Masters of Death (3 page)

But excuses were unlikely to placate a Wehrmacht commander in chief, and Himmler went on to counter the army’s criticism by framing the SS actions as antiresistance measures and by invoking superior authority. He sketched this perspective in notes in his own hand for a speech he made in March 1940 to the supreme army commanders: “Executions of all potential leaders of resistance. Very hard, but necessary. Have seen to it personally. . . .No underhand cruelties. . . . Severe penalties when necessary. . . . Dirty linen to be washed at home. . . . We must stay hard, our responsibility to God. . . . A million workslaves and how to deal with them.” And the appeal to authority, reported by an aide of von Brauchitsch’s who was present at the meeting: “With wagging pince-nez and a dark expression on his common face [Himmler] had said he had been charged by the Führer to take care that the Poles could not rise again. Therefore extermination policy.”

The three-week course at Pretzsch in June 1941 involved only minimal training. Bruno Streckenbach, one man remembered, told the new Einsatzgruppen “that this was a war assignment which would be concluded by December at the latest.” Another recalled hearing from Stahlecker, the newly appointed chief of Einsatzgruppe A, that “we would be putting down resistance behind the troop lines, protecting and pacifying the rear army area (the word ‘pacify’ was used very frequently) and hence keeping the area behind the front clear. . . . Stahlecker also told us we would have to conquer our weaker selves and that what was needed were tough men who understood how to carry out orders. He also said to us that anyone who thought that he would not be able to withstand the stresses and psychological strains that lay ahead could report to him immediately afterwards.” The men sat through familiar lectures on honor and duty and the subhuman nature of the people they would be asked to corral. They conducted “terrain exercises,” which one of them dismissed as “games of hide and seek.” The military training, another remembered, “was very brief. It was limited to firing of weapons. The men and the NCOs had the opportunity to go on a range and fire their weapons. At that time no intensive military training was possible, because the physical condition of the men didn’t permit this in most cases; . . . all the men intended to be sent to an
Einsatz
were inoculated, and the results of this inoculation brought fever and weakness in its wake, so that military training was not possible.” Nor, evidently, was it necessary for accomplishing the work the Einsatzgruppen would do.

Only near the end of their time in Pretzsch, a few days before they would march, did the men learn where they were going: Russia. The Third Reich was preparing a surprise attack against the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, scheduled to begin on 22 June 1941. Behind the Wehrmacht as it invaded the U.S.S.R. from the west would follow four Einsatzgruppen. Einsatzgruppe A, under forty-year-old SS-BRIGADEFÜHRER
⁷
Stahlecker, attached to Army Group North, would operate in the former Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Einsatzgruppe B, under forty-six-year-old SS-Brigadeführer Arthur Nebe, attached to Army Group Center, would “pacify” Byelorussia. Einsatzgruppe C, under forty-nine-year-old SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Otto Rasch, attached to Army Group South, would sweep northern and central Ukraine. Einsatzgruppe D, under thirty-four-year-old SS-STANDARTENFÜHRER
⁸
Otto Ohlendorf, attached to Eleventh Army, would operate in southwestern Ukraine (Bessarabia), southern Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus.

The four task forces were further subdivided into a total of sixteen Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos, the real operational units of the formations, answerable to the task force leaders but functionally independent. Blobel, for example, led Sonderkommando 4a of Rasch’s Einsatzgruppe C, operating through the Ukraine to Kiev and beyond; Jäger, the brutal, walrus-mustached secret policeman, led Einsatzkommando 3 of Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe A, operating throughout Lithuania.

Einsatzgruppe A, the largest of the four task forces, counted 990 personnel (divided into two Sonderkommandos and two Einsatzkommandos), including 340 Waffen-SS, 172 motorcycle riders, 18 administrators, 35 Security Service (SD) personnel, 41 Criminal Police, 89 State Police, 87 Auxiliary Police, 133 Order Police, 13 female secretaries and clerks, 51 interpreters, 3 teletype operators and 8 radio operators. Ohlendorf, whose Einsatzgruppe D, with a roll call of about 500, was the smallest of the four (but was subdivided into four Sonderkommandos and one Einsatzkommando), would testify that his task force “had 180 vehicles. . . . This large number of [trucks] shows that the
Einsatzgruppe
was fully motorized. The
Waffen-
SS . . . were equipped with automatic rifles. The others either had rifles or automatic rifles. I believe that is about the total equipment.” The fact that the Einsatzgruppen were fully motorized is significant: the Wehrmacht itself was only partly motorized in June 1941, with much of its artillery still horse-drawn. Himmler intended his Einsatzgruppen to succeed and made sure the units were properly outfitted.

No detailed record of Einsatzgruppen equipment has survived, but a military historian, French L. MacLean, offers a speculative list derived from standard German military practice. Basing his estimates on Einsatzgruppe A, MacLean puts the total number of vehicles per group at about 160, of which sixteen would have been motorcycles, some with sidecars. Another sixteen would have been staff cars, MacLean estimates, “leaving some 128 as cargo and troop-carrying trucks—most likely Opel ‘Blitz’ 3-ton types. . . . Some 63 trucks would have been used to transport
Einsatzgruppe
soldiers; 50 others would have been remaining to haul required supplies.”

The four Einsatzkommandos of Einsatzgruppe A and the headquarters staff would have been issued field radios and possibly teletype machines for communication; radio messages that the British intercepted provide documentary evidence of Einsatzgruppen crimes. For electricity, MacLean notes, the units would each have had at least one mobile generator, “most commonly a large 507-pound two-cylinder variety.” There is no mention among eyewitness accounts of earth-moving equipment such as bulldozers; MacLean issues each Einsatzkommando at least forty shovels for digging mass graves, and possibly surveying equipment to record sites. “Each group would have also had a large field range mounted on one of the trucks to provide food for the troops. All elements would have additionally carried their own ammunition, cold-weather heating stoves, medium-size tents, portable field desks and chairs, spare parts for vehicles, light sets, cooking and serving utensils, arms room supplies, a few days’ worth of rations and water, gas and petroleum products for the vehicles, and sundry other items required for living in the field.” Weapons, MacLean proposes, would have included Luger, Mauser Model 1910 and Walther P-38 pistols for officers and Mauser Kar 98b rifles for enlisted men. Machine pistols (“Bergmann 9mm Model 35/Is or MP 38s”) were commonly used by both officers and enlisted men. Machine guns would control perimeters; hand grenades would flush victims from hideouts. There was no need for large arms, MacLean concludes: “The mission of the Einsatzkommando, after all, was execution, not combat.”

This time around, the Reichsführer-SS wanted no Wehrmacht complaints about his Einsatzgruppen operations; with Hitler’s support he saw to it that the military signed off in advance. Hitler himself dictated the necessary paragraph in the formal “Instructions on Special Matters Attached to Directive No. 21 (Barbarossa),” which Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Armed Forces High Command, issued on 13 March 1941:

Within the field of operations of the army, in order to prepare the political and administrative organization, the Reichsführer-SS assumes on behalf of the Führer special tasks which arise from the necessity finally to settle the conflict between two opposing political systems. Within the framework of these duties the Reichsführer-SS acts independently and on his own responsibility.

The “two opposing political systems” were Bolshevism, which Hitler and his Nazi leadership believed to be a Jewish conspiracy, and National Socialism.

Negotiating the details of this order, Army Quartermaster Wagner and Heydrich agreed on 26 March 1941 that Heydrich’s task forces were “authorized within the frame of their assignment to carry out on their own responsibility executive measures concerning the civilian population.” “Special tasks” and “executive measures” were SS euphemisms for mass murder. By ceding to Himmler’s organization independent authority over civilians in the territories it would occupy upon the commencement of Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht was knowingly colluding in atrocity.

It did so partly because it accepted Hitler’s argument that “Jewish” Bolshevism was a fundamental threat to the German state, if not to civilization itself—and partly because Hitler bought it off with medals and promotions. A general attending a March 1941 speech to several hundred Barbarossa commanding officers and chiefs of staff heard Hitler invoke a “clash between two ideologies.” Bolshevism, the Führer claimed, was “the equivalent of social delinquency. Communism is a tremendous danger for the future. We must get away from the point of view of soldierly comradeship [between opposing armies]. The Communist is from first to last no comrade. It is a war of extermination.” To be exterminated were “Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia. . . . Commissars and the NKVD [i.e., Soviet secret police] people are criminals and must be treated as such.”

The political purges of the previous decade in the U.S.S.R. gave weight to Hitler’s assertions; the German military was keenly aware that the NKVD purges had decimated the ranks of Red Army officers. “Out of eighty members of the 1934 Military Soviet,” writes Barbarossa historian Alan Clark, “only five were left in September 1938. All eleven Deputy Commissars for Defense were eliminated. Every commander of a military district . . . had been executed by the summer of 1938. Thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, fifty-seven out of eighty-five corps commanders, 110 out of 195 divisional commanders, 220 out of 406 brigade commanders, were executed. But the greatest numerical loss was borne in the Soviet officer corps from the rank of colonel downward and extending to company commander level.” From the point of view of a German officer, it would not be wise to lose the war.

The final components of Wehrmacht capitulation to SS operations in the war zone were assembled in further negotiations in May 1941 between Quartermaster Wagner and Walter Schellenberg, the polished, diplomatic SS officer who directed the counterespionage section of Heydrich’s RSHA. The Einsatzgruppen, Wagner had agreed, would operate even in the front-line areas (under Wehrmacht supervision) as well as completely independently behind the lines, with logistic support—quarters, fuel, rations—from the army. “This is the first time these special units will have been engaged at the front,” Heydrich had emphasized when he briefed Schellenberg conspiratorially before the negotiations began; “every one of their members will have the opportunity to prove himself and to earn a decoration. This should finally dispel the false impression that the staff of the executive departments are cowards who have got themselves safe posts out of the fighting line. This is extremely important, because it will strengthen our position in relation to the Wehrmacht.” If the Einsatzgruppen were ideological vanguards, they would also be instruments of bureaucratic infighting—of which Heydrich was a master.

Further support for the Einsatzgruppen came on 6 June 1941, when the army high command (OKH, Oberkommando des Heeres) issued its Commissar Order. Written distribution of this notorious order was confined to a few senior officers, who passed it along orally to their subordinates. The Communist political commissars, in the OKH’s eyes, were “bearers of the Jewish-Bolshevik worldview” within the Red Army and the “initiators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of combat.” They could be expected to visit special cruelty upon German POWs, the Commissar Order asserted, and should therefore be shot on capture. Other Soviet functionaries could be sorted into those who were active opponents of Germany (also to be shot on capture) and those who were not (who might be spared). Doubtful cases were to be handed over to the Einsatzgruppen. With the Commissar Order, Keitel asserted in a postwar deposition, Hitler was clearing the way “for Himmler to become, alongside the Wehrmacht, a key factor in the conduct of the war in the East. The justification for this move was sought in the claim that the Soviet government had not ratified the ‘Hague Agreement’ of 1907 or the Geneva accords and had intentionally set itself above the conventions of international law; their breach relieved us of our corresponding obligations.”

On 17 June 1941, a day or two after Streckenbach told the men in Pretzsch about Barbarossa, Heydrich ordered the chiefs of the Einsatzgruppen and their commandos to Berlin, to RSHA headquarters at No. 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where he briefed them further on their impending mission. Erwin Schulz, who had led an Einsatzkommando in Czechoslovakia in 1938 and who had just been appointed to lead Einsatzkommando 5 (EG C), remembered Heydrich using many of the same arguments Hitler had used with the Wehrmacht leadership. “The fight which would soon take place would be the hardest and most bitter the German people have ever gone through,” Schulz testified Heydrich told them. “In the fight to come not only were people fighting against other people, but for the first time ideology was fighting against another ideology. . . . He explained that Bolshevism would not stop from using every means of fighting, as Lenin had already written; emphasizing in particular the part the partisans were to play, which Lenin and others had written about, and this could not be misunderstood. [He said] that everyone should be sure to understand that in this fight Jews would definitely take their part, and that in this fight everything was set at stake, and the side which gave in would be . . . overcome. For that reason all measures had to be taken against the Jews in particular. The experience in Poland had shown this.”