Hitler

all the bestialities which have been inflicted on the German and related ethnic nation. The soldier must therefore have full understanding for the necessity of the severe but just atonement from the Jewish subhumans.’ He concluded: ‘Only in this way will we fulfil our historic duty of liberating the German people from the Asiatic-Jewish threat once and for all.’
    The Commander-in-Chief of the 17th Army, Colonel-General Hermann Hoth, went, if anything, even further than Reichenau. He spoke in an order on the ‘Behaviour of German Soldiers in the East’, issued on 17 November, of a struggle of ‘two inwardly unbridgeable philosophies … German feeling of honour and race, centuries-old German soldierly tradition, against asiatic ways of thinking and primitive instincts whipped up by a small number of mainly Jewish intellectuals’. His men should act out of ‘belief in a change in the times, in which, on the basis of the superiority of its race and achievements, the leadership of Europe has passed to the German people’. It was a ‘mission to rescue European culture from the advance of asiatic barbarism’. He pointed to the way the Red Army had ‘bestially murdered’ German soldiers. Any sympathywith the native population was wholly misplaced. He stressed the guilt of Jews for circumstances in Germany after the First World War. He saw the extermination of the ‘spiritual support of Bolshevism’ and ‘aid of the partisans’ as ‘a rule of self-preservation’.
    Towards the end of November, the Commander-in-Chief of the 11th Army, Erich von Manstein, in a secret order to his troops, was equally uncompromising. The German people had stood since 22 June, he stated, in a life-and-death struggle against the Bolshevik system, which was not being fought according to traditional European rules of war. The clear implication was that a Soviet regime dominated by Jews was responsible for this. Manstein referred to the Soviet partisan war behind the front lines. Jewry, with ‘all the key-points of the political leadership and administration, trade, and crafts’ in their hands, formed, he claimed, the ‘intermediary between the enemy in the rear and the remainder still fighting of the Red Army and Red Leadership’. From this, he drew his conclusion. ‘The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be eradicated once and for all,’ he wrote. ‘Never again must it enter into our European living space. The German soldier has the task, therefore, not solely of smashing the military means of power of this system. He is also the bearer of a racial idea and avenger of all atrocities perpetrated on him and the German people … The soldier must show sympathy for the necessity of the hard atonement demanded of Jewry, the spiritual bearer of the Bolshevik terror …’
    Other army commanders increasingly used the spread of partisan warfare as justification for the no-holds-barred treatment of the Jews. Already in the first weeks of ‘Barbarossa’, Jews were being equated with partisans by some commanders or seen as the major source of their support. But the ‘partisan struggle’ only began in earnest in the autumn. In the rear area of Army Group Centre, a ‘seminar’ was organized in September 1941 to allow an exchange of views and experiences between selected officers and leading SS spokesmen on the ‘combating of partisans’. The participants took away from their ‘orientation course’ the plain message to serve as the guideline for future ‘pacification’ policy: ‘Where there’s a partisan, there’s a Jew, and where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan.’
    Such voices were influential. There were, however, others. Some commanders insisted on rigorous separation of the Wehrmacht from the actions of the Security Police. One of these, General Karl von Roques,put out an order at the end of July prohibiting any participation by his men in pogroms on the grounds that it was ‘unsoldierly’ and would seriously damage the standing of the Wehrmacht. However, his order was ineffective. Cases continued to occur in which ‘soldiers and also officers had independently undertaken shootings of Jews or participated in them’. In September, he was forced to issue another order, in which he repeated that ‘executive measures’, especially against Jews, were solely the province of the Higher SS and Police Leader, and any unauthorized shootings by individual soldiers, or participation in ‘executive measures’ of the SS