CRÜWELL: What were NEHRING’S[208] orders?
THOMA: NEHRING is stupid. He re-issued extracts from those orders. He issued some stupid orders which came down in the form of leaflets. One of these so-called orders was: ‘We are so short of material that every cartridge case is of the greatest value at home, and if material continues to be wasted as it is at present, we will have to stop the war in the autumn.’ He issued orders like this, signed NEHRING, thousands of them were sent down.[209]
Document 84
SRX 150
CRÜWELL – General der Panzertruppe – Captured 29 May 42 in North Africa.
THOMA – General der Panzertruppe – Captured 4 Nov. 42 in North Africa.
BURCKHARDT – Major (C.C. 1 Paratroop Regiment – Captured 5 Nov. 42 in North Africa.
Information received: 26 Jan. 43
THOMA (re explains about atrocities): ‘…so that I am actually ashamed to be an officer.’ And then he said: ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I said: ‘Whom else should I tell it to?’ He said: ‘That’s a political matter, it’s got nothing at all to do with me.’ I’ve never forgotten that of HALDER.[210] Then I went and put it into writing and gave it to BRAUCHITSCH. And BRAUCHITSCH didn’t say much, but I could read in his eyes what was up – he said: ‘Do you want to take it further?’ He said: ‘Listen, if you take it further, anything may happen.’ Then I said: ‘Of course, because I am ashamed to have experienced a thing like that.’ The good people say: ‘The FÜHRER doesn’t know about that.’ Of course he knows all about it. Secretly he’s delighted. He says: ‘Things – went – badly – for – so – many – years.’ and now he’s getting his own back, and thereby, by that attitude, he has thrown away the inner respect of the honest decent people. Of course, people can’t make a row, they would simply be arrested and beaten if they did. But he says – he just ignores it, he’s not in the least interested in it. (He just says) ‘Let the hooligans remain in power’ – and so they do and it’s obvious what you said to me recently. ‘It mustn’t happen again that they go about with the red flag. Of course it won’t happen because it’s a dictatorship, but that doesn’t mean that the idea has been uprooted completely, that’s why they are all the more likely to blow up. Or, worse still, we may get passive resistance – that’s much more dangerous. In a company it doesn’t matter if there are rows now and then, but when there’s a passive resistance in a company – there is such a thing too.
Document 85
CSDIC (UK) SR REPORT, SRM 175 [TNA, WO 208/4165]
LUDWIG CRÜWELL – General der Panzertruppe – Captured 29 May 42 in North Africa.
WILHEIM RITTER VON THOMA – General der Panzertruppe – Captured 4 Nov. 42 in North Africa.
Information received: 14 Feb. 43
THOMA: A Staatsanwalt from MINSK came to see me in March; he was really a BERLIN Staatsanwalt. He was a man in the forties and he begged me to do everything in my power to enable him to join up as a soldier in any capacity – he was a NCO on the reserve. He said: ‘I can’t stand the things that are going on here any longer.’ Then he told me the kind of thing that happened. I know myself that there were actually savage, brutalised louts there, who trampled on the bellies of pregnant women, and that sort of thing.
CRÜWELL: Yes, but those are very isolated cases for which even the SS can’t be blamed. I can’t believe that Germans would do such a thing!
THOMA: I don’t think I should have believed it either, if I hadn’t actually seen it. I made two written reports about it. I feel that no one can accuse me of having been in any way responsible for it.
CRÜWELL: What did you report in writing?
THOMA: The atrocities perpetrated by the SS and the shootings and the mass executions at PSKIP(?) and at MINSK – two pages of typescript which I sent to the OKW.[211] I received no reply. I established that no soldiers were ever involved, only a special detachment of the SS. They introduced the name ‘Rollkommando.’ It’s no good denying it. Of course, these people have become completely brutalised by months of such conduct.
CRÜWELL: I am the last to want to defend such atrocities but, taking the broad view, you must admit that we were bound to take the most incredibly severe measures to combat the illegal guerrilla warfare in those vast territories.
THOMA: Yes, but the women had nothing whatever to do with it. Orders were actually given that all Jews were (to be cleared out of) the occupied territories – that is the great idea, but, of course, there are so many in the east that you don’t know where to start.[212]
Document 86
CSDIC (UK) SR-REPORT, SRGG 209 [TNA, WO 208/4165]
GEORG NEUFFER – Generalmajor (GOC, 20th Flak Division) – Captured 9 May 43 in Tunisia.
GERHARD BASSENGE – Generalmajor (GOC, Air Defences Tunis/Bizerta) – Captured 9 May 43 in Tunisia.
Information received: 10 July 43
NEUFFER: What will they say when they find our graves in POLAND? The OGPU[213] can’t have done anything worse than that. I myself have seen a convey at LUDOWICE(?)[214] near MINSK; I must say it was frightful, a horrible sight. There were lorries full of men, women and children – quite small children. It is ghastly, this picture. The women, the little children who were, of course, absolutely unsuspecting – frightful! Of course, I didn’t watch while they were being murdered. German police stood about with tommy-guns, and – do you know what they had there? Lithuanians, or fellows like that, in the brown uniform,[215] did it. The German Jews were also sent to the MINSK district, and were gradually killed off, so far as they survived the other treatment. By treatment I mean housing and food and so on. It was done like this: when Jews were taken away from FRANKFURT – they were only notified immediately beforehand – they were allowed to take only a little with them, a hundred marks, otherwise nothing, and then the hundred marks would be demanded from them at the station to pay the fare.[216] But these things are so well known – if that ever gets known in the world at large – that’s why I was so surprised that we got so frightfully worked up over the KATYN case![217]
BASSENGE: Yes.
NEUFFER: For that’s a trifle in comparison to what we have done there.
Document 87
CSDIC (UK) SR REPORT, SRGG 303 [TNA, WO 208/4166]
KURT KÖHNCKE – Oberstleutnant (Commander, 372 Heavy Flak Battery) – Captured 8 May 43 in Tunisia – and a number of German Senior Officers (PW) one of whom may be:
HANS REIMANN – Oberst (Commander, Panzer Grenadier Regiment 86) – Captured 12 May 43 in Tunisia.
Information received: 12 Aug. 43
KÖHNCKE: Oberst HEYM (PW)[218] says: ‘If I were commander of the German troops I would set alight every village and every town in ITALY and withdraw slowly to the BRENNER, as a reply to the fact that the Italians have now apparently sent divisions to the BRENNER in order to guard the railway there.’ That’s a fine idea, completely senseless, but just like us.
208
General der Panzertruppe Walther Nehring (15.8.1892–20.4.1983), from 26.10.1940 CO, 18.Pz.Div.; 9.3.1942 Cmmdg Gen., Deutsches Afrika Korps; 15.11.1942 appointed Cdr, German forces in Tunisia; 9.12.1942 Führer-Reserve; 10.2.1943 C-in-C, XXIV.Pz.Korps; 21.4.1945 C-in-C, 1.Pz.Armee.
209
No such order by Nehring has been found in the War Diary, 18.Pz.Div., which deployed alongside Thoma’s 17.Pz.Div. in the summer of 1941, nor in the Deutsches Afrika Korps War Diary.
210
Brauchitsch and Halder not only tolerated SS atrocities in Poland in 1939/1940, but became deeply inveigled in a war of extermination against the USSR in 1941 from an anti-Bolshevist standpoint. Hartmann, ‘Halder’.
211
The report to OKW to which Thoma refers here is unidentified. On 31.12.1941 he maintained that amongst other things he had written, ‘For a decent German soldier it is a disgrace and a scandal that he is being trained in this manner, in a way that is unworthy of a German soldier.’ He received no reply to this letter. SRX 1442, 31.12.1944, TNA WO 208/4162. 24,000 Jews were murdered in Minsk in August and November 1941. Thoma can have had only indirect knowledge of these massacres because his division stood several hundred kilometres east of the city; on a tour of the front he was in the Minsk area on 1.7.1941 and 17.7.1941. When he took command of 17.Pz.Div.on 21.7.1941, this was already south-east of Smolensk. Accordingly it is more probable that he was referring to smaller-scale murders from the beginning of July 1941. Gerlach, ‘Kalkulierte Morde’, p. 549, ‘Enzyklopädie des Holocaust’, Vol. II, p. 950f, and see Thoma, diary entries 1, 17, 21.7.1941, BA/MA 2/2. A locality called Pskip cannot be found in the Russian gazeteer of placenames.
212
Crüwell was attempting here to justify the German mass murders behind the front as a reaction to illegal partisan warfare. This allowed him to knowingly skirt the fact that the Wehrmacht – independent of the danger that actually existed to some extent from dispersed Red Army units – proceeded with mindless brutality against the civilian population. Army units murdering tens of thousands of civilians under the pretext of combating partisans. This is not to mention the 700,000 to 750,000 victims of the SD-Einsatzgruppen in the period to the spring of 1942, which Crüwell also plays down valiantly. ‘Das deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg’, pp. 1030–78; Krausnick/Wilhelm, ‘Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges’, p. 620. It is also interesting that Thoma apparently knew that all Jews in the occupied territories were to be liquidated. For the mass murder of the Jewish civilian population in the Soviet Union, see Longerich, ‘Politik der Vernichtung’, pp. 293–418.
213
OGPU, Soviet secret service, 1922–24. At the time of World War II it was known as NKVD. For the alleged NKVD shootings in Poland see Musiel, ‘Konterrevolutionäre Elemente’.
214
Ludowice is about 30 kilometres north-east of Thorn in Poland (formerly West Prussia), but Neuffer is probably thinking of another, White Russian locality of similar name near Minsk. Neuffer became Chief of Staff, Luftgaukommando Moskau on 1.12.1941 and would not have been aware of the murder of 7,000 Jews at Minsk on 20.11.1941. His account refers most probably to executions in March 1942 when 5,000 Jews were murdered. Neuffer was transferred out of Russia in April 1942. ‘Enzyklopädie des Holocaust’, Vol. II, p. 951.
215
For the involvement of Lithuanian auxiliaries in the mass shootings on the Eastern Front, see Dean, ‘Collaboration’; Stang, ‘Hilfspolizisten’.
216
From April to November 1942 Neuffer was CO, 5.Flak.Div. at Darmstadt. At this time there were seven large-scale deportations of Jews from Frankfurt am Main that had apparently not escaped Neuffer’s notice. ‘Dokumente zur Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden’, p. 532f.
217
In the spring of 1943, German troops 20 kilometres west of Smolensk in the Katyn Forest discovered the mass graves of 4,363 Polish officers murdered by the Red Army in 1940. Nazi propaganda made the best possible use of this opportunity. Goebbels, ‘Diaries’, Vol. 8, entries for 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24 and 28.4.1943.
218
Oberst Johannes Heym (6.10.1894–?) was commandant of several airfields during the war. He was captured in Tunisia and arrived at Trent Park in mid-May 1943. On 21.8.1943 he was transferred to the United States.