Commissar Order
정치위원 명령
The "Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars" issued on 6 June 1941 by the German Armed Forces High Command (OKW) together with the Army High Command (OKH). They denied captured Red Army political commissars the status of soldiers and ordered them separated from other prisoners and disposed of (shot) on the spot. The order, a direct breach of the international law of war on prisoners, was suspended on a trial basis on Hitler's instruction on 6 May 1942.
In depth
According to the judgment of the International Military Tribunal, on 12 May 1941 the OKW urged Hitler to issue an order to the OKH. The OKW paper of that day called "commissars of every kind" the true bearers of Bolshevism, a threat to the swift "liberation" of the population of the occupied regions and the instigators of barbaric Asiatic methods of warfare. The guidelines were finalised by the OKW together with the OKH on 6 June. Alfred Jodl, chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, led the drafting, and the army chief of staff Franz Halder bore major responsibility for the wording. The guidelines stated that commissars were "not recognised as soldiers" and, once separated, "are to be finished off"; the shift from "should" in the penultimate draft to "are" in the final text is read in different ways.
The historian A. M. Ermakov notes that the order declared mercy and observance of international rules out of place and demanded action "immediately and without any delay, with all ruthlessness". The test of guilt was not an offence, which the OKW itself thought probably unprovable, but the personal impression of the German officer. Orders of this kind were mostly classified, passed only through officers, and briefed to regimental commanders and up, who passed them on orally. The German historian Wolfram Wette observed that in 1941 the Wehrmacht leadership needed no political commissars like the Red Army's: the generals took on that role.
Christian Streit put the number of commissars shot at the front at several thousand; Felix Römer documents at least 3,430 executions and estimates the real figure in the high four digits. When units objected that the order made commissars fight to the last, the OKH asked for a review on 23 September 1941, which Hitler refused on the 26th. Only on 6 May 1942 did Hitler order that commissars in encircled units be promised their lives on a trial basis, in order to encourage surrender. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg convicted Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, and in the later High Command trial Walter Warlimont and Hermann Reinecke received life sentences.