Crimes of the Wehrmacht
As crimes of the Wehrmacht are crimes referred to the members of the Wehrmacht in World War II have committed. They include planning and conducting wars of aggression and extermination , mass murders of civilians and those suspected of being partisans , mistreatment and murder of prisoners of war , occupation crimes , and direct and indirect participation in genocides , including the Holocaust and the Porajmos . The Wehrmacht leadership issued criminal orders that violated the norms of international martial law ( Geneva Conventions , Hague Land Warfare Regulations and customs of war).
The legal and political processing of these crimes is still ongoing. Few crimes committed by the Wehrmacht have been tried in Nazi trials since 1945. In the Federal Republic of Germany they have long been publicly disputed or played down, their prosecution delayed and hindered. How many common soldiers were involved in them, the number of victims and the motives of the perpetrators are still controversial today.
Crime areas
Crimes of the Wehrmacht are divided between the preparation of a war of aggression aimed at annihilation and the fatal side effects and consequences of the war . The former happened above all in relation to Eastern Europe, the latter happened in and after all of the Wehrmacht's wars of conquest, most recently also when German troops withdrew from the "Old Reich".
The crimes occurred mainly in the following areas:
- as the destruction of large parts of the population of enemy states through warfare
- as the exploitation policy of the occupied countries
- as mass murders of civilians justified by “fighting gangs” (meaning partisans )
- as cooperation with SS Einsatzgruppen and military administrations of occupied areas in tracking down, extraditing and murdering persecuted groups, especially Jews
- as the murderous treatment of prisoners of war, especially through systematic undersupply of Red Army soldiers
- as shooting of "suspects" by the secret field police
- as so-called end- phase crimes , including around 50,000 legally enforced death sentences against their own soldiers.
They took place mainly in the rear areas of the Eastern Front, so that occupation units with around 700,000 soldiers were more often involved in them in autumn 1943 than front units with around two million soldiers. Units like the Secret Field Police or the so-called Jagdkommando were much more involved in the crimes than the rest of the soldiers in their divisions.
Structure and role of the Wehrmacht before the start of the war
The Wehrmacht had emerged from the Reichswehr in 1935 , whose officer corps had largely continued and preserved the conservative and reactionary traditions of the empire during the Weimar period .
This change took place in several steps: the prerequisite was the approval of rearmament from autumn 1933, followed by the admission of many former SA and police members after the Röhm putsch (which was also carried out indirectly at the instigation of the Wehrmacht, as it was the so-called SA "People's Army" and unwelcome competitors). The oath of leadership in 1934 was new, as was the introduction of compulsory military service and the formation of new high commands for all sub-areas in 1935. Thus, the military leadership gradually abandoned the theory of the two pillars of power, the party and the military, and was largely expanded into the army of the Third Reich .
In January 1938, the Reichswehr Minister Werner von Blomberg and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army , Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch , fell over allegations of homosexuality (Fritsch) and intrigues of the SS. This opened the way for Hitler to appoint himself as Commander-in-Chief and to be in leading generals loyal to the Nazi regime To introduce positions ( Keitel and Jodl ). The Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) took the place of the Reichswehr Ministry as the commanding body . After Hitler set up and took over the OKW, the Wehrmacht was one of the main pillars of power of the Nazi regime, with whose interests it largely coincided ideologically and politically. With around 18 million members during the war, the Wehrmacht also became a military instrument for the National Socialist policy of conquest and extermination.
Due to the processing of extensive Wehrmacht documents, it is indisputable that the army also actively participated in extermination campaigns and that the Wehrmacht was involved in crimes through active action or inaction. The high command in particular, but also middle officers, NCOs and men were involved in mass crimes in the occupied territories.
- The generals
There is a relative consensus about the political responsibility of the Wehrmacht leadership for many Nazi crimes in the areas occupied and administered by the German military. The war crimes of the Wehrmacht were often part of the specifically National Socialist violent crimes and in some cases only made them possible to the extent that they were carried out. Historically, therefore, they cannot be clearly separated from the large-scale deportation, expulsion and extermination projects of the Nazi regime. Knowledge, consent or open or tacit tolerance of the majority of the generals with regard to the planning and execution of the crimes can be considered proven. This is made clear by a number of orders and instructions from OKW, individual generals and subordinate command posts.
Hitler and the Wehrmacht leadership drew essential impulses from Erich Ludendorff's book The Total War of 1934. In this, an optimal mobilization of the willingness to use violence and a unity between civil society and military organization were called for. Essential elements of National Socialist ideas were pre-formulated by Ludendorff. And although Ludendorff provided Hitler with one of the most enduring keywords of Nazi ideology, his military strategy in total war differed significantly from Ludendorff's considerations in terms of content. Unlike Ludendorff, who, based on the stab in the back, wanted to give the military all control, Hitler viewed the war as genuinely political; as a result, the war became more cruel than Ludendorff's ideology or his intellectual antipode, Clausewitz , whose work Ludendorff regarded as outdated.
Even before the outbreak of war, the army was sworn to a unified ideological line with the Nazi state by decrees issued by the leadership. Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch , Commander-in-Chief of the Army until 1937, expected according to the decree of April 25, 1936, especially from the officer,
"... that he acts according to the views of the 3rd Reich, even if such views are not laid down in legal provisions, ordinances or official orders."
The General Field Marshal and Commander in Chief of the Army from 1938 Walther von Brauchitsch emphasized in a decree on the education of the officer corps at the end of 1938 :
“Wehrmacht and National Socialism are of the same spiritual tribe. You will continue to achieve great things for the nation if you follow the example and teaching of the Führer, who embodies the real soldier and National Socialist in his person. "
OKW and OKH documents clearly show that the drafts for the Barbarossa jurisdiction decree and the commissioner's order were thought through and worked out in the area of responsibility of the OKW (Halder, Müller, Jodl, Warlimont and others) and the Wehrmacht.
A number of other commands from the leadership demanded extremely tough and sometimes illegal action from the troops . Examples of this are Keitel's order of September 16, 1942, an order of the commander of Panzer Group 4, Erich Hoepner , of May 1941, or Field Marshal von Mansteins of November 20, 1941.
Criminal orders
Commissar order
On March 30, 1941, at a conference in preparation for the "Russian War" (Operation Barbarossa ) , Hitler ordered the generals present to kill the Soviet "Commissioners" (party officials) after the war began. Following this intention, the OKW and the legal department of the High Command of the Army (OKH) formulated appropriate orders.
The Commissar Order "of the OKW from June 6, 1941 ordered political commissars of every type and position" - civilian Soviet party officials and enforcement officers in the Red Army - if only because of the mere suspicion of resistance or sabotage immediately on the battlefield or after capture to execute :
“These commissioners are not recognized as soldiers; the protection under international law for prisoners of war does not apply to them. "
General Walter Warlimont , who signed the execution guidelines of the order on behalf of the OKW, affirmed that "protection and consideration under international law" is wrong here: "Therefore, if taken in combat or resistance, they are to be dealt with immediately with the weapon." Lieutenant General Hermann Reinecke also took over the command for the prisoner-of-war department in the OKW with a basic order of September 8, 1941 stating that “the use of weapons against Soviet prisoners of war is generally considered lawful”.
This was also based on the anti-Semitic delusional idea that the majority of Soviet party functionaries were Jews and that they held leading positions in the Red Army. "Commissioner" and "Jew" were often equated in practice. Until July 1941, however, there were only lower ranks there, so-called Politruks (political workers, agitators). After the order became known, many Soviet command officers removed their badges from their uniforms and were then no longer distinguishable from ordinary soldiers.
The commissioner's order was given in writing to the three armed forces and the commanders-in-chief of all armies and air fleets, and from there to most of the lower-ranking units orally. Although it met with opposition from some parts of the troops, according to the files it was executed by up to 80 percent of the German divisions. As a result, German front-line troops carried out 4,000 executions according to records, but the total number of victims could also be in the five-digit range. In May 1942, after a request from the OKH for a review, Hitler revoked the commissioner's order on a trial basis in order to soften enemy resistance and encourage trapped Soviet troops to surrender. Thereafter the order was not renewed, but continued to be carried out for Jews under the Red Army until the end of the war.
Martial Law Decree
On May 14, 1941, the OKW issued the martial law decree signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel . This provided
- To withdraw crimes committed by hostile civilians from the jurisdiction of the courts-martial and court martial "until further notice",
- Freeriders "to be ruthlessly dealt with by the troops in combat or on the run",
- also "to put down all other attacks by enemy civilians [...] on the spot with the utmost means until the attacker is destroyed".
What was meant was to collectively punish suspicious places as the origin of partisans, for example by burning down, killing and deporting the inhabitants. It was expressly forbidden to “keep suspicious perpetrators in order to pass them [...] on to the courts”. The decree thus deprived civilians suspected of being partisans of any legal protection from the outset and allowed or ordered the troop units to practice lynching and collective violence against the Soviet civilian population. At the same time, he deprived the military courts of the legal obligation to prosecute the perpetrators except in the case of excessive rape .
Atonement
With the atonement order of September 16, 1941, the OKW issued instructions to the troops to kill 50 to 100 civilians for every soldier killed in an ambush. For this purpose, civilians (mainly communists , Jews and Gypsies ) were interned as hostages as a precaution .
Night and fog releases
With the Night and Fog Decree of December 7, 1941, the OKW issued the secret instruction to deport suspected resistance people from France, Belgium, Holland and Norway to a secret location in Germany at night and without a military trial. The Wehrmacht leadership expected this to have a greater deterrent effect.
Command command
With the command order of October 18, 1942, the OKW issued the instruction as a secret matter of command to the troops that members of Allied commandos should be refused any pardon . Should the Wehrmacht receive living prisoners, they would have to be handed over to the chief of the security police and the SD for liquidation .
Bullet enactment
With the bullet decree of the OKW of March 1944, a secret order was issued with the instruction to hand over captured officers and higher NCOs to the chief of the security police and the SD after their escape attempts. These prisoners of war then came to the Mauthausen concentration camp , where they were systematically murdered.
numbers
Perpetrator
The share of simple Wehrmacht soldiers in the Eastern Army in the crimes, as well as the criteria for their participation, are controversial. Estimates range from under five percent to eighty percent.
From a legal point of view, 0.05 percent of Wehrmacht soldiers were convicted by German and Allied courts for war crimes or involvement in the Holocaust. This figure also includes the mass judgments of the Soviet judiciary in the immediate post-war period, most of which were overturned as unfounded by the Russian Federation Military Prosecutor in the early 1990s.
Victim
The commissioner's order resulted in several thousand deaths. The order to extradite Jewish and political prisoners of war to the SD resulted in proven 140,000 victims. However, estimates put up to 600,000 victims.
About the number of partisans and the German troops deployed against them, the losses on both sides and the casualties among the civilian population, hardly anything can be said precisely because of considerable source problems, and not only for the eastern theaters of war. In most cases, these are different estimates that differ greatly from one another.
According to an estimate by Christian Streit, 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war died, that is 57 percent of all Red Army soldiers who were captured by Germany. According to David J. Dallin , 3.7 million or 63% died. Two million were already dead before the spring of 1942 because they were not to be treated gently and their admission to camps had been poorly or not at all prepared. The mass deaths declined when the Soviet prisoners of war were needed as labor, but it was not until July 1944 that they were cared for like Western prisoners. According to the sources, the question of how “intent or state of emergency” worked together cannot be answered conclusively, but it can be answered to the effect that a considerable part of the troop leaders had adopted the ideological guidelines of the political leadership. The death rate for English and American prisoners of war was about 3.5 percent.
Eastern Europe
Poland
On August 26, 1939, Adolf Hitler made it clear to the Army Group Leaders and Army Leaders on Obersalzberg that a military victory in the prepared attack on Poland was not enough. Rather, it is "a matter of eliminating the living forces" in order to secure the area to be conquered for the German " people without space ". Reinhard Heydrich and Eduard Wagner , Quartermaster General of the Army, agreed in writing that "backwards of the fencing troops" so-called Einsatzgruppen from SS, Security Police and SD should undertake to "fight all elements hostile to the Reich and German". It was known from what was happening in the Reich that this primarily meant Jews and Communists. The Wehrmacht leadership ceded its responsibility for the occupied territories and their civilian population, which had been given according to the Hague Land Warfare Regulations , to the forces that were already engaged in the cleansing of racial politics in the Reich.
The High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) and the Army (OKH) actively represented the necessity of this agreement vis-à-vis the officer corps. Walther von Brauchitsch offered Himmler support with her explanation; individual generals such as Walter von Reichenau , Erich von Manstein and others were responsible for the propagandistic indoctrination of the troop commanders. However, under current law, they and those directly responsible for their actions remained responsible for their actions. The Military Criminal Code (MStGB), the War Criminal Procedure Code (KStVO) and the Special War Criminal Law Ordinance (KSSVO) threaten offenses against “male discipline”, in particular looting and assaults against the civilian population, with imprisonment or the death penalty . However, the martial law decree and other ordinances effectively overruled these laws.
A traditional devaluation of the international law of war based on the "war purpose" was tied in with . The Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch , decreed on September 12, 1939 with an "Ordinance on Gun Possession" that the areas west of the San, middle course of the Vistula and north of the Narew were no longer to be regarded as combat areas. Thousands of dispersed Polish soldiers who were still in these areas and who should have been regarded as combatants with the right to fight or to carry weapons were declared to be rioters, robbers and bandits. This legitimized massacres such as the shooting of hundreds of such Polish soldiers on September 8 in the forest near Ciepielów .
According to the agreed division of tasks, the Wehrmacht provided accommodation, supplies and vehicles for the Einsatzgruppen that murdered around 60,000 Polish intellectuals, including 7,000 Jews, during and after the attack on Poland by the end of 1939. The Wehrmacht leadership remained involved in these lethal activities. More than 3,000 Polish soldiers were murdered by German soldiers away from the fighting. Over 16,000 civilians were executed between September 1 and October 25, 1939. It can be assumed that at least during the German invasion, more than half of the victims were due to the Wehrmacht. Historians such as Gerd R. Ueberschär therefore come to the conclusion: "The Wehrmacht was already involved in the Nazi crimes in Poland." Until February 1940, representatives of the army command such as Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz raised accusations against the actions of the police and Brauchitsch SS units, but were no longer heard there. With his order "Heer und SS" of February 7, 1940, Brauchitsch emphasized the necessity of the "solution of popular political tasks" ordered by Hitler "for the protection of German living space", which "inevitably" led to otherwise unusual, tough measures against the Polish population have led.
With the secret pardon after the Polish campaign , German crimes on Polish territory were amnestied on October 4, 1939.
Czechoslovakia
After the Munich Agreement , the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was occupied by the armed forces in violation of international law by breaking up the rest of the Czech Republic . After this annexation, the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under German administration was established. The Slovak part of the country became the Slovak State , a satellite state controlled by the German Reich . With this approach, Adolf Hitler broke his promise not to make any further territorial claims to Czechoslovakia after the annexation of the Sudetenland . Due to the German jurisdiction created after the annexation, the legal basis for the persecution of minorities and those who think differently was created.
Soviet Union
War and supply planning
Hitler had announced a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union several times since 1924. He justified it in his program Mein Kampf (1925) with two supposedly unavoidable goals: the conquest of “ living space in the east ” and the smashing of “ Bolshevism ”, i.e. the Soviet state and social system or “ Jewish Bolshevism ”, its representatives were equated in the Nazi propaganda with “ World Jewry ” as the main enemy of the “Aryan race ”.
In a lecture on March 30, 1941, he described the coming war in Russia in front of around 250 Wehrmacht generals as a “battle between two world views ” and demanded “to move away from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship”.
Even before the first combat operations and the adoption of orders contrary to international law , Colonel-General Georg von Küchler outlined the premises for the war against the Soviet Union in front of division commanders on April 25, 1941 . First of all, he explained to those present that the confirmed plans for the attack on the Soviet Union and the details of the implementation were subject to confidentiality. He then stated:
“If the inhabitants (note: Russia) take part in the fight against us, [...], they will be treated as franc tireurs and subjected to the corresponding severe punishments. [...] The political commissioners and GPU people are criminals. [...] You are to be brought before a field court without further ado. "
In a further order of April 28, 1941, OBdH Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch issued "Regulations for the use of the Security Police and the SD in the Association of the Army". It says here:
“The special commandos of the security police and the SD carry out their tasks on their own responsibility. They are subordinate to the armies with regard to marching, supplies and accommodation. [...] For the central control of these commands, a representative of the chief of the security police and the SD is used in each army. "
The OKW planned the "Operation Barbarossa" as another blitzkrieg . In order to counteract the threat of insufficient food supply due to the ongoing warfare since September 1939, the aim was to feed all German troops and parts of the German civilian population from the war year 1941/42 onwards for the entire duration of the war at the expense of the natives from the conquered Soviet territories. In a meeting between General Georg Thomas and the state secretaries of the war-economically important departments on May 2, 1941, the OKW's economic armaments office decided:
"1. The war can only be continued if the entire armed forces are fed from Russia in the third year of the war.
2. There is no doubt that tens of millions of people will starve to death if we get what we need out of the country.
3. The most important thing is the recovery and removal of oilseeds, then grain. The existing fat and meat will probably be consumed by the troops. "
On the basis of this hunger plan , the OKW limited the food supplies of the German army for the Russian campaign to a few weeks. For the further supply, the fertile southern Russian black earth areas should be cordoned off from the north and all food transports there should be prevented. The death of countless Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians was accepted from the start. In the course of the war, the OKW released certain Soviet areas for looting, including Kharkov , cities in the Donets Basin , in the Crimea and in front of Leningrad . As early as the winter of 1941/42, mass deaths began in many larger cities. As a result, "the weakest of the city's residents, ie children, the elderly and people with no family ties, died in the tens of thousands every month". Only after many residents were abducted as forced laborers did the situation improve somewhat in the following winter.
Counter partisans
From 1942 onwards, the resistance of Soviet partisans in the rear area increasingly became a serious threat for the Wehrmacht, which they had not considered in their planning before the war and had long underestimated. The fight between the Wehrmacht and partisans was fought from 1942 on both sides with relentless severity and criminal acts against the enemy and the civilian population.
On May 14, 1941, the OKW issued the martial law decree signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. Among other things, this provided for partisans "to be ruthlessly dealt with by the troops in combat or on the run", and "to put down all other attacks by enemy civilians [...] on the spot with the utmost means until the attacker was destroyed".
The international law of the time did not have a clear legal status for partisans, so that they were only considered prisoners of war if they wore a permanent and recognizable sign from a distance, carried arms openly, observed the laws and customs of war and the existence of a responsible leader. In addition, the execution of captured irregular fighters was permitted by the then applicable martial law (Hague Land Warfare Ordinance of 1907) under certain circumstances. At least the first two points and point four often did not apply to many of the Soviet partisans. As even the French prosecution and American judges in Nuremberg ruled, the shooting of captured partisans - even without trial - was not a war crime. Hostage shootings and reprisals were not generally prohibited under the martial law of the time, but were also not expressly permitted , been.
However, one of the necessary legal requirements for such killings included the ban on killing hostages without a judicial process, for revenge or for reasons of military expediency. In addition, it was mandatory to prove that the perpetrators themselves could not be caught, that the population was involved in the resistance action to be atoned for and that there was no longer any possibility of restoring peace and order through other measures. Above all, the number of hostages killed had to be proportionate. "Atonement measures" and hostage shooting with excessively fixed quotas, such as 100 killed hostages - including women and children - for a killed German, were therefore clearly illegal and classified as war crimes. Furthermore, serious violations of human rights, such as particularly cruel acts or the killing of children, were clear war crimes. Therefore, many massacres of the German fight against partisans did not represent acts of war, even under the law of the time, but serious war crimes.
In this respect, the Wehrmacht very often exceeded the already relatively wide scope of legal partisan combat in an excessive and thus criminal manner. Often not only partisans, but also alleged “partisan helpers” and “partisan suspects” were liquidated unchecked and relatively indiscriminately. The fight against partisans increasingly affected people, localities and population groups unrelated to partisan activity. The Jewish population was generally equated with “the partisan” or classified as its helpers and murdered. It should also be noted that despite Josef Stalin's call for partisan warfare on July 3, 1941, the same did not gain momentum for a long time and the Red Army soldiers in the rear of the army were mostly disorganized soldiers who often only hid out of fear of the Germans.
The German tactic of advancing on so-called "taxiways", protecting them for supplies and at the same time leaving extensive stretches of land the size of the Saarland, for example, uncombed to the side, led to the grotesque situation that it was still there until the end of 1942, beginning of 1943 Were areas that no German soldiers, police officers or administrative officials had seen.
With regard to the "fight against" these people, Hannes Heer even speaks of a "partisan fight without partisans" for the period 1941 to 1942. Lutz Klinkhammer, on the other hand, regards the partisan war of the Wehrmacht neither as a myth nor as a code for mass murder, but also not as an exclusively military matter. It represented a hybrid form between fighting and murders of the civilian population.
The OKW's atonement order of September 16, 1941 stated that up to 100 hostages should be shot for every murdered German and up to 50 hostages should be shot for every wounded. Based on this, on March 19, 1942, the Wehrmacht Commander Southeast issued instructions to his troop commanders “regarding the fight against insurgents”. The “Combat Instructions for Combating Gangs in the East” signed by Jodl on November 11, 1942 summarized all previous individual orders and demanded inexorable severity against women and children.
That the fight against partisans was seen as a welcome pretext for the extermination policy as early as 1941 is shown by the following statement by Hitler from a secret meeting with leading Nazi functionaries: “The Russians have now given an order for partisan war behind our front. This partisan war also has its advantage: it gives us the opportunity to exterminate whatever is against us. "
Treatment of prisoners of war
There were the following, in some cases secret, orders for the criminal treatment of prisoners of war:
- Commissar order , in agreement with the head of the General Wehrmacht Office General Hermann Reinecke and the head of the Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war camps Colonel Breyer, Heydrich issued the deployment order No. 8 of July 17, 1941. In every prisoner-of-war camp and transit camp, "in political, criminal or other respects Unsustainable elements ” are filtered out by a command from SS and SD employees. The aim was to find functionaries of the Comintern , leading party functionaries, people's commissars , all former political commissars of the Red Army, intelligentsia , Jews and fanatical communists as well as “terminally ill” for execution outside the prisoner of war camps.
- Command command provided for the execution of captured commandos, regardless of whether they were in uniform or not.
- The Kugel decree provided for the execution of escaped officers and higher-ranking NCOs.
Individual German commanders-in-chief had other captured Red Army soldiers murdered, including female officers who were considered particularly fanatical, although in fact they were only used for auxiliary services. In Belarus , dispersed Red Army soldiers were threatened with shooting if they did not voluntarily allow themselves to be captured within a set deadline.
Most of the Soviet prisoners were first transferred from assembly points to transit camps in the operational area, from there to main camps or officers' camps in the hinterland. a. in Ukraine , Poland, Austria , Romania and the German Reich - brought. In many cases they had to walk the paths; while the escort teams murdered those who remained exhausted by the thousands; B. after the Kiev Kessel Battle (approx. 1,000) and in the Vyazma – Bryansk area (approx. 4,000). Research can no longer determine exact figures here.
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In many camps, the newcomers were left to fend for themselves, had to live in the open air or in self-dug caves, received too little food and little or no medical care. Until September 1941 the daily rations were still relatively sufficient, after which the military leaders cut the allocations considerably. The reasons for this were the unexpectedly failed lightning victory, the lack of supplies for the own army, which found too little food in the conquered areas, insufficient transport capacities and a general supply crisis that began especially at the end of 1941, the impending winter and Hitler's initial ban on Soviet prisoners in the Reich to transport.
Self-created economic constraints led to the fact that those responsible for the food concentrated almost exclusively on the supply of their own troops, whereby the acceptance of starvation of the prisoners was favored by the brutalization of the war and ideological influences and “in the months of October 1941 to January 1942 coincided with the transport and supply crisis of the Wehrmacht ”.
These self-created constraints, which made it impossible to care for the prisoners, were structurally due to the fact that the OKW was expecting “two to three million Soviet prisoners of war” in March 1941, when it began planning the supply, but “the decision was made shortly before the start of the attack not to bring Soviet prisoners of war to Germany ”. This resulted in a storage system that deviated from the previous organizational scheme. By mid-December, “around 3.35 million Red Army soldiers were held in German custody” and were housed in temporary “transit” and “main camps” for a long time. Neither the resources nor the organizational prerequisites were available to provide these people with the care they are entitled to under international law. Often there were not even cordoned off areas (temporary camps) available, so that the prisoners were secured with simple chains of guards and allowed to freeze to death or starve to death.
Hermann Göring did not want to endanger the mood of the German population by the lack of grain deliveries and, untruthfully, claimed on September 16, 1941 that the feeding of Bolshevik prisoners, in contrast to feeding other prisoners, was "not bound by any international obligations":
"Your catering can therefore only be based on the work done for us."
In fact, Article 82 of the 1929 Geneva Convention, which Germany signed in 1934, also applied to enemy states that had not acceded to the treaty. But at the beginning of October 1941, Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner decreed :
“Non-working prisoners of war in the prison camps have to starve to death. Working prisoners of war can in individual cases also be fed from army stocks. "
As a result, the already weakened Red Army soldiers who were unable to work and whose number rose sharply in the following months, no longer received enough daily food. The consequences were particularly evident in the main camps: between October 1941 and May 1942, up to two of 3.7 million Soviet prisoners of war probably died, at least 850,000 of them in the care of the army before being transferred to the hinterland. An ordered slight increase in the food rations in December 1941 came too late and was often not implemented. In the following winter of the war, hundreds of thousands more died as a result of inhumane treatment during transport and in the camp, criminal deprivation of food, shelter and nursing care, and inhumane forced labor. Many Soviet civilians, members of the militia, construction crews and recruits were among the fatalities. The total number of indirectly murdered camp inmates is estimated at around three million. The General Wehrmacht Office under Hermann Reinecke, which organized the distribution and care of the prisoners of war, was primarily responsible for the mass deaths with genocidal proportions.
Exceptions to the dismissal for willing Ukrainians, Balts , members of Turkic peoples and Soviet Germans with good leadership and a place of residence near the camp did not apply to “ Slavs ”. Individual camp commanders tried to cope with excessive manpower losses and epidemics and to procure additional food, but at the same time prevented the local population from using firearms to feed the starving people through the camp fence.
In addition, with the help of informers and denunciations, the camp officers selected two groups from the mass of ordinary prisoners: particularly valuable ones who were to be persuaded to defeat and work in the Wehrmacht, and “undesirable” or “dangerous” people. The latter were then handed over to special detachments from the security police, who either shot them immediately or deported them to special camps set up for them. The Wehrmacht camp crews often murdered this group themselves. This affected around 150,000 Red Army soldiers, including many Jews, for whom the murder warrant remained in place until the end of the war.
All in all, the same racist attitude was shown in dealing with Red Army soldiers , according to which only the strongest had a right to life and the weak had to perish or the "dangerous" had to be murdered.
In the Nuremberg trials, the accused military personnel, including Wilhelm Keitel , tried to attribute the mass deaths of Soviet prisoners of war to the supposedly impossible care of the immense numbers of prisoners. Historians such as Dieter Pohl emphasize that this was the result of criminal war planning, warfare and racist misanthropy, in which the food supply for one's own troops from the occupied territories was done at the expense of the civilian population and prisoners of war :
“Operation Barbarossa” led directly to genocide. For the first time, the German leadership planned the murder of large population groups in a campaign [...] with food deprivation, disenfranchisement and reprisal massacres. The largest group of victims in terms of numbers are the Soviet prisoners of war [...]. "
See also: Babi Yar Massacre , Drobizki Yar , Kamenets-Podolsk Massacre
Murders
It is true that there was no systematic murder campaign against the mentally ill in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union, especially since at the beginning of the campaign no precise regulation had been made on how to deal with Soviet psychiatric patients. But under certain constellations, institutional patients were also victims of mass murders. For the German occupiers, the mentally ill people were uncontrollable, dangerous, “useless eaters” and sources of epidemics. This view was also widespread in the Wehrmacht, which took over the administration of the occupied territories. As early as 1939, the Wehrmacht, SS and Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle had forced the relocation of prison residents in occupied Poland as well as in the provinces of Poznan and East Prussia by referring to their interests in the use of the buildings and thus not only influenced early murders by shooting and gas vans , but also the murders the " Action T4 " in certain regions such as Bavaria , Württemberg , Baden and Rhineland . In the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, too, military doctors often claimed the facility buildings were used as military hospitals, while the occupying power was hardly prepared to adequately feed the “unproductive” inmates. Whether there was mass murder therefore depended on the initiative of individual departments. Walter Stahlecker , chief of Einsatzgruppe A , recorded on October 8, 1941, that he had been urgently asked several times by high-ranking officers of the Wehrmacht to clean up mental hospitals "that were needed for lodging purposes". But the question was also discussed in the General Staff of the Army. Chief of Staff Franz Halder noted on September 26, 1941 after a lecture by Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner : “Insane asylums near North . Russians regard the mentally weak as sacred. Still killing necessary. ”An SS commando ( Sonderkommando Lange ) experienced in mass murder was specially requested from the Warthegau .
On December 26, 1941, General Georg von Küchler, as commander of the 18th Army, supported an application by the XXVIII. Army Corps to have about 230 patients in an institution in the former Makarevskaya Pustin monastery killed by task forces of the Security Police and the SD because of the "risk of epidemics" . In the Nuremberg General Trial he denied this and suspected an error. In the similar Makarevskaja case, in which about 1,200 patients from a large psychiatric institution were handed over to the task forces for killing in November 1941, later research revealed his involvement. The case of the institution for mentally ill children in Červen near Minsk , where the local commandant suggested mass murder, is documented for the area of Army Group Center . In Dnepropetrovsk , which was under military administration, Einsatzkommando 6 murdered 800 inmates of the Igrin institution by November 12, 1941. In Kalinin , which was briefly occupied , a regimental commander of the 6th Panzer Army had ten mentally ill inmates shot dead. The remaining inmates were released, but murdered when they were arrested. The Ic officer of the 3rd Panzer Army reported to the Panzer AOK. 3 in June 1942 113 disabled people in Isakovo near Vjaz'ma, which thereupon ordered the "elimination of the cripples" and commissioned the security police and SD to do so. The findings so far show a gradual radicalization of the measures taken by the Wehrmacht and the task forces against the hospital patients. In Vinnitsa , Ukraine, the military administration initially reduced food allocation. In the autumn of 1941, 800 sick people were shot and 700 more were poisoned. The premises were then used as a sanatorium and casino. After the occupation of Kursk by the 2nd Army, Soviet investigations showed that the city command office forced the medical staff of the local psychiatric institution to kill all inmates who were classified as unfit for work. 400 people starved to death and about 600 were killed by lethal injection.
Dieter Pohl concludes that in these mass murders the military often took on the function that was taken over by the health and interior administrations during the euthanasia in the Reich. By deciding which institutions should be "evacuated" and which not, they effectively decided on the life and death of the patients, while the SS and police apparatus took over the killing.
Southeast Europe
Albania
After parts of the German 1st Mountain Division south of Borova , a small mountain village, were attacked by local partisans in Italian-occupied Albania on July 6, 1943 , members of the division committed the Borova massacre , destroyed the village and killed 107 residents (mostly women, Children and old).
Greece
Greece was attacked in October 1940 by Italian and later also by German and Bulgarian troops and then occupied. The economic exploitation of the country led to the great famine , and atrocities were committed against the population in over 100 places, these places are called in memory of this as the martyr villages and cities of Greece .
Crete
After the first "retaliatory actions" at the special company League of Nations by German mountain fighters after the airborne battle for Crete , the following commanders on Crete , General Alexander Andrae , General Bruno Bräuer , General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller and General Heinrich Kreipe , initially tried to adopt a less harsh repression policy.
The paratroopers were immediately withdrawn from the island and replaced by infantry and security divisions. When there was sabotage at airport and fuel facilities and clashes with Cretan partisans, the Andarten , during the ensuing occupation, they too began mass executions of civilians. In a “atonement” in September 1943, they burned a dozen villages in the Viannos subdistrict , killing at least 440 people (men, women and children). The retreat to the region around Chania , the 'core fortress of Crete', in autumn 1944 was accompanied by the destruction of Cretan villages along the line of retreat and the executions of civilians. According to Greek estimates, between 3,000 and 9,000 civilians died during the German occupation of Crete.
see also
- Kondomari (June 2, 1941, 23 farm workers shot dead)
- Kandanos (June 3, 1941, 23 dead),
- Parivolia near Chzania (June 1941, 42 men were shot in front of their wives),
- on September 14, 1943, Germans attacked several villages (including Viannos , Amira, Vechos, Kephalovrissi, Krevvates, Agios Vassilios, Pefkkos, Simi, Gdochia, Myrtos, Mournies, Malles). They killed 440 people, arrested 200 and destroyed three places.
- Anogia (destroyed by fire and dynamite in August 1944)
Peloponnese and Northwest Greece
Even mountaineers were at war crimes involved, the 1st Mountain Division at the shooting of Italian prisoners of war Division "Acqui" on Cephalonia and Corfu . 155 officers and 4,750 ordinary Italian soldiers who had surrendered to the German troops were killed after their capture, following the orders of the High Command of the Wehrmacht and in contravention of all provisions of international martial law. This was one of the most serious war crimes with the direct involvement of Wehrmacht units. In addition, mountaineers supported the Secret Field Police in the deportation of the Jewish population in Greece . At the beginning of July 1943, the 1st Mountain Division was relocated to western Greece in the Epirus . The military successes of ELAS had made it necessary to reinforce the German occupation forces, and in response to this, the terror should be intensified. Hitler's order of December 16, 1942 also applied to them:
"[...] If this fight against the gangs in the East as well as in the Balkans is not carried out with the most brutal means, the available forces will no longer be sufficient to master this plague in the foreseeable future. The troops are therefore entitled and obliged to use any means in this struggle without restrictions, even against women and children, if only it leads to success ... "
In the three months between the beginning of July and the beginning of October 1943 alone, around 207 villages with 4,500 houses were destroyed and over 2,000 Greeks and Albanians, including women, the elderly and children, were killed.
An indication that there were very few skirmishes with partisans is the fact that “only” 23 mountain troops died in this period.
see also:
- Kommeno (August 16, 1943, murdered 317 residents),
- Lyngiades (October 3, 1943, 83 dead),
- Kalavrita (December 13, 1943, over 650 dead),
- Klissoura (Epirus),
- Distomo massacre (June 10, 1944, 218 dead)
Persecution of Jews in Thessaloniki
Immediately after the German invasion of Greece in early May 1941, a hit of the 12th Army affiliated detail of Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg under Lieutenant Hermann von Ingram one in Greece. In Thessaloniki , a local task force working group in cooperation with the Wehrmacht's secret field police carried out over 50 raids on the Jewish community in Thessaloniki . In the process, the resident data necessary for subsequent deportations were collected and historically valuable documents, cultural assets and liturgical objects were stolen, including around 100,000 books from the Jewish libraries.
In autumn 1941, at a meeting in the Führer Headquarters Wolfsschanze with Adolf Hitler, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler in the presence of Reinhard Heydrich and the Wehrmacht officers Wilhelm Keitel , Alfred Jodl , Rudolf Schmundt and Gerhard Engel raised the question of the Jewish population of Thessaloniki and Himmler was given power of attorney for deportation. By order of the military commander of Saloniki Aegean, General Curt von Krenzki , all male Jews between the ages of 18 and 45 had to assemble on July 11, 1942, a sabbath, on the Freedom Square for examination and registration for forced labor . The fit Jews were sent to malaria-infested swamps or had to do heavy labor in chrome mines. Compulsory labor was lifted again in October 1942. War Administrator Max Merten from the Saloniki-Aegean Military Administration had pressed an agreement from the Jewish community that would allow Jews to pay 2.5 billion drachmas and leave the valuable 300,000 square meter area of the Jewish cemetery (for which the city administration had long been a covetous Had thrown his eye) from forced labor.
On February 6, 1943, the special command of the security police for Jewish affairs arrived in Saloniki Aegean with SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner in Thessaloniki. The command presented Max Merten with extensive prefabricated Jewish edicts, which the latter put into effect for the commander Saloniki Aegean of Army Group E. From then on, Greek Jews had to wear the Star of David, mark their shops and apartments with it, and move to ghettos . The National Socialist measures of exclusion, labeling and ghettoization were implemented within less than three weeks. The deportations began two and a half weeks later. The ghetto districts were often surrounded by the Jewish security service and the field gendarmerie at night for the deportations. The abandoned apartments were looted by German soldiers and the last time Greek collaborators, thieves and beggars appeared in search of valuables.
On March 1, 1943, all Jewish families were asked to declare their property. On March 8, the Greek government set up the Office for the Administration of Jewish Property (YDIP) under the lawyer Elias Douros. The office was initially under the German military administration and the property of the Jews was made short shrift. 280 million drachmas went to the German military administration. The vacant Jewish homes and businesses were handed over to the Governor General of Macedonia in trust .
Serbia
Since the police and SD units were soon overwhelmed with the containment of the heavy activities of Tito's partisans that began in mid-1941, the OKW - at Hitler's request - entrusted the Wehrmacht with this task in August. When the military fight against the partisans by partly still mixed units from the Wehrmacht, police and SD had proven to be relatively unsuccessful, the occupiers began with "expiatory actions" and hostage shootings, which were directed against partisans, the civilian population and especially Jews and Roma . Two of the massacres carried out by the Wehrmacht with the highest number of civilian casualties (over 4,000) were those in Kraljevo and Kragujevac .
A typical example of a "expiatory action" that has no causal connection and is therefore uncovered under martial law as well as the equation of Jews and partisans was the instruction of the authorized general in Serbia , Franz Böhme , appointed in September 1941 , because of 21 soldiers killed in a fight with partisans 2,100 Select prisoners from the concentration camps of Šabac and Belgrade , preferably communists and Jews, for liquidation .
Karl H. Schlarp estimates the number of people killed in reprisals in Serbia at 41,000 to 46,000.
The Holocaust in Serbia was characterized by the coordinated action of the Wehrmacht, the military administration, the police and special forces. The National Socialists described Serbia as the second occupied country after Estonia as " Jew-free ". The registration and identification, disenfranchisement, social exclusion and robbery of the Jews and Roma in early 1941 was followed by the shooting of male victims by the Wehrmacht in autumn 1941; only a few survived. From October 16, hundreds of interned Jews were murdered after every partisan attack. From December 1941, Jewish women, children and old people from Serbia were interned in the Sajmište concentration camp . In May 1942 the Gestapo there murdered 6,000 of them with a gas truck. Until autumn 1941, the Wehrmacht was involved in these actions through indirect support, but from that point on - in contrast to other areas occupied by Germany - they mainly committed these war crimes themselves.
- Report by lieutenant and company chief Liepe on the shooting of 449 Jews and "gypsies" near Belgrade
Western Europe
Spain
The air attack on Gernika by German fighter planes of the Condor Legion on April 26, 1937, in which, according to recent estimates, around 300 people were killed, is often regarded as the first war crime of the Wehrmacht and a violation of international law . The entire complex of air warfare was neither discussed nor charged by the Allies in Nuremberg , despite further and more extensive German air raids during the Second World War .
France
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During the Western campaign and immediately after the armistice on June 22, 1940, members of the Wehrmacht committed numerous war crimes against prisoners of war and civilians.
At least 3,000 black French soldiers ( Tirailleurs sénégalais ) were murdered for racist motives between May 24 and June 24, 1940 , although they had already surrendered or were wounded and no longer fought. Former Reich German Jews who served as emigrants in the French armed forces and had been taken prisoner were shot at the army prisoner assembly points on the instructions of Army Group B after their identity had been established. On June 23, 1940, German troops murdered 114 civilians in Oignies and Courrières because they believed they were being attacked by franc tireurs.
Of the 1.5 million French prisoners of war, around 21,000 died; most of them because of the bad treatment in German "reprisal camps" like Rawa-Ruska in Poland. Prisoners who dared to try to escape or who refused to do forced labor were accommodated there. Blacks and Orientals were treated worse by them. Western European Jews were segregated and forced to perform particularly difficult and degrading labor before being deported to extermination camps. The head of OKH Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch ordered Otto von Stülpnagel , the commander of the German occupiers in France, and his subordinate military district chiefs in November 1940 to push ahead with the Aryanization of Jewish companies in France. On December 17, 1941, Stülpnagel ordered a “Jewish fine” of one billion francs, which the Association of Jews in France had to pay in installments.
Contrary to the Compiègne armistice (1940) , the German Reich de facto annexed Alsace and Lorraine . From 1942, the German-speaking French in these areas were forcibly recruited by the Wehrmacht and SS, contrary to the Hague Land Warfare Regulations. Of 130,000 of these soldiers (they call themselves Malgré-nous ) 40,000 French died for the occupation forces. After the war, in Soviet captivity and in France, they were treated as collaborators rather than victims of a war crime. In 1981 the Federal Republic of Germany agreed to pay a symbolic reparation amounting to 250 million DM into a fund.
Other direct war crimes included compulsory civilians from hostile countries, such as mine sweeping, individual massacres, and an unknown number of local women raped. The statistics of German courts-martial only recorded cases that had become known; however, it is believed that most of the cases could not be reported and went undetected.
Netherlands
In the Putten case , after the murder of a Wehrmacht soldier by Dutch partisans on October 1, 1941, on the orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Netherlands, General Friedrich Christiansen , 661 men from the Putten community were transferred by the Wehrmacht to concentration camps (only 49 people survived) and the village afterwards burned down. Christiansen was sentenced to prison by a Dutch court and was pardoned and released in 1951.
Belgium
Under the orders of the military commander for Belgium and northern France , General Alexander von Falkenhausen , the Wehrmacht's economic staff had liquidated or aryanized ( de-Jewified ) by the end of 1942 . Falkenhausen authorized the deportation of Jews and had hostages shot.
Italy
After the overthrow of the dictator Benito Mussolini at the end of July 1943, the Badoglio government fought on the side of the Reich for a few weeks until it concluded a special armistice (on September 3; announced on September 8). Hitler and the Wehrmacht leadership had prepared the Axis case and started the occupation of Italy. On September 10th, Rome was occupied by the Wehrmacht.
On October 13, 1943, the Badoglio government declared war on Germany; Italy thus entered the war on the side of the Allies.
Italian troop commanders were shot dead as irregulars if they did not succeed in getting their soldiers to hand over their weapons to the Wehrmacht and surrender within a short time. According to the Hague Land Warfare Regulations, however, as belligerents, these soldiers were entitled to oppose disarmament and were not allowed to be treated as irregulars. This was clearly established in the trial of the Southeast Generals charged with war crimes .
On Hitler's orders, some Wehrmacht officers had Italian units shot down when they were handed over their weapons and captured. The 1st Mountain Division executed around 5000 disarmed Italian soldiers on the island of Kefalonia ( massacre on Kefalonia ) and around 100 Italian officers on the island of Kos . Similar mass executions of Italians took place in Albania and Yugoslavia .
An order from the commanding general of the XXII. Mountain Army Corps , Hubert Lanz , stated that Italian soldiers found in civilian clothes should be shot completely informally. He defied the rules of martial law .
Over 13,000 Italian prisoners of war drowned when they were supposed to be brought in hopelessly overloaded steamers from the Greek islands to the mainland in 1943. The order to transport them away regardless of whether life-saving equipment was available on board the ships was a violation of international martial law.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz , ordered that all leading officers from Submarina and other Italian naval agencies should be sentenced if they were responsible for fighting against German naval forces. This order may have required war crimes from his subordinates.
Around 600,000 soldiers of the Italian armed forces were disarmed, interned and deported to the territory of the empire for forced labor. They were classified as " military internees " in order not to have to recognize them as prisoners of war protected under international law. They were collectively considered "traitors". By the end of the war, around 40,000–45,000 of them died of starvation, illness and abuse. The survivors were transferred to civil prison status in 1944 and better cared for afterwards.
Norway
On October 28, 1944, General Alfred Jodl , Chief of the Wehrmacht Command Staff (WFSt), ordered the complete and ruthless deportation ( evacuation ) of the Norwegian population and the destruction of all accommodation east of the Lyngenfjord as part of the Northern Lights operation . The order was carried out with the severity and thoroughness commanded in most places.
Africa
The Tunisian commander, General Walther Nehring , imposed a fine of 20 million francs on the Jewish community in Tunisia , as international Jewry was responsible for the Anglo-American landing in North Africa. On the instructions of General Field Marshal Albert Kesselring , he had the Jewish population used for forced labor in building fortifications, contrary to the Hague Land Warfare Regulations.
Participation in the extermination of the Jews
The Wehrmacht was involved in the " final solution to the Jewish question " in several ways :
- In the run-up to the attack on Poland (1939) and the Russian campaign, the high command and part of the upper level of command agreed to the plans and orders to murder the ruling elites of the conquered states, which at the same time justified and initiated the nationwide extermination of Jews. So they knew the plans and execution of the Holocaust early on.
- Military agencies were involved in many occupation measures that followed the conquests, including deportations, the establishment of Jewish ghettos , exclusionary ordinances such as clothing labels for Jews, the singling out of Jewish prisoners of war, and the recruitment of “armaments Jews” for forced labor in the German armaments industry.
- The Wehrmacht made its infrastructure, including the Europe-wide Wehrmacht transport system, often available for the deportations of Jews, for example for the transports of French Jews and Greek Jews to Auschwitz .
- Wehrmacht units actively participated in mass shootings, justified as “fighting gangs” (fighting partisans ), which accounted for a large part of the extermination of Jews, especially in Russia. This direct involvement was based on an order from the Reich Security Main Office of July 17, 1941. According to this, Wehrmacht units were supposed to hand over “politically intolerable” prisoners to Einsatzkommandos of the Security Police and SD , who then killed or abducted them. According to Reinhard Heydrich's execution guidelines of the same day, the order included prominent Soviet state officials, senior figures in the central and intermediate levels of Soviet authorities, leading figures in business life, the “Soviet intelligentsia” and “all Jews”.
To provide psychological relief for the soldiers and to promote mass murders and crimes against civilians and Jews, Jews and partisans were equated. Typical of this is an order from General Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau (1884–1942) from October 10, 1941:
“The soldier in the eastern region is not only a fighter according to the rules of the art of war, but also a bearer of an inexorable, folkish idea and the avenger for all bestialities inflicted on German and related nationalities. That is why the soldier must fully understand the necessity of the harsh but just atonement for Jewish subhumanity. It has the further purpose of nipping in the bud uprisings in the rear of the Wehrmacht, which experience shows were always instigated by Jews. […] Insidious, cruel partisans and degenerate women are still being made prisoners of war […] and treated like decent soldiers and taken to the prison camps. [...] Such behavior by the troops can only be explained by complete thoughtlessness. "
That the fight against partisans - or the equation of partisans and Jews - was often just a pretext is also suggested by the following statement by Panzer General Hans Röttiger from November 1945 (which was revoked shortly afterwards) , in which he admits that:
"... the ultimate aim of the fight against gangs that we waged was to exploit the army's military gang warfare to enable the ruthless liquidation of Judaism and other undesirable elements."
Colonel-General Erich von Manstein stated in an order dated November 20, 1941:
“This fight is not waged in traditional form against the Soviet armed forces solely according to European rules of war. [...] Judaism is the intermediary between the enemy at the rear and the remnants of the Red Army and the Red leadership who are still fighting [...] The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be exterminated once and for all. "
Colonel-General Hermann Hoth formulated this in an army order of the 17th Army of November 17, 1941 as follows:
“It is the same Jewish class of people […]. Their extermination is a matter of self-preservation. "
In his speeches in Poznan and other secret speeches between October 1943 and June 1944, Heinrich Himmler spoke openly to commanders of the Wehrmacht about the extermination of the Jews and the policy of extermination against Red Army soldiers and Slavs.
According to Dieter Pohl , only a minority of the Wehrmacht soldiers were directly involved in the murder of Jews, but the Wehrmacht as an organization took part in it in many ways: The military administrations in many occupied areas issued anti-Jewish ordinances that prepared the deportation of Jews to the Eastern European extermination camps. In Serbia , the military administration ordered the shooting of the Jewish men in mid-1941. In the Soviet Union, the commandant offices took care of the registration and identification of Jews, their disadvantages in terms of supplies and also the establishment of individual ghettos. They often worked with the police on large-scale murders, provided infrastructure and sometimes staff. Secret field police and field gendarmerie hunted hidden Jews and some killed them themselves. Wehrmacht units deployed in the hinterland often murdered Jews and Gypsies , as did the Einsatzgruppen, such as the 707th Infantry Division in Belarus.
Furthermore, many members of Wehrmacht units witnessed and assisted the mass murders committed by the Einsatzgruppen. Their commanders often allowed SD commands (SD = Security Service of the Reichsführer SS ) to sort out and kill Jews, communists and other “suspects” in the prisoner-of-war camps . In April 1940, the Wehrmacht leadership for its part excluded almost all “ Jewish mixed race ” from their ranks.
Forced labor
In the eastern theater of war, that is, in today's Belarus, Ukraine and in the conquered areas of Russia, the civilian population was used for forced labor behind the front within the framework of the occupation structures at army, corps and divisional level. Quotas of forced laborers were regularly given to the rear army areas or to the German Reich. Since the beginning of 1944, people within the area of responsibility of Army Group Center have been systematically deported to Germany as forced laborers. For example, the 9th German Army was commissioned to provide 25,000 forced laborers for the war economy by the end of March 1944. The forced laborers lived under conditions similar to those of concentration camp inmates. The death penalty has already been imposed for minor offenses. The regiment was also extremely arbitrary, as the shooting of forced laborers after the escape of individual prisoners shows.
Residents who were classified as unfit for work were viewed by the German military as “annoying blackheads” that had to be got rid of. They were initially also deported to the west, but from 1943 onwards increasingly “hostile” into the combat area. In the area of responsibility of the 9th German Army , for example, up to mid-March 1944 45,000 people were interned in properties fenced with barbed wire near the village of Osaritschi , which were located exactly on the front line. After the transports were completed, an approx. 5 km wide strip of territory around the camps was cleared by the German troops, so that they were taken over by Soviet soldiers on March 19. Of the 45,000 people, only 33,000 had survived the conditions in the building-free areas. In the 3rd Panzer Army , the residents of Vitebsk, unable to work, were locked in a similar camp near the front on May 22, 1944, where they were to be overrun by the expected Soviet summer offensive (→ Operation Bagration ).
In Wehrmacht brothels , women and girls from the annexed areas were forced into prostitution . In contrast to the forced laborers, the forced prostitutes have not yet received any compensation; In addition, this group of victims is often defamed and hushed up in their home countries and is not even mentioned or noticed in the German public.
Destruction measures
During the withdrawal from occupied territories, all facilities that could be useful for the enemy were systematically dismantled or destroyed by the Wehrmacht. The economic staff at the respective higher command level was responsible for drawing up the plans . The able-bodied civilian population was abducted for forced labor and the remaining residents were left helpless in destroyed towns so that the advancing enemy had to take care of their survival. The ARLZ measures represented an increase in the concept of the scorched earth through the large-scale displacement of people and the destruction of entire settlement and industrial areas. Basically, less was destroyed in the western and southern operational areas (France, Italy) than in the east (Soviet Union), where the destruction measures were carried out as completely as possible.
Sexual violence
Sex crimes and rape by Wehrmacht soldiers remained largely unexplored until the end of the 1990s. In 1999, the military historian Wolfgang Petter pointed out that an order from the Army High Command of July 5, 1940 ultimately resulted in "choosing the gentlest penal tenor" in the case of rape. The fact that the Wehrmacht often had no interest in prosecuting and documenting sexual violence against civilians, according to historian Birthe Kundrus in the same volume published by the Military History Research Office, was due to the fact that “in the context of the race-ideologically motivated war of conquest and extermination, humiliation of the population was an integral part of warfare. "
In her dissertation on sexual violence by Wehrmacht soldiers, published in 2004, Birgit Beck stated that 5,349 Wehrmacht soldiers had been convicted of “moral offenses”, especially “rape” by 1944. How large the number of unreported sexual acts of sexual violence was in relation to these 5,000 documented cases cannot be reliably estimated due to the armed forces leadership's lack of interest in criminal prosecutions and the “dry sources”. Beck emphasizes that above all the martial law decree of May 13, 1941, belonging to the Barbarossa company , which removed the criminal offenses of German soldiers against Soviet civilians from the military court “compulsory prosecution”, destroyed the basis for the prosecution of sexual offenses and largely prevented them from being recorded. Rape of Soviet women by German soldiers occurred most frequently “in the context of billeting in civilian houses, when requisitions were ordered or in connection with looting”. The military historians Michael Epkenhans and John Zimmermann state that rape of Russian women by German soldiers "[must] be counted as part of the humiliation practice of the Wehrmacht warfare in the occupied territories". As a rule, the military superiors were not interested in appropriate criminal prosecution.
Regina Mühlhäuser confirms these findings in her dissertation 2010, specifically related to the German-Soviet war, and states that very few sexual acts of violence committed by Wehrmacht soldiers resulted in disciplinary consequences or were punished by a court. Sexual acts of violence by German soldiers against Soviet women did not represent rare exceptional acts, and occasionally entire units were even involved in excessive sexual violence. In addition, according to Mühlhäuser, there is "various pieces of evidence that the murder of Jewish women after sexual violence was not an isolated incident."
For the topic of forced prostitution for the Wehrmacht brothels, see the chapter on forced labor . The social scientist Christa Paul points out that everyday life in the Wehrmacht brothels in Eastern Europe was characterized by sexual violence.
Robbery and destruction of cultural property
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The large-scale robbery of art and cultural property in the occupied territories was also a crime under Article 56 of the Hague Convention. The task force of Reichsleiter Rosenberg undertook extensive confiscations from 1940. The Führer's order of July 5, 1940, as well as an instruction of General Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel of September 17, 1940 authorized the "securing of any abandoned cultural property". From 1940 to 1944, National Socialist organizations plundered castles, libraries, museums and private collections in the areas occupied by the German Wehrmacht. This tolerated and supported the actions and partly took part in them.
Human trials
The Wehrmacht researched various areas that were important to the war effort. Prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates were used as test subjects for this research. The army, navy and air force provided personnel and equipment out of self-interest. The researches extended to
- fatal negative pressure attempts to use aircraft at great heights. The air force provided the vacuum chambers;
- deadly cold tests to research better survival techniques for sailors, pilots and army soldiers;
- Seawater experiments to increase the chances of survival of sailors and pilots at sea;
- Experiments with combat gas;
- Attempts to prevent and combat infectious diseases to improve the state of health in large gatherings such as troops or prison camps;
- For medical research purposes, people were also brutally injured and their wounds filthy, to simulate war wounds and to investigate medical care through drugs or surgery.
Wehrmacht and Law
Deficits in martial law
Since the establishment of the Reich in 1871, German jurisprudence has focused on internal unity, while international law was only an appendage of public law or criminal law. The lack of examination of the legal provisions of the Hague Land Warfare Regulations and the Geneva Convention resulted in incomplete implementation in German law. In both world wars this led to a lack of a legal image of the war, which was reinforced for the Second World War by recourse to "war custom" and "military necessity" as well as by the National Socialist legal training from 1933. The weak points in both wars were:
- the partisan war with Art. 2 Hague Land Warfare Regulations
- the hostage and reprisal institutions
- and the occupation policy.
With the War Criminal Procedure Ordinance (KStVO) and the Special War Criminal Law Ordinance (KSSVO) of August 17, 1938, the crimes of undermining military strength , rioting , high treason , treason and favoring the enemy were redrafted for both Germans and "foreigners" . With the institution of the emergency court in the form of stand courts at regimental level, a fair trial was no longer guaranteed. Atonement against "suspects" was introduced against foreign civilians and dispersed soldiers as intentional criminal law and § 3 KSSVO only permitted acquittal or the death penalty and prevented a differentiated assessment of the crimes. With the transfer of domestic legal relationships to foreign occupied territory, the German occupation law did not comply with the rules of the occupacio bellica .
The collapse of the law finally became evident in many court martial proceedings against members of the German armed forces as well as against prisoners of war.
Wehrmacht investigation center
The Wehrmacht investigation center - fully Wehrmacht investigation center for violations of international law , abbreviated: WUSt - was formally used by the Wehrmacht leadership to clarify war crimes of the opposing side and its own departments. Christoph Rass points out that after the experiences of the First World War , this four-person staff position made up of lawyers served as a kind of auxiliary force in the Nazi counter-propaganda when accusations were made. After his work, the military leadership in Germany learned in 1914/18 that the journalistic "exploitation" of war crimes could become a weapon of politics. In addition, due to the Leipzig trials before the Reichsgericht, high military officials and Wehrmacht lawyers had to be aware that crimes by the Wehrmacht could well become justiciable. This “investigative body” was established in the middle of September 1939 by a decree of Keitel , chief of the OKW, dated September 4th , at the OKW's legal department. Her task was then to determine the violations of international law committed by the opposing military and civilians against German Wehrmacht members and at the same time to clarify the accusations made against the German Wehrmacht in this regard from abroad . From 1939 to 1942 she published thirteen documents, seven on the attack on Poland, two each on the war against France and the Soviet Union, and one each on Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian and the fighting with the British on Crete. He estimates that around 8,000 cases were processed in this way between 1939 and 1945. In each case, it was based on investigations by the responsible court officers. About half of the WUSt archive was lost in the war, 226 volumes of files have been preserved. Only one volume of these deals with German war crimes, the investigations of which by the WUSt were inconclusive and did not result in any proceedings. Rass also refers to the later selective publication by Franz W. Seidler , a historian at the Munich Federal Armed Forces College , who worked against the Wehrmacht exhibition of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research with his "Edition" from the material of the investigating body under the title "Crimes against the Wehrmacht" ( 1998).
Prosecution
The majority of the criminal trials against members of the Wehrmacht in Germany were conducted by the Allies before the two states were founded.
Nuremberg Trials
In the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals , in which the Austrian Major General Erwin von Lahousen testified as a key witness and the most important witness for the prosecution, the judges appointed by the Allies sentenced some of those primarily responsible, including generals of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW). However, they did not classify the OKW and the General Staff - unlike the Gestapo , SD and Schutzstaffel - as criminal organizations, but rather described the leaders of the Wehrmacht as "ruthless military caste" and recommended that they be held accountable individually in future criminal proceedings. In other Nazi trials, they mainly condemned crimes that had been committed against their own soldiers.
Selected high-ranking representatives of the Wehrmacht were indicted in two subsequent Nuremberg trials. In the Generals in Southeastern Europe trial (hostage murder trial) and in the High Command of the Wehrmacht trial , senior and some senior former commanders were charged with the following:
Case VII:
- War crimes and " crimes against humanity ": mass murder
- War crimes and crimes against humanity: pillage and robbery
- War crimes and crimes against humanity: executions contrary to international law
- War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: Forced Labor and Deportation for Slave Labor
Of the 12 accused, 9 were sentenced to several years' imprisonment, one committed suicide and two were acquitted.
Case XII:
- Crimes against peace
- "War crimes and crimes against humanity"
- common plan and the conspiracy
These crimes were divided into crimes against war leaders and prisoners of war on the one hand and crimes against civilians on the other. Of the 14 defendants, 11 were sentenced to several years' imprisonment (some up to 20 years and life), one committed suicide and two were acquitted.
- Crimes against humanity
“Crimes against humanity” is an international criminal offense that was contractually stipulated in 1945 in the London Statute of the International Military Tribunal, which was created for the Nuremberg Trials of the main war criminals . The following acts were subsumed under this :
“Crimes against humanity including: murder, ethnic extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts against the civilian population; or: persecution on the basis of racial, political and religious motives; regardless of whether national law has been violated. "
The Charter was enacted by the Allies as a right overriding national legal systems. It formed the basis for the Nuremberg Trials against the most important Nazi rulers imprisoned and the twelve subsequent trials. The idea behind it was to create a binding, internationally valid catalog of norms that would also allow states, their institutions and actors to be indicted for their crimes before an international court.
The use of this legal institute (catalog of standards) was criticized by the defense as early as the Nuremberg Trials, but also by former National Socialist legal scholars, because the retrospective use of these norms for the condemnation of the crimes of the Wehrmacht would contradict the legal principle Nulla poena sine lege , which is valid in many countries , since these were formulated and specified only after the acts were committed. This argument was rejected by the judges, referring to the legal practice in applying the Hague Land Warfare Regulations . In their application, it was customary to judge not on the basis of legal texts or agreed catalogs of penalties, but on the basis of precedents . Likewise, the tu quoque arguments put forward by the defendants' defense lawyers were rejected as an attempt to delay the trial . They tried to delay the trials, pointing out the alleged need to investigate war crimes committed by the Allies.
Nevertheless, this charter played a rather subordinate role for the legal processing, since most crimes were already criminal offenses and this basic fact was not required for a successful indictment.
Federal Republic of Germany
In the Control Council Act No. 4 of 1945, the Allies determined that German judicial authorities were only allowed to prosecute those crimes committed by members of the Wehrmacht that were committed against German soldiers or civilians. The Control Council Act No. 10 of 1945 continued to limit the German judiciary's jurisdiction in the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity . However, the Allies could authorize German courts if the crimes were committed against Germans or stateless persons. The occupying powers handled this possibility differently. In the American and Soviet zones, German authorities were only empowered on a case-by-case basis; in the British and French zones, general assignments of jurisdiction were established by ordinances. It was not until 1950, five years after the war, that the Allies reduced the number of criminal offenses that the occupation authorities could pursue. With the Control Council Act No. 13 in 1950, German jurisdiction was essentially restored, including for war crimes. According to this, war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht could also be prosecuted by the German judiciary, regardless of the nationality of the victims, unless they were directed against members of the Allied military.
The Western powers withdrew from the prosecution of war crimes soon after the end of the war against the backdrop of the looming Cold War . The East-West conflict was more and more in the foreground, and since the Berlin Airlift (1948 to 1949) at the latest , the idea of seeing the West Germans as allies and no longer as defeated took hold. In many cases, this led to pardons and significant reductions in penalties for Nazi and war criminals who had already been convicted, as well as to deliberate prevention of criminal prosecution in the prosecution of seriously incriminated offenders, as they either “used” or a criminal because of their specialist knowledge or their contacts, both politically and in terms of intelligence Should be part of the construction of the Federal Republic. A prominent example of such a case is General Reinhard Gehlen , former head of the Department of Foreign Armies East (FHO) of the German General Staff , head of the Gehlen Organization and the first president of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), were included in the number of former SD members.
Numerous mass crimes went unpunished; The reasons for this were unclear responsibilities, foreign crime scenes and different places of residence and residence of the perpetrators in Germany. In 1958 the “ Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes ” was set up; public prosecutor's investigations were thus coordinated nationwide. It was not until 1965 that the central office was given responsibility for prosecuting war crimes. Since then, preliminary investigations have been initiated against members of the Reich authorities, the police and camp crews of the concentration camps on the federal territory and crimes against prisoners of war have been prosecuted.
A significant role for the slow pace of prosecution of Nazi and war crimes played the fact that the panels of the judiciary (courts) were composed in the young Federal Republic to a considerable extent from lawyers who are already on the National Socialist period of as organs The administration of justice.
Since 1960, all crimes except murder have been statute-barred. An amendment to the Criminal Code, Paragraph 50, made complicity in murder time barred in 1968 ; thus all “ desk perpetrators ” were no longer subject to criminal prosecution.
After the war, the West German judiciary focused on a number of cases. These included crimes against Soviet prisoners of war, crimes that occurred in conjunction with the Wehrmacht and the Security Police, including crimes by the Wehrmacht's Secret Field Police. For the area outside the Soviet Union, there are also hostage shootings in occupied countries and end-stage crimes.
In general, however, a large part of the investigations and proceedings have been discontinued. The vast amount of material received by the public prosecutor's offices and the Central Office resulted in very few charges. What is striking about the convictions is the low level of punishment that is generally typical of Nazi proceedings before West German courts.
German Democratic Republic
By the end of 1946, 14,098 people are said to have been convicted of war crimes or crimes against humanity in the Soviet occupation zone. It should be noted that in the Soviet Union and the Soviet zone of occupation, the persecution of Nazi and war criminals was associated with retaliatory measures as well as specific repression and terrorist measures. The Allied provisions were interpreted extensively by the Soviet security and judicial authorities, arbitrarily applied in disregard of elementary rule-of-law standards and massively abused for political goals.
Despite the GDR's self-image as an “anti-fascist state”, the prosecution of Nazi crimes was not more intense in the GDR than in the Federal Republic. To underline this, the government often cited that around 13,000 war criminals had been convicted. However, this assertion did not stand up to an examination by the central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes after reunification. Only a tiny fraction of that concerned war crimes. The majority were convicted of Nazi crimes and membership in organizations that had been declared criminal. From 1966 to 1985 there were 65 proceedings and six judgments. The procedures, which were largely influenced by state security, served increasingly propaganda purposes from the 1960s onwards and were intended to show the West's inadequate coming to terms with the past as well as the allegedly fascist basic character of the Federal Republic, the Bundeswehr and NATO .
Belgium
On March 9, 1951, the Brussels War Council pronounced the verdict on the former military commander Alexander von Falkenhausen and his military administration chief Eggert Reeder . For their contribution to hostage executions, deportation of Jews and forced labor, they were each sentenced to 12 years of forced labor. Former Lieutenant General George Bertram, also accused, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the execution of hostages.
France
The processing of desk acts in connection with the Aryanization of Jewish assets under the control of the military commander France was thwarted in the post-war period both by the Adenauer administration around Globke and by the French government, as they feared that important decision-makers in their respective economies and administrations would with the To de-legitimize their NS and Vichy past.
Greece
On December 19, 1946, Generals Bruno Bräuer , Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller and Sergeant Friedrich Schubert were sentenced to death for their crimes before a special court in Athens. General Alexander Andrae was sentenced to four life sentences in Athens on December 22, 1947. In the same year, the major of the economic staff, Walter Deter, was convicted of economic crimes. On February 19, 1948, Generals Hellmuth Felmy for the massacres of Klissura and Distomo, Wilhelm List for instigating and tolerating the killing of thousands of civilians, Wilhelm Speidel for the Kalavryta massacre and Hubert Lanz for the war crimes in Epirus in the Nuremberg hostage murder trial sentenced. In 1959, the former war administrator Max Merten was convicted by a Greek military tribunal for his involvement in the Holocaust and economic crimes. The prosecution of war crimes in Greece was discontinued due to economic pressure from Germany in the same year after the still open cases had been handed over to the Federal Republic for further "prosecution".
Soviet Union
With the decree "On measures to punish German fascist criminals guilty of killing and mistreating the Soviet civilian population and captured Red Army soldiers, as well as spies and traitors from the ranks of the Soviet population and their supporters" of April 19, 1943 ( Ukas 43), the Supreme Soviet ordered the USSR for "German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian and Finnish criminals" as well as for "spies and traitors to the fatherland among the Soviet citizens" convicted of murder and ill-treatment of the civilian population and of captured Red Army soldiers ". The execution was to be carried out by hanging; the bodies of the hanged men were to be left on the gallows for a few days as a deterrent.
The first trial against members of the Wehrmacht and the SS took place from December 15 to 18, 1943 in Kharkov . The defendants, a captain of the military defense , an SS-Untersturmführer, a member of the Secret Field Police and a local collaborator were charged with the killing of captured and wounded Red Army soldiers and civilians during the German occupation of Kharkov between December 1941 and summer 1943. The accused were sentenced to death and publicly executed.
Between December 1945 and the beginning of February 1946 there were again public trials against Wehrmacht members at eight different court locations. The negotiations took place in
- Smolensk from December 16-19, 1945 against 10 defendants,
- Bryansk from December 25-30, 1945 against 4 defendants, including Generals Friedrich Gustav Bernhard and Adolf Hamann ,
- Leningrad from December 29, 1945 to January 5, 1946 against 11 defendants, including Major General Heinrich Remlinger , former commandant of Pskow ,
- Nikolaev from January 12 to 17, 1946 against 9 defendants, including Lieutenant General Hermann Winkler , former city commander,
- Minsk from January 15 to 29, 1946 against 18 defendants, including Generals Johann-Georg Richert , Eberhard Herf and Gottfried von Erdmannsdorff ,
- Kiev from January 17 to 29, 1946 against 15 defendants, including Generals Paul Scheer , Karl Burckhardt and Eckart von Tschammer und Osten ,
- Velikie Luki from January 26 to 31, 1946 against 11 defendants, including Lieutenant General Fritz-Georg von Rappard , former site commander of the city,
- Riga from January 28 to February 3, 1946 against 8 defendants, including Generals Friedrich Jeckeln , Siegfried Ruff , Albrecht Baron Digeon von Montenton , Friedrich Werther , Bronislaw Pawel , Hans Küpper and Wolfgang von Ditfurth .
The charges, mass shootings in punitive actions and other atrocities against Russian prisoners and civilians, were almost identical in all proceedings. All 86 accused (18 generals, 28 officers and 39 non-commissioned officers and men) were convicted of the crimes of which they were charged; in 67 cases, including all the accused generals, to death by hanging, in 19 cases to forced labor between 12 and 20 years. The death sentences were carried out publicly in front of tens of thousands of spectators.
Up to April 1948 1,112 prisoners of war had been convicted of war crimes committed in the Soviet Union, from October 1947 to June 1949 3,750 judgments were made in (June 1949) 6,036 ongoing investigative proceedings.
After the USSR announced that it would release all prisoners of war, with the exception of those convicted by military tribunals, by January 1, 1950, 13,603 prisoners of war were convicted of war crimes in November and December 1949. January 1950 not completed. 1,656 were sentenced in January 1950. Nearly 86% of the sentences were for 25 years in a camp, the maximum sentence permitted after the death penalty was abolished in the USSR in May 1947.
reception
Change in the West German view of history
In the post-war period, memoirs and court statements by German generals and officers determined the West German historical image of the “decent German soldier” and the “ clean Wehrmacht ”, whose members, with exceptions, fought fairly according to international martial law. In it, crimes of the Wehrmacht were hardly mentioned, disputed or presented as individual acts.
One of the few exceptions are the statements of Major General Erwin von Lahousen , who presented himself as a key witness for the prosecution in the context of the trial of the main war criminals in Nuremberg .
On the other hand, more space is given to tactical questions about how the war could have been won without Hitler's interference. In magazine novels, the German soldier was usually confronted with the partisan as conscientious, committed, tough but fair in combat, comradely, friendly, educated and handsome. He is often portrayed as a treacherous and traitorous communist, criminal, pimp or drug dealer with a physiognomy that corresponded to National Socialist racial ideas. German war crimes occurred very rarely and were then blamed on the SS.
Since the Nuremberg Trials, the Wehrmacht as a whole has been viewed in public as "acquitted"; Troop crimes were primarily viewed as acts of individual perpetrators. The close institutional connection of the top Wehrmacht with the National Socialist party and state apparatus and thus their overall responsibility for their war of annihilation were largely ignored, as was the cooperation of soldiers of all ranks with the criminal organizations SD, SS and Gestapo. After the first debates on collective guilt in the post-war period, amnesty laws were passed up to around 1955 that cemented this attitude for more than a decade. Hannes Heer sums up the attitude at the time as follows:
“Meaningful interpretations of one's own experience were relegated to areas of functional pride about effectiveness, competence and combat strength or to private areas of experienced and confirmed comradeship in a community of fate and survival - areas that were compatible with reconstruction and economic miracles. Political or anti-political sense could not be generated from this, the interpretation scheme rather suited an apolitical, privatist habitus. "
The first scientific work on the crimes of the Wehrmacht was the dissertation published in 1978 by Christian Streit Keine Komaden . Her focus was the treatment of prisoners of war Soviet soldiers and the closely related issues of the Commissar Order and forced labor. For years, Streit's dissertation was hardly received.
With recourse to new sources that are now accessible, including files of the Wehrmacht, trial documents, testimonies, field post , diaries, a younger generation of historians refuted the legend of the “clean”, apolitical, mislead and clean Wehrmacht misused by the Nazi regime . For example, the execution of the commissioner's order, which had been disputed up to that point, and the participation of entire units in mass murders were proven. As a result, this generation of military historians assumed “a problematic involvement of the Wehrmacht in the Nazi crimes during the war”: It was “ultimately an 'accomplice of evil' and a 'steel guarantor' and not an allegedly apolitical area of the Nazi state to watch".
GDR reception
The perception and interpretation of the Wehrmacht in the GDR was mainly shaped by the Marxist-Leninist view of history (see imperialism theory and Marxist fascism theory ). From this point of view, the Wehrmacht was “... the most important instrument of the German monopoly bourgeoisie to secure rule over its own people, especially to hold down the labor movement, and to implement the world power plans of the big bourgeoisie, especially the reactionary class goals against the Soviet Union.” This perspective required a strict class antagonism within the Wehrmacht in the form of exploiting and oppressive generals and higher officer corps as tools of capitalism and exploited, oppressed ordinary soldiers and non-commissioned officers.
In the worldview of the SED propaganda, the GDR became the "state of victims" and "state of anti-fascism". Several personally persecuted communists in state and party leadership were considered evidence of this doctrine. The historical responsibility for Nazi crimes was delegated to the West and loyal citizens of the GDR were offered a general absolution.
Media presentation
The crimes of the Wehrmacht had also been a topic in the media in the Federal Republic before 1989, around 1978 by the American-Soviet television documentary The Unforgotten War . During the historians' dispute in 1986/87, however, they only played a subordinate role. Research literature from 1991 such as Reinhard Rürup's book The War against the Soviet Union 1941–1945 appeared after reunification . A documentation or the volume Erobern und Vernichten edited by Peter Jahn and Reinhard Rürup . The war against the Soviet Union in 1941–1945 was hardly noticed by experts.
First the two Wehrmacht exhibitions “War of Extermination. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 ”(first version: 1995 to 1999; second version: 2001 to 2004) made the historical image of the Wehrmacht, which has meanwhile been corrected by historical scholars, better known among the population. With many pictures and written documents, they spread the knowledge that entire units of the troops had participated in mass shootings of civilians and Jews and in acts of retaliation. This meant that war crimes could no longer be traced back to criminal orders, accused of individual perpetrators and viewed separately from the genocide policy of the Nazi regime.
The exhibition provoked protests in parts of the German public, especially among former members of the Wehrmacht, including well-known personalities such as former Wehrmacht officers Helmut Schmidt and Richard von Weizsäcker , but it also met with approval and well-founded criticism. Some historians have pointed to some mismatched photographs that mistakenly show crimes committed by the Red Army or other military allied with Germany.
The exhibits were then scientifically checked and the exhibition revised accordingly.
The second exhibition emphasized the fact that it was possible to ignore criminal orders in the Wehrmacht. According to the exhibition, officers who did not want or could not take part in mass murders would have been transferred and otherwise remained unmolested.
In right-wing extremism , both versions of the exhibition are presented and fought as a propaganda show to slander honest German soldiers; the marginal errors of the first version are used to discredit the entire basic thesis.
Reception in the Bundeswehr
The first traditional decree of the Bundeswehr from 1965 praised the resistance fighters of July 20, 1944 with the words "In the end only responsible to the conscience, soldiers have proven themselves to the last consequence in the resistance to injustice and crimes of the National Socialist tyranny", but avoided clarifying statements the assessment of the Wehrmacht as an overall institution or its crimes.
With the traditional decree of September 20, 1982 , the Bundeswehr separated itself more from the traditions of the Wehrmacht and claims the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 as a model for the "citizen in uniform". In the 1982 decree, the priorities are set somewhat differently than in 1965, and “guilt” is spoken of self-critically for the first time: “Under National Socialism, armed forces were partly culpably involved, partly they were misused through no fault of their own. An injustice regime like the Third Reich cannot establish tradition. "
The handling of the Wehrmacht exhibition was inconsistent in the Bundeswehr. Various site commanders visited the exhibition with their soldiers or recommended a visit, and the former Inspector General of the Bundeswehr Ulrich de Maizière was present at a panel discussion. In contrast, Defense Minister Volker Rühe and his successor Rudolf Scharping forbade soldiers to speak at events as part of the Wehrmacht exhibition and for employees of the military history research office to discuss the exhibition.
Root cause research
Various controversial and sometimes contradicting theses have been developed by science, which try to explain why members of the Wehrmacht committed war crimes or how their inhibition threshold for committing or avoiding these acts was designed. Many of these explanatory models remain rather speculative, as they are difficult to statistically verify or falsify due to the lack of source material.
“So far, certain explanatory models have been found for the factors that were decisive for the attitude and behavior of those soldiers who did not belong to the higher military leadership but were nevertheless responsible for the implementation of the occupation policy, but all of them can be described as problematic. "
Demodernization of the war
According to the historian Omer Bartov , various factors favored the war crimes committed by Wehrmacht soldiers: for example, the so-called “demodernization”, that is, an increasing failure of modern weapons, a drastic deterioration in living conditions and a growing intellectual distance from modern life of the combat units and the resulting brutality, in particular the Eastern Front from 1941. This led to physical and psychological exhaustion and mental dulling among the soldiers. Defeatist - nihilistic , social Darwinist models of justification as well as the contempt for traditional authorities and values would have spread in the isolated combat units, which are less and less like a modern army . He quotes a former combatant:
“Man becomes an animal. He has to destroy in order to survive [...] The fight here again takes on its most primeval, animal-like form [...] "
One wages “a struggle for survival, in which everything is allowed that can prevent the annihilation of the individual soldier and, moreover, his comrades, his unit, his race and his country.” These attitudes may also make people more susceptible to ideological indoctrination. The soldiers were increasingly allowed to “take out” anger and frustrations on enemy soldiers and civilians in the context of normal combat operations. This “demodernization” at the front also contributed significantly to the brutalization of the troops after Hannes Heer .
Function of primary groups
"Primary groups", that is, units organized on a national and regional level, which could also offer a kind of family cohesion, could have promoted perseverance, brutality and inclination to crime and susceptibility to ideologization in the East. In which direction and to what extent, however, is controversial. While some in these primary groups see the reason for the particular willingness to perform and sometimes also the crimes of the Wehrmacht members, others see the loss of traditional ties as a gateway for National Socialist indoctrination and increased war crimes. Contrary to the view that social order made ideology superfluous, it is argued that there was bitter fighting on the relatively hopeless eastern front, devoid of "social order" in contrast to the western front. To the extent that functioning social bonds are broken, ideological motivation has become increasingly important.
ideology
The crimes of the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe were largely based, like other Nazi crimes, on a racism that did not recognize the population of the enemy states as equal legal subjects and thus invalidated the basis of applicable international law. In doing so, the Nazi and Wehrmacht leadership strove to destroy the state structures, national unity and political leaders of the conquered areas as well as their demographic transformation.
The role of ideology within the Wehrmacht as a cause of crime is assessed differently. While authors such as Omer Bartov and Hannes Heer assess the function of the National Socialist ideology as an essential contributory cause for the crimes of the Wehrmacht and state that the convictions of the Wehrmacht leadership and the regime correspond, Klaus Jochen Arnold writes :
“With regard to the Wehrmacht, not Hitler, Himmler etc., it was not a long-planned mass extermination of Jews or Slavs for ideological reasons, but above all war, and this war, which was fought with bitterness on both sides, created a war Climate in which mass murder could become the everyday business of "normal men". "
Christian Gerlach sees the occupation policy in the east as a radical economic, inconsiderate sense of expediency, in which ideology played a rather subordinate role.
The decisive influence of the army command and the upper echelons through the National Socialist propaganda can be ascertained relatively clearly. Mark Mazover writes:
"More recent studies have shown not only how deeply political indoctrination had penetrated the officer corps and was even institutionalized there, but also how the Nazi ideology was reflected in the orders and activities of the military commanders."
In contrast, the effectiveness of this factor for the middle and especially the lower ranks is rather questionable or not clearly answerable. Rolf-Dieter Müller writes about the research on the "Everyday history of the soldier":
“What role did ideology and propaganda play in this? Systematic studies on this are almost completely lacking. Apart from individual findings, which mostly only relate to the Eastern Front, we know relatively little about motivation and mentalities within the Wehrmacht. [...] How can the effects of oppression and discipline in an army of blind obedience be distinguished from the effects of ideologization and propaganda? "
While Manfred Messerschmidt , despite its substantial representation of Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht doubts that "this really an influence on the soldiers" had, and Hans Mommsen believes that "the mentality of the average Landsers more of sobriety and rejection of unrealistic propaganda tirades" marked Hannes Heer combines leadership and troops, at least in the area of the persecution of the Jews, by writing:
“The Wehrmacht's participation in the Holocaust took place at all levels of military command [...] down to the troop leaders. [...] The mentality of the Wehrmacht leadership corresponded to the consciousness of the troops. "
literature
- to the armed forces
- Rudolf Absolon: The Wehrmacht in the Third Reich. Structure, structure, law, administration. Oldenbourg Verlag, 6 volumes, relevant here:
- Volume IV: February 5, 1938 to August 31, 1939. 2nd edition, 1998, ISBN 3-486-41739-8 .
- Volume V: September 1, 1939 to December 18, 1941. 1st edition, 1988, ISBN 3-7646-1882-5 .
- Volume VI: December 19, 1941 to May 9, 1945. 1995, ISBN 3-7646-1940-6 .
- Jürgen Förster : The Wehrmacht in the Nazi state. A structural-historical analysis. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58098-3 .
- Walter Manoschek : The Wehrmacht in the race war. The war of annihilation behind the front. Picus Verlag, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-85452-295-9 .
- Manfred Messerschmidt : The Wehrmacht in the Nazi state. Time of indoctrination. R. von Decker, Hamburg 1969, ISBN 3-7685-2268-7 .
- Rolf-Dieter Müller , Hans-Erich Volkmann (Ed. On behalf of the Military History Research Office ): The Wehrmacht. Myth and Reality. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 .
- Wolfram Wette : The Wehrmacht - Enemy Images War of Extermination Legends. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-7632-5267-3 .
- to Wehrmacht crimes
- Birgit Beck : Wehrmacht and sexual violence. Sex crimes before German military courts 1939–1945. Schöningh, Paderborn 2004, ISBN 3-506-71726-X . ( Review ; PDF; 53 kB)
- Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen: Victims, Heroes, Survivors. Sexual Violence On The Eastern Front During World War II . University of Minnesota, May 2004 ( victimsheroessurvivors.info [PDF; 13.0 MB ] dissertation).
- Michael Epkenhans / John Zimmermann : The Wehrmacht - War and Crime . Reclam, Ditzingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-15-011238-0 .
- Karl Glaubauf , Stefanie Lahousen: Major General Erwin Lahousen - Edler von Vivremont. A Linz defense officer in the military resistance. LIT-Verlag, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-7259-9 .
- Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Ed.): Crimes of the Wehrmacht. Dimensions of the War of Extermination 1941–1944. 2nd, expanded edition 2002. Hamburger Edition , ISBN 3-930908-74-3 .
- Christian Hartmann , Johannes Hürter , Ulrike Jureit (ed.): Crimes of the Wehrmacht. Balance of a debate. Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52802-3 . (online at: books.google.de )
- Christian Hartmann : Company Barbarossa. The German War in the East 1941–1945. Chapter 5 Crimes (pp. 469–788) 1st edition, Oldenbourg 2009.
- Walther Hubatsch (ed.): Hitler's instructions for warfare 1939–1945. Documents of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. 2nd edition, Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Koblenz 1983, ISBN 3-7637-5247-1 .
- Walter Manoschek: Annihilation War - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944. In: Dirk Rupnow (Hrsg.): Wehrmachtsausstellung-en in discourse. Studien-Verlag, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-7065-1734-5 .
- Sönke Neitzel : bugged - German generals in British captivity 1942–1945. Propylaeen-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-549-07261-9 .
- Dieter Pohl : Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933–1945. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-534-15158-5 .
- Karl Heinrich Pohl (ed.): Wehrmacht and extermination policy. Military in the National Socialist system. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-525-01382-5 .
- Heribert Prantl (Ed.): Wehrmacht Crimes. A German controversy. Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-455-10365-0 .
- Andreas Toppe: Military and international law. Legal norms, specialist discourse and war practice in Germany 1899–1940. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58206-2 .
- Oliver von Wrochem (Ed.): Reprisals and Terror. "Retaliation Actions" in German-Occupied Europe 1939-1945, Paderborn 2017, ISBN 978-3-506-78721-7 .
-
Gerd R. Ueberschär :
- Places of horror. Crimes in World War II. Primus Verlag, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-89678-232-0 .
- Nazi crimes and the military resistance against Hitler. Primus Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-89678-169-3 .
- Poland
- Jochen Böhler : Prelude to the war of extermination. The Wehrmacht in Poland in 1939. fiTb, Frankfurt a. M. 2006, ISBN 3-596-16307-2 .
- Daniel Brewing: In the shadow of Auschwitz: German massacres of Polish civilians 1939–1945, Darmstadt 2016, ISBN 978-3-534-26788-0 .
- Baltic states
- Rüdiger Ritter: Division of Labor Mass Murder: War crimes in Lithuania during the Second World War. In: Timm C. Richter (Ed.): War and crime. Situation and intention: case studies. Villa ten Hompel Aktuell 9, ISBN 3-89975-080-2 .
- Soviet Union
- Wassili Grossman, Ilja Ehrenburg, Arno Lustiger: The Black Book. The genocide of the Soviet Jews. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994, ISBN 3-498-01655-5 .
- Hannes Heer : Women who serve in the Red Army are always to be shot. Confessions of German prisoners of war about their use on the Eastern Front Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-930908-06-9 .
- Johannes Hürter: Hitler's military leader. The German commanders-in-chief in the war against the Soviet Union in 1941/42. 2nd edition, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58341-0 .
- Hans-Adolf Jacobsen : Commissar order and mass executions of Soviet prisoners of war. In: Martin Broszat, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Helmut Krausnick: Anatomy of the SS State. Volume 2, ISBN 3-423-02916-1 .
- Rolf Keller: Soviet prisoners of war in the German Reich 1941/42. Treatment and employment between the policy of extermination and the requirements of the war economy. Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0989-0 . Reviews: H-Soz-u-Kult February 9, 2012, www.kulturthemen.de February 9, 2012
- Rolf-Dieter Müller : The Last German War 1939-1945. 2005, ISBN 3-608-94133-9 .
- Dieter Pohl : The rule of the armed forces. German military occupation and local population in the Soviet Union 1941–1944. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58065-5 .
- Alfred Streim : Soviet prisoners in Hitler's war of extermination. Reports and documents 1941–1945. Müller Juristischer Verlag, Heidelberg 1982, ISBN 3-8114-2482-3 .
- Alfred Streim: The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war in the "Barbarossa case". Müller Juristischer Verlag, Heidelberg 1981, ISBN 3-8114-2281-2 .
- Christian Streit: The treatment of the Soviet prisoners of war and international law problems of the war against the Soviet Union. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Wolfram Wette : "Operation Barbarossa". The German attack on the Soviet Union. Revised new edition. Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-596-24437-4 .
- Christian Streit: No comrades. The Wehrmacht and the Soviet prisoners of war 1941–1945. New edition. Dietz, Bonn 1997, ISBN 3-8012-5023-7 .
- Southeast Europe
- Hagen Fleischer , Loukia Droulia (Ed.): From Lidice to Kalvryta. Resistance and Terror of Occupation. Series: Nazi Occupation Policy in Europe 1939–1945. Volume 8, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-932482-10-7 .
- Hagen Fleischer: In the cross shadow of the powers. Greece 1941–1944 (occupation - resistance - collaboration). Series: Studies on the History of Southeast Europe . Frankfurt a. M. / Bern / New York 1986, ISBN 3-8204-8581-3 .
- Marlen von Xylander: The German occupation in Crete 1941-1945. Individual publications on military history, Vol. 32, Freiburg 1989, ISBN 3-7930-0192-X .
- Hermann Frank Meyer : Bloody edelweiss. The 1st Mountain Division in World War II. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86153-447-1 . (online at: books.google.com )
- Hermann Frank Meyer: Kommeno: narrative reconstruction of a Wehrmacht crime in Greece. Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-929889-34-X .
- David Leuenburger: “Land of idleness”: Germany's debt (s) to Greece - Germany is presenting itself as an impeccable debt brake in the current EU debt crisis. Its historical debts to Greece can hardly be recorded with money. Jena Jan. 2012, 58th issue (PDF; 8.0 MB) of Unique magazine , 11th year, p. 12 f., ISSN 1612-2267 .
- Hermann Frank Meyer : From Vienna to Kalavryta. The bloody trail of the 117th Jäger Division through Serbia and Greece. Mannheim / Möhnesee 2002, ISBN 3-933925-22-3 .
- Walter Manoschek: “Serbia is free of Jews”: military occupation policy and the extermination of Jews in Serbia in 1941/42. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-486-56137-5 .
- Italy
- Friedrich Andrae: Also against women and children: the war of the German armed forces against the civilian population in Italy 1943–1945 . Piper, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-03698-8 .
- Carlo Gentile : Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945. Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . (Cologne, Univ., Diss., 2008.)
- Christiane Kohl : The sky was bright blue. About the raging of the Wehrmacht in Italy. Reportage tape. Picus, Vienna 2004, ISBN 978-3-85452-484-7 .
- Gerhard Schreiber : German war crimes in Italy. Perpetrator - victim - law enforcement. CH Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-39268-7 .
- Gerhard Schreiber: The Italian military internees in the German sphere of influence, 1943–1945. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-486-55391-7 .
- Western Europe
- Bernhard Brunner: The France Complex. The National Socialist Crimes in France and the Justice of the Federal Republic of Germany. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-693-8 .
- Peter Lieb : Conventional war or Nazi ideological war? Warfare and the fight against partisans in France 1943/44. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-57992-5 .
- holocaust
- Walter Manoschek: "Where the partisan is, there is the Jew, and where the Jew is, the partisan is". The Wehrmacht and the Shoah. In: Gerhard Paul (ed.): The perpetrators of the Shoah. Fanatic National Socialists or just normal Germans? Dachau Symposia on Contemporary History Volume 2, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-89244-503-6 .
- Walter Manoschek: Serbia is free of Jews. Military occupation policy and the extermination of Jews in Serbia 1941/42. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-486-55974-5 .
- Forced labor
- Almuth Püschel: Forced labor in Potsdam: foreign workers and prisoners of war. Märkischer Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-931329-37-2 .
- Rape and forced prostitution
- Birgit Beck : Wehrmacht and sexual violence. Sex crimes before German military courts 1939–1945. Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 2004, ISBN 3-506-71726-X .
- Insa Meinen: Wehrmacht and prostitution during the Second World War in occupied France. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2002, ISBN 3-86108-789-8 .
- Regina Mühlhäuser : Conquests - Sexual acts of violence and intimate relationships of German soldiers in the Soviet Union 1941–1945. Hamburger Edition 2010, ISBN 978-3-86854-220-2 .
- David R. Snyder: Sex Crimes under the Wehrmacht. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2007, ISBN 978-0-8032-4332-3 .
- Historical reception and processing
- Detlev Bald, Johannes Klotz, Wolfram Wette: The Wehrmacht Myth. Post-war debates and maintaining tradition. Construction Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-7466-8072-7 .
- Christian Gerlach, Johannes Klotz, Reinhard Kühnl: Wehrmacht as a model? Wehrmacht crimes, right-wing extremism and the Bundeswehr. Papyrossa, Cologne 2002, ISBN 3-89438-162-0 .
- Wilfried Loth , Bernd-A. Rusinek : Transformation policy: Nazi elites in West German post-war society. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1998, ISBN 3-593-35994-4 .
- Walter Manoschek, Alexander Pollak, Ruth Wodak, Hannes Heer (eds.): How history is made. For the construction of memories of the Wehrmacht and World War II. Czernin Verlag, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-7076-0161-7 .
- Alexander Pollak: The Wehrmacht legend in Austria. The image of the Wehrmacht in the mirror of the Austrian press after 1945. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-205-77021-8 .
Web links
- Crimes of the Wehrmacht Website of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research
- Manfred Messerschmidt: Greatest severity ... Wehrmacht crimes in Poland September / October 1939. (PDF; 2.11 MB)
- Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars (Commissar Order), June 6, 1941 , in: 1000dokumente.de . With an introduction by Felix Römer
- Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals. Selected and prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission 1947–1949.
- The fairy tale of the chaste Germans. on: Spiegel Online one day.
- Tobias Winstel: Guide to the past . A 24-year-old student has guided through the Wehrmacht exhibition and reports on his experiences, Munich 1997, accessed on August 24, 2010.
- Christian Hartmann : Criminal War - Criminal Wehrmacht? Thoughts on the structure of the German Eastern Army 1941–1944 Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 2004, pp. 1–75
Individual evidence
- ^ Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933-1945. Darmstadt 2003, p. 28.
- ↑ Wehrmacht. In: Brockhaus. 2006.
- ↑ Norbert Graml in: Hermann Graml: The Wehrmacht in the Third Reich. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 1997, issue 3, p. 369 ( PDF ).
- ↑ Wilhelm Deist writes: "Because in the military sector in particular, the 'partial identity of the objectives' with the National Socialist regime resulted in a complex agreement on essential questions of foreign and domestic policy." after: Wilhelm Deist: Military, State and Society - Studies on Prussian-German military history. Oldenbourg, 1991, p. 406.
- ↑ Wehrmacht. In: Brockhaus Encyclopedia. Volume 29, 21st edition 2006, p. 554 f.
- ^ Manfred Messerschmidt: Forward defense - The memorandum of the generals for the Nuremberg court. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Hrsg.): Destruction War - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, p. 543.
- ^ Alfred Streim: Clean Wehrmacht? - The prosecution of war and Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic and the GDR. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (eds.): War of extermination - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, p. 570.
- ↑ Dieter Pohl : Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933–1945 , Darmstadt 2003, foreword.
- ↑ a b Manfred Messerschmidt: Forward Defense - The memorandum of the generals for the Nuremberg court. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Hrsg.): Destruction War - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, p. 540.
- ↑ a b P. M. Baldwin: Clausewitz in Nazi Germany. Journal of Contemporary History 16 (1) (1981): 5-26, p. 11 f.
- ↑ Quoted from Manfred Messerschmidt: Wehrmacht in the Nazi state - time of indoctrination. Hamburg 1969, p. 82.
- ↑ Document No. 107 ; quoted from Manfred Messerschmidt and Ursula von Gersdorff : Officers in the picture from documents from three centuries. Stuttgart, 1964, p. 274.
- ^ Hannes Heer: The logic of the war of extermination - Wehrmacht and partisan struggle. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (eds.): War of Extermination - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944, Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, p. 113; Manfred Messerschmidt: Forward Defense - The Generals' Memorandum for the Nuremberg Court of Justice. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Ed.): War of extermination - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, p. 543.
- ↑ a b Quoted from: Michael Busch, Karl-Volker Neugebauer : Basic Course in German Military History - The Age of World Wars - Peoples in Arms , MGFA, Oldenbourg, 2006, p. 345.
- ↑ Hannes Heer: Killing Fields - The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (eds.): War of Destruction - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, p. 57 ff.
- ^ Omer Bartov: Hitler's Wehrmacht - Soldiers, Fanaticism and the Brutalization of War. Rowohlt, 1995, pp. 191 and 192.
- ^ One day at Spiegel Online or Felix Römer: The Commissar Order - Wehrmacht and Nazi Crimes on the Eastern Front 1941/42, F. Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 2008.
- ^ Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933-1945. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-534-15158-5 , pp. 39 and 43.
- ↑ Lothar Gruchmann: Nacht- und Nebel-Justiz , Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1981, issue 3 ( PDF ).
- ↑ Command order of October 18, 1942 , documentArchiv.de, accessed on June 21, 2015.
- ↑ Lothar Gruchmann: Kugelerlass , lexikon-drittes-reich.de, accessed on June 21, 2015.
- ↑ so Rolf-Dieter Müller , quoted from Christian Hartmann (ed.): War and crime - on the structure of the German Eastern Army. In: Communications from the Joint Commission for Research into the Recent History of German-Russian Relations 2 , Oldenbourg, 2005, p. 18.
- ↑ J. Käppner ( Süddeutsche ) on the documentary: Die Wehrmacht - a balance sheet: "Even if only five percent of the soldiers - and that would be a low estimate - were actively involved in the Holocaust and other crimes, that would be one over the war years That means a figure of 500,000 people. Half a million people in uniform who massacre hostages, willingly assist the SS murder squads or do the dirty work themselves. " (Note: the 5% relates to the fighting force; the Wehrmacht had around 20 million members in total , i.e. including all employees, etc.)
- ↑ Hannes Heer , based on Christian Hartmann: How criminal was the Wehrmacht? In: Christian Hartmann (ed.): War and crime - On the structure of the German Eastern Army. In: Communications of the Joint Commission for Research into the Recent History of German-Russian Relations 2 , Oldenbourg, 2005., pp. 70 ff.
- ↑ Münchner Merkur , No. 70, 24./25. March 2018, page 4 (background): The burden of tradition.
- ↑ Christian Streit: The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war…. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär / Wolfram Wette: "Operation Barbarossa" ... , revised. New edition Frankfurt a. M. 1991, ISBN 3-596-24437-4 , p. 165.
- ^ Alfred Streim: Soviet prisoners in Hitler's war of extermination. Heidelberg 1982, ISBN 3-8114-2482-3 , p. 176.
- ^ Christian Streit: No comrades. The Wehrmacht and the Soviet prisoners of war 1941–1945. New edition Bonn 1991, ISBN 3-8012-5016-4 , p. 105.
- ^ Lutz Klinkhammer: The partisan war of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944. In: RD Müller, HE Volkmann, (Ed. On behalf of MGFA): The Wehrmacht: Myth and Reality. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 819.
- ^ Christian Streit: No Comrades - The Wehrmacht and the Soviet Prisoners of War 1941–1945. 1991, p. 244.
- ^ Pavel Polian: Deported home - Soviet prisoners of war in the "Third Reich" and their repatriation. Oldenbourg, 2000, p. 44.
- ↑ Christian Streit: The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war…. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär / Wolfram Wette: "Operation Barbarossa" ... , revised. New edition Frankfurt a. M. 1991, ISBN 3-596-24437-4 , p. 169.
- ↑ Christian Streit: No Comrades - The Wehrmacht and the Soviet Prisoners of War 1941–1945 , p. 244. pp. 187–190.
- ↑ See on the transfer of autonomous activities in the rear army area to the SS Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Rassenpolitik und Kriegführung - Security Police and Wehrmacht in Poland and the Soviet Union , Passau 1991, p. 139.
- ↑ Manfred Messerschmidt : "Greatest hardship ...". Crimes of the Wehrmacht in Poland September / October 1939. Lecture at the opening of the exhibition of the same name on September 2, 2005 in the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn . Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn 2005, p. 13. PDF
- ↑ Hans-Erich Volkmann: On the responsibility of the Wehrmacht . In: The Wehrmacht. Myth and Reality , Eds. Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , pp. 1202 f.
- ^ Jochen Böhler: Prelude to the War of Extermination - The Wehrmacht in Poland 1939. Frankfurt a. M. 2006, p. 241.
- ↑ Timm C. Richter (ed.): War and crime - situation and intention - case studies. Martin Meidenbauer, 2006, p. 168.
- ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: Article Wehrmacht. In: Encyclopedia of National Socialism , 1998, p. 102.
- ↑ Manfred Messerschmidt : "Greatest hardship ...". Crimes of the Wehrmacht in Poland September / October 1939. Lecture at the opening of the exhibition of the same name on September 2, 2005 in the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn . Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Bonn 2005, p. 17 f.
- ↑ Martin Moll: "Leader Decrees" 1939–1945. Steiner Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-515-06873-2 , p. 100
- ^ Jochen Böhler: Prelude to the war of extermination. The Wehrmacht in Poland in 1939. Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-596-16307-6 , p. 153.
- ↑ On April 14, 1939 adopted standard laws; "Disposal of German jurisdiction in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia"; "Disposal of the criminal courts"; "How the courts act in matters of civil law".
- ^ Notes in Halder's diary from Hitler's speech in the Reich Chancellery on March 30, 1941; quoted from: Max Domarus: Hitler - Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945 , Würzburg 1962, Volume 2, p. 1682.
- ↑ Colonel General von Küchler; quoted from: Handwritten notes of the Commander-in-Chief of the 18th Army. Colonel General von Küchler, documented in: Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm : Rassenpolitik und Kriegführung - Security Police and Wehrmacht in Poland and the Soviet Union , Passau 1991, pp. 133–139.
- ↑ Quoted after the order of ObdH Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch, about the cooperation with the Security Police and the SD for the planned Eastern War of April 28, 1941; documented in: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Wolfram Wette: The German attack on the Soviet Union - "Operation Barbarossa" 1941, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 249 f.
- ↑ Quoted from: Christian Streit: No Comrades - The Wehrmacht and the Soviet Prisoners of War 1941–1945 , 1991, p. 63.
- ↑ Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murders in the Nazi era 1933–1945. Darmstadt 2003, p. 56 f.
- ↑ Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murders in the Nazi era 1933–1945. Darmstadt 2003, p. 57.
- ^ Günther Deschner: Mercilessly Erledigen: The Partisan War in the East. In: The Second World War, Volume 4, The total war , Manfred Pawlak Verlagsgesellschaft, 1989, pp. 175–178.
- ^ Joachim von Meien: The partisan war of the Wehrmacht during the Russian campaign in World War II. 2007, p. 46 ff.
- ↑ Truman Anderson: The 62nd Infantry Division - Reprisals in the Army Area South, October to December 1941. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Ed.): Destruction War - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, P. 309.
- ↑ a b Günther Deschner: Mercilessly Done - The Partisan War in the East. In: The Second World War, Volume 4, The total war , Pawlak-Verlag, 1989, pp. 179 and 181.
- ↑ Peter Lieb: Conventional war or Nazi ideological war? - Warfare and fighting partisans in France 1943/44. Oldenbourg, 2007, pp. 253 and 254
- ^ Götz Aly , Ulrich Herbert : National Socialist Extermination Policies - Contemporary German Perspectives an Controversies. Berghahn Books, 2000, p. 174.
- ^ Friedrich Berber, Textbook of Völkerrechts , Vol. II, 1969, pp. 236 f .; Jörn Axel Kämmerer, war repression or war crimes? , in: Archiv des Völkerrechts (AVR) 1999, pp. 283 and 296 ff.
- ^ Hannes Heer: The logic of the war of extermination - Wehrmacht and partisan struggle. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (eds.): War of Destruction - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, pp. 104-131.
- ^ Lutz Klinkhammer: The partisan war of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944. In: RD Müller, HE Volkmann, (Ed. On behalf of MGFA): The Wehrmacht: Myth and Reality. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 836.
- ↑ BA-MA: RH 20-12 / 218; quoted from www.hfmeyer.com
- ↑ OKW / WFSt / Op. No. 1216/42, combat instructions for fighting gangs in the east of November 11, 1942, signed IA Jodl
- ^ From Bormann's minutes of a meeting between Hitler and leading Nazi figures on July 16, 1941 at the Fuehrer's headquarters; quoted from: "Domination, administration, exploitation" - minutes of a leadership meeting. In: The Second World War, Volume 3, Tief im Feindesland , Pawlak-Verlag, 1989, p. 372.
- ↑ Printed as document no. 24 with attachments by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen : "Kommissarbefehl ...", in: Anatomie des SS – Staates, Vol. II, pp. 200–204 / This was followed on July 27 by an employment order no. 9, which included the realm.
- ↑ a b c d e Raul Hilberg : The Destruction of the European Jews , Vol. 2, Fischer Taschenbuch, 1982, ISBN 3-596-24417-X .
- ↑ Veit Veltzke: Art and Propaganda in the Wehrmacht - paintings and drawings from the Russian war. Kerber, 2005, p. 38.
- ^ Klaus Jochen Arnold : The Wehrmacht and Occupation Policy in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union - Warfare and Radicalization in "Operation Barbarossa". Duncker & Humblot, 2005, pp. 408-412, citation p. 408; Rüdiger Overmans : The prisoner-of-war policy of the German Reich 1939 to 1945. In: The German War Society 1939–1945 . Volume 9, second half volume: exploitation, interpretations, exclusion . Published by Jörg Echternkamp on behalf of the Military History Research Office . DVA, Munich 2005 (= The German Reich and the Second World War, Vol. 9 / 1–2), pp. 729–875, here pp. 799–825.
- ^ Rüdiger Overmans: The Prisoner of War Policy of the German Reich 1939 to 1945 , p. 804.
- ^ Rüdiger Overmans: The Prisoner of War Policy of the German Reich 1939 to 1945 , p. 804 f.
- ^ Raymond Cartier: The Second World War, Volume 1. Lingen Verlag, Cologne 1987.
- ↑ Christian Streit: The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war ... In: Gerd R. Ueberschär / Wolfram Wette: "Operation Barbarossa" ... , revised. New edition, Frankfurt a. M. 1991, ISBN 3-596-24437-4 , p. 168.
- ↑ Quoted from Christian Streit: No comrades - The Wehrmacht and the Soviet prisoners of war 1941–1945 , 1991, p. 157.
- ^ Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933-1945. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-534-15158-5 , p. 40 ff.
- ^ Dieter Pohl: Holocaust. Herder, Freiburg 2000, p. 57.
- ↑ a b c Dieter Pohl: The rule of the Wehrmacht. German military occupation and local population in the Soviet Union 1941–1944 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, p. 274.
- ↑ Ulrike Winkler u. Gerrit Hohendorf: "Now Mogiljow is free from crazy people". The murder of psychiatric patients in Mogilew in 1941/42. In: Babette Quinkert, Philipp Rauh a. Ulrike Winkler: War and Psychiatry 1914–1950. Wallstein, Göttingen 2010 (= BGNS 26), p. 79.
- ↑ Uwe Kaminsky: "Gnadentod" and Economism. On ethical patterns of justification, Nazi “euthanasia”. In: Wolfgang Bialas u. Lothar Fritze (ed.): Ideology and morality in National Socialism . V & R, Göttingen 2013, p. 258.
- ↑ Götz Aly: The burdened. ›Euthanasia‹ 1939–1945 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2013, p. 103.
- ↑ Johannes Hürter: The Wehrmacht before Leningrad . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 2001, issue 3, p. 435 ff. ( PDF ).
- ↑ a b Dieter Pohl: The rule of the Wehrmacht. German military occupation and local population in the Soviet Union 1941–1944 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, p. 275.
- ↑ Ulrike Winkler u. Gerrit Hohendorf: "Now Mogiljow is free from crazy people". The murder of psychiatric patients in Mogilew in 1941/42. In: Babette Quinkert, Philipp Rauh a. Ulrike Winkler: War and Psychiatry 1914–1950. Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, p. 80.
- ↑ Dieter Pohl: The rule of the Wehrmacht. German military occupation and local population in the Soviet Union 1941–1944 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, p. 276.
- ^ Hermann Frank Meyer: Bloody Edelweiss: the 1st Mountain Division in World War II , Ch. Links 2008, ISBN 978-3-86153-447-1 , p. 159 ff.
- ^ Hagen Fleischer : Everyday Occupation on Crete 1943–1944 - A Documentation. In: Dietrich Eichholtz: History of the German War Economy 1939-1945. Volume 3, 1943-1945, Munich 1999, p. 361.
- ↑ Marlen von Xylander: The German occupation on Crete 1941-1945. Individual publications on military history, vol. 32, Freiburg 1989, ISBN 3-7930-0192-X , p. 39.
- ↑ Marlen von Xylander: The German occupation on Crete 1941-1945. Individual publications on military history, vol. 32, Freiburg 1989, ISBN 3-7930-0192-X , p. 127.
- ^ Hagen Fleischer : Everyday occupation. In: Dietrich Eichholtz: History of the German War Economy 1939-1945. 3rd volume, Saur Verlag, new edition 2002, ISBN 3-598-11428-1 .
- ↑ according to the memorial stone; Goeb (2010, p. 226) names 25 farm workers
- ↑ according to the memorial stone; Goeb (2010), p. 224 f.
- ↑ according to the memorial stone; Goeb (2010), p. 220 f.
- ↑ Manachem Shelah: The Murder of Italian Prisoners of War, September-November 1943. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Ed.): Destruction War - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, pp. 195–204.
- ^ Gerhard Schreiber: The Italian military internees in the German sphere of influence 1943–1945. Oldenbourg, 1990, p. 158, (figures based on Italian information)
- ↑ Federal Archives (Ed.): Europe under the Swastika - The Occupation Policy of German Fascism in Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Italy and Hungary (1941–1945). Hüthig Verlagsgemeinschaft, Volume 6, ISBN 3-8226-1892-6 , pp. 71 ff., 219.
- ^ Report on the "Brendtenfeier" and the protests (video) ARD Magazin Kontraste , broadcast on May 26, 2005.
- ^ Report on the "Brendtenfeier" and the protests (video) ARD Magazin Panorama, broadcast on June 12, 2003.
- ^ Hermann Frank Meyer : Bloody edelweiss. The 1st Mountain Division in World War II. 2008.
- ↑ Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg on gedenkorte-europa.eu, the homepage of Gedenkorte Europa 1939–1945 , accessed on June 19, 2016.
- ^ Steven Bowman: The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945 , Stanford University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8047-5584-9 , pp. 60 ff.
- ^ Wolfgang Breyer: Dr. Max Merten - a military officer in the German armed forces in the field of tension between legend and truth . University of Mannheim, Mannheim 2003, urn : nbn: de: bsz: 180-madoc-771 , p. 48ff.
- ^ Raul Hilberg : The annihilation of the European Jews. Volume 2, Fischer Verlag 1982, ISBN 3-596-24417-X , p. 738 ff.
- ↑ Thessaloniki on gedenkorte-europa.eu, the homepage of Gedenkorte Europa 1939–1945 , accessed on June 19, 2016.
- ^ Steven Bowman: The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945 , Stanford University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8047-5584-9 , pp. 64 ff.
- ↑ Stratos Dordanas and Vaios Kalogrias, The Jewish community of Thessaloniki during the German occupation , published in Ghetto: Rooms and Borders in Judaism , Pardes, issue 17, Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2011, ISBN 978-3-86956-132-5 , p. 107 ff.
- ↑ Stratos Dordanas and Vaios Kalogrias, p. 117.
- ↑ Stratos Dordanas and Vaios Kalogrias, S. 115th
- ^ BA-MA, RW 40/5, KTB Ia, Chief OKW, for information to Military Commander Serbia, August 9, 1941.
- ^ Michael Portmann : Serbia and Montenegro in World War II 1941-1945. 2007, p. 27.
- ^ Karl H. Schlarp: Economy and Occupation in Serbia 1941-1944. Steiner Franz Verlag, 1998, p. 161.
- ↑ Walter Manoschek: "Are you going to shoot with Jews?" - The extermination of the Jews in Serbia. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (ed.): War of Destruction - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, pp. 52 and 53.
- ^ Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933-1945. Darmstadt 2003, p. 79.
- ↑ Walter Manoschek: “Are you going to shoot with Jews?” The extermination of Jews in Serbia. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (ed.): War of destruction. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, pp. 39, 42, 52 and 53.
- ↑ Klaus A. Maier: The destruction of Gernika on April 26, 1937. In: Military History Research Office (ed.): Military history, journal for historical education. Issue 1/2007, p. 22. (PDF; 2.2 MB)
- ↑ Michael Busch, Karl-Volker Neugebauer: Basic Course in German Military History - The Age of World Wars - Peoples in Arms. 2006, p. 406.
- ↑ Natalino Ronzitti, Gabriella Venturini: The Law of Air Warfare - Contemporary Issues. 2006, p. 162.
- ^ Albrecht Kieser massacre of black French soldiers , Deutschlandfunk, July 27, 2009, accessed on June 25, 2015.
- ↑ Peter Lieb: Conventional War or Nazi Weltanschauung war. Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, p. 518.
- ^ Raffael Scheck: They are just Savages. German Massacres of Black Soldiers from the French Army in 1940. In: The Journal of Modern History 77 , 2005, pp. 325-344; Raffael Scheck: Hitler's African Victims. The Wehrmacht massacre of black French soldiers. Association A, Berlin 2009
- ↑ Bernhard R. Kroener, Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans Umbreit: The German Empire and the Second World War , Vol. 5/1: Organization and mobilization of the German sphere of influence. War administration, economics and human resources. 1939-1941. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-421-06232-3 , p. 295.
- ^ Bernard Poloni in: German-speaking minorities 1945: a European comparison , editor: Manfred Kittel, Oldenbourg Verlag 2007, ISBN 3-486-58002-7 , p. 540 ff.
- ↑ The long-awaited words for the Malgré-nous , evangelisch.de, accessed on August 18, 2015.
- ↑ Women's International League for Peace and Freedom: Ruth Seifert: War and Rape - Analytical Approaches 1 ( Memento from June 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF, 127 KB)
- ^ Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933-1945. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-534-15158-5 , p. 43 ff.
- ↑ Madelon de Keizer: War crimes in the occupied Netherlands - The "Putten case". In: Wolfram Wette , Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): War crimes in the 20th century . Darmstadt 2001, pp. 260-262.
- ^ Maxime Steinberg: The Judenpolitik in Belgium Within the West European Concepts published in Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans , editor: Dan Michman, Berghahn Books, 1998, ISBN 965-308-068-7 , pp. 199 ff.
- ^ Gerhard Schreiber: The Italian military internees in the German sphere of influence 1943 to 1945 - betrayed, despised, forgotten. Munich 1990, p. 156.
- ^ Gerhard Schreiber: The Italian military internees in the German sphere of influence 1943–1945. Oldenbourg, 1990, p. 507.
- ↑ Filippo Focardi: The calculation of the "boomerang". Politics and legal issues in dealing with German war crimes in Italy in Norbert Frei (ed.): Transnational politics of the past. How to deal with German war criminals in Europe after World War II , Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-89244-940-6 , p. 536
- ↑ to this section: Gerhard Schreiber: Military Slaves in the Third Reich. In: Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): The Second World War. Analyzes, basic features, research results. Commissioned by the Military History Research Office, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-932131-38-X , p. 764 ff.
- ↑ Arnim Lang: Operation Northern Lights - The Destruction of Northern Norway by German Troops… , in: End of War in the North: From Hot to Cold War , Eds. Robert Bohn and Jürgen Elvert, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995, ISBN 3-515-06728-0 .
- ^ Konrad Kwiet : Racial Policy and Genocide. In: Encyclopedia of National Socialism 1998, p. 60.
- ↑ RSHA of July 17, 1941 in document no. 24 with attachments printed in: Hans-Adolf Jacobsen : “Commissar order and mass executions of Soviet prisoners of war.” In: Anatomie des SS – Staats , dtv 463, Munich 1967, Volume II, p. 200 -204.
- ^ Reichenau order (AOK 6, Ia, Az. 7), behavior of the troops in the eastern area of October 10, 1941; quoted from: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Wolfram Wette: "Operation Barbarossa" - The German attack on the Soviet Union 1941 , F. Schöningh, 1984, p. 416.
- ↑ Available online at: NS Archive - Documents on National Socialism
- ↑ Quoted from Manfred Messerschmidt : Forward defense. The generals' memorandum for the Nuremberg Tribunal . In: Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds.): War of destruction. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944 . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1995, pp. 531–550, here p. 532. Thereafter, Röttiger withdrew this statement on December 8th on the advice of his lawyers.
- ↑ Quoted from: Christian Streit: No Comrades - The Wehrmacht and the Soviet Prisoners of War 1941–1945 , 1991, p. 116.
- ↑ Printed in: Crimes of the Wehrmacht - Dimensions of the War of Extermination 1941–1944, exhibition catalog. Hamburg 2002, p. 90.
- ↑ Bradley F. Smith, Agnes F. Petersen (eds.): Heinrich Himmler. Secret speeches 1933–1945. Propylaeen Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1974, ISBN 3-549-07305-4 .
- ↑ Walter Manoschek: "Are you going to shoot with Jews?" - The extermination of the Jews in Serbia. In: Hannes Heer , Klaus Naumann (Hrsg.): Destruction War - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, pp. 44–47.
- ^ Dieter Pohl : Holocaust. Herder, Freiburg 2000, p. 120 f.
- ^ Israel Gutman (ed.): Enzyklopädie des Holocaust Vol. III, Piper, Munich a. a. 1998, article Wehrmacht , p. 1564.
- ↑ Christoph Rass: "Menschenmaterial": German soldiers on the Eastern Front. Interior views of an infantry division 1939–1945 . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2003, ISBN 978-3-506-74486-9 . P. 370 ( online )
- ↑ Chistoph Rass, Menschenmaterial , pp. 386-402; Е. Морозов (Ed.): Преступления немецко-фашистских оккупантов в Белоруссии. 1941-1944 , pp. 142-161.
- ↑ Shtetle: Vitebsk (accessed on August 15, 2009) ( Memento from June 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Almuth Püschel: Forced Labor in Potsdam: By foreign workers and prisoners of war; Documentation. In: the series Blown Traces . Märkischer Verlag, Wilhelmshorst 2002, ISBN 3-931329-37-2 , p. 74.
- ↑ Birthe Kundrus: Only half the story. Women in the Wehrmacht. In: Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed. On behalf of MGFA ): The Wehrmacht: Myth and Reality. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , pp. 719-735, here p. 733.
- ^ Wolfgang Petter: Military mass society and de-professionalization of the profession. In: Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed. On behalf of MGFA ): The Wehrmacht: Myth and Reality. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , pp. 359-370, here p. 369.
- ↑ Birthe Kundrus : Only half the story. Women in the Wehrmacht. In: Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann (Ed.): The Wehrmacht: Myth and Reality. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 734.
- ↑ Birgit Beck: Wehrmacht and sexual violence. Sex crimes before German military courts 1939–1945. Schöningh, Paderborn 2004, ISBN 3-506-71726-X , p. 326 f.
- ↑ Birthe Kundrus: Only half the story. Women in the Wehrmacht between 1939 and 1945 - A research report. In: Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed. On behalf of the Military History Research Office): The Wehrmacht. Myth and Reality . R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , pp. 719-735, here p. 734; see. also Birgit Beck: Wehrmacht and sexual violence. Sex crimes before German military courts 1939–1945 . Schöningh, Paderborn 2004, ISBN 3-506-71726-X , p. 334.
- ↑ Birgit Beck: Wehrmacht and sexual violence. Sex crimes before German military courts 1939–1945. Paderborn 2004, ISBN 3-506-71726-X , p. 327.
- ↑ Birgit Beck: Wehrmacht and sexual violence. Sex crimes before German military courts 1939–1945. P. 328.
- ↑ Michael Epkenhans / John Zimmermann: The Wehrmacht - War and Crime . Reclam, Ditzingen 2019, p. 78.
- ^ Regina Mühlhäuser: Conquests. Sexual violence and intimate relationships between German soldiers in the Soviet Union 1941–1945. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2010, p. 145.
- ^ Regina Mühlhäuser: Conquests. Sexual violence and intimate relationships between German soldiers in the Soviet Union 1941–1945. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2010, p. 74 u. P. 144.
- ^ Regina Mühlhäuser: Conquests. Sexual violence and intimate relationships between German soldiers in the Soviet Union 1941–1945. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2010, p. 134.
- ↑ Christa Paul: forced prostitution: state-built brothels under National Socialism. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1994, p. 134.
- ↑ International Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land (The Hague, July 29, 1899) (Third Section, Article 56, p. 15, PDF)
- ↑ Jonathan Petropoulos: Art theft and collecting mania - Art and politics in the Third Reich. Berlin 1999, p. 168.
- ↑ looting of public and private property ; at www.zeno.org
- ↑ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. Fischer, ISBN 978-3-596-14906-3 .
- ↑ Andreas Toppe: Military and Martial Law , Oldenbourg, 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58206-2 , p. 427f.
- ^ Andreas Toppe: Military and international law of war , p. 430f.
- ^ Andreas Toppe: Military and international law of war , p. 434
- ^ Andreas Toppe: Military and international law of war , p. 435
- ↑ Christoph Rass: Abused Crimes Die Zeit from November 16, 2009.
- ↑ In October 1914, a “Military Investigation Center for Violations of Martial Law” was set up in the Prussian War Ministry . It was supposed to obtain material for the German counter-propaganda in order to refute the accusations and to counter it with the help of its own incriminating material.
- ↑ cf. in addition u. a. Andreas Toppe: Military and international law , about p. 236 ff.
- ↑ Research on the unity of Alfred de Zayas (USA) and the Dutch international lawyer Walter Rabus could confirm the authenticity of the collected reports with a high degree of probability. Initially, this does not say anything about how they are used by the Foreign Office and the Nazi-controlled press.
- ^ The Trial of the Major War Criminals in the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg November 14, 1945 to October 1, 1946 (1947), Volume 22, p. 591.
- ^ Susanne Jung: The legal problems of the Nuremberg process. JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen, 1992, p. 138 ff.
- ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann (Ed.): The Wehrmacht. Myth and Reality published on behalf of the Military History Research Office, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , p. 1081 ff.
- ↑ Meyer-Seitz: The prosecution of Nazi crimes. 1998, p. 36.
- ^ Henry Leide: Nazi Criminals and State Security - The Secret Past Policy of the GDR. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005, p. 29.
- ↑ Friedrich Egler: The Soviet Special Camp No. 3 , 1995, p. 10.
- ^ A b Alfred Streim: Clean Wehrmacht? - The prosecution of war and Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic and the GDR. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (eds.): War of extermination - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, pp. 588 and 589.
- ^ Günther Wieland: The Nuremberg Trial of the Century , Berlin 1986, p. 119.
- ^ Alfred Streim: Clean Wehrmacht? - The prosecution of war and Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic and the GDR. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (ed.): War of Destruction - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 , Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, pp. 589, 590 and 591.
- ^ Henry Leide: Nazi Criminals and State Security - The Secret Past Policy of the GDR. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005, p. 73 ff.
- ↑ Gerd de Coster, Dirk Martin: The development and digitization of criminal prosecution files from the post-war period , Francia - Research on West European History, 2012, vol. 39, p. 387.
- ^ Bernhard Brunner: The France Complex: The National Socialist Crimes in France and the Justice of the Federal Republic of Germany , Wallstein Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-89244-693-8 , p. 113 ff.
- ↑ Katerina Kralova: The Legacy of the Occupation - German-Greek Relations since 1940 , Böhlau-verlag 2016, ISBN 978-3-412-50362-8 , p. 131 ff.
- ↑ Eberhard Rondholz : Blutspur in Hellas , published in 2012 in Greece Studies 10, p. 31.
- ↑ Eberhard Rondholz: Blutspur in Hellas , published in 2012 in Greece Studies 10, p. 33 f.
- ↑ Manfred Zeidler : Stalin Justice contra Nazi war crimes. (PDF) Hannah Ahrendt Institute for Totalitarian Research TU Dresden, 1996, p. 16 ff. , Accessed on February 18, 2018 .
- ^ A b c Manfred Zeidler : Stalin justice versus Nazi war crimes. (PDF) Hannah Ahrendt Institute for Totalitarianism Research TU Dresden, 1996, p. 25 ff. , Accessed on February 18, 2018 .
- ^ A b Manfred Zeidler: Stalin justice versus Nazi war crimes. (PDF) Hannah Ahrendt Institute for Totalitarianism Research TU Dresden, 1996, p. 34 ff. , Accessed on February 18, 2018 .
- ↑ z. B. Franz Halder: Hitler as a general. 1949. Heinz Guderian: memories of a soldier , 1950. Erich von Manstein: lost victories , 1950.
- ^ Friedrich Gerstenmeier: Strategic memories - The memoirs of German officers. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Hrsg.): Destruction War - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, p. 626 f.
- ↑ Michael Schornstheimer: Harmless Idealists and Daring Soldiers - Military and War in the Illustrated Novels of the Fifties. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Hrsg.): Destruction War - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, pp. 635–642.
- ↑ Hans-Erich Volkmann: On the responsibility of the Wehrmacht. in: RD Müller, HE Volkmann (Ed. on behalf of MGFA ): The Wehrmacht: Myth and Reality. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , p. 1197 f. and 1207 ff.
- ^ Jürgen Förster: Wehrmacht, War and Holocaust. In: RD Müller, HE Volkmann (Ed. On behalf of MGFA): The Wehrmacht: Myth and Reality. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , pp. 948-963 ff.
- ^ Annette Weinke : The Nuremberg Trials. CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-53604-2 , p. 99 ff.
- ↑ Jürgen Danyel: The memory of the Wehrmacht in both German states. In: RD Müller, HE Volkmann (Ed. On behalf of MGFA): The Wehrmacht: Myth and Reality. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , p. 1139 ff.
- ^ Annette Weinke: The Nuremberg Trials. CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-53604-2 , p. 107 ff.
- ↑ Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann: Introduction. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Hrsg.): Destruction War - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, p. 33.
- ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: Wehrmacht. In: Encyclopedia of National Socialism. 1998, p. 106 f.
- ↑ Gerhart Haas: On the image of the Wehrmacht in the historiography of the GDR. In: Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann (Hrsg.): The Wehrmacht - Myth and Reality. Munich 1999, p. 1100.
- ↑ Gerhart Haas: On the image of the Wehrmacht in the historiography of the GDR. In: Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann (Hrsg.): The Wehrmacht - Myth and Reality. Munich 1999, p. 1100.
- ^ Henry Leide: Nazi Criminals and State Security - The Secret Past Policy of the GDR. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005, pp. 12 and 13.
- ↑ The Wehrmacht Exhibition - and what it's really about - A necessary correction of public opinion; on www.studis.de ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Bogdan Musial: Pictures at an Exhibition - Critical Comments on the Traveling Exhibition "War of Extermination - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944". In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 47 (1999), pp. 563–591.
- ^ Omer Bartov, Cornelia Brink, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Friedrich P. Kahlenberg, Manfred Messerschmidt, Reinhard Rürup, Christian Streit, Hans-Ulrich Thamer: Report of the commission to review the exhibition “War of Extermination. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 ”. ( Memento of October 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 370 kB), November 2000.
- ↑ Section 14 of the decree
- ↑ Quoted from: Michael Busch, Karl-Volker Neugebauer: Basic Course in German Military History - The Age of World Wars - Peoples in Arms. MGFA, Oldenbourg, 2006, p. 347.
- ↑ Interview with Hannes Heer, Walter Manoschek and Jan Philipp Reemtsma in ZEIT No. 22, May 1999
- ^ Theo J. Schulte: The Wehrmacht and the National Socialist Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union. In: Roland G. Foerster (Ed.): "Operation Barbarossa" - On the historical site of German-Soviet relations from 1933 to autumn 1941 , p. 165.
- ^ Omer Bartov: Hitler's Wehrmacht - Soldiers, Fanaticism and the Brutalization of War. Rowohlt, 1995, pp. 27, 38 and 48.
- ^ After H. Spaeter, W. Ritter von Schramm : The history of the tank corps Großdeutschland. Bielefeld 1958, Volume I, p. 341.
- ^ Bähr: War letters from fallen students 1939–1943, Tübingen, 1952, p. 83.
- ^ Omer Bartov: Hitler's Wehrmacht - Soldiers, Fanaticism and the Brutalization of War. Rowohlt, 1995, p. 50.
- ↑ Hannes Heer: Dead Zones - The German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Hamburger Edition, 1999, p. 94.
- ↑ Janowitz and Shils: Cohesion and Disintegration. P. 281; quoted from Omer Bartov: Hitler's Wehrmacht - soldiers, fanaticism and the brutalization of war. Rowohlt, 1995, p. 54; EP Chodoff: Ideology and Primary Groups. P. 569 ff.
- ^ Omer Bartov: Hitler's Wehrmacht - Soldiers, Fanaticism and the Brutalization of War. Rowohlt, 1995, p. 59.
- ^ Dieter Pohl: Persecution and mass murder in the Nazi era 1933-1945. Darmstadt 2003, pp. 37 and 47.
- ^ Omer Bartov: Hitler's Wehrmacht - Soldiers, Fanaticism and the Brutalization of War. Rowohlt, 1995, p. 93 ff. And p. 164.
- ↑ Crimes of the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union in 1941 - the results of a war that became radicalized or measures planned long before the German attack on June 22, 1941? A panel discussion with Prof. Dr. Gerhart Hass and Dr. Klaus Jochen Arnold.
- ↑ Mark Spoerer: The labor factor in the occupied eastern territories in the conflict of economic and ideological interests. In: Communications from the Joint Commission for Research into the Recent History of German-Russian Relations 2. Oldenbourg, 2005, p. 70.
- ↑ Mark Marzover: Military violence and National Socialist values - The Wehrmacht in Greece 1941 to 1944. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Hrsg.): Annihilation War - Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, 2nd edition 1995, p. 160 .
- ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans-Erich Volkmann: The Wehrmacht - Myth and Reality. Munich 1999, p. 26.
- ^ Adolf Graf Kielmansegg, Manfred Messerschmidt: The Wehrmacht in the Nazi State - Time of Indoctrination. Decker, 1969, pp. 334 and 483.
- ↑ Hans Mommsen: War experiences. In: Ulrich Borsdorf / Mathilde Jamin (ed.): About life in war. Rowohlt, 1989, p. 13.
- ↑ Hannes Heer: Killing Fields - The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust. In: Hannes Heer, Klaus Naumann (Hrsg.): Destruction War - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944. 2nd edition, Hamburger Edition, 1995, p. 74.
- ↑ Table of contents, excerpt
