The Wehrmacht was wholly complicit in Himmler’s operations, even though the SS did most of the killing. On 10 August 1941, the Sixth Army commander, Walter von Reichenau, cited in an order the “necessary execution of criminal, Bolshevist and mainly Jewish elements” which the SS must carry out. Manstein described Jews on 20 November as “the middle-man between the enemy at our backs and the remains of the Red Army.”
