Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (42 page)

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.

186

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.
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

188

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 convincingly
67
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