his cousin, Gen. Otto von Stülpnagel. In this position, he, along with his personal adviser Lieutenant-Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, continued to maintain contact with other members of the conspiracy against Hitler. War crimes Substantial archival evidence indicates that during his tenure as commander of the 17th Army and military governor of France, Stülpnagel was involved in war crimes. According to Evans, he ordered that future reprisals for French Resistance activities were to take form in mass arrests and deportations of Jews. Following an attack on German soldiers, Stülpnagel ordered the arrest of 743 Jews, mostly French and had them interned at a German-run camp at Compiègne; another 369 Jewish prisoners were deported to Auschwitz in March 1942. In the Soviet Union, Stülpnagel signed many orders authorizing reprisals against civilians for partisan attacks and closely collaborated with the Einsatzgruppen in their mass murder of Jews. He admonished his soldiers not for the murder of the civilian population but for the chaotic way in which it was undertaken, particularly the premature taking of hostages and random measures. He ordered his troops to focus on Jews and Communist civilians, remarking that Communists were Jews that needed capture anyway; in order to improve relations with Ukrainians, even in cases of Ukrainian sabotage, local Jews were targeted for reprisal. Thomas J. Laub presents a more complicated picture of Stülpnagel. According to Laub, while having a role in the Final Solution by their part in the deportation of Jews (although reluctantly, possibly by trying to avoid seeing the consequences of the deportation, which they preferred over mass shootings), both Carl-Heinrich and his cousin Otto (also his predecessor in France) disagreed with the regime's extreme aspects, including its racial agenda, and viewed the war as a traditional struggle between nation states rather than an ideological struggle. Otto von Stülpnagel tried to protest against illegal orders, but Hitler and his sycophants in Berlin had other ideas. From 1940, the Einsatzstab Rosenberg and SS officers in France began to try to undermine the military administration and forced the Vichy government to follow the Nazi regime's extreme policies more rigorously. Hitler regarded military complaints as a sign of ideological impurity and thus granted both the Einsatzstab Rosenberg and the SS autonomy, effectively eroding the authority of the military administration. In the end, Otto von Stülpnagel could not reconcile the demands of the regime with his conscience and resigned. Carl-Heinrich, seeing