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fighting against other people, but for the first time ideology was fighting against another ideology. . . . He explained that Bolshevism would not stop from using every means of fighting, as Lenin had already written; emphasizing in particular the part the partisans were to play, which Lenin and others had written about, and this could not be misunderstood. [He said] that everyone should be sure to understand that in this fight Jews would definitely take their part, and that in this fight everything was set at stake, and the side which gave in would be . . . overcome. For that reason all measures had to be taken against the Jews in particular. The experience in Poland had shown this.”
    Schulz emphasized in this postwar testimony, however, that neither in Berlin nor in Pretzsch had Heydrich and Streckenbach mentioned either the Commissar Order or the extermination of the Jews. At the outset of Barbarossa, at least, the work of the new Einsatzgruppen would be similar to the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland—brutal enough work at that. Heydrich ordered four categories of enemies executed: “[1] All officials of the Comintern 9 (most of these will certainly be career politicians); [2] officials of senior and middle rank and ‘extremists’ in the [Communist] Party, the Central Committee, and the provincial and district committees; [3] the people’s commissars; [4] Jews in the service of the party or the government; [as well as] other extremist elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.).” Heydrich also told the Einsatzgruppen leaders to secretly encourage and not to interfere with “any purges that may be initiated by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories.” Which meant that Jews who were not “in the service of the party or the government” were targeted from the outset; if the SS was not yet prepared to be seen murdering large numbers of Jews without at least minimal “political” justification, it was charged with the responsibility of organizing others to do so. (“The aim of Einsatzkommando 2 from the beginning,” commando leader Rudolf Lange would report from Latvia in January 1942, “was a radical solution of the Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews.”)
    The SS probably approached mass murder cautiously because of its past conflicts with the Wehrmacht; it needed first to assess whether the army on the scene would support and ignore the SS’s performance of its murderous “special tasks” in the occupied territories as the high command in Berlin had agreed to do. And in any case, as Streckenbach had informed the new Einsatzgruppen in Pretzsch, Russia was expected to be defeated by December. For now, elimination of the “Jewish-Bolshevik” leadership and intelligentsia; after the quick victory, there would be time to deal with the rest of the Eastern Jews.
    But not only the Jews. A more grandiose vision than revenge against the Jews drove the Nazi elite. Himmler had refurbished a Saxon castle, Wewelsburg, for his SS leadership, which he considered “a knightly Order.” Sited on a bluff of the Alme River near Paderborn in western Germany, it looked out grandly across the Westphalian plain. One week before Barbarossa, the Reichsführer-SS assembled his top SS and police leadership at Wewelsburg for a three-day meeting. Heydrich attended; so did Heydrich’s stern, balding rival Kurt Daluege, the chief of the Order Police, and the Higher SS and Police Leaders Himmler had designated to assume civilian control of the occupied Soviet territories once the Wehrmacht moved on. Speaking to the assembled Gruppenführers 10 in their elegant black uniforms, Himmler repeated Hitler’s arguments about an ultimate contest between ideologies and the necessity of seizing new living space —Lebensraum— for the Fatherland. He then put a number on what that seizure would mean. “It is a question of