Kurt Daluege
The German armed forces launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and Brześć was captured the same day. On 24 June 1941, a 15 man Sicherheitspolizei detachment, commanded by SS-Untersturmführer Schmidt, arrived in Brześć. On December 16, 1941 the Germans placed Brest under the administration of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and established a Nazi ghetto in the city for some 18,000 Polish Jews, who still resided there after months of deportations and ad hoc mass executions. On July 10–12, 1941 the German "Einsatzgruppe" under "SS-Obergruppenführer" Karl Eberhard Schöngarth massacred 5,000 Jews including 13-year-old boys and 70-year-old men in a single night. The Order Police battalions passing through Brześć and Białystok carried out significantly larger shooting actions. "The first massacre of Brest Jews – wrote Christopher Browning – was perpetrated not by the notorious "Einsatzgruppen" but rather by Police Battalion 307 with Wehrmacht support, in mid-July, on the orders of Himmler's chief of Order Police, Kurt Daluege.".