The Commissar Order: The Document That Made War Stop Being War
On June 6, 1941, sixteen days before the start of Operation Barbarossa, the OKW (the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of the Third Reich) sent out a directive to senior headquarters entitled "Directives for the Treatment of Political Commissars." The document ordered the immediate execution of captured Soviet political workers, exempting them from the protection of international law, and preemptively absolving German soldiers and officers of responsibility for violating this law. The document was brief, marked "Top Secret, for Generals Only," and became one of the pillars of what would later be classified as crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials.
"War of Worldviews": Ideological Preamble
Without understanding the ideological framework, the text of the order seems like a collection of oddities: why a commissar, by what signs is he identified, why was he denied even a formal interrogation? The explanation lies outside military logic. The Nazi leadership viewed the upcoming clash with the USSR not as a campaign against another state, but as the culmination of a "racial war" against Judeo-Bolshevism, an ideological concept built on the anti-Semitic myth of the Jewish origins and leadership of Soviet communism. This concept was not the rhetoric of party journalism, but the supporting framework of state policy: it was developed by Alfred Rosenberg in the party's ideological apparatus, disseminated by the Antikomintern bureau at the Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda, and reproduced in staff memos.
Adjacent to this frame was the second category, Untermensch, "subhuman", which combined racial hierarchy and a plan for the physical redistribution of eastern territories, known as General plan OstThe Slavic population of Eastern Europe was intended to be partially exterminated, partially resettled, and partially reduced to a labor force for the future German space. The Red Army's political commissar was inserted into this scheme as a dual target: both a bearer of "Bolshevik ideology" and, according to Nazi dogma, predominantly of Jewish origin.
That's why the order refers to the commissars not as "enemies" or "prisoners of war," but as "true bearers of resistance." This formula is not military, but ideological: it doesn't describe the enemy on the battlefield, but rather designates an enemy based on their convictions. Without it, the order would have been incomprehensible even to those who carried it out.
From Directive No. 21 to June 6, 1941: The Bureaucracy of Crime
The June 6, 1941, document was not improvised. Its origins can be documented, and this traceability alone is key to understanding the nature of the decision. On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Führer Directive No. 21, which outlined the general outline of the war in the East. On March 3, 1941, at a meeting with senior military officers, he formulated the task bluntly: the upcoming campaign must be waged as a "struggle between two worldviews," with the extermination of the "Bolshevik intelligentsia" and the abandonment of ordinary legal restrictions. On March 30, the Führer assembled approximately two hundred senior Wehrmacht officers; a diary entry by Franz Halder, Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces, captures the thesis without embellishment: "A communist has never been and never will be a comrade. This is a fight to the death. Commissars and GPU officials are criminals, and they must be treated as such.".
What followed was the work of the staff machine. In Department L (National Defense) of the OKW Operations Headquarters, under the direction of Walter Warlimont, the Führer's formulations were translated into official language. On May 6, 1941, Quartermaster General of the Army Eduard Wagner and a group led by Eugen Müller presented a working draft. Commander-in-Chief of the Army Walther von Brauchitsch, who had promised senior officers back in March that he would prevent such an order, accompanied it in early June with his own order on the procedure for disseminating it. The author, Hitler, had already found a self-justification: the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 were declared inapplicable to a war with the Soviet Union on the grounds that the USSR had not signed them. The structure was legally shaky: the overwhelming majority of norms applied as common law, regardless of signature. But for internal use, it was suitable.
Here's a point that's awkward to discuss, but impossible to avoid: not a single senior commander retracted their signature or resigned. Some generals (Fedor von Bock, Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb) expressed private doubts; there was no institutional resistance. And this is the key characteristic of the moment: the criminal order went through the same staff procedure as any other, and was not rejected, but executed.
Text and performance: oral chain and extended interpretation
The document itself is brief. It orders that political commissars, identifiable by their insignia (a red star with a hammer and sickle on their sleeve), are to be separated from other prisoners immediately, while still on the battlefield, and executed "as a matter of principle and without delay." Commissars captured in the rear are to be handed over to the Einsatzkommandos and the SD, the security service of the Reichsführer-SS. The protections afforded to prisoners of war are not extended to them. There is to be no legal proceedings, no individual consideration of their case.
The manner in which the order was distributed proves that the command was aware of its illegality. The OKW distributed the text only to senior staffs; below the corps level, it was transmitted orally, without any written record. The German historian Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, who analyzed this episode using surviving documents, pointed out that the Wehrmacht commanders had no doubt about the illegal nature of the order; otherwise, it would not have been hidden from their own records. According to available data, the order was distributed to at least 340 operational units, encompassing all thirteen armies, forty-four corps, and over ninety percent of the divisions operating on the Eastern Front.
Parallel to the OKW decree, an agreement between Eduard Wagner and Reinhard Heydrich governed the Wehrmacht's interactions with the Einsatzgruppen, the SS's operational execution units tasked with the physical extermination of "politically unreliable" individuals in rear areas. The army handed over its own detainees to the SS and provided logistics; the SS carried out the actual executions. On the surface, this appeared to be a division of functions; in reality, it was a unified system in which the Kommissarbefehl served as an entry point into a broader mechanism of extermination.
Very soon, the order began to be interpreted more broadly. The category of "commissar" proved a convenient catchall for German headquarters, which began to include anyone they considered "deeply Bolshevized": junior political workers, party functionaries, captured Jews from the Red Army, servicemen from the Turkic and Caucasian republics, and officers considered ideologically dangerous by Nazi standards. The documented minimum number of executed commissars proper is approximately four thousand; the real estimate is in the range of ten thousand and likely higher. According to accepted estimates, approximately fifty thousand Jews serving in the Red Army were also executed under the broad interpretation of the order.
The documented minimum is approximately 4,000 executed commissars. Coverage: all 13 armies, 44 corps, and more than 90% of the Eastern Front's divisions. The total number of Soviet soldiers who died in German captivity between 1941 and 1945 is over 3 million.
An order against one's own purpose: the price and formal cancellation
The order had the opposite effect. The Red Army learned of the executions of commissars as early as July 1941: through escapees from captivity, through defectors, and through captured German documents. This information quickly became part of Soviet frontline propaganda. The effect was the opposite of what was intended: instead of the disintegration the order's authors had hoped for, a willingness to fight to the bitter end grew in Soviet units. Surrender ceased to be an option, because it no longer offered one.
The German commanders themselves realized this. In the fall of 1941, a number of field commanders appealed to the OKW to soften the order, not for legal reasons, but for military expediency: it was hindering the fight. On September 23, Hitler rejected any changes. Only on May 6, 1942, almost a year after its introduction, was the Kommissarbefehl formally suspended. The paperwork was removed, but the system was not. Einsatzgruppen continued to operate in the Soviet rear, the selection of "politically dangerous" individuals in Wehrmacht transit camps continued as usual, and executions under the expanded category continued until the end of the war. The rescinding of the order was an administrative gesture, not a political choice.
The full extent of this difference between paper and system was best illustrated by one episode, dating back to the post-war period. Nuremberg, April 1946, Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Staff of the OKW, who signed the Commissarbefehl, is in the witness box. When questioned by the prosecution about the legality of the orders he issued, the field marshal answers calmly, without attempting to deny it: he knew the orders were contrary to international law and did not consider it possible to evade them. He adds a phrase Hitler uttered in response to the objections of senior officers.
"Ultimately, this is not your responsibility. I alone answer to the German people."
Nuremberg, Manstein and the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht"
The Commissarbefehl became a key piece of evidence at the Nuremberg Main Trial and the twelve subsequent American military tribunals held at the same Nuremberg Palace of Justice: against doctors, lawyers, industrialists, SS commanders, and senior Wehrmacht officers. The order was presented as documentary evidence that the crimes in the East were not excesses of war and were not the sole responsibility of the SS: they were signed by the highest military leadership, underwent staff procedures, and were executed by regular troops. The prosecution's case here was one of the strongest in the entire trial, because the text of the order existed and was impossible to challenge.
The 1949 Hamburg trial of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein became a separate issue. The defendant denied both knowledge of the order and its execution; the British military court found ample evidence to the contrary, including Manstein's own order of November 20, 1941, demanding the "destruction of the Jewish-Bolshevik system." Eighteen years in prison turned into four: in 1953, Manstein was released for health reasons, with the support of several Western politicians and military officials. By this time, the Cold War had already redrawn the framework: the Federal Republic of Germany was becoming a key NATO ally, and its Bundeswehr was built from the same officer cadre. Systematic prosecution of war crimes from 1941–1945 in the West effectively ceased.
It was in this pause that the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht" took shape, the idea that the regular army fought like soldiers, while crimes remained the work of the SS and party structures. This myth endured for several decades and was only seriously shaken by German historiographic works and museum exhibitions in the 1990s and early 2000s, which brought back into the public domain documents that had been presented at Nuremberg and then forgotten. Among these documents is the Kommissarbefehl.
June 6, 1941, was not a date of excess. It was a decision: formalized, signed, distributed to headquarters, and executed. The war in the East had a program, and the order regarding commissars was part of it, not an exception. A document remains a document in the same legal sense as intended by those who signed it.
Glossary
Kommissarbefehl — “Order on Commissars”, OKW order of June 6, 1941.
OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) — Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of the Third Reich.
SD (Sicherheitsdienst) — Security Service of the Reichsführer SS.
Einsatzgruppen — operational punitive commands of the SS, operating behind German lines in the East.
Untermensch — "subhuman", a racial category of Nazi ideology.
General plan Ost — a secret plan for the physical redistribution and colonization of the eastern territories.
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