ABSTRACT
On 29 September 1947, Dr Eduard Strauch was to give his opening statement in the trial in Nuremberg against the main perpetrators of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units responsible for securing the back territory of the advancing German army after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Before Strauch could answer his name, he suffered an epileptic seizure and dropped to the floor ‘as if hit with a pistol shot’:2 a fate which befell the numerous Jewish men, women and children shot during executions by these units. As a member of Einsatzgruppe A, employed in the Baltic countries, Eduard Strauch played an important part in this initial implementation of the Nazi genocidal policy against the European Jewish population. The Einsatzgruppen were the mobile units of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) in Berlin, the security ministry founded in 1939 which put conventional police forces and SS branches under one institutional roof and leadership.3 Its foundation was the result of a power struggle within the Nazi movement over control of the German police, which had started almost immediately after the Nazi takeover of power in 1933. This struggle effectively ended in 1936, when Reichsführer-SS (RFSS) Heinrich Himmler was nominated as Head of the German police. He unified the German police in two branches: the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) or Order Police under Kurt Daluege, which merged the uniformed police, and the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) or Security Police, which brought together the political Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) and criminal Kriminalpolizei (Kripo), in other words the plainclothes policemen.4 Headed by the same man as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence service of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, they formed the Sipo-SD, which during the war became the perpetrator institution par excellence. From the executions in the East to the administration of the deportations in the West, a Sipo-SD officer was usually somehow involved. Following the career of Eduard Strauch, the involvement of these men, some of whom had a background in the Weimar police or administration, in the Holocaust will be reconstructed. With his prewar professional career in the SD, his membership of Einsatzgruppe A in Latvia, his deployment as commander of the Sipo-SD in Minsk, his activity in occupied Belgium and finally arrest and judgement in Nuremberg, Strauch was present at different stages 289and different locations of conceptualising and carrying out the Final Solution. In considering how the Sipo-SD implemented the Holocaust to solve the perceived Jewish problem in Poland, in the newly created Reichskommisariat Ostland (Baltic states and Belarus) and in the occupied western European countries (Belgium, France and the Netherlands), the myth of an all-seeing and all-powerful German police will be tackled by showing how much the latter depended on collaboration with local institutions and collaborators to carry out the actual apprehension and executions of its victims. What will not be covered is how the genocidal practice was implemented inside the borders of the so-called Altreich or Germany proper. As Michael Wildt has argued, ‘the RSHA as an institution was mobile and flexible; its central office was in Berlin, but it realised its full power and potential on the local level’.5 As will be shown, this was especially applicable to the Nazi occupied territories.
