Directive No. 21

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Directive No. 21 Barbarossa case

The instruction no. 21 for Operation Barbarossa , occasionally Barbarossa Order , one was secret leader of adoption to the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) from 18 December 1940 to prepare all the armed services to " overthrow Soviet Russia in a quick campaign ( Operation Barbarossa )." As The ultimate goal is the shielding against Asiatic Russia on the Volga – Arkhangelsk line, later referred to as the AA line , in Directive No. 21 .

After the successful campaign in the west of 1940 with the armistice at Compiègne and the withdrawal of British troops from mainland Europe at the Battle of Dunkirk , Adolf Hitler believed that , despite the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, he could also wage a blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union.

The directive regulated the strategic goals assigned to the army, the air force and the navy according to the principle of "combined arms" as well as the tasks to be assigned to the probable allies Romania and Finland. The commanders-in-chief of all branches of service were asked to report the orders they had made to implement the directive to Hitler in his capacity as Fuhrer and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht .

Hitler was determined to make the Wehrmacht an instrument of a race-ideological war of annihilation and to remove the boundaries between military and political-ideological warfare. On March 30, 1941, for example, in a secret address in the Reich Chancellery, he had told the more than 200 commanders, commanders and chiefs of staff of the associations intended for the "Barbarossa" company that he was interested in the "battle of two worldviews against each other," the Wehrmacht must " To move away from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship, the communist is not a comrade before and not a comrade afterwards. It is a war of extermination. "

The instruction was implemented within the Wehrmacht, for example through the so-called commissar order as well as orders for the cooperation of the army with the Einsatzgruppen , the martial law and the behavior of the troops in the Soviet Union.

After the Second World War it was used as evidence both in the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals and in the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial .

On May 20, 2015, the German Bundestag decided to “symbolically” compensate the former Soviet prisoners of war who were still alive . It was assumed that around 4,000 former soldiers were awarded 2,500 euros each. The processing of the fate of the killed Soviet prisoners of war has not yet been completed.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Instruction no. 21. Barbarossa case 2. of 9 copies from the holdings of the Federal Archives . Website of the Federal Agency for Civic Education , accessed on February 22, 2020.
  2. ↑ Guide No. 21, Barbarossa Case (December 18, 1940) German History in Documents and Pictures , accessed on February 22, 2020.
  3. ↑ Otto Langels: Assault on the Soviet Union 75 years ago: The company with the code name “Barbarossa” Deutschlandfunk , June 22, 2016.
  4. ^ Rolf Steininger: From lightning victory to catastrophe Wiener Zeitung , 18./19. June 2011. Austria-Forum, accessed on February 22, 2020.
  5. ↑ Felix Römer : “In old Germany such an order would not have been possible.” Reception, adaptation and implementation of the Martial Law Decree in the Eastern Army 1941/42 Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 2008, pp. 53–99.
  6. ↑ Andreas Himmelsbach: Crime, martial law and police criminal violence under German military occupation in France and the Soviet Union Stuttgart, Univ.-Diss. 2018.
  7. ^ Christian Streit: No comrades: the armed forces and the Soviet prisoners of war 1941–1945 . Dietz, Bonn 1997, p. 28.
  8. ^ Judgment. Section “The War of Aggression against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” . In: The trial of the main war criminals before the International Court of Justice in Nuremberg . tape 1 . Nuremberg 1947 ( zeno.org [accessed February 21, 2020]).
  9. ^ Judgment of August 29, 1958 - Ks 2/57. LG Ulm, 1958, accessed on February 21, 2020 : "33: Statements by Göring in the Nuremberg Trial about the final solution to the Jewish question , Barbarossabefehl (IMT vol. 9 pp. 459–461, pp. 575–577, 686–688, 704– 708) " .
  10. ↑ Soviet prisoners of war receive compensation. In: sueddeutsche.de. May 20, 2015, accessed August 16, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Germany compensates Soviet prisoners of war. In: zeit.de. May 20, 2015, accessed August 16, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Germany compensates Soviet prisoners of war. In: handelsblatt.com. May 20, 2015, accessed August 16, 2015 .
  13. ↑ Ulf Mauder: Soviet prisoners of war were treated like traitors Die Welt , November 17, 2019.