Hitler's Bandit Hunters (57 page)

Just as the accordion-like German occupation system extended with victory, so too it contracted with collapse. The British began to scent a general collapse as early as November 1944 when they noted that German refugees were, in fact, ethnic Germans trying to escape partisan vengeance.
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In Hungary the situation around Budapest deteriorated rapidly. The Waffen-SS took command of the city under Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, commander of IX SS Corps, no longer responsible for SS-Police colonial affairs. The IX SS Corps included the 8th SS-Cavalry Division Florian Geyer, the last incarnation of the SS-Cavalry Brigade. On December 21, two hundred German parachutists landed in the Hunyadi district, behind Russian lines, in an attempt to conduct sabotage and political warfare and stall the advance of the Red Army. Winkelmann requested Jüttner to hand their control over to the RSHA and to form an SS-Jagdverband.
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The city was surrounded by the Red Army and a state of siege announced by the Schutzpolizei on December 27. The SS garrison surrendered on February 11, 1945. Felix Steiner, a former senior Waffen-SS officer, praised Pfeffer-Wildenbruch’s performance for his tenacious “6th Army-like,” Stalingrad-style defense of the city.
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Collapse left a surfeit of redundant headquarters units. From August 1944 onward, all across Europe, staff formations mass migrated to the safety of the Reich.
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The final weeks saw Himmler’s police command system fracture into a north-south divide with Wünnenberg in overall command in Berlin.
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They became the Chef der Ordnungspolizei Nord (Flensburg) and the Chef der Ordnungspolizei Süd (Tyrol) and continued to operate for weeks after the war.
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As late as February 1945, Carinthia was declared a Bandenkampfgebiet. Along with other band-infested areas of the region, the SS began to wage Bandenbekämpfung inside Austrian borders.
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In March, Gehlen issued his last official “bandit situation reports.” This covered the period
November 1944 to February 1945; it presented a broad picture of partisan incursions joining the advancing allied armies. Gehlen identified Polish, Czech, Croat, Slovak, and Russian “bandits” flocking to the fronts. He continued to categorize nationalist and Communist bands and made the usual derogatory remarks about Jewish bands and their tendency for intensified criminality.
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The British monitored 10th SS-Police Regiment, SS-Police Regiment Bozen, an Italian volunteer police battalion, and 12th SS-Police Regiment, all in action against Italian partisans. Rösener and Globocnik had formed a Bandenstab, in Prevalko, to stabilize operations in Istria. Rösener received a message from the 4th Section Signals Interception Detachment, warning that Tito had declared a general mobilization of the Save district.
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On April 6, Rösener reported that German armed forces were mutinying and requested assistance in preventing arms from reaching the partisans. Later, Rösener reported that he had introduced the training of five Wehrwolf detachments.
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In the last days of the Nazi regime, there were outbreaks of open opposition to Hitler stirred by the absence of armed authority.
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In March 1945, Ritter von Epp attempted to make contact with OSS agents offering to negotiate with the German army in the south to end all fighting.
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In April, the Bavarian liberation movement (
Freiheitsaktion Bayern
) surfaced. The rebels declared a “pheasant hunt” (
Fasanenjagd
) of Nazi officials.
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They approached Epp to endorse their uprising; he equivocated. German security forces swiftly crushed the insurrection. Through denunciation, arrest, and the threat of execution, they defeated the rebels. A drumhead court-martial, convened by the commandant of Munich, imposed death sentences against Count Rittberg, a staff officer from Army Group South, and Major Caracciola, the Wehrmacht liaison officer assigned to Epp, who coincidently was the rebel leader. In the end, Epp proved his true character by surrendering quietly to the Americans. The SS continued to execute civilians, including a vicar and a teacher, for hoisting the blue and white flag of Bavaria above the church tower of Götting.
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They imposed their authority over Münstertal (Baden), on April 15–20, when the SS-Jagdverbände-Süd executed two deserters and a priest for making insulting and inflammatory remarks about the deteriorating military situation.
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On April 10, Skorzeny took himself off to Vienna, to rescue his family. His memoirs referred to crossing the Floridsdorf Bridge in Vienna and forcing a sergeant in the army to surrender a truck full of furniture to nobly carry German wounded.
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British intercepts indicate that he sent a signal ordering the execution of three officers he personally judged traitors. The men were hanged from the same Floridsdorf Bridge, but this episode was not mentioned in his memoirs, nor was the fact that the bridge served to affect his escape.
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Skorzeny also failed to comment that he remained with Kaltenbrunner to the end. He planned, if Hoettl is to be believed, to become the general of Nazi resistance; Kaltenbrunner called him “the partisan Napoleon.”
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On April 22, Ernst Rode was requested to attend a meeting with Kaltenbrunner in Aigen,
near Salzburg. During the meeting, it came to light that Karl Wolff was about to surrender in Italy. Peter Black noted that Kaltenbrunner had stumbled over Wolff’s secret because he himself had tried to make contact with the OSS.
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The discussion, however, turned on Austria. Berger, in communication to the meeting from Munich, claimed parallel authority with Kaltenbrunner and control of southern Germany. Rode reputedly told both Berger and Kaltenbrunner that their authorities were worthless and sent a message of that effect to Himmler. He then took it on himself to deliver Himmler’s train to the OKW south for use as a mobile headquarters.
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With the SS operational headquarters safely ensconced in Augsburg, the SS-Police commands divided, and all out of reach of the Red Army, the SS began their final acts of betrayal and self-protection. In Berlin, Fegelein absented himself from Hitler’s bunker on April 27, 1945. He was found in civilian clothing; Hitler ordered his execution for cowardice.
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Two days later, the BBC announced that Himmler had attempted to negotiate a separate peace.
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Himmler later excused his betrayal on the grounds that “Hitler was insane. It should have been stopped long ago.”
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To many across Europe, the war ended on May 8; this was not the case in southern Europe. Wolff surrendered the SS-Police forces to the Allies on May 2, 1945. Ordered not to pass weapons to Italian partisans by Field Marshal Alexander, he proved the exception.
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Delaying actions offered precious hours for German soldiers, civilians, and collaborators to escape partisan gun law. The SS-Division Galician marched into British captivity on May 10, 1945, in Austria.
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The Bosnian Handschar Division disintegrated; some went home, others stayed with their German officers and tried to effect capture by the Anglo-Americans. Some were set upon by Austrian freedom fighters or Tito’s partisans. The rump surrendered to the British on May 15.
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The Prinz Eugen Division, fighting the partisans on May 6, desperately tried to escape toward Austria. Caught up among the masses of frightened refugees and fleeing remnants of German forces, it continued rearguard actions until May 15. In a surreal world of chaos and collapse, collective memories of this time include final farewell parades by unit commanders and vicious firefights with partisans. The remnants eventually surrendered along with one hundred fifty thousand German troops taken into captivity by Tito’s partisans.
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On May 12, Kaltenbrunner was located in hiding and arrested by the U.S. Army. Fear had kept the fighting in effect until May 15, 1945, when Rösener and the Bandenstab Laibach finally surrendered. For all of Rösener’s failings, his forces were the last of the Bandenkampfverbände to lay down their arms. On May 18, Skorzeny surrendered to the U.S. Army in Styria. On May 23, Himmler committed suicide in Schleswig-Holstein; Prützmann had a few days earlier; both did so while in British captivity. Globocnik fled to Carinthia and, on May 31, was cornered by British troops; he also chose suicide.
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To the great relief of the rest of the world, it was over.

The history of Bandenbekämpfung did not end with Erwin Rösener’s surrender on May 15, 1945. The Allies were determined to judge Nazi war crimes, avoiding the sham of the 1921 Leipzig trials.
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Nuremberg became a world stage, the test whether international law could be made to work. The Allies arrived in Nuremberg with different agendas. The Soviet Union, obviously used to political show trials, plodded through Nuremberg as the Grand Alliance disintegrated into Cold War rivalries. Inside their occupation zone, the Soviets imposed massive reparations and a vigorous denazification program.
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The British, contrary to received opinion, prosecuted an active program of investigation and justice. They were hindered at first by having to dismantle the temporary pseudo-Nazi local governments introduced by American civil affairs teams in areas designated for British administration.
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They also administered the region with the greatest industrial capacity and the largest numbers of former foreign laborers, suitably relabeled displaced persons (DPs), and were in a race against the onset of winter to build adequate food stores. The British arrived in Nuremberg as the standard-bearers of the fight against Nazism but were suffering under the pressures of a national decline. American occupation authorities descended on Germany, marketing democracy as a viable political alternative. They had administered a contradictory policy of destroying the Nazi system and replacing it with institutions managed and administered by former Nazis. Parallel to official policy, the U.S. Army, the State Department, and a host of other organizations dispatched teams of competing scavenger investigators with contradictory agendas. Some targeted advanced technology reparations, while others gathered together former German generals into the Foreign Military Studies Program.
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The American prosecutors came to Nuremberg imbued with grandiose ambitions to dispense
liberal justice. Newly liberated countries like Poland and France were only allocated minor bit parts in the main event. German defendants arrived bewildered but determined to formulate an effective defense strategy. The senior officers of Bandenbekämpfung treated Nuremberg as the final bitter battle.

In 1998, a German police official published an article that accused the allied administration of a lack of due diligence in the pursuit of justice against Bandenbekämpfung. He blamed the Allies for not bringing Bach-Zelewski et al. to book. Wolfgang Kahl criticized the Allies for allowing Bandenbekämpfung to be treated as antipartisan warfare and consequently as a reasonable legal defense. The Nuremberg court, he noted, had agreed to the literal transcription-translation of Bandenbekämpfung as Partisanenbekämpfung. Kahl recognized that the German defendants had a common interest in propagating the milder interpretation. This manipulation of terminology was, in Kahl’s opinion, the willful avoidance of justice.
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His criticism of Nuremberg ignored some of the facts. In 1946, Nuremberg passed judgment on the SS, declaring it an illegal organization and

Under the guise of combating partisan units, units of the SS exterminated Jews and people deemed politically undesirable by the SS, and their reports record the execution of enormous numbers of persons. Waffen SS divisions were responsible for many massacres and atrocities in occupied territories such as the massacres at Oradour and Lidice.
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The origins of Kahl’s views lie in what Norbert Frei has called the “policy for the past” postured under the first West German government of Konrad Adenauer. This was the symbolic break from the Nazi past and the period of post-war allied occupation. Germany’s new beginning came at the cost of disengagement with the past.
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West Germany adopted the legal principles that safeguarded everyone’s civic rights, circumvented the Nuremberg judgements as victor’s justice, and allowed mass murderers to conduct their lives unmolested by law. This made trials of Nazis and SS war criminals a curious hit-and-miss affair.
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A judicial review of the term Partisanenbekämpfung, carried out by the federal legal service in 1967, made any corrective judgement of Bandenbekämpfung virtually impossible.
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In this chapter, we examine how the fallacy of antipartisan warfare expunged the record of Bandenbekämpfung. The post-war period was inundated with evidence purposefully constructed to ensure the plausible deniability of crimes. This was not a story of the big lie, but the massaging of half-truths and half-lies into plausible explanations. The written history remains littered with their examples. Questions will remain as to why Bandenbekämpfung was not tried at Nuremberg and why it was allowed to become a platform for the process of denial. Perhaps a simple answer
to the hurdle of serving justice against men like Bach-Zelewski was the fear they stirred long after the war.

The story of the last six months of the war has been the product of incomplete records, unreliable testimony, and dubious literature. These
final days
, as a media theme, have plummeted the depths of wild speculation, most dreamt up by the SS to further stir rumor and exaggeration. The end of Bach-Zelewski’s war began with the conclusion of his mission in Budapest, which was followed by a brief period of leave. He was recalled to duty in November 1944. Himmler had become commander of Army Group Upper Rhine, and he placed Bach-Zelewski in command of XIV SS Corps. The staff of the Ch.BKV remained with him. The corps of twelve thousand men, supplied with captured Russian guns and the same siege artillery used to destroy Warsaw, was emplaced in defensive positions around Baden Baden in southwestern Germany. There were several familiar formations including the 2nd SS-Police Regiment with a heavy artillery company, one battalion of border guards and cadets from the Police School Ettlingen. On January 4, 1945, the corps joined Operation “Nordwind,” the final southern flank attack of Hitler’s Ardennes offensive. After momentary surprise successes, the corps retreated under heavy U.S. counter-attacks.
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