Task Force Tilsit

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The Tilsit Einsatzkommando was a group within the SS , formed from the Tilsit State Police and the Memel Ordnungspolizei , which is commonly counted among the SS Einsatzgruppen . From June 1941 with the start of Operation Barbarossa until the end of September 1941, she murdered Jews, suspected communists and, on the basis of the commissioner's order, Soviet prisoners of war , according to Walter Stahlecker's report, 5,502 people. In addition, the security service for the Tilsit section, members of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, as well as local Lithuanian police officers and “white traders” (collective term for Lithuanian nationalist, anti-Soviet “partisans”) took part in the operations of the task force . With the Gargždai massacre carried out by the Einsatzkommando, the systematic mass shootings of the Jewish (initially only male, adult) Jewish population by the Einsatzgruppen began. The situation under which the murders were carried out cannot be determined with certainty and is the subject of changing historical interpretations.

Position and activity

The Tilsit task force under the direction of Hans-Joachim Böhmes was formed ad hoc in preparation for the mass shooting in Gargždai on June 24, 1941. Böhme was in front of the Tilsit state police station, with around 60-65 men there, and the border police commissioners in Memel , Tilsit , Eydtkau and Sudau were subordinate. Böhme and Werner Hersmann , heads of the SD section Tilsit, decided on June 23 to call in the Memel police force under Bernhard Fischer-Schweder . Böhme testified in court that initially on the night of June 21st to June 22nd, 1941, at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) issued an order for " special treatment ", i.e. H. Assassination received from Jews and Communists. Walter Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A , went to the Tilsit state police station on June 22 at around 8 p.m. and then ordered Böhme in the evening or at night, pointing out that it was a Führer order , to send Jewish men, women and men To murder children and "suspected communists" Lithuanians on a 25 km wide strip behind the border, which Böhme had confirmed by the RSHA. On July 1, 1941, Böhme reported to the Reich Security Main Office that the implementation of the operation had "been discussed with SS Brigadefuhrer Stahlecker on June 24 , who had basically declared his consent to the purges." On June 25th in Memel "contact" was made with the leader of the Einsatzkommando 1a Martin Sandberger and it was agreed that "along the former Soviet border in an area 25 km away from the border all necessary actions would be carried out in the previous form should."

For the border strip in which the Tilsit task force operated, task forces 1b and 3 were actually responsible, parts of task force A, which was transported from Pretzsch an der Elbe with the majority of its forces to the “ready room” (Danzig) on June 23 and how the other Einsatzgruppen were set up and instructed in Pretzsch before the attack on the Soviet Union. On June 30th Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich attended the massacre committed by the Einsatzkommando in Augustów . The report of the Einsatzkommando dated July 1st reads: “The Reichsführer SS [Himmler] and the Gruppenführer [Heydrich], who happened to be there, were informed of the measures taken by the Tilsit State Police and approved them in full. "Subsequently, Reinhard Heydrich explained to the Einsatzgruppen in operational order No. 6 of July 4, 1941 that the Tilsit state police station (in addition to the Allenstein Stapo and Security Police and SD in Krakow ) had been approved to relieve the operational groups and" above all " to secure their freedom of movement in the "newly occupied areas opposite their border sections" to "carry out cleaning operations". In view of the connection with Stahlecker, the Tilsit task force is also included in task force A in some depictions.

The USSR incident report No. 26 of July 18, 1941 reports 3,302 people killed by the Tilsit Einsatzkommando up to this date. From the end of July / beginning of August, the task force also shot Jewish women, children and old men. The fact that only such victims are mentioned in some reports from this time can be read as an indication that in some places the male Jewish population had already been wiped out by this time.

Ulm Task Force Process

In the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial in 1958, ten participants from the Tilsit Einsatzkommando, including Böhme, Fischer-Schweder and Hersmann, were sentenced to prison terms in 315 to 3907 cases for “aiding and abetting murder”.

History of the interpretation of the command situation

The historians Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm follow, especially in their work Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges , the presentation by Boehmes regarding an order to murder Jews from the RSHA. The Ulm court, for which Krausnick himself had delivered an expert opinion, classified these allegations as "irrefutable". Wilhelm describes the process in such a way that the task force Tilsit, which is subordinate to Task Force A, was only forwarded the central orders immediately before the start of the shooting in Gargždai. Krausnick assumes that the Einsatzgruppen had been given a "basic order to eliminate Judaism as completely as possible" before June 22, 1941 and that this was ultimately based on a special order issued by Hitler in the first half of March 1941. He referred to Boehme's account that Stahlecker had dismissed his objections by pointing out that it was a Führer order. Krausnick's thesis of a comprehensive and early extermination order was based on the reconstruction of the instructions given to the Tilsit Task Force, which should serve as the key to clearing up the entire command complex.

Doubts about the credibility of Boehme's testimony and the existence of such an order were expressed - according to Konrad Kwiet for the first time - in 1987 by Alfred Streim . He pointed out that a central order for the murder of Jews at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa has not been reliably proven and that the systematic murder of Jewish women and children did not begin until August 1941. Peter Longerich complains that "the alleged early and comprehensive extermination order represents an interpretation of the court that is not covered by the statements that Böhme made during the preliminary investigation". The first deployment of the Tilsit Task Force in Gargždai was due to a request from the Wehrmacht.

When the report of the Stapo -stelle Tilsit dated July 1, 1941 from the Moscow Archive Center for Historical Documentation became known , the doubts about Boehme's presentation of an order by Stahlecker have prevailed in recent research, since this report suggests an initiative by Boehme, on the Stahlecker and then Himmler and Heydrich responded supportively. The historian Christoph Dieckmann emphasizes that such an initiative allowed Böhme to get into the position of commander of such a task force.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Comprehensive report of Einsatzgruppe A up to October 15, 1941 Wikisource.
  2. ↑ BGH, 07.09.1962 - 4 StR 259/62. Opinionioiuris.de, accessed on February 26, 2015 .
  3. ↑ a b Joachim Tauber: Garsden, June 24, 1941 . In: Annaberger Annalen . No. 5 , 1997, ISSN  1614-2608 , pp. 125 .
  4. ↑ For example, when Jews were shot in Kretinga on June 25, 1941. Christopher Browning with a part by Jürgen Matthäus: The Unleashing of the “Final Solution” . National Socialist Jewish Policy 1939–1942. Propylaen, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-549-07187-6 , border crossing, p. 374 (Original title: The Origins of the Final Solution . 2003. Translated by Klaus-Dieter Schmidt).
  5. ↑ Approximately in Augustowo between June 26 and 30, 1941. Matthäus, p. 105.
  6. ↑ Approximately in Palanga on June 26th 1941. Arūnas Bubnys: Holocaust in Lithuanian Province in 1941 . S. 43 f . ( docscopic.info [PDF]).
  7. ↑ Around in Kretinga on June 25, 1941: Bubnys, p. 41.
  8. ↑ Tauber, p. 130.
  9. ↑ a b Helmut Krausnick , Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm: The troop of the Weltanschauung war . The Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD 1938–1942. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-421-01987-8 , pp. 285 (This part is written by Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm).
  10. ^ Tauber, p. 120.
  11. ^ HG van Dam , Ralph Giordano (ed.): Einsatzkommando Tilsit - The Trial in Ulm (=  concentration camp crimes before German courts . Volume 2 ). European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1966, p. 88-90 .
  12. ↑ Bert Hoppe, Hildrun Glass (ed.): Soviet Union annexed areas I . Occupied Soviet areas under German military administration, the Baltic States and Transnistria (=  The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 . Volume 7 ). Oldenbourg, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-58911-5 , DOK. 14 - The Tilsit police station reports to the Reich Main Security Office on July 1, 1941, that it carried out massacres of Jews in the Memel region, p. 144 .
  13. ↑ Christoph Dieckmann : The war and the murder of the Lithuanian Jews . In: Ulrich Herbert (Ed.): National Socialist Extermination Policy 1939–1945. New research and controversy . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-596-13772-1 , pp. 298 .
  14. ↑ Krausnick, p. 173.
  15. ↑ Matthew, p. 105.
  16. ↑ Krausnick, p. 162 f.
  17. ^ Tauber, p. 129.
  18. ^ Peter Longerich : Holocaust . The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford University Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-280436-5 , pp. 197 .
  19. ↑ Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Andrej Angrick, Jürgen Matthäus, Martin Cüppers (eds.): The "Event Reports USSR" 1941 . Documents of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union I. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-534-24468-3 , p. 139 .
  20. ↑ Longerich 2010, p. 231.
  21. ↑ Cf. Zvi Levit: Yurburg in the First Days of the Holocaust. Retrieved March 1, 2015 .
  22. ^ Peter Longerich: Politics of Destruction . An overall presentation of the National Socialist persecution of the Jews. Piper, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-492-03755-0 , pp. 326 .
  23. ↑ Van Dam, Giordano, pp. 139 f.
  24. ^ Wilhelm, p. 288 f.
  25. ↑ Helmut Krausnick: Hitler and the orders to the Einsatzgruppen . In: Eberhard Jäckel, Jürgen Rohwer (ed.): The murder of the Jews in the Second World War . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-596-24380-7 , pp. 99, 103 .
  26. ↑ See Longerich 1998, p. 326.
  27. ^ Konrad Kwiet: Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941 . In: Holocaust and Genocide Studies . tape 12 , no. 1 , 1998, ISSN  8756-6583 , pp. 4 .
  28. ^ Alfred Streim: The Tasks of the SS Einsatzgruppen . In: Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual . tape 4 , 1987, pp. 309-329 ( motlc.wiesenthal.com ). motlc.wiesenthal.com ( Memento of the original dated August 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / motlc.wiesenthal.com
  29. ↑ Longerich 1998, p. 328.
  30. ↑ Jürgen Matthäus : Beyond the border . In: Journal of History . tape 44 , no. 2 . Metropol, 1996, ISSN  0044-2828 , p. 103-105 .
  31. ↑ Longerich 1998, p. 503 f.
  32. ↑ Dieckmann, pp. 296, 298 f.