Read Army of Evil: A History of the SS Online
Authors: Adrian Weale
However, it seems that it was only in the spring of 1941 that the rest of Germany’s military and political leaders truly comprehended the full and terrible implications of this philosophy. General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations for the
Wehrmacht
High Command, noted on 3 March that Hitler had said that the “Jewish–Bolshevik intelligentsia” would need to be eliminated during Operation Barbarossa, and that this must be discussed between the High Command and the SS. Heydrich duly met with General Eduard Wagner, the army’s Quartermaster General, ten days later. During their discussions, Heydrich outlined the role he
envisaged the RSHA’s special task groups playing in Russia.
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Then, over the next couple of months, Wagner and Walter Schellenberg worked out the details. (Heinrich Müller had originally represented the RSHA but Wagner, who found Müller arrogant and uncouth, asked for him to be replaced.) On 4 April, Wagner sent Heydrich a draft agreement on the role of the special task groups, which stated: “Within the framework of their instructions and upon their own responsibility, the Special Units are entitled to carry out executive measures against the civilian population.”
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It went on to say that the groups would operate in the army’s rear areas; that they would be administratively subordinated to whichever military headquarters they were “supporting”; that the army would provide their logistical support, quartering, rations, fuel and ammunition; but, crucially, that their operational tasks would be set by the RSHA in Berlin. This draft document was eventually amended to allow the special task groups to operate right up to the front line, thus ensuring that they would be able to catch their intended victims by surprise. It was this amended version of the agreement that was signed by Heydrich and Wagner at the end of May.
The intention was to form four special task groups for the Russian campaign: one allocated to each of the three army groups; and the fourth, smaller group attached to the 11th Army, which was to strike into the Caucasus on the southern flank of Army Group South. As in the Polish campaign, the groups were originally of approximately battalion strength, just under a thousand men, subdivided into company-sized special task units. Special Task Group A, commanded by SS-Brigadier Franz Walther Stahlecker, was placed in Field Marshal von Leeb’s Army Group North. Stahlecker had joined the NSDAP in 1932 and served as Gestapo chief in Württemberg and SD chief in Vienna before clashing with Heydrich and transferring to the Foreign Office, becoming its representative in Bohemia-Moravia and Norway. Special Task Group B, attached to von Bock’s Army Group Centre, was commanded by SS-Brigadier Arthur Nebe, head of the Kripo. Nebe had volunteered for the post in April 1941, when Heydrich had
told his RSHA heads of division of the “heavy task” of securing and pacifying Russia. It seems that Nebe was keen to add some combat decorations to those he had amassed during the First World War. Special Task Group C, commanded by Dr. Otto Rasch, was assigned to von Rundstedt’s Army Group South. Rasch had already participated in special task group operations in Poland, where he had set up the Soldau concentration camp that had murdered many members of the intelligentsia. Special Task Group D was commanded by SS-Colonel Otto Ohlendorf, the unpopular head of SD-Home. He had twice refused to serve in occupied Poland, and it seems he agreed to lead Special Task Group D only to avoid a reputation for cowardice.
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Manpower for the special task groups was drawn from a variety of sources. In Special Task Group A, with an initial strength of 990, 9 per cent came from the Gestapo, 3.5 per cent from the SD, 4.1 per cent from Kripo, 13.4 per cent from the Order Police, 8.8 per cent from “foreign auxiliary police” and 34 per cent from the Waffen-SS.
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The remainder were administrative and technical support staff: clerks, cooks, drivers, mechanics and so on. At a time when the bulk of the German armed forces remained horse-drawn, the special task groups were fully motorised in jeeps, on motorcycles and in trucks, to give them a quick response time and enable them to keep up with the vanguard of the German forces.
The leadership cadre of the groups was varied, too. However, most were highly intelligent and well-educated men: Rasch had earned a doctorate in law; Franz Six—who commanded the
Moskow Vorkommando
(Advance Unit) within Special Task Group B—had been a senior academic at Berlin University while still in his late twenties; Ernst Biberstein, commander of Special Task Unit 6 in Special Task Group C, was, of all things, a Protestant pastor; and Paul Blobel, the alcoholic commander of Special Task Unit 4a, had qualified as an architect.
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They also generally showed a strong commitment to the
NSDAP and National Socialist ideology: Ohlendorf had been a party member since 1925; Nebe was an early SA member; and while Blobel joined the party only in 1931, he seems to have been a wholehearted convert, espousing the SS’s perversely named “Belief in God” doctrine,
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which renounced religious belief.
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None of these men seems to have taken great pleasure in their “heavy task,”
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but nor did they seek to avoid it: this was the mission of the SS.
In late May 1941, the special task groups assembled at the Border Police Academy in the small town of Pretzsch, near Wittenberg, on the Elbe. They were met there by SS-Brigadier Bruno Streckenbach, chief of personnel in the RSHA and himself a former special task group commander in Poland. Among other grim crimes, he had arrested and executed many of the academic staff of Cracow University. The briefing Streckenbach gave was sketchy. One witness recalls him telling the assembled troops that they would be engaged on “a war assignment which would be concluded by December at the latest.”
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Over the course of the next three weeks, they were given ideological lectures—designed to bolster their belief in the justice of the race war they were about to fight—and did basic weapons training, rangework and one or two field exercises. Their weapons were primarily light small arms: rifles, submachine guns, pistols, grenades and light machine guns. The men were not trained to take part in serious combat; rather, they learned how to protect themselves, and how to flush out and kill individual victims. Their officers and NCOs were given a rough idea of the kind of task they would have to fulfil; but it seems that only the commanders and their deputies received a full briefing at this stage. At his post-war trial, Ohlendorf stated:
On the basis of orders which were given by Brigadier Streckenbach, Chief of office I of the RSHA, by order of the head of the RSHA, to the chiefs of the Special Task Groups and the
Kommandoführer
at the time of the formation of the Special Task Groups in Pretzsch (in Saxony); and which were given by the
Reichsführer
-SS to the leaders and men of the Special Task Groups and Special Task Units who were assembled in Nikolaev in September 1941. A number of undesirable elements composed of Russians, gypsies, and Jews and others were executed in the area detailed to me. All Jews who were arrested, as such, were to be executed within my area. It was my wish that these executions be carried out in a manner and fashion which was military and suitably humane under the circumstances.
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Hilberg has characterised the actions of the special task groups in the opening months of Operation Barbarossa as the “First Sweep.”
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Broken down first into special task units, then into platoon-sized sub-units, the killing squads followed closely behind the frontline formations of the army. Their initial progress was remarkable: “We’ll only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will collapse,” Hitler had claimed at a conference with
Wehrmacht
commanders in April 1941, and his prophecy appeared to be coming true. Within days of the launch of the invasion, the killing operations began.
At stake were the lives of some four million Jews who lived in areas that would soon be occupied by the Germans: 260,000 in the Baltic States, 1.35 million in eastern Poland (which had been occupied by the Soviets in autumn 1939), 300,000 in Bessarabia and Bukovina, and over 2 million in Byelorussia, the Ukraine and the Russian Soviet Republic.
The number of Jews who were killed by each special task group was determined to a large extent by the density of the Jewish population and the speed of the German advance in that area. Special Task Group A, operating on the relatively short northern axis of advance along the
Baltic, had conducted some 112 separate killing operations in 71 localities by 1 December 1941.
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This reflected the fact that the group had been able to move backwards and forwards within its area of operational responsibility to ensure thorough execution of its tasks. SS-Colonel Karl Jäger, a police officer commanding Special Task Unit 3, reported his group’s elimination of some 137,000 Jewish men, women and children. He concluded:
Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families…
I consider the Jewish action more or less terminated as far as Special Task Unit 3 is concerned. Those working Jews and Jewesses still available are needed urgently and I can envisage that after the winter this workforce will be required even more urgently. I am of the view that the sterilization program of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterilization a Jewess becomes pregnant she will be liquidated.
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By contrast, the smaller Jewish population of Estonia, being further east, had some time to escape. Consequently, Special Unit 1a of Special Task Group A was unable to claim that it had liquidated the entire Estonian Jewish population. On 12 October 1941, the unit reported:
At the beginning of 1940 about 4,500 Jews were living in Estonia. About 1,900 to 2,000 of them were living in Tallinn, larger Jewish communities were at Tartu, Narva, and Parnu, while only [a] few Jews were living out in the flat country.
The deportations carried out by the Russians, as far as they concerned Jews, cannot be established in numbers. According to inquiries made so far, Jewry had hardly been affected by them. With the advance of the German troops on Estonian territory,
about half of the Jews made preparations for flight and, as these Jews had collaborated with the Soviet authorities, they left the country with them going east. Only [a] few of them were seized in Tallinn because their escape route had been cut off. After the occupation of the country, there were probably still about 2,000 Jews left in the country.
The Estonian self-defense units, which had been formed when the
Wehrmacht
marched in, started immediately to arrest Jews. Spontaneous demonstrations against Jewry did not take place because there was no substantial enlightenment of the population.
The following orders were therefore issued by us:
1. The arrest of all male Jews over 16.
2. The arrest of all Jewesses fit for work between the ages of 16 and 60, who were utilized to work in the peat bogs.
3. Collective billeting of female Jewish residents of Tartu and vicinity in the synagogue and a tenement house in Tartu.
4. Arrest of all male and female Jews fit for work in Parnu and vicinity.
5. Registration of all Jews according to age, sex, and fitness for work for the purpose of billeting them in a camp which is in the stage of preparation.
All male Jews over 16, with the exception of physicians and the appointed Jewish elders, were executed by the Estonian self-defense units under supervision of the Special Unit. As for the town and country district of Tallinn, the action is still under way as the search for the Jewish hideouts has not yet been completed. The total number of Jews shot in Estonia is so far 440.
When these measures are completed, about 500 to 600 Jewesses and children will still be alive.
The village communities are already now free from Jews. For the Jews residing at Tallinn and vicinity a camp is at present being
prepared at Harku (District Tallinn), which after receiving the Jews from Tallinn is to be expanded to contain all Jews from Estonia. All Jewesses fit for work are employed with farm work and cutting of peat on the property of the nearby prison so that the questions of feeding and financing are solved.
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This report and others from Special Task Group A allude to attempts to foment pogroms against the Jews by local populations. The indigenous Baltic populations’ resentment of Bolshevik rule was never in doubt, but the special task groups assumed that they also conflated Bolshevism with Judaism. This turned out to be far from true, especially outside Lithuania:
In Lithuania this [a pogrom] was achieved for the first time by partisan activities in Kovno. To our surprise it was not easy at first to set in motion an extensive pogrom against Jews. Klimatis, the leader of the partisan unit mentioned above, who was used for this purpose primarily, succeeded in starting a pogrom on the basis of advice given to him by an Advance Unit operating in Kovno, and in such a way that no German order or German instigation was noticed from the outside. During the first pogrom in the night from 25 to 26 June, the Lithuanian partisans did away with more than 1,500 Jews, set fire to several synagogues or destroyed them by other means and burned down a Jewish dwelling district consisting of about 60 houses. During the following nights about 2,300 Jews were made harmless in a similar way. In other parts of Lithuania similar actions followed the example of Kovno, though smaller and extending to the Communists who had been left behind.
These self-clearing operations went smoothly because the army authorities, who had been informed, showed understanding for this procedure. From the beginning it was obvious that only the first days after the occupation would offer the opportunity for carrying
out pogroms. After the disarmament of the partisans the self-clearing operations automatically ceased.
It proved much more difficult to set in motion similar clearing operations in Latvia. The essential reason was that the entire stratum of national leaders had been assassinated or deported by the Soviets, especially in Riga. It was possible though, through similar influences, for the Latvian auxiliary police to set in motion a pogrom against Jews also in Riga. During this pogrom all synagogues were destroyed and about 400 Jews were killed. As the population of Riga quieted down quickly, further pogroms were not feasible.
So far as possible, both in Kovno and in Riga evidence by film and photography was established that the first spontaneous executions of Jews and Communists were carried out by Lithuanians and Latvians.
In Estonia, by reason of the relatively small number of Jews, no opportunity presented itself for the instigation of pogroms. The Estonian home guard rendered harmless only some individual Communists whom they especially hated, but generally they limited themselves to carrying out arrests.
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