But outside the clouds are massing in the valley, and if he waits too long his airplane won’t be able to take off. They escort him to the parade ground, where he has the honor of reviewing the troops. He dispenses with the long speech and dashes past the assembled ranks, hardly even glancing at the gang of assassins chosen to go and exterminate subhumans in the East. There are nearly three thousand of them and they are turned out impeccably. Heydrich dives into the plane that idles at the end of the runway. It takes off just before the storm breaks. In the sudden downpour, the troops of the four Einsatzgruppen start to march.
In Berlin, there is no round table and no black magic. The atmosphere is bureaucratic, and Heydrich studiously writes his directives. Göring has asked him to keep them short and simple. On July 2, 1941, two weeks after the launch of Barbarossa, the following note is sent to SS commanders behind the front line:
“To be executed: all Komintern functionaries, Party functionaries, people’s commissars, Jews occupying positions in the Party or the State, other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, irregular soldiers, murderers, agitators).”
Simple indeed, but also quite cautious—curiously so. Why specify that Jews occupying positions in the Party or the State should be executed when all such functionaries were to be executed anyway, Jewish or otherwise? Heydrich didn’t know then how ordinary soldiers would react to the demands of his Einsatzgruppen. It’s true that the famous directive signed by Keitel on June 6, 1941, and thus approved by the Wehrmacht, authorizes the massacres, but officially this is limited to political enemies. In other words, Soviet Jews are targeted only because of their politics. The redundant meaning in this note is like a trace of one final scruple. Naturally, if the local people want to organize pogroms, that will be discreetly encouraged. But at the beginning of July, there is still no question of openly pursuing the extermination of Jews simply because they are Jews.
Two weeks later, swept along by the euphoria of their victories, this embarrassment will have disappeared. While the Wehrmacht routs the Red Army on all fronts, while the invasion progresses even more easily than the most optimistic forecasts, and while 300,000 Soviet soldiers are taken prisoner, Heydrich rewrites his directive. The main points are reprised, the list lengthened, and a few details added (former Red Army commissars are now included, for instance). And finally Heydrich replaces “Jews occupying positions in the Party or the State” with “all the Jews.”
Hauptmann Heydrich is on board a Messerschmitt 109 whose cabin is embossed with the initials