Commissar Order

Its official name was Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars (Richtlinien für die Behandlung politischer Kommissare).

It instructed the Wehrmacht that any Soviet political commissar identified among captured troops be summarily executed as a purported enforcer of the so-called Judeo-Bolshevism ideology in military forces.

In December 1940, Adolf Hitler began vague allusions to the operation[2] to senior generals on how the war was to be conducted, giving him the opportunity to gauge their reaction to such matters as collaboration with the SS in the "rendering harmless" of Bolsheviks, which eventually culminated in Führer Directive 21 on 18 December 1940.

The Wehrmacht was already politicised to some extent, having participated in the extra-legal killings of Ernst Röhm and his associates in 1934, communists in the Sudetenland in 1938, and Czech and German political exiles in France in 1940.

21 (Case Barbarossa)" discussing, among other matters, the interaction of the army and SS in the theatre of operations, deriving from the "need to neutralise at once leading bolsheviks and commissars.

The most brutal violence is to be used in the Great Russian Empire" (quoted from Halder's War Diary entry of 17 March ).

Political commissars as agents of the enemy troops are recognizable from their special badge—a red star with a golden woven hammer and sickle on the sleeves....

[11] The final draft of the order was issued by the OKW on 6 June 1941 and was restricted only to the most senior commanders, who were instructed to inform their subordinates verbally.

[11] Nazi propaganda presented Barbarossa as an ideological-racial war between German National Socialism and "Judeo-Bolshevism," dehumanising the Soviet enemy as a force of Slavic Untermensch (sub-humans) and "Asiatic" savages engaging in "barbaric Asiatic fighting methods" commanded by evil Jewish commissars to whom German troops were to grant no mercy.

[12] The vast majority of Wehrmacht officers and soldiers tended to regard the war in Nazi terms, seeing their Soviet opponents as sub-human.

[18] This unwanted effect was cited in German appeals to Hitler (e.g. by Claus von Stauffenberg), who finally cancelled the Commissar Order after one year, on 6 May 1942.