Postscript: Poland, 1939–Soviet Union, 1941
Einsatzgruppen Actions in Comparison
“We shall establish beyond the realm of doubt facts which, before the dark decade of the Third Reich, would have seemed incredible. The defendants were commanders and officers of special SS groups known as Einsatzgruppen—established for the specific purpose of massacring human beings because they were Jews, or because they were for some other reason regarded as inferior peoples.”1 Benjamin Ferencz, U.S. chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial, made this opening statement not coincidentally on September 29, 1947. Exactly six years earlier, on September 29, 1941, members of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C had staged a two-day massacre in the ravine at Babi Yar near Kiev in which more than thirty thousand Jews—men, women, and children—were murdered.2 Within six months—from late June to the end of 1941—the three thousand German men in the ranks of Einsatzgruppen A, B, C, and D who had marched into the Soviet Union on the heels of four German army groups had, with the help of the Wehrmacht and local collaborators, killed between five and eight hundred thousand civilians, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. Even compared to what Heydrich’s units had done in Poland in 1939, this killing spree was unprecedented. Unlike in 1939, the Einsatzgruppen recorded many—though far from all—of these murders and communicated the details back to the RSHA, which compiled extensive reports on German occupation policy in the Soviet Union.3
How was violence on such a scale possible? Different factors converged, some new, but most already discernible in 1939. We have seen that during the Polish campaign, even those German generals highly critical of the Einsatzgruppen’s violent measures at the same time endorsed the notion of “pacifying” the rear army areas. In the course of the war against Poland, the Wehrmacht’s role had undergone a transformation, as historian Christopher Browning writes, “from abdication to complicity”; during Operation Barbarossa—the attack on the Soviet Union starting June 22, 1941—the German army leadership would move “to outright participation” in a genocidal campaign.4 Again, Hitler set the broad goals that would determine how Nazi Germany waged war.5 On March 30, 1941, just as he had on August 22, 1939, prior to the attack on Poland, he put forward his views before the assembled senior generals, but this time with even more ominous implications: Bolshevism was an “asocial crime”; Germany would “have to step back from soldierly comradeship. The communist was not and is not a comrade. This is a fight of annihilation.” The war was about the “destruction of the Bolshevist commissars and the communist intelligentsia,” a task that the Wehrmacht could not accomplish alone and that called for the assistance of Himmler’s forces. The 1940 French campaign not far from his mind, Hitler harkened back to ideas about “the east” that had driven German policy in Poland since 1939: “The fight will be very different than in the west. In the east harshness today means leniency for the future. The commanders will have to overcome their doubts.”6 Few of Hitler’s generals would have such doubts; already on March 27, 1941, Army High Commander von Brauchitsch, whom Hitler had promoted to field marshal half a year earlier, informed senior Wehrmacht officers that “the troops have to realize that this struggle is being waged by one race against another, and proceed with the necessary harshness.”7
These radical notions formed the core context of Operation Barbarossa and would transform into equally radical directives in the next few weeks.8 When in late April 1941 the Army High Command instructed field units that “special detachments” of the Sipo and SD would perform “special tasks” behind the front line,9 the lack of specificity in outlining this assignment of Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen indicated that the Wehrmacht had given his units carte blanche. Jews played a much more central role as Germany’s archenemy than they had in Poland. Despite the interlude of the Hitler-Stalin pact, right-wing circles and the Nazi elite remained wedded to a strong belief in the inseparability of Jews and Communists, the rulers of the Soviet empire.10 Other orders sent the same message. The “decree on the exercise of military jurisdiction in the ‘Barbarossa’ zone and on special measures by the troops,” dated May 13, 1941, went further than the directives issued by the top Wehrmacht commanders in 1939: it replaced courts-martial against civilians with a stipulation that “partisans” were “to be finished off ruthlessly in battle or while attempting to escape,” whereas other attacks were to be “crushed by the troops on the spot using the utmost means, until the attacker is annihilated.” Due to the suffering inflicted by Bolshevism on the German people in 1918, criminal acts committed by German soldiers against the civilian population would no longer be “automatically” prosecuted.11
If Wehrmacht generals had moral qualms about excessive violence during the Polish campaign, their tolerance for atrocities committed by their own troops in the war against the Soviet Union was much higher, even before it began. An order dated June 6 authorized frontline troops to execute, contrary to international laws, any Red Army soldiers identified as political commissars, who were collectively deemed the “originators of barbaric Asian fighting methods.” The Wehrmacht High Command’s “Guidelines for the Behavior of Troops in Russia,” dated May 19 and issued to all soldiers before the attack, exceeded in sharpness even Hitler’s proclamation against the “Jewish-Bolshevist intelligentsia”: this battle demanded “ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total elimination of all active or passive resistance.”12 In conjunction with the ideologically driven perception of “the enemy,” the initiative field commanders of both the Wehrmacht and the Sipo/SD were expected to take in executing these orders led to the rapid escalation of violence against civilians, first and foremost against Jews, from the first days of Operation Barbarossa.13
According to the agreement finalized in late April between the German military and police leadership, Einsatzgruppen units would be operating in the rear army areas, “responsible for executive measures against the civilian population.” They would report to the three new Higher SS and Police Leaders appointed by Himmler (HSSPF Russland-Nord, -Mitte, and -Süd) and were to keep army commanders informed, without being subordinated to them. Unlike in Poland, executive power was now divided; Wehrmacht leaders felt relief at not being responsible for the activities of Heydrich’s units. Eduard Wagner, promoted to the rank of major general and the new quartermaster general who had been Heydrich’s partner in brokering the agreement, embraced the “fundamental principle” that “the implementation of the Führer’s political requirements is not a concern for the army”;14 as “the army cannot be burdened with every task,” he was pleased by the establishment of a “cooperation with the Reichsführer-SS in police [. . .] matters.”15 At the same time, Wehrmacht and police leaders smoothed over issues related to the past: on April 18, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, chief of Himmler’s personal staff, met with a Wehrmacht colonel for a discussion of “the events in Poland 1939.” On May 2, Wolff reported on the resolution of “the continuing conflicts over the SS activities in Poland.” Finally, on July 31, 1941, Himmler felt confident that the chapter on the Polish campaign had been closed.16
The initial directives Himmler and Heydrich gave to their men about how to understand and implement their “special tasks” were remarkably nondescript compared to the orders Hitler and military commanders gave to Wehrmacht troops in the run-up to Operation Barbarossa. Issued in writing in early July 1941 after he had met with unit leaders before their deployment, Heydrich’s orders to his Einsatzgruppen reflected the overall operational framework with its vague yet expandable focus on eliminating “Jewish Bolshevism”: communist functionaries, as well as “Jews in party and state positions,” were to be shot. Having received the first reports from field units on executions, Heydrich consciously extended the spiral of violence by allowing the shooting of “other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.).”17 The emotionally charged phantom of “Jewish Bolshevism” massively enlarged the 1939 “intelligentsia” scarecrow and created a command climate that bred violence against civilians. Nevertheless, the transformation of this fixation into a reality that would affect millions of people living beyond the German-Soviet border depended, as during the Polish campaign, to a large degree on the situation on the ground and decisions made by local German officials.18
Following in the Wehrmacht’s footsteps, the Einsatzgruppen not only came across people who somehow met the description of their broadly defined target groups but also encountered groups that shared the German obsession with “Jewish Bolshevism.” In the Baltic states and eastern Poland, under Soviet rule since 1939–1940, locals often welcomed Germans as liberators from Stalin’s yoke. Numerous massacres of local prisoners committed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret service, in the last minutes before the Red Army’s retreat fueled public outrage in these regions and fed the German propaganda machine.19 The gruesome NKVD crimes in Lwów [German: Lemberg] and other cities to some extent appeared as a variation of the “Slavic baseness” theme first virulent among Germans in 1939 in Bromberg and provided a similar subterfuge for violence, this time from groups of locals—mostly Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, and Poles—in the form of pogroms against Jews.20 For the Germans, these pogroms served as a spur to action and legitimated the projection of every real or imagined danger onto the proclaimed enemy, the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Eager to ratchet up violence, Heydrich immediately instructed the Einsatzgruppen not to hinder the “self-cleansing measures by anti-communist and anti-Jewish circles in the newly occupied territories.”21 If there was need for another pretext to further escalate the war against the civilian population, Stalin’s proclamation of July 3 calling for partisan warfare behind German lines provided one. On July 16, Hitler demanded, in the presence of top Nazi leaders, that “the vast area must be pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us.” A day later he signed a decree that considerably expanded Himmler’s latitude in the occupied territories.22
Compared to the Polish campaign, the German push toward “pacification” in the Soviet Union was framed in a more radical ideological context and also involved more men. Together with the Wehrmacht’s three million soldiers, a greater number of SS and police forces—Einsatzgruppen, Order Police, and Waffen-SS units—came to be deployed. Among those additional troops was the “Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS,” a special task force comprising roughly ten thousand elite Waffen-SS men that Himmler started using in late July 1941 for the purpose of “pacifying” parts of Ukraine and Belorussia. With some officers adopting for the first time a tactic they called “de-Jewification” (Entjudung), the Kommandostab added significantly to crossing the threshold from persecution to annihilation.23 Within a month, the mass murder of Jews, including women and children, had become a feature of daily life.
In addition to the almost frictionless cooperation between the Wehrmacht and the police during Operation Barbarossa, a marked difference between 1939 and 1941 involved the evolution of the radicalization process. In the Polish case, the Einsatzgruppen had escalated the violence when the Wehrmacht was phasing it out, whereas in the Soviet Union, atrocities against civilians and POWs accompanied the German attack from the start and characterized German rule until the Wehrmacht withdrew. Simultaneously, Heydrich’s executive portfolio expanded far beyond keeping an eye on the advance of the Einsatzgruppen. In mid-July, he started organizing selections by his Sipo/SD units of Soviet POWs in Wehrmacht camps to pick out communists and “all Jews,” adding to the staggering death toll of two million captured Red Army soldiers in the first year of the war in the east.24 Furthermore, Heydrich assumed a key function in the history of the Holocaust when, on July 31, 1941, Göring empowered him to make “all necessary preparations [. . .] for a complete solution to the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.”25 The German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union were the first areas in Europe in which such a “solution” was taking shape by way of physical annihilation.
From the east, the deadly dynamic started to engulf other regions; beginning in late 1941, different Nazi agencies interacted on many levels to organize the “Final Solution.” More than just orders and obedience determined the path of Nazi genocide. As Christopher Browning has put it, “Hitler’s words and Himmler’s and Heydrich’s actions at the center set in motion waves of political signals that radiated outward. Like expanding concentric circles, they encompassed more and more people who, reading these signals, became aware that something new was expected of them.”26 The activism of field officers eager to outdo one another in their degree of radicalism fueled the anti-Bolshevist crusade and racial war; nothing conveyed this message more strongly than execution figures. British intelligence interceptors at Bletchley Park who had managed to decipher German radio transmissions from behind the eastern front concluded with regard to the HSSPFs deployed in the occupied Soviet Union that “the leaders of the three sectors stand somewhat in competition with each other as to their ‘scores.’”27 The murder of “gypsies,” hospital patients, “racially inferior subjects with Asian characteristics,” and other “unwanted” people followed the logic of Nazi policies already visible in Poland in 1939 but was not a predetermined development. Contingencies mattered as much as personal decisions made by the perpetrators.
Having opened the doors to genocide beyond the German-Soviet border, top Nazi leaders only had to praise and encourage those under their command to show they were pleased with further activities of this type. When, about a week after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, Himmler and Heydrich met with Sipo/SD officers who had just completed a “cleansing operation” in the German-Lithuanian border region that had claimed the lives of several hundred civilians, primarily Jewish men, they “completely approved.”28 And the Reichsführer-SS sent a clear message during his visit to the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv (German: Nikolajew) on October 4 when he promoted Otto Ohlendorf, leader of Einsatzgruppe D, which was leaving a bloody trail in its wake in southern Ukraine, in front of his men.29 The news that Hitler was personally receiving reports “about the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the east” must have had a similar effect.30 Without many words or written directives, Himmler’s men in the field understood that the mass murder they committed had approval at the highest level. There seemed little need for conferences of Einsatzgruppen leaders in Berlin, which had frequently taken place in 1939. Reports from the periphery to the center sufficed in conjunction with occasional inspections from the SS leadership to make sure radical “pacification” remained at the core of a German occupation policy that was to devastate vast regions, destroy the lives of millions in the east, and foster the evolution of the “Final Solution” on a Europe-wide scale.
11. Opening statement by Benjamin Ferencz in Case 9 (the Einsatzgruppen Trial) on September 9, 1947, in Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10 (Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein & Co., 1997), 4:30. See also Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Benjamin Ferencz, “The Einsatzgruppen Trial,” in The Nuremberg Trials: International Law since 1945, ed. Herbert R. Reginbogin and Christoph J. M. Safferling, with Walter R. Hippel (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2006), 153–63. For further reading, see Annette Weinke, Die Nürnberger Prozesse (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006); Kim C. Priemel and Alexa Stiller, eds., NMT. Die Nürnberger Militärtribunale zwischen Geschichte, Gerechtigkeit und Rechtschöpfung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013).
2. Ereignismeldung UdSSR No. 97, September 28, 1941, published in Klaus-Michael Mallmann et al., eds., Die “Ereignismeldungen UdSSR” 1941. Dokumente der Einsatzgruppen in der Sowjetunion I (Darmstadt: WBG, 2011), 589–600.
3. Mallmann et al., Die “Ereignismeldungen UdSSR” 1941; see also Andrej Angrick et al., eds., Deutsche Besatzungsherrschaft in der UdSSR 1941–1945. Dokumente der Einsatzgruppen in der Sowjetunion II (Darmstadt: WBG, 2013). For additional sets of Einsatzgruppen reports, see Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42: Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolitizei und des SD (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1997).
4. Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004), 72–81.
5. See Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); also Idem., Inside Hitler’s High Command (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000), 102–69; Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer. Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007).
6 . Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch: Tägliche Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres 1939–1942, ed. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1962), 2:336–37.
7 . Quoted from Megargee, War of Annihilation, 33. See also Jürgen Förster, “Operation Barbarossa as a War of Conquest and Annihilation,” in Germany and the Second World War, Vol. 4: The Attack on the Soviet Union, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 485.
8 . Megargee, War of Annihilation, 35–41. See also Jürgen Förster, “Verbrecherische Befehle,” in Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfram Wette and Gerd R. Ueberschär (Darmstadt: Primus, 2001), 137–51; Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer. Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007), 247–65. For reproductions of key campaign documents, see War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).
9 . OKH (Brauchitsch) regarding deployment of Sipo/SD units in conjunction with the Wehrmacht, April 28, 1941, BA-MA, RH 22/155.
10. See Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 92ff.
11. See Felix Römer, “The Wehrmacht in the War of Ideologies: The Army and Hitler’s Criminal Orders on the Eastern Front,” in Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, ed. Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 73–100.
12. Megargee, War of Annihilation, 37–38.
13. See Browning, Origins, 245–67.
14. File note 16th Army/Qu. 2, May 19, 1941, BA-MA, RH 20-16/1012.
15. Discussion points for the meeting with heads of the general staff on June 4–5, 1941, BA-MA, RH 2/129.
16. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, 2:372, 390, 135.
17. CdS to the HSSPF in the East, July 2, 1941, USHMMA RG 14.016M (BAB, R 58/241), fiche 7:314–19.
18. See Jürgen Matthäus, “Controlled Escalation: Himmler’s Men in the Summer of 1941 and the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Territories,” HGS 21, no. 2 (2007): 218–42.
19. See Bogdan Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschiessen.” Die Brutalisierung des deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges im Sommer 1941 (Berlin: Propyläen, 2000).
20. For examples, see Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, eds., The “Final Solution” in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 64ff.; Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Alexander B. Rossino, “Polish ‘Neighbors’ and German Invaders: Contextualizing Anti-Jewish Violence in the Białystok District during the Opening Weeks of Operation Barbarossa,” Polin 16 (2003): 431–52.
21. Browning, Origins, 272.
22. Ibid., 266–67.
23. See Martin Cüppers, Wegbereiter der Shoah: Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die Judenvernichtung 1939–1945 (Darmstadt: WBG, 2005); Browning, Origins, 279–84; Matthäus, “Controlled Escalation,” 225.
24. See Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1978). This definitive study on the fate of Soviet POWs in Wehrmacht custody is still not translated into English.
25. See Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 259–77.
26. Browning, Origins, 317.
27. Summary of German police decodes, August 21, 1941, British National Archives Kew, HW 16/6. Cf. Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 91ff.; Nicholas Terry, “Conflicting Signals: British Intelligence on the ‘Final Solution’ through Radio Intercepts and Other Sources, 1941–1942,” YVS 32 (2004): 351–96. See also Klaus-Michael Mallmann, “Der qualitative Sprung im Vernichtungsprozess. Das Massaker von Kamenez-Podolsk Ende August 1941,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismus 10 (2001): 239–64.
28. See Browning, Origins, 253–56.
29. Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 253; BAB, BDC-SSO file Otto Ohlendorf.
30. Browning, Origins, 312.