In the opening pages of Richard Hargreaves’s new book, “Opening the Gates of Hell,” the German military officers are issued what would, as the author notes, “go down in history as criminal orders.” The Germans were on the verge of invading the Soviet Union in the waning days of June 1941. Adolf Hitler had called upon his high command to conduct a “war of extermination” against the Russians. High command issued its orders, which guided the German troops’ conduct. “We would be insulting animals if we were to call the features of the slave-drivers [Bolsheviks]—a high percentage of them Jewish—animal-like,” the orders postulated. “They are the embodiment of the infernal, the personification of the insane hatred of all that is noble in mankind.”
Hargreaves notes that many of the German officers were greatly troubled by the orders, concerned that such “guidance” would create a lack of discipline among the troops. The author quoted a rightfully worried military chaplain, “Dreadful! No investigation of soldiers who commit crimes against the civilian population. I am deeply shaken. Where will it end? Where will it all lead? It means the disintegration of all order.”
