The following “form” for the carrying out of executions is recommended in Appendix 1 to Operational Order Number 14 of the Chief of the Security Police and SD, dated “Berlin, the 29th of October, 1941, No. 21 B/41 GRS-IV A.I.Z.”:
“Chiefs of operational groups decide questions about execution on their own responsibility and give appropriate instructions to the special task forces. In order to carry out the measures laid down in the directives issued, the Kommandos are to demand from the commandants of the camp the handing over to them of the prisoners. The High Command of the Army has issued instructions to the commandants for meeting such demands.
“Executions must take place unnoticed, in convenient places, and, in any event, not in the camp itself nor in its immediate vicinity. It is necessary to take care that the bodies are buried immediately and properly.”
The report of the operational Kommando (Obersturmbannführer Lipper to Brigadeführer, Dr. Thomas) in Vinnitza, dated December 1941, speaks of the way in which all the above-mentioned instructions were carried out.
It is pointed out in this report that, after the so-called “filtering” of the camp, only 25 persons who could be classed as “suspects” remained in the camp at Vinnitza.
“This limited number”—the report states—“is explained by the fact that the local organizations, in conjunction with the commandants or with the appropriate counterintelligence officers, daily undertook the necessary measures, in accordance with the rules of the Security Police, against the undesirable elements in the permanent prisoner-of-war camps.”
Thus, apart from the mass executions conducted by Sonderkommandos specially created for this purpose, the systematic extermination of Soviet persons was widely practiced by commandants and their subordinates in camps for Soviet prisoners of war.
Among the documents of the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union for the investigation of crimes committed by Germans in the temporarily seized territories of the U.S.S.R. there are several notes of the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, V. M. Molotov, on the subject of the extermination of prisoners of war and of their cruel treatment, and in these notes numerous instances are given of these monstrous crimes of the Hitlerite Government and of the German Supreme Command.
The note of V. M. Molotov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, dated 25 November 1941, on the subject of the revolting bestialities of the German authorities against Soviet prisoners of war, addressed to all ambassadors and ministers plenipotentiary of the countries with which the U.S.S.R. has diplomatic relations, points out that the German High Command and German military units subjected the Red Army soldiers to brutal tortures and killings.
The wild fascist fanatics stabbed and shot on the spot defenseless, sick, and wounded Red Army soldiers who were in the camps; they raped hospital nurses and medical aid women, and brutally murdered members of the medical personnel. A special count of the victims of these executions was conducted on instructions of the German Government and the Supreme Command.