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by Roland Binet (Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium)

Some people interested in military history have perhaps kept in mind a picture of the German Army during World War II – the Wehrmacht – as having been an army not essentially different from other belligerent armies, although, admittedly, it acted brutally and, sometimes, at the limit of what would have been deemed acceptable in times of war.

Some war-buffs would perhaps even think that numerous Wehrmacht generals and marshals displayed some form of chivalry vis-à-vis their military enemies inspired by ancient customs when horsemen and infantry troops sometimes showed leniency toward wounded enemies or soldiers at their mercy. Some of the former enemies of Germany would even profess some kind of admiration for Rommel, the Desert Fox. Many films praised his chivalrous spirit, movies that depicted him as a typical career soldier little interested in Nazism.

We now know that this picture of a decent German army under Hitler was totally false. We now know it thanks chiefly to the work of German historians who displayed the necessary intellectual courage to study the different aspects of the war campaigns led by the Wehrmacht on the battlefields of Western Europe as well as those unleashed on the Eastern front by Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. Because, as far as the Wehrmacht is concerned, a clear distinction can be made between the war Germany led in Western Europe and the one that was ruthlessly pursued in the Balkans and in the Soviet Union.

Were Generals and Marshals of the Wehrmacht ordinary soldiers? Heroes of any kind? We now know, for example, what some of the so-called “neutral” German generals and marshals thought in reality. For example, what did Rommel write to his spouse Lucie on the occasion of the invasion of Poland in September 1939? “What do you say about the events? Is it not altogether fantastic that we have such a man [i.e. Adolf Hitler].”

Or this equivocal sentence said before two generals on October 14, 1944, who had just told him he had a choice between suicide and a public show trial “I have loved the Führer and I still love him”.[1] What could we think about that other sentence from the well-known and respected Panzer general Guderian, whom many would have termed chivalrous “The basic principles [i.e. of national-socialism] were good”.[2]

In 1995 an itinerant exhibition was organized in Germany and Austria on the theme of the war crimes of the Wehrmacht. A book published on the occasion of the exhibition appeared in German and English, The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews and Other Civilians 1939-1944.”[3] When one peruses this book and looks at the hundreds of photographs illustrating the crimes committed by the Wehrmacht, chiefly on the Eastern front and in the Balkans, one can only be disgusted by the unprecedented scope of war atrocities committed by ordinary soldiers of an invading and occupying army.

In order to understand how the nature of an “ordinary” army was gravely compromised long before the start of World War II, we have to look at two fundamental acts which, at the time they were instituted, appeared insignificant although their impact would be far-reaching. These two military binding acts made the Wehrmacht a mere instrument of Hitler’s will, a man who had written Mein Kampf, a template of what he would do once in power, once he had vanquished his major enemies, the postulated Jewish-Bolshevist conspiracy. These two acts can be called a process of nazification of the German army. It started first on August 20, 1934, when the Reichswehr Minister von Blomberg replaced the traditional soldier’s oath by the following: “So help me God, I swear this sacred oath that I will obey the Führer of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler, and its people and that I will be a courageous soldier, and, as such, if necessary I will put my life at risk in order to respect this oath.” And, secondly, in 1938, Hitler took command of the Army.

These two military measures formed the mental frame under which the German soldiers would function should there be a war between Germany and other nations. Hence, they would be mere cogs of Hitler’s will and Nazi objectives. Hence, they would fight as Nazi apparatchiks.

The invasion of Western-Europe by the Wehrmacht troops in April and May 1940 was not devoid of atrocities, nor the campaigns against Greece and Yugoslavia starting in April 1941.

But as the Wehrmacht soldiers prepared themselves for the onslaught to the East, other orders of tremendous consequences were issued by the military High Command. The first one, on May 13, 1941, jointly by the “Oberkommando des Heeres” (OKH-Supreme Command of the Army) and the “Oberkommando der Wehrmacht” (OKW-Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht). The date is significant as it is only five weeks before the invasion of the Soviet Union. What was the tenor of this order, called in German the “Gerichtsbarkeitserlaß” to all branches of the German Army? “For actions accomplished by soldiers under the jurisdiction of the Wehrmacht and their consequences for the civilian enemy populations, there does not exist any obligation of legal proceedings against them, even in cases when these acts would constitute a military crime or a criminal act.”

The second one, the famous “Kommissarbefehl” (Order related to the fate of the political Commissars, aka “Politrouk”) of June 6, 1941, was even less ambiguous because it stated quite clearly that these “red” Commissars would have to be eliminated, discreetly, far from the battle zones.

Thus, armed with these legal provisos, the Wehrmacht soldiers were now in a position to launch an extermination war on the Eastern front, without consideration of the Hague Convention of October 18, 1907 delineating the protection assured to the civilian populations in case of war, or the Convention of Geneva of July 27, 1929 related to the treatment of war prisoners. This latter convention had not been signed by the Soviet Union, a fact Hitler took advantage of in his treatment of the Soviet prisoners, considered – as the Jews and the Slavs as a whole – as Untermenschen (inferior beings).

Let us look at what the historians have to say about the crimes the Wehrmacht committed during its invasion war in Western Europe and extermination war in Eastern Europe.

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The Holocaust

All serious historical sources agree that the Wehrmacht soldiers, as a whole, did not directly kill the Jews who became an easy prey to Germany after the invasion of their countries. First, because from an organizational point of view, the task of killing the Jews and other human elements deemed unworthy of living under Nazi yoke was the job of two distinct categories of specialized troops. On the one hand, the Einsatzgruppen (troops from the SD and police battalions, frequently helped by local volunteers or auxiliary units) had thus the sole responsibility of eradicating, by bullets, the “enemies” of Germany – the Jews and Reds ― in the Baltic republics and the territories of the USSR under German occupation. On the other hand, another branch of the SS (the SS Totenkopfverbände and Wachverbände) dealt with the convoys ― the so-called death trains ― from Western Europe, gassing, controlling the Jewish populations in the ghettos, killing by bullets and cremating the Jews in death camps mainly situated in occupied Poland, in the so-called “General-Government” territory under direct German rule.

Nevertheless, this does not mean to say that the Wehrmacht as a military Corps can be exonerated from the crime of genocide against the Jews. In most countries under German occupation, it was the Wehrmacht which had sole civilian, juridical, social and military command over the populations. Many countries were under direct military rule, such as the Baltic States, Belgium, the Netherlands, and , while others such as Norway, Croatia, Slovakia and France kept some form of civilian power associated and collaborating with the occupying military command. Let us also not forget that Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy were Germany’s allies.

In fact, as a consequence of that “état de fait” in the field, all directives and orders taken by the highest SS authorities against the Jews were issued by the Wehrmacht Command in the occupied territories under its military rule, and supervised by the military power in the countries where some form of collaboration (police, local fascist militias, etc.) dealt with the Jews. These Nazi diktats were in any event controlled and enforced by the Wehrmacht troops, often too by the Feldgendarmerie, a specific branch of enforcers, part of the German Army, not the SS.

The Wehrmacht soldiers, particularly in the Soviet territories under German occupation, in the Balkans and in the Baltic States, made every effort – with a remarkable ideological enthusiasm – to raid the places where the Jews lived, to escort them under armed guard to ghettos or to killing fields.

The Wehrmacht was also responsible for logistical and supporting aspects of the Holocaust.

Some historians such as Raoul Hilberg (“The destruction of the Jews of Europe”) and Guido Knopp (“Die Wehrmacht – eine Bilanz” , “Holokaust”, “Die SS – eine Warnung der Geschichte”) note that the collaboration between the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) and the high Military Command of the Wehrmacht was excellent. For example, in October 1941, the Einsatzgruppe A, indicated that “the collaboration with Panzergruppe 4 under command of Army General Hoepner is very close, yes, even nearly cordial.”[4] On July 6, 1941 (barely 15 days after the start of the invasion of the USSR!), the Einsatzkommando 4b from Einsatzgruppe C announced from Tarnopol, in a report to the RSHA[5], that “the Army agreeably willing against the Jews”. On September 8, 1941, the Einsatzgruppe D qualified as “excellent” its relationship with the military authorities.”[6]

The enthusiasm that the Wehrmacht soldiers displayed in tracking down the Jewish Untermenschen and giving a hand to the SS mobile killing units and SS Totenkopfverbände, by helping in the arrest of the Jews in nearly all Western and Eastern European countries, escorting and guarding these fated to die, descending on homes and buildings suspected of harboring Jews, etc., received a serious ideological support from the highest military command. For example on October 10, 1941 Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Reichenau issued this order to the troops of the 6^th Army under his command on the Eastern front: “The fundamental goal of this campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the destruction of the means of its power and the annihilation of its Asian influence in the European cultural sphere. The soldier, in the Oriental space, is not only a warrior according to the rules of war but also the inflexible bearer of a national idea and the avenger of all the bestialities that the Germans and kindred peoples of similar nationality must have suffered”.[7] Two high German commanding officers ― Panzer Corps Generals Hermann Hoth and Erich von Mannstein ― felt such passionate zeal at these martial words that they hurried to issue a similar order to the tank troops under their own command.

Some say of Generalfeldmarschall von Reichenau that he was present as an interested spectator during the Babi Yar (Kiev) massacres of Jews at the end of September 1941, resulting in 30,000 victims in just two days. And there is a well documented case where the same von Reichenau refused to save some ninety Jewish orphans (who stayed in a school building without water or food for a week, after the massacre of their parents) in August 1941 in the Ukrainian village of Biela Zerkov. Some even say that he expressly ordered their death.[8] But von Reichenau was not the only Nazi follower that instilled Hitler’s ideology of destruction of the enemies of the Reich into his soldiers’ minds, as Raoul Hilberg writes “the generals let themselves be led to that attitude of collaboration [with the SS troops under the authority of RSHA] under the pretext that the Jews were so many irreducible Bolsheviks, who inspired and supported the partisans’ war at the rear of the German front: and, as a consequence the army had to protect itself by attacking the evil at the very presumed root, and that meant dealing with the Jews.”

The striking proof of the sick mentality of the Wehrmacht leaders on the Eastern front – a mentally that seeped down to the lower echelons of the military hierarchy – lies in the fact that spontaneous and induced massacres of Jews by local populations took place a few days after the invasion of the Soviet Union in Lvov (Eastern Poland, under Soviet rule since September 17^th, 1940), in Kaunas (Lithuania) and Riga (Latvia). These cities just invaded by the Wehrmacht should have been under martial law. Why then, if the Wehrmacht did not condone these barbarous acts of killings, did it choose not to interfere with armed and dangerous indigenous populations bent on killing their hated so-called enemies, the Jews?

As to the direct participation of the Wehrmacht in the massacre of the Jews, it is estimated at 20,000 persons; the only unit, that is almost unanimously quoted as having killed around 10,000 people, is the 707^th I.D. of the Wehrmacht. To which we can add between 4,000 and 5,000 Jews who were killed in Yugoslavia by the troops of General Franz Böhme, a “tough” general sent there to fight against the partisans.[9]

But we must not be deluded in thinking that the SS killed the Jews and that the Wehrmacht troops were drawn into this mess only by orders from their military hierarchy. Six and a half years of psychological indoctrination and mental conditioning had transformed the Wehrmacht soldiers into willing executioners of the Führer’s designs and crazy ideas about races.

For example, the Allied bugged the conversations between German prisoners of war, in Great Britain and in the United States. This is what lieutenant Müller from the Wehrmacht had to say about one war event “The SS invited us to a killing of Jews. The entire troop went with weapons and all and we have killed them. Every soldier had the opportunity to choose the one he wished.”[10] There are other sickening manifestations from Wehrmacht soldiers. On numerous well-known photographs, one can see soldiers from the German Army looking placidly while SS troops – or sometimes local thugs (as in Kaunas, in the well-known garage court killings) – killed the Jews. Joe J. Heydecker, an antifascist German soldier who published a remarkable book of photographs of the Warsaw ghetto, had this to say about his sick brothers in arms “In front of the mass pits, there where place after place the Jewish inhabitants were brutally massacred without any age or sex distinction, there always were soldiers.”[11]

As far as the Holocaust is concerned, as the German historian Felix Römer wrote “It is indisputable that the major part of these crimes was committed by the SS, by the Einsatzgruppen. Without the Wehrmacht, these crimes would not have been committed on such a scale. The Wehrmacht has supported the Holocaust, partly passively, partly actively. Without the Wehrmacht, no genocide would have taken place”.[12]

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The Treatment of Prisoners of War and Political Commissars

Prior to its war against the “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy” on the Eastern front, the Wehrmacht had already executed 3,000 Polish prisoners of war in September 1939 and some African troops in France, on the Loire, in June 1940.

On March 30, 1941, Hitler had told a selected group of his generals that “…the Russian-Asiatic danger must be eliminated without consideration (…) the communist is before and after the fact no comrade of ours. This is an extermination war that we lead against the red army, the Soviet state and its representatives.” And the author who referred to this quotation adds: “After this speech, each general of the highest rank knew what one awaited of him.”[13]

Once the extermination war on the USSR was unleashed in June 1941, thanks to the Blitzkrieg, the Wehrmacht was soon in a military position to trap dozens of Soviet divisions or entire Army Corps and, thus, to capture hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers as prisoners of war. With the ghastly result that no appropriate camps were built to detain these masses of war prisoners, that not sufficient food came to these famished soldiers, and that, often, they had nothing to protect themselves from the sun, the wind, the rain. Sometimes, in order to reduce the staggering numbers of captured enemies, the Wehrmacht killed them.

Historical sources agree to say that there were between 2,500,000 and 3,300,000 Soviet prisoners of war who died while in captivity (between 45 and 57 % of the total). But the Wehrmacht was also quite active in other regions. 5,300 Italian prisoners of war were massacred in Greek islands after the capitulation of Italy, 46,000 others found death during transportation. And you have to take into consideration that many Soviet political Commissars were killed without any due form of trial, the figures vary from 3,400 to 8,000.[14]

As we will see below, one can surmise that the mentality of racial superiority, of total freedom in military actions, that the Nazi authorities had devised for its army apparatchiks had transformed the Wehrmacht soldiers into killing machines for whom the killing zones were not restricted any more to mere military objectives.

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The Extermination of Civilian Populations by Means of Imposed Hunger, Military Brutality an Arbitrary Rule

Leningrad, encircled at the very start of the invasion of the Soviet Union experienced hunger during the course of three years, there were even proven cases of cannibalism. Between 3,000 and 4,000 persons died every day, from hunger chiefly but also from the devastating effects of bombings and artillery fire.[15] The figures of the civilian dead for that cultural city vary between 623,000 and one million. Leningrad was a gigantic mass grave, but there were numerous other cases where hunger caused by the Wehrmacht provoked civilian deaths. “Only in Charkov, the 4^th largest city in the Soviet Union, there were 11,000 deaths caused by hunger until August 1942.”[16]

Other methods the Wehrmacht used a certain number of times, and on a huge scale too, was to empty whole territories, above all when the retreat was in full swing beginning in 1943. For example, in March 1944, south of Bobruisk in the Soviet Union, the 9^th Army forced the evacuation of some 50,000 persons. Some sources think that 9,000 Soviet citizens died during that enforced deportation from their homes. “Only in White Russia, one million persons were sent in the ‘emptiness’” indicates the historian Christian Hartmann.[17]

Here are two other emblematic examples of the inimitable way the Wehrmacht soldiers acted often quite recklessly when it came to the Eastern front: “Our motorcyclist battalion attacked a village with a heavy snow falling, and we conquered it with significant losses. Then, we had to attack the following village mined by the Russians. The civilian population of the {first} village was sent to the mined field. Out of 30 men sent, 21 were killed.” “The infantry goes forward; we spend the night in a peasants’ house; the following morning, we leave but there are many heavy machine gun ammunition crates, heavy and difficult to carry. Two crates are forgotten and left. The following troop finds these two crates and deducts that they were stolen by partisans from the infantrymen. They then hanged the inhabitants of the house. That kind of thing happened quite often.” [18]

In Greece, it is estimated that circa 300,000 persons died of cold and hunger, essentially because the German army confiscated food and fuels.[19]

We must not forget that in some countries the Wehrmacht resorted to the murder of the intelligentsia. It began in Poland. Frank, Gauleiter (District or Region Boss) of the ‘General Government’ part of Poland said “What we now have been able to identify as the leading class in Poland, must be liquidated…” There is no written trace of Hitler’s orders in this regard but in a report of July 2, 1940, Heydrich spoke of an “utterly radical Sonderbefehl [special order] of the Führer”. Some authors estimate that nearly 2 million Polish citizens were thus exterminated by the German army and the SS troops. This ideological struggle against the intelligentsia was continued in the Soviet Union.[20]

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Enslavement of the Population, Systematic Plundering of Natural Resources and the Scorched Earth Policy

When the military collapse of the German Army became more and more pronounced, the Wehrmacht resorted to a determinate policy of the scorched earth.

We know that when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Stalin decreed a policy of the “scorched earth” (already used by the Russians against Napoleon in 1812). But as the German army’s retreat took more gigantic forms in mid 1943, the Wehrmacht used the same method of not leaving anything edible or drinkable of use to the Soviet enemies after their retreat from occupied territories. Hitler had ordered to destroy everything in the territories the Wehrmacht would leave behind: “any consideration of the situation of the population must be abandoned in favor of the interest of conducting the fight”. This is what soldiers said about that policy: “During the retreat, everything that could be of use to soldiers was to be destroyed. All the houses should be burned, all the sources poisoned by putting dead hens or other things into them, so that nothing would be left”. “Where there was any possibility, we tried to take everything not fixed and impossible to remove: oxen, pigs – and the populations.”[21]

Let us not forget that on the Western front, Hitler – becoming madder and madder as Germany sank slowly into a military and economic chaos – had decreed first that cities such as Rome and Paris would have to be destroyed, then later, in 1945 that a ‘scorched earth’ policy should be applied on German soil. Thanks to some perspicacious high-ranking Germans (those responsible for the defense of Rome and Paris and Minister Speer in Germany), the worst scenarios possible were avoided. But, this does not mean that these high-ranking ‘men with a conscience’ were not Nazis, it means that they thought ahead and that, by that time, Hitler’s star had waned. But no such ‘weak-hearted’ measures were ever considered on Soviet soil to preserve the integrity of these territories. There, the German hatred against Bolshevism was such that nobody within the Wehrmacht even thought of preserving the natural and animal resources, the environment, the houses and farms. Killing, abusing, torturing, robbing, hanging, had become a kind of second nature to Hitler’s Wehrmacht soldier-toys fighting or being stationed on the Eastern front.

As had been the case in the Western sphere very early after the occupation, as the German workforce was slowly being depleted in order to put more men in the army, and as the women were not in sufficient number to replace them, Germany compelled some categories of men from the occupied countries to go and work in Germany. The Wehrmacht and the Feldgendarmerie – enforced that obligation in a ruthless manner. For example, my own father had to hide in a small village in Belgium during 18 months in order not to be deported to Germany to work there as a slave. Two of my wife’s uncles from her father’s side were deported in Germany as slaves, one died there as he was slightly handicapped (we know what the German Nazis thought of the handicapped, had they not begun by killing their own mental handicapped in 1939?).

But, with a large part of the Soviet Union under Nazi yoke, the figures of these “slaves” working for the Reich became staggering. 600,000 persons worked for the Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union territory alone (it is to be noted that many women were enslaved as whores for the military brothels), and 2,800,000 Soviet citizens were sent to Germany to work as “worker” slaves for the Nazis.[22]

According to a recent study by researchers from the (American) Holocaust Memorial Museum, there were during WWII 30,000 work camps and 500 brothels spread out massively in Germany but also in occupied or “friendly” nations.[23]

But, on a huge scale, the Wehrmacht plundered the natural resources of many of the territories belonging to the Soviet Union. “Independently from global plans of economic exploitation of territories on the Eastern front, some Wehrmacht units already suffered from a severe lack of food only a few months after the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union. With the result that in 1941, the confiscation of food by the soldiers reached such a level that it led to “Kahlfraßzonen {entire zones emptied of food resources}. Whole regions were devastated; spreading in some cases to 300 kilometers behind the front line, in these zones, there weren’t any animals or seeds to plant any more.”[24] Guido Knopp indicates that 80 % of the combat zones where the Wehrmacht fought became a gigantic Kahlfraßzone.

But other countries suffered too. In Greece, nearly 500,000 dwellings, 50 % of the local industry and 75 % of the infrastructure was destroyed by the Germans.[25]

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The “War against the Partisans” and Reprisal Measures

Killing civilians as reprisal measures when a German soldier had been wounded or killed by so-called “francs-tireurs” (guerrilla fighters) had already become quite a habit for the German army, as had been the case in Belgium during WWI when hundreds of Belgian civilians had been slaughtered in some cities (Louvain, Namur, Dinant, for example). Most high-ranking officers of the Wehrmacht had fought in Flanders or in France during WWI, so they had had time to have that harsh reprisals policy ingrained in them.

But during WWII the number of partisans or civilians killed as “partisans” (members of the armed or secret resistance movements) was out of all proportions. Of course, the Wehrmacht received instructions to act in a tough and determinate manner. An order from the OKW of December 16, 1942, aimed at the Eastern front soldiers but quite characteristic of the mentality of the German Generalität {High Command Generals} indicated that “the fight against the partisans has nothing to do with the Geneva convention and the troops must use every means in that unrestricted fight, including thus against women and children, if this paves the way to success (…), every consideration is a crime against the German people and the front soldiers, nor any German must be punished in a disciplinary or judicial way for his behavior in the struggle against bands and their supporters.”[26]

In the Soviet Union, often the Wehrmacht publicly hanged the persons suspected of being partisans. When one looks at “The German Army and Genocide – Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews and Other Civilians – 1939-1944” published by the “Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung,” one can see 10 pages with 88 photographs of public hangings in Poland and – mostly – in the Soviet Union. In the USSR there are estimates that half a million civilians or real partisans were killed as acts of reprisals. But, in the general anti-Bolshevik and anti-Jewish climate on that front going on a par with a growing fear among the Wehrmacht soldiers of being attacked from the rear, one can assume – as do most authors and historians – that a large majority of these dead were innocent civilians ensnared in a gigantic military killing machine. In Yugoslavia, the figures are between 300,000 and 350,000 “partisans” killed, a third being thought of having been mere innocent civilians.[27]. In Kraljevo, for instance, between 4,000 and 5,000 innocent victims were executed as reprisals by the 717^th I.D., in Kragujevac circa 2,300 by the 749^th and 724^th infantry regiments.[28]

 

In Greece, it is estimated that 130,000 – men, women, children and elderly people – were executed, often as reprisal measures for attempts against German soldiers.[29]

But, on quite a “smaller’” level, the Wehrmacht carried out the same kind of retaliatory measures against the “resistance members” or people suspected of being “francs-tireurs” in Western Europe. Between 6,000 and 7,000 innocent civilian victims are estimated to have been killed as reprisals in France, and about 10,000 in Italy, of which a large part is to be attributed to the sole Wehrmacht.[30]

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The Wehrmact: A “Correct” Army?

Given these awesome crime figures, one can thus wonder why the Wehrmacht was not condemned in Nürnberg for crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Seventeen million men served in the Wehrmacht. Few were those who opted out and fought against their native country, such as German Kanzler and Nobel Prize winner Willy Brandt who fought alongside Norwegian resistance fighters, or those who took the side of the Soviet Union, working mainly in propaganda units (the film “Ich war neunzehn” – “I was 19 years old” which came out in the 60s was a good example of how such small propaganda units worked).

Far too numerous were those mindless men who supported Hitler to the bitter end, passively or actively, morally, politically, lethargically, or even by working hard, in an effective manner, within that gigantic hate and killing machine.

But, we must enlarge the circle of responsibilities. Had there been no popular support for Hitler and his demented ideas, no support at the level of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, no sick mentality among its soldiers, the country would never have resisted until May 8, 1945, nearly six years after the start of the first military campaign against Poland. And 50 million people would not have died in vain and in the atrocious, inhuman, unbearable, conditions these innocent victims had to go through before dying. As mere things…

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