EBERBACH: Didn’t he come under FRANK?
KITTEL: FRANK merely had the right to give instructions, and KOPPE got his orders from BERLIN. It turned out from that mess that the police did what they liked and FRANK was over them in administrative matters. So just what a State needs, namely a legislative power and an executive power, was lacking, and that was lacking in the whole of the east, and that’s the secret of our whole failure. When I think of that ‘Don Quixote’ we had at ROSTOV, General HENNECKE(?), Chief of the Police of WEIMAR, and then subsequently Chief of Police at ROSTOV,[311] although admittedly he only used his authority very little – then one can only say that this man with his pushing ways: ‘This is the SS, this is Heinrich HIMMLER, room will be made here; this house will be a Police Station, and later there will be a leaders’ headquarters here.’ That was set up first of all. He brought a completely separate electric power station from GERMANY, electric stoves, huge radios and everything. I said to him: ‘If you take over the executive power here I shall have to submit to the orders of my superiors; the police are here – 800 Russian police with whom we have so far kept the town in order; there is no German policeman over them, but it is done on a certain basis of trust; the people have such-and-such weapons.’ ‘What, they have weapons, that’s unheard of, that’s contrary to all the FÜHRER’s orders.’ The first thing was that they disarmed the police – trouble started from that day. Then they disbanded the police and picked people out from the rabble. All that work of the last five months was completely undone and destroyed in one month. Then one affair occurred – the SS shot all the prisoners in the civil prison at ROSTOV. They set fire to the prison and it didn’t burn. The Russians captured it in that state, and can put it all down to my account, because at first I had the executive power in my hands.
Document 126
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 265
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 7 Feb. – 1 Mar. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]
BRUHN: I do believe that shootings and all sorts of things were carried out there on a large scale, and as a matter of fact KITTEL (PW) told me that. He was an eye-witness of it at LVOV and CRACOW when hundreds and thousands of people were shot; he knows it for a fact, but I didn’t know it. I’ve never spoken to an eye-witness of a thing like that. I’ve heard it, but it was impossible to establish the truth of things like that. KITTEL is on the list of criminals, and one must not forget that such people are subconsciously obsessed with the idea that they must go in the direction through thick and thin, because they’ll fall anyhow, whereas people like ourselves are much more conscious of the fact that we can go everywhere, wherever we like. Of course, they can stand us up against the wall, but then it would be judicial murder. But I asked KITTEL: ‘What did you do on that Sunday morning when the hundreds of people were shot near your house?’ Then he said: ‘Everyone knew about it.’[312] (Cf. SRGG 1086(C)). So in a certain sense he was implicated in it, and one must not forget – I believe ULLERSBERGER (PW) is also afraid of a similar fate, and MEYER (PW) will say to himself anyhow: ‘They will have their knife into me, because so-and-so many PW were shot by my “Division”.’ Those people know for a fact that they probably haven’t a chance of returning to their own country. So on the one hand it leads to complete agreement and cooperation with all these ideas expressed by GOEBBELS, or on the other hand it leads to personal rows like we have here. KITTEL described it to me like this: he had a house at some place or other, and then one Sunday morning he was woken from his beautiful sleep by intermittent rifle-fire. So he asked someone to go and see what was happening. After a time this fellow returned and reported to him that a few hundred Jews were assembled there and were just being shot. That was in the area south-east or south-west of RIGA. He experienced the same thing again at CRACOW. Then he said that soldiers were under his command who were off duty on Sunday morning and who were stationed in that village, had all gone there and watched it. Then they dug their graves and then they picked up the children by their hair and then simply killed them. The SS did that. The soldiers stood there, and besides that the Russian civilian population stood 200 m away and watched as they were killed there. He proved how vile the whole thing was by the fact that an out-and-out SS man who was employed on his staff later succumbed to a nervous breakdown and from that day onwards kept saying that he couldn’t carry on any longer, it was impossible; he was a doctor. He couldn’t get over it. That was his first experience of such things actually being done. A cold shudder ran through SCHAEFFER (PW) and me when we heard that, and then we said to KITTEL: ‘What did you do then? You were lying in bed and heard that, and it was only a few hundred metres away from your house. Then surely you must have reported that to your GOC. Surely something was bound to be done about it?’ He replied that it was generally known and was quite usual. Then sometimes he also interspersed remarks such as: ‘There wasn’t anything particularly bad about it either,’ and ‘they were to blame for everything anyhow,’ so that I almost assumed at that time, that it hadn’t even mattered very much to him personally.
SCHLIEBEN: We are doomed to bloodshed.
BRUHN: It’s simply like this, that if we, as decent people were asked today: ‘What should be done to a government like that, what should become of a people like that which has carried out such things on a large scale?’, one can surely only say that for the sake of humanity a people like that should not win the war, but should be pushed back to its frontiers. In that way one becomes an accuser of one’s own country.
SCHLIEBEN: This is the situation into which those people have brought us. And then he (GOEBBELS) quotes the Almighty!
BRUHN: GOEBBELS drags up all sorts of things which he has no right at all to say. This is the scourge of God which is now overtaken humanity. That’s what happens if you look upon life solely for eating and drinking.
SCHLIEBEN: Such a thing does exist and it is coming too! ‘And I will visit the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation!’
BRUHN: For the same reason I believe that when the policy of extermination overtakes us, which we have actually merited by our shedding of blood, the blood of our children will have to be shed too, or perhaps that of our relations.
Document 127
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 270
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 9 Mar. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]
ROTHKIRCH: The IO said: ‘You were in the military “Kommandantur” in RUSSIA. You were at LVOV; what did you do there?’ ‘I was in command of the local “Kommandanturen” there.’ ‘A large number of crimes must have been committed in your area too?’ Yes, of course they occurred but military administration hasn’t the slightest connection with civil administration. On the contrary, there was usually a fair amount of animosity between us; we had the prerogative and woe to anyone who dared carry out executions in my area. Whereupon he said: ‘We act on the principle that anyone who witnesses a crime and does nothing to prevent it, is an accessory.’ Then he asked me about MINSK. I said: ‘I was GOC there but my instructions were quite clear: I had to fight the partisans as GOC of security troops of the “Heeresgruppe Mitte”.’[313] Well, then he interrogated me fairly thoroughly. What can he do? Of course I said I had nothing to do with all that business. I said: ‘Not only I, but none of the Generals had anything to do with it, on the contrary, we turned it down in the most definite way. Many a General was dismissed as a result of his refusal.’ Then the IO said: ‘Incidentally, the Russians will demand the handing over of a lot of officers.’ Of course those officers who held those administrative jobs should be among them. If you’re handed over, it’s all up.
311
Here meaning SS-Gruppenführer and Generalleutnant der Polizei Paul Hennicke (31.1.1883–25.7.1967), Police President of Weimar, April 1938 – October 1942. No details are known regarding the murder of civilian convicts by the SD.
313
Rothkirch had been at HQ, Commdg Gen. Security Forces, Army Group Centre, since 8.10.1943 and was appointed Cdr, White Russia. Following a positive appraisal by Feldmarschall Busch he was promoted to General der Kavallerie on 1.1.1944.