The Commissar Order (German: Kommissarbefehl) was a written order given by Adolf Hitler 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 demanded that any Soviet political commissar identified among captured troops be shot immediately as an enforcer of the Communist ideology and the Soviet Communist Party line in military forces.
According to the order, all those prisoners who could be identified as "thoroughly bolshevized or as active representatives of the Bolshevist ideology" should also be killed.
Read more about Commissar Order: History
Famous quotes containing the word order:
“You cannot have one well-bred man without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women;Mit requires a great many cultivated women,—saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society, in order that you have one Madame de Staël.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)