The Commando Order

On 18 October 1942 Adolf Hitler signed a secret order that has gone down in history as the Commando Order (Kommandobefehl). It decreed that soldiers of Allied raiding units operating in Europe and Africa were to be “slaughtered to the last man” – whether or not they wore uniform, whether or not they were armed, whether they were fighting or trying to escape, and even when they plainly wished to surrender. Those who fell into the hands of the armed forces by other means, for instance when arrested by the police in occupied countries, were to be handed over at once to the SS Security Service (SD). Holding them in prisoner-of-war camps, even temporarily, was forbidden.

It was one of the most openly criminal orders ever issued to the Wehrmacht. The law of war, which Germany had accepted and itself invoked, forbade declaring that no quarter would be given and made a uniformed soldier who had laid down his arms a prisoner of war. The authors of the order knew this perfectly well, which is why they gave it the highest security classification.

The raids that enraged Hitler

The British Commando units were formed in the summer of 1940 on the initiative of Winston Churchill, who wanted to harass the occupied coasts of Europe. The first, clumsy forays gave way to ever larger and better-prepared operations: the Lofoten raid in March 1941, the Vågsøy raid in December that year and, in March 1942, the St Nazaire raid, which put out of action for the rest of the war the largest dry dock on France’s Atlantic coast, the only one able to take the battleship Tirpitz. Alongside the great operations there were dozens of small actions: little groups arrived at night by boat or submarine, blew up power stations and radar stations, seized prisoners and vanished. According to the post-war testimony of Alfred Jodl, what irritated Hitler was precisely the effectiveness of these small, well-equipped units, which tied down disproportionately large forces in western Europe and Norway.

The immediate pretext came from two incidents in August and October 1942. After the Dieppe Raid on 19 August the Germans found on the beach a copy of the operation order, which the Canadian Brigadier William Southam had taken ashore against instructions. Among its dozens of pages of instructions was an order to tie the hands of prisoners. On the night of 3–4 October 1942 a small party of commandos from the Small Scale Raiding Force and No. 12 Commando, among them the Dane Anders Lassen, landed on the island of Sark. They took five German soldiers from the annexe of the Dixcart Hotel and tied their hands. On the way to the beach the prisoners tried to escape; according to the commandos’ account, one was shot when he shouted to alert his comrades, and of the three who made a run for it one was killed by a bullet, another by a knife, and the third got away. One prisoner was brought back to England. The Germans, who found the bodies in the morning, announced that the dead men’s hands had been tied.

From communiqué to order

Propaganda seized on the Sark affair at once. A German communiqué announced that British commandos had tied prisoners’ hands and shot them when they tried to free themselves, and recalled the order found at Dieppe. On 7 October 1942 an addendum was attached to the daily Wehrmacht report read out on the radio, drafted, according to many accounts, by Hitler himself: from now on all British “terror and sabotage troops” and their helpers who behaved not like soldiers but like bandits would be ruthlessly wiped out in battle, wherever they appeared. Two days later Berlin announced that 1,376 British and Canadian prisoners, most of them taken at Dieppe, would be put in shackles. Canada retaliated in kind against German prisoners in its own camps, which at the camp in Bowmanville, Ontario, ended in a riot lasting several days. The spiral of reprisals was broken only by Swiss mediation: the Canadians gave up the shackles on 12 December 1942, the Germans somewhat later.

The announcement in the communiqué now had to be turned into an order. The task went to the Wehrmacht operations staff in the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW). Jodl instructed his deputy, General Walter Warlimont, to prepare a draft under which commandos would be treated in the same way as partisans in the East. Lawyers and staff officers worked on it for a long time, because they realised that it broke the law of war. Hitler signed the final version on 18 October 1942 as Führer Order No. 003830/42, top secret and produced in only twelve copies for the highest commands.

The text of the order

The order began with a justification. The enemy, Hitler wrote, had long been waging war by methods contrary to the Geneva Conventions; members of the so-called commandos behaved in a “particularly brutal and underhanded” manner, and these units were said to recruit criminals as well, even men released from prison in enemy territory. Captured orders supposedly showed that commandos were not only to tie up prisoners but also to kill defenceless ones if they became a burden. On this basis Hitler announced that Germany would apply to these units the same methods that the communiqué of 7 October had foreshadowed.

The operative part was unambiguous. All participants in commando operations against German forces in Europe and Africa were to be “slaughtered to the last man” in battle or in pursuit – regardless of whether they were soldiers in uniform or saboteurs, armed or unarmed, and whether they had come by sea, by air or by parachute. Even if they intended to surrender at the moment of discovery, they were not to be spared. Every case was to be reported to the OKW, and a mention of the unit’s “annihilation” was to appear in the Wehrmacht report. Individual commandos, agents and saboteurs captured other than in combat were to be handed over without delay to the SD, which for them meant execution without trial. The order did not apply to soldiers taken prisoner in normal combat operations, during large-scale seaborne or airborne landings, after naval battles, or to airmen baling out by parachute. It ended with a threat: any commander or officer who failed to instruct his men about it, or acted against it, would answer to a court martial.

On 19 October Jodl passed the order on, together with an additional explanation from Hitler, with the proviso that it was intended for commanders only and must on no account fall into enemy hands. In it Hitler explained that partisan warfare in the East had already created a serious danger, and that the British and Americans were now carrying similar methods to the West, counting on their men enjoying the protection of the Geneva Conventions once they surrendered. He allowed one or two captives to be kept alive for interrogation, after which they too were to be killed. According to some accounts the secrecy was not complete, because the order was also transmitted by radio, and British intelligence, which was breaking the Enigma ciphers, intercepted and read it.

The first victims: the Glomfjord commandos

The order was applied almost immediately. In September 1942 ten soldiers of No. 2 Commando and two Norwegians from Operation Musketoon, carried to Norway by the Free French submarine Junon, blew up the hydroelectric power station at Glomfjord, which supplied an aluminium works, around 20 September (sources give the night of 19–20 or of 20–21 September). The turbines and pipelines were destroyed, and the station did not work again until the end of the war. During the withdrawal, however, part of the party fell into German hands. Four men reached Sweden, one of the Norwegians died of his wounds, and seven Britons – two officers, the Canadian Captain Graeme Black and Captain Joseph Houghton, together with five NCOs and other ranks – were captured in uniform.

They were first held at Colditz Castle, in the officers’ camp, where Black managed to pass his comrades’ names to a British airman; as a result London knew they were alive. On 13 October they were taken to the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin and interrogated, according to some sources under the supervision of the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller. On 22 October they were moved to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and on the morning of 23 October they were killed with shots to the back of the head and their bodies burned in the crematorium. The Germans told the International Red Cross that the prisoners had escaped. They were the first victims of the Commando Order.

The order in action

In the months that followed the order became the norm. In November 1942 two gliders carrying British sappers on their way to destroy the heavy water plant at Vemork near Rjukan crashed in southern Norway (Operation Freshman, part of the heavy water sabotage campaign). All who survived the crashes were murdered – some shot the same day, the wounded killed later. In December 1942 two Royal Marines captured during Operation Frankton, a canoe raid on shipping in the port, were shot in Bordeaux; four other participants were killed in 1943. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder noted at the time in the war diary of the naval command that the execution of uniformed soldiers was “something new in international law”. In July 1943 the crew of the Norwegian motor torpedo boat MTB 345 was shot near Bergen. In March 1944, on the orders of General Anton Dostler, fifteen American soldiers of the OSS operation “Ginny II”, put ashore in uniform on the Ligurian coast, were executed in Italy. In the summer of 1944, after the Normandy landings, the OKW confirmed that the order remained in force and applied to all parachutists captured outside the immediate combat zone; several dozen SAS soldiers were killed in France at that time. In the autumn of 1944 and the winter of 1945 captured British and American commandos and agents were murdered in Mauthausen. The order was also invoked to justify killing downed airmen.

Not everyone carried it out. According to many accounts, Erwin Rommel did not pass it on to the troops under his command in Africa, and some lower-level commanders treated captured commandos as ordinary prisoners. Others, such as Colonel General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst in Norway, made it harsher in their own instructions.

Trial and significance

The Commando Order was a crime under the law in force in 1942. The Hague Conventions of 1907 expressly prohibited declaring that no quarter would be given, and even a spy caught in the act could not be punished without trial. The Geneva Convention of 1929, which Germany had ratified, guaranteed prisoner-of-war status to every uniformed soldier who surrendered. A saboteur in civilian clothes or in enemy uniform could be put on trial, but a soldier in the uniform of his own army could not. Hitler’s order covered both, and the charges used to justify it concerned isolated incidents, which the order turned into a pretext for murdering everyone.

After the war the document became one of the pieces of evidence before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (PL). Wilhelm Keitel and Jodl were charged with transmitting and enforcing it; both were sentenced to death and hanged on 16 October 1946, Keitel having been refused the firing squad he had asked for as a soldier. Raeder, who admitted passing the order on to the navy and approving the execution of the prisoners taken at Bordeaux, received a life sentence. General Dostler was condemned by an American military court and shot in December 1945, and in 1946 Falkenhorst was sentenced to death at Brunswick, a sentence later commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment. Many lower-level perpetrators were also convicted. The tribunals rejected the plea that the accused would have risked their own lives had they not obeyed.

The Commando Order completed a series of criminal orders by which Hitler and the OKW abolished the law of war, first in the East – as with the Commissar Order of 1941 – and now also in the war against the Western Allies, towards whom the Wehrmacht had until then broadly observed the conventions. It neither stopped the raids nor deterred the commandos, who knew what capture would mean. It cost the lives of dozens of captured commandos, agents and airmen and became one of the most frequently cited examples of the principle that a superior’s order does not absolve anyone of responsibility for a crime.