I
will post information about the War Crimes of the Wehrmacht from Wikipedia and
other links.
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September 1, 1939.
6 am. German troops start moving into Poland
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Execution of partisans by German soldiers,
Soviet Union, September 1941
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War crimes of the Wehrmacht were those carried out by the German
armed forces during World War II. While the principal perpetrators of the Holocaust
amongst German armed forces were the Nazi
German 'political' armies (the SS-Totenkopfverbände and particularly the Einsatzgruppen), the regular armed forces
represented by the Wehrmacht committed war crimes of their own,
particularly on the Eastern Front in the war against the Soviet Union. The Nuremberg
Trials at the end of World War II judged that the Wehrmacht was not
an inherently criminal organization, but that it had committed crimes during
the course of the war.
1
Before the war
When
the National Socialists (Nazis) came to power, it was welcomed by many officers of the Wehrmacht
as a way of creating the Wiederwehrhaftmachung of Germany, namely the
total militarization of German society in order to ensure that Germany did not
lose the next war. As such, what both the Nazis and the German Army wanted to
see was a totally militarized Volksgemeinschaft
that would be purged of those perceived internal enemies like the Jews who it
was believed had "stabbed Germany in the back" in
1918.
As
such, many officers willingly embraced National Socialist ideology in the
1930s. Acting on his own initiative, the Defence Minister Werner von Blomberg had purged the Army of all
its Jewish personnel in February 1934. On December 8, 1938, the Army leadership
had instructed all officers to be thoroughly well versed in National Socialism
and to apply its values in all situations. Starting in February 1939, pamphlets
were issued that were made required reading in the Army. The content can be
gauged by the titles: "The Officer and Politics", "Hitler's
World Historical Mission", "The Army in the Third Reich",
"The Battle for German Living Space", "Hands off Danzig!",
and "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the Third Reich".
In the last essay, the author, C.A. Holberg wrote:
The defensive battle against Jewry will continue, even if the last Jew has left Germany. Two big and important tasks remain: 1) the eradication of all Jewish influence, above all in the economy and in culture; 2) the battle against World Jewry, which tries to incite all people in the world against Germany.
Attitudes
like the ones expressed above coloured all the instructions that came to Wehrmacht
troops in the summer of 1939 as a way of preparing for the attack on Poland.
2
War crimes
Some
examples of the war crimes the Wehrmacht committed include:
2.1
Invasion of Poland
See
also: German AB-Aktion in Poland and Częstochowa massacre
Wehrmacht
attitudes towards Poles were a combination of contempt, fear, and a belief that
violence was the best way to deal with them.
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Polish Hostages
preparing by Nazi-Germans for mass execution. Palmiry near Warsaw 1940. Photo
made in secret by Polish underground ( resistance) intelligence service
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Location
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Palmiry Forest and other locations in Occupied Poland.
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Date
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Spring – summer 1940
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Target
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Polish intellectuals and the upper classes.
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Attack type
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Massacres
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Weapons
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Deaths
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7,000
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Perpetrators
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2.1.1
Mass murder of Polish civilians
Wehrmacht
units killed thousands of Polish civilians during the September 1939 campaign
through executions and the terror bombing of cities. Any act of defiance was
met with the most ruthless violence, although the Army leadership did seek to
discourage so-called "wild" shootings where Wehrmacht troops would
indiscriminately shoot all Poles on their own initiative. Court martial
proceedings were begun against some of the junior officers who had led these
shootings, but this was nullified on October 4, 1939, when Hitler pardoned all
military personnel who had been involved in war crimes in Poland. After the end
of hostilities, during the Wehrmacht's administration of Poland, which
went on until October 25, 1939, 531 towns and villages were burned; the Wehrmacht
carried out 714 mass executions, alongside many incidents of plunder, banditry
and murder. Altogether, it is estimated that 16,376 Poles fell victim to these
atrocities. Approximately 60% of these crimes were committed by the Wehrmacht.
Wehrmacht soldiers frequently engaged in the massacre of Jews on their
own, rather than just assisting in rounding them up for the SS.
In
the summer of 1940, Reinhard Heydrich, the
chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo), noted that: "...compared to the
crimes, robberies and excesses committed by the army [part of the Wehrmacht],
the SS and the police don't look all that bad". Even when the German Army
was not involved in war crimes, all of the top military leaders were aware of
what was happening in Poland. None made any objection on moral principles; the
few who did object did so because of concerns about discipline. Moreover, the
general who objected the loudest to war crimes in Poland, General Johannes von Blaskowitz, was opposed to the
Army committing war crimes with the SS, not the idea of atrocities against
Poland. The Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote that Blaskowitiz was actually
"legitimizing murder" by expressing approval of SS massacres while
demanding that the Army be kept out of the massacres as damaging to discipline.
Bartov wrote that once officers and troops saw that murder was
"legitimate" in Poland, the effect was that the Army tended to copy
the SS.
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The execution of 56 Polish citizens in
Bochnia, near Kraków, during German occupation of Poland, December 18, 1939 in
a reprisal for an attack on a German police office two days earlier by the
underground organization "White Eagle"
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2.1.2
Massacres of Polish POWs
See
also: Massacre in Ciepielów
Numerous
examples exist in which Polish soldiers were killed after capture; for
instance, at Śladów, where 252 prisoners
of war (POW)s were shot or drowned, at Ciepielów, where some 300 POWs
were killed, and at Zambrów, where a further 300 were killed. Polish POWs of Jewish origin
were routinely selected and shot on the spot. The prisoners of the POW camp in Żyrardów,
captured after the Battle of the Bzura, were denied any food and
starved for ten days. In many cases Polish POWs were burned alive. Units of the
Polish 7th Infantry Division were
massacred after being captured in several individual acts of revenge for their
resistance in combat. On September 11, Wehrmacht soldiers threw hand
grenades into a school building where they kept Polish POWs. According to
German historian Jochen Böhler, the Wehrmacht mass murdered at least 3.000
Polish POWs during the campaign.
2.1.3
Rapes
There
were rapes committed by soldiers of the Wehrmacht forces against Jewish
women and girls during the Invasion of Poland. Rapes were also committed
against Polish women and girls during mass executions carried out primarily by
the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, which
were accompanied by Wehrmacht soldiers and on territory under the
administration of the German military, the rapes were carried out before
shooting the female captives.
Only
one case of rape was prosecuted by a German court during the military campaign
in Poland, the case of gang rape committed by three soldiers against women of
the Jewish Kaufmann family in Busko-Zdrój;
however, the German judge sentenced the guilty for Rassenschande
- shame against the [German] race as defined by the racial policy of Nazi Germany - and
not rape.
2.1.4
Widespread plunder and theft
Throughout
the campaign Wehrmacht engaged in widespread theft and plunder of Polish
citizens' property. Until November 3, 1939 the Wehrmacht sent to the Nazi
Germany 10,000 train wagons with stolen property including agricultural
machinery, furniture and food.
2.2
Invasion of Belgium
2.2.1
Vinkt massacre
Main
article: Vinkt Massacre
Between
May 25 and 28, 1940, the Wehrmacht committed several war crimes in and
near the small Belgian village of Vinkt. Hostages were taken and used as human
shields. As the Belgian army continued to resist, farms were searched and
looted, and more hostages were taken. In all, 86 civilians are known to have
been executed. Besides Vinkt, other massacres and shootings happened with
estimates of 600 victims.
2.3
Invasion of the Soviet Union
Some
German officers had considered Communism in the Soviet Union to be a Jewish
plot even before the Third Reich. In 1918, Karl von Bothmer, the German Army's
plenipotentiary in Moscow called the Bolsheviks "a gang of Jews" and
expressed the desire "to see a few hundred of these louts hanging on the
Kremlin wall". Evaluations of the Red Army by the visiting Reichswehr
officers during the period of German-Soviet co-operation in the 1920s often
show anti-Semitism with comments about the "Jewish slyness" of
General Lev Snitman or the "Jewish blood" of General Leonid Vajner
being very typical. In 1932, Ewald Banse, a leading German professor and a
member of the National Association for the Military Sciences (a group secretly
financed by the Reichswehr) wrote in a pamphlet calling for
"intellectual world domination" by Germany wrote that the Soviet
leadership was mostly Jewish who dominated an apathetic and mindless Russian
masses.
In
1935, Colonel Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel in a
report about the military capacity of the Red Army wrote that the commissars
were "mostly of the Jewish race".
2.3.1
Commissar Order
Main
article: Commissar Order
The
order cast the war against Russia as one of ideological and racial differences,
and it provided for the immediate liquidation of political commissars in the Red Army. The order
was formulated on Hitler's behalf in 1941 by the Wehrmacht command and
distributed to field commanders. General Franz
Halder, contrary to what he was to claim after the war, did not oppose the
Commissar Order, and instead welcomed it writing that "Troops must
participate in the ideological battle in the Eastern campaign to the end".
The enforcement of the Commissar Order led to thousands of executions. The
German historian Jürgen Förster was to write in 1989 that it was simply not
true as most German Army commanders claimed in their memoirs and some German
historians like Ernst Nolte were still claiming that the Commissar
Order was not enforced.
On July 17, 1941 the OKW declared that
the Wehrmacht was to:
free itself from all elements among the prisoners of war considered Bolshevik driving forces. The special situation of the Eastern Campaign therefore demands special measures [an euphemism for killing] which are to be carried out free from bureaucratic and administrative influence and with a willingness to accept responsibility. While so far the regulations and orders concerning prisoners of war were based solely on military considerations, now the political objective must be attained, which is to protect the German nation from Bolshevik inciters and forthwith take the occupied territory strictly in hand.
As
such, all Soviet POWs considered to be commissars together with all Jewish POWs
were to handed over to the Einsatzgruppen to be shot. The OKW attached
great importance to the killings of POWs believed to be commissars as it was
believed that if the captured commissars reached POW camps in Germany that they
would stage another Dolchstoß like that believed to have caused
Germany's defeat in World War I. Between July–October 1941, between 580 000–600
000 POWs in Wehrmacht custody were turned over to the SS to be killed. In
September 1941, both Helmuth James von Moltke
and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris wrote memos pointing out to the OKW
that the order of July 17, 1941 was illegal under international law. In
particular, both Moltke and Admiral Canaris noted that the German claim that
Soviet POWs had no rights because the Soviet Union had not ratified the Geneva Convention was invalid as Germany
had ratified the Geneva Convention and thus under international law was obliged
to provide humane treatment for the POWs in its care. In response,
Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel wrote:
"These scruples accord with the soldierly concepts of a chivalrous war!
Here we are concerned with the extermination of an ideology. That is why I
approve and defend this measure”.
In
the summer of 1942, there was an illusory liberalization of the treatment of
captured political officers. On June 10, the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller issued an order on the segregation
of prisoners and ordered that commissars be isolated from the rest of the
prisoners and sent to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. However, this
did not change the plight of commissars much, as Mauthausen was one of the
worst Nazi concentration camps where they usually waited for a slow death. On
October 20, 1942, Müller again ordered commissars captured in battle to be shot
on the spot. Only those commissars who were identified as deserters were sent
to Mauthausen.
In
the following months reports continued to be filed regarding the executions of
Soviet commissars. The last known account of the liquidation of a political
officer came from units of Army Group South in July 1943.
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Wilhelm
Keitel in 1939
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2.3.2 Barbarossa
Decree
The
background behind the Barbarossa Decree was laid out by Hitler during a high
level meeting with military officials on March 30, 1941, where he declared that
war against Soviet Russia would be a war of extermination,
in which both the political and intellectual elites of Russia would be
eradicated by German forces, in order to ensure a long-lasting German victory.
Hitler underlined that executions would not be a matter for military courts,
but for the organised action of the military. The decree, issued by Field Marshal Keitel a few weeks before Operation Barbarossa, exempted punishable
offenses committed by enemy civilians (in Russia) from the jurisdiction of military
justice. Suspects were to be brought before an officer who would decide if
they were to be shot. Prosecution of offenses against civilians by members of
the Wehrmacht was decreed to be "not required" unless
necessary for the maintenance of discipline.
The
order specified:
- "The partisans are to be ruthlessly eliminated in battle or during attempts to escape", and all attacks by the civilian population against Wehrmacht soldiers are to be "suppressed by the army on the spot by using extreme measures, till [the] annihilation of the attackers;
- Every officer in the German occupation in the East of the future will be entitled to perform execution(s) without trial, without any formalities, on any person suspected of having a hostile attitude towards the Germans", (the same applied to prisoners of war);
- "If you have not managed to identify and punish the perpetrators of anti-German acts, you are allowed to apply the principle of collective responsibility. 'Collective measures' against residents of the area where the attack occurred can then be applied after approval by the battalion commander or higher level of command";
- German soldiers who commit crimes against humanity, the USSR and prisoners of war are to be exempted from criminal responsibility, even if they commit acts punishable according to German law.
The
"Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia" issued by the
OKW on May 19, 1941 declared "Judeo-Bolshevism" to be the most deadly
enemy of the German nation, and that "It is against this destructive
ideology and its adherents that Germany is waging war". The guidelines
went on to demand "ruthless and vigorous measures against Bolshevik
inciters, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews, and the complete elimination of all
active and passive resistance.” Influenced by the guidelines, in a directive
sent out to the troops under his command, General Erich
Hoepner of the Panzer Group 4 stated:
The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slavic people, of the defence of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation and of the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared.
In
the same spirit, General Müller, who was the Wehrmacht's senior liaison officer
for legal matters, in a lecture to military judges on June 11, 1941 advised the
judges present that "...in the operation to come, feelings of justice must
in certain situations give way to military exigencies and then revert to old
habits of warfare... One of the two adversaries must be finished off. Adherents
of the hostile attitude are not be conserved, but liquidated". General
Müller declared that, in the war against the Soviet Union, any Soviet civilian
who was felt to be hindering the German war effort was to be regarded as a
"guerrilla" and shot on the spot. The Army's Chief of Staff, General Franz
Halder, declared in a directive that in the event of guerrilla attacks,
German troops were to impose "collective measures of force" by massacring
villages.
In
November 1935, the psychological war laboratory of the Reich War
Ministry submitted a study about how best to undermine Red Army morale should a
German-Soviet war break out. Working closely with the émigré Russian Fascist
Party based in Harbin, the German psychological warfare unit created a series
of pamphlets written in Russian for distribution in the Soviet Union. Much of
it was designed to play on Russian anti-Semitism, with one pamphlet calling the
"Gentlemen commissars and party functionaries" a group of
"mostly filthy Jews". The pamphlet ended with the call for
"brother soldiers" of the Red Army to rise up and kill all of the
"Jewish commissars". Though this material was not used at the time,
later in 1941 the material the psychological war laboratory had developed in
1935 was dusted off, and served as the basis not only for propaganda in the
Soviet Union but also for propaganda within the German Army. Before Barbarossa,
German troops were exposed to violent anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic
indoctrination via movies, radio, lectures, books and leaflets. The lectures
were delivered by "National Socialist Leadership Officers", who were
created for that purpose, and by their junior officers. German Army propaganda
portrayed the Soviet enemy in the most dehumanized terms, depicting the Red
Army as a force of Slavic Untermensch (sub-humans) and "Asiatic"
savages engaging in "barbaric Asiatic fighting methods" commanded by
evil Jewish commissars
to whom German troops were to grant no mercy. Typical of the German Army
propaganda was the following passage from a pamphlet issued in June 1941:
Anyone who has ever looked into the face of a Red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are. There is no need here for theoretical reflections. It would be an insult to animals if one were to call the features of these, largely Jewish, tormentors of people beasts. They are the embodiment of the infernal, of the personified insane hatred of everything that is noble in humanity. In the shape of these commissars we witness the revolt of the subhuman against noble blood. The masses whom they are driving to their deaths with every means of icy terror and lunatic incitement would have brought about an end of all meaningful life, had the incursion not been prevented at the last moment;" [the last statement is a reference to the "preventive war" that Barbarossa was alleged to be].
German
Army propaganda often gave extracts in newsletters concerning the missions for
German troops in the East:
It is necessary to eliminate the red sub-humans, along with their Kremlin dictators. German people will have a great task to perform the most in its history, and the world will hear more about that this task will be completed till the end.
As
a result of this sort of propaganda, the majority of the Wehrmacht
Heer officers and soldiers tended to regard the war in Nazi terms,
seeing their Soviet opponents as so much sub-human trash deserving to be
trampled upon. One German soldier wrote home to his father on August 4, 1941
that:
The pitiful hordes on the other side are nothing but felons who are driven by alcohol and the [commissars'] threat of pistols at their heads...They are nothing but a bunch of assholes!...Having encountered these Bolshevik hordes and having seen how they live has made a lasting impression on me. Everyone, even the last doubter, knows today that the battle against these sub-humans, who've been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.
As
a result of these views, the majority of the German Army worked
enthusiastically with the SS in murdering Jews in the Soviet Union. The British
historian Richard J. Evans wrote that junior officers tended
to be especially zealous National Socialists with a third of them being Nazi
Party members in 1941. The Wehrmacht did not just obey Hitler's criminal
orders for Barbarossa because of obedience, but rather because they shared
Hitler's belief that the Soviet Union was run by Jews, and that it was
necessary for Germany to completely destroy "Judeo-Bolshevism".
Jürgen Förster wrote that the majority of Wehrmacht officers sincerely
believed that most Red Army commissars were Jews, and that the best way to
defeat the Soviet Union was to kill all of the commissars so as to deprive the
Russian soldiers of their Jewish leaders.
The
order was in line with the interests of the Wehrmacht command, which was
eager to secure logistical facilities and routes behind the front line for the
divisions on the Eastern Front. On May 24, 1941, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the head of the
German Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres – OKH),
slightly modified the assumptions of the "Barbarossa Jurisdiction."
His orders were to use the jurisdiction only in cases where the discipline of
the army would not suffer. Contrary to what was claimed after the war, the Wehrmacht
generals such as Heinz Guderian, did not intend to mitigate the
records of the jurisdiction of an order, or in any way violate Hitler's
intentions. His command was intended solely to prevent individual excesses
which could damage discipline within army ranks, without changing the
extermination intentions of the order.
As
part of the policy of harshness towards Slavic "sub-humans" and to
prevent any tendency towards seeing the enemy as human, German troops were
ordered to go out of their way to mistreat women and children in Russia. In
October 1941, the commander of the 12th Infantry Division sent out a directive
saying "the carrying of information is mostly done by youngsters in the
ages of 11–14" and that "as the Russian is more afraid of the
truncheon than of weapons, flogging is the most advisable measure for
interrogation". After the war began, the Nazis issued a ban on sexual
relations between Germans and foreign slave workers. In accordance to these new
racial laws issued by the Nazis; in November 1941, the commander of the 18th
Panzer Division warned his soldiers not to have sex with "sub-human"
Russian women, and ordered that any Russian women found having sex with a
German soldier was to be handed over to the SS to be executed at once. A decree
ordered on 20 February 1942 declared that sexual intercourse between a German
woman and a Russian worker or prisoner of war would result in the Russian man
being punished by the death penalty. During the war, hundreds of Polish and
Russian men were found guilty of "race
defilement" for their relations with German women and were executed.
It should be noted that these directives applied only to consensual sex; the Wehrmacht's
view towards rape was much more tolerant.
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Killing of Jews at
Ivanhorod, Ukraine, 1942. A woman is attempting to protect a child with her own
body just before they are fired on with rifles at close range.
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2.3.3
Anti-Partisan and anti-Jewish actions
Under
the guise of anti-partisan operations, the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union
massacred Jews. Co-operation with the SS in anti-partisan and anti-Jewish operations
was close and intensive. In the spring of 1941, Reinhard Heydrich and the First
quartermaster of the German Army, General Eduard
Wagner successfully completed negotiations for co-operation between the Einsatzgruppen
and the German Army to allow the implementation of "special tasks".
Following the Heydrich-Wagner agreement on April 28, 1941, Feldmarshal Walther von Brauchitsch ordered when
Operation Barbarossa began that all German Army commanders were to identify and
register all Jews in the occupied areas in the Soviet Union at once and to
co-operate fully with the Einsatzgruppen". Each Einsatzgruppen,
in its area of operations, were under the control of the Higher SS-Police
Chiefs. In a further agreement between the Army and the SS concluded in May
1941 by General Wagner and Walter Schellenberg, it was agreed that the Einsatzgruppen
in front-line areas were to operate under Army command while the Army would
provide the Einsatzgruppen with all necessary logistical support.
In
August 1941, following the protests by two Lutheran chaplains about the
massacre of a group of Jewish women and children at Byelaya
Tserkov, General von Reichenau wrote:
The conclusion of the report in question contains the following sentence, "In the case in question, measures against women and children were undertaken which in no way differ from atrocities carried out by the enemy about which the troops are continually being informed".
I have to describe this assessment as incorrect, inappropriate and impertinent in the extreme. Moreover this comment was written in an open communication which passes through many hands.
It would have been far better if the report had not been written at all.
One
SS man who saw the killings at Byelaya
Tserkov described them as follows:
I went to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. I had nothing to do with this technical procedure. The Ukrainians were standing around trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body. They fell into the grave. The wailing was indescribable. I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I find it very hard to bear. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later...The grave was near some woods. It was not near the rifle-range. The execution must had taken place in the afternoon at about 3.30 or 4.00. It took place the day after the discussions at the Feldkommandanten...Many children were hit four or five times before they died.
In
the summer of 1941, the SS Cavalry Brigade commanded by Hermann
Fegelein during the course of "anti-partisan" operations in the Pripyat
Marshes killed 699 Red Army soldiers, 1,100 partisans and 14,178 Jews. Before
the operation, Fegelein had been ordered to shoot all adult Jews while driving
the women and children into the marshes. After the operation, General Max von Schenckendorff,
who commanded the rear areas of Army
Group Centre ordered on August 10, 1941 that all Wehrmacht security divisions when on anti-partisan
duty were to emulate Fegelein's example and organized between September 24 and
26, 1941 in Mogilev,
a joint SS-Wehrmacht seminar on how best to murder Jews. The seminar
ended with the 7th Company of Police Battalion 322 shooting 32 Jews at a
village called Knjashizy before the assembled officers as an example of how to
"screen" the population for partisans. As the war diary of the
Battalion 322 read:
The action, first scheduled as a training exercise was carried out under real-life conditions (ernstfallmässig) in the village itself. Strangers, especially partisans could not be found. The screening of the population, however resulted in 13 Jews, 27 Jewish women and 11 Jewish children, of which 13 Jews and 19 Jewish women were shot in co-operation with the Security Service.
Based
on what they had learned during the Mogilev seminar, one Wehrmacht
officer told his men "Where the partisan is, there is the Jew and where
the Jew is, there is the partisan".
The
707th division of the Wehrmacht put this principle into practice during
an "anti-partisan" sweep that saw the division shoot 10,431 people
out of the 19,940 it had detained during the sweep while suffering only two
dead and five wounded in the process. In Order No. 24 dated November 24, 1941,
the commander of the 707th division declared:
5. Jews and Gypsies:...As already has been ordered, the Jews have to vanish from the flat country and the Gypsies have to be annihilated too. The carrying out of larger Jewish actions is not the task of the divisional units. They are carried out by civilian or police authorities, if necessary ordered by the commandant of White Ruthenia, if he has special units at his disposal, or for security reasons and in the case of collective punishments. When smaller or larger groups of Jews are met in the flat country, they can be liquidated by divisional units or be massed in the ghettos near bigger villages designated for that purpose, where they can be handed over to the civilian authority or the SD.
At
Mirgorod,
the 62nd Infantry Division executed "the entire Jewish population (168
people) for associating with partisans”. At Novomoskovsk, the 444th Security Division
reported that they had killed "305 bandits, 6 women with rifles (Flintenweiber),
39 prisoners-of-war and 136 Jews". In revenge for a partisan attack that
had killed one German soldier, the Ersatz-Brigade 202 "as an act of
retaliation shot 20 Jews from the villages of Bobosjanka and Gornostajewka and
burnt down 5 Jew-houses". Even more extreme was the case in Serbia, where
the majority of the Jews there were murdered by the Wehrmacht, not the SS. At Šabac,
"Central European Jewish refugees, mostly Austrians, were shot by troops
of predominantly Austrian origin in retaliation for casualties inflicted by
Serbian partisans on the German Army". The orders issued by Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel in September 1941 called for the German Army to shoot 100 Serbs
for every German soldier killed by the Serb guerrillas and did not call for
Jews to be singled out. But because of rampant anti-Semitism in the German
officer corps, it was more or less automatically assumed that the Serbian
Jewish community were behind all of the partisan attacks, hence the targeting
of Jews in the mass shootings carried out in retaliation for guerilla attacks.
The German historian Jürgen Förster, a leading expert on the subject of Wehrmacht
war crimes, argued that the Wehrmacht played a key role in the Holocaust
and it is wrong to ascribe the Shoah as solely the work of the SS while
the Wehrmacht were a more or less passive and disapproving bystander.
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A member of
Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a man sitting by a mass grave in Vinnytsia,
Ukraine in 1942. Present in the background are members of the German Army, the
German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth. The back of the photograph is
inscribed "The last Jew in Vinnitsa"
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Besides
its own war crimes, the Wehrmacht worked very closely with the Einsatzgruppen
in murdering members of the Jewish population of the Soviet Union. On October
10, 1941 General Walther von Reichenau drafted
an order to be read to the troops under his command stating that: "the
soldier must achieve full understanding of the necessity for a harsh but just
vengeance against Jewish subhumanity.” Upon hearing of Reichenau's Severity
Order, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt,
the commander of Army Group South announced his "complete
agreement" with it, and sent out a circular to all of the Army generals
under his command urging them to send out their own versions of the Severity
Order, which would impress upon the troops the need to exterminate Jews.
General Erich von Manstein, in an order to his troops on
November 20, 1941 stated:
Jewry is the middleman between the enemy at our rear and the still fighting remnants of the Red Army and the Red leadership; more than in Europe, it [Jewry] occupies all key posts of the political leadership and administration, of trade and crafts and forms the nucleus for all disquiet and possible revolts. The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all.
On
July 6, 1941 Einsatzkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe
C – which was operating in Tarnopol at the time – sent a report which noted "Armed
forces surprisingly welcome hostility against the Jews". On September 8,
1941 Einsatzgruppe D reported that relations with the German Army were
"excellent". Franz Walter Stahlecker of Einsatzgruppe
A wrote in September 1941 that Army
Group North had been exemplary in co-operating with his men in murdering
Jews and that relations with the Fourth Panzer Army commanded by General Erich
Hoepner were "very close, almost cordial".
2.3.4 Mass
rapes
Rapes
were allowed in practice by the German military in eastern and southeastern
Europe, while northern and western countries were relatively spared. In Occupied
Denmark, which initially agreed to collaborate with Nazi Germany, rapes
were not widespread, and German officials promised to punish them. By contrast
thousands of Soviet female nurses, doctors and field medics fell victim to rape
when captured, and were often murdered afterwards. German soldiers used to
brand the bodies of captured partisan women – and other women as well – with
the words "Whore for Hitler's troops" and rape them. Following their
capture some German soldiers vividly bragged about committing rape and
rape-homicide. In the Soviet Union alone an estimates regarding the rape of
Soviet women by the Wehrmacht range up to 10,000,000 incidents, with
between 750,000 and 1,000,000 children being born as a result.
Birgit Beck in her work Rape:
The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmacht,
1939–1944 describes the leniency in punishing sex crimes by German
authorities in the East, at the same time pointing out heavy punishments
applied in the West. If a soldier who committed a rape was subsequently
convicted by a court-martial, he would usually be sentenced to four years in
prison
The German penal code was also valid for soldiers in war. but rapes were rarely
prosecuted in practice and rapes by Germans of non-German women were not taken
seriously, nor was it punishable by death, especially in the eastern European
territories.
In
Soviet Russia rapes were only a concern if they undermined military discipline.
The German military command viewed them as another method of crushing Soviet
resistance. Since 1941, rape was theoretically punishable with the death
sentence; however, this only concerned the rape of German women and was
intended to protect German communities.
In
October 1940 the laws on rape were changed, making it a "petitioned
crime" – that is a crime for which punishment had to be requested.
Historian Christa Paul writes that this
resulted in "a nearly complete absence of prosecution and punishment for
rape”. There were rape cases in the east where the perpetrators were sentenced
if the rape was highly visible, damaging to the image of the German Army and
the courts were willing to pass a condemning verdict against the accused.
According
to the historian Regina Mühlhäuser the Wehrmacht
also used sexual torture and undressing in numerous cases of interrogations.
2.4
Wehrmacht brothel system
Main
article: German military brothels in
World War II
Under
the German occupation, a widespread system of sexual slavery (forced
prostitution) was instituted. The Wehrmacht also ran brothels where
women were forced to work. The reason for establishing these brothels was the
German officials' fear of venereal disease and onanism
(masturbation). The Oberfeldarzt der Wehrmacht (Chief Field Doctor of
the Wehrmacht) drew attention to "the danger of [the] spread of homosexualism".
On
May 3, 1941 the Foreign Ministry of the Polish Government in Exile issued a
document describing the mass raids carried out in Polish cities with the aim of
capturing young women, who were later forced to work in brothels attended by
German officers and soldiers.
In
the Soviet Union women were kidnapped by German forces for prostitution; one
report by the International Military Tribunal
stated that "in the city of Smolensk the German Command opened a brothel for officers in
one of the hotels into which hundreds of women and girls were driven; they were
mercilessly dragged down the street by their arms and hair."
The
Nuremberg
trials did not prosecute anyone for rape or other sexual violence; rape was
defined as a crime against humanity, but prosecution was not included because
such crimes had "no nexus to war".
2.5
POW maltreatment
2.5.1
POW Camps
Main article:
Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs
See also: Prisoner
of war and Geneva Convention (1929)
The
Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment
of Prisoners of War had been signed by Germany and most other countries
in 1929, while the USSR and Japan did not sign until after the war (the final
version of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949). This
meant that Germany was legally obliged to treat all POWs according to it, while
in turn, Germans captured by the Red Army could not expect to be treated in
such a manner. The Soviet Union and Japan did not treat prisoners of war in
accordance with the Geneva Convention.
While
the Wehrmacht's prisoner-of-war camps for inmates from the west generally
satisfied the humanitarian requirement prescribed by international law,
prisoners from Poland (which never capitulated) and the USSR were incarcerated
under significantly worse conditions.
By
December 1941, more than 2.4 million Soviet Red Army troops had been taken
prisoner. These men suffered from malnutrition and diseases such as typhus that
resulted from the Wehrmacht's failure to provide sufficient food, shelter,
proper sanitation and medical care. Prisoners were regularly subject to
torture, beatings and humiliation. All Jews, commissars,
"intellectuals" and Muslims serving in the Red Army were either
executed by the Wehrmacht or handed over to the SS to be shot. The Muslim POWs were
shot because they were circumcised, and therefore might be Jewish; it was felt
to be safer to simply shoot all circumcised POWs rather run the risk that a
Jewish POW might escape execution by claiming to be a Muslim. Reflecting the
close co-operation between the Wehrmacht and the SS was an Einsatzgruppen
report, which read:
In Borispol, following a demand by the Commandant of the local P/W camp, a platoon of Sonderkommando 4 shot 752 Jewish prisoners of war on 14 October and 356 on 16 October 1941 including several commissars and 78 wounded Jews handed over by the camp medical officer.
According
to a RHSA report of December 5, 1941, the Wehrmacht had since June 22 handed
over to the Einsatzgruppen 16, 000 Soviet POWs to be
"liquidated". A Typical of the Wehrmacht's treatment of Soviet POWs
were the reports of the 11th Army commanded by Erich von Manstein on the "wastage"
rates in the first half of 1942. According to the reports:
Date
|
Died/shot
|
Escaped
|
Handed over
to the SD |
Discharged
|
Total wastage
|
7.1.1942
|
135
|
181
|
140
|
26
|
507
|
6.2.1942
|
1,116
|
155
|
111
|
2,293
|
3,680
|
6.3.1942
|
1,115
|
36
|
66
|
298
|
1,522
|
Between
the launching of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 and
the following spring, 2.8 million of the 3.2 million prisoners taken died while
in German hands. The German failure to attain their anticipated victory in the
East led to significant shortages of labor for German war production and,
beginning in 1942, prisoners of war in the eastern POW camps – primarily
Soviets – were seen as a source of slave labor to keep Germany's wartime
economy running. On August 6, 1941, the OKW declared that Soviet POWs capable
of work were to receive 2,200 calories/day and those not capable of work 2,040
calories/day. On October 21, 1941, the OKW ordered a huge reduction in the food
rations for Soviet POWs, with POWs incapable of work henceforth to receive only
1,490 calories/day. In a meeting of senior generals called at Orša on November
13, 1941, the Army's First quarter-master General Eduard Wagner stated
"Non-working prisoners of war in the camps are to starve”.
A
grand total of 5.7 million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner during the war,
of whom at least 3.3 million (58 percent of the total) died in captivity.
2.5.2
Massacres
The
killing of POWs by Wehrmacht soldiers started during the September 1939
Poland campaign. In many cases large groups of Polish soldiers were murdered
after capture. Hitler's Commando Order,
issued in 1942, provided "justification" for the shooting of enemy commandos,
whether uniformed or not.
The
massacres include that of at least 1500 black French POWs of West African
origin and was preceded by propaganda depicting the Africans as savages. From
October 1942 onwards, the Wehrmacht carried out the 'Commando Order'
calling for the summary execution of all captured commandos, even if in
uniform. After the Italian armistice in 1943, many POWs were
executed on several occasions when Italian troops resisted their forcible disarmament
by the Germans. The massacre of the Acqui Division at Kefalonia is
the most infamous.
On
March 26, 1944, 15 uniformed US Army officers and men were shot without trial
at La Spezia,
in Italy, after orders of the commander of the German 75th Army Corps, General Anton Dostler, despite the opposition of his
subordinates of the 135th Fortress Brigade. Dostler was sentenced to death by
an American military tribunal and executed by firing squad in December 1945.
 |
|
Commemorative plaque
of the French victims of the Night-and-Fog Decree at Hinzert concentration camp
|
2.6
Night and Fog Decree
The
Night and Fog Decree, issued by Hitler in
1941 and disseminated along with a directive from Keitel, was operated within
the conquered territories in the West (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway,
Denmark and the Netherlands). The decree allowed those "endangering German
security" to be seized and made to disappear without trace. Keitel's
directive stated that "efficient intimidation can only be achieved either
by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and
the population do not know his fate."
 |
|
A German soldier in front of a sign erected
after the razing of Kandanos, in Crete in 1941. The sign
roughly translates to "Kandanos was destroyed in reprisal for the brutal
murders of paratrooper and pioneer convoys in an ambush by armed men and women."
|
2.7
Reprisal actions
See
also: Partisan (military)
In
Yugoslavia and Greece, many villages were razed and their inhabitants murdered
during anti-partisan operations. Examples in Greece include: Kondomari,
Distomo, Mousiotitsa, Kommeno, Drakeia and Kalavryta;
the razing of Kandanos
and the holocausts of Viannos
and Kedros.
In
occupied
Poland and the USSR, hundreds of villages were wiped out and their
inhabitants murdered. In the USSR, captured Soviet and Jewish partisans were used to sweep fields
of land mines.
In
a number of occupied countries, the Wehrmacht's response to partisan
attacks by resistance movements
was to take and shoot hostages. Examples are: Putten (Netherlands), Oradour-sur-Glane (France), Telavåg (Norway) and Lidice (Czech Republic). As many as 100 hostages were
murdered for every German killed. In 1944, prior to and after the D-Day
invasion, the French Resistance
and the Maquis
increased their activities against all German organisations, including the Wehrmacht
and Waffen-SS.
In
issuing orders for hostage-taking, Keitel stated that "it is important
that these should include well-known personalities or members of their
families." A Wehrmacht commander in France stated that "the
better known the hostages to be shot, the greater will be the deterrent effect
on the perpetrators." The author William Shirer stated that over 30,000
hostages are believed to have been executed in the West alone. The Wehrmacht's
hostage policy was also pursued in Greece, Yugoslavia, Scandinavia, and Poland.
 |
|
The murder of Greek civilians in Kondomari, Kakopetros Crete by German Paratroopers 1941 (although
they operated under the command of the Luftwaffe)
|
 |
|
During World War II 85% of buildings in Warsaw were destroyed
by German troops.
|
2.8
Destruction of Warsaw
See
also: Battle of Warsaw (1939), Warsaw
Uprising and Planned destruction of Warsaw
Up
to 13,000 soldiers and between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed by
German-led forces during the Warsaw Uprising. At least 5,000 German regular
soldiers assisted the SS in crushing Polish resistance, most of them reserve
units. Human shields were used by German forces during the fighting.
 |
|
Portrait of Siegfried
Handloser as a defendant in the Medical Case Trial at Nuremberg, Porträt von
Siegfried Handloser als Angeklagter im Nürnberger Ärzteprozess
|
2.9
Human experimentation
See
also: Doctor's Trial
Throughout
the war Germany engaged in numerous experiments on human prisoners and POWs.
The Wehrmacht had full knowledge of those experiments, and performed
some of its own. It provided assistance regarding:
- High altitude tests
- Drinking seawater
- Freezing of the human body
- typhus research.
In
many cases the test subjects, even if they survived, were murdered afterwards
to study any changes within their bodies that happened during the experiment.
Examples
of experiments conducted by the Wehrmacht include:
- Experiments on homosexuals: Wehrmacht doctors wanted to "cure" homosexuality by hormone treatments and putting homosexuals into battle.
- Experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau by doctor Emil Kaschub. Kaschub came from Upper Silesia and was an ensign in the Wehrmacht (he was not a member of the SS). He performed experiments on the limbs of middle-aged and young prisoners; they would deliberately be infected with various toxic substances, which caused sores, abscesses and pain. The condition of the patients would be photographed by Kaschub every few days and liquid from their wounds collected. The probable motive for those experiments was to find out how soldiers made themselves sick in order to escape service in the Wehrmacht.
- In August 1941. the staff doctor assigned to the Sixth Army, Gerhart Panning, learned about captured Russian dumdum bullets by using Jewish POWs. To determine the effects of this type of ammunition on German soldiers, he decided to test them on other human beings after asking SS-Standartenführer (Colonel) and a member of the SD Paul Blobel for some "guinea pigs", (Jewish POWs).
2.10
Biological warfare
During
the war members of the Wehrmacht attempted to influence Hitler's
decision to study biological warfare only regarding defense. The head of the
Science Division of the Wehrmacht, Erich Schumann, urged the Führer that
"America must be attacked simultaneously with various human and animal
epidemic pathogens, as well as plant pests." Laboratory tests were
prepared for the use of plague, anthrax, cholera and typhoid. The possibility
of using foot and mouth disease against Britain was also studied.
3
Post-war views
3.1
Evolving analysis
At
the end of the war in 1945, several Wehrmacht generals made a statement
that defended the actions against partisans, the executions of hostages and the
use of slave labor as necessary to the war effort. The generals contended that
the Holocaust was committed by the SS and its partner organizations, and that
the Wehrmacht command had been unaware of these actions in the death
camps. The statement said that the armed forces had fought honorably and left
the impression that the Wehrmacht had not committed war crimes.
However,
individual high-ranking Wehrmacht officers stood trial for war crimes.
The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) commander-in-chief, Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel, and chief of operations staff Alfred Jodl were both
indicted and tried for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in
1946. They were convicted of all charges, sentenced to death and executed by
hanging, although Jodl was acquitted post-mortem seven years later. While the
tribunal declared that the Gestapo, SD
and SS (including the Waffen-SS) were inherently criminal
organizations, the court did not reach the same conclusion with respect to the Wehrmacht
General Staff and High Command. The accused were members of the Nazi Party
itself and were executing the party's beliefs through their rank. The German Wehrmacht
along with Allied armies committed what are classified as war crimes. The SS
and political "Armed" groups committed what are classified as crimes
against humanity.
The
prosecution of war crimes lost momentum during the 1950s as the Cold War
intensified; both German states needed to establish armed forces and could not
do so without trained officers and soldiers that had served in the Wehrmacht.
German historiography in the 1950s viewed war crimes by German soldiers as
exceptional rather than ordinary; soldiers were seen as victims of the Nazi
regime. Traces of this attitude can still be seen in some German works today,
which minimize the number of soldiers who took part in Nazi crimes. This was
especially the case as the German public in the immediate post-war period were
more interested in seeing themselves rather than others as victims. Thus the
subject of Red Army atrocities against German civilians in 1944–45 received
vastly more popular and historical interest in the 1950s than did the subject
of Wehrmacht atrocities against Soviet civilians in 1941–44. Beyond that,
Operation Barbarossa had been portrayed in Germany as a "preventive
war" forced on Germany by Soviet attack alleged to be planned for July
1941. This claim was widely believed in the Reich during the war, and
indeed was so popular that as late as the 1950s some West German historians
were still arguing Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war". As a
result of this view of Operation Barbarossa, for many Germans, violence
inflicted by the Wehrmacht on Soviet civilians and POWs was seen as something
that the Soviets had brought down on themselves, hence the absence of any guilt
on the part of many Germans. Cold War priorities and taboos about revisiting
the most unpleasant aspects of World War II meant that the Wehrmacht's
role in war crimes was not seriously re-examined until the early 1980s.
In
their memoirs, German Army generals claimed that the war had been a "clean
war" on their part with the Army fighting because of the noble
Prussian-German traditions, patriotism and a deep sense of honour and duty and
that National Socialism had virtually no influence on the Army. In this
version, almost all German war crimes were the work of the SS and any
"excesses" committed by the Army were only the product of a long and
bitter war and were no different from Allied war crimes. Very typical were the
claims of one Infantry commander, who stated in his memoirs that all of the
battles fought by his men were "always fairly conducted, though tough and
bitter." Such claims were widely believed not only in Germany but abroad,
with the British military historian Captain Basil Liddell Hart writing that "the German
Army in the field on the whole observed the rules of war better than in
1914–18".
On
11 December 1979, the West German television show Report aired a
documentary entitled "Crimes of the Wehrmacht in World War Two". The
public's reaction was almost overwhelming negative, with World War II veterans
leading a campaign to have the producer of Report fired for the
"defamation" of German soldiers. This despite the fact – as the
German historian Jürgen Förster was to write in 1989 – that the producers of
the documentary had gone out of their way to be fair and unbiased.
In
1986, the German historian Hans Mommsen wrote about the role of the Wehrmacht
under National Socialism:
The leadership of the Wehrmacht rather willingly made themselves into accomplices in the policy of extermination. It did this by generating the "criminal orders" and implementing them. By no means did they merely passively support the implementation of their concept, although there was a certain reluctance for reasons of military discipline and a few isolated protests. To construct a "casual nexus" over all this amounts in fact to steering away from the decisive responsibility of the military leadership and the bureaucratic elites.
British
historian Ian
Kershaw wrote that the genocide and extreme brutality used by the Nazis was
their way of ensuring the Lebensraum ("living space") for the
people who met the strict requirements of being part of Hitler's Aryan Herrenvolk
("Aryan master race") and the elimination of the Slavic people:
The Nazi revolution was broader than just the Holocaust. Its second goal was to eliminate Slavs from central and eastern Europe and to create a Lebensraum for Aryans. ... As Bartov (The Eastern Front; Hitler's Army) shows, it barbarised the German armies on the eastern front. Most of their three million men, from generals to ordinary soldiers, helped exterminate captured Slav soldiers and civilians. This was sometimes cold and deliberate murder of individuals (as with Jews), sometimes generalised brutality and neglect. ... German soldiers' letters and memoirs reveal their terrible reasoning: Slavs were 'the Asiatic-Bolshevik' horde, an inferior but threatening race. Only a minority of officers and men were Nazi members.
In
1989, the British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that right from the
beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht fought a genocidal
war of "extreme brutality and barbarism". Evans noted that the
Wehrmacht officers regarded the Russians as "sub-human", were from
the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939 telling their troops that war was
caused by "Jewish vermin", and explained to the troops that the war
against the Soviet Union was a war to wipe out what were variously called
"Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", the
"Asiatic flood" and the "red beast". Such views helped to
explain why 3,300,000 of the 5,700,000 Soviet POWs taken by the Germans died in
captivity. In 1992, Omer Bartov noted that the three leaders of the "new
revisionism" in German history that sparked the Historikerstreit of the late 1980s were
all in some ways seeking to promote the image of the Wehrmacht as a force for
the good, and seeking to portray the Wehrmacht as a victim of the Allies rather
the victimizer of the peoples of Europe, writing of "...the bizarre
inversion of the Wehrmacht's roles proposed by all three exponents of the new
revisionism, whereby overtly or by implication the Army is transformed from
culprit to saviour, from an object of hatred and fear to one of empathy and
pity, from victimizer to victim". Specially, Bartov noted:
- That Michael Stürmer's geographical interpretation of German history meant that Germany's "mission" in Central Europe was to serve as a bulwark against the Slavic menace from the East in both World Wars.
- That Ernst Nolte's argument about a "casual nexus" with the National Socialist genocide as a logical, if extreme response to the horrors of Communism led to Wehrmacht crimes in the Soviet Union being portrayed as essentially justified. This was even more the case as Nolte insisted that Operation Barbarossa was as Hitler claimed a "preventive war", which meant that for Nolte, Wehrmacht war crimes were portrayed as a defensive response to the threat posed to Germany by the "Asiatic hordes".
- That Andreas Hillgruber's call for historians to "identity" and "empathize" with German troops fighting on the Eastern Front in 1944–45 implicitly devalued the lives of those suffering and dying in the Holocaust, which was allowed to continue in part because the German troops held out for so long.
Bartov
wrote that all three historians had in varying ways sought to justify and
excuse Wehrmacht war crimes by depicting the Wehrmacht as engaging in a heroic
battle for Western civilization, often using the same language as the Nazis
such as referring to the Red Army as the "Asiatic hordes". Bartov
ended that these sorts of arguments reflected a broader unwillingness of the
part of some Germans to admit to what their Army did during the war. In 1998, Jürgen Förster, a German
historian, wrote that for too long most people have accepted at face value the
self-serving claims made by generals like Erich von Manstein and Siegfried Westphal who promoted the
idea of the Wehrmacht in their memoirs as a highly professional,
apolitical force who were victims of Adolf
Hitler rather than his followers. Förster argues that the Wehrmacht
played a key role in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and other war crimes. In
1999, the New Zealand historian Christian Leitz wrote that
the claims promoted after the war that the Wehrmacht had been an
"untarnished shield" with the Army somehow standing apart from the regime
it served so loyally was a "myth" that no serious historian had taken
seriously since the 1980s.
3.2
Films
In
his 2004 essay "Celluloid Soldiers" about post-war German films, the
Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote that German films of the 1950s showed
the average German soldier as a heroic victim: noble, tough, brave, honourable
and patriotic, while fighting hard in a senseless war for a regime that he did
not care for. The 08/15 film trilogy of 1954–55 concerns a
sensitive young German soldier named Asch (Joachim Fuchsberger). No mention is ever made
of the genocidal aspects of Germany's war in the East with instead the German
soldiers being shown as the victims of a war that they can not fathom the
reasons for. Bartov commented that given the intense indoctrination in the
Wehrmacht about how the war against the Soviet Union was a war to destroy
"Judeo-Bolshevism" that Asch would most definitely have known what
they were fighting for. The war on the Eastern Front was portrayed in a manner
that suggested that all who fought in the war were equally victims, but since
the focus in the 08/15 films is on the unit commanded by Asch inevitably
the impression is given that it was German soldiers who were the primary
victims of the war. The term 8/15 refers to a type of machine gun used in World
War I that was manufactured in such quantities that 8/15 became German Army
slang for anything was standard issue, which implied that Asch and the soldiers
under his command were Everyman characters of the war on the Eastern Front. The
last of the 08/15 films ends with Germany being occupied by a gang of
American soldiers portrayed as bubble-gum chewing, slack-jawed morons and
uncultured louts, totally inferior in every respect to the heroic German
soldiers. The only exception is the black-marketing Jewish American officer,
who is shown as both hyper-intelligent and unscrupulous, which Bartov noted
seems to imply that the real tragedy of World War II was the Nazis did not get
a chance to exterminate all of the Jews, who have now returned with Germany's
defeat to once more exploit the German people. This is especially the case
because the Jewish officer speaks his German with an upper-class accent, which
is evidently meant to suggest he is a rich German Jew who fled to the United
States in the 1930s and upon his return after 1945 is engaging in the same sort
of black-market activities that had led the Nazis to run people like him out of
Germany in the first place.
In
Der Arzt von Stalingrad (The Doctor from Stalingrad) of 1958,
dealing with German POWs in the Soviet Union, the Germans are portrayed as more
civilized, humane and intelligent than the Soviets, who are shown for the most
part as Mongol savages who brutalized the German prisoners. One of the German
POWs, the dashing Doctor Sellnow (Walter Reyer), successfully seduces the
beautiful and tough Red Army Captain Alexandra Kasalniskaya (Eva Bartok),
who prefers him to the sadistic and hideously deformed camp commandant Piotr
Markov (Hannes Messemer), which as Bartov comments is also
meant to show that even in defeat, German men were more sexually virile and
potent than their Russian counterparts. This was especially important to German
audiences because of the "crisis in masculinity" in Germany after the
war, namely doubts about how manly German men were after losing the war. Hence
the exaggerated picture German films liked to show of the typical Wehrmacht
soldier as an ultra-macho type who was just as much a victorious conquering
hero in the bedroom as on the battlefield. Bartov argued that the need to show
German soldiers as manly war heroes meant they could never be shown as war
criminals. Bartov wrote that the portrayal of the Soviet guards as mostly Asian
shows disturbing affinities to war-time Nazi
propaganda, where the Red Army was often described as "the Asiatic
horde". A recurring theme in Der Arzt von Stalingrad was that the
German soldiers were being punished for crimes that they had not committed. In
the 1959 film Hunde, wolt ihr ewig
leben? (Dogs, do you want to live forever?), which deals with
the Battle of Stalingrad, the focus is on
celebrating the heroism of the German soldiers in that battle, who are shown as
valiantly holding out against overwhelming odds with no mention at all of what
those soldiers were fighting for, namely National Socialist ideology or the
Holocaust. Bartov noted that the clear impression that these films give is that
the average German soldier who fought on the Eastern Front was a hero worthy of
the highest admiration. This in turn led to a tendency to portray the war in
the East in a manner that was devoid of its political context with the war
being reduced to struggle between German soldiers whom the audiences were
expected to like and admire vs. vast hordes of nameless, faceless, brutal
Russian soldiers. In such a narrative, war crimes by the Wehrmacht had no place.
This
period also saw a number of films that depicted the military resistance to
Hitler. In Des Teufels General (The Devil's General)
of 1954, a Luftwaffe general named Harras (Curd
Jürgens), loosely modeled on Ernst Udet,
appears at first to be a cynical fool whose major interests in life appear to
be beautiful women and alcohol, but who turns out to a gallant and upright
anti-Nazi officer who is secretly sabotaging the German war effort by designing
faulty planes. General Harras, who is represented as a great German patriot has
turned against the Nazi regime because of certain unspecified
"abominations" which are neither shown nor explained. Bartov
commented that in this film, the German officer corps is shown as a group of
fundamentally noble and honourable men who happened to be serving an evil
regime made up of a small gang of gangsterish misfits totally unrepresentative
of German society, which served to exculpate both the officer corps and by
extension German society. This impression is further reinforced by the comic
exchanges between the decent and upright Harras and various thuggish Nazis. The
witty, elegant, and sophisticated bon vivant Harras whose wisecracks
aimed at boorish Nazi leaders served to show that while the latter may be
Harras's political superiors, the former remains their social superior.
Officers such as Harras may have served a criminal regime, but Des Teufels
General seems to suggest that there never a part of that regime. Bartov
wrote that no German film of the 1950s showed the deep commitment felt by many
German soldiers to National Socialism, the utterly ruthless way the German Army
fought the war and the mindless nihilist brutality of the later Wehrmacht.
Bartov
also wrote that German film-makers liked to show the heroic last stand of the
6th Army at Stalingrad, but none has so far showed the 6th Army's massive
co-operation with the Einsatzgruppen in murdering Soviet Jews in
1941 during its march across the Ukraine. Likewise, Bartov commented that
German films tended to dwell on the suffering of the 6th Army during the Battle
of Stalingrad and its aftermath without reflecting on the fact that it was the
Germans who invaded the Soviet Union and that the Russians were fighting to
defend their country. Bartov went on to state that as late as the 1991 film Mein
Krieg (My War), featuring interview footage of six German veterans
juxtaposed with their amateur films the veterans shot during the war, contains
strong hints that the interviewees saw and/or were involved in war crimes with
at one point a mass grave of civilians in Russia being glimpsed in the
background of one of the amateur films; but the point is not pressed by the
film-makers.
Only
with Jenseits des Krieges (released in the US as East of War) in
1996, a documentary directed by Ruth
Beckermann dealing with the public's reaction to the exhibition "War
of Extermination" in Vienna in 1995, did a German film admit to Wehrmacht
war crimes being commonplace instead of an exception to the rule. Some veterans
in Jenseits des Krieges denied that the German Army committed any war
crimes at all while others express relief at long last that the truth has been
told. One critic wrote of the veterans in Jenseits des Krieges that
"Some are sorry for their brutality, while others rationalize such acts as
shooting POWs, raping women and butchering Jewish people as part of what
soldiers were expected to do".
3.3
Wehrmachtsausstellung
Main
article: Wehrmachtsausstellung
The
Wehrmachtsausstellung (German: German
Army exhibition)
was the name for two exhibitions focusing on war crimes of the Wehrmacht
committed on the East Front from 1941 to 1944. They ran from 1995 to 1999 in
the original form, and (following extensive criticism) from 2001 to 2004 in a
revised form. Since then, it has permanently been at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in
Berlin.
The
exhibition was the subject of a documentary, Der unbekannte Soldat
("The Unknown Soldier") by Michael
Verhoeven, in 2006. It compares the two versions of the exhibition, and its
maker, Jan Philipp Reemtsma.
3.4
Exhibition about the Wehrmacht in Poland in 1939
One
criticism was that both exhibitions only covered the German presence in the
Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945 and excluded the German occupation of Poland
after September 1939. The Polish exhibition "Größte Härte ...
Verbrechen der Wehrmacht in Polen September/Oktober 1939", a
cooperative effort of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance
and the Deutsches Historisches Institut in
Warsaw, was presented on September 1, 2004, in Poland. A German version was
presented in 2005. It was scheduled to be shown in Nuremberg at the Documentation Center
of the Nazi Party Rallying Grounds from September 1, 2007 to early 2008.
 |
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German soldiers photographing the hanging of
a Soviet citizen (the original caption claims he was a partisan)
|
4
Analysis of photos and letters
Rumors immediately began circulating of appalling crimes committed in the occupied territories – wholesale deportations and systematic massacres ... A story solemnly made the rounds of the world's newspapers that storks migrating from Holland to South Africa had been found with messages taped to their legs that read, "Help us! The Nazis are killing us all!"
The
attitude of German soldiers towards atrocities committed on Jews and Poles in
World War II was also studied using photographs and correspondence left after
the war.
Photographs
serve as a valuable source of knowledge; taking them and making albums about
the persecution of Jews was a popular custom among German soldiers. These
pictures are not the official propaganda of the German state but represent
personal experience. Their overall attitude is antisemitic.
German
soldiers as well as police members took pictures of Jewish executions,
deportations, humiliation and the abuse to which they were also subjected.
According to researchers, pictures indicate the consent of the photographers to
the abuses and murders committed. "This consent is the result of several
factors, including the anti-Semitic ideology and prolonged, intensive
indoctrination." Archival evidence as to the reaction to policies of
racial extermination can also be traced in various letters that survived the
war. Many letters from Wehrmacht soldiers were published in 1941 and
entitled "German Soldiers See the Soviet Union"; this publication
includes authentic letters from soldiers on the Eastern front. To give an
example of the intensive indoctrination "that transcends the mere results
of military service", researchers Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel quote a
German soldier writing:
The German people is deeply indebted to the Fuehrer, because if these animals, our enemies here, had reached Germany, murders of a nature not yet witnessed in the world would have occurred.... No newspaper can describe what we have seen. It verges on the unbelievable, and even the Middle Ages do not compare with what has transpired here. Reading Der Stuermer and observing its photos give only a limited impression of what we have seen here and of the crimes committed here by the Jews.
Judith
Levin and Daniel Uziel state that this type of writing and opinion was very
common in correspondence left by German soldiers, especially on the Eastern Front.
Other
samples of German soldiers' letters were sent home and copied during the war by
a special Polish Home Army cell that infiltrated the German
postal system. These letters have been analyzed by historians and the picture
they paint is similar to views expressed by Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel. Many
soldiers wrote openly about the extermination of Jews and were proud of it.
Support for "untermensch" and "master race"
concepts were also part of the attitude expressed by German soldiers. Presented
examples reflecting this trend include samples such as:
I'm one of those who are decreasing [the] number of partisans. I put them against the wall and everyone gets a bullet in his head, [a] very merry and interesting job....My point of view: this nation deserves only the knaut, only by it can they be educated; a part of them already experienced that; others still try to resist. Yesterday I had [the] possibility to see 40 partisans, something like that I had never encountered before. I became convinced that we are the masters, others are untermenschen.
Much
more evidence of such trends and thoughts among Wehrmacht soldiers exists and
is subject to research by historians.
The
historians responsible for the exhibition assume that the anti-Semitic climate
and propaganda in Nazi Germany had an immense impact on the entire population
and emphasize the importance of the indoctrination.
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