It was also within this larger context that the fate of the Jews was determined. The original goal, to remove them from the German area of influence and control, largely remained intact in 1939–1940, even as the Jewish problem intensified. Forced emigration had not been effective, efforts to shove Polish Jews across the demarcation line with Russia had failed, the reservation scheme came to naught, and the Madagascar Plan collapsed as a result of British persistence in the war. Although a territorial solution remained official policy, by the time of Barbarossa a new dynamic was emerging. Security concerns, the identification of Jews as Communists and potential partisan fighters, and the fear of the internal enemy undermining the war effort all led to the preinvasion decision to murder the male Jews of the Soviet Union. In its implementation, the decision also demonstrated the intersection between policy and ambition. In the early summer of 1941, local initiatives often drove policy forward as ambitious and ruthless SS and SD men used the autonomy given them to drive forward a murderous solution to a problem they knew had high priority with the Führer. The decision in the summer of 1941 to expand the murder to include all Soviet Jews and then the further resolution that same autumn to kill all Jews under German control both illustrated the importance of the military situation: unexpectedly tough Soviet resistance, high German losses, the traditional fear of partisan war and internal upheavals fomented by Jews, and the apparently sudden prospect of complete success combined to create an explosive atmosphere. Inspired, perhaps, by the expectation and euphoria of imminent victory after such a tough struggle, Hitler now definitively decided that the Jews had no place in the new Nazi imperium. The territorial solution, which itself had assumed high levels of mortality through “natural causes,” gave way to an “exterminationist solution,” which envisioned a much more immediate death, especially for the Jews in those areas designated for German colonization.
The timing, implementation, and attainment of Hitler’s far-reaching goals, of course, depended on military triumphs. The success of the Wehrmacht formed the prerequisite for the realization of Hitler’s vision. Military victories and setbacks set the ultimate parameters for the extent to which this imperial policy could be pursued: how much of policy was to be put into effect, the extent and success of this implementation, and the compromises that undermined the full impact of Nazi plans. Solving the Jewish problem and creating the racial-utopian Germanic Lebensraum in the east were both central to the Nazi worldview, and, for both, the war-fighting ability of the German armed forces was the essential component. The realization of this fact also raises the question of the extent to which the Wehrmacht knowingly participated in and supported Nazi criminal activities in the Soviet Union. Despite postwar attempts to depict the Wehrmacht leadership as primarily apolitical and technocratic, from the end of World War I it had been a bastion of aggressive nationalism and revisionism, conservative, strongly anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Semitic. Deeply affected by the war experience and the defeat in 1918, the great majority of its members accepted the Dolchstoss myth and, with Hitler, were determined that Jewish-Bolshevism would not again destroy Germany.8
Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the army leadership raised no objections to the flood of criminal orders emanating from the Führer and the OKW. From Hitler’s injunctions to conduct a brutal and merciless war of extermination to cooperating with the RSHA in delineating spheres of responsibilities behind the front to specific measures such as the Commissar Order and the Barbarossa Jurisdiction Decree, the army leadership could be under no illusions as to the purpose and methods of the coming war in the Soviet Union, but it failed to mount any protest. Indeed, during the summer and autumn of 1941, army leaders, both at the front and in the OKH, often explicitly urged their troops, in ideologically charged, anti-Semitic proclamations, to wage war on National Socialist lines and discard notions of humane treatment of the enemy. Further, the army fully cooperated with the murderous Einsatzgruppen units as they carried out their bloody task, offering logistic, intelligence, and communications support, as well as occasionally furnishing manpower for executions. It also willingly handed over commissars and Jews to the Einsatzgruppen for murder. Moreover, millions of Soviet prisoners of war died in camps under its control as part of a deliberate plan of murder and starvation. Army security units used ruthless methods to suppress the partisan war as well as embracing the use of SS and police units in order to pacify and safeguard rear areas. It remorselessly plundered and stripped the areas under its control of foodstuffs in order to feed itself off the land, regardless of the consequences for local civilians. It also exploited native inhabitants for labor and cooperated with the forced roundups, the infamous Menschenjagd conducted by Sauckel’s organization that sent people as forced laborers back to Germany. The nexus between economic, colonial, racial, and military imperatives was, perhaps, best illustrated in Polish eastern Galicia, where local authorities began constructing Durchgangstrasse 4, a key transportation corridor into Ukraine that neatly combined immediate military utility with an eventual use, as part of Generalplan Ost, as an axis of settlement for Volksdeutsche. In the meantime, the Autobahn would be constructed by Jewish laborers, some twenty thousand of whom would be worked to death in a process of extermination through labor.9
Complicity of the Wehrmacht and the army leadership in Nazi crimes is, of course, not the same as complicity of average soldiers. This raises the further question of how far typical Landsers participated in these criminal activities. This remains a difficult question to answer with any degree of precision or reliability. In terms of the most serious of these atrocities, the murder of the Jews and the Soviet prisoners of war, it is obvious that, without the logistic and administrative cooperation of the Wehrmacht bureaucracy, mass murder on such a large scale would hardly have been possible. Although the institutional complicity is apparent, it also seems clear that relatively few soldiers took an active part in the shootings of Jews. In general, average Landsers probably cooperated with SS killers more in the Baltic than in Ukraine, for example, but best estimates are that, overall, not more than twenty to thirty thousand Wehrmacht personnel, out of the millions who served on the Ostfront, were active in explicitly aiding the Security Police in the selection, organization, and shooting of Jews and accounted for only around 1 percent of the victims. Much the same could be said with regard to implementation of the Commissar Order or the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. Without the functional cooperation of the Wehrmacht, these murderous policies could not have been carried out, but relatively few of the active perpetrators were front troops.
This same formulation would apply as well to the partisan war, where, until 1943, most of the violence stemmed from rear security units. The worst of the crimes with which the Ostheer was associated—the murder of the Jews, the shooting of political officials, the systematic starvation of prisoners of war, the colonial exploitation of food and raw materials, and participation in forced labor roundups—were largely perpetrated by occupation and security units. If the typical Landser was a combat infantryman, then, his point of contact with the native inhabitants of the Soviet Union was more likely to be in the form of the requisitioning of food items than in mass murder. Likely the greatest culpability the average Landser incurred was during the scorched-earth retreat of the autumn of 1943. Given the freedom to destroy, and often operating in areas controlled by partisans, many responded in an orgy of destruction. For the rest, however, SS, party, and Wehrmacht officials scrambled to gain control of the spoils. The Ostheer, as Christian Hartmann noted, was “supposed to conquer the Lebensraum, perhaps even secure it, but not organize it.” By and large, then, the responsibility for the greatest crimes committed by the Wehrmacht accrued to those in the rear areas and in leadership positions. Further, the number of those involved in serious crimes was very small, perhaps only 5 percent of the entire Ostheer. This relatively tiny number admittedly accounted for enormous damage, but it would be false to replace the incorrect view of the “clean” Wehrmacht with an equally erroneous one in which all were criminals.10