Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

the order, drawn up after

discusssions with Heydrich: Bundesarchiv Berlin (BAB), RW 4v/575, published in

Jacobsen, ‘Kommissarbefehl’, doc. 2. On 16 April Wagner met Himmler, Heydrich,

the Head of the Order Police, Kurt Daluege, and Hans Jüttner (Chief of Staff in the SS

Main Leadership Office) in a hotel in Graz, clearly in order to discuss the draft

(Himmler, Dienstkalender, ed. Witte, 150). The negotiations are presented in detail by

Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südli-

chen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg 2003), 41 ff.

18. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 81.

19. RH 22/155. Jacobsen, ‘Kommissarbefehl’, doc. 3.

20. RH 31-Iv.23; cf. Jürgen Förster, ‘Operation Barbarossa as a War of Conquest and

Annihilation’, in Boog et al., ed., Germany and the Second World War, iv. 481–521;

and Walter Manoscheck, ‘Serbien ist Judenfrei’. Militärbesatzungspolitik und Judenver-

nichtung in Serbien 1941/42 (Munich, 1993), 41–2.

21. Halder, KTB ii. 317 ff., 320.

22. Ibid. 335 ff., 336–7.

23. BAM, RH 22/155, published in Reinhard Rürup, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941–

1945. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin, 1991), 45; for details of the genesis of this measure see Förster, ‘Operation Barbarossa’; and Ralf Ogorreck, Die Einsatzgruppen und die Genesis

der ‘Endlösung’ (Berlin, 1996), 19 ff. The accompanying letter by the Commander-in-

Chief of the army of 24 June (Disciplinary Decree; Jacobsen, ‘Kommissarbefehl’, doc.

10) pursues the line of the need to prevent the excessive implementation of this order

from the Führer by the troops on the ground. The activity report made by the

Notes to pages 183–185

495

intelligence officer of the Third Tank Group for the period between January and July

1941 (BAB, RH 21–3/v, 423) shows how the intelligence officers and military judges of

the Group were informed of the order on 11 June by Special Purpose General Müller:

‘One of the two enemies must fall by the wayside, those who hold hostile view are to be

finished off, not preserved . . . . The severity of the war demands severe punishments

(remember the First War: the Russians in Gumbinnen: shooting dead all the inhabit-

ants of villages on the route between Tilsit and Insterburg in case the route was

damaged). Where there is any doubt about who the perpetrators are, suspicion will

often have to suffice. It is often not possible to provide unambiguous proof.’

24. BAM, RH 2/2082, published in Rürup, Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, 46. On the

Commissar Order in general see Felix Römer, Der Kommissarbefehl Wehrmacht und

NS-Verbrechen an der Ostfront 1941/42 (Paderborn, 2008 ) .

25. BAM, RH 22/12. There are similarities in the tenor of the instructions drawn up by the Army Propaganda Department for the Implementation of Propaganda in the case of

Barbarossa (BAM, RW 4/v, 578) and the June edition of the journal Troop Information.

26. NOKW 2079, published in Jacobsen, ‘Kommissarbefehl’, 184–5.

27. Meaning the OKH order of 28 April, which corresponded to the Wagner–Heydrich

draft made on 26 March (see above, pp. 182–3).

28. Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 56 ff.

29. Originally the Wehrmacht had obviously tried to accommodate all the Order Police

battalions in permanent tactical subordination to its own security formations, but had

not succeeded in doing so (Halder, KTB ii. 371).

30. At a meeting on 8 July 1941 Himmler made it unambiguously clear that the units under

the command of the command staff would be deployed in the areas under political

administration. ‘It is possible to deploy the larger formations in the Army Rear Areas.

Members of the command staff and of the units under its command have in principle

no business in the operational area or the Army Rear Area’: Command staff, note Ia,

meeting of 8 July 1941 (YV, M 36/3).

31. On the formation of Einsatzgruppen see Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 74 ff.; Helmut

Krausnick, ‘Die Einsatzgruppen vom Anschluss Österreichs bis zum Feldzug gegen die

Sowjetunion. Entwicklung und Verhältnis zur Wehrmacht’, in Helmut Krausnick and

Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, DieTruppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen

den Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938–1942 (Stuttgart, 1981), 19 ff.; Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42. Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte

des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Berlin, 1997); Hans-Heinrich

Wilhelm, ‘Die Einsatzgruppe A der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1941/42. Eine

exemplarische Studie’, in Krausnick and Wilhelm, Truppe, 281 ff.; Hans-Heinrich

Wilhelm, Die Einsatzgruppe A der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1941/42 (Frankfurt

a. M., 1996), 11 ff.

32. In the cases of the campaigns against Denmark and Norway and of the war in the West

the Wehrmacht had largely succeeded in preventing the formation of such units. See

Krausnick, ‘Einsatzgruppen’, 107 ff., and Krausnick, ‘Hitler und die Befehle an die

Einsatzgruppen in Sommer 1941’, in Eberhard Jäckel and Jürgen Rohwer, eds, Der

Mord an den Juden in Zweiten Weltkrieg: Entschlussbildung und Verwirklichung

(Stuttgart, 1985) (the publication of a note by Heydrich of 2 July 1940).

496

Notes to pages 185–186

33. The 909 members of Einsatzgruppe A in February 1941 were made up as follows: 37 SD

members, 55 Kripo employees, 85 Stapo workers, 134 Order Police, 257 Waffen-SS men,

185 truck drivers, 53 emergency services personnel (who had for the most part not been

part of the SS or Police), 9 telex operators, 23 radio-operators, 22 female employees, 26

administrators, 3 special representatives.

34. Krausnick, ‘Einsatzgruppen’, 180–1.

35. Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und

Vernunft 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996), gives further details of this type.

36. Wilhelm, ‘Einsatzgruppe A’, in Krausnich and Wilhelm, Truppe, 281 ff.

37. On the Order Police see Andrej Angrick et al., eds, ‘Da hätte man schon ein Tagebuch führen müssen’. Das Polizeibataillon 322 und die Judenmorde im Bereich der Heeresgruppe Mitte

während des Sommers und Herbstes 1941’, in Helga Grabitz et al., Die Normalität des

Verbrechens (Berlin, 1994), 325–85; Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police

Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992); Daniel J. Goldhagen,

Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996);

Konrad Kwiet, ‘Auftakt zum Holocaust: Ein Polizeibataillon im Osteinsatz’, in Wolfgang

Benz, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Ideologie und Herrschaft (Frankfurt a. M., 1993), 92–110; Jürgen Matthäus, ‘What about the “Ordinary Men”? The German Order

Police and the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Union’, (HGS) 10 (1996), 134–50; Klaus-

Michael Mallmann, ‘Vom Fussvolk der “Endlösung”. Ordnungspolizei, Ostkrieg und

Judenmord’, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch 25 (1997), 355–91; Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Police

Battalions. Enforcing Racial War in the East (Lawrence, 2005). The work of Hans-Joachim

Neufeldt, Jürgen Huck, and Georg Tessin, Zur Geschichte der Ordnungspolizei, i and ii

(Koblenz, 1957) omits the whole complex