Hitler's Bandit Hunters (80 page)

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington D.C., College Park Annex microfilm and documents collections includes the captured German records group. This includes the near complete record of Himmler’s papers. How
complete the collection is will never really be known, and we must assume that a certain amount of weeding out took place before Karl Wolff handed the documents over to the Americans. The total number of record groups consulted includes:

RG242 Captured German documents
Berlin Document Centre (BDC) microfilm of SS personnel files
RG 238 World War II war crimes record group
RG319 U.S. Army Intelligence record group
RG338 U.S. Army Historical Branch Foreign Military Studies

There is a cautionary tale. Not all the papers discovered on the microfilms were labeled in the finding guides. On my third visit to the archives, the vast majority of my time was spent examining the 642 SS microfilms for misplaced and unmarked documents. America has other fine collections including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum, with its library and document collections, and the Center for Military History, U.S. Army (Pennsylvania), with its collection of G5 McSherry papers and documents from the U.S. Army occupation of Germany (1944–47).

The German Federal archives are located in Berlin-Lichterfelde, Koblenz, Freiburg im Breisgau, and Kornelimünster near Aachen. The files of the Nazi Party and SS are located in Berlin. The military papers of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS records are kept in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (BA-MA) in Freiburg im Breisgau, in southwest Germany. They hold the Abwehr papers of Major General Gempp. Often overlooked is the Deutsche Dienststelle in Berlin, which was originally the Wehrmacht’s personnel record with muster rolls for all the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, and SS-Police. The Hauptstadtarchiv-Düsseldorf proved exceptionally helpful in assisting the search for key denazification papers that provided background on the level of Reichskolonialbund membership among industrialists.

Britain has a fine collection of documents. The Public Record Office in London changed its name to the National Archives. To avoid confusion, I have elected to continue to use PRO. The archives holds a unique series of documents that includes:

German Police Decodes (HW16 series)
Foreign Office papers (FO series)
CSDIC collection including the PWIS and WCIU papers (WO series)
The papers of Lieutenant Colonel A. P. Scotland (WO series)
British war crimes papers (WO series)

The Imperial War Museum has the only complete set of Nuremberg documentation in Britain. The Wiener Library contains a small but valuable collection of documents.

There is an abundance of mainstream literature dedicated to the study of the Third Reich. By contrast, there is next to nothing regarding Bandenbekämpfung, although there is a large body of scholarship on Partisanenbekämpfung. The body of literature interwoven into this book is not replicated here. This is only a brief overview of the main literature that has influenced this research.

Since the late 1950s, scholarship has diligently tried to piece together an explanation of the totality of Nazi crimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Russia. Christian Streit (
Keine Kameraden
) and Omer Bartov (
The Eastern Front, 1941–1945
, and
Hitler
’s
Army
) in their different approaches identified the German army’s
complicity to Nazi ideological doctrine and war crimes. The façade of the German army’s professional morality was later exposed by the exhibition, “The War of Destruction and the Crimes of the Wehrmacht” (
Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944
) of 1995 (Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung,
Verbrechen Der Wehrmacht
). Refer to Bill Niven,
Facing the Nazi Past
, for the story of the exhibition). Hannes Heer, the former director of the exhibition, advanced the literature with essays and books on Nazi security policy. Christian Gerlach’s research focused on the occupation of Belorussia. His doctoral thesis has transformed our collective impression of the scale of German behavior in the occupied Soviet Union. He examined such practices as collective reprisals and hostage taking, the German army’s consistent security responses to resistance since 1871. Gerlach highlighted the large Bandenbekämpfung operations of 1942–43, explained the connections between security and economic pressures on German policy and the exploitation of industrial and agricultural zones (
Kalkulierte Morde
, and see also
Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord
). Another important country-specific study of Nazi occupation is Mark Mazower’s examination of Greece (
Inside Hitler
’s
Greece
). He isolated the transfer of SS specialists from the east to parts of southern Europe; this extended the realm of extermination and exploitation among Hitler’s Axis allies.

Although Bandenbekämpfung was about empire building, many post-war interpretations tended to equate German antipartisan warfare with military security. This requires some explanation. In addition to the influence of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the U.S. Army, in keeping with its traditions, established a pseudo-academic study of the war in Europe. It employed many of its former enemies, senior German officers living in the spotlight of war crimes justice, to write reports on aspects of Hitler’s war. Understandably those selected to write about the security campaign described their deeds as antipartisan warfare. Ironically, many were unable to break with the past or certain words and phrases; the foreign military reports are littered with references to “Banden,” “Banditen,” and “Bandenbekämpfung.” Their influence shaped the Cold War years, as Western scholars in the field of security studies concentrated on the power of the Soviet and Yugoslav partisans. Few acknowledged Himmler’s central role, preferring to embellish the story of the highly professional German army and the failure of its “antiguerrilla” measures. In 1960, John Armstrong and his colleagues published a timely definitive study of the Soviet partisan movement. They viewed Hitler’s security policy as subject to the “overriding objective of destroying Soviet military power within a very short time,” and said that the “German command regarded the partisans as crucially important only insofar as they impeded the German war effort.” In Armstrong’s opinion, German and Soviet methods were barely separable: “The combination of Soviet and German objectives produced a situation in which measures of almost unparalleled ruthlessness became the norm of guerrilla and antiguerrilla warfare alike” (
Soviet Partisans in World War II
, 6–7). The force of this opinion still emerges in the literature. Given the tensions of the Cold War world, it is perhaps not surprising that scholarship used the past to judge contemporary conflicts, in particular Vietnam.

In 1976, Keith Simpson stepped away from this trend with his article about German military security policy (“The German Experience of Rear Area Security on the Eastern Front 1941–45”). Simpson isolated the German tradition of security from the Franco–Prussian tradition through the First World War and into Weimar. He disagreed with the thesis of failure and thought German methods were brutal but “very effective,” and were for that reason maintained. Simpson explained Weimar’s pivotal role in his analysis, “because of the polarization in politics between nationalists and communists, the weaknesses of the central government, and the need to
establish an effective police force which was capable of maintaining internal security.” During Weimar, he argued, “paramilitary
Schutzpolizei
gained experience from internal security operations during the communist uprisings of 1918 and 1923.”

The publications in press and discussed in 1997 were particularly germane to this book. Christopher Browning’s extremely harrowing account of the activities of a police battalion in Eastern Europe has had the most profound impact upon the research for this book (
Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
). Browning assessed the Nazi Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) as the product of repeated German attempts to introduce a militarized police, rather than of nazification. He also noticed the tendency of the police troops to improve with their killing experience. Ulrich Herbert’s magnum opus of Dr. Werner Best was a primer for examing Himmler, Daluege, and Bach-Zelewski (
Best, Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989
). Having discovered that Edward Crankshaw was party to what is now referred to as the PRO HW16 series German Police Decodes, his study of the Gestapo took on a new pallor. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
briefly turned the historical establishment on its head. Goldhagen expounded a suspicion, long dismissed by leading historians, that the Nazis had awakened a character trait of the German people, “eliminationist anti-semitism.” The response to Goldhagen was quite remarkable with equal amounts of deprecation and support. In retrospect, ten years later,
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
was about exploiting the German media, forcing the German people to face their past, the Holocaust in particular, the combination of which many more eminent scholars found distasteful. (See Ulrich Herbert,
Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik, Neue Forshungen und Kontroversen
. These published lectures highlight how far research has come in explaining Nazism and show that simple answers are not satisfactory in this complex subject. See also Norman Finkelstein,
The Holocaust Industry.
) Fewer books published today refer to Goldhagen, while his books, in German shops, gather dust.

Since I completed the PhD in 2001, several scholars have emerged with some bearing here. Ben Shepherd and I met in 1997. I have read his work from the PhD thesis (“German Army Security Units in Russia, 1941–1943: A Case Study”) through to his book
War in the Wild East
. He conducted an in-depth study of a security formation, the 221st Security Division, which served in the rear area of Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front. The book purports to be a study of the perpetrators following on from the work Christopher Browning. In some respects, this places our work in the same genre. His archive base and analysis ends in 1943, just at the time when Bandenbekämpfung was about to peak. In practical terms, this forces a separation between our researches. In general terms, his findings that the Germans were fixated with the Soviet “guerrilla” is only half the story. In the quest for colonization and victory, the partisans were an obstacle to the Germans; the absence of partisans and even collaboration did not end the German terror. I am not convinced that in his research Shepherd was able to break through the fundamental walls of his subject. Is his book about a division or about perpetrators? In his thesis, Shepherd alleged the partisans “regularly flouted three of the four criteria of lawful combatant status laid down in the 1907 Hague Convention” and that “partisan outrages were calculated to provoke vicious German reprisals.” He rounded off the section, “How far this behaviour was compelled by German terror in the first place is of course another question.” In the first instance, Shepherd implies Soviet complicity in the horror, which ignores the fact that Hitler’s armies invaded Russia brandishing the Barbarossa directives and wildly circumventing the laws of war (refer to chapters 2, 3, and 4 in this book).
Secondly, in legal terms, if the rules of land warfare were breached, then the onus was on the Germans to establish a thorough investigation and set legal proceedings against the Soviets before committing reprisals. It is unclear what he meant by “another question”; isn’t the purpose of a German perpetrator study to focus on Nazi terror, almost to the exclusion of all others? Ultimately, how are extenuating circumstances applied in regard to the laws of warfare, when the laws are deliberately circumvented by either party?

Edward Westermann’s
Hitler’s Police Battalions
has examined the Order Police. In many respects, there is overlap between our findings, but Westermann and I will probably have to agree to disagree. The difference between our two books lies in emphasis. Westermann has carried through a perpetrator study from an organizational perspective. He argues, with considerable merit, that the police established an organizational culture that enabled it to perform many of its tasks without remorse. He has concentrated on the influence and impact of the Nazis’ ideology as the root cause of their killing; this is ground upon which we differ. He experimented with organizational theory and adapted it quite well. Westermann did not take this very far, and some of his analysis comes to an abrupt halt. In terms of the overall study of the police, his book still represents an important work and is essential reading on the subject.

The latest developments have come in the field of German colonialism. Colonial warfare is often treated as a cul-de-sac of military history, explained away as those “savage little wars of modern peace.” The works of Jürgen Zimmerer (
Deutsche Herrschaft Über Afrikaner
) and Jan-Bart Gewalt (
Herero Heroes
and “Learning to Wage and Win Wars in Africa”) deserve special mention for their efforts in revealing the full extent of German savagery in Namibia. The German pacification of the Herero ensured that Bandenbekämpfung thereafter traveled the road of extermination and enslavement. Isabel Hull’s study of the German army in Namibia (formerly German Southwest Africa) was awaited with anticipation and published as
Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany
. This book has disappointed those who cling to the tired notion that the German army was an honorable estate bewitched and corrupted by Nazism. Hull’s analysis of the Imperial German Army, its military culture, and its professionalism explodes the myth of a clean professional army ill-prepared for war in August 1914. It also examines the resort to genocide, by the army in Namibia, against the Herero.