Eastward from Pretzsch
In the spring of 1941 a police academy in Pretzsch, a town on the Elbe River about fifty miles southwest of Berlin, became the site of a sinister assembly.
Several thousand men from the ranks of the SS—the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel, or defense echelon, a police and security service that answered directly to Adolf Hitler and operated outside the constraints of German law—were ordered to report to Pretzsch for training and assignment.
They were not told what their assignment would be, but their commonalities offered a clue: many of them had served in SS detachments in Poland, which Germany had invaded and occupied in 1939, and preference was given to men who spoke Russian.
Assignment to Pretzsch emptied the SS leadership school in Berlin-Charlottenburg and depleted the professional examination course of an SS criminal division. It drew in lower-and middle-ranking officers of the Security Police (the Gestapo and the criminal police), some of them passed on gratefully by their home regiments because they were considered too wild. The Waffen-SS, the small but growing SS army, contributed enlisted men. High-ranking bureaucrats within the shadowy Reich Security Main Office, an internal SS security agency, were posted to Pretzsch as well.
They had been handpicked for leadership positions by Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the RSHA and the second most powerful man in the SS, and his superior Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS.
Most of these handpicked leaders were lawyers, and a few were physicians or educators; most had earned doctoral degrees. Among the more exotic specimens were Otto Ohlendorf, a handsome but argumentative young economist who had fallen into disfavor with Himmler; Paul Blobel, a rawboned, highstrung, frequently drunken architect; Arthur Nebe, a former vice squad detective and Gestapo head who had enthusiastically volunteered; and Karl Jäger, a brutal fifty-three-year-old secret police commander. A reserve battalion of the regular German Order Police (uniformed urban, rural and municipal police) completed the Pretzsch roster.
Soon the men learned that they would be assigned to an Einsatzgruppe—a task force. Einsatz units—groups and commandos—had followed the German army into Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland when Germany had invaded those countries successively in 1938 and 1939. Einsatzgruppen secured occupied territories in advance of civilian administrators. They confiscated weapons and gathered incriminating documents, tracked down and arrested people the SS considered politically unreliable—and systematically murdered the occupied country’s political, educational, religious and intellectual leadership.
Since Germany had concluded a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939, many of the candidates at Pretzsch assumed they would be assigned to follow the Wehrmacht into England. Some of them had previously trained to just that end.
Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes
Nebe never commanded the Gestapo. That was Heinrich Mueller’s bailiwick. Nebe commanded the Kriminalpolizei [Criminal Police] side of the Sicherheitspolizei [Security Police]., which was under Heydrich’s direct command, and inclided the Gestapo, Kriminalpolizei, and the Sicherheitsdienst [SS SD, the SS Security Service]. The uniformed police [Ornungspolizei-Order Police] was a separate entity commanded by Kurt Daleuge. Several order police regiments were also sent to Russia.
Among the “more exotic specimens” of Einsatzkommando officers were a former opera singer, and a former Protestant Minister.
Ohlendorf was not only an economist. He also had a law degree.