Commissar order

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Cover letter of the commissioner's order
Commissar order page 1 in the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds
Commissioner's order, page 2
Commissioner's order, page 3

The so-called commissioner order - officially guidelines for the treatment of political commissioners - of June 6, 1941 is the best known criminal order of the German armed forces in the war against the Soviet Union during the Second World War . It contained the instruction not to treat political commissars of the Red Army as prisoners of war , but to shoot them without a trial .

Main points

The “guidelines” were established under the lead management of Colonel General Alfred Jodl , Chief of the Wehrmacht Command Staff at the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW). In the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals , the International Military Court found in its judgment against Wilhelm Keitel , head of the OKW:

"On May 12, 1941, five weeks before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the OKW urged Hitler to issue an order to the Army High Command (OKH), according to which political commissars should be dealt with by the Army."

The order was issued by the OKW on June 6, 1941 shortly before the " Operation Barbarossa " in cooperation with OKW and OKH and should only be passed on orally to the commanders. In the order, for the formulations of which Chief of Staff Franz Halder had "decisive responsibility", it says:

"Political commissars as organs of the enemy troops are recognizable by special badges - a red star with a hammer and sickle woven in gold on the sleeves. [...] You are out of the prisoners of war immediately, i. H. still on the battlefield to be separated. This is necessary in order to deprive them of any possibility of influencing the captured soldiers. These commissioners are not recognized as soldiers ; the protection under international law for prisoners of war does not apply to them. They are to be done after the segregation has been carried out. "

Likewise, “political commissioners of all kinds”, namely civil sovereigns and political leaders, should be liquidated, “even if they are only suspected of resistance, sabotage or incitement to this”.

Elsewhere it says: "Political commissioners who are not guilty of any hostile act or who are suspected of such will initially remain unmolested." It was only later to be decided whether these people should be handed over to the Sonderkommandos. If possible, this check should be carried out by the Sonderkommando itself.

In the penultimate draft, the exact wording was: "Political commissars [...] should remain unmolested for the time being." Hitler was presumably carefully presented with a modified version in which "should" was replaced by "will" and which therefore allows different interpretations.

Reactions

Some military commanders, including von Manstein and the Abwehr office , raised concerns about the commissioner's order. However, it was explained to them by Wilhelm Keitel, head of the OKW :

“The concerns [expressed] correspond to the soldier's conceptions of chivalrous war. This is about the destruction of a worldview , so I approve of the measures and cover them. "

Selections and mass shootings

While the first part of the order, the execution of political commissars immediately after their arrest, was aimed directly at the members of the Wehrmacht, the second part was the task of the security service , which, however, was dependent on the support and cooperation of the Wehrmacht.

For the practical implementation, the OKW instructed the commanders of the transit and prisoner-of-war camps to carry out a rough selection of the prisoners in order to "immediately free themselves from those elements among the Kr. Gef. That are to be regarded as Bolshevik driving forces". In agreement with the head of the General Wehrmacht Office, General Hermann Reinecke, and the head of the Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war camps, Colonel Breyer, Heydrich issued deployment order No. 8 of July 17, 1941 for the General Government and East Prussia . In every prisoner of war camp and transit camp, the "politically, criminal or other intolerable elements" should be filtered out by a command of SS and SD employees. The aim was to find functionaries of the Comintern , leading party officials, people's commissars , all former political commissars of the Red Army, intelligentsia , Jews and fanatical communists as well as “terminally ill” people. On July 21, there followed the deployment order No. 9 for the segregation of the commissioners to the Stapo in the Reich territory and on October 29th, the deployment order No. 14 for the task forces in the occupied eastern area.

The Jews were most threatened by the murders. Most of the time, the German camp doctors took care of the identification of the Jews.

The separated prisoners of war were to be temporarily housed in a separate block of the camp and later transported away for liquidation. According to the order of the OKH of October 7, 1941, the separations should be carried out as inconspicuously as possible and the liquidation carried out without delay away from transit camps and localities and not known to the other prisoners of war or the population.

execution

Soviet prisoner of war marked with the “ Jewish star ”, propaganda recording 1941

Members of the task force interrogated the prisoners who were classified as suspicious and documented their statements on a questionnaire. The statements of collaborating Soviet “shop stewards” should not be unreservedly believed. Occasionally - so complained a task force leader - camp officers would also have suggested that prisoners of war be sorted out if they had committed minor offenses against camp discipline.

According to an “activity report” by a task force from Munich, 456 out of 3,788 Soviet prisoners of war were singled out as “intolerable” within nine weeks. Other surviving figures also confirm that between 12% and 14% of prisoners of war were selected for murder.

In order to maintain secrecy, the executions should take place in the concentration camps in a shielded manner. It is estimated that by the end of July 1942 around 38,000 Soviet prisoners of war who had previously been selected by the task force were murdered there.

According to an estimate by Christian Streit, the number of commissioners who were shot at the front by members of the Wehrmacht when they were captured is several thousand. This figure was controversial until Felix Römer's dissertation published in 2008 ; In his dissertation, especially on the “Commissar Order”, Römer can now exactly document a minimum number of “3430 verifiable executions”, cites additional files that indicate the murder of hundreds of other commissioners, and estimates the actual number of commissioners murdered at “a high four-digit number which, however, was probably not or only just under five digits ”. Approximately 80,000 Jewish prisoners of war members of the Red Army were murdered.

resistance

At the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals , some commanders of front-line troops swore that they had neither received nor forwarded the commissar's order. However, since numerous official enforcement reports have been received, the claim that the order was not carried out in practice by the tacit opposition of the generals has been refuted; this only happened in a few areas.

Commanders of POW camps in the Reich area tried several times to hinder the work of the task forces. The resistance of Major Meinel from Military District VII is well documented, who formally complained to the OKW that the examination practice was too “superficial” and withheld 173 of 474 prisoners of war that had been singled out. Meinel expressed the view that the whole procedure was not to be approved “from a soldier's point of view”: “If an enemy soldier was captured, then he was captured and should not be shot without further ado.” Every manpower was urgently needed. In addition, one must fear that the Red Army will retaliate against the German prisoners of war. At the urgent request of the SD, Meinel was dismissed from his post in mid-1942 because of his “strange attitude”.

There is no case where an attempt would have been made to force the execution of the commissar's order if it was not obeyed, or where an attempt was made to sanction its non-compliance by a court martial. Even so, it was usually followed.

Involvement of the foreign allies

General Antonescu , the nominal commander in chief of the "German-Romanian Army Front Romania", himself a fanatical anti-Semite and anti-communist, was informed about the commissar order and the martial law decree by the commander-in-chief of the 11th Army von Schobert , whose guidelines for the occupation policy in Transnistria stipulated that political commissars to be handed over to the Germans. The Finnish state police and the Finnish armed forces transferred a total of almost 2,900 people to the SS with knowledge of the situation. Among them were 400 to 500 communists and 118 political commissioners.

Suspension of order

Despite Keitel's affirmative declaration, from September 1941 onwards there were repeated reports from the troops that doubted the expediency and justification of the order. The liquidation of the political commissars did not go unnoticed by the enemy, led to sustained resistance and prevented a premature capitulation of encircled opponents. In a letter dated September 23, 1941, the OKH asked the OKW to “review the need to implement the“ Commissioner ”decree in its current form in view of the development of the situation”. Hitler refused to change the order on September 26, 1941. Ultimately, however, the objections had an effect. On May 6, 1942, the war diary of the Wehrmacht High Command stated:

"In order to increase the tendency to defeat and surrender enclosed Soviet troops, the Führer orders that the [...] commissioners and politruks can initially be assured of the preservation of their lives in such cases on a trial basis."

The order was not reinstated. The murders of Jewish prisoners of war in the operational area continued unchanged. In July 1943 the OKH declared that Jewish prisoners of war should not be deported to the west, but should be handed over to the security police, who then murdered them without exception. Not all murders took place in the operation area. A considerable part was deported to the camps in the Reich Commissariats or in the General Government and murdered there. The survival of the political commissars, who were selected in reception camps east of the Reich border, was also not assured. In the autumn of 1942 around 200 Soviet political commissars were murdered by Zyklon B in Neuengamme concentration camp ; In mid-April 1943, 59 political commissars were sent to Mauthausen concentration camp for liquidation .

Historiography and Interpretations

The commissar's order was just one of several similar orders, "which were issued under the sign of the war of extermination and carried out by the Wehrmacht". However, after the war it attracted much more attention, which, however, did not cover the scope of the "criminal orders".

Although well-founded research results proved by the beginning of the eighties at the latest that large parts of the Eastern Army had obeyed the Commissar's order, some military historians remained uncertain; because the files of the Eastern Army were only randomly evaluated.

The historian Dieter Pohl judged: “With the commissioner's order, the Wehrmacht actively took over part of the murders. The OKH initiated the initiative to kill not only military commissioners but also top civilian officials on their own. In fact, the OKW weakened this direction ... ”Contrary to some post-war legends, the murder order was passed on to most of the units. In his study on the war of extermination, which was not specifically dedicated to the “Commissar Order ”, Pohl was unable to prove that this order was carried out across the board, and assumed that it had been implemented in 50 to 60 percent of all German divisions.

For his dissertation, Felix Römer sifted through the files of all German front-line units that were deployed on the Eastern Front during the period of validity of the commissioner's order. He demonstrated that "the vast majority of the German front-line units willingly implemented the commissioner's guidelines" and that executions took place in over 80 percent of the divisions deployed. Around 3,400 executions are clearly documented. Two thirds of the shootings were carried out by the front units, one third were carried out by rear security forces and prison camps. Further suspected cases and unreported numbers suggest a total number of victims "in the high four-digit range".

Römer comes to the judgment that the extermination of the commissars was by no means only reluctant, but that "in considerable parts of the Eastern Army also found profound approval". This approval only waned after the failure of the Blitzkrieg plan, and the initiatives of the command authorities to lift the order were purely purely rational.

Legal processing

Keitel and Kaltenbrunner at the Nuremberg Trial

In the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals , Keitel, Jodl and Ernst Kaltenbrunner ( Reich Security Main Office ) a. a. convicted of this order and sentenced to death. In the OKW trial , the former generals Warlimont and Reinecke were sentenced to life imprisonment. In the Generals in Southeastern Europe trial , the former generals Ernst von Leyser and Lothar Rendulic were sentenced to imprisonment for having ordered the murder of prisoners of war by passing on orders, although no killings could be proven for the command area of ​​Rendulic.

See also

literature

  • Martin Broszat : Chapter commissioner order and mass executions of Soviet prisoners of war. In: Anatomy of the SS State. Volume 2. Ed. Hans Buchheim , Broszat, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen , Helmut Krausnick . Freiburg 1965, pp. 163–283 - most recently dtv, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-423-30145-7 .
  • Jürgen Förster : The "Barbarossa" company as a war of conquest and extermination. In: Horst Boog, Jürgen Förster, Joachim Hoffmann , Ernst Klink, Rolf-Dieter Müller , Gerd R. Ueberschär : The attack on the Soviet Union (= Military History Research Office [ed.]: The German Reich and the Second World War . Volume 4 ). 2nd Edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-421-06098-3 , pp. 435–440 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  • Christian Hartmann u. a. (Ed.): Crimes of the Wehrmacht. Balance of a debate. Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52802-3 .
  • Helmut Krausnick: Commissioner's order and “Barbarossa jurisdiction decree” in a new perspective . In: VfZ . 25, 1977, pp. 682-738, ifz-muenchen.de (PDF).
  • Reinhard Otto: Wehrmacht, Gestapo and Soviet prisoners of war in German Reich territory in 1941/42. Oldenbourg, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-486-64577-3 .
  • Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933–1945. 2nd Edition. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2008, ISBN 978-3-534-21757-1 .
  • Felix Römer : The commissioner's order. Wehrmacht and Nazi crimes on the Eastern Front 1941/42. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2008, 666 pages. ISBN 978-3-506-76595-6 .
  • Alfred Streim : Soviet prisoners in Hitler's war of extermination. Reports and documents 1941–1945. Heidelberg 1982, ISBN 3-8114-2482-3 .
  • Christian Streit: No comrades. The Wehrmacht and the Soviet prisoners of war 1941–1945. Bonn 1991, ISBN 3-8012-5016-4 .
  • Heinrich Uhlig: The criminal order. In: Power of Conscience. Volume 2. Ed. European publication. Rinn, Munich 1965, pp. 287-510.

Web links

Commons : Commissar order  - collection of images
Wikisource: Commissar Order  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 1000 documents commissioner order , pdf, BSB Munich.
  2. ↑ Jörn Hasenclever: Wehrmacht and Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union , Ferdinand Schöningh 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-76709-7 , p. 67.
  3. ^ Werner Maser: Nuremberg . Droemer Kauer, Munich / Zurich 1977, ISBN 3-426-00582-4 .
  4. ↑ Quoted from Heribert Ostendorf: The - contradicting - effects of the Nuremberg trials on the West German judiciary . In: Gerd Hankel , Gerhard Stuby (ed.): Criminal courts against crimes against humanity . Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-930908-10-7 [p.?].
  5. ↑ Wolfram Wette : The Wehrmacht. Enemy images, war of extermination, legends . S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2002, p. 99.
  6. ↑ later called "Einsatzgruppe"; Krausnick: Commissar order , p. 704.
  7. ↑ Krausnick, Kommissarbefehl , p. 725, note 213.
  8. ^ Alfred Streim: Soviet prisoners in Hitler's war of extermination , reports and documents 1941–1945. 1982, ISBN 3-8114-2482-3 , p. 34.
  9. ↑ Reinhard Otto: Wehrmacht ... , ISBN 3-486-64577-3 , p. 54 f.
  10. ↑ As document no. 24 with attachments printed by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen : "Commissar order ...", in: Anatomie des SS – Staates, Vol. II, pp. 200–204 / On July 27th, a deployment order no. 9, which included the Reich territory.
  11. ^ Raul Hilberg : The Destruction of European Jews , Fischer Taschenbuch 1982, Volume 2, ISBN 3-596-24417-X , p. 351 ff.
  12. ↑ Peter Longerich: Politics of destruction , Piper 1998, ISBN 3-492-03755-0 , p. 411 ff.
  13. ↑ Dieter Pohl: Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht , Fischer 2011, ISBN 978-3-596-18858-1 , p. 230 ff.
  14. ↑ Manfred Messerschmidt: The Minsk Trial , published in 1946 in War of Extermination - Crimes of the Wehrmacht , Ed. Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann, Zweiausendeins, 1995, ISBN 3-86150-198-8 , p. 557.
  15. ↑ IMT: The Nuremberg Trial ... Reprint Munich 1989, ISBN 3-7735-2527-3 , Volume 38 / Document 178-R, p. 427.
  16. ↑ IMT, ISBN 3-7735-2527-3 , Volume 38 / Document 178-R, p. 448.
  17. ↑ Reinhard Otto: Wehrmacht ..., ISBN 3-486-64577-3 , p. 268.
  18. ↑ Christian Streit: The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war ... In: Gerd R. Ueberschär , Wolfram Wette (Ed.): "Enterprise Barbarossa" ... Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-596-24437-4 , p. 165.
  19. ↑ Horst Rohde: Political indoctrination in higher staffs and in the troops - examined using the example of the commissioner's order . In: H. Poeppel u. a. (Ed.): The soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Munich 1999, ISBN 3-7766-2057-9 , pp. 124–156 versus Jürgen Förster: The “Barbarossa” company… In: Horst Boog, Jürgen Förster, Joachim Hoffmann , Ernst Klink, Rolf-Dieter Müller , Gerd R. Ueberschär : The attack on the Soviet Union (= Military History Research Office [Hrsg.]: The German Reich and the Second World War . Volume 4 ). 2nd Edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-421-06098-3 , pp. 435–440 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  20. ↑ Felix Römer: The commissioner order. Wehrmacht and Nazi crimes on the Eastern Front 1941/42 . Paderborn 2008, p. 359 u. P. 367.
  21. ^ Resistance and Combat - Jewish Soldiers in the Allied Armies . Yad Vashem ; accessed on April 16, 2015.
  22. ↑ Krausnick: Commissar order , p. 733.
  23. ^ Reinhard Otto: Wehrmacht ..., ISBN 3-486-64577-3 , pp. 200-229.
  24. ↑ IMT: ISBN 3-7735-2527-3 , Volume 38 / Document 178-R, pp. 419-498.
  25. ↑ IMT: ISBN 3-7735-2527-3 , Volume 38 / Document 178-R, p. 433.
  26. ↑ Hans-Erich Volkmann: On the responsibility of the Wehrmacht in: RD Müller, HE Volkmann, (Ed. On behalf of the MGFA): The Wehrmacht: Mythos and Reality , Munich, Oldenburg 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , p. 1204 f.
  27. ^ Jürgen Förster: Hitler's allies against the Soviet Union in 1941 and the murder of Jews in: Christian Hartmann, Johannes Hürter, Ulrike Jureit : Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Balance of a debate. Beck, Munich 2005, p. 94 ff.
  28. ^ Werner Maser : Nuremberg . Droemer Kauer, Munich / Zurich 1977, p. 216.
  29. ^ Streim: Annihilation War , p. 96.
  30. ↑ Dieter Pohl: The rule of the Wehrmacht . Fischer Verlag 2011, ISBN 978-3-596-18858-1 , p. 234.
  31. ^ Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial (ed.): The exhibitions. ISBN 3-86108-075-3 , p. 93.
  32. ↑ Reinhard Otto: Wehrmacht ..., ISBN 3-486-64577-3 , p. 249.
  33. ^ Streit, Christian, no comrades: the Wehrmacht and the Soviet prisoners of war 1941 - 1945, [Heidelberg 1977] Dietz Verlag Bonn 1997, pp. 83f.
  34. ↑ For the state of research, see Felix Römer: The commissioner's order. Wehrmacht and Nazi crimes on the Eastern Front 1941/42. Paderborn 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-76595-6 , pp. 13-19.
  35. ↑ Dieter Pohl: The cooperation between the army, SS and police in the occupied Soviet territories, in: Christian Hartmann et al., 2005, p. 109.
  36. ↑ Dieter Pohl: Persecution and Mass Murder ..., 2008, p. 39.
  37. ↑ Felix Römer: Der Kommissarbefehl ..., quote p. 551, number p. 565.
  38. ↑ Felix Römer: The Commissar Order ..., p. 561/562.
  39. ↑ Felix Römer: The Commissar Order ..., p. 566.
  40. ^ Kerstin Freudiger: The legal processing of Nazi crimes , Mohr Siebeck 2002, ISBN 3-16-147687-5 , p. 121.
  41. ^ Military Tribunal V, Judgment, p. 1305 (Leyser) and p. 1294 (Rendulic).