On 2 July 1941 – some two weeks after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union – one of division Wiking's Dutch volunteers drew a y-shaped death rune in his diary. Next to the rune he wrote the name of his regiment's commanding officer Standartenführer Hilmar Wäckerle. An SS veteran and former commandant of the concentration camp Dachau, Wäckerle had found his death on the very same day hit by a bullet – possibly from a sniper. The remainder of that day's diary note ran ‘No 1 Company spend their time off shooting Jews, who have been involved in “partisan activity” ‘. This sentence hinted at a bloody extermination of Jews, which had been initiated by Wiking soldiers and local Ukrainian extremists. Two of the major characteristics of the invasion, which Division Wiking was now a part of, is in a way condensed in this brief diary note. Like the German formations generally, the SS divisions were to suffer immense casualties – even among high-ranking officers like Wäckerle. Moreover, the campaign engendered a further radicalisation of the German policy towards Jews and other groups of civilians, and the Nazi occupation regime in the East, and soldiers of the Waffen-SS would become important pawns in this process.

Dating back to fall 1940, Hitlers intention to attack the Soviet Union materialised in December 1940 as Weisung Nr. 21 (Instruction No 21) Fall Barbarossa. Through the attack Germany wished to achieve liberty of action in the area from the Baltic Sea to the Urals and wanted to facilitate a massive ‘ethnic reorganisation’, which would eventually cost millions of Soviet citizens their lives. These plans were obvious from the succession of orders and directives conceived by the top-level German civil and military authorities prior to the attack. On 13 March 1941, the OKW disseminated the Richtlinien auf Sondergebieten zur Weisung nr. 21 (guidelines concerning certain areas covered by Instruction No 21). Himmler's SS and police units thus assumed an independent role moving with the military vanguard in order to ‘pacify’ the areas conquered by the army. In other words, they were meant to commit systematic atrocities on a grand scale.