Hitler's Bandit Hunters (27 page)

Military necessity does not admit of cruelty—that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the wanton devastation of a district. It admits of deception, but disclaims acts of perfidy; and in general, military necessity does not include any act of hostility, which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult.
⁹¹

In 1944, following the spate of escape, the Germans issued new regulations for the treatment of POWs, which were posted to all camps. The regulations opened, “escaping from prison camps has ceased to be a sport.” It confirmed that Germany maintained the Geneva Convention but stated that because “England has besides fighting in an honest manner instituted an illegal warfare in non combat zones in the form of gangster commandos, terror bandits, and sabotage troops, even up to the frontiers of Germany.” The statement alluded to the existence of the German handbook for modern irregular warfare, which had two purposes: first, to combat gangsterism and, second, to create strictly forbidden zones, called death zones in which all unauthorized trespassers will be immediately shot on the spot.”
⁹²
This is positive evidence that Bandenbekämpfung regulations had been adapted to determine Hitler’s war and the criminal interpretation of the Geneva Convention.

In his June 1943 Bandenbekämpfung order, Himmler announced the existence of the “combating-bandits formations” (
Bandenkampfverbände
) and the office of the chief of combating-bandits formations (
Chef der Bandenkampfverbände
). This was the final stage in turning Bandenbekämpfung into an operational concept. Christopher Bellamy identified three elements within the operational concept: the moral element that motivates the troops to fight; the physical element, concerned with armies and their logistics; and the conceptual element, the force driving the other two.
¹
The physical element of Bandenbekämpfung was the Bandenkampfverbände, with troops from the army, navy, air force, SS-Police, and Waffen-SS, and auxiliaries assigned to security operations for unspecified periods of duty. The moral element of Bandenbekämpfung was personified in Bach-Zelewski, whom Hitler and Himmler believed was their perfect appointment. The third element, the motivation of the troops, came not only from Hitler and Himmler as ideologues or Bach-Zelewski as their commander, but also from the socializing effect of being part of a highly organized and dynamic system. In this sense, the Bandenkampfverbände was a unique idea.

The four components within the Bandenkampfverbände were a commitment to information warfare, central control and coordination of security, the proactive management of troops through the orders of battle, and the command task of molding the troops to reach a common performance standard. As Chef der Bandenkampfverbände, Bach-Zelewski was tasked with regime-wide promotion of Bandenbekämpfung through the projection of positive results, the command of the Bandenkampfverbände across a variety of conflict situations, and the ensurance of consistent performances from the troops.
²
His fitness for command was decided by Himmler; however, a general observation of his character fails to isolate any superior qualities. Bach-Zelewski was an intelligent man, a Junker, a political opportunist, and a self-confessed serial killer. Bach-Zelewski’s military skills were biased toward the infantry, and as a Great War soldier, he was awarded medals associated with heroism and courageous deeds. He was an exponent of modern warfare, security actions, resettlement programs, and mass killing. In addition, he held a close personal relationship with many senior officers of the German army high command; they trusted him. Bach-Zelewski was riddled with self-doubt, including a range of phobias that manifested themselves in his bowel condition. Bach-Zelewski’s tasks were onerous. They involved harnessing Bandenbekämpfung doctrine to the existing limits of war leadership (
Kriegsführung
), the conduct of operations (
Kampfführung
), and the formulation of fighting style (
Kampfweise
). He was also responsible for discipline, with powers greater than a typical divisional or corps commander, and the publication of the official Bandenbekämpfung regulations issued by the OKW (1944).
³
Understanding Bach-Zelewski and the Bandenkampfverbände, therefore, are the keys to realizing how important Bandenbekämpfung became as the final manifestation of Germany’s concept of security warfare.

In November 1945, Bach-Zelewski revealed under interrogation that his authority shaped his job as Chef der Sonderverbände. This was, he suggested, a central reporting agency designated to as “Extraordinary Battle Area” (
Sonderkampfgebiet
). He explained that his powers only extended into being an inspector and that he was without executive powers to counsel the commanders. The one exception, which he did not clarify, was the large-scale Operation “Heinrich” for which he was the commander. In an earlier interrogation, on October 24, he boasted that his staff received upward of fifteen thousand reports daily from across Europe and added, “I think we had three to four hundred thousand soldiers for the fighting of partisans.” He explained that agents acquired information from among civilian communities and passed it to the security police. The information service existed in all regions and departments. His intelligence officers were responsible for the collection of this information assisted by the HSSPFs who maintained a system of situation maps. The General Quartermaster was the distribution bureau that transformed the data into operational situation reports.
⁴
These reports were then passed on a daily basis to Hitler.
⁵
In 1945, the allied interrogators more than likely misunderstood this testimony. First, the interrogators had little understanding of the internal workings of the German staff system. Second, the Allies had little appreciation of the direction, administration, and practice of Bandenbekämpfung. Third, they could not grasp the strategic importance of Bandenbekämpfung to the German war effort. Martin van Creveld has
explained that command has two primary purposes: to arrange and coordinate the needs of the army and to carry out the mission of causing the maximum amount of death and destruction on the enemy. However, in terms of non-conventional warfare, he was obliged to accept some “modification” where the “purely military factors are less important than psychological and political ones.”
⁶
Thus, the Bandenkampfverbände was an exceptional form of information warfare and the driving force of an asset-stripping strategy that encompassed extermination and enslavement.

The German staff system was in a state of constant change and reorganization in the period 1939–45. Geyer’s warning of specialization had turned the staff into a regime within the regime. The intelligence services were bloated with bureaucracy and subject to an institutional tug-of-war between the Wehrmacht and SS. The numerous rationalizations examined by the Allies after the war led to the conclusion that it was a ramshackle organization of many “bolted-on” parts. The German army’s operations were dominated by cartography. Military cartographers produced a constant flow of maps for every conceivable situation, on a daily basis, sometimes up to four or five times per day. The maps contained details of enemy movements, their order of battle, their reserves, the rapidly changing probing attacks, the development of an offensive, and so forth. Cartographers wrote this data onto maps by hand and then printed the maps for distribution to commanders, including Hitler. After the war, many senior generals comically portrayed Hitler poring over these maps identifying imaginary armies and breakthroughs. The data for the maps came through the long chain of intelligence officers, from the battalion level up to the OKW. Today a laptop computer could scroll through maps and details in minutes, if not seconds; in the 1940s, the Germans used maps of 1 to 100,000-scale, 1 to 200,000-scale, and 1 to 300,000-scale; many were in large format, several square meters. To maximize the flow of information, the staff updated a card-index system, with the cards marked to correspond to map grid-references. In an effort to understand the German concept of intelligence, the Allies made a critical analysis but came up against stonewall testimony as to the role and influence of the intelligence officer. If they had looked harder, they might have discovered that the intelligence services shaped the German command’s perception of the war.
⁷

In 1942, Franz Halder the chief of the Army General Staff introduced two initiatives that had a great bearing on Bandenbekämpfung. One involved acquiring tactical intelligence (
Aufklärung
). The origin of this idea, as far as one can tell, came from German sport hunting techniques, in which small groups of hunters worked in teams to track down and kill game. This idea effectively combined armed reconnaissance with intelligence-gathering tasks. There were two sections to the Jagdkommando order. The first recommended
the composition of the Jagdkommando units. All formations in areas threatened by partisans were to raise a Jagdkommando. The typical group included one officer and four troopers. Each group was expected to include a civilian scout, proven in security work. They were armed to inflict a firefight on the partisans. The second section covered the guidelines for Jagdkommandos (
Richtlinien für Jagdkommandos
). The Jagdkommandos were ordered to move only at night, to avoid detection. Upon reaching the “combat” area, they were to emulate the fighting style (
Kampfweise
) of the partisans, scouting and laying traps. The Jagdkommandos adopted “cunning,” were led by capable officers initiating ruses (
Kriegslist anwenden
), and were warned to be patient and to await the enemy. In the event of facing superior force, they were advised to signal their senior command and await the arrival of reinforcements. The Jagdkommando served as both an immediate and aggressive reaction to the bands, as well as gathering intelligence. They were particularly suited for reconnaissance-in-force (
gewaltsame Aufklärung
). The presence of Jagdkom-mandos was meant to prevent the bands from resting and was regarded as crucial for maintaining a “bandit-free area” (
bandenfreies Vorfeld
). Each Jagdkommando patrol could last several weeks and range within a twenty-kilometer radius. Halder reiterated in his order that membership of the Jagdkommando was recognized as a “distinction.”
⁸

The other Halder initiative involved reorganizing Eastern Front military intelligence and involved the Foreign Armies East Department (
Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost
, FHO). In April 1942, Halder promoted Oberst Reinhard Gehlen to command the FHO, making this an independent department and allowing certain freedom of reporting and information collection. The FHO took on the capability of making long-term strategic predictions.
⁹
Gehlen instigated a bureaucratic process that amassed volumes of data. He remained at his post until the end of the war because he proved highly suited to the changing politics of the war. His late war reports monitored the movements of “bandits” and Jews and were distributed to Hitler and the SS.
¹⁰
Post-interrogation studies accumulated by the allied powers show a high degree of German officers’ denial over Bandenbekämpfung balanced against an excruciatingly detailed knowledge of how the system worked. Gehlen’s memoirs did not include any reference to the monitoring of Jewish bands in the east.
¹¹

The German army’s Intelligence Referat (Ib) was responsible for tracking “bandits” and was under Gehlen’s command. This section began by tracking the movements of Soviet partisans, but later this responsibility was expanded to include monitoring all Eastern European resistance. The Referat issued a daily “bandit” situation report based on information from the GFP, signals, and the host of intelligence officers. Its mission was to identify the direction of “bandit activity” (
Bandenschwerpunkte
). It maintained a manual filing system recording the movements of each band, its command chain, its fighting style, its organization, and the extent of its activity. The Referat then
created a map of known “bandit activity” (
Karte des Bandeneinsatzes).
¹²
The process of mapping was linked to the individual field intelligence officers who worked on 1 to 300,000-scale maps. This level of mapping recorded two forms of information: The first was “bandit” activity, recording positions, camps, command points, landing fields, airfields, the positions of security troops, and the identification of protected convoys. Second, a monthly “bandit” situation map recorded attacks on railways, troops, and civilians; looting; cases of sabotage; and potential threat level. Maps also included levels of loyalty that could be expected from an area so that the appropriate level of security could be applied. Finally, all the situation maps were consolidated into large strategic maps that included industry, populations, reserves, economies, and social reliability. Once a map was redundant, it was destroyed.
¹³
In 1944, the army intelligence service organized an intelligence instruction course (
Lehrgang
) in Posen. In eighteen days, the intelligence candidates received instruction on every aspect of the war. On April 14, 1944, their day involved studying the role of the intelligence officer in what the Allies translated as “partisan warfare.” The “bandit” session was compartmentalized to the strategic direction of the war.
¹⁴
This demonstrates that the Germans could, and did, accumulate a large level of information ranging from community loyalty assessment down to economic or book values of property holders. It points toward the main thrust of Bandenbekämpfung, not as a counter-response to partisan incursions, as so often depicted, but as a planned program of asset-stripping security warfare operations. The information available to the commanders and the troops enabled the Germans to precisely pick their targets and conduct operations with the maximum amount of preparation.