come sharply into prominence, and had largely been clarified. Most active in pressing forward the initiative had been Reinhard Heydrich, alongside his nominal boss Himmler.68 Goring, the heads of the Four-Year Plan Organization, and the High Command of the Wehrmacht had also been deeply implicated. Hitler had authorized more than initiated. His precise role, as so often, is hidden in the shadows. But he had little need to move into the foreground. His radical views on ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ were known to all. The different policy-objectives of the varying — and usually competing — power-groups in the regime’s leadership could be reconciled by accepting the most radical proposals, from Heydrich and Himmler, on the treatment of the arch-enemy in the East. This, in any case, complied with Hitler’s own ideological impulses. He set the tone once more, therefore, for the barbarism while others preoccupied themselves with its mechanics. And, in the context of the imminent showdown, the barbarism was now adopting forms and dimensions never previously encountered, even in the experimental training-ground of occupied Poland.
By mid-March, discussions between the Security Police and army leadership about the treatment of political commissars were, as we have already noted, well advanced. Here, too, in the fateful advance into the regime’s planned murderous policy in the Soviet Union, the army leaders were complicitous. On 17 March, Halder noted comments made that day by Hitler: ‘The intelligentsia put in by Stalin must be exterminated. The controlling machinery of the Russian Empire must be smashed. In Great Russia force must be used in its most brutal form.’69 Hitler said nothing here of any wider policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’. But the army leadership had two years earlier accepted the policy of annihilating the Polish ruling class. Given the depth of its prevalent anti- Bolshevism, it would have no difficulty in accepting the need for the liquidation of the Bolshevik intelligentsia.70 By 26 March, a secret army order laid down, if in bland terms, the basis of the agreement with the Security Police authorizing ‘executive measures affecting the civilian population’.71 The following day, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch, announced to his commanders of the eastern army: ‘The troops must be clear that the struggle will be carried out from race to race
The army was, therefore, already in good measure supportive of the strategic aim and the ideological objective of ruthlessly uprooting and destroying the ‘jewish-Bolshevik’ base of the Soviet regime when, on 30 March, in a speech in the Reich Chancellery to over 200 senior officers lasting almost two and a half hours, Hitler stated with unmistakable clarity his views of the coming war with the Bolshevik arch-foe, and what he expected of his army. This was not the time for talk of strategy and tactics. It was to outline to generals in whom he still had little confidence the nature of the conflict that they were entering. He rehearsed once more his familiar arguments. England’s hopes had been placed in the United States and Russia. The Russian problem had to be settled without delay. This was the key to Germany’s accomplishment of its other tasks. Manpower and
He went on to the most striking part of his speech — the ideological aims of the war. He was forthright: ‘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. A Communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of annihilation. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the Communist foe. We do not wage war to preserve the enemy.’ He went on to stipulate the ‘extermination of the Bolshevist commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia’. ‘We must fight against the poison of disintegration,’ he continued. ‘This is no job for military courts. The individual troop commanders must know the issues at stake. They must be the leaders in this fight’… ‘Commissars and GPU men,’ he declared, ‘are criminals and must be dealt with as such.’ The war would be very different to that in the West. ‘In the East, harshness today means lenience in the future.’ Commanders had to overcome any personal scruples.73
Brauchitsch claimed after the war that he had been surrounded by outraged generals when Hitler had finished speaking.74 Had this been the case, it would merely have prompted the question why they (or Brauchitsch on their behalf) did not express their outrage to Hitler. However, General Warlimont, who was present, recalled ‘that none of those present availed themselves of the opportunity even to mention the demands made by Hitler during the morning’.75 When serving as a witness in a trial sixteen years after the end of the war, Warlimont, explaining the silence of the generals, declared that some had been persuaded by Hitler that Soviet Commissars were not soldiers but ‘criminal villains
The day after Hitler’s speech to the generals, 31 March 1941, the order was given to prepare, in accordance with the intended conduct of the coming campaign, as he had outlined it, guidelines for the ‘treatment of political functionaries
‘When one has seen how, dozens of times, Hitler’s most casual observation would bring the over-zealous Field Marshal running to the telephone to let loose all hell, one can easily imagine how a random remark of the dictator’s would worry Keitel into believing that it was his duty on this occasion to give factual expression to the will of the Fuhrer even before the beginning of hostilities. Then he or one of his subordinates would have telephoned OKH and asked how matters stood. If OKH had in fact been asked such a question, they would naturally have regarded it as a prod in the rear and would have got moving at once.’77 Whether there had been a direct command by Hitler, or whether — as Halder presumed — Keitel had once more been ‘working towards the Fuhrer’, the guidelines initiated at the end of March found their way by 12 May into a formal edict.78 For the first time, they laid down in writing explicit orders for the liquidation of functionaries of the Soviet system. The reasoning given was that ‘political functionaries and leaders (commissars)’ represented a danger since they ‘had clearly proved through their previous subversive and seditious work that they reject all European culture, civilization, constitution, and order. They are therefore to be eliminated.’79
This formed part of a set of orders for the conduct of the war in the East (following from the framework for the war which Hitler had defined in his speech of 30 March) that were given out by the High Commands of the Army and Wehrmacht in May and June. Their inspiration was Hitler. That is beyond question. But they were put into operative form by leading officers (and their legal advisers), all avidly striving to implement his wishes,80
The first draft of Hitler’s decree of 13 May 1941, the so-called ‘Barbarossa-Decree’, defining the application of military law in the arena of Operation Barbarossa, was formulated by the legal branch of the Wehrmacht High Command.81 The order removed punishable acts committed by enemy civilians from the jurisdiction of military courts. Guerrilla fighters were to be peremptorily shot. Collective reprisals against whole village communities were ordered in cases where individual perpetrators could not be rapidly identified. Actions by members of the Wehrmacht against civilians would not be automatically subject to disciplinary measures, even if normally coming under the heading of a crime.82
The ‘Commissar Order’ itself, dated
The ready compliance of leading officers with the guidelines established by Hitler for the criminal conduct of
