The Einsatzgruppen

In the first months after Operation Barbarossa, the Higher SS and Police Leaders and their staffs were pre-occupied with coordinating the activities of the four Einsatzgruppen that were combing occupied Russia to eliminate its Jewish population. This took a year or so, and then the SS hierarchy in the East turned its attention to setting up ghettos in several major cities and towns to accommodate Jews forcibly evicted from their homes in Western Europe, before they could be shipped to the extermination camps.

The core of the SS occupation force was provided by 14 SS police regiments in Belorussia and seven locally recruited "rifle regiments". A major effort was made to recruit Schuma battalions from the Baltic states. Some 26 Schuma battalions were eventually deployed in the Baltic states; 64 others, comprising some 26,000 men, eventually operated elsewhere in occupied Russia alongside the SS police.

Army and Waffen-SS cooperation

Waffen-SS and army units transiting through occupied Russia or garrisoned behind the front for training and recuperation were often mobilized by the local Higher SS and Police Leaders to participate in various missions. It was a brave Waffen-SS or Wehrmacht officer who refused to carry out the requests of the personal representatives of Himmler. These tasks could range from anti-partisan sweeps to the premeditated massacres of Jews.

The most infamous incident of this type occurred in Poland with the crushing of the uprising in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in April 1943. When the surviving 60,000 Jews in the ghetto decided to fight back rather than meekly be transported to Nazi death camps, the SS leadership in Poland mobilized a task force of 800 Waffen-SS troops, 800 SS policemen, 100 Wehrmacht soldiers and 340 Ukrainian and Baltic auxiliaries to crush the rebellion. This force first surrounded the ghetto and then systematically burnt and demolished every building inside to flush out the resistance. Over a month later, the SS police general Jürgen Stroop boasted that his men had rounded up 56,000 prisoners, and killed 7000 in the course of the operation. The one-sided nature of this struggle is reflected by the fact that Stroop's men only managed to recover nine rifles and 59 pistols, along with several hundred hand grenades and improvised weapons from the ruins of the ghetto. The erasing of the Warsaw ghetto was a massacre, not a battle.

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski

In Russia, the Higher SS and Police Leaders soon became key figures in the partisan war. As far as Himmler and the SS were concerned, the campaign to eliminate the Jews was identical to the struggle against the partisans. In July 1941 Himmler appointed a top SS officer, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, to be Higher SS and Police Leader in the Army Group Centre rear operations zone. His first job was to comb the Pripet Marshes looking for Jews. In September 1941 he declared his philosophy, stating that "where there is a Jew, there is a partisan, and wherever there is a partisan there is a Jew".

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