The Wehrmacht Was Not Involved Only the SS

The “clean Wehrmacht” thesis was the central self-justification of the post-war German military establishment and a foundational myth of West German political culture in the 1950s and 1960s. The thesis was demolished by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research’s exhibition Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation 1941 to 1944, which toured Germany from 1995 to 2004 and presented the documentary record of Wehrmacht involvement in war crimes against civilians and prisoners across the Eastern Front. The exhibition’s catalogue and the supporting scholarly literature established that the Wehrmacht had been actively involved in the killing operations, that its commanders had issued the orders that authorised the involvement, and that the post-war myth of separation between Wehrmacht and SS was unsupportable. The matter is settled in the professional historical literature; the deniers continue to cite the discredited myth.

The criminal orders

The Wehrmacht’s involvement in the killing of civilians on the Eastern Front rested on a series of formal criminal orders issued by the Wehrmacht command in the months before and during the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Commissar Order (Kommissarbefehl) of 6 June 1941, signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel as Chief of the OKW, instructed Wehrmacht units to execute Soviet political officers (politruks and commissars) on capture, in violation of the Geneva Convention. The Barbarossa Decree (Erlass über die Ausübung der Kriegsgerichtsbarkeit im Gebiet “Barbarossa”) of 13 May 1941 suspended the application of military law to operations against Soviet civilians, effectively giving Wehrmacht troops legal cover for killing civilians without trial. The Severity Order (Reichenau Order) of 10 October 1941, issued by Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau commanding the 6th Army, instructed his troops on the necessity of “harsh and just retribution against subhuman Jewry”. The order was distributed to Wehrmacht units across the Eastern Front and was endorsed by the OKH and OKW.

The orders were not the secret instructions of a small clique. They were the Wehrmacht’s formal operational orders, signed by its most senior officers, distributed through the standard chain of command, implemented by line units across the Eastern Front. The orders authorised, and in the Reichenau case explicitly required, the participation of Wehrmacht units in operations against Jewish civilians. The orders survive in the surviving Wehrmacht files; they were entered as evidence at the Nuremberg trials; they are reproduced in standard scholarly editions.

Wehrmacht participation in the killings

Wehrmacht units participated in the killing operations in three principal ways. First, by direct shooting: numerous Wehrmacht security divisions, infantry regiments and rear-area units conducted mass shootings of Jewish civilians and Soviet POWs across the Eastern Front. The 707th Infantry Division alone killed approximately 10,000 Jewish civilians in Belarus in autumn 1941, in operations that the SS itself characterised as a Wehrmacht initiative. The Field Gendarmerie units conducted shootings across the rear areas. The 11th Army under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein issued explicit orders authorising and requiring the killing of Jews in its operational area in Crimea.

Second, by support and supply for SS operations. The Einsatzgruppen depended on Wehrmacht logistical support to operate at all. They received their fuel, food, ammunition and transport from Wehrmacht supply chains; they coordinated their operations with Wehrmacht commanders; they reported to Wehrmacht rear-area commanders on their activities and their results. The “Wehrmacht Reporting Bulletins” (Wehrmachtberichte) regularly described “anti-partisan operations” that included the killing of Jewish civilians as a coordinated Wehrmacht-SS operation.

Third, by the systematic killing of Soviet prisoners of war. Approximately 3 million Soviet POWs died in Wehrmacht custody between June 1941 and May 1945, the second-largest single category of victims of the German operation after the Jewish dead. The deaths were not the consequence of disease or wartime hardship; they were the consequence of Wehrmacht decisions on food rations, housing and medical treatment that produced foreseeable and foreseen mass mortality. The Wehrmacht’s responsibility for the Soviet POW deaths is direct and unmediated by any SS involvement. The standard scholarly treatment is by Christian Streit (Keine Kameraden, 1978; revised editions to 1991) and by Christian Hartmann (Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg, 2009).

The Hamburg exhibition and its impact

The Hamburg Institute for Social Research’s exhibition opened in Hamburg in March 1995 and toured to over thirty German cities through 1999, drawing approximately 850,000 visitors. The exhibition presented the documentary record (orders, photographs, after-action reports, soldiers’ letters home) and was deliberately confrontational about the Wehrmacht’s involvement in war crimes. It produced substantial public controversy, including counter-demonstrations by veterans’ organisations and right-wing groups, and at one point the bombing of one of the exhibition venues. A revised version of the exhibition opened in 2001 with corrected captions on a small number of disputed photographs (the Institute had acknowledged that some photographs in the original version had been incorrectly attributed to the Wehrmacht when they were in fact from Soviet NKVD operations); the substantive findings on Wehrmacht involvement remained unchanged. The exhibition is the standing public reference on the question.

The post-war German military establishment

The post-war myth of Wehrmacht innocence had been actively constructed by senior German officers in the late 1940s, particularly through the memoirs of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein (Verlorene Siege, 1955) and General Heinz Guderian (Erinnerungen eines Soldaten, 1951), and through the writings of the Wehrmacht Historical Branch’s post-war successor organisations. The myth served the purpose of allowing former Wehrmacht officers to participate in the creation of the West German Bundeswehr in the 1950s, and of allowing West Germany to build a national identity that distinguished its armed forces from the criminal apparatus of the Third Reich. The myth was politically useful but historically false. The historians have demonstrated that no such clean separation existed.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it preserves the post-war myth of a clean German military, separate from and uninvolved with the killing operation. The myth was constructed for political reasons that no longer apply, and the historical record has long since refuted it. To accept the denier claim is to accept the post-war exoneration of an institution that had been actively involved in the war crimes the operation produced. The Wehrmacht’s involvement is documented at every level: in the criminal orders signed by its senior officers, in the operational reports of its units, in the soldiers’ letters home, in the photographs of its troops at killing sites, in the testimony of its surviving officers at the Nuremberg trials and in subsequent proceedings. The deniers’ framing requires the listener to dismiss all of this evidence in favour of a self-serving post-war myth.

What did the Commissar Order say? What did the Reichenau Order require? Where can the Wehrmacht’s involvement in the Soviet POW deaths be read?

See also

• Soviet Prisoners of War
• The Nuremberg Trials
• Wilhelm Keitel

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Sources

• Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941 bis 1944, Hamburger Edition, 2002, the catalogue of the revised exhibition
• Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds.), War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II 1941 to 1944, Berghahn, 2000
• Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941 bis 1945, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978; revised edition Dietz, 1991
• Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg: Front und militärisches Hinterland 1941/42, Oldenbourg, 2009
• Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, Harvard University Press, 2006
• Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, Oxford University Press, 1991
• Commissar Order (Kommissarbefehl), 6 June 1941, Nuremberg Document NOKW-1076
• Barbarossa Decree (Erlass über die Ausübung der Kriegsgerichtsbarkeit im Gebiet “Barbarossa”), 13 May 1941, Nuremberg Document C-50
• Walter von Reichenau, Severity Order, 10 October 1941, Nuremberg Document UK-81
• Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front 1941, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006
• Walter Manoschek (ed.), “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum: Vernichtung”: Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen 1939 bis 1944, Hamburger Edition, 1995
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “The German Military and the Holocaust”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org