Although no decision had yet been made regarding the Final Solution, the extermination of the Jews of Europe, Hitler was clearly thinking in terms of a destructive racial war. The prerequisite for achieving his goals, the successful defeat of the Soviet Union, necessarily involved the army in this war of annihilation. On 26 February, General Thomas, the Wehrmacht’s economic expert, had learned from Goering that one of the first objectives of a German occupation would be “to finish off the Bolshevik leaders as soon as possible.” Less than a week later, on 3 March, Jodl, the chief of staff of the OKW, met with Hitler to discuss the guidelines for occupation policy. The Führer stressed that this was a showdown “between two world views…. The Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, up to now the oppressor of the people, must be eliminated…. These tasks are so difficult that one can not burden the army with them…. The necessity of immediately rendering harmless all Bolshevik leaders and commissars [justified these measures].” Accordingly, on 13 March the OKW issued “Guidelines for Special Areas concerning Directive No. 21 (Operation Barbarossa),” which created a very shallow zone of army operations behind which “the Reichsführer SS [Himmler] is entrusted on behalf of the Führer with special tasks… that result from the necessity of finally resolving the conflict between two opposing political systems. Within the framework of these tasks, the Reichsführer SS will act independently and on his own responsibility.”65
Nor could army leaders harbor any illusion as to the nature of these tasks. At a conference on 17 March, Hitler again revealed his murderous intentions. “The intelligentsia put in by Stalin,” he emphasized, “must be exterminated. The controlling machinery of the Russian empire must be smashed…. Force must be used in its most brutal form…. The nation will break up once the functionaries are eliminated.” On 26 March, Heydrich presented Goering his proposal regarding the solution of the Jewish question, noted the Reichsmarshall’s request for a manual instructing the troops on the threat posed by the political commissars and Jews, and received Goering’s assurances that the army would not interfere in operations behind the front. That same day the army negotiator, Quartermaster-General Wagner, and Heydrich also agreed on a draft, issued as an order by Brauchitsch on 28 April, pertaining to the responsibilities of the Einsatzgruppen, the special commandos of the Security Police. While the murder squads were to carry out their tasks on their own responsibility, the army would furnish logistic support and also coordinate its activities with an army liaison officer. This agreement made the army command complicit in mass murder since, given their prior experience with SS killing squads in Poland, they could hardly have had any illusions about SS intentions. The day after initial agreement had been reached with the SS, in fact, Brauchitsch told senior commanders that the troops “have to realize that this struggle is being waged by one race against another, and proceed with the necessary harshness.”66 By March at the latest, then, Heydrich, with the agreement of army leaders, had begun preparing for a territorial solution of the Jewish problem that envisioned the rapid deaths of very large numbers of people.
If some in the army leadership still failed to get the message, Hitler made it crystal clear on 30 March when he addressed a gathering of some two hundred officers for over two hours. Halder’s notes indicated that no one in attendance could doubt the Führer’s aims or what was expected of the army. After beginning with the familiar strategic justification of the invasion and stressing the economic importance of securing the resources of Russia, Hitler then bluntly laid out the ideological aims of the war:
Clash of two ideologies. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with a social criminality. Communism is an enormous danger for our future. We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers…. This is a war of extermination…. We do not wage war to preserve the enemy….
War against Russia: Extermination of the Bolshevist commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia…. This is no job for military courts. The individual troop commanders must know the issues at stake. They must be leaders in this fight. The troops must fight back with the methods with which they are attacked. Commissars and GPU [secret police] men are criminals and must be dealt with as such….
This war will be different from the war in the west. In the east, harshness today means lenience in the future. Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples.
Although some generals later claimed that they expressed shock and outrage at the lunch that followed, General Warlimont admitted after the war that, far from protesting to Hitler, no one even mentioned his demands during the meal.67
So little shocked were the generals, in fact, that the next day preparation began on guidelines, in accordance with Hitler’s demands, for the treatment of political functionaries and commissars. Over the next two months, Hitler’s intentions for the conduct of the war in the east were given shape in a series of orders that formalized the army’s acceptance of mass murder. In late April, a draft order authorized troops to combat guerrilla activity through “all means at their disposal,” while commanders were freed from any obligation to prosecute troops for criminal actions against civilians, except when necessary to maintain order. “In judging such deeds,” the draft noted, “it had to be taken into consideration that the collapse of 1918, the later suffering of the German people, and the struggle against National Socialism with the countless blood sacrifices of the movement were clearly traced back to the influence of Bolshevism.” This draft, modified on 6 May and signed by Keitel on 13 May, explicitly granted German troops the right to use any and all measures against Soviet citizens, including collective reprisals, while prohibiting the prosecution of soldiers for offenses committed “out of bitterness over the atrocities… of the carriers of the Jewish-Bolshevik system.”68 Murderous actions against Russian civilians, then, were to be seen as just retribution for earlier misdeeds allegedly committed against Germans or understandable outrage at the excesses of a criminal element.
At the same time, another draft circulated that sought to define the army’s role in the treatment of political leaders and commissars. The OKW issued a first draft, “Guidelines for the Behavior of the Troops in Russia,” on 19 May that again emphasized, “Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German people. Germany’s struggle is directed against this subversive ideology and its functionaries… [and] requires ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total elimination of all active or passive resistance.” Keitel then signed the final version of the notorious “Commissar Order” on 6 June. Typically, it began with a justificatory statement: “In the struggle against Bolshevism, we cannot count on the enemy acting according to the principles of humanity or international law. In particular the political commissars at all levels, as the real leaders of resistance, can be expected to treat prisoners of war in a hate-filled, cruel, and inhuman manner.” Having attributed to the enemy the very treatment the Germans themselves planned to inflict, the directive went on: