707th Infantry Division (Wehrmacht)

707th Infantry Division
active	May 2, 1941 to August 3, 1944
Country	German Empire
Armed forces	Wehrmacht
Armed forces	army
Branch of service	infantry
Type	Infantry division
Commanders
Please refer:	see below

The 707th Infantry Division (707th ID) was a large unit of the army of the German Wehrmacht in World War II . She was widely involved in the Holocaust and war crimes in the German-Soviet War .

Division history

The 707th ID was set up on May 2, 1941 from replacement units of Military District VII (Munich) . The division was broken up in the Soviet summer offensive in 1944 and officially disbanded on August 3, 1944.

After the start of the German attack on the Soviet Union in August 1941, the division was set off from being deployed in the Reich territory to the rear of the Eastern Front for "security and pacification". Their main tasks were securing behind the front and fighting partisans .

The 707th Infantry Division initially belonged to the 2nd Panzer Army of Army Group Center , and after August 1943 to the 9th Army . Their main area of application was in the Bryansk and Orel area ; in addition, it was used in the Schisdra area. It was used against partisans in the woods near Bryansk and in the spring of 1943 as a position division with Dimitrijew .

In 1943, the division took part in battles against partisans in the northwest of Brjansk as well as attack and defensive battles near Ordzhonikidsegrad, a suburb of Bryansk. Another object was to secure on the Desna and the Sosch past the Dnieper in space Shlobin - Schatilki-Parichi - Bobruisk . The division was destroyed from June 27 to 29, 1944 in the breakout fighting from the Bobruisk pocket during the Soviet operation Bagration in the area of Army Group Center. The surviving soldiers were taken prisoner of war . The 707th ID was formally dissolved on August 3, 1944.

War crimes

The commander of the 707th Infantry Division from 1941–1943 was Major General Gustav Freiherr von Bechtolsheim ; he was considered a proven anti-Semite and a national socialist loyal to the regime in terms of Nazi propaganda . Under this commander , there has been evidence of killings and mass murders among the Belarusian civilian population, the estimated number of deaths in the tens of thousands. In the occupied area of the 707th Infantry Division there was a "division of labor" with the SS; the SS made the larger cities “free of Jews”, the units of the division “looked after” Jews, “gypsies” and “other rabble” in the flat countryside. The 11th Reserve Police Battalion (with a Lithuanian protection team ) subordinated to the division murdered 5,900 Jews in the Sluzk- Kleck area. For October 1941 alone, the division reported in its monthly report that it had taken 10,940 “prisoners” within four weeks and shot 10,431 of them. Their own losses amounted to 2 dead and 5 wounded.

The 707th Infantry Division is considered to be the armed forces association with the largest share in the Holocaust. The historians Peter Lieb and Christian Gerlach rate the division as an association that, unlike others, autonomously and systematically organized and carried out large massacres of Jews with many thousands of victims.

Commanders

Division commanders of the 707th ID:
period of service	Rank	Surname
May 3, 1941 to February 22, 1943	Major general	Gustav Freiherr von Mauchenheim called Bechtolsheim
February 22 to April 25, 1943	Colonel	Hans von Falkenstein
April 25 to June 1, 1943	Lieutenant General	Wilhelm Rußwurm
June 1 to December 3, 1943	Lieutenant General	Rudolf Busich
December 3, 1943 to January 12, 1944	Major general	Alexander Conrady
January 12 to May 15, 1944	Lieutenant General	Rudolf Busich
May 15 to June 27, 1944	Major general	Gustav Gihr

structure

727th Infantry Regiment
747th Infantry Regiment
Artillery Division 657
Field Replacement Battalion 707
News Company (Section) 707
Engineer Company 707
Supply Force 707
Kl.Kw.Kolonne 707

Individual evidence

↑ Jürgen Förster : Wehrmacht, war and Holocaust in: Rolf-Dieter Müller , Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.): Jürgen Förster: Wehrmacht, war and Holocaust in: Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.): Die Wehrmacht. Myth and Reality , Munich 1999, p. 958, Munich 1999, p. 958 f.
↑ Peter Lieb: Perpetrator out of conviction. The diary of a regimental commander: a new approach to a notorious Wehrmacht division. Colonel Carl von Andrian and the murders of the Jews of the 707th Infranteried Division in 1941/42 . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 50 (2002), issue 4, pp. 523–557, here p. 523 f .; Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and annihilation policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-930908-54-9 , pp. 617–621.

literature

Johannes Hürter : Hitler's Army Leader: The German Supreme Commanders in the War against the Soviet Union 1941/1942. 2nd Edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 2007. ISBN 978-3-486-58341-0 .
Peter Lieb : Perpetrator out of conviction? Colonel Carl von Andrian and the murders of the Jews of the 707th Infantry Division 1941/42 , in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 50 (2002), issue 4, pp. 523–557 (PDF in the archive, 6.7 MB)
Georg Tessin : Associations and troops of the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in World War II 1939–1945. Volume 12. The Land Forces 631-800 . Biblio-Verlag, Bissendorf 1975, ISBN 3-7648-1080-7 .
Klaus-Michael Mallmann & Gerhard Paul Ed .: Careers of Violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. 2nd rev. Edition Primus, Darmstadt 2005, 2011 ISBN 978-3-89678-726-2 ; also Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 2011 (including Hannes Heer : Gustav Freiherr von Mauchenheim, called Bechtolsheim: a Wehrmacht general as an organizer of the Holocaust )

Web links

Organizational History of 371st through 719th German Infantry, Security and Panzer Grenadier Divisions 1939–1945 (PDF; 385 kB), Nafziger Collection, Combined Armed Research Library.
Discussion of a study on the 707th Infantry Division by the archive director of the Institute for Contemporary History in the FAZ

[1] Jürgen Förster : Wehrmacht, war and Holocaust in: Rolf-Dieter Müller , Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.): Jürgen Förster: Wehrmacht, war and Holocaust in: Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.): Die Wehrmacht. Myth and Reality , Munich 1999, p. 958, Munich 1999, p. 958 f.

[2] Peter Lieb: Perpetrator out of conviction. The diary of a regimental commander: a new approach to a notorious Wehrmacht division. Colonel Carl von Andrian and the murders of the Jews of the 707th Infranteried Division in 1941/42 . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 50 (2002), issue 4, pp. 523–557, here p. 523 f .; Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and annihilation policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-930908-54-9 , pp. 617–621.