Military occupation and criminal orders

The military chain began before an order reached a field unit. Within the OKW, operational, general and legal departments drafted, reviewed, signed and circulated directives that removed judicial safeguards, selected prisoners for transfer to the Security Police and authorised unlawful treatment of commandos and civilians. Hermann Reinecke, Walter Warlimont and Rudolf Lehmann occupied different positions in that process; their profiles distinguish drafting, legal formulation, signature, distribution and supervision.

Army and rear-area commanders then received reports, issued implementing instructions and coordinated military administration with the SS, police and SD. Georg-Hans Reinhardt, Karl von Roques and Max von Schenckendorff show different forms of command responsibility: transmission of orders, receipt of execution reports, cooperation with security agencies and the circulation of anti-partisan doctrine. None of those functions automatically makes a commander the personal executor of every subordinate crime.

Occupation in the Balkans joined military command to civil administration and police power. Wilhelm List delegated executive authority in Serbia and received reports of reprisal shootings, while Harald Turner's administrative staff linked field commands, collaborationist bodies, camps and the logistics of killing. Their distinct offices must be read together without treating every decision by one apparatus as the act of the other.

Franz Magill's SS cavalry detachment shows how a central exterminatory impulse was translated at a lower operational level into squadron assignments, coordination with the SD and an after-action report. Postwar judgments against Magill, List, Reinhardt and OKW officials defined different offences and evidentiary boundaries. The dossier therefore follows a chain of documents and authority rather than ranking perpetrators by victim totals.