Martial Law Decree

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With the decree on the exercise of martial law in the "Barbarossa" area and on special measures of the troops of May 13, 1941 , briefly called martial law decree , Adolf Hitler had the chief of OKW Wilhelm Keitel order that criminal offenses by civilians in the eastern areas against the German armed forces , could not be punished by ordinary proceedings before court martial or court martial . Rather, fleeing people should be shot immediately, suspects should be shot at the behest of an officer ; Members of the Wehrmacht did not have to expect to have to answer to a military court after an attack .

Historians see a "close ideological and legal connection" with the much better known commissioner order of June 6, 1941, in which the violation of international law is obvious.

History of origin

In 1940 planning began for the far-reaching war goals in the East, which were summarized under the term General Plan Ost . This struggle, so Adolf Hitler expressed himself, will differ essentially from the struggle in the West. A war of extermination is being waged with the aim of exterminating certain political opponents. This fight “against the poison of decomposition” is not a matter for the courts-martial, but a task of the troop command.

From March 1941, plans were drawn up to regulate the deployment of Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police (SD) and the distribution of tasks and cooperation with the army. The Lieutenant General responsible for legal issues in the Army High Command z. b. On May 6, 1941, V. Eugen Müller sent a draft for the later “Barbarossa Jurisdiction Decree” to the OKW, which contains a detailed justification for the orders passed shortly thereafter. This time, the opposing army would add "as a particularly dangerous element from the civilian population that disintegrates any order, the bearers of the Jewish-Bolshevik worldview, " who uses his "weapon of disintegration insidiously and from ambush".

This Führer decree is dated May 13, 1941. The next day, 19 out of 23 copies were sent by the OKW as secret commandos . A transfer should not take place before June 1st.

Content

The first section of the order of May 13, 1941 relates to the "Treatment of Crimes committed by enemy civilians":

  • For the time being, courts-martial or court martial are not responsible for crimes committed by hostile civilians.
  • Irregulars are to be "ruthlessly dealt with" in combat or on the run.
  • Civilians who attack members of the Wehrmacht and their entourage are to be "knocked down" immediately.
  • Suspects can be shot at the behest of an officer.
  • "Collective acts of violence" can be carried out against localities by order of a battalion commander.
  • It is expressly forbidden to identify and hold suspects in order to later bring them to a court.
  • Only when the occupied area is "sufficiently pacified" can the commanders-in-chief introduce armed forces jurisdiction over civilians.

A second section of the order relates to crimes committed by members of the Wehrmacht against residents of the occupied territory:

  • There is no compulsion to prosecute members of the Wehrmacht, even if it is a military crime.
  • When assessing such acts, thoughts of revenge and experiences of sadness that have been inflicted on the German people through “Bolshevik influence” must be taken into account.
  • Only serious sexual offenses, acts of criminal inclination, senseless destruction of accommodation and booty are punishable by a court martial, as this serves to "maintain male discipline".
  • "Extreme caution" should be used in assessing the credibility of enemy civilians.

A third section highlights the personal responsibility of the commanders for carrying out the order:

  • All officers are to be instructed in “urgent form” in good time.
  • The legal advisers are to be informed of the instructions and also of the verbal political intentions of the management.
  • Only those judgments are to be confirmed that correspond to the political intentions of the leadership.

At a meeting on June 11, 1941 in Warsaw, Müller explained to the General Staff officers responsible for enemy reconnaissance and defense (Ic) and the Wehrmacht in what sense the decree should be interpreted:

“The term 'irregulars' also includes those who, as a civilian, obstruct the German armed forces or call for them to be obstructed (e.g. agitators, distributors of leaflets, disregarding German orders, arsonists, destroying signposts, traitors, etc.) [...]. In cases of doubt, suspicion will often have to suffice. "

Execution and resistance

The overwhelming majority of the command authorities of the Wehrmacht passed the court martial decree on to the subordinate units, thereby enabling its implementation. Several troop leaders feared, however, that the lifting of compulsory prosecution and the elimination of the court courts would damage the order and discipline of the troops. The AOK 6 felt compelled to point out in its implementing regulations to adopt on a division commander may order spite of the adoption of court martial for crimes against civilians. On the other hand, the provisions of the first section, the procedural executions and the collective violence, met with little criticism. Some of these even met with expressed approval. Some troop commanders restricted the authorization of all officers to carry out arbitrary executions without authorization, reduced the number of persons or, like Colonel General Heinz Guderian, still ordered rapid field trials. Skeptical remarks such as Colonel General Franz Halder's were rare. He wrote: “If this discipline is jeopardized or wavered, then military leadership […] is over. The responsibility for the violation of international law agreements and customs does not have such an immediate impact, especially since the legal terms involved here are sometimes quite flexible ... "

The commissar order issued a few days later , which refers to the martial law decree and orders the segregation and liquidation of political commissars , met with much greater reservations and resistance .

Controversies and interpretations

In his interpretation, the historian Jürgen Förster included an instruction from Walther von Brauchitsch of May 24, 1941, in which the superiors were called upon to “ prevent arbitrary excesses by individual army members and to prevent the troops from becoming overgrown in good time.” Förster criticized “the shifting of responsibility down ”and judged:“ If they [ie the army command] had really wanted to prevent the troops from shaking their legal consciousness through ideological guidelines [...], they should at least not have made their own contribution to the violation of international law and would have been more resistant to the restriction of the martial law have to."

Christian Streit found that the drafting of the decree of May 13, 1941 and the related commissioner's order of June 6, 1941 was "a decisive step towards the inclusion of the Wehrmacht in the extermination policy". The military historians Michael Epkenhans and John Zimmermann sum up: "The martial law decree gave soldiers carte blanche to treat the inhabitants of the country they were supposed to conquer." Wigbert Benz stated that the Soviet civilian population was de facto outlaws due to the martial law decree drawn up by the Wehrmacht leadership was declared. It is a "core component of the criminal orders" to which hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians fell victim.

About the assessment of the attitude of those officers who later emerged as resistance fighters on July 20, 1944 , a controversy arose as to the extent to which the martial law decree in 1941 was rejected by the Wehrmacht. Johannes Hürter and Felix Römer proved that the decree was also accepted in the Army Group Command Center as the basis of German occupation policy. They emphasized that the court martial was basically accepted; The protest was directed exclusively against the lifting of the compulsory prosecution. Hermann Graml , on the other hand, assessed the implementation regulations of the troop commanders as an attempt to “at least partially secure human behavior”. In the “Zeitlauften” of October 30, 2008, Felix Römer stated in connection with his book published in the same year: “In hardly any other area, however, was the army so directly, actively and comprehensively involved in the implementation of the National Socialist extermination policy as in its implementation this command. "

literature

  • Hans-Adolf Jacobsen : Commissar order and mass executions of Soviet prisoners of war. In: Hans Buchheim : Anatomy of the SS State. Volume 2: National Socialist Concentration Camps 1933–1945. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1967 ( dtv 463), decree printed as Document No. 8 on p. 181 ff.
  • Felix Römer: “In old Germany such an order would not have been possible.” (PDF) Reception, adaptation and implementation of the martial law decree in the Eastern Army in 1941/1942. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . 56, 2008, pp. 53-99.
  • Felix Römer: The commissioner's order. Wehrmacht and Nazi crimes on the Eastern Front 1941/42. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn a. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-76595-6 (also: Kiel, Univ., Diss., 2007).
  • Christian Streit: No comrades. The Wehrmacht and the Soviet prisoners of war 1941–1945. New edition. Dietz, Bonn 1991, ISBN 3-8012-5016-4 , pp. 33–42 (At the same time: Heidelberg, Univ., Diss., 1977: The Soviet prisoners of war as victims of the National Socialist war of extermination 1941–1945 .)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen Förster: The enterprise "Barbarossa" as a war of conquest and annihilation . In: Horst Boog, Jürgen Förster, Joachim Hoffmann , Ernst Klink, Rolf-Dieter Müller , Gerd R. Ueberschär : The attack on the Soviet Union (= Military History Research Office [ed.]: The German Reich and the Second World War . Volume 4 ). 2nd Edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-421-06098-3 , pp. 413–447, here p. 430 ( here p. 430 # v = onepage restricted preview in the Google book search).
  2. ^ Alfred Streim : Soviet prisoners in Hitler's war of extermination. Heidelberg 1982, ISBN 3-8114-2482-3 , p. 23.
  3. ^ Christian Streit: No comrades ... Bonn 1991, ISBN 3-8012-5016-4 , p. 34 - Halders note of March 30, 1941.
  4. ^ Hans-Adolf Jacobsen : Commissar order and mass executions of Soviet prisoners of war . In: Anatomy of the SS State . Volume 2. dtv 463, Munich 1967, p. 176 - Document 5a of May 6, 1941.
  5. ↑ quoted from Timm C. Richter: The Wehrmacht and the Partisan War . In: RD Müller, HE Volkmann (Ed. On behalf of MGFA ): The Wehrmacht: Myth and Reality . Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56383-1 , p. 840.
  6. ↑ Felix Römer: In old Germany such an order would not have been possible. Reception, adaptation and implementation of the martial law decree in the Eastern Army 1941/1942 . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 56, 2008, p. 63 f., P. 72.
  7. ^ Hans-Adolf Jacobsen: Commissar order ... In: Anatomie des SS-Staates . Volume 2, dtv 463, Munich 1967, p. 147.
  8. ^ Printed in Hans-Adolf Jacobsen: Kommissarbefehl… In: Anatomie des SS-Staates . Volume 2. dtv 463, Munich 1967, p. 185 f. = Document 10.
  9. ↑ Jürgen Förster: The enterprise "Barbarossa" as a war of conquest and annihilation . ISBN 3-421-06098-3 , p. 433.
  10. ^ Christian Streit: No comrades ... Bonn 1991, ISBN 3-8012-5016-4 , p. 35.
  11. ↑ Michael Epkenhans / John Zimmermann: The Wehrmacht - War and Crime . Reclam, Ditzingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-15-011238-0 . P. 8, see also p. 54f.
  12. ^ Wigbert Benz: The Russian campaign of the Third Reich. Causes, goals, effects. Haag and Herchen, Frankfurt am Main, 2nd edition 1988, ISBN 3-89228-199-8 , p. 51 f.
  13. ↑ Johannes Hürter, Felix Römer: Old and new historical images of the resistance and Eastern War . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 53 (2005).
  14. ^ Hermann Graml: mass murder and military opposition. To the latest discussion about the resistance in the staff of Army Group Center . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 54, 2006, p. 16.
  15. ↑ Felix Römer: The Commissar Order - Wehrmacht and Nazi Crimes on the Eastern Front 1941/42 . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2008, ISBN 3-506-76595-7 .
  16. ↑ "No problem for the troops"