Editing Commissar Order (section)

==Response==
The first draft of the Commissar Order was issued by General [[Eugen Müller]] on 6 May 1941 and called for the shooting of all commissars in order to avoid letting any captured commissar reach a [[Prisoner-of-war camp|POW camp]] in Germany.{{sfn|Jacobsen|1968|pp=516–517}} German historian Hans-Adolf Jacobsen wrote:

<blockquote>There was never any doubt in the minds of German Army commanders that the order deliberately flouted international law; that is borne out by the unusually small number of written copies of the ''Kommissarbefehl'' which were distributed.{{sfn|Jacobsen|1968|p=517}}</blockquote>

The paragraph in which Müller called for army commanders to prevent "excesses" was removed on the request of the OKW.{{sfn|Jacobsen|1968|pp=518–519}} [[German Army (1935–1945)|German Army]] Commander-in-Chief [[Walther von Brauchitsch]] amended the order on 24 May 1941 by attaching Müller's paragraph and calling on the army to maintain discipline in the enforcement of the order.{{sfn|Jacobsen|1968|p=519}} The final draft of the order was issued by the OKW on 6 June 1941 and was restricted only to the most senior commanders, who were instructed to inform their subordinates verbally.{{sfn|Jacobsen|1968|p=519}}

Nazi propaganda presented Barbarossa as an ideological-racial war between German National Socialism and "Judeo-Bolshevism," dehumanising the Soviet enemy as a force of Slavic ''[[Untermensch]]'' (sub-humans) and "Asiatic" savages engaging in "barbaric Asiatic fighting methods" commanded by evil Jewish commissars to whom German troops were to grant no mercy.{{sfn|Förster|2005|p=126}} The vast majority of ''Wehrmacht'' officers and soldiers tended to regard the war in Nazi terms, seeing their Soviet opponents as sub-human.{{sfn|Förster|2005|p=127}}

The enforcement of the Commissar Order led to thousands of executions.<ref name="Förster pages 494-520">[[Jürgen Förster|Förster, Jürgen]] "The Wehrmacht and the War of Extermination Against the Soviet Union". ''The Nazi Holocaust'' p. 502</ref> German historian [[Jürgen Förster]] wrote in 1989 that it was simply not true that the Commissar Order was not enforced, as most German Army commanders claimed in their memoirs and some German historians like [[Ernst Nolte]] were still claiming.<ref name="Förster pages 494-520" /> The majority of German units carried out the Commissar Order.<ref>{{Cite encyclopedia|title=The War of Annihilation in the Soviet Union|encyclopedia=The German Military and the Holocaust|url=https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-military-and-the-holocaust|access-date=2020-08-10|language=en}}</ref> [[Erich von Manstein]] passed on the Commissar Order to his subordinates, who executed all the captured commissars, something that he was convicted of by a British court in 1949.<ref name="Smesler, Ronald page 97">Smesler, Ronald & Davies, Edward ''[[The Myth of the Eastern Front]]'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 p. 97</ref> After the war, Manstein lied about disobeying the Commissar Order, saying he had been opposed to the order, and never enforced it.<ref name="Smesler, Ronald page 97" /> On 23 September 1941, after several ''Wehrmacht'' commanders had asked for the order to be softened as a way of encouraging the [[Red Army]] to surrender, Hitler declined "any modification of the existing orders regarding the treatment of political commissars."{{sfn|Jacobsen|1968|p=522}}

When the Commissar Order became known among the Red Army, it provoked stronger resistance to German forces.<ref name="HolocaustEncyclopedia">[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007454 Holocaust Encyclopedia: Commisar Order]</ref> This unwanted effect was cited in German appeals to Hitler (e.g. by [[Claus von Stauffenberg]]), who finally cancelled the Commissar Order after one year, on 6 May 1942.{{sfn|Hartmann|2013|p=91}} The order was used as evidence at the [[Nuremberg trials]] and as part of the broader issue of whether the German generals were obligated to [[superior orders|follow orders]] from Hitler even when they knew those orders were illegal.