‘When one has seen how, dozens of times, Hitler’s most casual observation would bring the over-zealous Field Marshal running to the telephone to let loose all hell, one can easily imagine how a random remark of the dictator’s would worry Keitel into believing that it was his duty on this occasion to give factual expression to the will of the Führer even before the beginning of hostilities. Then he or one of his subordinates would have telephoned OKH and asked how matters stood. If OKH had in fact been asked such a question, they would naturally have regarded it as a prod in the rear and would have got moving at once.’77 Whether there had been a direct command by Hitler, or whether — as Halder presumed — Keitel had once more been ‘working towards the Führer’, the guidelines initiated at the end of March found their way by 12 May into a formal edict.78 For the first time, they laid down in writing explicit orders for the liquidation of functionaries of the Soviet system. The reasoning given was that ‘political functionaries and leaders (commissars)’ represented a danger since they ‘had clearly proved through their previous subversive and seditious work that they reject all European culture, civilization, constitution, and order. They are therefore to be eliminated.’79
This formed part of a set of orders for the conduct of the war in the East (following from the framework for the war which Hitler had defined in his speech of 30 March) that were given out by the High Commands of the Army and Wehrmacht in May and June. Their inspiration was Hitler. That is beyond question. But they were put into operative form by leading officers (and their legal advisers), all avidly striving to implement his wishes,80
The first draft of Hitler’s decree of 13 May 1941, the so-called ‘Barbarossa-Decree’, defining the application of military law in the arena of Operation Barbarossa, was formulated by the legal branch of the Wehrmacht High Command.81 The order removed punishable acts committed by enemy civilians from the jurisdiction of military courts. Guerrilla fighters were to be peremptorily shot. Collective reprisals against whole village communities were ordered in cases where individual perpetrators could not be rapidly identified. Actions by members of the Wehrmacht against civilians would not be automatically subject to disciplinary measures, even if normally coming under the heading of a crime.82
The ‘Commissar Order’ itself, dated
The ready compliance of leading officers with the guidelines established by Hitler for the criminal conduct of the war in the East was unsurprising. It had followed the gradual erosion of the traditional position of power of the armed forces’ — especially the army’s — leadership since 1933. Milestones on the way had been the Röhm affair of 1934 (when the SA’s leaders had been liquidated, in no small measure to placate the army) and, especially, the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis of 1938. The great victory in the West in 1940 had silenced the doubters, underlining the rapidly growing inferiority complex of the armed forces’ leadership towards Hitler. The subordination of the army to a Leader whose political programme had for long served its own ends had turned inexorably into subservience to a Leader whose high-risk gambles were courting disaster and whose ideological goals were implicating the army in outright criminality.
