The troops must be made aware:
1. In this struggle to show consideration and apply principles of international law to these elements is wrong. They are a danger for our own security and the rapid pacification of the conquered areas.
2. Political commissars are the originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of fighting. Thus, they have to be dealt with immediately and… with the utmost severity. As a matter of principle, therefore, they will be shot at once.
Significantly, only commissars apprehended in rear areas were required to be turned over to the Einsatzgruppen for disposal; otherwise, they were to be shot immediately by the army units that had captured them. During the Polish campaign, some army commanders had been repelled by the executions carried out by the SS murder squads. On the eve of Barbarossa, they had now, despite a few protests, become accomplices to premeditated murder.69
How had this come to pass? In part, it was but the latest in a process of accommodation to Nazi criminality dating to the June 1934 Röhm purge. Once again, as in the past, army leaders made acquiescence tolerable, this time through several supplementary decrees issued by Brauchitsch that seemed to give commanders some autonomy in carrying out these orders: according to circumstances, officers could choose to impose lesser penalties on commissars; soldiers would not be allowed to do as they pleased; officers were to maintain discipline and avoid arbitrary outrages. Then, too, the army leadership was anxious not to lose any more power and influence to the SS, as had happened following the Polish campaign. Poland proved significant in another way as well. Eighteen months of brutal occupation and subjugation of the Poles had seemingly hardened the attitudes of many in the officer corps, who had come to regard the Poles as racially inferior colonial subjects.70
The Commissar Order also struck a raw nerve in the officer corps, whose attitudes had been shaped by both tradition and two haunting World War I experiences: the blockade that had slowly strangled Germany’s ability to wage war and caused the starvation deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the traumatic collapse of 1918, when the “stab in the back” by the November criminals (Communists, socialists, and Jews) had destroyed their world. In addition to a traditional contempt for the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, then, most senior army officers supported Hitler in his contention that political commissars were criminal and had to be dealt with accordingly. At various gatherings, officers expressed opinions hardly at variance with those of the Führer. Germany had to secure its food supply, Colonel-General Georg von Küchler, head of the Eighteenth Army, emphasized to his divisional commanders, and the only means was by the conquest of European Russia. In any case, he stressed, “A deep chasm separates us ideologically and racially from Russia…. The aim has to be to annihilate European Russia…. The political commissars and GPU people are criminals.” Colonel-General Erich Hoepner, the commander of Panzergruppe 4, who would be executed three years later for his part in the plot to kill Hitler, expressed his sentiments even more bluntly: “The war against the Soviet Union is an important part of the struggle for existence of the German people. It is the old battle of Germans against the Slavs, the defense of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation, the repulse of Jewish-Bolshevism. This struggle… has to be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military encounter… must be directed… toward the merciless and complete annihilation of the enemy. In particular, there is to be no mercy for the supporters of the current Russian-Bolshevik system.” The mentality of Germany’s military elite, then, hardly varied from that of the Führer. Both saw the world in social Darwinist terms, accepted the need for Lebensraum, regarded the Slavs as inferior and fitting subjects for German domination, and viewed communism as a malignancy that had to be eliminated. Crucially, both also accepted the need for a war of annihilation, within which the destruction of the Jews played a key role.71
Even as the army leadership fell into line ideologically, the SS had been busy preparing for its role. Heydrich not only supervised the negotiations that granted his special units broad authority as well as logistic support from the army but also initiated the process of selecting and training suitable leaders. Four Einsatzgruppen composed of between six hundred and one thousand men each, further subdivided into Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, would accompany the army into Russia. For the most part, the commanders of these various units came from educated backgrounds, with academics, lawyers, economists, civil servants, an opera singer, and even a Protestant minister among them; three of the four Einsatzgruppen commanders, in fact, totaled four doctorates among them. Heydrich drew the top leadership almost exclusively from the ranks of the Security Police and the SD, men who were ambitious, energetic, ruthless, prone to take the initiative, ideologically reliable, and staunchly anti-Semitic. In the second half of May, the roughly three thousand men selected for these killing squads received training at a police school near Leipzig. Heydrich visited the school on a number of occasions to remind the men of the necessity of their special tasks, to reinforce the life-and-death nature of the upcoming struggle, and to stress the special danger posed by the Jews.72
Despite the later prominence and notoriety of the Einsatzgruppen, they constituted only one part, and the smallest at that, of the forces to be deployed in this ideological war. In addition, numerous battalions of the Order Police and the Reserve Police, together numbering perhaps twenty thousand men, were made available for participation in these special tasks, as were the First SS Brigade and the SS Cavalry Brigade, with another eleven thousand men. The Order Police units, in particular, three-quarters of whose officers were party members, had been educated for toughness and inculcated with a spirit of “soldierly warriors” and, thus, could be expected to carry out their murderous duties with brutal efficiency. Throughout the Order Police units, a process of institutional socialization had instilled an ethos focused on ruthlessness, German racial superiority, the need for Lebensraum, and hatred of Communists and Jews. By the time of the invasion of Russia, then, Hitler, leading party officials, the army command, the heads of the SS, and top bureaucrats had crossed the threshold to planned, deliberate murder. For Hitler, military operations against the Soviet Union designed to gain Lebensraum and political-police measures aimed at the extermination of ideological and racial enemies were simply different facets of the same war. As Ian Kershaw aptly observed, “The genocidal whirlwind was ready to blow.”73
Unlike the Phony War, this second interregnum, between the summer of 1940 and June 1941, did not benefit the Germans but instead illuminated the weaknesses of their position. Great Britain had used the respite to strengthen itself substantially, most vitally by gaining assurance of material aid from the United States, which itself increasingly geared up for war. Despite the logic of the Mediterranean strategy, Hitler had to concede that Germany had neither the strength to bring it off on its own nor the ability to coerce its reluctant allies into action and, thus, had no way to force England to make peace. The economic situation also remained precarious as, far from solving their food and raw material problems, the Germans’ conquests had added the burden of feeding the occupied populations of Western Europe without the benefit of imports, which were cut off by the British blockade. The twin Italian fiascos in Greece and North Africa struck at the prestige of the Axis and promised to drain limited German resources, nor could the Japanese be persuaded to strike at Singapore in order to distract and weaken the British.