BASSENGE: I agree. That is my personal impression.
WILDERMUTH: He doesn’t make a good impression on me.
BASSENGE: No.
WILDERMUTH: His face! Would you like a face like that in your regiment?
BASSENGE: No, I know that type well and I always go by their fingers; I look at their hands.
WILDERMUTH: In carrying out the mass executions the SS did things which were unworthy of an officer and which every German officer should have refused to do, but I know of cases where officers did not refuse, and did do them, those mass executions. I know of similar things which were done by the army, and by officers. I personally always adopted the attitude that I wouldn’t obey an order like that because it’s against my honour as an officer; I’m not an executioner, I’m an officer. The question arises; are the majority of us of the view that the SS did things which some people possibly consider necessary from a political point of view, but which we, as officers, would never have done and therefore purposely left to people who are not officers. I don’t know whether one could get away with that attitude. It would be a very good thing politically if the German officers’ corps were to say: ‘We dissociate ourselves in that way from these people,’ but they could immediately confront us and say: ‘But if you please, in this instance the German Hauptmann So-and-so, or the German Oberst So-and-so did exactly the same thing as the SS.’
Document 115
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 226
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 20–1 Nov. 44 [TNA, WO 208/4364]
MEYER: Do you know that I had an NCO shot at CAEN because he raped a girl?
EBERBACH: No.
MEYER: The fellow did the following: He was drunk and then went… where there were several women; he picked out a girl and forced her to guide him to the next village. The girl ran away and he re-entered her house, locked the girl in and finally raped her. The girl died. Thank God we succeeded in establishing the… the following morning and I had the fellow shot; I ordered the mayor and several municipal councillors to attend the execution. They had to watch it. Whereupon the mayor sent me word that he thanked me on behalf of the local population for the expeditious way in which the case had been handled. He regarded it as an offence committed by a criminal, not by a German soldier. He repeated those words at the funeral so that relations with the population were on a perfect footing once more and that matter had been cleared up.[276]
EBERBACH: (laughing) That’s something speaking in your favour. But I believe that the FÜHRER issued an order for the East that the raping of women and girls should not be… as a criminal offence, but only as a disciplinary – as terror was part of the rules of war.
MEYER: I never heard that.
EBERBACH: You haven’t been in the East for a long time. I don’t know that order either as it is a long time since I was there, but officers who were there recently, said that such a FÜHRER-order existed.
MEYER: That is… by that we undermine all that is best in the troops.
EBERBACH: That order wasn’t issued for the West, merely for the East.
MEYER: On the other hand, I know several officers who had Ukrainian girls during the winter of 1941–42 at TAGANROG – there were marvellous girls down there. Those officers, after having been before a Court of Honour, haven’t been promoted until this day.[277]
EBERBACH: I can’t make HIMMLER out at all; on the one hand, because he decided to have all the Jews massacred, consciously…
MEYER: Do you know why? HIMMLER is the most faithful executor of the FÜHRER’s orders. The FÜHRER used to say: ‘Should the Jews succeed once again in involving EUROPE in a war, it will not mean the destruction of the German people, but the annihilation of the Jewish race.’[278]
WILDERMUTH: A leader of the SD and police officer is not a real officer. I refuse to have anything to do with the SD.
THOMA: It occurs to me, because it said in the newspaper today that that man (Generalmajor DUNCKERN (PW))[279] is from the SD – perhaps I should ask for him to be sent somewhere else. I refuse to associate with those swine.
WILDERMUTH: So do I.
THOMA: All those who occupied any position of authority in the SD are nothing but murderers.
WILDERMUTH: They are all murderers.
THOMA: Perhaps the Waffen-SS is a little better.
WILDERMUTH: In the Waffen-SS there are men who did nothing beyond fighting bravely. One never knows what a man may have been involved in. That is the reservation I feel with regard to MEYER (PW). How do I know what crimes he may have committed?
THOMA: He was in RUSSIA and was picked out by the ‘Leibstandarte’!
BROICH: Anyone who is CO of the ‘Hitler Youth Division’ in 1944 must be a Nazi, that’s obvious. That man would be the first to shoot our wives and us if he were given the order to do so, just like all the others, and he’d do it with glee. Just like RAMCKE (PW), he is pretending to know nothing about it all.[280]
WILCK: His whole expression—
BASSENGE: He behaved quite sensibly today—
BROICH: That man is clever and knows the lie of the land exactly: he is reticent and pretends not to know anything.
WILCK: Of course he’d like to become one of us now.
BROICH: It was sheer cowardice on his part to pretend to be an Army ‘Oberst’. Suddenly the Army is good enough for him.[281]
WILCK: Yes, all of a sudden.
[…]
MEYER: Do you know that our education has resulted in a certain amount of brutality, which is partly quite unconscious to us – for instance, the execution of those involved in the 20 July ‘Putsch’, and above all, the liquidation of their families.
EBERBACH: Were you present?
MEYER: No, I only heard about it recently.
EBERBACH: Were you present at that RÖHM business, those executions as LICHTERFELDE, etc.?
MEYER: I was present in MUNICH but took no part in the shooting. That business was clean though. They were shot like soldiers, but the majority of those who performed the executions at the time are no longer alive. Only Sepp DIETRICH is still alive and… the others have all been killed.[282] It puzzles me today. The next-of-kin of those shot on 30 June 1934 have been excellently cared for; their wives and children etc. were given plenty of money. They came under the FÜHRER’s protection etc. I don’t know what happened afterwards – whilst this time they even shot pregnant women. If I imagine my wife stood up against the wall with her children by her side… bumped off![283]
EBERBACH: Yes, what a dreadful life!
MEYER: Yes. We have gained our personal strength and endurance from our faith in the purity of our ideas… from our belief in our race, from our belief in a healthy, clean family-life and now suddenly! The fact which depresses me so much is that we are represented as being swine. You are told to your face the exact opposite of what you were fighting for and what you have striven for.
EBERBACH: Chin up!
Document 116
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 227
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 22–3 Nov. 44 [TNA, WO 208/4364]
276
The shooting of a Scharführer of SS-Div.
277
Eberbach meant here the ‘Gerichtsbarkeitserlass’ of 13.5.1941, which lifted the obligation to prosecute German soldiers who committed crimes against Soviet civilians, although rape was excluded. The total number of prosecutions fell sharply upon its introduction into the field. Meyer and Eberbach may have had knowledge of this document. A special order from Hitler in 1941 regarding punishment for rape is not known. Beck, ‘Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt’.
278
Hitler to the Reichstag, 30.1.1939. The speech is reproduced in Domarus, ‘Hitler’, Vol. 2, pp. 1047–67, here p. 1058.
279
SS-Brigadeführer and Generalmajor der Polizei Anton Dunckern (29.6.1905–19.12.1985), SD and finally SS and police chief of Metz, where he was taken PoW by the Americans in November 1944. He was interrogated at another centre and taken to the USA in April 1945. Sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment by a French military court in 1951, he was released in 1954 and became a lawyer in Munich. For his interrogation reports see SRGG 1120-1124, 11–23.1.1945, TNA WO 208/4169.
280
A thorough investigation of which war crimes Meyer may have had knowledge has not been made. Since he served with the SS from 1931 (SS-LAH from 1934), and the Waffen-SS must always be considered as integral to the SS, it is hardly likely that he had no idea of the scale of Nazi war crimes. Against him personally, however, there lies only the shooting of Canadian PoWs in Normandy. Margolian, ‘Conduct Unbecoming’; Nassua, ‘Ahndung’.
281
Meyer was captured on 7.9.1944 near Namur. After ridding himself of his soldier’s paybook and bloodied camouflage smock he assumed the identity of an Oberst of 2.Pz.Div. After a short spell in hospital he was transferred to a PoW camp where he was recognised on 8.11.1944 and flown to England. His memoirs deal with this episode at length. Kurt Meyer, ‘Grenadiere’, pp. 313–32.
282
The list of dead at IfZ has 83 names, 50 of them SA people. Gritschneider gives 90 names, Gritschneider, ‘Der Führer hat sie zum Tode verurteilt’, p. 60ff. The total number of those murdered is put at between 150 and 200. Longerich, ‘Die braunen Bataillone’, p. 219. Sepp Dietrich appeared at Stadelheim prison in company with a group of SS men with orders to kill SA leaders Hans-Peter von Heydebreck, August Schneidlhuber, Wilhelm Schmidt, Hans Erwin Graf von Spretti, Edmund Heines and Hans Hayn detained there. It cannot be determined reliably whether Dietrich was one of the shooters. The murderers of Röhm were Theodor Eicke (17.10.1892–16.2.1943) and Michael Lippert (14.4.1897–1.9.1969). Gritschneider, ‘Der Führer hat sie zum Tode verurteilt’, pp. 32–6.
283
Nothing is known regarding material support for those bereaved by the murders of 30.6.1934.