Bach-Zelewski basically took over all anti-partisan operations in central Russia during 1941 and into 1942, organizing joint sweeps of partisan-controlled territory with Waffen-SS troops and army units. He was provided with a number of Waffen-SS units, including a motorized infantry brigade and the cavalry brigade led by Hermann Fegelein. Along with assorted police units, the SS general had some 36,000 men under his direct command and could also call on several thousand army soldiers. Fegelein was particularly zealous in his work, launching a series of killing actions in the Pripet Marshes that left 1000 suspected partisans, 699 Red Army soldiers and 14,178 Jews dead.

The partisan threat grows

Bach-Zelewski's men soon found themselves caught in a maelstrom of partisan fighting during the winter of 1941, as tens of thousands of Soviet troops who had been bypassed by the panzer spearheads started to band together, along with peasants alienated by German oppression, and strike back. German garrisons were raided, railway lines blown up, truck convoys ambushed and collaborators assassinated. Belorussia was the centre of partisan activity against the Germans, and the region's huge forests offered them the perfect sanctuary. By the end of 1941, the partisan bands were receiving help from the Soviet High Command and their attacks were coordinated with Red Army offensives. These bands at first only mustered a few hundred men, but by the time German troops were driven off Russian soil in the summer of 1944 several hundred thousand partisans were in operation.

By early 1942 Bach-Zelewski's Waffen-SS men were no longer facing unarmed Jewish villagers who meekly lined up to be machine-gunned, but well-armed and motivated partisans. When the Waffen-SS men suffered casualties at the hands of the partisans it enraged Bach-Zelewski, who ordered even more barbaric reprisals. If partisans fired on German troops from villages, then the village was torched and the villagers' crops and cattle confiscated, before the population was either conscripted as forced labour or executed. Huge swathes of central Russia were laid bare and tens of thousands of people were forced to flee to towns controlled by the Germans, or to the forests to take shelter with the partisans.

In September 1942, the partisan problem was so out of control that Himmler was able to persuade Hitler that it was all the army's fault and that he should be put in charge of the partisan war. Himmler appointed Bach-Zelewski as his chief of anti-partisan units on the entire Eastern Front.

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