Even before Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union began in 1941, several orders from the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the German Army High Command, made it apparent that the campaign in the East was to be a conflict untrammeled by the laws of war. All of these orders either originated with Adolf Hitler personally or were issued with his full knowledge and approval. The OKH’s Chief of Staff, Gen. Franz Halder, kept a detailed diary during the planning stages of Barbarossa. In his diary entry for March 13, 1941, Halder wrote that Hitler spoke of the need for an “extermination of entire grades of society” once Soviet territory was under German control. Four days later, according to Halder, Hitler took that line of thinking even further. “The intelligentsia established by Stalin must be exterminated,” the Führer said, adding that “the most brutal violence is to be used” against the Soviet Union. What Hitler meant by the phrase “most brutal violence” was soon spelled out in several formal directives, one of which was the infamous Kommissarbefehl, or Commissar Order.
When Germany unleashed its invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 in Operation Barbarossa, its war against the Soviet Union immediately took on stark contrasts with the conflict already underway in the West. In numeric terms, Barbarossa was the largest ground invasion ever mounted in the history of warfare. It was also the bloodiest theatre of the Second World War, with more than 5 million
