Even so, the troops were to be directly instructed about the need to deal mercilessly with the political commissars and Jews they encountered. When he met Göring on 26 March, to deal with a number of issues related to the activities of the police in the eastern campaign, Heydrich was told that the army ought to have a three- to four-page set of directions ‘about the danger of the GPU-Organization, the political commissars, Jews etc., so that they would know whom in practice they had to put up against the wall’.66 Göing went on to emphasize to Heydrich that the powers of the Wehrmacht would be limited in the east, and that Himmler would be left a great deal of independent authority. Heydrich laid before Göring his draft proposals for the ‘solution of the Jewish Question’, which the Reich Marshal approved with minor amendments. These evidently foresaw the territorial solution, which had been conceived around the turn of the year, and already been approved by Himmler and Hitler, of deportation of all the European Jews into the wastelands of the Soviet Union, where they would perish.67
During the first three months of 1941, then, the ideological objectives of the attack on the Soviet Union had come sharply into prominence, and had largely been clarified. Most active in pressing forward the initiative had been Reinhard Heydrich, alongside his nominal boss Himmler.68 Göring, the heads of the Four-Year Plan Organization, and the High Command of the Wehrmacht had also been deeply implicated. Hitler had authorized more than initiated. His precise role, as so often, is hidden in the shadows. But he had little need to move into the foreground. His radical views on ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ were known to all. The different policy-objectives of the varying — and usually competing — power-groups in the regime’s leadership could be reconciled by accepting the most radical proposals, from Heydrich and Himmler, on the treatment of the arch-enemy in the East. This, in any case, complied with Hitler’s own ideological impulses. He set the tone once more, therefore, for the barbarism while others preoccupied themselves with its mechanics. And, in the context of the imminent showdown, the barbarism was now adopting forms and dimensions never previously encountered, even in the experimental training-ground of occupied Poland.
By mid-March, discussions between the Security Police and army leadership about the treatment of political commissars were, as we have already noted, well advanced. Here, too, in the fateful advance into the regime’s planned murderous policy in the Soviet Union, the army leaders were complicitous. On 17 March, Halder noted comments made that day by Hitler: ‘The intelligentsia put in by Stalin must be exterminated. The controlling machinery of the Russian Empire must be smashed. In Great Russia force must be used in its most brutal form.’69 Hitler said nothing here of any wider policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’. But the army leadership had two years earlier accepted the policy of annihilating the Polish ruling class. Given the depth of its prevalent anti-Bolshevism, it would have no difficulty in accepting the need for the liquidation of the Bolshevik intelligentsia.70 By 26 March, a secret army order laid down, if in bland terms, the basis of the agreement with the Security Police authorizing ‘executive measures affecting the civilian population’.71 The following day, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch, announced to his commanders of the eastern army: ‘The troops must be clear that the struggle will be carried out from race to race
