RAMCKE: From the inferno.
ROTHKIRCH: Yes, I was at KUTNO,[324] I wanted to take some photographs – that’s my only hobby – and I knew an SS leader there quite well and I was talking to him about this and that when he said: ‘Would you like to photograph a shooting?’ I said: ‘No, the very idea is repugnant to me.’ ‘Well, I mean, it makes no difference to us, they are always shot in the morning, but if you like we still have some and we can shoot them in the afternoon sometime.’ You can’t imagine how these men have become completely brutalised. Just think of it some of these Jews got away and will keep talking about it. And the craziest thing of alclass="underline" how is it possible for pictures to get into the press? For there are pictures in this paper (Weltwoche?[325]). They even filmed it and the films, of course, have got abroad; it always leaks out somehow. In LVOV, just like people catching fish with a net, ten SS men would walk along the street and simply grab any Jews who happened to be walking along. If you happened to look Jewish, you were just added to their catch (laughs). Sometime the world will take revenge for that. If those people, the Jews, come to the helm and take revenge, it will of course be terrible. But I think it doubtful whether the enemy will permit them to get there, for most of the foreigners, the English, the French and the Americans, are also quite clear about the Jews. It won’t be like that. They’ve allied themselves with the devil in order to beat us; just as we concluded that alliance with the Bolsheviks for a time, they are doing the same thing. The important question is: which ideology should gain the upper hand in the world? And whether they will trust us? One must now work to that end so that they will trust us and we must steer clear of everything which will arouse them afresh so that we first show them: ‘Friends, we want to cooperate in creating a sensible world.’
Document 130
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 272
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 16–19 Mar. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]
HEYDTE: There’s another camp which is even worse than LUBLIN; it’s in CZECHOSLOVAKIA. Half-a-million people have been put to death there for certain. I know that all the Jews from BAVARIA were taken there. Yet the camp never became over- crowded.[326]
WILDERMUTH: Yes, I’ve heard of that too.
HEYDTE: But I don’t only know that all the Jews from BAVARIA were taken there, I know that all the Jews from AUSTRIA were taken there, and still the camp wasn’t over-crowded.
WILDERMUTH: From all over GERMANY. It appears that most of the Jews from GERMANY were either sent to LUBLIN or to that place.
HEYDTE: I was also told that the Jews are simply gassed in a gas-chamber there. They gassed mental defectives too.
WILDERMUTH: Yes, I know. I got to know that for a fact in the case of NUREMBERG; my brother is doctor at an institution there. I’ve seen one of those transports myself. The people knew where they were being taken.
HEYDTE: Yes, and then they’ve also done it with old people.
WILDERMUTH: Not with old people!
HEYDTE: Homes for old people! Yes, that is so.
Document 131
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 275
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 24 Mar. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]
[…]
ROTHKIRCH: Look how brutalised we’ve become: I drove through a small Polish place where students were being shot merely because they were students, and Polish nobility and estate owners were all being shot: it was not out in the fields, it was in the town, in front of the Town Hall, you could still see the bullet marks on the thing. I went to BOCKELBERG (VOLLARD-BOCKELBERG?)[327] and told him about it. He said: ‘Listen, we can’t do anything else, it has to be done, because students are the most dangerous people of all, they must all go, and as for the nobility, they will always work against us. Anyway, don’t get so worked up about it, if we win the war, it won’t matter.’ I replied: ‘Sir, that may be, but new principles like that take some getting used to.’
Document 132
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 276
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 25 Mar. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]
DASER: I tried to restrict it all the time and as a result the number of shootings decreased considerably, not only in my area but in the entire area
THOMA: Well, who ordered those shootings?
DASER: FALKENHAUSEN. I protested against it very successfully as those mistakes had been made before – they shot two or three at LILLE; an officer and civil servant were shot in the street by civilians at BRUSSELS. They used to throw hand grenades at the crowds streaming out of cinemas. They shot either a ‘Hauptmann’ or a ‘Major’, besides a uniformed official and a paymaster. Whereupon three or four hostages were shot.
THOMA: Who were the hostages?
DASER: People who had been handed over to us for working against us; people we could lay hands on, who were in possession of arms, although that was forbidden, or people who had made attempts to sabotage railways. If they were caught red-handed they were shot on the spot anyway. I was able to achieve two things: firstly I managed to prevent five or six hostages from being shot immediately the next day whenever one of our men was shot; I ordered them to wait a fortnight or three weeks in case the perpetrator was found, as on some occasion three or four hostages were shot because one of our men had been killed and a week later we caught the culprit. I never signed a death-warrant ; they always went up to BRUSSELS. I became well known on that account with the 15th Armee, who reported to FALKENHAUSEN that the troops were being molested and cables were being cut. They asked him to have more hostages executed. He called us to a conference where I objected against those measures. I said: ‘It’s no use, we are only creating martyrs. The way it has been done up to now is wrong.’ He then said: ‘All right, I agree with your ideas and your argument.’[328]
Document 133
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 277
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 28–9 Mar. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]
WILDERMUTH: In SERBIA I too was given orders to have a hundred people shot for every German killed and fifty for every German wounded. However, I never carried out these orders. One ‘Kommandant’ of some Serbian place, after a skirmish 10 or 20 km away in the mountains, during which two Germans had been killed and three wounded, used to have three hundred and fifty Serbs shot, two hundred for the two Germans killed and a hundred and fifty for the three wounded. About two thousand four hundred people were shot there. The reaction came when he had six hundred people from an aircraft factory shot in one day, including the German foreman. These are things which shouldn’t happen. I never even dreamt of carrying out that order.[329]
324
At Kutno, captured by German troops on 15.9.1939, the Jewish population was corralled into a ghetto in June 1940 where they lived under the most appalling circumstances. During March and April 1942 the ghetto was gradually emptied, the inhabitants being taken to Kulmhof camp for extermination. Nothing is known of the mass shootings of Jews at Kutno.
325
In ‘Weltwoche: Unabhängige Schweizerische Umschau 13’, (1945), No. 585, p. 3 (26.1.1945), accompanying an article ‘Kann sich Hitler noch auf die SS verlassen?’ (‘Can Hitler Still Rely on the SS?’), a photograph was published above a caption indicating that it portrayed Polish civilians unearthing mass graves containing the corpses of their murdered countrymen. It shows two SS men, a number of civilians with shovels, and some corpses in civilian clothes. In the article an anonymous SS man speaks of events at Zhitomir in the winter of 1942 in which tens of thousands were murdered and interred in mass graves.
326
At Lublin-Maidanek death camp approximately 250,000 people were murdered by gassings and mass shootings between October 1941 and July 1944. The only large concentration camp in Czechoslovakia was at Theresienstadt (today Terezin), a ghetto-like complex 60 kilometres north-west of Prague. Between 24.11.1941 and 20.4.1945, 140,000 Jews were brought there from western and central Europe; 33,000 died of starvation and the poor hygiene conditions in the overcrowded camp; 88,000 went to the death camps in the east. ‘Enzyklopädie des Holocaust’, Vol. 3, pp. 1403–7.
327
General der Artillerie Alfred von Vollard-Bockelberg (18.6.1874 – disappeared 1945), 6.9.1939 Military Cdr, Posen; 26.10.1939 C-in-C, Border Region Centre; 5.11.1939–14.5.1940 CO, Wehrkreis I, Königsberg. At this time Rothkirch was Ia, XXXIV.Armeekorps stationed in the General-Gouvernement and probably met Vollard-Bockelberg in October 1939.
328
Between 25.12.1942 and 10.6.1943, Wilhelm Daser was CO, Oberfeldkommandantur 670 at Lille, one of nine districts under the Military Cdr, Belgium and Northern France, General Alexander von Falkenhausen. Between 27.11.1942 and 10.7.1944, Falkenhausen had 240 hostages shot in 18 separate incidents; 30 persons were shot during Daser’s period in office, 10 of whom were executed in Brussels on 16.1.1943 for attacks on Wehrmacht personnel in Oberfeldkommandantur 670 district. Daser authorised the seizure of hostages as a reaction to the attacks, but the death sentences were handed down by Falkenhausen. Weber, ‘Die innere Sicherheit’, esp. p. 139ff; Warmbrunn, ‘Occupation of Belgium’.
329
Wildermuth refers here to the massacre at Kralievo in the nine days from 15.10.1941, in which 4,000 to 5,000 civilians were shot dead as a reprisal by units of 717.Inf.Div. After the town was attacked by Chetniks on 5.10.1941, the Dornier aircraft factory was closed the following day for the alleged unreliability of the workforce. These employees were then held in a workshop of railway coachmakers together with workshop and railroad staff. On 11.10.1941 the Chetniks launched a second attack on Kralievo that lasted until 16.10.1941. The attacks had had artillery support while Wehrmacht troops came under fire from the civilian population. On 15 and 16.10.1941 between 300 and 1,755 hostages were shot, including the Dornier employees. That a German factory supervisor was shot as a hostage is not confirmed by the archive. The Kralievo district commandant, Oberleutnant Alfons Matziowicz, had issued an instruction on 15.10.1941 that 100 Serbs were to be shot for every dead German. This was authorised under Keitel’s order of 16.9.1941 that the death of a German was to be expiated by the killing of 50 to 100 Serbs; OKW War Diary, Vol. 1, p. 1068. There is scarcely any evidence of Wildermuth’s involvement in the shootings. The 717.Inf.Div. files do not indicate when and on whose orders any particular batch of hostages were shot, although most were carried out by elements of Inf.Reg.749 under Major Desch, senior officer at Kralievo. This unit was guilty of other massacres in the Kralievo area after 16.10.1941. The activity report of Wildermuth’s Inf.Reg.737 for September 1941 does prove, however, that atrocities were committed in his direct area of jurisdiction before the October incident. The report states, ‘140 to 150 enemy dead, 6 wounded, 92 prisoners,