June 4, 1941

Criminal Orders

The Wehrmacht's Russia conduct guidelines reach divisional commands

Before the invasion began, a military conduct directive put "Jews" in the same action clause as Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, and saboteurs.

"Ruthless action" written into troop conduct

On 4 June 1941 the Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia reached Wehrmacht divisional commands, weeks before Operation Barbarossa opened on 22 June. The chronology is disputed: the same document carries a creation or issue date of 19 May 1941.

The text told soldiers that Germany was fighting Bolshevism and demanded ruthless action against "Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews", together with the elimination of active or passive resistance.

The other named categories purported to describe conduct; Jews were listed beside them regardless of conduct. Historians interpret the wording as casting Jews collectively as racial-political enemies and legitimating military violence against them.

Why the same directive is filed under two dates

The 4 June 1941 date is the label the US Holocaust Memorial Museum attaches to its translated excerpt of the guidelines.

The German Federal Archives instead catalogue the document as annex 3 to an Armed Forces Operations Staff file created on 19 May 1941, and much of the scholarship dates it accordingly.

Christopher Browning's account of the origins of the Final Solution supports reconciling the two: 19 May for creation or formal issue, 4 June for distribution down to divisional level.

The order series it arrived with

Which headquarters issued the guidelines is not settled. The Bundesarchiv catalogue records the surviving document's provenance as the Army High Command's Generalquartiermeister branch — OKH/GenQu — while institutional histories, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum among them, place the guidelines within the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht's series of pre-invasion orders. Either way they belonged to a wider complex of criminal orders that removed legal protections from Soviet civilians and prisoners of war.

The guidelines did not themselves contain a universal, operational order to murder every Soviet Jew, although they were an important instrument of antisemitic incitement.

Divisional commands now held an antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik indoctrination document to transmit to their units. Two days after the 4 June distribution, the separate Commissar Order of 6 June explicitly directed the killing of captured Soviet political commissars.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at 1941-05-19.

What the sources leave uncertain

June 4 is supportable as a distribution date, but not as the document's original creation or formal issue date. The Bundesarchiv file and much scholarship date it May 19, while USHMM educational material labels its excerpt June 4.
The surviving wording is criminal and explicitly names Jews, but it does not literally say “kill every Jew.” Historians interpret it as making Jews collective racial-political enemies and legitimating military violence against them.