68. In a paper as yet unpublished, ‘From Barbarossa to Wannsee. The Role of Reinhard Heydrich’, Eberhard Jäckel (to whom I am most grateful for the opportunity to consult it) puts a compelling case for viewing Heydrich, not Himmler (as does Richard Breitman in his The Architect of Genocide), as the chief ‘architect’ of the Final Solution.
69. Halder KTB, ii.320 (17 March 1941); trans. Halder Diary, 339.
70. Streit, 31.
71. Warlimont, 158–60; Anatomie des SS-Staates, ii.172, 202–3 (Doc.2). Negotiations involving the General-Quartermaster Eduard Wagner and the SS leadership about the arrangements for the ‘special commission’ of the Reichsführer-SS in the east were under way in early March (Anatomie, ii.171–2). According to Walter Schellenberg, he himself was involved in deliberations with Wagner, and in turning them into ‘an expression of the Führer’s will’ (Schellenberg, 92; see Streit, 31–2 and 310 n.19 (for contradictions in Schellenberg’s testimony)). Wagner’s meeting with Heydrich turned upon establishing a demarcation line between police and military spheres of responsibility for the liquidation of captured political commissars, and was prompted by the Wehrmacht’s concern that Heydrich would greatly widen the scope of his own powers (Jörg Friedrich, Das Gesetz des Krieges. Das deutsche Heer in Rußland 1941–1945. Der Prozeß gegen das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Munich/Zurich, 2nd edn, 1995, 289–92).
72. DRZW, iv.416–17.
73. Halder KTB, ii.335–7 (30 March 1941); trans. Halder Diary, 345–6. According to Halder’s post-war testimony, Hitler justified his ideological warfare in the East by alluding to the fact that the USSR had not signed the Geneva Convention of 27 July 1928 relating to the treatment of prisoners-of-war. (IMG, vii.396–7 (statement by Halder on 31 October 1945). See also Anatomie, ii.174; and Streit, 36.)
74. IMG, xx.635 (testimony by Brauchitsch on 9 August 1946); see also Leach, 153; and Streit, 35.
75. Warlimont, 162. His explanation, that they had not followed Hitler’s diatribe or grasped the meaning of what he was saying, is scarcely credible.
76. Cit. Domarus, 1683, n.134.
77. Cit. Anatomie, ii.175–6; trans., Anatomy of the SS State, London, 1968, 516.
78. Anatomie, ii.176, 211–12.
79. Anatomie, ii.211.
80. See Jürgen Förster, ‘The German Army and the Ideological War against the Soviet Union’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld (ed.), The Policies of Genocide. Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany, London, 1986, 15–29, here 17. See also Streit, ch.III; Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Zeit der Indoktrination, Hamburg, 1969, 390–411; and Helmut Krausnick, ‘Kommissarbefehl und “Gerichtsbarkeitserlaß Barbarossa” in neuer Sicht’, VfZ, 25 (1977), 682–738, especially 717ff, 737.
81. Förster, ‘German Army’, 19; Streit, 36ff
82. Anatomie, ii.178–9, 215–18.
83. Förster, ‘German Army’, 19. See, on its genesis, Streit, 44–9.
84. Anatomie, ii.225–7; trans., Anatomy of the SS State, 532. (Italics in the original.)
85. Streit, 50–51.
86. Engel, 102–3 (10 May 1941); Anatomie, ii.177; DRZW, iv.446; Bodo Scheurig, Henning von Tresckow. Ein Preusse gegen Hitler, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin, 1987, 113–14. On reports of the order being implemented by different units, see Krausnick, ‘Kommissarbefehl’, 733–6. According to the most meticulous, if still provisional, statistical analysis yet made, between a half and two-thirds of front divisions implemented the order. (Detlef Siebert, ‘Die Durchführung des Kommissarbefehls in den Frontverbänden des Heeres. Eine quantifierende Auswertung der For schung’. I am most grateful to Detlef Siebert for providing me with a copy of this as yet unpublished paper.)
87. Anatomie, ii.177.
88. Leach, 154–5. It has been surmised, however, with some justification that Bock’s objections were primarily levelled against the decree limiting military jurisdiction, issued a day after the decree on treatment of ‘political functionaries’ (Anatomie, ii.174–5).
89. DRZW, iv. 24, 446. For Küchler’s support of ‘severe measures undertaken’ in Poland (where he had nonetheless criticized the brutality of the SS) in the interests of a ‘final völkisch solution’ of ‘an ethnic struggle raging for centuries on the eastern border’, see Streit, 55–6.
