MEYER: I must say that I heard about large-scale massacres of the Jews for the first time at COMPIÈGNE and after that LUBLIN business was made public.[284]
EBERDING: I just heard tales about it too. I don’t know anything positive. CHOLTITZ (PW) was present at the capture of SEBASTOPOL and one of the officers of his ‘Regiment’ was actually invited to be present when thirty thousand Jews were shot.[285]
MEYER (incredulously): Thirty thousand?
Document 117
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 232
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 8–11 Dec. 44 [TNA, WO 208/4364]
WILDERMUTH: If only ours were a young immature people, but they have been infected to the depth of their moral fibre. I must tell you that I have considered this question really seriously; a nation which has accepted such a rule of lies, brute force and crime, in the main without raising any objection, is simply not a people; a people in which the murder of mental defectives was possible and where intelligent people could still say: ‘That wasn’t at all a bad idea of theirs’ should be liquidated. Such bestiality has never been seen in the world before. One might just as well get rid of all consumptives or all suffering from cancer.[286]
WAHLE: I wanted to hear your opinion about the following: if one accept as a premise that the Germans are the most immature people in the world, that they were forced by BISMARCK into unity and that after BISMARCK, came that crazy fellow ADOLF and wanted to force them into—
WILDERMUTH: Into mastery over EUROPE.
WAHLE: Yes, into becoming a world power, do you think that an intelligent or redeeming deed could be performed now by anyone who has been infected by this National Socialist poison? I don’t think so.
WILDERMUTH: Well, it depends to what extent he has been infected: RUNDSTEDT has perhaps not been infected to such an extent; I don’t know him.
WAHLE: All the same, he sat in that court and condemned a large number of innocent men along with that group. RUNDSTEDT and SPECHT. He condemned innocent men like WITZLEBEN and BECK.[287]
Document 118
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 237
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 21–2 Dec. 44 [TNA, WO 208/4364]
WILDERMUTH: Hans von GRAEVENITZ was head of PW welfare. He told me GOEBBELS had to speak so that the people should stop agitating that the Russians should be left to perish as second-rate human beings and he actually hinted to me that one-and-half million PW were left to perish, partly whilst being transported and partly later on in GERMANY.
ELFELDT: I spoke to GRAEVENITZ in the spring of 1942 when the greater part of the prisoners was being brought in. On that occasion he told me: ‘The majority of them are in such a miserable condition as you wouldn’t believe could be possible.’ A greater number of them died afterwards in GERMANY as as a result of complete exhaustion. Those immense losses occurred when that mass of PW was suddenly transported from the front to the German PW camps, right at the beginning too, and, of course, when they were suddenly put into PW camps which hadn’t adequate accommodation. Subsequently all efforts were made to right matters but as a result of those weeks of undernourishment—
WILDERMUTH: Probably to some extent the thing was unavoidable.
ELFELDT: At BRIANSK later on there was a commandant who managed to put the PW to work in the fields and by the spring conditions had become bearable. But it is indescribable how many of them perished during the winter up to that period. If a capable commandant had been on the spot in the autumn and had had the fields reaped, then it wouldn’t have been…
WILDERMUTH: You can’t feed them properly if you keep them on the march; they’d eat too much. Some of the deaths are a direct consequence of the war and we can’t be held responsible for them.[288]
Document 119
CSDIC (UK), SR Report SRGG 1086(C) [TNA, WO 208/4196]
Generalleutnant SCHAEFER (Commander, 244 Infantry Division) – Captured 28 Aug. 44 in Marseilles
Generalmajor VON FELBERT (Commandant of Feldkommandatur 560 Besançon) – Captured 5 Sept. 44 in Landresse.
Generalmajor BRUHN (Commander, 553 Volksgrenadier Division) – Captured 22 Nov. 44 in Zabern.
Generalleutnant KITTEL (Commandant, Metz and Commander, 462 Volksgrenadier Division) – Captured 22 Nov. 44 in Metz.
Information received: 28 Dec. 44
KITTEL: (re administration in RUSSIA) I quarrelled with every Security Service chief, because I would brook no… in my affairs. I had the sentences prepared for me, then I had them brought to me and signed them personally from the very beginning, from a certain level of severity upwards. That’s to say I wasn’t interested in two years’ imprisonment; the people could demand that themselves, but ten years’ hard labour or six years’ penal servitude or a death sentence – I said: ‘I’m going to sign those myself,’ having regard alone to the political consequences. I had town majors who have straight away hanged a Russian for the theft of a piece of soap. The very first thing I did if I arrived somewhere and got a town major’s office under my control was just to say to my operations officer: ‘Please issue order No. so-and-so.’ That set out what sentences he could inflict and what he could not inflict and stated that I reserve for myself the right of confirmation of all death sentences and that they were to be confirmed by me.
? BRUHN: But surely those ‘Wehrmachtskommandanten’ were always army officers—
KITTEL: Yes.
? BRUHN: Reserve officers, or were they SS officers?
KITTEL: They were a great many regular officers among them.
? FELBERT: Can the officers be classified by saying that the very young ones who went through the Hitler Youth Movement and became ‘Bannführer’ etc. were particularly strict?
KITTEL: No. The people in control there were nothing but old crocks. There were some queer fish among them. I’ll just pick out one case: I had one town major who was at MACHAJEWKA(?)[289] near STALINO. MACHAJEWKA(?) was a fairly large place, with 300,0000 inhabitants. He was a regular officer and had now finally been discharged with the rank of ‘Oberstleutnant’.
? FELBERT: But didn’t have anything at all to do with politics?
KITTEL: He had nothing to do with politics. When he was in ordinary uniform he looked tolerable. He had had a summer tunic made out of drill, evidently to his own specifications, and one day a few soldiers came to the town major’s office at MACHAJEWKA(?) and presented in front of my desk a man they were holding by the scruff of the neck. ‘I’ve got a Russian spy here.’ (laughs) It was the town major himself! He had asked a few soldiers where they came from and where they were going, so they had seized him by the scruff of the neck and marched him into his own office. And that swine had hanged more than anybody else. I put an end to his activity then. He was an Austrian, funnily enough, for the Austrians were extraordinarily lenient otherwise. I always said I was glad if I didn’t have a fire-eater as town major, who always thinks that everyone is a bandit and is bound to get the wrong man in the end. A charming Austrian like that, who occasionally drank a vodka with them and got on very well with the major, and in that way slowly collected people he could trust; one like that has… far better service than one who bangs on the table and says: ‘Eight horses were stolen tonight; I’m going to burn down this village.’ They did that, too.
284
Meyer refers here to the liberation of Maidanek death camp at Lublin by the Red Army on 24.7.1944.
285
The major mass shooting of Jews in the Crimea took place at Simferopol between 13 and 15.12.1941, when units of Einsatzgruppen D shot 10,000 to 11,000 people in the city park. Inf.Reg.16 commanded by Choltitz was at Sevastopol at this time. What massacre was observed by the regimental officer is unknown. The total number of victims of genocide in the Crimea is estimated at about 40,000. ‘Enzyklopädie des Holocaust’, Vol. 2, p. 821f. For the involvement of local military field offices in the Holocaust see Oldenburg, ‘Ideologie und militärisches Kalkül’, pp. 159–224.
286
For euthanasia and its development in the eugenics of the Kaiserreich and Weimar republic see Klee, ‘Euthenasie’.
287
On Hitler’s order on 2.8.1944, Keitel summoned a session of the Wehrmacht Honour Court under the presidency of von Rundstedt. The other judges were Guderian, General der Infanterie Walter Schroth (3.6.1892–6.10.1944), General der Infanterie Karl Kriebel (26.2.1888–28.11.1961) and Generalleutnant Karl-Wilhelm Specht (22.5.1894–3.12.1953). The latter, who had won the Oak Leaves on the Eastern Front as CO, Inf.Reg.55 in 1941, was Insp.-Gen., Führer-Youth Movement. Generalmajor Ernst Maisel (16.9.1896–16.12.1978) prepared the protocols. Generalleutnant Heinrich Kirchheim deputised for Guderian at two sessions and at the special session for Speidel. The Honour Court was required to decide if officers suspected of complicity in the conspiracy were to be discharged from the Wehrmacht so that they could be tried in the People’s Court, or simply released. It heard no legal argument and relied solely on evidence presented by the RSHA and Gestapo. At the first session on 4.8.1944, 22 principal conspirators involved in the 20.7.1944 coup attempt were expelled from the Wehrmacht, including Generalfeldmarshall von Witzleben and Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. At the four sittings of 4, 14, 24.8.1944 and 14.9.1944, 55 Army officers were discharged from the Wehrmacht and another 29 released on the recommendation of the Honour Court (including Hans Cramer on 24.8.1944 and Alexander von Pfuhlstein on 14.9.1944). Charges against 19 other officers were dropped. At a special session on 4.10.1944, by majority decision Speidel was not dismissed from the Wehrmacht, and his superior officer Rommel was implicated accordingly. Keitel and Specht voted against Speidel. For the Honour Court, see Ueberschär, ‘Stauffenberg’, p. 150f; Reuth, ‘Rommel’, p. 238ff; Domarus, ‘Hitler’, Vol. 2, p. 2137f; and ‘20 Juli 1944’, p. 195ff.
288
Elfeldt was Chief of Staff to General der Artillerie at OKH in the spring of 1942. It is not known when he spoke to Graevenitz, who was head of the OKW PoW office. For camp commandants who interceded for their Soviet prisoners see Hartmann, ‘Massensterben oder Massenvernichtung?’.
289
Makejewka, town in the Donetz basin. Kittel was commandant of nearby Stalino (today Donezk) from 15.5.1942 to 19.9.1942.