1 Genocide and the Wehrmacht Historical accounts of Nazi crimes often focus on the actions of the Heinrich Himmler

and the SS. This narrow point of view, however, neglects the important role that the Wehrmacht fulfilled not only in facilitating the actions of the SS, but in actively advancing Adolf Hitlers genocidal worldview. Through the development and implementation of the Hunger Plan, utter disregard for the lives of prisoners of war, and direct orders from the high command targeting Jews and coordinating with the SS, the Wehrmacht not only allowed but was complicit in the Nazi crimes of genocide and mass murder. On May 2, 1941, several weeks before the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, a meeting of the Staatssekratre adopted a plan designed by Herbert Backe for the administration of food in the soon to be occupied areas of the Soviet Union.1 The plan was designed to expropriate food from occupied territories in order to feed not only the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, but civilians in Germany as well. Appropriately now known as the Hunger Plan, the document also recognized that, x million people will doubtlessly starve, if that which is necessary for us is extracted from the land; later estimates put the number at 30 million people.2 While the Hunger Plan was developed by Backe, a representative of the Reich Ministry for Food, several senior members of the Wehrmacht, notably General Georg Thomas and LietenantGeneral Dr. Wilhelm Schubert, were present at the meeting.3 Thomas and Schubert represented the Economic Command Staff East, which was responsible for developing and enforcing the economic policy for occupied Soviet territories.4 Their presence at the meeting demonstrates that senior Wehrmacht officials were not only aware of Backes plan, but approved of it. Approval, however, means less without action. While in reality, the Wehrmacht was never able to fully implement the Hunger Plan, in Leningrad, where two German armies were available to enforce a blockade, at least 600,000 Soviet civilians died of starvation.5

2 The effects of the Hunger Plan were not only limited to civilians though. On the Eastern Front, the lack of food was a major factor in Wehrmacht abuse of Soviet prisoners of war. Of the three million Soviet POWs who died in German captivity, the vast majority died of starvation.6 The food shortages deliberately caused by senior Wehrmacht officers were compounded by simple vindictiveness. When local civilians offered to help feed starving POWs, the German army refused their offers and banned any future attempt to do so.7 The same lack of concern for human life extended to the construction of POW camps, which were often less camps than they were fields enclosed with barbed wire.8 Official numbers state that 58 percent of the 5.7 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht died before the end of the war.9 In reality, the true number was likely much higher.10 Many Soviet soldiers, however, did not even have the chance to become POWs. Specific orders from Wehrmacht high command, which will be discussed further below, in addition to widely accepted Nazi racial beliefs, resulted in little mercy for Soviet soldiers attempting to surrender during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa.11 Wehrmacht abuse of POWs, moreover, was not confined to the Eastern Front. While Wehrmacht treatment of Western POWs was usually drastically better than that given to their Soviet counterparts, certain groups were also targeted for abuse and murder based on Nazi racial theories. When the French Army surrendered in June 1940, the Wehrmacht took thousands of Tirailleurs Sngalais, West African colonial troops, as prisoners. German soldiersoccasionally with the encouragement of their officersarbitrarily murdered an estimated three thousand of these men in only two months.12 As indicated above, the most searing indictment of Wehrmacht complicity in Nazi crimes comes from the orders issued by Wehrmact generals themselves, which legitimized the violence and brutality of their soldiers. The general guidelines issued for Operation Barbarossa provide insight into how the Wehrmacht understood its duties. The guidelines ordered, ruthless and energetic

3 action against Bolshevik agitators, irregulars, saboteurs, Jews and total elimination of active and passive resisitance.13 Destruction of active resistance, in other words actually defeating the Red Army, is the second to last task on the list. Later in the war, the Wehrmacht and the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, which administered the death camps, fought bitterly over priority for supplies only to be told that they were of equal importance; the military actions of the Wehrmacht were simply the vehicle for the enforcement of Hitlers worldview.14 The inclusion of Jews in a category of their own further demonstrates this point. By setting Jews aside as targets alongside armed, military objectives, the orders for Operation Barbarossa built on precedence established during the occupation of Poland; they gave the Wehrmacht authority to kill any Jews its soldiers encountered, civilian or not.15 Individual generals, moreover, further elaborated on the racial nature of their actions. Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch, Commander in Chief of the Army, for example, called the invasion, the struggle against World Jewry, which [is striving] to arouse all the peoples of the world against Germany.16 General Erich Hoepners May 2, 1941 marching orders provide a similar example. Hoepner described the war against Russia as, a fundamental part of the German peoples struggle for existence, the main threat to which was Jewish Bolshevism.17 Other generals issuing such orders included Walter von Reichenau, Erich von Manstein, and Karl-Heinrich von Stlpnagel.18 Bolshevism itself was another strong area of concern for the Wehrmacht. The general guidelines for Operation Barbarossa were followed by another order from Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command, which made use of the guidelines provisions against Bolshevik agitators. On June 6, 1941, Keitel issued what is now known as the Commissar Order; this order required that any Soviet commissar, a political officer attached to Red Army units, be summarily executed upon being taken prisoner.19 No generals raised any

4 objection to this order and very few failed to implement it.20 Even if, however, commissars were not shot on sight, the Wehrmacht often turned them over to the SS for special treatment.21 Cooperating with the SS, indeed, came from direct orders as well. A meeting between Army Quartermaster-General Horst Wagner and Reinhard Heydrich resulted in an order allowing the SS Einsatzgruppen and the Order Police to operate unimpeded behind the front lines.22 These two groups were tasked with carrying out the commissar order in addition to targeting Jews and Gypsies for murder. They relied on the Wehrmacht for provisions, intelligence, and, occasionally, protection. For instance, when army chaplains attempted to intervene in the murder of approximately ninety Jewish children, Field Marshal Gerd von Runstedt, commander of Army Group South, sided with the SS, ordering they show no mercy.23 It was only with the aid and assistance of the Wehrmacht that the SS was able to operate so successfully. General Franz Halder summarized the way the Wehrmacht would function during Operation Barbarossa well when he said, we must abandon the standpoint of soldierly comradeship. The Communist is first and last no comrade. This is a war of annihilation.24 Combined with the overarching focus on Jews, it is easy to conclude that the Wehrmacht officer corps shared Hitlers worldview and sought to advance it through their actions. The prevalence of these attitudes explains why the Wehrmacht devoted time, resources, and attention to genocide while simultaneously engaged in the largest martial struggle of 20th century and rightly links it to the crimes of the Nazi state.

Alex J. Kay, Germanys Staatssekratre, Mass Starvation and the Meeting of 2 May 1941, Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (2006), 685-686. 2 Quoted in ibid; ibid, 688-89. 3 Ibid, 690. 4 Ibid.
1

Ibid, 700. Ibid. 7 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War, (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009), 184. 8 Ibid, 183. 9 Ibid, 185. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid, 182. 12 Doris Bergen, War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009), 139. 13 Quoted in Evans, The Third Reich at War, 175. 14 Eberhard JckelHitlers World View: A Blueprint for Power, trans Herbert Arnold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 62. 15 Evans, The Third Reich at War, 175-76. 16 Quoted in ibid. 17 Quoted in ibid, 176. 18 Ibid, 177. 19 Ibid, 176. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid, 182. 22 Ibid, 177 23 Bergen, War & Genocide, 157-58. 24 Quoted in Evans, The Third Reich at War, 175.
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Bergen, Doris. War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009. Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich at War. New York: The Penguin Press, 2009.

Jckel, Eberhard. Hitlers World View: A Blueprint for Power. Trans Herbert Arnold, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Kay, Alex J. Germanys Staatssekratre, Mass Starvation and the Meeting of 2 May 1941, Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (2006): 685-700.