Wannsee Conference in 100 Facts

[RolandVT]

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (signed on August 23, 1939) should not have been a surprise to anyone because it was signed by two European totalitarian powers led by dictators who had very similar geopolitical objectives.

Hitler wanted to conquer and annex Lebensraum in the East (so that there would be no repeat of the horrors of Blockade of Germany during the First Great War) and Stalin wanted to occupy and annex the whole continental Europe.

As part of this broad geopolitical objective, Hitler wanted to attack and destroy the Red Army (and subsequently occupy the European part of the Soviet Union) … and Stalin wanted to attack and destroy Wehrmacht and Waffen SS (and subsequently occupy Germany and the rest of continental Europe).

To make it happen, both needed a common border between Germany and the USSR – and the only way to make it happen was to eliminate the only country that separated these two monsters: Poland.

Hence, the (in)famous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was fundamentally about one and only one issue (objective): invasion, occupation and the Fourth Partition of Poland – this time between Nazi Germany and Bolshevist Soviet Union (the latter being the “Red” reincarnation of Russian Empire). Everything else was but an appendix.

Under the Secret Protocol, Poland was to be partitioned between Germany and the USSR, while Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia went to Stalin. Soviet invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact, since it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence that had been agreed with the Axis… but Hitler did not care.

After this partition happens (it was made official by the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty of September 28), Hitler intended to pre-empt Stalin… and Stalin intended to pre-empt Hitler. In the end, Hitler hit first, preempting Stalin by 24 hours or so (Soviet invasion was set to happen on June 23, 1941).

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact became a major step on the Road to Holocaust because it gave Hitler a green light to invade and occupy Poland. And German occupation of Poland made Holocaust inevitable (see next section).

It gave a green light because in September of 1939, Hitler simply had no resources to fight both Poland and the Soviet Union at the same time – even if Britain and France remained neutral (they didn’t). Soviet neutrality all but guaranteed Wehrmacht victory in a war with Poland (it happened).

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was terminated on 22 June 1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union.

[bf-109]

To make it happen, the Polish government instituted the policy of (not exactly) “soft” ethnic cleansing both in the West (of Germans) and in the East (Ukrainians). Not exactly because it involved harassment, arsons, assaults… and, yes, murder.

While the actual death toll among Germans in Poland was nowhere near the 58,000 claimed by Nazi Propaganda (it was in the hundreds at most for all interwar years), it still was a casus belli for any nation (the USA would have invaded Mexico over such crimes against Americans in a heartbeat).

It is also worth noting that the first war crime of the Second Great War (it happened on the very day it started – on September 3) was committed… by Poles. During the so-called Bloody Sunday in then Bromberg (now Bydgoszcz) Polish soldiers and civilians brutally murdered around 300 German civilians for no other reason than being German. Which was a local genocide – plain and simple.

1. Замечание по выделенному жирным шрифтом. Речь идет об энических немцах, украинцах. А этнический американец в Мексике из- за которого войну начинать это кто, Зоркий Сокол или Чингачгук?
2. Второе. По Быдгощу. Расклад: идёт война, у стен города наступающий агрессор, враг. Война! Вдруг немалая часть немецкого населения нападает на польских военных посути являясь партизанами, диверсантами, изменниками. Что делают с такими? Да казнят. Но на практике не только их, нападавших. Просле этого стихийно начинается такая волна возмущения и ненависти родного населения что они только по одному признаку - вражескй этнос записывают во враги каждого и готовы убивать и громить и сжигать, как врагов, ибо это стихия, состояние аффекта. Можно только взмолиться невинным "не убивайте - я хороший", говорят иногда помогает. Нет, я их естественно не оправдываю. Да, это преступление.
Итак, уважаемый Махараджа, прежде чем писать "военное преступление, локальный геноцид" надо прежде всего задумываться о произошедшем, так как оно было и так как оно бывает всегда. И не забывать в тексте об это упоминать.

[RolandVT]

RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) became the lead agency in the “Holocaust Project” – although it became evident only almost two years after it was created on September 27, 1939. When Einsatzgruppen run by RSHA began murdering Jews en masse in the “Holocaust by Bullets” right after the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Still, its creation became a giant step on the Road to Holocaust – and a colossal slab in the “slab stack” that less than two years later triggered the “Holocaust Avalanche”. Killing four million European Jews.

All because to successfully implement such a gargantuan (and murderous) project, the Nazis needed the agency that had both the resources to commit serial mass murder – and an extensive experience in doing it on a smaller scale. Only RSHA did foot the bill.

Initially, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler created RSHA for purely political purposes: to consolidate his power of German security services – both those of the NSDAP and of the German state.

With the formation of the RSHA, Himmler combined under one roof (and under himself) the Nazi Party's SD (SS intelligence service) and the SiPo which was nominally under the Interior Ministry. The SiPo was composed of two sub-departments – Gestapo (political police) and Kripo (Criminal Police).

Officially, the fundamental objective of newly-minted security monster – not unlike Soviet NKVD - was to protect Nazi Germany against internal enemies. Including, obviously, the Jews – hence, it is no surprise that RSHA became the lead agency in the “Holocaust Project”.

This was made official by the (in)famous letter sent by Hermann Göring (the second-in-command in Nazi Germany acting on direct orders from Hitler) to Reinhard Heydrich (Chief of RSHA) with the order to “bring about a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe”.

In this letter (mandate essentially) he instructed all government agencies of the Third Reich to “cooperate” with Heydrich and (by extension) his RSHA. Which made the Wannsee Conference (organized by RSHA) and its aftermath possible.

RSHA leading role in the “Holocaust Project” was twofold. Its Einsatzgruppen committed most of the murders in “Holocaust by Bullets” and coordinated (via its Jewish office) all activities in the “Holocaust by Gas”.

[RolandVT]

Reincarnated by the Nazis, Jewish Ghettos of World War II were fundamentally different from their predecessors in Europe in XVI-XIX centuries. The latter were places to live in; the former were places to die in. Slow death factories.

In the early modern era, European Jews were confined to ghettos and placed under strict regulations as well as restrictions in many European cities. The ghetto system began in Renaissance Italy in July 1555 after Pope Paul IV issued the (in)famous bull Cum nimis absurdum.

The bull revoked all the rights of the Jewish community and placed religious and economic restrictions on Jews in the Papal States, renewed anti-Jewish legislation and subjected Jews to various restrictions on their personal freedom.

The most visible of these restrictions was the requirement of Jewish communities to reside in closed neighborhoods known as ghettos. The bull established the Roman Ghetto and required the Jews of Rome, who had existed as a community since before Christian times and numbered about 2,000 at the time, to live in it. The Ghetto was a walled quarter with three gates that were locked at night.

However, not all consequences of the bull were negative for the Jewish community. Following the formation of the ghetto system, there was a sharp decline in incidents such as pogroms, forced expulsion, and accusation of ritual murder that were common during the medieval period.

Paul IV’s successor, Pius IV, enforced the creation of other ghettos in most Italian towns, and his successor, Pius V, recommended them to other bordering states. In the 19th century, with Jewish emancipation, Jewish ghettos were progressively abolished, and their walls taken down.

The Papal States ceased to exist on September 28, 1870 when they were officially incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy, but the requirement that Jews live in the ghetto was formally abolished only in 1882, though after 1870 this requirement was seldom, if ever, enforced.

Initially, the Nazis viewed Jewish ghettos as strictly instrument of control – in their (incorrect) opinion the only way to contain the existential (to Germany) threat of the Jewish “fifth column” in Poland (numbering over 3,350,000) was to confine them to ghettos. Permanently.

The first ghetto (Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto) was set up on October 8, 1939, just over a month after the German invasion of Poland (and two days after the end of the Polish campaign).

Within a few months, the most populous Jewish ghettos in World War II, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Lodz Ghetto, had been established. Ultimately, the Nazis created over 1,000 ghettos – mostly in Central and Eastern Europe.

In many cases, the Nazi-era ghettos did not correspond to historic Jewish quarters. For example, the Kraków Ghetto was formally established in the Podgórze district, not in the Jewish district of Kazimierz. As a result, the displaced ethnic Polish families were forced to take up residences outside.

Later, Nazis decided that ghettos by themselves can be a highly efficient method of “final solution to the Jewish question” – if they become “slow death factories”. To facilitate this transformation, the Nazis began with creating brutal (and highly crowded) “living conditions”.

In Warsaw, the Jews, comprising 30% of the city overall population, were forced to live in 2.4% of the city’s area, a density of 7.2 people per room. In the ghetto of Odrzywół, 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by five families, between 12 and 30 to each room.

The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on smuggling and the starvation rations supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 1,060 kJ (253 kcal) per Jew, one-third of the ration of the Pole and one-tenth of the German.

With the crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and insufficient sanitation (coupled with lack of medical supplies), epidemics of infectious disease (such as typhus) became a major feature of ghetto life.

In the Lodz Ghetto some 43,800 people died of ‘natural’ causes (one out of five victims of the Holocaust), and 92,000 in the Warsaw Ghetto (one out of four). Hence, Jewish ghettos established by the Nazis were genuine death factories (killing centers) and thus a part of a “Holocaust Avalanche”.

Ultimately, Jewish ghettos became (literally) concentration camps and/or transit camps where Jews were concentrated before being shipped to the killing centers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor or Chelmno. In the interim, some ghettos were used as forced labor camps.

Almost 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone to Treblinka death factory over the course of 52 days. Jewish populations of the ghettos were almost entirely killed. On June 21, 1943, Heinrich Himmler issued an order to liquidate all ghettos and transfer remaining Jewish inhabitants to concentration camps. A few ghettos were re-designated as concentration camps and existed until 1944.

[RolandVT]

Theoretically, Stalin could have prevented the Holocaust if he had pre-empted Hitler and attacked German army before the latter invaded the USSR. That could have happened had France not fell to German onslaught in the summer of 1940 (exactly one year prior to commencement of Operation Barbarossa).

In this case, Hitler would have had neither time nor resources to pre-empt Soviet attack on his armed forces. Fall of France gave him both – and made the Holocaust in the USSR (“Holocaust by Bullets”) inevitable.

The latter became inevitable due to key National-Socialist dogma of the existential racial war between Jewish and Aryan races. Embodied correspondingly in “Judeo-Bolshevist” USSR and National-Socialist Third Reich.

Due to existential racial nature of that war (the first was true while the second was not), the outbreak of the “hot” war between the two would have immediately made Nazis snap – and commence the total annihilation of Jews under German control.

Wehrmacht pre-empted the Red Army because it was a far superior military machine… in fact, superior to every army on the planet. And, of course, Fall of France gave Hitler time and other resources to use these advantages to the fullest extent possible. Consequently, Fall of France became a major step on the Road to Holocaust (first in the Soviet Union and subsequently in Europe).

Was the Fall of France inevitable? The answer is a resounding “Yes”. There were many reasons for this catastrophic disaster but the primary one was that Germany passionately wanted to fight – and France did not (neither military nor civilians nor the French government). Subconsciously, even occupation by Germany for them was better than devastation caused by war on the French soil.

There were other reasons, of course. British and French intelligence failed miserably – and when it didn’t, political and military leadership did not utilize it properly in their decision-making.

German military doctrine of “blitzkrieg” turned out to be far superior to the French doctrine that for all practical purposes got stuck in the times of the First Great War. German system of command and control was far more flexible and gave far more decision-making power to low-level commanders – an absolute must in a fast-moving, heavily motorized war.

In Wehrmacht, there was a far better synergy between infantry, tanks, artillery and air force… oh, and they had their famous Stukas (dive bombers). In addition, German soldiers, NCOs, officers and generals were simply much better.

[RolandVT]

Auschwitz (Oświęcim) was by far the most efficient killing machine in the “Holocaust by Gas” – the deadliest phase in the “Holocaust Project”. In fact, Auschwitz (more precisely, Auschwitz II-Birkenau) is the site of the largest mass murder in a single location in human history. Consequently, its establishment in May of 1940, was a giant step on the Road to Holocaust.

However, it was much, much more than just that: ultimately, it grew to become a gargantuan complex of over 40 camps operated by WVHA (SS Main Economic and Administrative Office) in occupied Poland.

This diabolical monster included Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager); Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of labor subcamps.

Initially, Auschwitz was just another KL which underwent a rather typical evolution: from army barracks to concentration camp for political prisoners to a forced labor camp. The only difference was that – unlike previous camps – it was built for Poles, not Germans.

After Wehrmacht occupied Poland in September 1939, the Schutzstaffel (SS) converted Polish army barracks (future Auschwitz I), into a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Polish soldiers and officers.

Soon it graduated to a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners (those who were spared during “pacification” project). The first transport of political detainees to Auschwitz consisted almost solely of Poles (for whom the camp was initially established). For the first two years, the majority of inmates were Polish.

Fifty km southwest of Kraków, the site was first suggested in February 1940 as a quarantine camp for Polish prisoners by Arpad Wigand, the inspector of the Sicherheitspolizei (security police) and deputy of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the Higher SS and Police Leader for Silesia.

Around 1,000m long and 400m wide, Auschwitz consisted at the time of 22 brick buildings, eight of them two-story. A second story was added to the others in 1943 and eight new blocks were built.

The first mass transport – of 728 Polish male political prisoners, including Catholic priests and Jews – arrived on 14 June 1940 from Tarnów. By March 1941, 10,900 were imprisoned in the camp, most of them Poles.

The first experimental gassing at Auschwitz took place in August 1941.

[RolandVT]

Madagascar Plan was another escalation by the Nazis (and thus a major step on the Road to Holocaust) because it envisioned the establishment of a “slow death factory” (not unlike then-abandoned Nisko reservation) – this time on the island of Madagascar in Indian Ocean. Which was, indeed, a major escalation (serial killer – style) compared to relatively humane forced emigration. Escalation to genocide.

The Madagascar Plan was proposed in June of 1940 – right after the Fall of France – by Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office. According to this plan, all Jews under German control were to be deported to the island of Madagascar (taken away from France).

The plan was submitted to Adolf Eichmann (then head of the “Jewish” department in RSHA) who two months later released a memorandum on 15 August 1940 calling for the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years, with the island being governed as a police state under the SS. Eichmann assumed that many Jews would succumb to its harsh conditions should the plan be implemented (hence the major escalation for the Nazis). The RSHA would control all aspects of the plan.

Interestingly, this was not a novel idea – Paul de Lagarde, an antisemitic Orientalist scholar, first suggested deporting the European Jews to Madagascar in 1878. With the cooperation of the French, the Polish government commissioned a task force in 1937 to examine the possibility of settling Polish Jews on the island.

The head of the commission, Mieczysław Lepecki, determined the island could accommodate no more than 7,000 families, but Jewish members of the group estimated that, because of the climate and poor infrastructure, only 500 or even fewer families could safely be accommodated. So much for four million.

Rademacher envisioned the founding of a European bank that would ultimately liquidate all European Jewish assets to pay for the plan. Göring’s office of the Four-Year Plan would oversee the administration of the plan’s economics.

The Nazis expected that after the invasion of the UK, they would commandeer the British merchant fleet to transport the Jews to Madagascar (fat chance). However, with the failure to defeat the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, the proposed invasion of the UK was postponed indefinitely on September 17, 1940.

This meant the British merchant fleet would not be at Germany’s disposal for use in deportations, and planning for the Madagascar proposal stalled. The plan was officially shelved within the Foreign Office in February 1942. British forces took the island from Vichy France in November 1942 and gave it to the Free French.

[bf-109]

Was the Fall of France inevitable? The answer is a resounding “Yes”. There were many reasons for this catastrophic disaster but the primary one was that Germany passionately wanted to fight – and France did not (neither military nor civilians nor the French government). Subconsciously, even occupation by Germany for them was better than devastation caused by war on the French soil.

There were other reasons, of course. British and French intelligence failed miserably – and when it didn’t, political and military leadership did not utilize it properly in their decision-making.

German military doctrine of “blitzkrieg” turned out to be far superior to the French doctrine that for all practical purposes got stuck in the times of the First Great War. German system of command and control was far more flexible and gave far more decision-making power to low-level commanders – an absolute must in a fast-moving, heavily motorized war.

In Wehrmacht, there was a far better synergy between infantry, tanks, artillery and air force… oh, and they had their famous Stukas (dive bombers). In addition, German soldiers, NCOs, officers and generals were simply much better.

Вы часто повторяете и смакуете нацистскую пропаганду, впрочем не Вы один. А Вы в курсе, герр Роланд фон Таубе, что проив Франции была развернута авиационная группировка на четверть более крупная чем потом против СССР и 35% (тридцать пять процентов за месяц) её было уничтожено за месяц воздушных боёв? То есть больше, чем их потери против СССР за такой же срок, про которые уже коммунистическая пропаганда, не моргнув глазом, заявляет: ”потери, каких еще не знала германская авиация с самого начала второй мировой войны”? Тогда во Франции что было?
Самое дальнее растояние которое прошел Вермахт за 40 дней до капитуляции примерно 600 км если мерять с севера на юг. Это примерно столько же, сколько они прошли в СССР за такое же время. И Франция проиграла не потому что была слабая и не сопротивлялась, а потому что её територия практически законилась. Но за первые две недели Германия потеряла половину своих танков.
Могла ли Франция не проиграть? Легко! Если бы после её объявления войны Германии начала активные действия. Тогда история Европы сейчас была бы другая.
Было бы лучше, если бы Вы писали чуть меньше, но чуть профессиональнее, а то уже совсем желтая литература.

[RolandVT]

… and very probably cost Adolf Hitler his war, his party, his state, his country and his very life. Very probably because this forced invasion (aka April War or Operation 25) forced Hitler to postpone for more than a month his invasion of the Soviet Union (initially set for May 15th, 1941).

Due to this delay, he simply did not have enough time to destroy the red Army, capture Moscow and cause the collapse of the Soviet state before the weather conditions slowed his blitzkrieg to a crawl… and finally stopped it cold (literally).

Hitler was forced to launch the invasion of Yugoslavia because of the coup d’état that overthrew the pro-Axis government in that country. The new government immediately signed the Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression with the Soviet Union in Moscow which created a very real possibility of a “stab in the back” of Germany after its invasion of the latter (ironically, that’s exactly what happened).

The order for the invasion was put forward in “Führer Directive No. 25”, which Adolf Hitler issued on 27 March 1941 – hours after Yugoslav coup d’état. The invasion commenced with an overwhelming air attack on Belgrade and facilities of by the Luftwaffe and attacks by German land forces from southwestern Bulgaria.

These attacks were followed by German thrusts from Romania, Hungary and Austria. Italian forces were limited to air and artillery attacks until 11 April, when the Italian Army attacked towards Ljubljana and down the Dalmatian coast.

On the same day, Hungarian forces entered Yugoslav Bačka and Baranya, but like the Italians they faced practically light resistance. Italians moved into Dalmatia also from Italian-controlled Albania, after repelling an initial Yugoslav attack there.

An armistice was signed on 17 April 1941, based on the unconditional surrender of the Yugoslav army, which came into effect the next day. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was then occupied and partitioned by the Axis powers.

Most of Serbia and the Banat became a German zone of occupation while other areas of Yugoslavia were annexed by neighboring Axis countries, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Albania and Bulgaria. Croatia got its independence.

It did not help Germany much, though because Germans now faced a full-fledged guerilla war with well-armed Yugoslav (mostly Serbian) Home Army numbering initially over 100,000 (it grew to 800,000 by 1945). Which kept stabbing Wehrmacht in the back… pretty much during the whole Second Great War.

The genuinely murderous (and quite predictable) side effect of German occupation of Yugoslavia was expansion of Shoah to the Balkans – namely to Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. In Serbia, it proceeded pretty much as in the USSR at the same time.

The first phase, which lasted between July and November 1941, involved the murder of Jewish men, who were shot as part of retaliatory executions carried out by German forces in response to the rising anti-Nazi, partisan insurgency in Serbia.

In October 1941. Franz Böhme (commander of Wehrmacht forces in the Balkans), ordered the execution of 100 Serbian male civilians for every German soldier killed and 50 for every wounded.

Altogether some 30,000 Serbian civilians were executed by German troops during the first 2 months of this policy, among them 5,000 Jewish men, or nearly all the Jewish males above age 14 in Serbia.

The second phase, between December 1941 and May 1942, involved the incarceration of the women and children in Sajmište concentration camp and their subsequent gassing in a mobile gas van. Over 10,000 were killed.

The Holocaust in neighboring Croatia was even more brutal. Of the 39,000 Jews who lived in independent Croatia in 1941, more than 30,000 were murdered (77%). Of these, 6,200 were shipped to Nazi Germany and the rest of them were murdered locally, the vast majority in Ustaše-run concentration camps, such as Jasenovac (a genuine Hell on Earth).

Croatia was the only country other than Nazi Germany who operated its own extermination camps for the purpose of murdering Jews and members of other ethnic groups (i.e., Serbs).

Still, German invasion of Yugoslavia postponed (by a month) the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and (quite possibly) in German-controlled Europe.

[RolandVT]

Nazi leaders (Himmler, Heydrich, Göring, Hitler) were textbook serial killers. True, they were serial mass murderers… but still serial killers. So, they did exactly what most serial killers do – they escalated, snapped (started killing) and escalated again, graduating to more extensive and move vicious serial mass murder.

They escalated from persecution and forced emigration to deportation to “slow death factory” in Europe (Nisko Plan) to even worse killing center in Africa (Madagascar Plan) … until in April of 1941, they finally snapped – and made a firm commitment to carrying out “Holocaust by Bullets” (initially killing all Jewish men of military age in occupied territories of the Soviet Union).

This snap was the inevitable result of a critical mass formed after three key components converged and created a literally deadly synergy. First, the total number of Jews under German control (perceived by Nazis as the “fifth column” after the idiotic “declaration of war” by Chaim Weizmann) grew to totally unmanageable (in Nazi minds) 4,000,000 +.

Second, neither forced emigration nor deportation of Jews to a remote piece of land (in Europe) or elsewhere, were now possible. Total extermination appeared to be the only viable solution.

And, finally, in a speech to his leading generals on March 30, 1941 Adolf Hitler officially announced that the inevitable upcoming existential (true) racial (not true) war with “Judeo-Bolshevist” (wrong on first count) Soviet Union would be the “war of annihilation” – both ways.

No surprise here – after Holodomor and Great Terror in the USSR (and wholesale deportations from Baltic countries and occupied Poland, Bessarabia and Bukovina in 1940) that scared the bejesus of the Nazis they had every right to assume that Stalin would kill millions of Germans – if he wins this genuinely existential war.

So, not surprisingly, Adolf Hitler legally (in Nazi Germany his word was above any written law) sanctioned the eradication of all Communist political leaders and intellectual elites in the Soviet Union… which for all practical purposes included all male Jews of military age.

There is no evidence that Hitler explicitly ordered extermination of the latter – it was simply not his management style. Most certainly, on the last days of March (or first days of April) of 1941, he ordered (most likely, via Göring) Himmler or directly Heydrich to come up with the “solution to the Jewish question in the USSR”.

After Operation Tannenberg, Intelligenzaktion and AB-Aktion the solution was a no-brainer so the decision was to… just shoot them all. More specifically, shoot all male Jews of military age – and Einsatzgruppen were the obvious tool, given their extensive experience in (ultimately unsuccessful) “pacification” of Poland.

Most likely, this solution (first stage of “Holocaust by Bullets”) was proposed by Heydrich (who had the overall command of Einsatzgruppen) and was approved – sometime in mid-April of 1941 – by Himmler, Göring and Hitler – in that order.

In late April of 1941, four Einsatzgruppen were created: Einsatzgruppe A (Baltic states); Einsatzgruppe B (Belarus); Einsatzgruppe C (Northern and central Ukraine); and Einsatzgruppe D (Bessarabia, Southern Ukraine, Crimea, and Caucasus).

Each Einsatzgruppe numbered 500–990 men to comprise a total force of 3,000. Einsatzgruppen A, B, and C were to be attached to Army Groups North, Centre, and South; Einsatzgruppe D was assigned to the 11th Army.

In May 1941, Heydrich verbally passed on the abovementioned order at the SiPo (Security Police) NCO School in Pretzsch, where the commanders of the reorganized Einsatzgruppen were being trained for Operation Barbarossa.

Right before that, Heydrich and the First Quartermaster of the German Army, General Eduard Wagner, successfully completed negotiations for co-operation between the Einsatzgruppen and the German Army to allow the implementation of the “special tasks” (i.e., serial mass murder).

Following the Heydrich-Wagner agreement on 28 April 1941, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch ordered that when Operation Barbarossa began, all German Army commanders were to immediately identify and register all Jews in occupied areas in the Soviet Union, and fully co-operate with the Einsatzgruppen.

Led by SD, Gestapo, and Kripo officers, Einsatzgruppen included recruits from the Orpo, Security Service and Waffen-SS, augmented by uniformed volunteers from the local auxiliary police force.

Each Einsatzgruppe was supplemented with Waffen-SS and Order Police battalions as well as support personnel such as drivers and radio operators. Order Police was heavily involved in “Holocaust by Bullets” because its formations were larger and better armed, with heavy machine-gun detachments, which enabled them to carry out operations beyond the capability of the SS.

Each Einsatzgruppe followed an assigned army group as they advanced into the Soviet Union. During the course of their operations, the Einsatzgruppen commanders received assistance from the Wehrmacht.