Captured Soviet commissar waiting to be executed

Captured Soviet commissar waiting to be executed. Heeresgruppe Süd, Ukraine, August 1941.

** The red star on the Russian's sleeve denotes him as a commissar. He's wearing the collar insignia of a Senior Battalion Commissar, equivalent to the rank of Colonel.

He's also wearing a highly unusual medal for a political commissar, a commemorative "XX Years of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army" medal that means he served with the Red Army since at least 1921. Very few political commissars were career officers, and even fewer could boast 20 years of service after Stalin's purges.**

The Commissar Order (German: Kommissarbefehl) was an order issued by the German High Command (OKW) on 6 June 1941 before Operation Barbarossa. Its official name was Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars (Richtlinien für die Behandlung politischer Kommissare). It instructed the Wehrmacht that any Soviet political commissar identified among captured troops be summarily executed as an enforcer of the Judeo-Bolshevism ideology in military forces.

According to the order, all those prisoners who could be identified as "thoroughly bolshevized or as active representatives of the Bolshevist ideology" should also be killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissar_Order

First page of the Commissar Order, dated 6 June 1941.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissar_Order

Brutal treatment of a POW and very unnecessary, the smirks on the German soldiers faces given what they are about to is abhorrent