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

in the Army Rear Areas Sonderkom-

mandos of the Security Police and the SD would be deployed; further Sonderkom-

mandos (called Einsatzkommandos, to distinguish them) would be used in the

Rear Areas of the Army Groups; nine battalions of Order Police formations would

be tactically subordinated to the Security Divisions in the Rear Areas of the Army

Groups, with the Higher SS and Police Commanders authorized to assume direct

command for the purposes of ‘special assignments’; 29 further battalions of Order Police would be deployed in the Rear Areas of the Army Groups; and finally,

Laying the Ground for Racial Annihilation

185

Waffen-SS formations would be used in addition, albeit primarily in the areas

under political administration and only exceptionally in the Rear Areas of the

Army Groups, as later remarks by Himmler made clear. 30

All these formations were under the command of the Higher SS and Police

Commanders, who in the first phase of the war were assigned to the commanders

of the Army Rear Areas but would later be under the command of the civilian

administration leadership.

The deployment of Police and SS formations in the occupied Soviet areas was

due to take place in three stages to match the planned structure of the occupation

administration: first, the Sonderkommandos of the Einsatzgruppen in the Army

Rear Areas; second, the task Einsatzkommandos of the Einsatzgruppen in the Rear

Areas of the Army Groups and the battalions of the Order Police; third, the SS

brigades in the areas under civilian administration. After the war had begun this

scheme was treated with some flexibility such that the various formations were

also deployed outside the areas they had originally been intended for. The scheme

is important above all because it makes clear how plans had been made from the

outset for gradually using the formations to combat enemies defined in political

and racial terms as the occupied areas became more secure. The massing of

formations controlled by the Reichsführer SS in the occupied zones is therefore

not to be seen as deriving from decisions taken after 22 June in the light of the way

the war was developing; it took place in accordance with plans drawn up before

the war had even started.

It is necessary to take a brief look at the way the various formations were put

together and at the debated issue of command structures.

From the spring of 1941 onwards the Security Police’s NCO School in Pretzsch

near Leipzig oversaw the formation of four Einsatzgruppen totalling some 3,000

men, 31 based on the experience of the Einsatzgruppen deployed in the war against Poland. 32 Einsatzgruppen A, B, and C were due to be assigned to the Army Groups North, Centre, and South; Einsatzgruppe D was destined for the 11th Army, which

together with two Romanian armies under its command was to form the south

wing of the invasion. The permanent members and the leadership were recruited

from the SD, the Gestapo, and the Criminal Police (Kripo), and each unit was

reinforced by one reserve battalion of the Order Police and the Waffen-SS, divided

amongst the individual commandos, and by further auxiliary personnel (truck

drivers, interpreters, radio operators, etc.), who were mostly from the SS and

Police. 33 A fifth Einsatzgruppe was eventually set up with Eberhard Schöngarth, the commander of the Security Police in Cracow; in early July it was sent to

eastern Poland and from August was entitled ‘Einsatzgruppe for Special

Purposes’. 34

The staffs of the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos were divided up into

specialist sections in accordance with the Reich Security Head Office model, and

these were responsible for SD, Gestapo, and Kripo matters, amongst others.

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

Within the leadership of the Einsatzgruppen one particular type of person dom-

inated: the specialist, a man with some theoretical training (often a degree in law)

and practical experience within the police apparatus, committed to National

Socialist ideology, a radical agent acting out of conviction. 35 Amongst the seventeen members of the leadership of Einsatzgruppe A—all of whom, without

exception, had years of experience in the SS or the police—there were eleven

lawyers, nine with doctorates; thirteen had been members of the NSDAP or one of

its organizations since before 1933. 36

Himmler’s second-stage formations for the occupied Eastern zones, the Order

Police, 37 initially entered the war against the Soviet Union with 23 battalions with a total of 420 officers and 11,640 men; by the end of the year 26 battalions were ‘in

deployment’. 38 As had originally been intended, nine battalions were under the command of the Security Divisions, one for each of the Einsatzgruppen or to

reinforce army engineering units (OT); the remainder were assigned to four Police

regiments (North, Centre, South, and Special Purposes). Of the twenty-three

battalions that began the war, five consisted of experienced professional police-

men, a group that made up the bulk of the officer and NCO levels of the other

units; seven battalions were made up of older police reservists with no prior

service; 39 eleven battalions recruited from young volunteers, 40 who had been signed up during a joint campaign by the SS and the police. 41 ‘Suitability for the SS’42 and ‘political reliability’43 were required of these volunteers, who had hopes of being taken on by the police later. A not inconsiderable number of them came

from the ‘Ethnic German Militia’ that had been involved in numerous massacres

in Poland. 44 It was the members of these eleven volunteer battalions with unit numbers in the 300s—obviously highly motivated by this means of selection—

who were to ‘excel’ in many subsequent massacres. Only a minority of the Order

Police battalions deployed in the East were populated by ‘average’ middle-aged

Germans, the ‘ordinary men’ or ‘willing executioners’ referred to in some of the

secondary literature. 45 All these units were led by high-ranking police officers whose experience often extended as far back as the civil conflict and border

skirmishes of the post-war period, and a significant proportion of the lower officer

ranks had been educated in the SS-Junker schools. 46 The NCOs were largely professional policemen who had been waiting for years for the brutal suppression

of an internal enemy that might or might not come to the fore, and after 1938 they

had been recruited by choice from the membership of the SS, 47 having already

‘proved themselves’ in various vicious operations in the war against Poland.