Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,soc.history
Subject: Einsatzgruppen: Operational Situation Report: USSR #116
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Organization: The Nizkor Project (USA)
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The Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service

Berlin,
October 17, 1941

50 copies
-----------
(36th copy)

OPERATIONAL SITUATION REPORT USSR No. 116

............
Einsatzgruppe A
Location: Krasnogvardeisk
Security Police Work

The cooperation of security police work in the pacification of
the area behind the front and in the Rear Army area continued at
the time of this report. As to details, the activities of The
Einsatzgruppe can be summarized as follows:

1) Partly in collaboration with the Field and Local Military
Commanders the population was recently checked on the basis of
security police standards. Unreliable elements blocking efforts
to pacify the region were segregated and either transferred to
military and civilian prisoner camps or executed by the
Kommandos. Between October 2 and 12, 260 persons in all had to be
executed.

2) Owing to the change-over to trench warfare and, in compliance
with requests from our side, the Army evacuated a strip next to
the front line. The respective orders of the various army corps
differed in their basic approaches (some ordering complete
evacuation, others the evacuation of all men, others again to
transfer to definite quarters in towns, etc.). Upon the request
of the Army, Security Police investigations were carried out in
the transient camps.

3) As partisans were still alive behind the fighting troops,
special measures became necessary in this matter as well. In the
first place, the intelligence work had to be broadened by
dispatching our own spies, by drawing in the village elders, and
the population in general. The results of this preparatory
intelligence work served as the basis of various operations
actively combatting partisans. For the rest, a partisan report
which was intercepted indicates that because of the imminent cold
season, the partisans do not expect to be able to hold out beyond
the middle of November.

Actions for combatting sabotage followed the same lines as with
the cooperation in combatting partisans. For instance, on October
6, ten people had to be shot in Slutsk, the poulation being
informed thereof by the following announcements:

"Notification: On October 6, 1941, ten people were shot in Slutsk
because a Wehrmacht telephone line was cut with the intent to
commit sabotage. Should further acts of sabotage of the same kind
be committed, twenty people will be shot in the future. The
German Security Police."

4) During the time covered by this report, one of the main tasks
of the Einsatzgruppe was setting up the organization to secure
information from Petersburg. (1) In general, the information is
being collected in the following ways:

        a) By Russian deserters (either caught by our own
        Sonderkommandos or delivered by the fighting troops or
        local military commanders;
        b) By prisoners (methodical searches and clearing of
        military prisoner-of-war camps; this way proved to be
        exceptionally successful);
        c. By dispatching our own agents (owing to the increasing
        rigidity of the fronts and the development of stable
        lines with trenches, entanglements and mine-fields, it is
        extremely difficult to get an agent through the lines and
        back. Moreover, every reasonably healthy man is being
        enlisted at once in the workers defense force in
        Petersburg. At any rate, only agents with good Bolshevik
        identification papers can be sent out).

Although our intelligence work originally aimed at the collection
of information concerning the general political climate, the
questions of general mood, supply conditions, important persons
and offices, from the outset information of a purely military
character was forwarded in great quantities. Therefore the
military circles were extremely interested in reports on the
situation. In some cases, this went so far that the results of
our intelligence service regarding military targets were being
used by the HQ of the 10th Army for giving orders to the
artillery. According to our investigations, the targets of
military and war-economic importance in Petersburg tally with the
statements of the Army, as laid down in the military-geographical
plan. (Arad, pp. 191-193)

(1) Leningrad

                        Work Cited

Arad, Yitzak, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, editors. The
Einsatzgruppen Reports. New York: Holocaust Library. 1989.

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