Let's not forget that German "anti-partisan" operations in occupied Soviet territory and the Baltics would eventually help shape the Holocaust post-1941. The enthusiastic massacre of Jews by locals in the Baltics was encouraged and channeled by the Germans as a method of recruitment and control, and eventually the Baltics became an important killing ground for for Jews from all over Eastern Europe.

The mission of the Einsatzgruppen, according to Otto Ohlendorf, was essentially rear-area security, and they were aided and sometimes exceeded by Wehrmacht security divisions. "Where the partisan is, there is the Jew, and where the Jew is, there is the partisan" went the slogan, and to a large extent this attitude was endemic to the German conception of anti-partisan operations in the East. The difference between German operations can be seen when German units used to the Eastern way of doing things were transferred to the western European theater in 1944.