The defendant Reinhardt, at first a corps commander, secceeded to the command of Hoth's Armored Group, which was later designated as the Third Panzer Army. Reinhardt was made a full general in 1942, and became the Commanderin-Chief of Army Group Center in August 1944. The defendant Salmuth was also promoted from corps to army command, and became a full general in 1943. From June 1942 to August 1943 he commanded sucessively the Seventeenth, the Fourth and the Second Armies on the eastern front; from August 1943 to August 1944 he commanded the Fifteenth Army in France. The defendant Hollidt, who led the 50th Infantry Division into Southern Russia, rose rapidly to corps command in January 1942 and became Commander-inChief of the Sixth Army in March 1943; in that same year he, too, became a full general. The defendant von Roques remained an Army Group Rear Area Commander until December 1942 when he went back into retirement. The defendant Woehler served as Chief of Staff of the Eleventh Army -first under von Schobert and later under von Manstein -until February 1943. After a brief period of service as Chief of Staff of Army Group Center and as a corps commander, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general and made Commander-in-Chief of the Eighth Army in Southern Russia in August 1943, and in December 1944 became the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group South.
If it please the Court, Mr. Niederman will now continue with the reading. BY MR. NIEDERMAN: Your Honors -
Count Two: Belligerents and Prisoners of War -
the "Commissar" Order.
On 8 June 1941, two weeks before Russia was attacked, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, issued an order entitled "Directives for the Treatment of Political Commissars" to the commanders of the Army Groups and Armies then deployed along the Russian border awaiting the word to attack. This order read in part as follows:
"When fighting Bolshevism one can not count on the enemy acting in accordance with the principles of humanity or International Law. In particular it must be expected that the treatment of our prisoners by the political commissars of all types who are the true pillars of resistance, will be cruel, inhuman and dictated by hate.
"The troops must realize "That in this fight it is wrong to treat such elements with clemency and consideration in accor dance with International Law.
They are a menace to our own safety and to the rapid pacification of the conquered territories.
"2) That the originators of the asiatic barbaric methods of fighting are the political commissars.
They must be dealt with promptly and with the ut most severity.
"Therefore, if taken while fighting of offering re sistance, they must, on principle, be shot immediately.
"For the rest, the following Instructions will apply:
"I. Theatre of Operations.
"Political commissars in their capacity of officials attached to the enemy troops are recog nizable by their special insignia - red star with "an inwoven golden hammer and sickle on the sleeves.
.. They are to be segregated at once, i.e. while still on the battlefield, from the prisoners of war.
This is necessary in order to deprive them of any possibility of influencing the captured soldiers.
These commissars will not be recognized as soldiers; the protection granted to prisoners of war in accordance with International Law will not apply to them.
After having been segregated they are to be dealt with."
If there were no other proof to be offired in this proceeding except that concerning the issuance and execution of this one order, it would still more than justify the presence in this dock of every defendant except Sperrle, Blaskowitz, and Schniewind. The Commissar Order was formulated by the defendants Lehmann and Warlimont, issued nv Warlimont to nineteen different offices of the Wehrmacht including the OKH, distributed by the OKH to the defendants Leeb, Kuechler, Hoth, and Woehler, passed on to Reinhardt, Salmuth, Hollidt and Reques, and executed by units subordinated to them. Reinecke saw to its enforcement in the prisoner of war camps under his jurisdiction.
The Commissar Order was not the exclusive achievement of any one man. On 6 May 1941, the OKH forwarded to Warlimont a proposed draft of an order for the treatment of commissars: Warlimont submitted this draft to the defendant Lehmann in the Legal Department of the OKW. Lehmann approved the draft with minor changes and returned it to Warlimont the next day. On 12 May, Warlimont submitted the draft as approved by the Legal Department to Jodl together with a memorandum in which he stated:
"...Military functionaries (commissars) are to be dealt with according to proposal OKH.
They are not recognized as prisoners of war and are to be liquidated at the latest in the transient PW camps and under no circumstances to be removed to the rear area.
On 6 June, Warlimont issued the order to the Supr me Commands of the Army, Navy, and Air Force with instructions that it was to be distributed in writing to Army and Air Fleet Commanders and orally to lower commands. Two days later, Brauchitsch passed down the order with the amendment that "Political commissars attached to the troops should be segregated and dealt with by order of an officer, inconspicously and outside the battle zone proper". From army group to army, army to corps, corps to division, division to regiment -- down this order for murder went until it was well known over the entire Eastern Front.
During the proceedings before the International Military Tribunal, a veritable parade of German field marshals and generals took the witness stand and testified under oath that the German army commanders in Russia refused to pass down the Commissar Order to their troops -- or passed it down with oral instructions to disregard it -- and that the order was never carried out. At the time this testimony was given, most of the documents relevant to this question were not available to the prosecution. The evidence to be offered in this proceeding will, we believe, expose the true nature of the testimony given by the German generals before the IMT. The Commissar Order was issued to be obeyed, not to be ignored, and we shall present conclusive evidence that it was generally distributed and extensively carried out on the Eastern Front.
The minutes of a conference held on 17 June 1941 among generals of the LVII Corps of Panzer Group 3, then under the command of Hoth, contain the following notation: "The Fuehrer has ordered that Russian political Commissars are to be 'liquidated'. This order is to be disseminated orally only." The minutes of a meeting of the commanding officers within the 454th Security Division, subordinated to the defendant Roques, indicate that by 20 June the order had reached regimental level. At this meeting, the commanding general lectured his subordinate officers on the essential points of the Commissar Order directing them to report, through channels, on action taken against political commissars.
On the morning of 22 June 1941, the invasion of Soviet Russia started. By the evening of the same day, the XXVIII Corps of the Sixteenth Army in Army Group North, under the defendant von Leeb, was already in possession of a report listing executions carried out under the Commissar Order. One of the divisions in Hoth's Panzer Group 3 reported to higher headquarters the same evening that one commissar and one civilian had been killed. In the following weeks and months, the enforcement of the Commissar Order became routine work in the operations of the advancing German armies, and references to killings of commissars constantly occur in the reports from subordinate to higher headquarters. They make monotonous reading and differ more in the numbers of executed commissars than in their wording. A report of one of the divisions in Kuechler's Lighteenth Army stated on 26 October 1941: "Nothing particular to report. 16 Commissars shot. 61st Infantry Division -1C." The Commissar Order itself explicitly required the submission of reports on its execution through regular army channels; whatever these defendants may conjure up in their defense they can never honestly say that they did not know that this criminal order was being executed by units subordinated to them.
As we have just seen, the murder of commissars who were uniformed members of the Red Army was the task of the German combat troops. The fate in store for commissars was soon noised abroad in the Red Army, and naturally some of the prospective victims went to some pains to conceal their identity from the Germans in the event of capture. General Halder noted in his useful diary on 1 August 1941, with respect to the "treatment of captured commissars", that they were "for the most part identified only in prisoner-of-war camps". This possibility the Wehrmacht had anticipated. The defendant Reinecke, as Chief of the OKW department with jurisdiction over prisoner-of-war matters, entered into an agreement with the notorious Reinhardt Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and Himmler's right hand man.
This agreement covered not only the apprehension of commissars, but also the weeding out from Russian prisoners of certain types and categories regarded as "subversive", which was to be accomplished by the special SS gangs called "Einsatzgrupoen". The first two paragraphs of the Reinecke-Heydrich agreement read:
The Wehrmacht must immediately free itself of all those elements among the prisoners of war who must be regarded as Bolshevist influences.
The special situation of the campaign in the East therefore demands special measures, which have to be carried out in a spirit free from bureaucratic and administrative influences, and with an eagerness to assume responsibility.
While the regulations and orders of the prisoner of war system were hitherto based exclusively on consider ations of a military nature, now the political goal must be attained, namely to protect the German people from Bolshevist agitators and to gain a firm grip on the occupied territory at the earliest possible moment.
The agreement further provided that "suspects" and "intolerable elements" among the prisoners should be segregated by the Einsatzkommandos and surrendered to them by the camp officials. The fate of the prisoners selected is made all too clear by Heydrich's instructions that:
Executions must not be carried out in or near the camp.
If the camps are in the Government General close to the frontier, prisoners are to be moved to former Soviet territory, if possible, for special treatment.
In execution of this agreement, on 8 September 1941 the defendant Reinecke issued an order stating that:
....Selection according to the political attitude of the prisoners of war will be carried out by the Ein satzkommandos, which are especially assigned to this task.
Close collaboration with the Einsatzkommandos is the duty of camp commanders.
This injunction to murder helpless human beings was distributed to over two hundred separate agencies including the prisoner of war camps in Germany and Poland, and to the Armed Forces Commanders in Riga, the Ukraine, and Norway. Pursuant to these orders, many thousands of Russian prisoners were shot dead by the Wehrmacht and the Einsatzkommandos.
Other portions of Reinecke's order of, 8 September 1941 stated:
The Bolshevist soldier has therefore lost all claim to treatment as an honorable opponent, in accordance with the Geneva Convention *** The order for ruthless and energetic action must be given at the slightest indica tion of insubordination, especially in the case of Bolshevist fanatics.
Insubordination, active or passive resistance, must be broken Immediately by force of arms (bayonets, butts, and firearms) *** Anyone carrying out the order who does not use his weapons, or does so with insufficient energy, is punishable *** No warning shot must ever be fired *** The use of arms against prisoners of war is as a rule legal.
This order, like the "Commando" Order, was reviewed by Admiral Canaris. In this case, too, Canaris' opinion that the order was a flagrant violation of international law was clearly given:
The Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners of war is not binding in the relationship between Germany and the U.S.S.R. Therefore only the principles of general international law on the treatment of prisoners of war apply.
Since the 18th century these have gradually been established along the lines that war captivity is neither revenge nor punishment, but solely protective custody, revenge nor punishment, but solely protective custody, the only purpose of which is to prevent the prisoners of war from further participation in the war.
This principle was developed in accordance with the view held by all armies that it is contrary to military tradition to kill or injure helpless people *** The decrees for the treat ment of Soviet prisoners of war enclosed are based on a fundamentally different viewpoint.
The order just quoted played on important part in the IMT's conviction of General Keitel, who noted on Canaris' memorandum of protest, "These objections arise from the military concept of chivalrous warfare. This is the destruction of an ideology. Therefore I approve and back the measure."
Such orders as these inevitably resulted in cruelty and inhumanity on a wide scale. As the IMT stated in its Judgment: "The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war was characterized by particular inhumanity.... It was the result of systematic plans to murder." These "systematic plans" were embodied in orders from the OKW, prepared by Warlimont and Lehmann; orders for the transfer of prisoners to concentration camps, signed by Reinecke; OKH orders, distributed by field commanders, for the shooting of Russian soldiers in uniform on the pretext that they were "guerillas"; orders for the killing of escaped prisoners upon recapture, a flagrant violation of the usages of war; and other similar directives. The crimes which such orders resulted in are reflected in numerous reports from combat units under the command of these defendants. Thus:
On 15 September 1941 a report by one of the divisions under the defendant Roques stated:
"Numerous escapes of Russian prisoners of war from rail transports have been reported.
Guard Battalion 703 captured 13 and shot them."
On 13 April 1942 a report from the Rear Area of Army Group North, then commanded by Kuechler stated:
"Five escaped prisoners of war shot to death."
ASecurity Division in the Rear Area of the defendant Loeb's Army Group reported on 10 October 1941:
"In the course of a patrol eleven Red Army soldiers arrested.
Seven of them were shot after detailed interrogation, four were handed over to the prisoner canps."
A report of 8 October 1943 to the Eight Army, commanded by the defendant Woehler, shows that the principles of the "commando order" were also applied in the East:
"Seven i parachutists were captured.
Of these, six destroyed. All members of the Third Airborne Brigade."
These reports, selected almost at random, show the frighteningly routine character of these brutalities. What they do not show on their face is their utter stupidity. It was a cardinal objective of the German occupation of the Ukraine to "pacify" and "exploit" the land in the interests of German economy; such open mistreatment and slaughter of Russian soldiers was bound to frustrate the Germans' own objectives. A young German lieutenant on the intelligence staff of Rundstedt's Army Group South reported on 8 October 1941 that German occupation policy in the Ukraine was being seriously obstructed because:
prisoners were shot when they could not march any more, right in the middle of villages and some of the bigger hamlers, and the corpses were left lying about, and the population saw in these facts that which they did not understand and which confirmed the worst distortions of enemy propagandas.
The fate of enemy soldiers who survived their capture and were taken to prisoner of war camps under the control of the OKW and the Army Group and Amies commanded by these defendants was even more appalling, The defendants will undoubtedly stress the circumstances which prevailed during the campaign in Soviet Russia, and admittedly it is difficult to handle large masses of prisoners under primitive conditions of transportation.
But the situation was of the defendants' making, not the prisoners', and even making every allowance, the story is a horrible one. The reports of disease and death among the Russian prisoners reach such astronomical figures that it is divvicult to bear in mind that human lives are being tabulated. A series of entries in the war diary of Kuechler's Eighteenth Army, at that time subordinated to Laeb's Army Group North, reveals that on 4 November 1941 about ten prisoners were dying every night from exhaustion; five days later "the prisoners' rations are so insufficient that one hundred men will die daily." On 28 November it was estimated that "all the inmates of Camp East will have died within six months at the latest", and that "in the camp at Pleskau out of twenty thousand about one thousand perish weekly from exhaustion."
A report of 21 December 1941 from a prisoner of war district in Roques' command, utilizing the percentage of mortality among the prisoners up to that date, estimated that if those mortality rates persisted, within a year the percentage of deaths at four camps would be 28%, 87%, 82% and 80% respectively. With prisoner of war camps thus transmuted into charnel houses it is not surprising that as of 1 May 1944 the Prisoner of War organization of OKW reported that, out of a total of 5,153,381 prisoners taken since the beginning of the war, 845,128 had died in installations under the control of OKH and 1,136,236 in those under the OKW. This total of nearly two million did not include prisoners handed over by the Wehrmacht to the Einsatzgruppen and other extermination units.
THE PRESIDENT:At this point, as counsel well know, the Tribunal will take its customary mid-afternoon recess.
(A recess was taken,)
THE MARSHAL:The Tribunal is again in session.
THE PRESIDENT:Proceed.
MR. NIEDERMAN:Your Honors, it is ironical that one of the most dmning indictments of Germany's treatment of Soviet prisoners was written by Alfred Rosenberg, a defendant before the IMT and himself certainly no angel, who on 28 February 1942 in a letter to Keitel, stated:
The fate of the Soviet prisoners of war in Germany is .... a tragedy of the greatest extent. Of 3.6 millions of prisoners of war, only several hundred thousand are still able-to work fully. A large part of them have starved, or died, because of the hazards of the weather. Thousands also died from typhus. It is understood, of course, that there are difficulties encountered in the feeding of such a large number of prisoners of war. Anyhow, with a certain amount of understanding for goals aimed at by German politics, dying and deterioration could have been avoided to the extent described. For instance, according to information on hand, the native population within the Soviet Union are absolutely willing to put food at the disposal of the prisoners of war. Several understanding camp commanders have successfully chosen this course. However, in the majority of cases, the camp commanders have forbidden the civilian population to put food at the disposal of the prisoners, and they have rather let them starve to death. Even on the March to the camps, the civilian population was not allowed to give the prisoners of war food. In many cases, when prisoners of war could no longer keep up on the march because of hunger and exhaustion, they were shot before the eyes of the horrified civilian population, and the corpses were left. In numerous camps, no shelter for prisoners of war was provided at all. They lay under the open sky during rain or snow..... Utterances such as these have been heard: "The more of these prisoners die, the better it is for us"......
The prosecution is unable ,to improve on Rosenberg's description If the Court please, Mr. McHaney will continue reading. MR. MC HANEY:
Count Three: Civilians -- Murder and Ill-treatment Generally As no mentioned earlier, the Germans had very far-reaching economic and political designs with respect to the Russian territories overrun by the Wehrmacht.
In order to exploit these areas for the benefit of Germany, it was planned to "pacify" and crush all opposition, to obliterate the Soviet political system and set up now regional political administration, and to convert the productive resources of the land to the uses of the Third Reich. The economic features of this program were primarily entrusted to civilians agencies, but the Wehrmacht too played its part. The Germans were most concerned with natural resources and factories, but they did not overlook making arrangements, under Rosenberg, for the systematic plunder of valuables and cultural objects.
The Army was directed to assist Rosenberg's plunder gangs,and theevidence will show that Reinecke, Woehler, Roques and other defendants were helpful to the Rosenberg units. We will postpone further discussion of the evidence establishing the Wehrmacht's participation in plunder, destruction and devastation in violation of the laws of war until its actual presentation in this proceeding.
For, revolting and criminal as were these plundering activities, and terrible as was their effect on the standard of living -- and indeed on life itself -- within the occupied territeries, they were as nothing compared to the outright slaughter of the inhabitants which began as soon as the German troops set foot on Russian soil. The Tribunal should not assume that the cause of this slaughter was any innate and peculiar brutality of the German soldiers. True it is that among the troops were many Who had been filled with poisonous Nazi racial ideology and myths, and who therefore entered gladly into the diabolical spirit of the occasion.
But the primary responsibility for these millions of murders rests on the men in this dock, and on others who, unless dead, might fittingly be sitting there too. What happened in Russia was deliberately contrived among the leaders of the Wehrmacht, and was embodied in orders, which were circulated throughout the German Army and which brought about the carnage that ensued.
Within the limits of available time, we can only sketch the outlines of this criminal structure. The basic order was issued by the OKW some five we ks before the invasion, on 15 May 1941, to the Commanders-in-Chief of the Army, Navy and Air Force. This order, in unmistakable terms, legalized the murder of Russian civilians by German troops. It accomplished this in two ways. Firstly, for the punishment of Russian civilians suspected of unfriendly acts, the order substituted summary execution by the troops for action by military courts. After a sweeping mandate directing the troops to "take ruthless action against any threat from the enemy population", the order stated:
Until further notice the military courts and the courts martial will not be competent for crimes committed by enemy civilians.......
Likewise all other attacks by enemy civilians on the Armed Forces, its members and employees, are to be suppressed at once by military, using the most extreme methods, until the assailants are destroyed.
Where such measures have been neglected or were not at first possible, persons suspected of criminal action will be brought at once before an officer. This officer will decide whether they are to be shot.
On the orders of an officer with the powers of at least a Battalion Commander, collective despotic measures will be taken without delay against localities from which cunning or malicious attaks are made on the Armed Forces, if circumstances do not permit quick identification of individual offenders.
The second part of the order was even more vicious; it guaranteed German soldiers against any fear of punishment for crimes committed against the civilian population, unless such crimes were likely to undermine the discipline of the Army. This was accomplished as follows:
With regard to offenses committed against enemy civilians by member s of she Wehrmacht and its employees, pro secution it is not obligatory even where the deed is at the same pine a military crime or offense.
When judging such offenses, it must be borne in mind, whatever the circumstances, that the collapse of Germany in 1918, the subsequent sufferings of the German people and the fight against Natinal Socialism which cost the blood of innumerable suppoters of the movement, were caused primarily by Bolshevik influence and that no German has forgotten this fact.
Therefore the judicial authority will decide in such cases whether a disciplinary penalty is indicated, or whether legal measures are necessary. In the case of offenses against inhabitants it will order a court martial only if maintenance of discipline or security of the forces call for such a measure.....
Warlimont and Lehmann were in a unique p osition to know the purpose ox this order -- the so-called "Barbarossa jurisdiction order" --inasmuch as they formulated it. Drafts of the order were prepared vy them, and the OKH, as early as April 1941. These drafts were discussed (as his diary shows ) with the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Halder, on 6 May; it appears that Haider wished to preserve one jurisdiction of the military courts over minor offenses On this suggestion, the defendant Lehmann commen ted:
I have objections to this ....now that we have decided to take this stop it has to be done completely, otherwise there is the danger that the troops will push off matters uncomfortable to them to the courts and in that way (and those will be the doubtful cases) the contrary of that which we want to achieve will occur.
It would have been indeed difficult to have made murder and crime easier or more praiseworthy to the German soldier. This order, so terrible in its intent and in its consequences, was distributed by the defendants Leeb, Kuechlcr, Hoth, Reinhardt, Salmutn, Hollidt, Schniewind, Roques, and Woehler to units under their command. The results were, of course, precisely what was ordered. The diary of the Rear Area of the Second Army under Salmuth reported:
16 October 1942: A large number of suspects were shot in the neighboring villages.
4 to 18 October 1942: Several hundred suspects were seized and liquidated in the localities.
19 October 1942: A great number of suspects were shot in the mopping up *** Another report on 19 February 1943 to Reinhardt's 3rd Panzer Army described the following action:
In order to keep bands from resettling in this territory*** the population of villages and farms in this area were killed without exception to the last baby. All homes were burned down. Cattle and victuals were confiscated and taken from this area.
Naturally enough, such bestial behavior enraged the Russian civilian population. No doubt they would have fiercely opposed the German invaders in any events but the conduct of the German troops under these orders won thousands of recruits to the Russian partisan bands which began to form behind the German lines.
The German Army's attitude toward these partisans was based on Hitler's statement of 16 July 1941:
The Russians have now ordered partisan warfare behind the front. This partisan warfare has some advantages for us; it enables us to eradicate everyone who opposes us.
It would be futile here even to attempt to enumerate the criminal orders and atrocities perpetrated in the course of anti-partisam warfare. The defendants will plead that the partisans, too, committed atrocities, and will attempt to justify their actions on the basis of military necessity. They will, no doubt, make involved legal arguments that the particsan were not untitled to the rights of belligerents under the laws of war, despite the fact that a directive issued on 11 November 1942 ny Warlimont's office stated:
The partisans are military resources of the opponent organized before the war and expanded during the war. Nevertheless we do not recognize them.... They are led by officers and commissars who have been left behind systematically and who are currently transported by air. Their battle assignment is directed by the Russian Military Supreme Command according to uniform plan.
But the true answer to these arguments is much simpler, German troops, wherever they appeared, by murder aid ill treatment of the civilian population, by conscription to forced labor, by plunder of property and food, by extermination of Jews, government functionaries, and the intelligentisia, forced the inhabitants of the occupied countries to defend themselves, For the defendants to say that they were privileged to slaughter the population in retaliation for measures of self-protection provoked by their own acts is preposterous. Precisely analogous is the plea of the burglar that he had to kill the house owner in self-defense. One will not be heard to defend on the ground that his circumstances required him to commit a crime when such circumstances were of his own making. That the resistance of the civilian population was the inevitable result of the Wehrmacht's own crimes is put beyond all doubt that the following report, dated 31 July 1942, on the development of the partisan movement, directed to the commenders of all army groups and armies in the East:
The requisitioning of horses and vehicles by the German Wehrmacht and the lack of agricultural machines had a very bad effect on the cultivation of the land.... The resentment resulting from this, which is forstered by the Bolshevik agitators, has repeatedly formed expression in the utterance: "Stalin at least left us one cow in the shed, but the Germans even take that"....
....when recruiting for labor allocation in Germany first started, the most incredible rumors, as already mentioned, were spread about the fate of the conscripted persons. When it was even said that the former Red Army soldiers would be put into prisoner of war camps, masses of them left their places of work and went into the woods, where they joined partisan bands. The great number of prisoners of war who died on the march to the prisoner of war camps, the conditions and the high death rate in the camps themselves, had not remained a secret, and the former Red Army soldiers lived in constant fear, therefore, that one day they would have to suffer the same fate.
The prosecution wishes to stress once more that the German troops were deliberately incited to commit those atrocities by the defendants and the other army leaders. There is today hardly a single German general, who, if willing to talk frankly, will not admit that these orders, quite apart from being criminal, were a military blunder of the first magnitude. But blunder or no blunder, there is no difficulty in fixing the primary responsibility for these incredible outrages. That responsibility lies on the German military leaders who issued orders of which the following promulgated by the defendant Hoth on 17 November 1941, is a good example:
.....stronger than ever we carry in us our faith in a turning point of history when the German people have been given the leadership in Europe on the strength of their superior race and their achievements 1111Compassion and softness towards the population would be completely out of place.
... especially the soldiers must understand the necessity of harsh measures against elements alien to our people.
and our kind.. a sound feeling of hatred is not to be suppressed but must be strengthened.
It is only too well known that anti-Semitism was a cardinal point of Nazi ideology. Throughout the early years of the Third Reich, the Jews of Germany were subjected to ever more sever restrictions, persecutions and barbarities, and by 1939 life in Germany was all but intolerable for them. The war presented Himmler and Heydrich with what, to the, was a golden opportunity to carry these doctrines to their logical and terrible conclusion the extermination of all Jews in Germany and in the countries overrun by the Wehrmacht. Deliberate extarmination of Polish Jews began soon after the conquest of that unhappy country. But practical problems soon cropped up. No one, at least for centuries, had ever tried to eradicate an entire national or racial group, and it soon became apparent that such a project was an ambitious undertaking, which required time and money and man power and planning. With the invasion of the Soviet Union, the project was for the first time put on a truly systematic footing.
The triggermen in this gigantic program of slaughter were, for the most part, the members of the so-called "Einsatzgruppen" of the SS. The Einsatzgruppen were special purpose units composed of personnel drawn from the Security Police, Sicherheitsdienst (SD), Gestapo and other elements of the SS. Subordinate formations of the Einsatzgruppen were called Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos. They were formed shortly before the invasion of Russia to accompany the troops for the express purpose of exterminating elements of the population considered "inferior" and "po litically or racially undesirable". The chief victims of this genocidal program were the Jews, and it can be conservatively estimated that nearly one million Russian Jews were slaughtered by the Einsatzgruppen. For instance, a report from the Higher SS and Police Leader for South Russia state that in 1942, in the three-month period between September and December, 363,211 Jews were killed in that area alone. Other "racially undesirable" and "inferior" peoples included the Gypsies. The Einsatzgruppen were also entrusted with the mission of dismantling the existing regional and local governmental agencies, in order to make way for the new governamental administration to be established by the Germans.