Under the code name “Operation Tannenberg,” preparations at SD headquarters included the compilation of a proscription list known as the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen (Special prosecution book for Poland).1 The overall coordination of this effort was taken over in early June by Werner Best, the head of the Gestapo’s Department I (administration and personnel) and Department III (counterintelligence), who was second only to Reinhard Heydrich as the most important figure in the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei). In the end, there were seven Einsatzgruppen encompassing sixteen Einsatzkommandos (deployment groups and deployment commandos, respectively), altogether comprising some 4,250 persons, of which 2,250 came from the Ordnungspolizei (“order” police, or uniformed law enforcement officers) and the rest primarily from the Gestapo and the Kriminalpolizei (criminal police, or plainclothes investigators), while the SD mainly supplied the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos.2
Of particular interest are the instructions these men brought with them into the war zone, for they allow conclusions to be drawn about the kind of warfare that Germany was intending to wage, and thus about its envisaged war goals. The foreign-deployment guidelines for the Security Police and the SD were issued at the end of August, after consultations between Heydrich and Colonel Eduard Wagner, the responsible officer in the Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH); here, the Einsatzgruppen were tasked in very general terms with the “combating of all anti-Reich and anti-German elements rearwards of the fighting troops.”3 Expressions like “völkische Flurbereinigung” (“ethnic cleansing of the soil”), which became so common just a few weeks later, are entirely missing here, as are any mentions of the Jewish populace. Instead, it was explicitly written that “mistreatment or killings of apprehended persons are strictly forbidden.”4 These guidelines contain no hint of the mass murders that these same units would commit just a few weeks later. It cannot be ruled out, however, that these written instructions may have served as cover for the SS, with a supplementary “killing order” issued orally by Himmler and Heydrich.5
In the latest research, this interpretation is most forcefully argued by Alexander B. Rossino. One piece of evidence is the testimony on a meeting with Einsatzgruppen leaders on August 18, 1939, who were apparently informed by Heydrich about further alleged atrocities committed against the ethnic Germans, leading him to expect heavy resistance from paramilitary Polish groups; in order to suppress them, “everything was permissible, meaning executions as well as arrests,” according to Lothar Beutel, leader of Einsatzgruppe IV.6 Another attendee of that meeting, however, the liaison chief of Einsatzgruppe IV, Dr. Ernst Gehrke, denied having received a “general liquidation order,” but added that “back then it was not the usual way, expressing such things so openly.”7 No further clarity on Rossino’s contentions is provided by a message from Heydrich to the chief of the Ordnungspolizei Kurt Daluege on July 2, 1940, in which he makes retrospective mention of the murders in Poland. Certainly, Heydrich does write that the “instructions for police deployment were extraordinarily radical (e.g., liquidation order for many Polish leadership groups, going into the thousands)”—this is not in doubt.8 But the real question is when these instructions were actually issued, whether before the war or after it was already in progress—on this point, the message offers no clue. Although Rossino’s interpretation cannot be entirely discounted on the basis of the surviving documents, I think it nonetheless fails to adequately consider the processual character that shaped the development of violence during these weeks. In this view, killing campaigns are primarily seen as the end product of a well-defined process of decision and command, one that is ascribed to the headquarters, with little attention paid to events on the periphery or to the personal initiative of agents on the ground; as a result, a more complex model of interaction between the hub and the periphery is no longer considered.
In my view, it seems much more likely that Heydrich initially refrained from issuing wholesale killing orders to those gathered on August 18, especially since he could not yet be sure at that point whether such a thing was actually enforceable against the will of the Wehrmacht. Instead, one can assume that it was more about readying these men for a deployment that was clearly unlike those that had come before. And it certainly cannot be ruled out that the prohibition against killing, as specified in the guidelines, was explicitly qualified with potential exceptions. Speaking in favor of this was an order issued on August 18 by Best to the SS units stationed on occupied Czech territory, in which he expanded the circle of those considered enemies. Every person who politically opposed the German occupation was now to be treated as an “enemy of the state,” including all communists and left-wing social democrats, as well as all Jews.9 Although one can hardly assume that any greater deference was ordered in regard to the Polish populace, this still does not mean that a general killing order necessarily existed for the deployment in Poland.10
But it was not only the SS units that were caught up in this radicalization process. The Wehrmacht too had long since begun unshackling itself from the “constraints” of international war conventions. After an order had already been issued as early as February 16, 1939, specifying the separation of war prisoners according to “racial” criteria (which was actually implemented after September 1 with the systematic selection of Jewish prisoners), the Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH) as well as individual commanders began preparing their soldiers for the war against Poland on an ideological level.11 Thus, in a handbook from the Wehrmacht High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) dated July 1, 1939, the Polish populace was vilified as “fanatically hate-filled” and was also accused of “destroying and poisoning food stockpiles.” It was because of this that any “accommodating treatment” would in fact be “construed as weakness.”12 For the Army High Command, it was just a short leap to then declare on August 9, 1939, that the rules of the Hague Conventions were to be obeyed at most “in spirit.”13 To ensure that the individual commanders in chief also understood what the upcoming war was about and how it was to be waged, Hitler invited them to a meeting on August 22. His speech to them must have cleared up any last doubts among the Wehrmacht leadership about the character of the impending war: “Poland’s destruction at the fore. Goal is the elimination of all living forces, not the reaching of a certain line . . . shut the heart against pity. Brutal actions . . . Any newly reemerging living Polish force is to be immediately exterminated again.”14
The German leadership thus wanted a war that was aimed not only at the extinguishing of Poland’s armed forces, but also at already laying the groundwork for a German-dominated Eastern Europe, whose borders—at least for now—had been defined by the pact with the Soviet Union. But beyond that, vagueness dominated in Berlin. There was certainly no hint of any “detailed plans of expansion and conquest” that Antoni Czubinski claims to have found, nor anything else that resembled a plan, however coherent, about the future war aims.15 There was consensus on only two aspects: the annexation of large parts of western Poland beyond the borders of 1918 and the homogenization of the populace there.
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Thus, although the SS Einsatzgruppen probably did not have a wholesale killing order when they crossed Poland’s borders on the early morning of September 1, they were nonetheless committed to waging a war that violated all rules of international law. And the Wehrmacht had set out on a similar course. As already demonstrated decades ago by Polish historians, and also proved more recently by two impressive studies, the Wehrmacht was certainly not just a bystander in the mass murders committed by the SS and police units during the war against Poland.16
One of the first major war crimes occurred in the city of Bydgoszcz, known in German as Bromberg. The shooting of retreating Polish soldiers by ethnic Germans, in which forty to fifty soldiers were killed, had led to Polish retaliatory attacks on September 3, in which anywhere from one hundred to three hundred people were killed.17 During the Wehrmacht’s conquest of the city soon thereafter, a war crime was already committed by a unit from Einsatzgruppe IV, which executed more than fifty defenders of city hall, mostly youths.18 Further attacks on German personnel were answered with ever more radical terror measures, until the local Wehrmacht commander apparently gave free rein to the head of Einsatzkommando 1, which ultimately led to a mass execution on September