The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (189 page)
Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: William L. Shirer
effective from today [November 9, 1941] Soviet Russians obviously marked by death and who therefore are not able to withstand the exertions of even
a short march shall in the future be excluded from the transport into the concentration camps for execution.
34
Dead prisoners or even starved and exhausted ones could not perform work and in 1942, when it became obvious to the Germans that the war was going to last considerably longer than they had expected and that the captive Soviet soldiers constituted a badly needed labor reservoir, the Nazis abandoned their policy of exterminating them in favor of working them. Himmler explained the change in his speech to the S.S. at
Posen
in 1943.
At that time [1941] we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw material, as labor. What after all, thinking in terms of generations; is not to be regretted but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger.
35
They were now to be fed enough to enable them to work. By December 1944, three quarters of a million of them, including many officers, were toiling in the armament factories, the mines (where 200,000 were assigned) and on the farms. Their treatment was harsh, but at least they were allowed to live. Even the branding of the Russian war captives, which General Keitel had proposed, was abandoned.
*
The treatment of Western prisoners of war, especially of the British and Americans, was comparatively milder than that meted out by the Germans to the Russians. There were occasional instances of the murder and massacre of them but this was due usually to the excessive sadism and cruelty of individual commanders. Such a case was the slaughter in cold blood of seventy-one American prisoners of war in a field near
Malmédy
, Belgium, on December 17, 1944, during the
Battle of the Bulge
.
There were other occasions when Hitler himself ordered the murder of Western prisoners, as he did in the case of fifty British flyers who were caught in the spring of 1944, after escaping from a camp at Sagan. At Nuremberg Goering said he “considered it the most serious incident of the whole war” and General Jodl called it “sheer murder.”
Actually it seemed to be part of a deliberate German policy, adopted after Anglo–American bombing of Germany became so extensive from 1943 on, to encourage the killing of Allied airmen who had bailed out over Germany. Civilians were encouraged to lynch the flyers as soon as they had parachuted to the ground and a number of these Germans were tried after the war for having done so. In 1944 when the Anglo–American
bombings were reaching their peak Ribbentrop urged that airmen shot down be summarily executed but Hitler took a somewhat milder view. On May 21, 1944, in agreement with Goering, he merely ordered that captured flyers who had machine-gunned passenger trains or civilians or German planes which had made emergency landings be shot without court-martial.
Sometimes captured flyers were simply turned over to the S.D. for “special treatment.” Thus some forty-seven American, British and Dutch flyers, all officers, were brutally murdered at
Mauthausen
concentration camp in September 1944. An eyewitness, Maurice Lampe, a French inmate at the camp, described at Nuremberg how it was done.
The forty-seven officers were led barefooted to the quarry … At the bottom of the steps the guards loaded stones on the backs of these poor men and they had to carry them to the top. The first journey was made with stones weighing about sixty pounds and accompanied by blows … The second journey the stones were still heavier, and whenever the poor wretches sank under their burden they were kicked and hit with a bludgeon … in the evening twenty-one bodies were strewn along the road. The twenty-six others died the following morning.
37
This was a familiar form of “execution” at Mauthausen and was used on, among others, a good many Russian prisoners of war.
From 1942 on—that is, when the tide of war began to surge against him—Hitler ordered the extermination of captured
Allied commandos
, especially in the West. (Captured Soviet partisans were summarily shot as a matter of course.) The Fuehrer’s “Top-Secret Commando Order” of October 18, 1942, is among the Nazi documents.
From now on all enemies on so-called commando missions in Europe or Africa challenged by German troops, even if they are in uniform, whether armed or unarmed, in battle or in flight, are to be slaughtered to the last man.
38
In a supplementary directive issued the same day Hitler explained to his commanders the reason for his order. Because of the success of the Allied commandos, he said,
I have been compelled to issue strict orders for the destruction of enemy sabotage troops and to declare noncompliance with these orders severely punishable … It must be made clear to the enemy that all sabotage troops will be exterminated, without exception, to the last man.
This means that their chance of escaping with their lives is nil … Under no circumstances can [they] expect to be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention … If it should become necessary for reasons of interrogation to initially spare one man or two, then they are to be shot immediately after interrogation.
39
This particular crime was to be kept strictly secret. General Jodl appended instructions to Hitler’s directive, underlining his words: “
This order is intended for commanders only and must not under any circumstances fall into enemy hands.
” They were directed to destroy all copies of it after they had duly taken note.
It must have remained imprinted on their minds, for they proceeded to carry it out. A couple of instances, of many, may be given.
On the night of March 22, 1944, two officers and thirteen men of the 267th Special Reconnaissance Battalion of the
U.S. Army
landed from a naval craft far behind the German lines
in Italy
to demolish a railroad tunnel between La Spezia and Genoa. They were all in uniform and carried no civilian clothes. Captured two days later they were executed by a firing squad on March 26, without trial, on the direct orders of General Anton Dostler, commander of the
LXXVth
German Army Corps. Tried by a U.S. military tribunal shortly after the war, General Dostler justified his action by contending that he was merely obeying Hitler’s Commando Order. He argued that he himself would have been court-martialed by the Fuehrer if he had not obeyed.
*
Some fifteen members of an Anglo–American military mission—including a war correspondent of the
Associated Press
, and all in uniform—which had parachuted into
Slovakia
in January 1945 were executed at
Mauthausen
concentration camp on the orders of
Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner
, the successor of
Heydrich
as head of the S.D. and one of the defendants at Nuremberg.
†
Had it not been for the testimony of a camp adjutant who witnessed their execution, their murder might have remained unknown, for most of the files of the mass executions at this camp were destroyed.
40
On October 22, 1941, a French newspaper
Le Phare
published the following notice:
Cowardly criminals in the pay of England and Moscow killed the Feldkommandant of
Nantes
on the morning of October 20. Up to now the assassins have not been arrested.
As expiation for this crime I have ordered that 50 hostages be shot, to begin with … Fifty more hostages will be shot in case the guilty should not be arrested between now and October 23 by midnight.
This became a familiar notice in the pages of the newspapers or on red posters edged with black in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Poland
and Russia. The proportion, publicly proclaimed by the Germans, was invariably 100 to 1—a hundred hostages shot for every German killed.
Though the taking of hostages was an ancient custom, much indulged in for instance by the Romans, it had not been generally practiced in modern times except by the Germans in the First World War and by the British in
India
and in
South Africa
during the
Boer War
. Under Hitler, however, the German Army carried it out on a large scale during the second war. Dozens of secret orders signed by General Keitel and lesser commanders were produced at Nuremberg ordering the taking—and shooting—of hostages. “It is important,” Keitel decreed on October 1, 1941, “that these should include well-known leading personalities or members of their families”; and General von Stuelpnagel, the German commander in France, a year later stressed that “the better known the hostages to be shot the greater will be the deterrent effect on the perpetrators.”
In all, 29,660 French hostages were executed by the Germans during the war and this figure did not include the 40,000 who “died” in French prisons. The figure for Poland was 8,000 and for Holland some 2,000. In Denmark what became known as a system of “clearing murders” was substituted for the publicly proclaimed shooting of hostages. On Hitler’s express orders reprisals for the killing of Germans in Denmark were to be carried out in secret “on the proportion of five to one.”
41
Thus the great Danish pastor-poet-playwright, Kaj Munk, one of the most beloved men in Scandinavia, was brutally murdered by the Germans, his body left on the road with a sign pinned to it: “Swine, you worked for Germany just the same.”
Of all the war crimes which he claimed he had to commit on the orders of Hitler “the worst of all,” General Keitel said on the stand at Nuremberg, stemmed from the
Nacht und Nebel Erlass
—“Night and Fog Decree.” This grotesque order, reserved for the unfortunate inhabitants of the conquered territories in the West, was issued by Hitler himself on December 7, 1941. Its purpose, as the weird title indicates, was to seize persons “endangering German security” who were not to be immediately executed and make them vanish without a trace into the night and fog of the unknown in Germany. No information was to be given their families as to their fate even when, as invariably occurred, it was merely a question of the place of burial in the Reich.
On December 12, 1941, Keitel issued a directive explaining the Fuehrer’s orders. “In principle,” he said, “the punishment for offenses committed against the German state is the death penalty.” But
if these offenses are punished with imprisonment, even with hard labor for life, this will be looked upon as a sign of weakness. 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.
42
The following February Keitel enlarged on the Night and Fog Decree. In cases where the death penalty was not meted out within eight days of a person’s arrest,
the prisoners are to be transported to Germany secretly … these measures will have a deterrent effect because
(a) the prisoners will vanish without leaving a trace,
(b) no information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.
43
The S.D. was given charge of this macabre task and its captured files are full of various orders pertaining to “NN” (for
Nacht und Nebel
), especially in regard to keeping the burial places of the victims strictly secret. How many Western Europeans disappeared into “Night and Fog” was never established at Nuremberg but it appeared that few emerged from it alive.
Some enlightening figures, however, were obtainable from the S.D. records concerning the number of victims of another terror operation in conquered territory which was applied to Russia. This particular exercise was carried out by what was known in Germany as the Einsatzgruppen—Special Action Groups, or what might better be termed, in view of their performance, Extermination Squads. The first round figure of their achievement came out, as if by accident, at Nuremberg.
One day some time before the trial began a young American naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Whitney R.
Harris
, of the American prosecution staff, was interrogating Otto Ohlendorf on his wartime activities. It was known that this attractive-looking German intellectual of youthful appearance—he was 38—had been head of Amt III of Himmler’s Central Security Office (R.S.H.A.) but during the last years of the war had spent most of his time as a foreign trade expert in the Ministry of Economics. He told his interrogator that apart from one year he had spent the war period on official duty in Berlin. Asked what he had done during the year away, he replied, “I was chief of Einsatzgruppe D.”
Harris, a lawyer by training and by this time something of an intelligence authority on German affairs, knew quite a bit about the
Einsatz
groups. So he asked promptly:
“During the year you were chief of Einsatzgruppe D, how many men, women and children did your group kill?”
Ohlendorf, Harris later remembered, shrugged his shoulders and with only the slightest hesitation answered:
“Ninety thousand!”
44
The
Einsatz
groups had first been organized by Himmler and Heydrich to follow the German armies into Poland in 1939 and there round up the Jews and place them in ghettos. It was not until the beginning of the Russian campaign nearly two years later that, in agreement with the German Army, they were ordered to follow the combat troops and to carry out one
phase of the “final solution.” Four Einsatzgruppen were formed for this purpose, Groups A, B, C, D. It was the last one which Ohlendorf commanded between June 1941 and June 1942, and it was assigned the southernmost sector in the
Ukraine
and attached to the Eleventh Army. Asked on the stand by Colonel John Harlan
Amen
what instructions it received, Ohlendorf answered:
“The instructions were that the Jews and the Soviet political commissars were to be liquidated.”
