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Vernichtungskrieg: Strategy, Operations, and Genocide
in the German Invasion of the Soviet union, 1941 1

GEOFFREY P. MEGARGEE

For most of the past sixty years, most of the literature on the Nazi-Soviet war has suffered
from a fundamental and artificial division in subject matter. Military historians have long
devoted themselves to the sweep of armies across the vast spaces of the Soviet Union, usu-
ally to the exclusion of such topics as occupation policies. Holocaust historians, on the other
hand, while sometimes displaying an awareness of military affairs, often lacked the expertise
to discuss the war itself. Thus an ordinary reader could be excused for thinking that military
strategy and operations, on the one hand, and occupation policy, on the other, had little or
nothing to do with one another. That, of course, was exactly what many former German
2
generals wanted people to believe. The truth was very different, however. The actions of
German military and paramilitary forces were as important for the Soviet civilian population
as they were for the Red Army, and the consequences of those actions affected, in turn, the
military situation that the Wehrmacht faced.
One does not often find a single document that sums up issues such as these. Among the
documents that relate to Operation Barbarossa, however, there is one that highlights many
of the connections between the military and genocidal aspects of the conflict. The document
in question is an order issued by Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, commander of Sixth
3
Army, on October 10, 1941. I intend to examine that document point by point and use
it to illustrate the interaction of civilian and military spheres during the campaign. The text
begins thus:
Regarding the behavior of the troops in relation to the Bolshevik system, there still exist
many unclear ideas.
The most important goal of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the com-
plete destruction of its instruments of power and the eradication of the asiatic influence in
the European cultural realm.

1 This paper is drawn from my recent work, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front,
1941 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). The opinions expressed herein are my own and do not
necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
2 For an examination of German efforts to create the image of the Aclean@ Wehrmacht, see Ronald M.
Smelser and Edward J. Davies II, The Myth of the Eastern Front: the Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular
Culture (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008).
3 This document can be found in a number of places. A facsimile is included in Hamburger Institut für Sozial-
forschung, hg., Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensionen des Vernichtungs-krieges 1941-1944. Ausstellung-
skatalog. (Hamburger Edition, 2002), 331; another, along with clear text, can be seen on the website NS Ar-
chiv: Dokumente zur Nationalsozialismus (http://www.ns-archiv.de/krieg/ untermenschen/reichenau-befehl.
php). It is also quoted in several works, including Christian Streit, Keine Kamaraden: Die Wehrmacht und
die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945, 2d ed. (Bonn: Dietz, 1997), 115. Emphasis in the original.
This translation is the author’s.