensive against Stalingrad and in the North Caucasus died in areas under military jurisdiction, as did the fifty thousand Jewish Red Army soldiers selected and murdered by the Security Police in the Wehrmacht’s prisoner-of-war camps. To be added to this number are another 350,000 Jews who were murdered under Romanian occupation. Even if most of the more than 2.4 million victims claimed by the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union alone (within the borders of June 1941) were accounted for by the German SS and police apparatus, more than half a million of them died with the military’s administration, acquiescence, and frequently also support—sometimes including actual participation in the killing. Outside of the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht was also directly or indirectly involved in the Holocaust. In Serbia, Wehrmacht units murdered almost all Jewish men—close to six thousand—who were held as hostages during the course of perverse antipartisan campaigns. In other parts of German-occupied Europe, especially in the territories under military administration in France, Belgium, and Greece, Wehrmacht agencies supported the disenfranchisement and deportation of the Jewish populations.
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The persecution and murder of the Jews in the territories under military administration would have been very difficult to implement against the will of the Wehrmacht and in particular the generals. The stance of the generals in the east regarding the “Jewish question” was, therefore, very important. How antisemitic were they?6 Until World War I, the antisemitism in the Prussian-German officer corps did not differ significantly from that of the other conservative elites in Germany and many other European states. Reservations toward the Jews corresponded to the mood of the time and were fed by various forms of resentment: religious and cultural resentment directed at the Jewish religion and orthodox eastern Jewry, dissimilatory resentment directed against the emancipation and assimilation of the German Jews, and biological resentment directed against the Jewish race. At this point, it was still anti-Judaism and dissimilatory antisemitism that predominated rather than the newer racist hatred of Jews. The directive of the Prussian War Ministry from October 1916 to the effect that all Jewish soldiers be recorded statistically in order to examine whether Jews shirked army service disproportionately more often was a discriminatory measure and at the same time an alarming indication of antisemitic tendencies within the military.7 Toward the end of World War I, these tendencies became more intense, fueled by the exhortations to hold out made by the Pan-German League, whose propaganda was directed ever more frequently against the Jewish influence among enemies at home and abroad.
Various forms of antisemitism merged and radicalized noticeably once again during the period of upheaval in 1918–1919. The military defeat, the revolution, and the change of system to a republic were blamed in particular on the Jews, who were cast back into their traditional role of scapegoat. The fighting against Spartacists in the Reich and Bolsheviks in the Baltic, whether experienced firsthand or not, also counted among the negative experiences of the military elite. “Jewish Bolshevism” became a code phrase for the collapse of monarchy and power, internal order, and military strength. Open antisemitism spread from the Pan-German League and the racial nationalists to the conservatives. The fact that the liberal Weimar Republic enabled many assimilated Jews to reach prominent positions in politics, society, the economy, and culture appeared to confirm the prejudice of a Jewish republic. Furthermore, serious conflicts were sparked off regarding the immigration of Polish “eastern Jews,” who more clearly corresponded to the cliché of the “racially foreign” (rassefremd) Jew than the German Jews did. Just how popular antisemitism was among sections of the population before Hitler’s assumption of power was first demonstrated not by the successes of his party from the end of the 1920s but by the anti-Jewish proclamations of conservative parties and associations such as the Young German Order, the Reich Agricultural League, and the German Nationalist People’s Party; many officers sympathized with the latter. For all their differences in terms of their manifestations, the nationalist conservatives, the Pan-German League, the racial nationalists, and the National Socialists were linked by a fundamental antisemitic consensus. It was clear to only a very few that Hitler’s ideology and politics would ultimately lead to the attempt to completely exterminate the Jews in the regions under German control. The partial identity of antisemitic thinking made it easier, however, to perhaps internally reject the further steps in the direction of the Holocaust and nonetheless to accept these steps again and again in practice.
Symptomatic for the anti-Jewish stereotypes within the nationalist conservative elite of the officer corps is the record kept by Gotthard Heinrici, who would later be among the “ordinary” generals and commanders on the eastern front. This officer complained as early as October 1918 that Germany was being governed by a “clique of Jews and Socialists.”8 During the Weimar years, he was close to the German Nationalists and hoped, following the change of government on January 30, 1933, “that we have finished with the Marxian Jewish pigsty.”9 He regarded the antisemitic stance and policies of Hitler’s new government as fundamentally necessary, but in his view the pogrom-like excesses of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the boycott of April 1, 1933 went too far: “It was necessary to force the Jews out of their influential positions. Yet the means were inappropriate.”10 Heinrici initially registered without criticism the countless discriminatory measures directed against Germans of the Jewish faith during the months and years that followed. It was not until the large pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, (Reichskristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass) that he was shocked, though not very deeply. Shortly thereafter, he learned from a speech by Alfred Rosenberg in Detmold of the consequences and objectives that loomed as a result of the National Socialists’ hatred of Jews: “For an hour he talked about the horrible Jews. The Jewish question, he said, would only be solved when there were no more Jews in Germany. They would do everything to accomplish that. Anyway, it would be best if there weren’t any Jews left in the whole of Europe.”11 This perspective may have scared him, but the contemptuous racial policies did not prevent his increasingly positive stance toward the Nazi regime and his “Führer” over the next two years. When General Heinrici was transferred to Poland with his army corps in spring 1941, he was irritated in his quarters in Siedlce not only by the bedbugs and lice but also by the “awful Jews,” which he mentioned in the same breath.12 Despite his knowledge of National Socialist anti-Jewish policies, the antisemitism of this general was clearly unabated at the beginning of the campaign in the east.
Even if not all generals were so decidedly antisemitic, there is no evidence that the unmistakable disenfranchisement and persecution of the German Jews up to 1941 was a decisive factor in the generals’ assessment of the Nazi regime. As a rule, their attitude toward the Jewish part of the population was no better than detached and indifferent. The widespread unease regarding the Night of Broken Glass was just as unsustained as Erich von Manstein’s rare criticism of the application of the “Aryan Paragraph” in the Wehrmacht in spring 1934.13 Not until the crimes committed in Poland from September 1939 onward did any incomprehension become more evident. During the Polish campaign and the first months of the occupation period until February 1940, several army generals opposed the murders, which targeted above all the Polish “intelligentsia” but also around seven thousand Jews by the end of 1939 alone.14 One can argue about whether they intervened out of fundamental political and ethical considerations or only because they were concerned about the discipline and morale of their troops, who in some cases participated in the attacks on Jews. Nonetheless, the conduct of generals such as Blaskowitz, Küchler, Manstein, Reichenau, and Weichs remains remarkable. Although their antisemitic resentments were directed above all against the orthodox “caftan Jews,”15 they disagreed with the abuse and murder of these Jews, who were regarded as “harmless.” As these crimes in Poland took place under their jurisdiction, they felt—unlike during the pogroms of 1933 and 1938 in the Reich—obliged to intervene. At the same time, this intervention already marked the outermost boundary of dissent that the generals allowed themselves against National Socialist anti-Jewish policies.
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Although the violence against the Jewish population in the occupied Soviet Union far exceeded anything that had gone on in Poland before 1941, not only the central military authorities like the OKW and the OKH but also the army generals deployed against the Red Army could be integrated into the National Socialist program without resistance.16 The fact that the eastern front was by far the most important theater of war for the role played by the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust justifies the focus on the military elite in this theater. The eastern generals at the outset of Operation Barbarossa were the sixteen commanders of army groups, armies, and panzer groups who exerted the most influence as the highest authorities of executive power in the army rear areas and the army group rear areas. There were also the 17 commanding generals of army corps (general commands) and 155 commanders of divisions (divisional commands), making a total of 218 officers—all born in the nineteenth century—who commanded more than three million soldiers.17 Why, unlike in Poland, was there no further protest from these ranks? In addition to a certain resignation in view of the limited impact of their interventions in Poland in 1939–1940, the corruption of the generals as a result of the unexpected victory in the western campaign and the tributes, promotions, and material bequests (endowments) that followed, as well as the partial political and ideological identification with Nazi ideology, all played an important role. The doubts about Hitler’s war policy now completely receded. As soon as the generals were gradually transferred eastward in order to prepare for the attack on the Soviet Union, criticism of the oppression and maltreatment of the Polish population and, especially, its Jewish component had faded away. Instead, it was “moral indifference” and the “paralysis of conscience, the stirring of which became inconvenient,” that manifested themselves.18 The enslavement, ghettoization, and pauperization of the Polish Jews were noted though they now scarcely provoked any sympathy or outrage, but rather revulsion about the sordid state of “Jew nests.” Old aversions to the eastern Jews surfaced, without the cause of the misery, that is, German occupation policy, being reflected on or criticized.
The resentment of eastern Jews then coalesced in the Soviet theater of war with the enemy image of Jewish Bolshevism. The generals had already tolerated the disenfranchisement of the assimilated Jews in their own country and, after an initial period of acclimatization, thereafter also the brutal suppression of the Polish Jews. Thus, objections on principle were scarcely to be expected from them against the targeting of Soviet Jews, who were regarded as the pillars of the Communist system, from the outset in the combating of enemies by the Security Police. The further the Wehrmacht advanced eastward, the more they encountered big city Jews who had found their place in the modern Soviet state as functionaries, academics, salaried employees, and industrial workers. These assimilated Jews were generally regarded as far more dangerous than the Orthodox Jews in the shtetl culture. Most German generals were deeply permeated by the enemy image of Jewish Bolshevism. The old resentment from the years of revolution and upheaval between 1917 and 1923 could now be vocalized and reactivated by the Nazi regime. The German military elite had already registered the supposedly large Jewish influence in the Soviet Union long before 1941. The role of the Jews in the state, in the army and in society in the Soviet Union was, as a rule, greatly exaggerated and viewed in an exclusively negative light.
Hitler succeeded in mobilizing the generals not only against the Stalinist Soviet Union but also against the “Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia,” which allegedly supported this state and therefore had to be removed. The antisemitic grid within the thinking of his generals was sufficient for them to see above all Jews in the cadre of the Bolshevik nemesis. Only a very few foresaw that Hitler’s racial fanaticism was more far-reaching than “only” removing Jewish functionaries and intellectuals, and would soon cross the threshold to genocide. There was a widespread consensus that the “peoples of the Soviet Union,” as the Army High Command formulated it, were “under Bolshevik-Jewish leadership.”19 Therefore, the Wehrmacht elite entertained the illusion that by neutralizing the “Jewish-Bolshevik” cadre it would deprive enemy resistance of its foundation and thus break it. This was not only part of the military elite’s political and ideological thinking but also part of its military thinking. In this campaign, the Wehrmacht elite had no intention of flinching from tough measures or from finally eliminating the Bolshevik threat once and for all.
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To what extent were the generals, overwhelmingly conservative, socialized, and educated in Imperial Germany, prepared to follow the policies of violence against the Jewish population in the occupied Soviet Union? The political images of the enemy and military calculations among the Wehrmacht elite fostered the acceptance of anti-Jewish measures. Soon after the German attack on June 22, 1941, however, the killing operations reached a dimension that could be justified neither with military or policing necessity nor with the political and ideological presuppositions of the generals, but rather broke the mold. At the outset of the campaign, it could not be predicted how the generals deployed in the east would react to this escalation of racial hatred of Jews, in spite of their fundamental antipathy toward Jewish Bolshevism. Their reaction was anxiously awaited by Hitler and the SS leadership. Ultimately, the generals of the Eastern Army possessed some room for maneuver in their area of command, which they could also have made use of against the actions of SS and police forces. The degree to which Himmler and Heydrich’s murder squads were able to ply their bloody trade in an unrestrained and smooth fashion depended on the attitude of the generals.
Even before the campaign began, the generals were informed about plans for an extremely severe course of action against the Soviet Jews. There could be no doubt that the four Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), who were to “process” an enormous swath of territory from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea with only 3,500 men, as well as other SS and police units envisaged for the military hinterland, would be deployed above all for this purpose. The infamous Wagner-Heydrich agreement of April 1941, as well as additional orders and discussions, gave cause for apprehension,20 even if it did not necessarily indicate mass murder of noncombatant Jewish men and certainly not the genocide of all Jews. It was announced for the army areas merely that the Sonderkommandos of the Einsatzgruppen would tackle “particularly important individuals.” Here, the military elite still had extensive possibilities for exerting influence, because the army commanders were permitted to preclude the deployment of the SS and the police if it threatened to disturb military operations. The Wagner-Heydrich agreement made absolutely no mention of a deployment in the combat zone. Furthermore, the Sonderkommandos were “subordinated to the armies with regard to marching, supplies and accommodation.” In the army group rear areas, the tasks of the SS units extended further and were more independent of the military agencies. Even here, however, the Einsatzkommandos were subordinated logistically to the Wehrmacht. Thus, in the military area of operations there were enough points of leverage for curbing or even prohibiting unwelcome actions by the Security Police that clearly exceeded the wording of the prior consultations. The SS leadership was walking a tightrope. On the one hand, it left open the looming scope of the murder policies and the number of victims. On the other hand, it did not insist on a clear separation of security police tasks from the Wehrmacht. After the protests of individual generals in the Polish campaign, the SS leadership could by no means be certain that the most senior troop command would accept massacres within army formations and would not apply their remaining competences against the activities of the Einsatzgruppen.
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The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, which marked the commencement of the systematic murder of the Jews in German-occupied Europe, passed through several phases of escalation in summer 1941, whereby dynamic processes on the ground and decisions made at the center interacted with each other.21 Initially, almost exclusively Jewish men were murdered, then, increasingly, women and children; from mid-August (and in some places even earlier) to early October 1941, the transition was made to the indiscriminate killing of all Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Before the German invasion, the Quartermaster-General of the Army, Eduard Wagner, had impressed on the troop commanders in the East that they should not concern themselves with the “political deployment” of the SS and the police, as long as the military situation did not absolutely require it.22 This became all the more difficult, however, the more widely the anti-Jewish operations spread. It was impossible to isolate the mass murder of sections of the civilian population in the area of operations from the jurisdiction and the tasks of the Wehrmacht, meaning a strict division of labor was nothing more than an illusion. Moreover, Himmler’s murder squads were reliant on “constant, close cooperation” with the Wehrmacht, in accordance with the Wagner-Heydrich agreement, in order “to align” the military and the policing tasks.23 From the outset, the senior staffs were well informed regarding the measures of the SS and the police. Even if the documentation of this information exchange and cooperation largely fell victim to the shredder, self-censorship, and the effects of the war, the surviving files leave us in no doubt.
All four Einsatzgruppen and their subordinate units received greater scope for action than initially planned. Instead of using certain possibilities of interpretation contained in the prior consultations to restrict the operating radius of the SS and the police, the commanders of the German Army allowed the Einsatzkommandos to ply their trade not only in the army group rear areas but also in the army rear areas, and the Sonderkommandos not only in the army rear areas but also in the combat zone, contrary to the Wagner-Heydrich agreement. In this way, the army group and army leaderships fostered without any necessity the murderous actions of the SS formations, which advanced with the fighting troops and were able to operate immediately behind the front line. In the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, which were compiled in the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA) to form the “Incident Reports USSR” (Ereignismeldungen UdSSR, or EM), the appraisal of the relationship with the Wehrmacht was correspondingly positive.24 To interpret this as nothing more than attention-seeking misses the point. The military also cherished the cooperation. The internal settlement of a dispute within the Ninth Army sheds light on the relationship between the command authorities and the SS. In August 1941, an SS lieutenant from Sonderkommando 7a complained about a disparaging remark made by an officer regarding the activities of the Security Police and the SD. The officer, whose conduct was also “most severely” condemned by the army commander, General Adolf Strauß, was promptly reprimanded by the army command with arguments that were very characteristic for the attitude of the military elite:
It is known to the military leadership that with regard to the treatment and dispatch of Jews and Bolshevik elements, special instructions have been issued on the orders of the Führer. Members of the Security Service, the police and the Waffen SS have been assigned to implement them and they are to act in accordance with their orders. The Wehrmacht can be grateful that it does not have anything to do with such matters. Understanding can be expected from the Wehrmacht for the members of the SS and the police, who have been commissioned with the implementation of these tasks. For them as well, the carrying out of the orders issued to them is a difficult task, and most of those involved would rather join with their comrades from the army to fight the external enemy. Unprofessional and inept behaviour on the part of officers in this matter must be regarded as particularly offensive. Especially with the head of the Sonderkommando deployed in the area of the Ninth Army, SS Lieutenant Colonel Blume, who is in every respect an entirely irreproachable SS officer, there exists the best relationship of trust, which must not be disturbed in any way whatsoever.25
The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, recalled after the war the positively enthusiastic reaction of the chiefs of staff of the individual army groups and armies during the large top-level meeting in Orša in mid-November 1941, when he asked, “What’s the situation with Himmler’s men, I was told: ‘These people are worth their weight in gold, because they secure the rear lines of communication and in this way save us having to deploy troops for this task.’”26 The high commands regarded the specialists from the Security Police and the SD as useful helpers in the combating of enemies (Gegnerbekämpfung) and safeguarding the areas behind the front. For this reason, they opened the door to the army areas wider than expected and even let them enter the combat zone. At the time of the meeting in Orša, the total murder of all Jews in the occupied Soviet territories was already at an advanced stage. Halder and the OKH had known about it for a long time. One colleague of Quartermaster-General Wagner, who had to summarize the reports of the RSHA, would never “forget it when General Wagner listened or when he added up the numbers of murder victims reported by the SD, those ‘liquidated,’ in the language of the SS, and took note of the territories that had been reported as ‘free of Jews.’”27
The command authorities in the area of operations also received enough information, not only from SS and police officers but also from their subordinate units. The mass executions did not take place hidden from view. Some soldiers participated in them, while many others observed them as eyewitnesses.28 There were enough witnesses whose impressions were passed on, at least in part, as far up as the high commands. They supplemented the routine reports by the Ic (intelligence) departments, counterintelligence troops, Secret Field Police, field gendarmerie, and other agencies working together with the Security Police. Several mass shootings took place in the vicinity of military headquarters. These events could be neither overlooked nor ignored. They were repeatedly a topic for conversation. The Einsatzgruppen staffs and their commandos were furthermore frequently stationed near or even in the localities in which the high commands of the army groups and armies were located. Alongside official contacts, various informal contacts could therefore arise, such as personal relations, mutual invitations, or collective vacations. Off-duty relationships with SS personnel and policemen, regardless of whether they were distanced or emphatically comradely, offered the possibility to learn even more about their tasks and operations.
The generals and their staffs could thus obtain an idea of the murderous activities of the SS and police forces. On this basis they had to decide to what extent they made use of their—admittedly limited but, if interpreted assertively, nonetheless effective—military jurisdiction vis-à-vis the Einsatzgruppen and, in part, also the battalions of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) and the brigades of the Waffen SS. In particular in the army zones, they could “consent or preclude,”29 tolerate and support Himmler’s “ideological troops,” or drastically limit their room for maneuver.30 They furthermore had the option to mark out the limits of cooperation at the lower levels. The administrative instructions and orders issued by the high commands to their subordinate formations and units had significant importance for the regional structuring of occupation rule and were by no means always predetermined by the regulations of the central authorities. In this respect, too, the senior troop command in the east possessed considerable scope for action. Again, however, it scarcely ever used this scope for action against the policies of mass murder in the operations zone, although these policies became ever clearer and more horrifying.
This stance of the senior staffs, ranging from passive to affirmative, impacted the cooperation of their subordinate departments with the SS and the police. Without the energetic assistance of the Wehrmacht at the front and in the communications zone, the policies of annihilation in the occupied Soviet Union could not have been executed so quickly or so extensively.31 The commandos of the Einsatzgruppen, which were weak in terms of personnel strength, could not be immediately on the spot on the vast eastern front wherever the Wehrmacht conquered and occupied a city or town. For this reason, the first measures against Jews and communists were very frequently taken by the Wehrmacht. This was especially true for the Secret Field Police (Geheime Feldpolizei), which was the military security police and thus part of the Wehrmacht, though the counterintelligence troops and field gendarmerie also arrested, interrogated, and executed often just as rigorously as Heydrich’s Security Police. These crimes took place directly in the area of authority of the high commands, to whom the military police was subordinated. The military administration—above all, the field and local headquarters (Feld- und Ortskommandanturen)—then registered and marked the Jews. They then incarcerated them in ghettos; disenfranchised, expropriated, and underfed them; deployed them for forced labor; frequently robbed them; and, in some cases even without the involvement of the Security Police, murdered them in the course of reprisals or as hostages.
Parallel to this, the mass shootings by the SS and police began from the first days of the campaign. Due to the rapid advance and the large spaces, many Jewish communities were initially omitted. But the murderers ultimately visited these places as well or returned to them in order to complete their tasks. They could then profit from the preliminary organizational work done by the military departments, since the Jews and other adversaries had in the meantime been apprehended. The further assistance of the military related above all to logistical support. As and when needed, lorries, ammunition, and cordons were provided. The agencies of the Wehrmacht stationed locally also acted as henchmen in the roundup and selection of the Jews, their escort to the execution site, and the burial of their corpses. Their soldiers sometimes even participated directly in the shooting operations performed by SS commandos, though this type of military assistance was too much for the troop command, which issued counterorders. At least in this respect, the planned division of labor was retained. The integration of the Eastern Army into the murder program of the SS and police was nonetheless extensive enough. The cooperation functioned—in spite of some conflicts and individual acts of resistance—to the last. It was promoted from an ideological viewpoint and was flanked by long-standing antisemitic indoctrination and agitation in the internal training and papers of the Wehrmacht, as well as in the propaganda distributed across the occupied territories.32
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Why did the Wehrmacht command authorities tolerate, or rather accept and, in some cases, even support the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews in territories under their control? One possible answer was given in postwar testimony by Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, who belonged to the military opposition against Hitler. As the counterintelligence officer of Army Group Center, he, like the entire staff of the army group, including the commander Fedor von Bock, was informed in detail in July 1941 of the activities of Einsatzgruppe B under SS Brigadier Arthur Nebe.33 The operations of July 1941, and not just the systematic murder of Jewish women and children months later, already constituted mass murder, and the high command could have energetically protested against them—but it did not. From a psychological point of view, it is therefore understandable that Gersdorff denied the real extent of his knowledge about the events of the opening phase of the eastern campaign. One statement made to the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Munich about the allegedly very low number of shootings of Jews in the reports of Einsatzgruppe B sheds a characteristic light on the attitude of conservative officers to the shooting operations against Jews in the Soviet Union: “The figures were on a scale that, in view of the size of Nebe’s operations zone, was quite conceivable, i.e. one could without further ado take the view that the shootings were related to the war. This was all the more the case when I learned that there were very many Jews among the operatives and that criminality within the Jewish population was greater and more active than within the remaining Russian population.”34 The former Field Marshal Erich von Manstein argued in retrospect in a similar vein: “It was really the case that the Jewish communities supplied a large percentage of partisans, saboteurs and dangerous people. . . . The fact that the Jews had reason to hate us naturally caused us to be vigilant in order to prevent this hatred from being turned into action.”35
From this type of antisemitic point of view, the partial persecution and removal of Jews appeared to be a military necessity in the struggle against Jewish Bolshevism. It was not only “Jews in Party and state positions”36 but also Jewish men of military-service age from the middle and upper classes (Jewish intelligentsia) that were classified as potential adversaries who might at any moment constitute a serious threat in the rear of the front and therefore had to be tackled promptly and preemptively by the limited number of security forces. As long as the racist security work of the SS and police was directed only against alleged functionaries, partisans, and saboteurs, as well as the Jewish intelligentsia, and furthermore justified as reprisals for crimes committed against German soldiers, there was virtually no resistance to it. The Einsatzgruppen made every effort in their reports to Berlin and to the military command authorities to cloak their murders in a pseudolegitimacy, although the dimensions of the shootings flouted any form of proportionality.
Nonetheless, the generals and their colleagues put aside their reservations against the already blatantly criminal police activities during the first months. The reason for this conduct is to be found not only in the ideological images of the enemy and in considerations of military necessity but also in the hopes for a lightning victory in the east. The military leadership wanted to successfully complete this highly risky campaign quickly, by all available means and without internal disputes—in order to then be transferred back to the West and, if possible, have nothing more to do with ethnic policies in the East. Military reasoning initially had absolute priority over political and ethical considerations. The fate of a suspect minority in a foreign country was of little consequence. On the contrary: many officers not only looked away but instead saw in the execution of supposedly dangerous adversaries, which Jewish functionaries and the intelligentsia were widely viewed as, an unpleasant but necessary building block in the realization and consolidation of the military victory. After all, in this “total” struggle against an ideological nemesis, a brutal approach was chosen in other areas as well, for example in the economic exploitation or the treatment of prisoners of war.37
Only when the hopes for a brief campaign were revealed as illusory and the transition was made to indiscriminate genocide (from mid-August 1941), did this understanding partially fade. Once the SS and police forces began targeting Jewish women and children ever more frequently and, ultimately, systematically killing all Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, some officers were troubled or even appalled. In some cases, their previously blunted conscience began to stir again and their indifferent or even approving stance toward the anti-Jewish operations changed—especially because at the same time news from back home filtered through to the effect that the persecution of German Jews had considerably intensified and led to the first deportations from the Reich to the East. Internal discussions took place in the command authorities, and, in a few cases, objections were voiced. However, the reaction to the gradual escalation of the killings of Jews was neither the same everywhere nor was it always critical. The majority continued to justify and support the murders—or at least tolerated them without objection. Alongside the argument of “combating of enemies,” the supply and accommodation situation, which had drastically deteriorated in many operations zones of the Eastern Army and appeared to improve as a result of a decimation of the population, increasingly came to the fore. Overall, the military command authorities and the military administration remained integrated into the policy of murder either directly or indirectly, by means of active participation or passive toleration. This integration was in some instances reluctant and combined with unease but took place in other cases out of conviction and self-initiative—until, soon after the turn of the year 1941–1942, most Jews in the territories controlled by the Wehrmacht, around half a million people, were dead.
***
Two examples from many should suffice to illustrate how broad the spectrum was of the generals in the East who were directly or indirectly involved in the Holocaust, and that they did not necessarily have to be Nazis in order to function in the framework of the war of annihilation. The furthest degree of serving as an accessory to mass murder was marked by the commander of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau.38 In his operations zone, the Holocaust by bullets assumed the most grievous proportions. Here two factors combined: the still large Jewish population in the Ukrainian cities conquered by the Sixth Army, in spite of escape and evacuation, and Reichenau’s particular radicalism. Given that he sympathized with Hitler already before 1933 and made every effort after the Nazi takeover of power to incorporate the armed forces into the new state, the conduct of this especially politicized and ideological general should come as no surprise. The fact that he could be independent to the point of renitence and had protested against shootings of Jews during the Polish campaign is somewhat bemusing, but it cannot alter the overall negative impression of his personality.
Reichenau worked well with Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C under the likewise particularly radical SS Colonel Paul Blobel; he gave direct murder orders, for example, against around ninety children in Belaya Tserkov39 and supported the large anti-Jewish massacres in Kiev and Kharkov. On October 10, 1941, only ten days after the shooting of 33,771 Jews in Babi Yar, Kiev, in the operations zone of his own army, he demanded in his notorious order on the “Conduct of the Troops in the Eastern Region” complete understanding from his soldiers “for the necessity of the hard but just atonement against Jewish sub-humanity.”40 The Reichenau order, with its plea for genocide, was in no way rejected by the less radical, conservative generals but was instead recommended by the superior military entities—the commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, and the OKH—to the other army commands to be circulated and emulated.41 The order was subsequently announced along the entire front, as a rule with affirmative covering letters from other commanders. Some generals, for example, Hermann Hoth (Seventeenth Army) and Erich von Manstein (Eleventh Army) were even inspired by it to issue their own radical orders.42
Even if Reichenau’s proximity to National Socialism was confirmed in horrific fashion in the occupied Soviet Union, National Socialist sentiments were by no means a prerequisite for the involvement of the generals in crimes. This is demonstrated not only by the adoption without objections of the Reichenau order among the other armies but also the conduct of numerous generals who were considerably less Nazified but nonetheless not “anti-Reichenaus” in the special situation of the war in the east. Even in the case of a general such as Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the predecessor to Hoth as commander of the Seventeenth Army who would later belong to the resistance of July 20, 1944, and is therefore assigned to a “different Germany” than his friend Reichenau, his distance to Nazi policies decreased during the first months of the war in the east.43 For Stülpnagel, too, the Soviet Jews were the pillars of the Stalinist regime and had to be targeted. In his orders, he therefore directed the repressive measures of the Wehrmacht against the Jewish population.44 At the same time, Stülpnagel recommended better “enlightenment about the Jews” in order to increase understanding for anti-Jewish operations.45 With his policy of treating the Jews as security risks and scapegoats he facilitated measures against the Jews—even if it remains unclear to what extent he accepted the murders themselves.
It is noticeable, however, how well Stülpnagel’s army command worked together with the Security Police. The large pogroms in western Ukraine (L’vov, Zolochov, Tarnopol, etc.) took place in the operations zone of the Seventeenth Army. According to the files of the Reich Security Main Office, the army command had itself suggested “first of all to use the anti-Jewish and anti-communist Poles living in the newly occupied territories for self-cleansing operations.”46 Furthermore, the army command repeatedly transferred to the Security Police the task of retaliating to acts of sabotage, for example, in Kremenchug,47 where 1,600 Jews were ultimately murdered. It is also striking whom the army leadership cited as “suspects” on September 7, 1941, and against whom one should not be afraid of proceeding with all severity: “Jews of both genders and all ages.”48 This was shortly before the transition from the selective to the complete eradication of the Jews in the operations zone of Army Group South via the massacre of Kamenets-Podolskiy (August 26–28, 1941, 23,600 victims).49 There can be no talk of Stülpnagel exerting a moderating influence on the treatment of the Jews in his army zone. On the contrary: the wording of his orders protected and indeed promoted anti-Jewish operations and the corresponding initiatives of his colleagues. If fewer Jews were ultimately killed in Stülpnagel’s jurisdiction than in the operations zones of other armies, it was mainly because the Seventeenth Army did not conquer any large cities after L’vov. To draw conclusions about his conduct in the German-Soviet war in 1941 from his active resistance in 1944 is an anachronistic fallacy, which is unfortunately to be found frequently in research on the resistance.50
***
The murder of around half a million men, women, and children of Jewish descent in the eastern operations zone would scarcely have been possible without the participation of the Wehrmacht, particularly in a logistical and administrative respect. Even if one takes into account that overall only a small proportion of the many million men of the Eastern Army were directly involved in the Holocaust and that there was a formal—though in practice frequently watered down—division of labor between the army and the SS and police apparatus, the participation of the Wehrmacht in the genocide in the occupied Soviet Union remains evident and comprehensive. Both the magnitude and the spatial expansion of the murder as well as the degree and functional structure of cooperation between Wehrmacht, SS, and police were decisively influenced by the conduct of the generals and their staffs. If intervention against the murders of Jews were to have any chance of success at all, then it had to come from the senior troop command of the generals in the east. In spite of all limitations in executive authority, it was especially the commanders of the army groups and the armies who fundamentally possessed enough in the way of formal competence and informal options to consent or preclude, impede or promote, protest or remain silent.
The fact that they did not use the scope of action remaining open to them in favor of the helpless victims, indeed as a rule did not even make any attempt to do so, provides a measure of the responsibility of the military elite for this first, so important, and groundbreaking stage in the genocide. It is certainly true that the Holocaust and the euthanasia were mass crimes committed by the state and were located in the arcane area of competence of the political leadership. This means that any serious attempt to thwart, undo, or at least dilute the fundamental decisions of the state leadership would have required an energetic protest or even a putsch by substantial parts of the Wehrmacht and would not necessarily have succeeded even then. For united action by the entire military leadership or at least the senior troop command on the eastern front, the prerequisites had long since been lacking after the generals had so deeply given themselves over to Hitler and his regime.
On the ground, in the operations zones, however, the generals deployed in the east could certainly have pursued a systematic obstruction of the racial-ideological murders. Clear protest or resistance on the part of several particularly prominent generals would at least have set an example and perhaps encouraged other commanders to engage in obstruction. After the experiences of the Polish campaign, Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and their executive organs must have feared a certain degree of opposition to their plans. During the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the SS and police behaved as though they wanted to test bit by bit what was possible in the new theater of war. The opening phase of the eastern campaign was thus of decisive importance for the further policies of murder. But when the military high commands learned of the mass murder of Jewish men, they were either silent or justified and even facilitated it. This clearly demonstrated that the leading command authorities of the Wehrmacht on the eastern front would not offer any resistance to the persecution of the Jews. This stance was an ominous sign for the gradual radicalization and expansion of the executions toward genocide. The murder of the Jewish “intelligentsia” and men of military-service age already announced the systematic “extermination,” for those Jews who initially survived could all the more easily be categorized as potential “avengers” or “useless eaters”—all the more so when the campaign unexpectedly lasted much longer. This underlines the evident and eminent importance of the failure to set limits to the murders during the opening phase of the German-Soviet war. Therein lies the greatest responsibility and joint guilt of the generals for the murder of the Soviet Jews and for the Holocaust overall. In this way, they became Hitler’s generals completely.
Of course, not every action taken and certainly not every word spoken against the anti-Jewish policy ordered by the highest authorities could be recorded in the service files or in private annotations. What good were internal discussions in intimate circles and clenched fists in pockets if—aside from the few known exceptions of officers beneath the rank of general—the discontent was not turned into actions, or at least none that might somehow have made themselves felt or had an impact. Solely for Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, three very timid interventions have been proven, one against executions in the vicinity of his headquarters, then one against the “selections” of Jewish prisoners of war by the Security Police in the transit camps of the Wehrmacht, and finally against the burdening of supply lines by rail transports of Jews.51 Yet in all three cases, the protection of human life was not at the forefront of his thinking but rather the motive of having as little to do with these things as possible. The case of Bock, who remained loyal to his Führer to the end, is an example of how a nationalist conservative general, whose surroundings tended ever more to opposition and, ultimately, even to resistance, was unable to bring himself to adopt a decisive stance against the Nazi crimes committed under the protection and safeguard of his troops. Even in the case of generals who were later active in (Stülpnagel, Hoepner) or at least on the margins of (Kluge) the coup against Hitler and had to forfeit their lives for it, there is no indication that the murder of the Soviet Jews had any kind of deep impact on their attitude toward the dictator and his regime. Their conduct in 1941 in fact suggests otherwise.
Some army commanders even went beyond the passive toleration of the murder of Jews. Reichenau’s agitating and murderous orders, the initiatives for pogroms and antisemitic propaganda by Stülpnagel and numerous other examples prove that proximity (Reichenau) or distance (Stülpnagel) to the Nazi regime was not necessarily decisive. Other things—alongside human weaknesses such as blind subordination, exaggerated assimilation, ambition, venality, conflict avoidance, or indifference—were crucial. Nationalist conservative generals and National Socialist functionaries possessed in their thinking a mutual stock of ideological grids, from which the deeply entrenched anti-Bolshevik and antisemitic sentiments coalesced disastrously in the eastern theater of war. The anti-Jewish stereotypes alone would surely not have been sufficient to acquiesce in or support the eliminatory policies of the Nazi regime in the occupied Soviet Union. Ideological components were supplemented by the military calculation prioritizing the security and the supply of German troops over all humanitarian considerations in this “total war” for “all or nothing,” which the campaign in the east was classified as from the outset and all the more so the longer it lasted. With the removal of the Jewish population, both a security threat and a contributing factor to the grave accommodation and food problems appeared to disappear. This type of justification for the murder of the Jews overlapped with National Socialist ideology and propaganda but it was not necessarily based on this. It could also be founded on nationalist conservative mentalities and military motives. It remains undisputed, however, that without Hitler and his fanatical supporters there would have been no genocide against the Soviet Jews.
All in all, we can verify a shockingly smooth integration of Hitler’s generals in the east (and their advisors) into the National Socialist program of murder. They frequently also possessed knowledge about the further course of the Holocaust, which was expanded in 1942 from the Soviet Jews to all Jews in German-occupied Europe, initially above all in Poland. The deportations of German Jews from October 1941 to the east were already well-known and constituted a subject in communications with the home front. It remains unclear when exactly and in what detail the troop generals learned of the industrial mass killing of people in the General Government. Baron Maximilian von Weichs, deployed from 1941 to 1945 as commander in the east and in the Balkans, admitted after the war that he had heard rumors about the death camps in Poland and personally broached the subject during a meeting with Himmler. The Reichsführer SS had apparently answered: “Those are not rumors, it is the truth.” The general furthermore recalled “that Himmler, even showing a certain pride, related that the exterminations were carried out in a very humane fashion. People were loaded onto railway cars without knowing that they were going to a death both painless and sudden.”52
This information prevented neither Weichs nor the vast majority of other field marshals and generals from condemning the assassination attempt of a few officers on Hitler on July 20, 1944,53 and loyally serving the Nazi state to the end. Himmler did not have to mince his words on January 26, 1944, when speaking at an indoctrination conference for commanders of all parts of the Wehrmacht in Poznań. The manuscript for his speech states: “Jewish question . . . complete solution, cannot allow any avengers for our children to emerge.”54 The generals gathered there greeted Himmler’s speech with great applause. At other ideological policy training sessions in May and June 1944, the Reichsführer SS confessed that the “Jewish question” had been “solved without compromise in accordance with the mortal struggle of our people for the survival of our blood.”55 Himmler continued, “In this circle I can again address this in all openness with a few sentences. It is good that we had the toughness to exterminate the Jews in our domain.”56
The knowledge of this gigantic state crime, which had begun immediately after the German attack on the Soviet Union in the operations zone of the Wehrmacht, had scarcely any noticeable impact on the generals, specifically those troop commanders who had borne the greatest responsibility on the eastern front in 1941 and 1942. On July 26, 1945, when the gas chambers of Auschwitz had long since become a subject for the global public, the US Army eavesdropped on a conversation in which two prominent captive generals, the former commanders in the German-Soviet war Heinz Guderian and Baronet Wilhelm von Leeb, discussed the merits and drawbacks of National Socialism. The exchange of views ended with the conclusion: “GUD: The fundamental principles were fine. L: That is true.”57
—Translated from German by Alex J. Kay
JOHANNES HÜRTER is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History Munich–Berlin and Professor of Modern History at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. Among other works, he has published Wilhelm Groener: Reichswehrminister am Ende der Weimarer Republik (1928–1932) (1993) and Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (2006).
1. See Johannes Hürter, “Die Wehrmachtsgeneralität und die ‘Bewältigung’ ihrer NS-Vergangenheit,” Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte 18, no. 1 (2014): 17–30. See also Alaric Searle, Wehrmacht Generals, West German Society, and the Debate on Rearmament 1949–1959 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); on the political and societal context see Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996).
2. See Oliver von Wrochem, Erich von Manstein: Vernichtungskrieg und Geschichtspolitik (Paderborn et al.: Schöningh, 2006).
3. See Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Zeit der Indoktrination (Hamburg: Deckers, 1969); Klaus-Jürgen Müller, Das Heer und Hitler. Armee und nationalsozialistisches Regime 1933–1940 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1969); Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer. Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006); Jürgen Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007).
4. This number is taken from Reinhard Stumpf, Die Wehrmachts-Elite. Rang- und Herkunftsstruktur der deutschen Generale und Admirale 1933–1945 (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1982), 46: 2,344 army generals, 556 air force generals, 291 admirals in the Imperial Navy.
5. The figures that follow are based on the (somewhat divergent) data provided in Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht. Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 243–282; Dieter Pohl, Verfolgung und Massenmord in der NS-Zeit 1933–1945, 3rd rev. ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011), 63–110; Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, vol. 7: Sowjetunion mit annektierten Gebieten I. Besetzte sowjetische Gebiete unter deutscher Militärverwaltung, Baltikum und Transnistrien, vol. ed. Bert Hoppe and Hildrun Glass (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), 13–49 (introduction).
6. On the following see Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, esp. 509–517.
7. See Werner T. Angress, “Das deutsche Militär und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 19 (1976): 77–146.
8. Heinrici’s diary, entry for October 17, 1918, quoted in Johannes Hürter, A German General on the Eastern Front: The Letters and Diaries of Gotthard Heinrici 1941–1942 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2014), 13–14.
9. Heinrici to his parents, Berlin, February 17, 1933, quoted in Hürter, A German General on the Eastern Front, 16.
10. Heinrici to his parents, Berlin, April 1, 1933, quoted in Hürter, A German General on the Eastern Front, 18. However, only a few days later he again defended the “necessary” coercive measures and “even some hardships,” and praised Hitler and Goebbels: “They carried out the boycott against Jews with great skill!” Heinrici to his parents, Berlin, April 9, 1933, quoted in Hürter, A German General on the Eastern Front.
11. Heinrici to his mother, January 16, 1939, quoted in Hürter, A German General on the Eastern Front.
12. Heinrici to his wife, April 22, 1941, quoted in Hürter, A German General on the Eastern Front, 60: “It is not very nice here, bad cold weather, spring is not in sight, bugs and lice are everywhere, just as the awful Jews with the Star of David on their sleeves.”
13. See Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 139–140.
14. See Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 177–188. See also Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938–1942 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981), 80–106; Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Jochen Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg. Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2006).
15. Even retrospectively: see Weichs, “Erinnerungen,” vol. 3, in Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau (hereafter BArch-MA), N 19/7, fols. 18–19, where he writes regarding the ghetto in Łódź: “Extremely dirty houses and cabins. The well-known type of caftan-Jew could be seen in droves here.”
16. The overview that follows regarding the shared responsibility of the German generals for the Holocaust in the Soviet Union is based on Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 517–599, where numerous examples and pieces of evidence can be found.
17. Figures according to the table on the wartime dispositions on June 22, 1941, in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, vol. 4: Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion, supplement (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983), Table 2, including the—soon deployed—reserves, though without the Romanian formations attached to the Eleventh Army. The figures were supplemented by the Army High Command Norway/Command Post Finland (two corps, four divisions). The admirals of the Imperial Navy and the generals of the Luftwaffe deployed in the east are not addressed in this chapter. The German admirals resembled the army generals in their structure and their (nationalist conservative) political and ideological orientation, while the Luftwaffe generals were younger, more socially heterogeneous and had more affinity with the Nazis.
18. Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, 112.
19. Order issued by the command of the Seventeenth Army, June 16, 1941, with enclosed pamphlet, “Wichtig für alle Führer und Soldaten im Falle eines Krieges mit der Sowjetunion!” [Important for all officers and soldiers in the event of war with the Soviet Union], in BArch-MA, RH 20-17/276.
20. Order issued by Brauchitsch, “Regelung des Einsatzes der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD im Verbande des Heeres” [Regulations on the deployment of the Security Police and the SD within army formations], April 28, 1941, reproduced in Gerd R. Ueberschär and Wolfram Wette, eds., “Unternehmen Barbarossa.” Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion 1941: Berichte, Analysen, Dokumente (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1984), 303–304. For an example of other unmistakeable statements see the order issued by the OKW, “Richtlinien für das Verhalten der Truppe in Russland” [Guidelines for the conduct of the troops in Russia], May 19, 1941, Gerd R. Ueberschär and Wolfram Wette, eds., “Unternehmen Barbarossa,” 312–313: “(1). Bolshevism is the mortal enemy of the National Socialist German people. It is against this subversive worldview and its carriers that Germany is fighting. (2). This struggle demands ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevik agitators, irregulars, saboteurs, Jews, and the complete elimination of all active or passive resistance.”
21. Essential: Peter Longerich, Politik und Vernichtung. Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich: Piper, 1998), 293–418; for an overview see: Pohl, Verfolgung und Massenmord, 70–79. For new arguments for an earlier initiation of genocide in the north (end of July), also fostered by positive collaboration with the Wehrmacht, see: Alex J. Kay, “Transition to Genocide, July 1941: Einsatzkommando 9 and the Annihilation of Soviet Jewry,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 27, no. 3 (winter 2013): 411–442.
22. Notes made by the chief of staff of Army Group North, Major General Kurt Brennecke, regarding a discussion on June 4, 1941, at the OKH in Zossen, June 9, 1941, in National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter NARA), T 312/805. On this occasion, Wagner confirmed once again, however, that the army remained the “highest authority” (Brennecke, NARA, T 312/805) in the area of operations and that his commanders could “consent or preclude, depending on the military circumstances” (notes made by the chief of staff of the Seventeenth Army, Colonel Vincenz Müller, regarding this discussion, June 6, 1941, in BArch-MA, RH 20-17/23).
23. Order issued by Brauchitsch, “Regelung des Einsatzes der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD im Verbande des Heeres,” April 28, 1941, reproduced in Ueberschär and Wette, eds., “Unternehmen Barbarossa,” 303–304.
24. See the essential edition of the Incident Reports and other Einsatzgruppen documents: Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Andrej Angrick, Jürgen Matthäus, and Martin Cüppers, eds., Dokumente der Einsatzgruppen in der Sowjetunion, vol. 1: Die “Ereignismeldungen UdSSR” 1941 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011); vol. 2: Deutsche Besatzungsherrschaft in der UdSSR 1941–45 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013); vol. 3: Deutsche Berichte aus dem Osten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2014). See also Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42. Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1997).
25. Notes on a discussion made by the chief of staff of the Ninth Army, Colonel Kurt Weckmann, August 22, 1941, in Central Archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Podolsk (TsAMO RF), fond 500, 12454/236.
26. Peter Bor, Gespräche mit Halder (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1950), 197–198.
27. Walter Bußmann, “Politik und Kriegsführung. Erlebte Geschichte und der Beruf des Historikers,” Fridericiana. Zeitschrift der Universität Karlsruhe no. 32 (1983): 3–16, here 11. Occasionally, Halder also attended the presentations. See also Bußmann’s remarks on the agreements reached before the beginning of the eastern campaign: “I am not able to answer the question as to whether the OKH at that point in time, i.e. during preparations for ‘Barbarossa,’ was aware of the consequences that, as we know, culminated in the ‘final solution.’ Whoever knew about the ‘program,’ and this was generally accessible in the various publications and proclamations, could not and must not harbour any illusions, even if it did not suffice for them to imagine that a genocide was being carried out.”
28. See Chapter 8 in this volume.
29. See note 22.
30. This is proven by the example of the Eleventh Army, which during the first weeks of the campaign imposed on Einsatzgruppe D, much to the resentment of its commander Otto Ohlendorf, every march route, every place of action and even, in some cases, its range of tasks. From August 1941, however, this army command also allowed the SS and the police in its area of jurisdiction considerable freedom. See Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 526–528.
31. On cooperation between the Eastern Army, the SS and the police see the overviews in Krausnick and Wilhelm, Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, 205–278; Pohl, Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, 243–282. A comprehensive study of the participation of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust in the Soviet Union is yet to be written. A detailed analysis using the example of Belarus: Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), 503–774. Using the example of Lithuania: Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011). Using the example of several divisions: Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg. Front und militärisches Hinterland 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009), 635–698.
32. See Jürgen Förster, “Geistige Kriegführung in Deutschland 1919 bis 1945,” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, vol. 9/1: Die deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939 bis 1945. Politisierung, Vernichtung, Überleben (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2004), 469–640, here passim.
33. See Johannes Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition. Tresckow, Gersdorff, der Vernichtungskrieg und der Judenmord. Neue Dokumente über das Verhältnis der Heeresgruppe Mitte zur Einsatzgruppe B im Jahr 1941,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 52 (2004), 527–562. The author’s theses provoked a controversy in Germany regarding the conduct of later resistance fighters during the first months of the German-Soviet war. On this see Manuel Becker, Holger Löttel, and Christoph Studt, eds., Der militärische Widerstand gegen Hitler im Lichte neuer Kontroversen (Berlin: LIT, 2010); Rafaela Hiemann, “Widerstand und kumulative Erinnerungskonstruktion: Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff,” in Life Writing and Political Memoir—Lebenszeugnisse und Politische Memoiren, ed. Magnus Brechtken (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2012), 145–201.
34. Transcript of the Public Prosecutor’s Office attached to Regional Court Munich I on the hearing of Gersdorff, Cologne, May 4, 1959, in Staatsarchiv München, Stanw. 32970/5. See also Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 1121.
35. Statement from 1949, quoted in Oliver von Wrochem, “Ein unpolitischer Soldat? Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Manstein,” in Karrieren im Nationalsozialismus. Funktionseliten zwischen Mitwirkung und Distanz, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Tobias Jersak, (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2004), 185–204, here 190.
36. Heydrich to the higher SS and police leaders, Berlin, July 2, 1941, in Klein, ed., Einsatzgruppen, 325.
37. See the overviews of the war of annihilation in the East: Pohl, Herrschaft der Wehrmacht; Christian Hartmann, Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany’s War in the East, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
38. See the detailed coverage in Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 576–588.
39. See Helmuth Groscurth, Tagebücher eines Abwehroffiziers 1938–1940. Mit weiteren Dokumenten zur Militäropposition gegen Hitler, ed. Helmut Krausnick and Harold C. Deutsch (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1970), 534–542.
40. Reichenau’s order “Verhalten der Truppe im Ostraum” [Conduct of the troops in the eastern region], October 10, 1941, reproduced in Ueberschär and Wette, ed., Unternehmen Barbarossa, 339–340.
41. Rundstedt’s order, October 12, 1941, reproduced in Ueberschär and Wette, ed., Unternehmen Barbarossa, 340; OKH order, October 28, 1941, reproduced in Ueberschär and Wette, ed., Unternehmen Barbarossa, 340–341.
42. Hoth’s order “Verhalten der deutschen Soldaten im Ostraum” [Conduct of the German soldiers in the eastern region], November 17, 1941, reproduced in Ueberschär and Wette, ed., Unternehmen Barbarossa, 341–343; Manstein’s order, November 20, 1941, reproduced in Ueberschär and Wette, ed., Unternehmen Barbarossa, 343–344.
43. See Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 570–575, where more evidence is provided.
44. See, for example, Stülpnagel’s order “Behandlung feindlicher Zivilpersonen (Partisanen, jugendliche Banden) und der russischen Kriegsgefangenen” [Treatment of enemy civilians (partisans, gangs of youths) and Russian prisoners of war], July 30, 1941, in BArch-MA, RH 20-17/276.
45. Stülpnagel’s position paper “Stellung und Einfluss des Bolschewismus” [Standing and influence of Bolshevism], August 12, 1941, in NARA, T 312/674 (2).
46. “Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 10” [Incident report USSR no. 10], Chief of the Security Police and the SD, Berlin, July 2, 1941, reproduced in Mallmann et al., eds., Ereignismeldungen UdSSR, 64–66, here 64.
47. Seventeenth Army, “Tätigkeitsbericht” [Activity report] Ic/AO, July 22, 1941, in Archiv des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, MA 1564, NOKW-2272.
48. Order of the Seventeenth Army “Überwachung des Zivilverkehrs” [Surveillance of civilian interaction], in BArch-MA, RH 20-17/276.
49. See Klaus-Michael Mallmann, “Der qualitative Sprung im Vernichtungsprozeß. Das Massaker von Kamenez-Podolsk Ende August 1941,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 10 (2001), 239–264.
50. This applies not only to the tendentious biographies of the two eastern front generals and later resistance fighters Erich Hoepner and Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel by Heinrich Bücheler, Hoepner. Ein deutsches Soldatenschicksal des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Herford: Mittler E.S. & Sohn, 1980); Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel. Soldat—Philosoph—Verschwörer. Biographie (Berlin/Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1989) but also, for example, to the standard work by Peter Hoffmann, Widerstand, Staatsstreich, Attentat. Der Kampf der Opposition gegen Hitler (Munich: Piper, 1969).
51. See Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 555–556, 564–565, and 594–595.
52. Hearing of Weichs by the Seventh US Army, May 30, 1945, in Bundesarchiv Koblenz, All.Proz. 2/FC 6180 P (Weichs). Original in English.
53. See Weichs’s diary, entry for July 21, 1944, in BArch-MA, N 19/3, fols. 187–188: “A stab in the back like in 1918 but worse because it comes from a source from which one would have expected the opposite.”
54. Heinrich Himmler, Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen, ed. Agnes F. Petersen and Bradley F. Smith (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1974), 201. On this meeting and Himmler’s speech see also Förster, “Geistige Kriegführung,” 602–605; Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1977), 146.
55. Speech by Himmler in Sonthofen, May 5, 1941, quoted in Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler. Biographie (Berlin: Siedler, 2008), 715. For similar remarks see Himmler’s speech in Sonthofen on May 24, 1944, Longerich, Heinrich Himmler.
56. Speech by Himmer in Sonthofen, June 21, 1944, Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 716.
57. Manuscript of conversation wiretapped by the Seventh US Army, July 26, 1945, in NARA, RG 238. Original in English.