Hitler's Bandit Hunters (58 page)

In the impending doom, Himmler transferred east to take command of Army Group Vistula, with Heinz Lammerding as his COS. This army group was positioned around Falkenburg in Pomerania. The army group deployed two corps, XVI SS Corps commanded by Heinz Reinefarth based in Küstrin and Bach-Zelewski’s X SS Corps assembled around Deutsch Krone. The staffs for the headquarters of X SS Corps came from the Ch.BKV and were under Oberst der Schutzpolizei Gölz.
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The corps was forced out of Schneidemühl by superior Red Army forces and then formed a series of oblique defensive positions with northern and western wings. On February 8–9, the corps suffered severely under attacks from the 1st Polish Army, which breached the defenses of the northern wing. The Germans were routed, and the front was only restored by the intervention of small combat teams from the army. Bach-Zelewski faced charges for breaching Hitler’s “no retreat” order, and Himmler forced him to explain in an official report. Bach-Zelewski blamed his troops for withdrawing without orders. His only solution was that the army should assume field command. He also stated that in the ensuing chaos, the soldiers in Deutsch Krone had been unexpectedly relieved. In a thinly veiled reference to Himmler’s poor leadership, he added that the army had pressed him to return the corps to its original positions, but the retreat of the army group (Himmler) made that impossible. These lame excuses marked the passing of their partnership.
¹²

In March 1944, after commanding operations in the Kovel area, Bach-Zelewski was again afflicted with bowel problems. Medical examination failed
to confirm a return of his complaint, but by then, Bach-Zelewski had been spirited away from the threat of Soviet encirclement. Correspondence between Bach-Zelewski and Himmler at that time indicated a close bond. Himmler’s first message was handed to Bach-Zelewski en route to the hospital: “My dear Bach, I am glad you are in Lublin. After your heavy fighting in Kovel, I await your trip to Karlsbad.”
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Twelve days later, Bach-Zelewski received a letter from Rode. “More than anything,” he wrote, “it was a joy that you are on the way to reconstitution. RFSS was also happy about it, he is still concerned about your well-being. He wants to hear the news about you all the time. For the duration of your absence, RFSS has taken command again as Ch.BKV, is there a better solution?” Two days later Rode wrote again: “he [Himmler] is very concerned for you…. The RFSS only did this [temporarily assume command] one time before, after Heydrich’s death, while he organized the SD. This is a friendly hint of its importance.”
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In April, Himmler wrote to Bach-Zelewski in the hospital: “I want to heartily thank you for your letter…. I am happy you are returned to health…. I no longer want you terrorising the doctors but that you will be fully cured.” He advised Bach-Zelewski that “to terminate the cure fourteen days early makes no sense at all. I call upon your intelligence and obedience, and expect you around 15 May and not before.” Himmler signed,
Your loyal Heinrich
, very different from his usual style.
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Breaking with Himmler in the final weeks proved easier than escaping from Hitler’s grasp. After the war, one observer noted that Hitler thought well of him. “That Bach-Zelewski is a clever chap,” Hitler said. “When we had a job breaking down Communist resistance somewhere I would bring him alone and he would put it across them!”
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Bach-Zelewski remained true to Hitler, although in January 1942, in his unhinged drug-induced condition, he recorded certain gossip that at the height of the crisis “he [Hitler] spent his New Year’s Eve alone in his winter garden until four in the morning.”
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Later in a diary entry, there is a copy of a letter he had couriered to his wife. It was entitled “The unknown God” (
Dem unbekannten Gott!
). “What is true and untrue— loyalty to Adolf Hitler and as an officer I accept my fate, having taken god’s way…. I beg for the life of Adolf Hitler and victory for the nation,” Bach-Zelewski wrote. Of Himmler, he wrote, “grant me merciful salvation, strength and power never to be afraid of the intrigues of the RFSS; and that I am not afraid.”
¹⁸
These were strange sentiments for his political benefactor and the godfather of his children and his commanding officer. Allegedly, Hitler told Keitel in the last days that “if Bach-Zelewski was here, I would be entirely at ease. He would scrape up prisoners of war, convicts, everything.”
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On February 17, Hitler transferred Bach-Zelewski to command of the Oder Corps, in positions south of Stettin, around Schwedt-on-the-Oder. The corps was made up of stragglers, dregs, and the 1st Naval Division of the Kriegsmarine. Bach-Zelewski was reunited with Skorzeny and the remnants of the SS-Jagdverbände. Remarkably, the corps, strengthened by the presence of
the 3rd Panzer Army, briefly stalled vigorous Red Army attacks across the River Oder. On April 16, Hitler addressed his final Directive 74 to the soldiers on the Eastern Front. He warned that the deadly Jewish-Bolshevik enemy was determined to destroy Germany and exterminate the German people. In this final fight to the death, he extolled the troops to stand firm as a sworn brotherhood and force the enemy to bleed to death at the gates of Berlin.
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Nine days later, the Oder front collapsed, and Bach-Zelewski and Skorzeny went their separate ways. Bach-Zelewski was finally apprehended by the U.S. Army, in Sonthofen, on the Austrian–Italian border, on August 1, 1945.

Following incarceration, Bach-Zelewski was interrogated, and a preliminary report recorded,

He is an ardent disciple of Hitler and the Nazi doctrine. He is quite anxious to relate his role on the Eastern Front, taking great pains to point out his alleged fair treatment of Poles, Russians and Jews.
²¹

After an initial period of investigation and negotiation, the decision was taken to use Bach-Zelewski as a witness for the allied prosecution. The U.S. prosecutor, Brig. Telford Taylor, and the British investigator, Squadron Leader Peter Calvocoressi, concluded that Bach-Zelewski could testify against the leading Nazis. In the face of opposition from colleagues, Taylor was forced to seek approval from Robert Jackson, the U.S. chief prosecutor, and it was granted.
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For several months, Bach-Zelewski underwent intensive interrogation to strengthen his evidence prior to entering the courtroom. The shock for the defendants when he entered the courtroom, in January 1946, was one of the defining moments of the trial. The feeling of the defendants was summed up by Göring, who called Bach-Zelewski a swine. The impact not only affected the defendants. One judge thought the neatly dressed man was little more threatening than “a mild and rather serious accountant.”
²³
Most observers were unable to associate this pathetic character with heinous crimes.

The adoption of Bach-Zelewski as an expert witness begs several questions. The first concerned whether he was a genuine turncoat, a coerced stool pigeon, or if instead he gave testimony for the prosecution in a ploy to avoid the law and extradition to the Soviets. The other question was of the value and reliability of his evidence, which is discussed later. The allied prosecutors, and in particular Taylor, had been on the distribution list of British decodes of German police signals. Taylor was fully cogent with Bach-Zelewski’s pivotal role in security warfare and the Holocaust.
²⁴
Bach-Zelewski was generally known as the commander of Bandenbekämpfung and had been publicly denounced as a war criminal by the BBC. Bach-Zelewski faced many
serious charges, including responsibility for the destruction of Borki, a village on the Bobruisk–Mogilev highway.
²⁵
He also testified that, at the end of 1942, Dirlewanger executed the population of a village along the Mogilev–Labrunisk road.
²⁶
Skorzeny suggested that Bach-Zelewski flattered Colonel Andrus, the U.S. Army commander of the prison guard responsible for the witnesses and defendants.
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During one case, Berger stated,

I experienced it. Bach-Zelewski was on the first floor on Criminal 1. Our cells were directly opposite each other. I saw Bach-Zelewski come from the interrogations. I saw this collapse, his attacks of weeping. In addition then the Protestant chaplain came to me and questioned me about Bach-Zelewski. And then I saw that quite suddenly all this stopped and that he was quite calm.
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The soundness of Bach-Zelewski as a witness seems ill-judged.

By October 1946, Taylor was confident enough in Bach-Zelewski’s reliability to request from him, through the interrogation officer Walter Rapp, a report on the prisoner’s response to the judgments handed down by the court. The report began with the army: “Most prisoners, with the exception of those who are members of the SS, consider the verdict against [Alfred] Jodl a judicial crime…. There is no sympathy for Keitel and everybody considers the sentence against him as just.” The acquittal of the German General Staff led to great jubilation among the inmates, as did the decisions against Göring, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Frank, Sauckel, and Funk. The judgment against Kaltenbrunner was regarded as just, and Bach-Zelewski coolly remarked that he had still been unable to accept the responsibility of his crimes. The defendants were apparently surprised that the SA was acquitted as a criminal organization and felt the Allgemeine-SS deserved similar treatment. When asked if there had been an upsurge of religiosity among the prisoners, Bach-Zelewski denied it. Rapp added to the findings that “[Bach-Zelewski] feels a great guilt and he only hopes that he could pay with his life for what he considers his past errors—but at the same time he says ‘as long as you [Walter Rapp] are here I don’t think that I will be tried because I seem to be more valuable as a witness than as a defendant.’” The report’s findings were distributed among members of the U.S. government.
²⁹

In 1951, a British army legal expert tried to explain the German justification for Germany’s behavior during the war: “the defense commonly rested on the argument that, under the conditions prevailing, i.e. guerrilla warfare—in the occupied countries, reprisals were justified as the only means of enforcing law and order, and of protecting the lives of the troops in rear of the fighting zone.”
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There was no limit to the number of professional legal opinions that
challenged, in spirit, Bach-Zelewski’s membership of the prosecution. However, the real test must be the reliability of his testimony, the value it added to the known facts, and the degree of previously unknown information revealed by his designated expertise. There were four cases pertinent to Bach-Zelewski’s expertise: labor policies, the treatment of Jews, the treatment of partisans (bandits), and the Warsaw uprising.

Both Sir Stafford Cripps in Britain and Henry Stimson in the United States had reviewed the implications of the Commando Order. In January 1946, Bach-Zelewski received general questions regarding Bandenbekämpfung and was asked to comment on the
Kampfweisung für die Bandenbekämpfung im Osten.
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Behind this question lay particular circumstances pertinent to his answer. Only months before, the U.S. Army found Gen. Anton Dostler guilty for causing the execution of American servicemen in Italy. He was executed by a U.S. Army firing squad on December 1, 1945.
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The British were preparing a trial against Col. Gen. Nikolaus von Falkenhorst to begin in July 1946. The proceedings were to examine the criminal intent of the Commando Order. The evidence included Falkenhorst’s order that “if a man is saved for interrogation he must not survive for more than twenty-four hours.”
³³
The British interrogator wrote, “I reminded him of the ghastly deeds which had followed his zealous interpretation of Hitler’s orders.”
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The answer to this question was regarded as particularly important. Without hesitation, Bach-Zelewski explained that the Kampfweisung was a general order to shoot partisans in line with the Commando Order. Taylor later explained that there were no illusions as to its purpose other than as a “blanket order of extermination,” “a flagrant violation of the laws of war and a capital war crime.”
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This might indicate that Bach-Zelewski was being truthful, but his absence from the western theater made it relatively easy for him to be honest in this case.
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In the case of reprisals and revenge killing, however, Bach-Zelewski’s replies were less consistent. He thought reprisals were not efficient. They only worked if the local populace was forced into submission. Troops actually required the population to be well meaning for their own protection. In October 1945, in regards to revenge actions, he stated that there was no central order, that they were purely a reaction to German losses, and although Schencken-dorff had declared no revenge actions, he had not formally issued an order. In Bach-Zelewski’s opinion, revenge actions were on the conscience of field commanders. He alleged that he had tried to prevent them through conferences with commanders but he was not very successful. Then he said, “there were thousands of cases like that.” The interrogator immediately responded, “what you mean is there were thousands of cases where people suspected of partisan activity were executed?” “Yes,” said Bach-Zelewski, “there have been numerous cases. Looking at all Europe … I am quite convinced of that.” Then he added that the guilt remained, not with the soldiers, but with the men hanging around Hitler who did not tell him what was going on.
³⁷

During one trial, Bach-Zelewski introduced the categories of the “house partisan” and the “wild partisan.” They had no military training. This “partisan movement,” he said, “was a people’s insurrection…. Such people’s insurrections, of course, being unrest not only the noble motives of a nation.” They asked him if all partisans were combated in the same manner. Bach-Zelewski’s answer in full was,