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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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. 48 The regular ideological indoctrination of these units by educational officers from the
SS Race and Settlement Main Office, 49 which had been intensified after the war began, 50 was intended to pave the way for a planned merger with the SS to form a as Himmler called it, ‘Corps for the Protection of the State’. 51
Alongside the Security and the Order Police, using the SS Death’s Head
Formations unified under a special ‘Command staff of the Reichsführung-SS’
Laying the Ground for Racial Annihilation
187
Himmler created for himself a special intervention team for those ‘special tasks
that I will from time to time assign to them’, in the words of Himmler’s seminal
order of 21 May. 52 They were to form the third and largest formation of the SS and Police units deployed in the East. As early as 7 April 1941, Himmler had set up a
special task staff under the leadership of Kurt Knoblauch, who had hitherto been
mobilization officer at the Party Chancellery, and this body was renamed the
‘Command staff of the RFSS’ on 6 May. 53 The staff was initially under the command of the SS Leadership Office, but later answered directly to Himmler.
On 1 May two motorized SS brigades were put together from Death’s Head
regiments and at the same time two SS cavalry regiments in Cracow and Warsaw
were brought together; they would later form the SS cavalry brigade. Several of
these Death’s Head units had already perpetrated a number of acts of violence in
Poland since the autumn of 1939 when the 4th Cavalry Squadron had repeatedly
shot Polish Jews in the Forest at Lucmierz; in December the 5th Squadron had
shot 440 Jews ‘escaping’ during a forced march from Cholm to Hrubieszów and a
few weeks later had murdered all 600 of a transport of Jews being
removed from
the district of Lublin. Many further murders of Polish Jews and other Polish
citizens have been documented. 54 Along with other formations, these units noted for their particular brutality were now—immediately before the start of the war—
placed under the command of the Command staff RFSS, 55 which by July 1941 had thus come to have some 19,000 men at its disposal. 56 The Command staff gave Himmler the means of intervening directly in combating politically and racially
defined opponents in the occupied Eastern zones and of setting clear priorities for
such action.
What were the instructions received by these various formations for their
‘deployment’ in the East? Historical research has looked at this question in detail
with respect to the Einsatzgruppen, with controversial results.
Research initially assumed that the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen had received
an ‘order from the Führer’ before the start of the attack, an order for the complete
annihilation of the Jewish population in the Soviet Union. This view was based on
knowledge obtained during the Trial of the Major War Criminals in Nuremberg
and in particular from the case against the Einsatzgruppen (case 9, the Einsatz-
gruppen Case) before the American military court. In this trial, Otto Ohlendorf,
the former commander of Einsatzgruppe D, managed to convince the court of his
version, according to which, a few days before the start of the war, the Director of
Department I of the Reich Security Head Office, Bruno Streckenbach, had an-
nounced at the Einsatzgruppe muster point in Pretzsch that the Führer had given a
general order for the murder of all Soviet Jews. Ohlendorf attempted to present
this order from the Führer not as a racist programme for the annihilation of all the
Jews in the Soviet area but as a general liquidation order primarily aimed at
‘securing’ the newly won territory, a liquidation that would affect ‘the Jews’ (he
never used the phrase ‘all the Jews’) but also other population groups. 57
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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941
This version of events was supported by a series of other commando leaders. 58
Only the leader of Einsatzkommando 5, Erwin Schulz, contradicted this account:
he testified that the decisive orders had only been communicated to him after the
start of the war by Otto Rasch, the leader of Einsatzgruppe C. 59 According to his defence counsel, Rasch himself, who was declared unfit for trial during the
proceedings, had said in response to this that he had only received the compre-
hensive order to murder the Jews in August or September, from Friedrich Jeckeln,
Higher SS and Police Commander in Russia-South. 60
The largely unanimous version of an early comprehensive order for the murder
of the Jews was taken up by Helmut Krausnick in his report for the ‘Ulm
Einsatzgruppe Trial’, the highly prominent first major National Socialist trial
before a Federal German court. 61 This assessment once more confirmed the model of an early comprehensive order, which had been issued by Hitler in
March 1941, in Krausnick’s opinion, and had been transmitted to the commando
leaders in May. This line of argument was followed in many later trials of
Einsatzgruppe members, 62 and was largely accepted by historians after Krausnick had published it in his seminal academic study. 63 It was for a long period one of the main pillars of the ‘intentionalist’ line of argument. 64 According to this view the leaders of the Einsatzkommandos were henchmen following orders, and put
into practice a programme of murders that had been devised at the very highest
levels of the National Socialist regime and set in train according to plan in the
spring of 1941.
This perspective of earlier research, characteristic of the way the National
Socialists’ persecution of the Jews was understood in the 1950s and 1960s, can
no longer be sustained nowadays. It did not, for example, take account of the fact
that in the face of the death sentence handed down by the Military Court,
Ohlendorf himself had been forced to recognize the failure of his defence strategy
and had resiled from his original version of events, the existence of an early
comprehensive order from the Führer. 65 More attention was paid to the fact that Streckenbach, who had unexpectedly returned from internment as a Soviet
prisoner of war in 1955, denied ever having transmitted the order in question. 66 On the basis of often intensive interrogations of Einsatzkommando leaders, the
Director of the Ludwigsburg Central Investigation Office, Alfred Streim, was
able to show convincingly67 that the alleged early comprehensive order to murder the Jews was in fact constructed for the purposes of Ohlendorf’s defence. Ohlendorf put formidable pressure on his co-defendants in order to be able to claim that
he had been acting upon orders received, thereby reducing to a minimum the
extent to which he had himself been free to act with respect to the atrocities of
several Einsatzkommandos. Streim’s theses are now broadly accepted by histor-
ians. 68
Streim’s argument is supported by a series of statements made by former
members of the Einsatzgruppen that expose Ohlendorf’s testimony as a defence
Laying the Ground for Racial Annihilation
189
strategy. Ernst Biberstein, who in 1942–3 was leader of Einsatzkommando 6 and
was sentenced to death in Nuremberg, convincingly exposed Ohlendorf’s man-
ipulation of historical events as early as 1948 in a detailed note that was to be given
to his family if he was executed. 69 There is more testimony that illuminates Ohlendorf’s role. 70
The analysis of statements concerning the deployment of Einsatzgruppen made
to German lawyers by former leaders of the Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkom-
mandos between the 1950s and early 1970s also suggest that there was no clear
order to murder all the Jews living in the Soviet Union that had been given before
the start of the war. These statements differ significantly from each other in
respect of place, time, the person transmitting the order, and the content of the
order. Whilst one element in the commando leadership clearly stated that far-
reaching orders such as this had only been issued weeks after the war had started, 71
the statements of those who mention an early comprehensive order are extremely
contradictory, especially when they are traced back over a long period, and are
characterized by memory lapses and reservations. 72 Clear evidence in favour of an early comprehensive order is only provided by the statement of commando leader
Zapp (Sonderkommando 11a)73 and—with reservations—by that of Ehler, who had originally been designated leader of Einsatzkommando 8.74 Some of the former commando leaders instead remember a step-by-step mode of receiving
orders, a ‘framework order’, which was intended to be ‘filled in’ on the initiative of
the commandos and by subsequent orders. 75 The fact that the undifferentiated murder of women and children only began weeks after the campaign started, and
the circumstance that the great mass of commando members agree in their claims
that they did not receive orders such as this from their leaders until immediately
before the massacres themselves both show that briefing the Einsatzgruppen was a
process that cannot be reduced to the issuing of a single order.
What emerges from all this is the
impression of a degree of vagueness in the
way orders were issued to Einsatzgruppen. A manner of issuing orders in which
the subordinate was supposed to recognize the ‘meaning’ behind the words
intuitively is familiar from National Socialist anti-Jewish policy from 1933 on-
wards, in particular in cases where the orders had something criminal about them.
In contrast to the military model of giving and carrying out orders this practice
presupposes a certain collusiveness, a strongly developed feeling of consensus
amongst those involved about how anti-Jewish policy was going to develop in the
future—which is a consensus that we can assume to be present when we remem-
ber how the leadership of the Einsatzgruppen were recruited from amongst the SS
and the police.
On the basis of the existing statements and other evidence we can ascertain
what organizational processes were at work in directing the leaders of the Einsatz-
gruppen to carry out their duties. Alongside Streckenbach’s visit to Pretzsch in
June, a social ‘farewell’ visit at which there will also have been discussion about
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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941
upcoming tasks, briefing for the SS leadership took place at a decisive meeting
with Himmler in Wewelsburg Castle from 11 to 15 June at which Jeckeln, Pohl, and
Heydrich were also present. 76 The commando leaders were briefed at two sessions with Heydrich, first a meeting in the Prince Carl Palace in Berlin (presumably on
17 June), and second an occasion when the Einsatzgruppe leadership received
instructions from Heydrich in Pretzsch shortly before the outbreak of war, a
meeting that took place immediately after the official farewell to the members of
the Einsatzkommandos who had reported for duty. 77
Even though the leadership of the Einsatzgruppen gave contradictory evidence
about their briefings during the war in the East, what emerges unanimously from
interrogations is that when such conversations took place the ‘firmness’ and
‘severity’ of the deployment about to take place were always stressed, as was the
view that the campaign was a conflict between two ‘world-views’ that had to be
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