After the war , Bruno Streckenbach testified that Werner Best had directed deployment orders directly to him at the end of July or beginning of August . He continued by saying he had immediately left Hamburg to drive to Vienna , where he had been deployed from as head of Einsatzgruppe I . The German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on the morning of 1 September 1939 . The Einsatzgruppen followed after them sending reports back to Berlin detailing the actions of Operation Tannenberg , the code name given to the deployment of the SD and Security Police in Poland during the opening weeks of the war . It was Streckenbach 's task to oversee four districts as '' Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei im General Gouvernement '' : Warsaw , Krakow , Radom and Lublin . In each of these districts , thousands of Polish intellectuals — many former officers , professors , teachers , or politicians — were arrested and soon after , murdered . Streckenbach detailed the mission of the Einsatzgruppen : they were to seize and destroy all political and racial enemy groups , such as Bolsheviks , gypsies , partisans and Jews . In addition , the Einsatzgruppen were to report on and evaluate material seized during the campaign and to gather information from agents among the Soviet population . He ordered all enemies of the Third Reich to be deported to concentration camps and there to be executed . Jews were especially singled out for Sonderbehandlung ( " special treatment " ) , a process that entailed particularly brutal punishment beatings . On 9 November 1941 he was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Polizei
Operation Tannenberg
Operation Tannenberg
Bruno Streckenbach