The Final Solution: A Genocide by Donald Bloxham

Author:Donald Bloxham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-12-04T10:06:00+00:00

owing to the fact that the Chief of the Order Police invited the Higher SS and Police Leaders to Berlin and commissioned them to take part in Operation Barbarossa without informing me of this in time, I was unfortunately not in a position to provide them with basic instructions about the sphere of jurisdiction of the Security Police and SD.69

The diminution of the RSHA's direct jurisdiction would only become more acute over the summer and autumn as large parts of the east were pacified. Despite Heydrich being named Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in late September, giving him personally a large territory in which he was direct ruler, answerable only to Hitler, as civilian regimes were established in Soviet territory his Einsatzgruppen task forces became stationary and formally subordinate to the regional HSSPFs, as in occupied Poland. For leadership on the `Jewish question', Heydrich and his RSHA would have to look away from the east.

The Wehrmacht partook of the expanding murder. The military provided its agreed logistical support and protection for the Einsatzgruppen. Rear guard units of the army were also involved in massacres of Jews. The army's conception of `preventative violence' led it to strike bloodily against any suspect partisans, but also against `strangers' in rural communities, even if they were simply refugees from the cities or people driven away from their homes by hunger. In the face of unexpectedly vigorous Soviet resistance after the initial Blitzkrieg victories, the Wehrmacht's preparedness to commit atrocities was further enhanced by the increasingly large losses it sustained in battle.7°

One of the legacies of the huge early successes of the invasion, and of further if more limited successes thereafter, was the capture of millions of Soviet soldiers. With their incarceration began one of the major crimes of the war. By the beginning of 1942, z million POWs were dead, most through starvation in open-air prison camps in the USSR and the Generalgouvernement. While for the first few months the provisions were woefully inadequate, and resulted in terrible hunger and disease, the real turning point came in autumn 1941 when the military procurement offices and the agricultural authorities determined to provide only for those inmates capable of work. Even for them the rations were insufficient, but for the others there was no chance of survival. The POWs were accepted as `necessary' mortalities given the need to supply the army and the Reich, and given that other priorities in transport requirements meant most could not be deported westward where there might have been some provision. Aside from the matter of supply, these measures could be enacted simply because of who the POWs were. Not only were they suspected of Bolshevik tendencies, their murder was a strike against the population from which they sprang. In September, the Security Police also began to shoot `politically suspect' POWs who had not already been murdered by the army. The army happily opened its POW camps to the SS men. All Jews were included in the measures.7'

At the same time the POWs seemed an attractive prospect for use in Himmler's economic empire-building further west.

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