The Fallen Realms

Acts of the Fallen

In the spring of 1941 a police academy in Pretzsch, a town on the

Elbe River about fifty miles southwest of Berlin, became the site

of a sinister assembly. Several thousand men from the ranks of

the SS—the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel, or defense echelon, a police

and security service that answered directly to Adolf Hitler and

operated outside the constraints of German law—were ordered

to report to Pretzsch for training and assignment. They were not

told what their assignment would be, but their commonalities

offered a clue: many of them had served in SS detachments in

Poland, which Germany had invaded and occupied in 1939, and

preference was given to men who spoke Russian.

Assignment to Pretzsch emptied the SS leadership school in

Berlin-Charlottenburg and depleted the professional examination

course of an SS criminal division. It drew in lower-and

middle-ranking officers of the Security Police (the Gestapo and

the criminal police), some of them passed on gratefully by their

home regiments because they were considered too wild. The

Waffen-SS, the small but growing SS army, contributed enlisted

men. High-ranking bureaucrats within the shadowy Reich Security

*

Main Office, an internal SS security agency, were posted to

Pretzsch as well. They had been handpicked for leadership

*The Reichssicherheitshauptampt, abbreviated RSHA.

Reinhard Heydrich, the head

of the RSHA and the second most powerful man in the SS, and

his superior Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS.

Most ofthese handpicked leaders were lawyers, and a few were physicians or educators; most had earned doctoral degrees. Among the more exotic specimens were Otto Ohlendorf, a handsome but argumentative young economist who had fallen into disfavor with Himmler; Paul Blobel, a rawboned, highstrung, frequently drunken architect; Arthur Nebe, a former vice squad detective and Gestapo head who had enthusiastically volunteered; and Karl Jäger, a brutal fifty-three-year-old secret police commander. A reserve battalion of the regular German Order Police (uniformed urban, rural and municipal police) completed the Pretzsch roster. Soon the men learned that they would be assigned to an Einsatzgruppe—a task force. Einsatz units—groups and commandos—had followed the German army into Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland when Germany had invaded those countries successively in 1938 and 1939. Einsatzgruppen secured occupied territories in advance of civilian administrators. The confiscated weapons and gathered incriminating documents, tracked down and arrested people the SS considered politically unreliable—and systematically murdered the occupied country’spolitical, educational, religious and intellectual leadership. Since Germany had concluded a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939, many of the candidates at Pretzsch assumed they would be assigned to follow the Wehrmacht into England. Some of them had previously trained to just that end. By the spring of 1941, Poland had already been decapitated. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later his munitions and armament minister, remembered that on the night of 21 August 1939, when news of Josef Stalin’s agreement to the nonaggression pact had settled Hitler’s decision to invade Poland, the Führer and his entourage had drifted out onto the terrace of his mountain retreat on the Obersalzberg to watch a rare display of northern lights vermilioning the mountain across the valley. “The last act of Götterdämmerung could not have been more effectively staged,”

Speer writes. “The same red light bathed our faces and our hands. The display produced a curiously pensive mood among us. Abruptly turning to one of his military adjutants, Hitler said: ‘Looks like a great deal of blood. This time we won’t bring it off without violence.’” The next day the Führer belabored the generals and field marshals of the Wehrmacht for hours with an impassioned harangue. He told them Germany needed room to expand and as a buffer against the Russians. Therefore he meant not merely

to occupy Poland but also to destroy it; in its place a new German eastern frontier would arise. “The idea of treating war as anything other than the harshest means of settling questions of very existence is ridiculous,” he challenged the army commanders. “Every war costs blood, and the smell of blood arouses in man all the instincts which have lain within us since the beginning of the world: deeds of violence, the intoxication of murder, and many other things. Everything else is empty babble. A humane war exists only in bloodless brains.” A field marshal who attended the conference reported Hitler warning them “that he would proceed against the Poles after the end of the campaign with relentless vigor. Things would happen which would not be to the taste of the German generals.” The field marshal understood the warning to mean “the destruction of the Polish intelligentsia, in particular the priesthood, by the SS.” When Germany had attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, beginning the Second World War in Europe, five Einsatzgruppen that Heydrich had organized followed behind the five invading Wehrmacht armies, each group subdivided into four Einsatzkommandos of 100 to 150 men. These advance cadres were augmented with Order Police battalions, Totenkopf concentration-camp guard regiments and Waffen-SS, producing a combined SS force approaching twenty thousand men. The commander of one of the Polish Einsatzgruppen in 1939, Bruno Streckenbach, would become the head of SS personnel responsible for recruiting the new Einsatzgruppen forming at Pretzsch in May 1941. Himmler’s SS was famously thorough. Heydrich, a tall, horse-faced, sneering former naval officer whom even his own subordinates called “the blond beast,” had started his career organizing elaborate card indexes on Nazi Party enemies, a system Hitler had instituted in the early days of the party to keep tabs on his own supporters. If the Einsatzgruppen in Poland followed standard SS practice, the lists Heydrich’s staff compiled of Polish enemies would serve them well. An SS officer on a later mission to the Caucasus describes how the system worked: As a group leader I was sent supplementary documentation. By far the most valuable was a slim little book, part of a limited, numbered edition, which I never let out of my sight. The typeface was tiny, I remember, and the paper was extra thin, in order to pack the most information into the smallest possible space…. It consisted of a series of lists, including the names of every active member of the Communist party in the Caucasus, all the non party intelligentsia, and listings of scholars, teachers, writers and journalists, priests, public officials, upwardly mobile peasants, and the most prominent industrialists and bankers. [It contained] addresses andtelephone numbers…. And that wasn’t all. There were additional listings of relatives and friends, in case any subversive scum tried to hide, plus physical descriptions, and in some cases photographs. You can imagine what the size of that book would have been if it had been printed normally. All these categories of people in Poland, and the Polish nobility as well, were marked for murder. During the first weeks after the invasion, while the Wehrmacht still controlled the occupied areas, a historian of the Polish experience summarizes, “531 towns and villages were burned; the provinces of Lodz and Warsaw suffered the heaviest losses. Various branches of the army and police [i.e., Himmler’s legions] carried out 714 [mass] executions, which took the lives of 16,376 people, most of whom were Polish Christians. The Wehrmacht committed approximately 60 percent of these crimes, with the police responsible for the remainder.” The historian cites an Englishwoman’s eyewitness account of executions in the Polish town of Bydgoszcz: The first victims of the campaign were a number of Boy Scouts, from twelve to sixteen years of age, who were set up in the marketplace against a wall and shot. No reason was given. A devoted priest who rushed to administer the Last Sacrament was shot too. He received five wounds. A Pole said afterwards that the sight of those children lying dead was the most piteous of all the horrors he saw. That week the murders continued. Thirty-four of the leading tradespeople and merchants of the town were shot, and many other leading citizens. The square was surrounded by troops with machine-guns. Three weeks after invading Poland, the Wehrmacht washed its hands of further responsibility for the decapitation, leaving the field to the specialists of the SS. Heydrich met with Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner to agree on an SS “cleanup once and for all” of “Jews, intelligentsia, clergy, nobility.” Heydrich then wrote the Einsatzgruppen commanders specifically concerning the “Jewish question in the occupied territory.” Cautioning strict secrecy, he distinguished between “the ultimate aim (which will take some time [to accomplish]),” and “interim measures (which can be carried out within a shorter period of time).” In the short term, Jews living in territories in western Poland scheduled to be annexed to Germany were to be “cleared” by shipping them eastward; Jews in the remainder of Poland were to be concentrated

into ghettos in towns with good railroad connections. Heydrich’s

letter did not specify what measures the “ultimate aim” would

require. Long after the war, when Adolf Eichmann saw this 1939

document, he concluded that it embodied the “basic conception”

of “the order concerning the physical extermination of the Jews”

of the occupied territories. Large numbers of Polish Jews were

murdered in any case, because they were politically suspect for

reasons other than their religion; at this early point in time,

Heydrich was basically assigning his Einsatzgruppen the7 Masters of Death

transitional task of bringing the Jewish population of Poland

under SS control.

An incident in the town of Wloclawek during the last week of

September was unusual only in its conflict between authorities.

A Totenkopf unit had arrested eight hundred Jewish men. Some

of them had been “auf der Flucht erschossen”—“shot while trying

to escape”—a standard euphemism for extrajudicial killing in the

concentration camps guarded by Totenkopf regiments. The SS

unit leader had planned to arrest every Jewish male in town, but

the local Wehrmacht commander had overruled him. “They will

all be shot in any case,” the SS leader had countered. In his

innocence the commander had responded, “The Führer can hardly

intend us to shoot all the Jews!” Warsaw fell on 28 September

1939, and the day before, Heydrich could already report that “of

the Polish leadership, there remained in the occupied area at most

3 percent.”

SS brutality in Poland descended to unadorned slaughter in

October, when Himmler extended executions to the mentally and

physically disabled. The so-called euthanasia program was just

beginning in Germany, to be directed initially against children,

but the first SS killings preceded any euthanasia murders. The

SS’s victims were German, removed from hospitals and nursing

homes in the Prussian province of Pomerania and transported

by train across the border into occupied Poland. The euthanasia

program in Germany had to proceed by stealth, but occupied

territory was no-man’s-land, beyond German law and public

scrutiny. Just as it would be easier to murder Jews in the

subjugated lands east of Germany, so it was easier to murder the

disabled there, including German citizens.

A large SS regiment had been resident in the Free City of Danzig

before the war, commanded by SS Sturmbannführer Kurt

Eimann. Eimann recruited several thousand members of the

regiment into an auxiliary police unit that bore his name. Late in

October 1939, the Pomeranian disabled were crowded into cattle

cars and shipped into occupied Poland. The Eimann Battalion met the train at the railroad station in the town of Neustadt. In a nearby forest, Polish political prisoners labored to dig killing

pits to serve as mass graves. Trucks delivered the disabled to the

forest. The first victim was a woman about fifty years old; Eimann

personally dispatched her with a Genickschuss, a shot in the neck

from behind at the point where the spinal cord enters the skull.

Historian Henry Friedlander quotes from postwar trial testimony:

“In front of the pit [Eimann] shot the woman through the base

of the skull. The woman, who had walked in front of him without

suspecting anything, was instantaneously killed and fell into the

pit.” During November 1939, further victims were transported

from Danzig, filling the Neustadt pits with some 3,500 bodies.

To eliminate witnesses, Eimann had the political prisoners who

dug the pits murdered and the pits covered with dirt.

Friedlander found that essentially all the disabled in the Polish

districts annexed to the Third Reich were shot into mass graves:

1,172 psychiatric patients in Tiegenhof beginning on 7 December

1939, for example; 420 psychiatric patients from the hospital in

*

Chelm, near Lublin, on 12 January 1940. A Sonderkommando

formed of German security police from Posen and Lodz by an

Einsatzgruppe leader, Herbert Lange, used moving vans fitted

with tanks of pure carbon monoxide to murder patients

throughout a former Polish province that was annexed to

Germany as Wartheland. “After killing handicapped patients in

1940,” Friedlander adds, “the [Lange commando] possibly also

killed Jews in the small villages of the Wartheland with these early

gas vans.”“Little by little we were taught all these things,”

Eichmann would explain without apology. “We grew into them.”

A secret annex to Germany’s nonaggression pact with the Soviet

Union had divided Poland between the two powers. To claim

Russia’s share of the spoils, the Red Army had invaded Poland

from the east on 17 September 1939. Hitler assigned Himmler

*Sondermeans “special.”

9 Masters of Death

the work of expelling eastward more than eight million

non-Germans from what had been western Poland and moving

ethnic Germans westward out of the Soviet-occupied Baltic states

to settle in their place. To launch the grandiose winnowing,

Himmler ordered Eichmann to organize transportation for a half

million Jews and another half million Gentile Poles. “I had to set

up guidelines for implementation,” Eichmann recalled, “because

those were the Reichsführer’s orders. For instance, he said, ‘No

one is to take any more with him than the Germans who were

driven out by the French.’ After the First World War, he meant,

from Alsace-Lorraine, or later from the Rhineland and the Ruhr.

I had to find out; at that time, fifty kilos of luggage were allowed

[per person].” Himmler issued his expulsion order on 30 October

1939, setting February 1940 as a deadline. After 15 November

1939, the entire railway network of the area of occupied Poland

that the Germans had named the General Government— central

and southern Poland—was reserved for resettlement transports.

Trainloads of Jewish and Gentile Poles began moving east in

December. The victims were dumped in the General Government

in the middle of Polish winter with no provision for food or

shelter. An uncounted number died of exposure or starved, results

that led the newly appointed and histrionic head of the General

Government, Hans Frank, formerly Hitler’s personal lawyer, to

declare in a public speech, “What a pleasure, finally to be able to

tackle the Jewish race physically. The more that die, the better.”

Himmler himself alluded to the devastating consequences of

resettlement in a speech the following autumn to one of his

battalions, bragging that Poland had been the place

where, in a temperature forty degrees below zero, we had to drag

away thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of

thousands—where we had to have the hardness—you should

listen to this, but forget it again at once—to shoot thousands of

leading Poles, where we had to have the hardness, otherwise it

would have rebounded on us later. In many cases it is much easier

to go into battle with a company of infantry than it is to suppress

an obstructive population of low culture or to carry out executions

or drag people away.

“It’s enough to make your hair stand up,” the Nazi propagandist

Hans Fritzsche would remark after the war, “the childish way

these philosophic dilettantes played around with populations as

if they were playing checkers.”

The transfer of populations foundered as the demands of war

production exposed the recklessness of deporting useful

manpower, but mass executions of Poles and Jews continued in

the General Government; more than one hundred such executions

were carried out in the last months of 1939, accounting for at

least six thousand lives.

Although the Wehrmacht had conducted mass executions while

it was still fighting to subdue Poland, before the fall of Warsaw,

those slaughters in its eyes had been disciplined and justified. In

contrast, the army leadership was disturbed by the excesses of the

Einsatzgruppen in Poland. It was not the victims’ suffering that

disturbed the military leaders; they were hardly concerned with

the victims. Rather, they were concerned with arousing Polish

resistance and with the effect of the killings on the character and

morale not only of Wehrmacht soldiers but even of the German

nation. The most detailed assessment that survives, a

memorandum by Eastern Territories Commander Johannes

Blaskowitz, is bluntly prophetic:

It is wholly misguided to slaughter a few ten thousand Jews and

Poles as is happening at the moment; for this will neither destroy

the idea of a Polish state in the eyes of the mass of the population,

nor do away with the Jews. On the contrary, the way in which the

slaughter is being carried out is extremely damaging, complicates

the problems and makes them much more dangerous than they

would have been if premeditated and purposeful action were

taken….

It is hard to imagine there can be more effective material in the

entire world than that which is being delivered into the hands of

enemy propaganda….

The effects on the Wehrmacht hardly need to be mentioned.

It is forced passively to stand by and watch these crimes being

committed….

The worst damage affecting Germans which has developed as

a result of the present conditions, however, is the tremendous

brutalization and moral depravity which is spreading rapidly

among precious German manpower like an epidemic.

If high officials of the SS and the police demand and openly

praise acts of violence and brutality, then before long only the

brutal will rule. It is surprising how quickly such people join forces

with those of weak character in order, as is currently happening

in Poland, to give rein to their bestial and pathological instincts….

They clearly feel they are being given official authorization and

that they are thus justified to commit any kind of cruel act.

Descriptions of cruel deportations and drunken massacres were

couriered back to Berlin and compiled into a dossier of

accusations against the SS, and on 24 January 1940 Himmler took

tea with Walther von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief East,

to negotiate a truce.

No record of the meeting survives, but the excuses Himmler

offered von Brauchitsch probably crept into a speech he gave a

few weeks later:

Obviously it is possible in the east with the trains—but not only

the evacuation trains—that a train freezes up and the people freeze.

That is possible, that happens unfortunately with Germans as well.

You simply cannot do anything to prevent it if they travel from

Lodz to Warsaw and the train remains standing ten hours on the

track. You cannot blame the train or anyone. That is just the

climate. It is regrettable for Germans, it is regrettable for Poles, if

you like it is even regrettable for Jews—if anyone wants to pity

them. But it is neither intended, nor is it preventable. I consider

it wrong to make a great Lamentoabout it.

To those who said it was cruel to march Poles off from their

houses with little notice, Himmler went on, “may I kindly remind

them that in 1919 our Germans were driven on a punishment

trek across the bridges with thirty kilograms of luggage…. We

have really no need to be crueller [than the French occupation

forces were]; however, we do not need either to play the great,

wild, dumb German here. Therefore we do not need to get excited

about it.”

Discipline was the issue, Himmler agreed, not excess:

I will in no way deny that in the East—it is very well known to

me—this or that excess occurred, where there was boozing, where

people were shot drunkenly, people who would perhaps have been

among those shot in any case, who however should not have been

shot by people boozing—where looting occurred in the whole

East, at times in a way, I must say, such as I had not imagined

possible, by every possible office, by all possible people in all

possible uniforms. But one does not excite oneself unnecessarily

over that. In my view one has to grasp the nettle…. The question

is merely whether you shoulder the load or you don’t shoulder

the load.

But excuses were unlikely to placate a Wehrmacht commander

in chief, and Himmler went on to counter the army’s criticism

by framing the SS actions as antiresistance measures and by

invoking superior authority. He sketched this perspective in notes

in his own hand for a speech he made in March 1940 to the

supreme army commanders: “Executions of all potential leaders

of resistance. Very hard, but necessary. Have seen to it

personally…. No underhand cruelties…. Severe penalties when

necessary…. Dirty linen to be washed at home…. We must stay

hard, our responsibility to God…. A million workslaves and how

to deal with them.” And the appeal to authority, reported by an

aide of von Brauchitsch’s who was present at the meeting: “With

wagging pincenez and a dark expression on his common face

[Himmler] had said he had been charged by the Führer to take

care that the Poles could not rise again. Therefore extermination

policy.”

The three-week course at Pretzsch in June 1941 involved only

minimal training. Bruno Streckenbach, one man remembered,

told the new Einsatzgruppen “that this was a war assignment

which would be concluded by December at the latest.” Another

recalled hearing from Stahlecker, the newly appointed chief of

Einsatzgruppe A, that “we would be putting down resistance

behind the troop lines, protecting and pacifying the rear army

area (the word ‘pacify’ was used very frequently) and hence

keeping the area behind the front clear…. Stahlecker also told us

we would have to conquer our weaker selves and that what was

needed were tough men who understood how to carry out orders.

He also said to us that anyone who thought that he would not be

able to withstand the stresses and psychological strains that lay

ahead could report to him immediately afterwards.” The men sat

through familiar lectures on honor and duty and the subhuman

nature of the people they would be asked to corral. They

conducted “terrain exercises,” which one of them dismissed as

“games of hide and seek.” The military training, another

remembered, “was very brief. It was limited to firing of weapons.

The men and the NCOs had the opportunity to go on a range

and fire their weapons. At that time no intensive military training

was possible, because the physical condition of the men didn’t

permit this in most cases;…all the men intended to be sent to an

Einsatzwere inoculated, and the results of this inoculation brought

fever and weakness in its wake, so that military training was not

possible.” Nor, evidently, was it necessary for accomplishing the

work the Einsatzgruppen would do.

Only near the end of their time in Pretzsch, a few days before

they would march, did the men learn where they were going:

Russia. The Third Reich was preparing a surprise attack against

the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, scheduled to begin on

22 June 1941. Behind the Wehrmacht as it invaded the U.S.S.R.

from the west would follow four Einsatzgruppen. Einsatzgruppe

*

A, under forty-year-old SS-Brigadeführer Stahlecker, attached

to Army Group North, would operate in the former Baltic states

of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Einsatzgruppe B, under

forty-six-year-old SS-Brigadeführer Arthur Nebe, attached to

Army Group Center, would “pacify” Byelorussia. Einsatzgruppe

*Brigadier General.

C, under forty-nine-year-old SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Otto Rasch,

attached to Army Group South, would sweep northern and central

Ukraine. Einsatzgruppe D, under thirty-four-year-old

SS-Standartenführer

†

Otto Ohlendorf, attached to Eleventh Army,

would operate in southwestern Ukraine (Bessarabia), southern

Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus.

The four task forces were further subdivided into a total of

sixteen Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos, the real

operational units of the formations, answerable to the task force

leaders but functionally independent. Blobel, for example, led

Sonderkommando 4a of Rasch’s Einsatzgruppe C, operating

through the Ukraine to Kiev and beyond; Jäger, the brutal,

walrus-mustached secret policeman, led Einsatzkommando 3 of

Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe A, operating throughout Lithuania.

Einsatzgruppe A, the largest of the four task forces, counted

990 personnel (divided into two Sonderkommandos and two

Einsatzkommandos), including 340 Waffen-SS, 172 motorcycle

riders, 18 administrators, 35 Security Service (SD) personnel, 41

Criminal Police, 89 State Police, 87 Auxiliary Police, 133 Order

Police, 13 female secretaries and clerks, 51 interpreters, 3 teletype

operators and 8 radio operators. Ohlendorf, whose Einsatzgruppe

D, with a roll call of about 500, was the smallest of the four (but

was subdivided into four Sonderkommandos and one

Einsatzkommando), would testify that his task force “had 180

vehicles…. This large number of [trucks] shows that the

Einsatzgruppewas fully motorized. The Waffen-SS…were

equipped with automatic rifles. The others either had rifles or

automatic rifles. I believe that is about the total equipment.” The

fact that the Einsatzgruppen were fully motorized is significant:

the Wehrmacht itself was only partly motorized in June 1941,

with much of its artillery still horse-drawn. Himmler intended

his Einsatzgruppen to succeed and made sure the units were

properly outfitted. No detailed record of Einsatzgruppen equipment has survived,

but a military historian, French L. MacLean, offers a speculative

†Colonel.

15 Masters of Death

list derived from standard German military practice. Basing his

estimates on Einsatzgruppe A, MacLean puts the total number

of vehicles per group at about 160, of which sixteen would have

been motorcycles, some with sidecars. Another sixteen would

have been staff cars, MacLean estimates, “leaving some 128 as

cargo and troop-carrying trucks—most likely Opel ‘Blitz’ 3-ton

types…. Some 63 trucks would have been used to transport

Einsatzgruppesoldiers; 50 others would have been remaining to

haul required supplies.”

The four Einsatzkommandos of Einsatzgruppe A and the

headquarters staff would have been issued field radios and possibly

teletype machines for communication; radio messages that the

British intercepted provide documentary evidence of

Einsatzgruppen crimes. For electricity, MacLean notes, the units

would each have had at least one mobile generator, “most

commonly a large 507-pound two-cylinder variety.” There is no

mention among eyewitness accounts of earth-moving equipment

such as bulldozers; MacLean issues each Einsatzkommando at

least forty shovels for digging mass graves, and possibly surveying

equipment to record sites. “Each group would have also had a

large field range mounted on one of the trucks to provide food

for the troops. All elements would have additionally carried their

own ammunition, cold-weather heating stoves, medium-size

tents, portable field desks and chairs, spare parts for vehicles, light

sets, cooking and serving utensils, arms room supplies, a few days’

worth of rations and water, gas and petroleum products for the

vehicles, and sundry other items required for living in the field.”

Weapons, MacLean proposes, would have included Luger, Mauser

Model 1910 and Walther P-38 pistols for officers and Mauser Kar

98b rifles for enlisted men. Machine pistols (“Bergmann 9mm

Model 35/Is or MP 38s”) were commonly used by both officers

and enlisted men. Machine guns would control perimeters; hand

grenades would flush victims from hideouts. There was no need

for large arms, MacLean concludes: “The mission of the

Einsatzkommando, after all, was execution, not combat.”

This time around, the Reichsführer-SS wanted no Wehrmacht

complaints about his Einsatzgruppen operations; with Hitler’s

support he saw to it that the military signed off in advance. Hitler

himself dictated the necessary paragraph in the formal

“Instructions on Special Matters Attached to Directive No. 21

(Barbarossa),” which Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the

Armed Forces High Command, issued on 13 March 1941:

Within the field of operations of the army, in order to prepare

the political and administrative organization, the Reichsführer-SS

assumes on behalf of the Führer special tasks which arise from

the necessity finally to settle the conflict between two opposing

political systems. Within the framework of these duties the

Reichsführer-SSacts independently and on his own responsibility.

The “two opposing political systems” were Bolshevism, which

Hitler and his Nazi leadership believed to be a Jewish conspiracy,

and National Socialism.

Negotiating the details of this order, Army Quartermaster

Wagner and Heydrich agreed on 26 March 1941 that Heydrich’s

task forces were “authorized within the frame of their assignment

to carry out on their own responsibility executive measures

concerning the civilian population.”“Special tasks” and “executive

measures” were SS euphemisms for mass murder. By ceding to

  the killings