Unfortunately, we are about to reach that part of the war where the war against humanity is going to escalate to levels maybe not ever seen before (and since) on this planet.
From Wikipedia (edited):
On 13 March 1941, in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler dictated his “Guidelines in Special Spheres re: Directive No. 21 (Operation Barbarossa)”.
Sub-paragraph B specified that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler would be given “special tasks” on direct orders from the Führer, which he would carry out independently.
This directive was intended to prevent friction between the Wehrmacht and the SS in the upcoming offensive. Hitler also specified that criminal acts against civilians perpetrated by members of the Wehrmacht during the upcoming campaign would not be prosecuted in the military courts, and thus would go unpunished.In a speech to his leading generals on 30 March 1941, Hitler described his envisioned war against the Soviet Union. General Franz Halder, the Army’s Chief of Staff, described the speech in his diary:
“Struggle between two ideologies. Scathing evaluation of Bolshevism, equals antisocial criminality. Communism immense future danger … This a fight to the finish. If we do not accept this, we shall beat the enemy, but in thirty years we shall again confront the Communist foe. We don’t make war to preserve the enemy … Struggle against Russia: Extermination of Bolshevik Commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia … Commissars and GPU personnel are criminals and must be treated as such. The struggle will differ from that in the west. In the east harshness now means mildness for the future.”
Though General Halder did not record any mention of Jews, German historian Andreas Hillgruber argued that because of Hitler’s frequent contemporary statements about the coming war of annihilation against “Judeo-Bolshevism”, his generals would have understood Hitler’s call for the destruction of the Soviet Union as also comprising a call for the destruction of its Jewish population.
The genocide was to be described using euphemisms such as “special tasks” and “executive measures”. The transport and murder of large numbers of people would also be referred to as “evacuation” in an attempt to hide the true nature of what was happening.Einsatzgruppe victims were often described as having been shot while trying to escape. In May 1941, Heydrich verbally passed on the order to kill the Soviet Jews to the SiPo (Security Police) NCO School in Pretzsch, where the commanders of the reorganised Einsatzgruppen were being trained for Operation Barbarossa.
In spring 1941, 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 euphemistically called “special tasks”.
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.
In further meetings held in early June 1941 Himmler outlined to top SS leaders the regime’s intention to reduce the population of the Soviet Union by at least 30 million people, not only through direct killing of those considered racially inferior, but also by depriving the remainder of food and other necessities of life.
After the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen 's main assignment was to kill civilians, as in Poland, but this time its targets specifically included Soviet Communist commissars and Jews.
In a letter dated 2 July 1941 Heydrich communicated to his SS and Police Leaders that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute all senior and middle ranking Comintern officials; all senior and middle ranking members of the central, provincial, and district committees of the Communist Party; extremist and radical Communist Party members; people’s commissars and Jews in party and government posts. Open-ended instructions were given to execute “other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc).”
Heydrich further instructed that any pogroms spontaneously initiated by the population of the occupied territories were to be quietly encouraged, as happened especially in the western reaches of the Soviet Union.There were various drafts of Generalplan Ost (the German plan for the treatment of the occupied eastern territories). Many different figures are used, ranging up to 80 million people killed (including all of occupied eastern Europe), tens of millions more deported and the rest used for slave labor.
The various drafts (the last to be drawn up whilst the Battle of Stalingrad was raging) set various percentages, country by country, for the number of people to be killed:
Russia: 50-60% to be killed, with half of the remainder to be deported east of the Ural mountains
Estonia, Latvia: 50% to be killed
Lithuania: 85% to be killed (Himmler, for some reason, had a special hatred for Lithuania)
Czechs: 50% to be killed
Belarusians: 75% to be killed
Ukrainians: 65% to be killed
Poles: 85% to be killed, with the “racially assimilable” to be Germanized so no Poles would remain and Poland would be destroyed forever
It seems that, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, the more we learn about the Wehrmacht’s participation in the war crimes and their collaboration with the Einsatzgruppen, the more the Wehrmacht seems to have been involved. The myth of the clean Wehrmacht has been blown out of the water, and I think it is good that TimeGhost will spend time on this.