Vanguard of Genocide: The Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Christopher M. Osmar August 2010 © 2010 Christopher M. Osmar. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Vanguard of Genocide: The Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union by CHRISTOPHER M. OSMAR has been approved for the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences by Norman J.W. Goda Professor of History Benjamin M. Ogles Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT OSMAR, CHRISTOPHER M., M.A., August 2010, History Vanguard of Genocide: The Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union (133 pp.) Director of Thesis: Norman J.W. Goda This thesis examines the involvement of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen in the development of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. The Einsatzgruppen participated in the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, executing Communists, Jews, Roma, and mentally handicapped persons behind German lines. Though no plan for the uninhibited annihilation of all Soviet Jews existed at the outset of the war, the Einsatzgruppen continually included more Jews in the groups targeted for execution in response to a perceived threat from the Soviet Jewish community. This thesis approaches the question of the role of the Einsatzgruppen leaders in the radicalization of the Einsatzgruppen task by analyzing the defense strategies employed by twenty-two Einsatzgruppen officers in The United States of America v. Otto Ohlendorf et. al., one of the twelve subsequent trials held at Nuremberg after World War II. It concludes that unclear orders, fear of Soviet Jews, the brutality of the war, and interaction with superiors drove the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen to expand upon their task until it reached the proportions of a genuine genocide. Approved: ______________________________________________ Norman J.W. Goda Professor of History 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 List of Tables ...................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 6 The Trial and the Defendants ............................................................................................ 21 The Superior Orders Defense and the Creation of the Führer Order Myth ...................... 39 Presumed Self Defense: Justifying Genocide ................................................................... 70 Initiative and Interpretation in the Evolution from Security to Genocide ........................ 94 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 120 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 130 5 LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1: Einsatzgruppen Executions by Month ..............................................................62 Table 2: Defendants in United States of America v. Otto Ohlendorf et al....................126 Table 3: Equivalent SS and U.S. Army Ranks .............................................................128 Table 4: Einsatzgruppen Organization..........................................................................129 6 INTRODUCTION On 22 June 1941, the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, nearly all the Jews living in the German sphere of influence were still alive. Though singled-out from the general population, stripped of their wealth and livelihoods, and concentrated in ghettos or dedicated housing units, the Jews within the Reich and occupied territories had escaped outright destruction. A year later hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews would be dead and the transportation of western Jews to extermination camps in the East would be underway. The turn from exclusion of Jews from civic and economic life to outright annihilation in the months following the opening of the campaign in the Soviet Union marked the most dramatic transformation of anti-Jewish policy during the Third Reich. The vanguards of this radical new approach to the “Jewish Question” were the Einsatzgruppen, task forces composed of personnel from the Gestapo, Criminal Police, Waffen-SS, Order Police, and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD or Security Service). Pushing into the Soviet Union on the heels of the Wehrmacht, the German army, the Einsatzgruppen combed newly occupied cities and villages for Communists, Roma, mentally handicapped persons, and Jews. When discovered by the Einsatzgruppen, members of these groups could expect detention and questioning, often followed by summary execution. By the time the Soviets drove the last German forces out of their territory, the Einsatzgruppen had slaughtered approximately one million people1, nearly as many as died in Auschwitz. 1 Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm estimates that, during the German occupation of the western reaches of the Soviet Union, 2.2 million of the 4.7 Jews living in the occupied territory perished. One third of these deaths are directly attributable to the Einsatzgruppen, and one quarter occurred during the first year of Einsatzgruppen activity. Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die 7 Leading the Einsatzgruppen was a cadre of men who, on the whole, were dedicated members of the Nazi party, well educated, and experienced in working with issues concerning occupied territory. Close inspection of their post-war trial testimonies and the reports they sent to Berlin in the first year of the Soviet campaign reveals that these commanders were integral to the evolution of Jewish policy which occurred in the Soviet Union. Though the Einsatzgruppen‟s original orders called for the execution of all Jews in party or state positions, they did not proscribe uninhibited destruction of entire Jewish communities. Nonetheless, given the power over life and death, many of the Einsatzgruppen leaders chose to incorporate ever more Jews into the executions carried out by their Kommandos. The engine for this process was the widely held anti-Semitic fear of communism personified in the Jew. The Berlin leadership subsequently endorsed and encouraged the expansion of Einsatzgruppen killings, adding further pressure to those Einsatzgruppen leaders who had not yet radicalized the activity of their units. The original plan for Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union, did not include provisions for paramilitary police units tasked with subduing the civilian population.2 When Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operation Staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW or High Command of the Armed Forces), presented Hitler with the Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938-1942, (Stuttgart: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 1981), 621-622. 2 The invasion of the Soviet Union would not be the first campaign to incorporate Einsatzgruppen. Reinhard Heydrich originally established Einsatzkommandos for the 1938 annexation of Austria, but these Einsatzkommandos had little in common with the Einsatzgruppen who would terrorize the Soviet Union. The purpose of the Austrian Einsatzkommandos was to secure government buildings and documents in the newly annexed territory. Einsatzgruppen served a similar function in the 1938 annexation of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, as well as the 1939 occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia. When the war began, Einsatzgruppen accompanied the German military into Poland. It was in Poland that the Einsatzgruppen first received a mandate to execute population groups deemed hostile to Germany. After the Polish campaign, Einsatzgruppen would participate in German western offensives, but with their original directive to capture government buildings and documents. 8 original draft of Directive No. 21 for Operation Barbarossa, Hitler directed him to revise the plan to ensure that the “Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia” would be “eliminated.”3 Chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, bent to Hitler‟s wish in his 13 March 1941 draft of “Instruction on Special Matters Attached to Directive No. 21 (Barbarossa).” It read, in part, “In order to prepare the political and administrative organization the Reichsführer-SS [Heinrich Himmler] has been given by the Führer certain special tasks within the operations zone of the army; these stem from the necessity finally to settle the conflict between two opposing political systems….”4 Having received the official nod from Keitel‟s addendum to Directive No. 21, Himmler turned to the Reichsicherheitshauptamt (RSHA or Reich Security Main Office) and its leader Reinhard Heydrich to organize the formations that would be responsible for carrying Hitler‟s world-ideological struggle into the Soviet Union. An order from Himmler created the RSHA on 27 September 1939 by merging the Main Office Security Police, comprised of the Kripo (Kriminalpolizei, the Criminal Police) and the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police), with the SD, a party intelligence service. Perched at the top of the RSHA, Heydrich embraced the opportunity to involve his organization in the war in the East. “This should finally dispel the false impression,” confided Heydrich to the RSHA director of counterespionage Walter Schellenberg in March of