Trial generals in Southeast Europe
The Generals Trial in Southeast Europe , also known as the hostage trial , in America known as the Hostages Trial , was the seventh of a total of twelve follow-up trials to the Nuremberg Trials ; it took place in 1947/1948. The central charge in Nuremberg was the generals' responsibility for killing thousands of Yugoslav and Greek civilians. Twelve field marshals and generals of the Wehrmacht were charged with war crimes in the occupied countries of Yugoslavia , Albania and Greece . One defendant took his own life before the start of the oral proceedings, the main defendant Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs left the trial due to illness. Two of the remaining ten defendants were acquitted, eight were sentenced to between seven years and life imprisonment. Although the court described the shooting of hostages as barbaric but permissible reprisals under customary war law , the executions of hostages carried out by German troops in the occupied territories were clearly classified as war crimes because of their excessive features.
The procedure
Its official name was The United States of America vs. Wilhelm List, et al. (USA against List and others). The indictment was brought on May 10, 1947, the proceedings were opened on July 8, and the hearing took place from July 15, 1947 to February 19, 1948 before the Military Tribunal V in Nuremberg. The presiding judge was Charles F. Wennerstrum , Iowa Supreme Court Justice with associate judges George J. Burke of Michigan and Edward F. Carter of Nebraska. The main prosecutors were Telford Taylor and Theodore Windowmakers. The spokesman for the overall defense was Hans Laternser . The legal basis was the Control Council Act No. 10 of December 20, 1945.
The charges
The indictment contained the allegations of perpetrator and complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity , which were summarized in the following charges:
- Murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania by non-combatants arbitrarily partisans , Communists , Communist suspects and tape suspects were declared or taken hostage and executed.
- Looting , robbery and willful destruction of cities and villages without military necessity in Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania and Norway.
- Drafting, communicating and carrying out criminal orders denying prisoner-of-war Greek, Yugoslav and Italian soldiers the status and rights of prisoners of war and resulting in the murder and ill-treatment of thousands.
- Assassination, torture, systematic terrorization, imprisonment in concentration camps, forced labor in military facilities and the deportation for slave labor of civilians from Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania.
The charges related largely to the issuing, passing on and execution of criminal orders, such as the atonement order of September 16, 1941, the order of Field Marshal Wilhelm List (Commander South-East) for the treatment of partisans , the Commissar order of June 6, 1941 and the command order of October 18, 1942.
Defendants and Penalties
None of the defendants pleaded guilty as charged.
| image | Surname | last rank; Position at the time of the crime | Charges | Sentence | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4th | ||||
 |
Wilhelm List (1880–1971) |
Field Marshal General ; Wehrmacht Commander Southeast (1941–1942), Commander of the 12th Army in 1941 | S. | U | S. | U | life sentence; Dismissed in 1952 for health reasons |
 |
Maximilian von Weichs (1881–1954) |
Field Marshal General; Commander 2nd Army during the Balkan campaign in 1941 | - | - | - | - | Proceedings due to inability to stand trial dropped |
 |
Lothar Rendulic (1887–1971) |
Colonel General ; Commander of the 2nd Panzer Army in Yugoslavia (1943–1944) | S. | U | S. | S. | 20 years; Dismissed in 1951 |
 |
Walter Kuntze (1883–1960) |
General of Pioneers ; Commander Southeast and the 12th Army from October 29, 1941 | S. | U | S. | S. | life sentence; Dismissed in 1953 |
|
Hermann Foertsch (1895–1961) |
General of the Infantry ; 12th Army Chief of Staff | U | U | U | U | acquittal | |
 |
Franz Böhme (1885–1947) |
General of the mountain troops ; Commander of the XVIII. Mountain Corps (1940–43), successor to Rendulic in 1944 | - | - | - | - | evaded by suicide on May 30, 1947 |
 |
Hellmuth Felmy (1885-1965) |
General of the Airmen ; Commander Southern Greece | S. | S. | U | S. | 15 years, released in 1951 |
 |
Hubert Lanz (1896–1982) |
General of the mountain troops; Commander of the XXII. Army Corps (1943-45) | S. | U | S. | U | 12 years, released in 1951 |
 |
Ernst Dehner (1889–1970) |
General of the Infantry; Corps commander under Rendulic (1943-44) | S. | U | U | U | 7 years, released in 1951 |
 |
Ernst von Leyser (1889–1962) |
General of the Infantry; Corps commander under Rendulic and Böhme | U | U | S. | S. | 10 years, released in 1951 |
 |
Wilhelm Speidel (1895–1970) |
General of the Airmen; Military Commander in Greece (1942–1944) | S. | U | U | U | 20 years, released in 1951 |
|
Kurt Ritter von Geitner (1884–1968) |
Major general; Chief of Staff to the Military Commander in Serbia and Greece | U | U | U | U | acquittal | |
S - guilty verdict; U - Innocent as charged
Judgments and justification
The defendant Franz Böhme committed suicide by jumping from the fourth floor of the prison in Nuremberg, Maximilian von Weichs was released from prison due to his poor health and was not convicted. The judgment was pronounced on February 19, 1948 by the International Military Tribunal of the United States of America in Nuremberg. Of the ten defendants remaining in the trial, two were acquitted, Herman Foertsch and Curt Ritter von Geitner. The others received prison terms ranging from seven years to life.
Wilhelm List was not found guilty of passing on the commissioner's order, but he was found guilty of Counts I and III. Walter Kuntze was found guilty of responsibility for the shooting of hostages and the deportation of Jews to concentration camps prior to their murder. He was thus guilty of Counts I, III and IV, as was Lothar Rendulic. Ernst Dehner was found guilty of hostage killings in point I. Ernst von Leyser was convicted, among other things, of abducting Croats for forced labor in Germany and of passing on the commissioner's orders in items III and IV. Felmy, commander of southern Greece, was charged with the " Klissoura Bloodbath " (Klisoura), in the Kastoria prefecture , in which at least 250 people, including 72 children, were murdered by units of the 7th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment I and II found guilty. Hubert Lanz was found guilty of the shooting of hostages and of the shooting of the Italian General Gandin and his staff officers in points I and III. Wilhelm Speidel, military commander of southern Greece and later Greece, was found guilty of the hostage killings in point I.
Hostage taking and shooting
The justification of the mass crimes against the civilian population as alleged reprisals under international law was one of the lines of defense in the process. It was not recognized by the judges. One of the central points of negotiation was the criminality of shooting hostages. The French chief prosecutor, François de Menthon, invoked Article 50 of the Hague Land Warfare Code of 1907 and saw the hostage shootings as "the first acts of terrorism by the German occupation forces in all countries". However, the court decided to instead follow the line taken against the major war criminals in the Nuremberg Trial . The mass murders of hostages by the Wehrmacht in connection with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel's decree of September 16, 1941 were dealt with there. It carried out:
“The thought that an innocent person can be killed for the criminal conduct of another is an abomination to any natural sense of justice. We condemn the injustice of such a provision as a barbaric holdover from ancient times. However, it is not our office to write international law as we would like it to be, but to apply it as we find it [...]. An examination of the evidence available to us on this matter convinces us that hostages can be taken to ensure the peaceful behavior of the people of the occupied territories and, under certain circumstances and when the necessary preparatory steps have been taken, can be shot as a final expression. "
However, the court severely restricted this finding. So it pointed to a number of other types of reprisals. In addition, it only considered hostage-taking as permissible if there was a connection between the population from which the hostages were taken and the crimes committed . Also, as in the main trial, the court did not consider the ordered shooting quotas to be appropriate and explained:
“The number of hostages shot must not exceed the severity of the offenses from which the shooting is intended to deter. If the aforementioned provisions are not met, the shooting of hostages is a violation of international law and is in itself a war crime. The extent to which this practice was used by the Germans exceeds the most elementary conceptions of humanity and justice. They invoke military necessity, which they confuse with expediency and strategic interest. "
Historical background
After the surrender of the Yugoslav army on April 17, 1941 and the occupation of Greece a few weeks later, most of the German troops were withdrawn in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union and Field Marshal List was appointed Wehrmacht commander in charge of the remaining weak forces. For the first time since the beginning of the Second World War , the Wehrmacht now encountered organized partisan units that offered extensive resistance. On June 27, 1941, the “General Headquarters of the Partisan Units for National Liberation” was created, and Josip Broz Tito took over its command . All German troops in the uprising area were given to the commanding general of the XVIII from Austria. Army corps, subordinated to Franz Böhme.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel's atonement order of September 16, 1941 was an instruction from the Wehrmacht High Command to combat partisans:
"The Fuehrer has now ordered that the sharpest means must be used everywhere in order to suppress the movement in the shortest possible time [...] As atonement for a German soldier's life, in these cases the death penalty for 50 to 100 communists must generally be considered appropriate. The type of enforcement must increase the deterrent effect. "
A few months earlier, in May 1941, the quota of 100 Serbs for every German soldier who had been harmed by an attack had been announced in Serbia. On October 4, 1941, Böhme ordered the shooting of 2,100 prisoners from the concentration camps of Šabac and Belgrade for 21 German soldiers , “mainly Jews and communists”. Another order from Boehme on October 10, 1941 went beyond List's order. He no longer established a regional or factual connection between the incidents to be sanctioned and the hostage executions. There was no mention of Jews in List's order, but Böhme expressly included them as a separate category in the hostage operations:
"... all communists, as such suspected male residents, all Jews, a certain number of nationalist or democratically minded residents ..."
Most of the Jewish population as well as the Sinti and Roma were shot in Serbia under the guise of shooting hostages. After the Baltic countries , Serbia was the first “ Jew-free ” area. But the rest of the Serbian civilian population was not spared either. The Kraljevo and Kragujevac massacres claimed the most victims . After that, the shooting of hostages by the SD , SS and Wehrmacht continued to a lesser extent.
Willful destruction of cities and villages
The destruction of 25 Greek villages in the Kalavryta massacre by the 117th Jäger Division under General Karl von Le Suire took place on December 6, 1943 in the area of command of the defendant Felmy and was assessed as arbitrary destruction. Felmy claimed to have verbally reprimanded Le Suire for this, but it can be shown that he contributed to his later promotion. Felmy was found guilty of this charge.
Evidence was provided that the villages of Paklonica, Vocarica, Grgeteg, Bukavac, Grgurevci and others were destroyed in the area of command of General Dehner in autumn 1943. Since the court had only fragmentary reports, the court did not consider guilt as proven for this charge, as it could also have been permissible reprisals.
General Rendulic was accused of deliberately devastating the Norwegian province of Finnmark as part of the scorched earth strategy in 1944, while retreating with the 20th Mountain Army from superior Russian forces, and without military necessity. The court considered it proven that this procedure was objectively not militarily necessary, but admitted that the defendant could have erred in his honest assessment of the military situation at the time and found him innocent on this count.
Assassination of Italian soldiers
With the armistice of Cassibile on September 3, 1943, an unclear command situation arose for the Italian troops in the Balkans. In Greece, the troops on Kefalonia under General Antonio Gandin refused to go into German captivity and fierce fighting broke out until the Italian troops surrendered. On Hitler's orders, all Italian soldiers on Kefalonia were to be shot for mutiny . The responsible General Lanz opposed it because it would be illegal and impracticable and was able to ensure that only the “guilty” officers were convicted by a German court martial. (The massacres of parts of the team that occurred at different times were not discussed during the trial.) Something similar happened in Corfu . The Italian officers, according to the court's finding, were neither mutineers nor franc-tireurs and Lanz was found guilty of a war crime.
General Rendulic ordered his troops in Yugoslavia to carry out the Fuehrer's order without scruples and the XV. Mountain Corps reported on October 6, 1943 that three generals and 45 officers had been convicted and executed. On October 9, the XXI. Mountain Corps that 18 officers had been executed. The court called this an unlawful act of revenge and found Rendulic guilty on this point.
Assassination of Soviet soldiers
Von Leyser was found guilty of having issued the criminal commissar order of June 6, 1941 as commander of the 269th Infantry Division in the Soviet Union, which was demonstrably carried out several times.
Rendulic was convicted of passing on the commissioner's order, with the fact that there was no evidence of the execution of the order by his subordinate troops.
Forced recruitment in Croatia
Von Leyser was found guilty of handing over captured civilians of military age to the Croatian puppet government for service in the Waffen-Ustasha or for forced labor in Germany .
Pardons
Public pressure to pardon those convicted in Nuremberg led to pardons from the American High Commissioner John Jay McCloy at a time when the establishment of West German armed forces was in the interests of the United States during the Cold War . Dehner, Felmy, Lanz, Leyser, Rendulic and Wilhelm Speidel were released from custody in the Landsberg War Crimes Prison in 1951 , Wilhelm List in 1952 and, most recently, Walter Kuntze in 1953. According to Beate Ihme-Tuchel, the extent of the criminal offenses and their atonement were disproportionate to one another.
Reception of the process
In its reasoning for the judgment, the court stated that it was not authorized to create new international law, but had to apply the law in force. The practice of hostage killing is a "barbaric holdover" in international war law. It also expressed the hope of having at least set an example for the protection of the civilian population in future wars. In the Geneva Convention of August 12, 1949 for the protection of civilians in times of war , the customary right to take hostages was finally deleted from the catalog of permissible reprisals .
The court was strongly reprimanded by former resistance fighters and also in the Soviet press because it did not recognize partisans as subjects of international martial law and denied them the protection contained therein.
Beate Ihme-Tuchel believes that the fact that the close connection between the struggle against the “ partisans ”, the hostage killings against the civilian population and the mass murder of Jews and Sinti and Roma was not at the center of the process, is the reason why the mass murders of Wehrmacht in the Balkans are still not anchored in the collective memory and were only noticed relatively late due to research.
In 1949, in order to protect the civilian population, Article 3 of the Geneva Convention expressly included the prohibition of any hostage-taking ( whenever and wherever ).
See also
literature
- Kevin Jon Heller : The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. Oxford University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-19-955431-7 .
- Kim Christian Priemel , Alexa Stiller: NMT: The Nuremberg Military Tribunals between History, Justice and Righteousness. Hamburger Edition 2013, ISBN 978-3-86854-278-3 .
- Beate Ihme-Tuchel: Case 7: The trial against the "Southeast Generals". Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): The National Socialism in front of the court. The allied trials against war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952 (= Fischer pocket books. The time of National Socialism. 13589) Fischer pocket book publisher, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 .
- Annette Weinke : The Nuremberg Trials. (= Beck'sche Reihe. 2404 CH Beck Wissen. ) Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-53604-2 .
- Martin Zöller , Kazimirz Leszczyński (Eds.): Case 7 - The Hostage Murder Trial Judged by the Military Tribunal V of the United States of America. VEB Verlag der Wissenschaften, (East) Berlin 1965.
Web links
- Hostage Case Nuremberg, Judgment 1948 , pdf, English
- Video collection on the Nuremberg trials of the Robert H. Jackson Center, including recordings of the hostage trial (1947/48)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kim C. Priemel, Alexa Stiller: NMT: The Nuremberg Military Tribunals between History, Justice and Righteousness. Hamburger Edition 2013, p. 776.
- ↑ Hostage Case Nuremberg, Judgment 1948. pdf, p. 1233 f.
- ↑ Beate Ihme-Tuchel: Case 7: The trial against the "Southeast Generals". P. 150f.
- ↑ Beate Ihme-Tuchel: Case 7: The trial against the "Southeast Generals". P. 151f.
- ↑ Beate Ihme-Tuchel: Case 7: The trial against the "Southeast Generals". In: National Socialism in Court. Edited by Gerd R. Ueberschär, 1999, Fischer, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 , p. 147.
- ↑ Martin Seckendorf (ed.): Europe under the swastika. Volume 6: The occupation policy of German fascism in Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Italy and Hungary (1941–1945). On behalf of the Federal Archives, Hüthig, Berlin a. a. 1992, ISBN 3-8226-1892-6 .
- ↑ Hostage Case Nuremberg, Judgment 1948. P. 1307 ff.
- ↑ Hostage Case Nuremberg, Judgment 1948. p. 1300.
- ↑ Kevin Jon Heller: The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. Oxford University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-19-955431-7 , p. 311.
- ↑ Hostage Case Nuremberg, Judgment 1948. P. 1312 f.
- ^ Charles T. O'Reilly: Forgotten Battles: Italy's War of Liberation, 1943-1945. Lexington Books, 2001, ISBN 0-7391-0195-1 , pp. 102 f. Accessed online here [1] July 29, 2016.
- ↑ Hostage Case Nuremberg, Judgment 1948. P. 1292 ff.
- ↑ Hostage Case Nuremberg, Judgment 1948. P. 1305 f.
- ↑ Kevin Jon Heller: The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. P. 349.
- ↑ Hostage Case Nuremberg, Judgment 1948. P. 1305.
- ↑ Kevin Jon Heller: The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. P. 217.
- ↑ Beate Ihme-Tuchel: Case 7: The trial against the "Southeast Generals". P. 152.
- ^ Annette Weinke : The Nuremberg Trials. CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-53604-2 , p. 82.
- ^ Gerhard Schreiber: German war crimes in Italy. Perpetrator, victim, law enforcement. Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-39268-7 , p. 116.
- ^ Annette Weinke: The Nuremberg Trials. P. 82.
- ↑ Beate Ihme-Tuchel: Case 7: The trial against the "Southeast Generals". P. 145 f.
- ↑ Beate Ihme-Tuchel: Case 7: The trial against the "Southeast Generals". P. 152.