Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

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

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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

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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 convincingly67 that the alleged early comprehensive order to