Author’s Note: The June 1941 German invasion of Russia was called Operation Barbarossa, in which 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen planned to seek out and destroy the 5,000,000 Jews in Russia and end civilian resistance.
In a podcast with Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper claimed the Nazis “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, and local political prisoners . . . . They went in with no plan for that and just threw these people into camps.” This resulted, he said, in “millions of people ended up dead there.”
Cooper’s ignorance about Operation Barbarossa and its objectives distorts what really happened and why. Let’s set the record straight.
Operation Barbarossa
On June 22, 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. It has been called the “most monstrous war of conquest, enslavement and extermination “ in modern times, notes German historian Jürgen Förster. More than three million German soldiers were involved in Operation Barbarossa, which found the Russians surprised, confused, and unprepared historian Richard Breitman. points out.
The next day, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), unleased approximately 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units, A, B, C, and D) to seek out and destroy the 5,000,000 Jews in Russia, and those in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Eastern Poland, the former Russian territories under German occupation, and vanquish civilian resistance.
Ninety percent of the Jews in Russia were concentrated in the cities. The Einsatzgruppen followed behind the advancing Wehrmacht, the German army, to gain the element of surprise. “The Jews are remarkedly ill-informed about our attitude towards them,” reported Sonderführer (Detachment Commander) Schröter from White Russia on July 12, 1941. Thus the effect “was all the more cruel as a result,” stressed German journalist Heinz Höhne.
Hitler did not envision this be a conventional war asserts German historian Jürgen Förster. He planned and organized a Vernichtungskrieg, (a war of annihilation) to achieve his concept of Lebensraum (living space) by conquering Russia. The “idea of acquiring living space,” Förster said, was “inextricably intertwined with the extermination of Bolshevism and the Jewish people, with the doctrine of economic self-sufficiency, and with the strategic necessity of thereby winning the war against Great Britain.”
The difference between the attack against Poland and Operation Barbarossa was that the “line between military and ideological warfare was erased before the first shot was even fired.” Hitler had pardoned the soldiers and SS in Poland after the campaign. In the Soviet Union, “a preemptive amnesty for crimes” had been declared.
Historian Yehuda Bauer notes that the Nazis initiated an ideological war in order for the German-Aryan race to gain superiority over Europe by extending their rule to the East and to acquire Lebensraum (living space)—the territory and material resources that would preserve their control. In addition, the conquest of Lebensraum was designed to become the foundation to “further biological expansion of the ‘Aryan race,’” and thus provide “the ‘human resources’ for future wars of conquest.”
The war would enable the Germans to destroy the power of “international Jewry,” which controlled the enemies of Germany (France, Britain and the US) and facilitate their removal, a goal Hitler articulated already in 1919. Thus, the obvious conclusion Bauer said, is that antisemitism was one of the two primary ideological motives influencing the Nazi leaders to start a war in which tens of millions of people lost their lives and produced endless misery.
Who were the men who commanded the Einsatzgruppen?
The leadership of the Einsatzgruppen were born between 1900 and 1910. During the war, they were in their 30s or early 40s. Before beginning their careers in the Security Services (SD), Nazi Party intelligence service and police, they worked in medicine, theology, economics, education, business, law and architecture.
Members of the Einsatzgruppen were recruited from the Security Police, the SD, the Gestapo, the Criminal police (Kripo), the uniformed police or Order Police (Ordnungspolizei), the Waffen SS and conscripts unfit for front-line duty Ronald Headland explains. The leaders of the Einsatzgruppen and the leaders of the Kommandos had one thing in common: most had enlisted in the SS, the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party’s initial paramilitary wing, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) at the earliest opportunity they could, reflecting the high regard the Nazis were held among students of the Weimar Republic.
Most later joined the Ministry of the Interior to become public servants. From the ministry, they were randomly selected to be posted in the east explains German historian Benno Müller-Hill. In Germany, not only lawyers, prosecutors and judges also hold doctoral degrees in law. The more aspiring public servants have earned them as well.
Einsatzgruppe A, B, C, D
Einsatzgruppe A was commanded first by Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker, a lawyer, attached to Army Group North, which operated from the Baltic States to the Leningrad area. He had been an adversary of Reinhard Heydrich, and had been reassigned to the Foreign Ministry. It had approximately 1,000 men. By commanding an Einsatzgruppe, he had hoped to be able to return to the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA).
Einsatzgruppe B, commanded by Arthur Nebe (chief of Kripo, the criminal police), was attached to Army Group Center, which operated between Belorussia and Moscow. It had 655 men.
Einsatzgruppe C, commanded by SS General Dr. Otto Emil Rasch, who had two PhD’s, was attached to Army Group Center in northern and central Ukraine. It had 750 men. Einsatzgruppe C, carried out the massacre at Babi Yar, where over 33,771 Jews were murdered in two days.
Rasch insisted every man in his unit had to participate in the executions as part of its “collective guilt,” according to German historian Heinz Höhne.
Witnessing ghastly scenes together formed a bond that kept the unit together Rasch believed. “Collective blood guilt was to be its cement.” Höhne said an eyewitness reported that in Einsatzgruppe C, practically everyone experienced “the most horrible dreams.”
Nonetheless, the goal had been accomplished—“the camaraderie of guilt.” “Collective blood guilt,” the idea that bloodshed united warriors together and bound them undyingly to their leader, influenced Hitler after about the influence of Genghis Kahn.
Hitler coined the phrase “blood cement,” historian Richard Breitman stated.
Rasch was replaced at the end of 1941, by SS-Brigadeführerund Generalmajor der Polizei Maximillian Thomas, PhD, with special training in psychiatry writes Benno Müller-Hill, a German professor of genetics.
