War crimes of the Wehrmacht

A woman weeps during the deportation of the Jews of Ioannina on March 25, 1944. The deportation was enforced by the German army. Almost all of the people deported were murdered on or shortly after April 11, 1944, when the train carrying them reached Auschwitz-Birkenau.

War crimes of the Wehrmacht were those carried out by German armed forces during World War II. While the principal perpetrators of the Holocaust amongst German armed forces were the Nazi German political armies (the SS-Totenkopfverbände and particularly the Einsatzgruppen), the traditional armed forces represented by the Wehrmacht committed war crimes of their own, particularly on the Eastern Front in the war against the Soviet Union. The Nuremberg Trials of the major war criminals at the end of World War II found that the Wehrmacht was not an inherently criminal organization, but that it had committed crimes in the course of the war.

War crimes

Some of the war crimes of Wehrmacht included:

Invasion of Poland

See also: Częstochowa massacre

Wehrmacht units killed thousands of Polish civilians during the 1939 September campaign through executions and terror bombing of cities. After the end of hostilities, during the Wehrmacht's administration of Poland, which went on until October 25, 1939, 531 towns and villages were burned, and the Wehrmacht carried out 714 mass executions, alongside mass incidents of plunder, banditry and murder. Altogether, it is estimated that 16,376 Poles fell victim to those atrocities. Approximately 60% of these crimes were committed by the Wehrmacht. Wehrmacht soldiers frequently engaged in massacres of Jews on their own rather than just assist in rounding up Jews for the SS. In the summer of 1940, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo) noted that "compared to the crimes, robberies and excesses committed by the army (Wehrmacht), the SS and the police don't look all that bad".

Polish POWs

See also: Massacre in Ciepielów

Numerous examples exist in which Polish soldiers were killed after capture, for instance at Śladów where 252 POWs were shot or drowned, at Ciepielów where some 300 POWs were killed, and at Zambrów where a further 300 POWs were killed. Polish POWs of Jewish origin were routinely selected and shot on the spot. The prisoners of the POW camp in Żyrardów, captured after the Battle of the Bzura, were denied any food and starved for 10 days. In many cases Polish POWs, once captured, were burned alive. Units of the Polish 7th Infantry Division were massacred after being captured in several individual acts of revenge for their defence in combat. On September 11, Wehrmacht soldiers threw hand grenades into a school building where they kept Polish POWs.

Mass rapes

Rapes were committed by detached Wehrmacht soldiers. The OKW was aware of the problem and urged to preserve the army’s credit. A soldier, who committed a rape, was convicted to four years of prison. The German penal code was also valid for the soldiers in war.

Szymon Datner, Polish-Jewish communist and former partisan, asserted, thousands of Soviet female nurses, doctors and field medics fell victim to rape when captured during the war, and often had been murdered afterwards.

The Wehrmacht also ran brothels where women were forced to work. Ruth Seifert in War and Rape. Analytical Approaches writes: "in the Eastern territories the Wehrmacht used to brand the bodies of captured partisan women - and other women as well - with the words "Whore for Hitler's troops" and to use them accordingly."

Destruction of Warsaw

Further information: [[:Battle of Warsaw (1939) and Warsaw Uprising]]

Up to 13,000 soldiers and between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed by German-led forces during the Warsaw Uprising. At least 5,000 German regular soldiers assisted the SS to crush the Polish resistance, most of them as reserve units. Human shields were used by German forces during the fighting.

Battle of France

Vinkt massacre

Main article: Vinkt Massacre

Between May 25 and May 28, 1940, the German Wehrmacht committed several war crimes in and near the small Belgian village of Vinkt. Hostages were taken and used as human shields. As the Belgian army continued to resist, farms were searched and looted and more hostages taken. In all, 86 civilians are known to have been executed.

Commissar Order

The order cast the war against Russia as one of ideological and racial differences, and provided for the immediate liquidation of political commissars of the Red Army. The order stated that German soldiers guilty of violating international laws would be "excused". The order was formulated on Hitler's behalf by the Wehrmacht command and distributed to field commanders.

Barbarossa Decree

The decree, issued by Field Marshal Keitel a few weeks before Operation Barbarossa, exempted punishable offences committed by enemy civilians (in Russia) from the jurisdiction of military justice. Suspects were to be brought before an officer who would decide if they were to be shot. Prosecution of offenses against civilians by members of the Wehrmacht was decreed to be "not required" unless necessary for maintenance of discipline.

POW maltreatment

POW Camps

see also Prisoner of war and Geneva Convention (1929)

In 1929, the Third Geneva Convention (1929) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War had been signed by Germany and most other countries, while the USSR and Japan did not sign until after the war (final version of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949). This meant that Germany was obliged to treat all POWs according to it, while in turn, Germans captured by the Red Army could not expect to be treated in such a manner. In fact, the Soviet Union and the Empire of Japan did not treat prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

While the Wehrmacht's prisoner-of-war camps for prisoners from the west generally satisfied the humanitarian conditions prescribed by international law, prisoners from Poland (which never capitulated) and the USSR were incarcerated under significantly worse conditions. By December 1941, more than 2.4 million Soviet Red Army troops had been taken prisoner. These prisoners suffered from malnutrition and diseases like typhus that resulted from the Wehrmacht's failure to provide sufficient food, shelter, proper sanitation and medical care for the prisoners. Prisoners were regularly subject to torture, beatings and humiliation. Between the launching of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 and the following spring, 2.8 million of the 3.2 million prisoners taken died while in German hands. The German failure to attain their anticipated victory in the East led to significant shortages of labor for German war production and, beginning in 1942, prisoners of war in the eastern POW camps — primarily Soviets — were seen as a source of slave labor to keep Germany's wartime economy running.

A grand total of 5.7 million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner during the war, of whom at least 3.3 million (58 percent of the total) died in captivity.

Massacres

Killing of POWs by Wehrmacht soldiers started during the September 1939 campaign in Poland. In many cases large groups of Polish soldiers were murdered after capture. On 26 March 1944, 15 uniformed U.S. Army officers and men were shot without trial at La Spezia, Italy, under orders of the commander of German 75th Army Corps, General Anton Dostler, despite the opposition of his subordinates of the 135th Fortress Brigade. Hitler's Commando Order, issued in 1942, provided "justification" for the shooting of enemy commandos whether uniformed or not. After the war, Dostler was sentenced to death by an American military tribunal and executed by firing squad on December 1945. The massacres include that of at least 1500 black French POWs of West African origin and was preceded by propaganda depicting the Africans as savages. After the Italian armistice in 1943, Italian POWs were executed on several occasions when Italian troops resisted their forcible disarmament by the Germans. The massacre of the Acqui Division at Kefalonia is the most infamous.

Night and Fog Decree

The Night and Fog Decree, issued by Hitler in 1941 and disseminated along with a directive from Keitel, was operative within the conquered territories in the West (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands). The decree allowed those "endangering German security" to be seized and to make them disappear without a trace. Keitel's directive stated that "efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate."

Reprisal actions

See also: Partisan (military)

A German soldier in front of a sign erected after the razing of Kandanos, Crete 1941.

Murder of Greek civilians in Kondomari, Crete by German Paratroopers 1941

In Yugoslavia and Greece, many villages were razed and their inhabitants murdered during anti-partisan operations. Examples include the massacres of Kondomari, Distomo, Kommeno and Kalavryta, and the razing of Kandanos in Greece.

In occupied Poland and the USSR, hundreds of villages were wiped out and their inhabitants murdered. In the USSR, captured Soviet partisans and Jewish partisans were used to sweep fields of land mines.

In a number of occupied countries, the Wehrmacht's response to partisan attacks by resistance movements was to take and shoot hostages. As many as 100 hostages were murdered for every German killed. In 1944, prior to and after the invasion, the French Resistance and the Maquis increased their activities against all German organisations, including the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS.

In issuing orders for hostage-taking, Keitel stated that "it is important that these should include well-known personalities or members of their families." A Wehrmacht commander in France stated that "the better known the hostages to be shot, the greater will be the deterrent effect on the perpetrators." Author William Shirer stated that over 30,000 hostages are believed to have been executed in the West alone. The Wehrmacht's hostage policy was also pursued in Greece, Yugoslavia, Scandinavia, and Poland.

Postwar views

Upon the end of the war in 1945, several Wehrmacht generals made a statement that defended the actions against partisans, executions of hostages, and the use of slave laborers as necessary to war effort. The generals contended that the Holocaust was committed by the SS and its partner organizations, and that the Wehrmacht command had been unaware of these actions in the death camps. This statement said that the armed forces had fought honorably and left the impression that the Wehrmacht had not committed war crimes and was "unblemished".

However, a number of high Wehrmacht officers stood trial for war crimes. OKW commander-in-chief Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and chief of operations staff Alfred Jodl were indicted and tried for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. Both were convicted of all charges, sentenced to death and executed by hanging, although Jodl was acquitted post-mortem six years after. While the tribunal declared that the Gestapo, SD and SS (including the Waffen-SS) were inherently criminal organizations, the court did not reach the same conclusion with respect to the Wehrmacht General Staff and High Command.

The prosecution of war crimes lost steam during the 1950s as the Cold War deepened; both German states needed to establish armed forces, and could not do so without trained soldiers and officers that had served in the Wehrmacht. Cold War priorities and taboos about revisiting the most unpleasant aspects of World War II meant that the Wehrmacht's role in war crimes was not seriously re-examined until the early 1980s.

Wehrmachtsausstellung

Main article: Wehrmachtsausstellung

Original exhibition, 1995–1999

The view of the "unblemished" Wehrmacht was challenged by an exhibition produced by the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hamburg Institute for Social Research)[2] titled Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 ("War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944"). The traveling exhibition, seen by an estimated 1.2 million visitors over the last decade, asserted with the support of written documents and photographs that the Wehrmacht was "involved in planning and implementing a war of annihilation against Jews, prisoners of war, and the civilian population". Historian Hannes Heer and Gerd Hankel had prepared it. The exhibit became controversial and required major changes when it was found that many of the allegations made were inaccurate and that the photographs did not in fact document what was alleged.

Criticism

After criticisms about incorrect attribution and captioning of some of the images in the exhibition, e.g. by Polish historian Bogdan Musial and Hungarian historian Krisztián Ungváry, the head and founder of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Jan Philipp Reemtsma, suspended the display pending review of its content by a committee of historians. In 1999, the institute transferred the exhibition to a "Trägerverein". Hannes Heer resigned from his post as "Leiter", and in 2000 he resigned from the institute as well. Reports had surfaced about his extreme left wing past during which he had been sentenced several times.

The committee's report [3] in 2000 stated that accusations of forged materials were not justified, but that some of the exhibit's documentation had inaccuracies and that the arguments presented were too sweeping. Even so, the committee reaffirmed the reliability of the exhibition in general:

The fundamental statements made in the exhibition about the Wehrmacht and the war of annihilation in 'the east' are correct. It is indisputable that, in the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht not only 'entangled' itself in genocide perpetrated against the Jewish population, in crimes perpetrated against Soviet POWs, and in the fight against the civilian population, but in fact participated in these crimes, playing at times a supporting, at times a leading role. These were not isolated cases of 'abuse' or 'excesses'; they were activities based on decisions reached by top level military leaders or troop leaders on or behind the front lines.

The committee recommended that the exhibition be reopened in revised form, presenting the material and, as far as possible, leaving the formation of conclusions to the exhibition's viewers.

Revised exhibition, 2001–2004

The revised exhibition was now named Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1944.("Crimes of the German Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation 1941-1944").. It focuses on Public international law and travelled from 2001 to 2004. Since then, it has permanently been at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

Movie

The documentary Der unbekannte Soldat ("The Unknown Soldier") by Michael Verhoeven was in cinemas from August 2006, and has been available on DVD since February 2007. It compares the two versions of the exhibitions, and brings out the background of its maker Jan Philipp Reemtsma, heir of the Reemtsma tobacco company which had held a reported 60% market share in Nazi Germany.

Exhibition about Wehrmacht in Poland 1939

One criticism was that both exhibitions only covered the German presence in the Soviet Union in the years 1941-1945 and excluded the German occupation of Poland after September 1939. The Polish exhibition "Größte Härte ... Verbrechen der Wehrmacht in Polen September/Oktober 1939", a cooperative effort of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Warsaw, was presented on 1 September 2004 in Poland, and in 2005 in a German version ([4] [5]). It was scheduled to be shown in Nuremberg at the Documentation Center of the Nazi Party Rallying Grounds from 1 September 2007 to early 2008. [6]

Analysis of photos and letters

German soldiers photographing the hanging of a Soviet partisan.

The attitude of German soldiers towards atrocities committed on Jews and Poles in WW2 was also studied using photos and correspondence left after the war.

Photos serve as a valuable source of knowledge, as taking them and making albums about the persecution of Jews was a popular custom among German soldiers. These photos are not official propaganda of the German state and represent personal experience. Their overall attitude is antisemitic. German soldiers as well as police members took pictures of Jewish deportations, executions, humiliation, and the abuse to which they were subjected. According to researchers photographs indicate the consent of the photographers to the abuses and murders committed. "This consent is the result of several factors, including the antisemitic ideology and prolonged, intensive indoctrination." Archival evidence as to the reaction to policies of racial extermination can also be traced in various letters that remained after the war. Many letters from Wehrmacht soldiers were published in 1941 and entitled "German Soldiers See the Soviet Union"; this publication includes authentic letters from soldiers on the Eastern front. To give an example of the intensive indoctrination "that transcends the mere results of military service" researchers Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel quote a German soldier writing:

"The German people is deeply indebted to the Fuehrer, because if these animals, our enemies here, had reached Germany, murders of a nature not yet witnessed in the world would have occurred.... No newspaper can describe what we have seen. It verges on the unbelievable, and even the Middle Ages do not compare with what has transpired here. Reading Der Stuermer and observing its photos give only a limited impression of what we have seen here and of the crimes committed here by the Jews."

Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel state that this type of writing and opinion was very common in correspondence left by German soldiers, especially on the Eastern Front.

Another sample are German soldiers' letters that were sent home and copied during the war by special Polish Home Army cell that infiltrated the German postal system. Those letters have been analyzed by historians and the picture they paint is similar to views expressed by Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel. Many soldiers wrote openly about extermination of Jews and were proud of it. Support for "untermensch" and "master race" concepts were also part of the attitude expressed by German soldiers. Presented examples reflecting this trend include samples such as: "I'm one of those who are decreasing number of partisans. I put them against the wall and everyone gets a bullet in his head, very merry and interesting job", "My point of view: this nation deserves only the knaut, only by it they can be educated; a part of them already experienced that; others still try to resist. Yesterday I had possibility to see 40 partisants, something like that I had never encountered before. I became convinced that we are the masters, others are untermenschen.".

Much more evidence of such trends and thoughts among Wehrmacht soldiers exists and is subject to research by historians.

In conclusion the historians responsible for the exhibition assume that the antisemitic climate and propaganda in Nazi Germany had an immense impact on the entire population and emphasize the importance of the indoctrination.

See also

• Command responsibility
• German war crimes
• Holocaust
• Holocaust denial
• Allied war crimes during World War II
• Hunger Plan
• Concentration camps
• Wehrmachtsausstellung
• Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs
• Japanese war crimes

References

• Davies, Norman (2006). Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory. London: Pan Books. ISBN 9780330352123.
• Evans, Richard J. (2008). The Third Reich at War. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 9780713997422.
• Fritz, Stephen G. (1997). Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-0943-4.
• Heer, Hannes (ed.) (1995). Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944 (War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht). Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS Verlag. ISBN 3-930908-04-2. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |other= ignored (|others= suggested) (help)
• Rossino, Alexander B. (2005). Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity. Modern War Studies. ISBN 0-7006-1392-7.
• Scheck, Raffael (2006). Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940. ISBN 0-521-85799-6.
• Wheeler-Bennett, Sir John (2005). The Nemesis of Power: German Army in Politics, 1918-1945. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

External links

• Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat