Commissar Order

The Commissar Order (German: Kommissarbefehl) was an order issued by the German High Command (OKW) on 6 June 1941 before Operation Barbarossa. Its official name was Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars (Richtlinien für die Behandlung politischer Kommissare). It instructed the Wehrmacht that any Soviet political commissar identified among captured troops be summarily executed as a purported enforcer of the so-called Judeo-Bolshevism ideology in military forces. It is one of a series of criminal orders issued by the Nazi leadership.

According to the order, all those prisoners who could be identified as "thoroughly bolshevised or as active representatives of the Bolshevist ideology" should also be killed.^[1]

^ Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II Archived March 30, 2008, at the Wayback Machine

[1] Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II Archived March 30, 2008, at the Wayback Machine

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