More arm-flapping, obfuscation and dodging from Dogzilla.
Einsatzgruppen were formed in 1938 (Anschluss), 1939 (annexation of the Czech lands), 1939 (Poland), 1940 (for use in the west), 1941 (for use in the Balkans) and for 'Barbarossa'. Their function was to serve as mobile political police forces to impose Nazi rule by arresting political opponents of the Nazi regime, and from 1939 onwards, by shooting potential opponents, which they did in Poland fairly extensively in the autumn of 1939. The guidelines for 'Barbarossa' are available and lay down categories of individuals who were to be summarily liquidated, irrespective of whether there was any actual opposition or not. On July 2 1941, Heydrich ordered that:
This was an extension of the illegal Commissar Order which decreed the summary execution of military commissars, with civilian 'commissars' slated to die at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen, along with "Jews in party and state functions", which covered potentially everyone down to a postman.
On July 17, 1941, Heydrich issued Action Order No 8, which regulated who was to be summarily executed from along captured Soviet prisoners of war being screened for 'undesirables', another illegal order. The categories of intended victims now included "all Jews". So any Jewish soldier in the Red Army could now be executed.
These two orders refute the arm-flapping about how the Einsatzgruppen were only created for "antipartisan warfare".
The tasks of the Einsatzgruppen expanded from these starting points to encompass the systematic mass murder of all Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. The expanded orders were passed on orally, and referred to in writing retrospectively. One such retrospective reference is in the Jaeger report.
The Jaeger report is evidence of a policy of systematic extermination of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, a policy which was being implemented across the length and breadth of the front by October 1941. This was SS policy; it still had to be negotiated with the civil administration and Wehrmacht on a region by region or even town by town basis. Thus when Jaeger writes
he clearly understood that the "solution of the Jewish problem" was to be carried out by murdering the Jews, and that the task was essentially complete, because he couldn't kill any more for the time being:
Einsatzkommando 2 in neighbouring Latvia wrote around the same time, 'the goal to which EK 2 strove from the outset, was a radical solution of the Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews'. This was another retrospective comment, indicating that by early 1942, EK 2 understood its goals to include total extermination. 'execution of all Jews' cannot be understood in any other sense, I think it's fair to say, even in Dogzilla World.
Stahlecker, who commanded Einsatzgruppe A and thus controlled EKs 2 and 3, wrote rather similarly in a February 1942 which recorded the execution of 248,000 Jews by the sub-units of the Einsatzgruppe to that date.
These sources and many others indicate that the SS escalated during the summer of 1941 to a policy of total extermination of Soviet Jews, modified only by logistical limitations and the opposition of civil or military authorities, who virtually never wanted to preserve more than a fraction of the Jewish population for labour.
Since the commander of EK2, Lange, was present at the Wannsee conference, this policy of total extermination is obviously linked to the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy across the whole of Europe.
Heydrich coordinated the activities of the Einsatzgruppen while also planning the Final Solution. Shortly after Wannsee, he sent the Einsatzgruppen a photocopy of his 'tasking' from Goering on July 31 1941 to prepare a total solution of the Jewish question - this was Heydrich's CYA authorisation from a more senior Nazi, the same authorisation used to convene Wannsee.
The cc'ing of this memo was a way of signalling to the Einsatzgruppen that their activities were now part of a grand project unfolding across the whole of Europe. Given that the Einsatzgruppen understood their role as including the murder of all Jews wherever possible, any deported Jews turning up in the occupied Soviet territories were liable to be killed. Which is precisely what happened with a couple of dozen transports from Germany to the Ostland in 1942.
For these and many other reasons, it is conventionally understood that Nazi policy escalated in stages, with the implementation of extermination in the occupied Soviet territories preceding a decision to exterminate Jews across the whole of Europe.
At the time when the decision to exterminate the Jews across the whole of Europe was announced to the political leadership and senior civil servants in December 1941 (by Hitler on 12 December, as noted in Goebbels' diary) and January 1942 (by Heydrich at Wannsee), the methods and timing were still up in the air, as should be obvious from the fact that various death camps were not yet even constructed. The Nazis thought in terms of killing off large numbers through exhausting forced labour, as well as in terms of continuing the mass shootings. And indeed, mass shootings carried on through 1942 and 1943 in parallel with gassing. Both were simply methods. Extermination can be carried out by a variety of means. The end result is the same, dead people.
No, it's not an interesting question, since it's a rather blatant attempt at derailing the current discussion. Your attempt to drag things back to a peripheral issue has already been answered some pages back, whereas you've not even attempted to reply to a great many questions put to you in the past few pages.
