?: Don’t you believe, Sir, that the English would have broken a pact with just as few scruples, if it had been to the advantage of their people?
?: Certainly; but they would choose a much more skilful reason. In general they don’t go in for unnecessary cruelties – that was reserved for us. The English think further ahead. We always think only how to get material for the next speech.
Document 90
CSDIC (UK) SR REPORT, SRGG 520 [TNA, WO 208/4167]
LUDWIG CRÜWELL – General der Panzertruppe – Captured 29 May 42 in North Africa.
HANS-JÜRGEN VON ARNIM – Generaloberst (GOC Army Group Africa) – Captured 12 May 43 in Tunisia.
Information received: 3 Nov. 43
CRÜWELL: If you listen to the gentlemen here, we’ve done nothing else but kill off everyone. But if you ask anyone, they were never present themselves. They heard about that from THOMA (PW).
ARNIM: I’ve never spoken to an eye-witness either.
CRÜWELL: It’s THOMA, he’s seen them all, the eye-witness.
ARNIM: Hasn’t THOMA seen it himself?
CRÜWELL: No, no, but he’s at any rate supposed to have seen people who did it.
ARNIM: I don’t believe that either.
CRÜWELL: No, but he’s on friendly terms with all those swine. That’s the crazy part! He’s almost on terms of ‘du’ with Sepp DIETRICH.
ARNIM: Charming! And then he curses the whole thing.
CRÜWELL: Yes, that’s just what I mean. Where’s he going to find all this circumstantial evidence(?) if people don’t trust him blindly? No one would tell me about it, because they would say: ‘This man may be quite a passable soldier, but we don’t want to have anything to do with him otherwise.’
ARNIM: They haven’t told him either.
CRÜWELL: Well, I don’t know.
ARNIM: He may have heard somewhere or other about some case.
I don’t like it either, when hostages are killed, when ten Frenchmen are killed because a few Germans have been killed somewhere.
CRÜWELL: But, Good God, in a case of necessity – that’s military law – it’s international military law.[233]
ARNIM: I must honestly say in that case I’d carefully pick out the people I was going to take, we’ll say criminals or people like that.
CRÜWELL: Well, yes, but you take some of the good ones as well, so that it acts as a deterrent. You can’t object to that, although I should have a horror of it, too, I am glad that I am not Governor of PARIS. But what would you do then, Sir? If you didn’t kill any, then we should be killed.
ARNIM: Yes, I would get hold of those who had actually committed the murder, those who had committed the first murder, with the help of the police or of police troops.
CRÜWELL: Yes, if you could do that, then there would be no need for all this business of hostages, but that’s how it is. I have never in my life had any hostages killed because I have not been in a dilemma – I have taken hostages, but, thank God, I have not needed to have them killed, but that is in accordance with military law. That’s typical again of the English, they say: ‘Those Huns – the things they do!’ and on the quiet they say to the others: ‘You must make a firm stand against them, you must do everything underground, secretly.’
ARNIM: They incite the underground people and if we defend ourselves against them, then there’s a great outcry. Incidentally, they are doing the same themselves in INDIA as they are reproaching us with.[234]
CRÜWELL: Yes, certainly, they are letting all the… die.
ARNIM: They don’t even publish an account in the newspaper when they kill hostages from among Indian nationalists.
Document 91
CSDIC (UK) SR REPORT, SRGG 647 [TNA, WO 208/4167]
HANS CRAMER – General der Panzertruppe (GOC German Afrika Korps) – Captured 12 May 43 in Tunisia.
KLAUS HUBBUCH – Leutnant (ADC to Generalmajor BOROWIETZ (PW)) – Captured 9 May 43 in Tunisia.
Information received: 10 Dec. 43
HUBBUCH (re executions in POLAND and RUSSIA): They are these bands that are taken prisoner and are then put beside their graves and shot – and moreover all of them. None of them are taken prisoner and treated as soldiers, but they are shot.
CRAMER: Yes, that’s what I always say too. Outrages have certainly been committed, so-and-so many Jews have been killed and Heaven only knows what, but so far I have never found anyone who has admitted to me that he has witnessed it in person. I am firmly convinced that terrible atrocities… but at present I haven’t any proof of it.
Document 92
CSDIC (UK) SR REPORT, SRGG 666 [TNA, WO 208/4167]
WILHELM RITTER VON THOMA – General der Panzertruppe – Captured 4 Nov. 42 in North Africa.
GERHARD BASSENGE – Generalmajor (GOC, Air Defences Tunis/Bizerta) – Captured 9 May 43 in Tunisia.
Information received: 16 Dec. 43
THOMA: […]
In the paper today there are details of the mass poisonings, that gas business. I know it’s true, because the people who did it told me about it themselves.
BASSENGE: I don’t know, but I presume it is… 100 per cent correct.
THOMA: Yes, I heard of it from a man who had to do it. It was SS men and Gestapo youths who rounded up the Jews and so on, and as they had no technical experts amongst their own numbers, chemists who were in the gas department of the Ordnance Branch, had to work with them.[235] One man told me himself with horror that that time in RUSSIA was the most appalling time of his life; I said I wouldn’t have done it.
THOMA: When I’ve got both the German and English news service I can roughly sift out what’s true.
BASSENGE: Obviously everyone lies like a trooper in war-time and here one has the opportunity of hearing both sides—
THOMA: We get a clearer picture than the Generals in command at the front.
BASSENGE: We were never so well-informed as we are here.
Document 93
CSDIC (UK) SR REPORT, SRGG 666 [TNA, WO 208/4167]
233
The opinion given here that the killing of hostages is covered by international law is misleading. The 1907 Hague Convention relating to land warfare contained no binding regulations, and it was left to individual states to interpret how each would react in warfare to illegal resistance. See in this connection the dissertation (in preparation) of Andreas Toppe, ‘Wehrmacht und Völkerrecht’, also ‘Zwischen Hammer und Sichel – Bewaffneter Widerstand der Bevölkerung in Ostmittel-europa während des Zweiten Weltkriegs und die Reaktion der deustchen und sowjetischen Besatzungsmacht’ in AHF No. 72, 8.11.2001.
234
Arnim probably means the great uprising by Indian nationalists against the British Raj that shocked the nation in August 1942 and was put down by force of arms. Hutchins, ‘India’s Revolution’.
235
Details of the involvement of the Army Weapons Office chemists in the gassings are not known to exist.