the quest for racial purity - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Moreover, in the first months of 1941, the Nazi leaders were deep in planning for the
invasion of the Soviet Union, which would, in turn, bring millions more Jews under their
control. Against the backdrop of the failed plans for mass expulsion and plans to initiate
the conflict that would destroy the archenemy of National Socialism, the Nazi leaders took
a first, practical step toward the “Final Solution”; they planned the murder of the Jewish
population throughout the Soviet Union.
Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, violating the existing nonaggression
pact between the two countries and initiating a war that would make genocide possible.
The Germans presented the invasion as a historic struggle against the Bolshevik ideology,
which was supposedly disseminated by Jews, and as an attack on the Soviet Union, which
was the seat of world communism. More than other conflicts, the Nazis and many other
Germans understood the war as a life-and-death struggle between two world views—the
“German/Aryan” and the “Jewish/Communist”—in which no compromise was possible.
In this context, German authorities gave their invading forces explicit orders to target for
annihilation all potential enemies, particularly Jews, Roma, members of the Soviet state
and Communist Party elites, and anyone else who might oppose their permanent rule.
Mobile Killing Squads of German SS and police personnel, who followed the German
army as it advanced deep into Soviet territory, were tasked with identifying and murdering
those whom they perceived to be racial or political enemies of Germany, as well as
developing intelligence nets to flush out those enemies who were not immediately visible.
Because Nazi ideology defined Soviet Jews as especially dangerous, the Mobile Killing
Squads, together with the auxiliary forces that they recruited from local collaborators and
the German Order Police units that reinforced them, first shot primarily Jewish men of
arms-bearing age, then buried them in mass graves. By the end of July, however, German
forces began to annihilate entire Jewish communities—men, women, and children—
without regard for age or sex. Those who were able to flee the massacres were often killed
by the local population or turned over to the Germans to be shot. SS and police units also
killed Roma and officials of the Soviet state and the Communist Party, as well as thousands
of residents of institutions for people with mental and physical disabilities.
The civilian German administrator of the Belorussian town of Slutsk witnessed and
reported on a massacre in his locale as follows:
As far as the manner in which this action was carried out, it is with deepest regret that I have to
state that this bordered on the sadistic.… The Jewish people but also [non-Jewish] White Russians
were taken from their homes and rounded up with indescribable brutality by both the German
138 | nazi ideology and the holocaust