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While this declaration prohibits specific acts by individuals, it also implicitly acknowledges that the genocide and slavery perpetrated by Nazi Germany required a high degree of coordination. Criminal culpability explicitly extends to the administrative apparatus of the SS, to the Nazi party, and to the chiefs of German industry that
profited from concentration camp labor. It includes pro-Fascist newspaper publishers who promoted racial hatred in the pages of their publications and the senior officers of Axis ministries and local governments that carried through the day-to-day business of mass murder and persecution.

This text uses the term
war crimes
to refer to those activities banned by Allied Control Council Law No. 10, such as murder, torture, deportation, or persecution on the basis of race or religion. A “war criminal,” logically, is one who has committed those crimes. But as is well known, many persons directly responsible for the Holocaust against the Jews, the mass murder by starvation of millions of Soviet prisoners of war, and other atrocities have escaped and never been tried for their deeds. Therefore, any serious discussion of who can properly be called a “war criminal” must of necessity consider all the historical evidence of what took place during the war and the Holocaust—not just the relatively small number of cases that were formally tried before the International Tribunal at Nuremberg or other courts. The term
war criminal
, as used here, is narrowly defined, but it goes beyond simply those persons who have been convicted in a court of law. It applies to the responsible officials of the political parties, police organizations, or wartime Axis governments whose records of terror, extermination, and anti-Semitism are beyond dispute; to the individuals who voluntarily participated in genocide or mass murders; and, in a small number of cases, to propagandists or publicists who actively promoted persecution on the basis of race or religion.

To understand how certain people in the pages that follow escaped punishment for their crimes, it is necessary to look briefly at one of the most prominent features of the Nazi political philosophy: extreme anticommunism and particularly fanatic hatred of the USSR.

The slaughter that followed the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 is without equal in world history. Next to the Nazis' operation of the anti-Jewish extermination centers at Treblinka, Sobibor, Birkenau, and elsewhere, the most terrible crimes of the entire war took place in name of anticommunism in the German-occupied territories on the eastern front. Civilian casualties in these areas were so enormous, so continuous, and so extreme that even counting the dead has proved impossible. Scholars have attempted to deduce the numbers of fatalities from captured German records, reports of
Einsatzgruppen
(mobile execution squads),
prisoner of war (POW) camp mortality reports, and Soviet census statistics. The evidence indicates that between 3 and 4 million captured Soviet soldiers were intentionally starved to death in German POW camps between 1941 and 1944. At least a million and a half Jews were exterminated inside Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, mainly through mass shootings but also through gassing, deportation to extermination camps, looting and destruction of villages, hangings, and torture. The generally accepted figure for all Soviet war dead is 20 million human beings—about 15 percent of the population of the country at the time—but the destruction was so vast that even this number can be only an educated guess.

The Nazis deliberately used famine as a political weapon in the East, and it soon became the largest single killer. As the German invasion of the USSR began, General (later Field Marshal) Erich von Manstein ordered that “the Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated.… In hostile cities, a large part of the population will have to starve.” Nothing, Manstein continued, “may, out of a sense of mistaken humaneness, be distributed to prisoners or to the population—unless they are in the service of the German Wehrmacht.”
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This was a war not only of conquest but of extermination. Entire regions of the USSR were to be cleared of the existing Communist apparatus and of Slavic “subhumans” to make way for settlement by “Aryan pioneers.” Above all, it was believed necessary to conduct an ideological war to wipe out the “Jewish-Bolshevist plague” and those who were its “carriers.”

The Nazis' mass killings at Lidice, Czechoslovakia, and Oradour, France—where the Germans rounded up the town's population in retaliation for the assassination of a German official, murdered the captives, and shipped any survivors to concentration camps, then
burned the place to the ground—are well remembered in the West today.

But inside the Nazi-occupied USSR there were not just one or two Lidices. There were hundreds. Mass killings of the Lidice type took place at Rasseta (372 dead), Vesniny (about 200 dead, mainly women and children), and Dolina (469 dead, again mainly women and children), to name only three. In the Osveya district in northern Belorussia alone, in the single month of March 1943, the Nazis and collaborationist troops devastated some 158 villages, according to
Times
of London correspondent Alexander Werth. “All able bodied men [were] deported as slaves and all the women, children and old people murdered,” Werth reports. This pattern of massacre and scorched earth warfare was repeated again and again throughout the war on the eastern front.

Nazi warfare against partisans was consistently brutal throughout Europe, and the Germans and their collaborators committed numerous violations of the “laws and customs of war,” such as torture, mass killings of innocent persons in retaliation for guerrilla attacks, and murder of hostages across the Continent. It was in the East, however, that such killings reached a truly frenzied level. At Odessa, for example, the Nazis and their Romanian collaborators destroyed 19,000 Jews and other so-called subversive elements
in a single night
in retaliation for a partisan bombing that had killed about a dozen Romanian soldiers. Axis troops rounded up another 40,000 Jews and executed them during the following week. The SS used gas wagons disguised as Red Cross vans to kill about 7,000 women and children in the south, near Krasnodar. At least 100,000 Jews and Slavs were slain at Babi Yar, near Kiev, and so on, and on, and on.
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Hitler's high command carefully planned the extermination campaign on the eastern front, drawing up directives for mass killings and distributing them to Wehrmacht and SS commanders. They established special SS teams devoted exclusively to mass murder—the
Einsatzgruppen
and their subgroups, the
Sonderkommandos
and
Einsatzkommandos
—and set up liaison between the killing teams and the army commanders at the front to ensure that the killing teams received the necessary intelligence and logistical support. The SS carefully tabulated the results of the carnage as it took place, wrote it up, and sent word back to Berlin. Teams of inspectors and experts (among them men who were later employed as experts on Soviet affairs by U.S. intelligence agencies) traveled the
eastern front throughout the war to make sure the exterminations or confiscations of food from occupied territories were going properly and were being carried out, as one
Einsatzgruppe
leader was to testify at Nuremberg, in a manner which was “humane under the circumstances.”
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What has since come to be termed “political warfare”—that is, the use of propaganda, sabotage, and collaborators to undermine an enemy's will to fight—played an important role in German strategy from the beginning of the conflict. Specialized Nazi-trained propaganda and terror teams made up of native collaborators were among the first units that marched with the German armies across Europe.

The Nazis originally planned to conquer the USSR in a matter of months, and for a time it looked as though they might succeed. But the German offensive bogged down, their supply lines stretched longer and became more vulnerable, and the partisan movement in the German rear grew stronger. As the fall of 1941 turned to winter, army commanders on the eastern front began to place increasing stress on using native anti-Communist collaborators to administer regions under Nazi occupation and to supplement Germany's fighting troops, particularly in antipartisan warfare.

Germany's Soviet affairs specialists contended that a systematic program of employing collaborators and quislings, not unlike that which Germany had used in the occupied zones of Western and Central Europe, was a necessary tactic to achieve a military victory over the USSR. They argued that the invading Nazis should attempt to convince the Soviet people that the Germans would permit collaborators to enjoy a measure of wealth and power under Nazi sponsorship, that the occupied territories would be granted some sort of limited “national independence,” that churches would be reopened, and that the collective farm system would be dissolved. The more extreme types of Nazi brutality should be temporarily restricted, they asserted, in order not to interfere with stabilizing Nazi power in the occupied areas. Anti-Communist émigré groups already on the Germans' payroll, such as the Natsional'no-Trudovoi Soyuz (NTS) and the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Organizatsiia Ukrainskikh Natsionalistov (OUN), were promoted as the Nazis' best instruments for applying this combined political/military strategy inside the occupied zone.
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Hitler, however, rejected such reasoning. His hatred of the Slavs in the East was both racial and political, and he had already laid
plans to exterminate the majority of the Slavic people once he had finished with the Jews. He had little interest in setting up any sort of Slavic states in the East, not even those ruled by Nazi quislings.

But political warfare tactics continued to gain popularity among Wehrmacht and some SS officers who were alarmed by Germany's disastrous losses in the field. These men began to criticize some aspects of the German occupation of the USSR, a fact which has been repeatedly raised in their defense since the end of the war. Such “criticisms” of Hitler's strategy cannot be taken at face value, however. One leading advocate of political warfare, Karl-Georg Pfleiderer, for example, followed up a 1942 inspection tour of the Ukraine with a report that the famine created by the German army was a bad practice—but only because it would interfere with Nazi efforts to extort more food from the occupied areas the following year.

Even that sort of logic did not apply to the treatment of Jews. The political warfare faction of the German leadership “washed their hands of the Jews of Russia,” notes Holocaust historian Gerald Reitlinger. Mercy for the Jews “had nothing to do with winning the war against Stalin” for the Germans, he writes; “it was not essential to the war effort.” Indeed, according to Reitlinger, advocates of political warfare in the East often used aggressive anti-Semitism as a means of legitimizing their otherwise controversial program.
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As the military situation of the German troops worsened, German intelligence experts on the USSR found themselves in increasing demand. Several of these consultants had been born in czarist Russia, all spoke the language, and all of them had made careers out of their expertise in Soviet affairs. Some such authorities, like Franz Six and Emil Augsburg, were senior SS officers and true believers in the Nazi cause who had personally led mobile extermination squads in the East. Others, like Gustav Hilger in the Foreign Office and Ernst Köstring, Hans Heinrich Herwarth, Reinhard Gehlen, and Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt of the Wehrmacht, appear to have been motivated primarily by a sense of duty and a nationalistic pride in what they perceived to be a historic mission to eradicate communism.
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Native collaborators and defectors became the key to the German political warfare group's plans. In the course of the war, the Nazis enlisted about a million such collaborators, including Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Cossacks, and, of course, large numbers of
Russians. The
Osttruppen
(eastern troops) program, commanded by Köstring and Herwarth, embraced all eastern collaborationist troops under German army administration, while the SS recruited its own defectors into units that eventually became part of the Waffen SS. A variety of auxiliary police, militia, and other antipartisan formations organized directly by the Nazis or by collaborationist local administrations under Nazi control filled out the picture.

The jobs assigned to these collaborators ranged from hauling ammunition for frontline troops to mass executions of Jews—the dirty work, in short, that the Nazis often did not want to do for themselves. For the Germans, these units became a living laboratory for the development of sophisticated propaganda, guerrilla warfare, and intelligence techniques for use against the Soviet government. After the war was over, as will be seen, they became the raw material from which the new U.S. political warfare capability was built.

The most important common cause among the German political warriors during (and after) the war became a “Russian Liberation Movement,” which they financed and armed. Their aim was nothing less than uniting all the squabbling collaborationist groups throughout the Nazi-occupied USSR into a single anti-Stalin army. The plan never succeeded, in part because of obstruction from Hitler, who feared the prospect of any all-Russian army, even one commanded by Nazi officers.

Hitler was, however, willing to go along with the pretense of a supposedly independent “Russian Liberation Movement” as a propaganda ploy, so a psychological warfare operation built around those themes was undertaken by Gehlen and Strik-Strikfeldt as early as 1941 and continued throughout the war. In 1942 this effort became known as the Vlasov Army after Andrei Vlasov, a former general in the Red Army whom the Germans had chosen to be the crusade's leader. Vlasov, who had been personally honored by Stalin in 1941 for his courage in the defense of Moscow against German attack, had defected to the Nazis the next year following a humiliating defeat. A tragic figure of Dostoyevskyan proportions, Vlasov apparently sincerely believed that the Nazi government would back his effort to raise an anti-Communist army from among German-held POWs and refugees, then train and equip that army, all the while asking next to nothing in return. Such dreams, of course,
were bound to lead to ruin. In the end Vlasov lost both his army and his life.
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