The Commissar Order Planning for Operation Barbarossa began in June 1940. In December 1940 Hitler began sending out vague preliminary directives to senior generals on how the war was to be conducted, giving him the opportunity to gauge their reaction to such matters as collaboration with the SS in the “rendering harmless" of Bolsheviks. The Wehrmacht was already to some extent politicised, having participated in the extra-legal killings of Ernst Rohm and his associates in 1934, communists in the Sudeteniand in 1938, and Czech and German political exiles in France in 1940. On March 3, 1941 Hitler explained to his closest military advisers how the war of annihilation was to be waged. ‘On that same day, instructions incorporating Hitler's demands went to Section L of the ‘Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) (under Deputy Chief Walter Warlimont); these provided the basis for the "Guidelines in Special Areas to Instructions No. 21 (Case Barbarossa)" discussing, among other matters, the interaction of the army and SS in the theater of operations, deriving from the ‘need to neutralize at once leading bolsheviks and commissars." Discussions proceeded on March 17 during a situation conference, where Chief of the OKH General Staff Franz Halder, Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner and Chief of Operational Department of the OKH Adolf Heusinger were present. Hitler declared: "The intelligentsia established by Stalin must be exterminated. The most brutal violence is to be used in the Great Russian Empire” (quoted from Halder’s War Diary entry of March 17). ‘On March 30, Hiller addressed over 200 senior officers in the Reich Chancellery. Among those present was Halder, who recorded the key points of the speech. He argued that the war against the Soviet Union "cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion" because it was a war of ideologies and racial differences." He further declared that the commissars had to be “liquidated” without mercy because they were the "bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism.” Hitler stipulated the “annihilation of the Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia’ (thus laying the foundation for the Commissar Order), dismissed the idea of the court marshals for felonies committed by the German troops, and emphasized the differentnature of the war in the East with the war in the West. Hitler was well aware that this order was illegal, but personally absolved in advance any soldiers who violated international law in enforcing this order. He erroneously claimed that the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 did not apply since the Soviets hadn't signed them. In fact, Russia had signed both conventions. The Soviet Union, as a distinct entity from the Russian Empire, did not, in fact, sign the Geneva Convention of 1929, However, Germany did and was bound by article 82, stating “In case, in time of war, one of the belligerents is not a party to the Convention, its provisions shall nevertheless remain in force as between the belligerents who are parties thereto."