'Severity Order' given to German troops

10th October 1941: Wehrmacht orders shows complicity in Nazi war crimes - urging them to be 'pitiless' behind the front line

A group of Russian peasants suspected of being partisans have been captured. A group of soldiers is briefed in the background. These official propaganda images suggest an orderliness inconsistent with many accounts of ‘partisan actions’.

The men are marched off under armed guard. Little detail gives context beyond the fact that this was somewhere in northern Russia in September 1941.

It was once widely argued that the regular German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, were quite separate from and often ignorant of the activities of the SS troops and Einsatzgruppen that conducted the racial killings in the east. Many members of the German armed forces sought to build this narrative after the war. Yet they would have all been aware of the 'ideological struggle' that the campaign in the East was portrayed as in Nazi propaganda.

Field Marshal von Reichenau was certainly not ignorant of what was happening in his command area. German Army Catholic chaplains had sent him a report on the horrific suffering of children and infants following the murder of their parents in August. Reichenau responded that the report “should never have been written”.

Adolf Hitler and Walter von Reichenau in the Hauptquartier der 6. Armee on 24th September 1941.

Some of the army commanders were ardent supporters of the Nazi line and clearly saw the war in racial terms. Reichenau, commanding the 6th Army during the drive through Ukraine on the Eastern Front, issued his notorious 'Severity Order' on the 10th October. It can be no coincidence that he had recently met Hitler.