The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau

June 22, 2015

In this first installment, Carolyn reads selections from the Introduction by Alfred de Zayas and the full content of chapters one and two. Some highlights:

• Some history of war crimes investigations from WWI;
• Learning from that war, the German govt. established a new war crimes bureau on Sept. 4, 1939;
• Name, history and statements from some of the Wehrmacht judges;
• The author's negative attitude toward the Third Reich and praise for members of the resistance brings up some issues;
• Hitler's "Barbarossa Decree" of 13 Sept. 1941 is read in full and discussed. 1h33m 

An idealist and United Nations advisor, Alfred de Zayas today still has hope for Democracy and the sovereignty of nations.

June 26, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 3 and 4. Chapter three is titled "Related German Agencies" and describes the numerous other official agencies with whom the War Crimes Bureau collaborated, and how cooperation was carried out.

Chapter four, "Methods of Obtaining Evidence" tells us how cases were built and gives some vivid examples of mutilations and other outrages committed against German soldiers on the East, West and South Fronts. The bulk of the testimony (approx. 85%) came from ten's of thousands of sworn witnesses giving depositions to military judges or local courts. 1hr11m

June 29, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5, "The Testimony of Witnesses," looks into how credible witness testimony was obtained by the judges. All witnesses took a "real" oath, and the judges sought verification for all testimony, sometimes going to great length to do so.

Chapter 6, "Expert Medical Opinion" explains how medical officers distinguish the nature of wounds, whether from battle or deliberate mutilation, whether inflicted before or after death. The most common mutilations (which occurred daily on the Eastern Front) were the gouging out of eyes and the cutting off of genitals. Severing feet and hands was also carried out by the savage Soviet troops and Jewish partisans. 1hr12m

Corporal Hans Muth, victim of mutilation: medical examination determined that his eyes had been deliberately put out while he was unconscious. 

July 6, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 7 and 8, having to do with how Bureau investigations were used by the German government and by the Wehrmacht.

Chapt. 7 talks about White Books and White Papers which were put out by the German Foreign Office. One unexpected and disappointing development was that when photographs of the atrocities committed on Germans in Poland were published in the White Books, there was such an outcry over the "horror pictures" that Germany stopped adding those images. Naturally, since the Germans didn't commit mutilations on their enemies, the other side didn't have such pictures to print. 

Chapt. 8 is about the use of Bureau investigations for "Diplomatic Protection" for prisoners of war, the wounded, medical personnel, etc. A number of examples of protests are given, on both the West and East Fronts (South too). Something I did not know: "thousands of German POW's had already been liquidated by Soviet forces in the first weeks of fighting." 47m28s

July 20, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 9 and 10. Chapter 9, "The Bureau and War Crimes Trials," describes what went into the decisions to hold trials against prisoners of war in German custody. It's divided into sections for Polish, French, British & American, and Russian POW's.

Chapter 10 discusses reprisal actions by the Wehrmacht troops, many of which were threatened but never carried out. De Zayas continues to show his moderate bias for the Allied side and against Adolf Hitler's N-S regime. 1h3m

Rudolf Lehmann was a respectable German jurist who was Judge Advocate General of the Wehrmacht in WWII. He joined the NSDAP in 1935, was arrested by the Americans in 1945, found guilty of war crimes at the Nuremberg High Command trial in 1947. Sentenced to 7 years imprisonment, he was released in 1950, as was typical.

July 27, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 11 and 12. Chapter 11 is titled “Investigations of German War Crimes” which discusses Adolf Hitler's “Order Number 1” (which was not a war crime but allows de Zayas to bring up the concentration camps and alleged “extermination of Jews”); alleged war crimes in North Africa; the status of medical personnel; alleged crimes during the Allied invasion of Europe and at Malmedy.

Chapter 12, titled “Wehrmacht Conceptions of Postwar International Law,” covers ideas that were being developed for a more German-friendly Convention of international laws of war. The current laws, they thought, represented British interests. 1h12m

August 3, 2015

Carolyn reads Chapter 13, titled "Poland." The German War Crimes Bureau was set up on Sept. 4, 1939 in response to the huge increase of reports of attacks against ethnic Germans, mainly from the former German provinces of Posen and West Prussia.

The first judges arrived as early as Sept. 9 and began taking depositions at Bromberg and Hohelsalza. By the end of October, they had six volumes of documents and commentary, each about 500 pages, organized as follows:

• 1) Polish atrocities in Bromberg, Pless, and Stopnica;
• 2) Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans and POW's in Poznan;
• 3-4) Violations of laws of war by the Polish Army;
• 5) Massacre of ethnic Germans in Lodz;
• 6) Polish murders of ethnic Germans (an addendum).

The Bureau's investigations found no evidence of franc tireur or “fifth column” activities among the ethnic Germans, which is what Polish soldiers and civilians were claiming as excuses to rob and kill them. The chapter ends with de Zayas asserting that German SS and SD were committing what he considered to be war crimes against Polish irregular fighters. 51m

August 10, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 14 and 15.

Chapter 14 is titled "The Western Theater of War" which covers:

• Crimes by English soldiers against civilians, mainly in Belgium;
• Crimes against German soldiers in France;
• The French Resistance.

Chapter 15 is titled "Crete":

• Violations of International Law  by British Armed Forces and Cretan civilians;
• Mutilation of German corpses was widespread, which brought on reprisals against civilians;
• Eyewitness reports by Wehrmacht survivors of British killings of wounded Germans. 1hr10min

Above: Remains of the crew of a Heinkel 111 that landed in Doullens, near Vimy, France in June 1940, and were lynched by French civilians (and badly beaten too, it appears), but try to find something about it on the Internet. You won't. These photographs are from the Bundesarchiv, published in De Zayas' book. Fortunately, a court-martial was held on June 6, with three perpetrators being sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out on June 29. (Read something about it in chapter 9.)

September 4, 2015

Carolyn reads Chapter 16, "Captured German Soldiers in the Soviet Union."  Stalin and the Red Army had a policy of German genocide and it was evident on the very first day of the war. Main themes:

• Massacre at Broniki on July 1, 1941 when 180 mostly wounded Germans were stabbed, shot and grenaded to death with never anyone punished for it; 
   
• Captured reports and orders, leaflets and intercepted radio and wireless messages, plus testimony of Soviet POWs all told of the policy of executing prisoners of war;
• Seven ways the Soviets justified the killing of prisoners;
• How the Soviets pretended they were following the Hague Conventions of war;
• Commissars and/or lower ranking officers were responsible for ordering the killings, but there were numerous reports of a Stalin Order.

War Crimes Bureau members believed that Stalin was responsible for the wide-spread killing of German prisoners of war. 1h2m

Sept. 14, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 17 -“Feodosia”, 18 -“Grischino” and 19 -“Soviet Crimes against Non-Germans.” These chapters give further evidence of the Soviet policy of killing all Germans the Red Army was able to get it's hands on, plus adding sub-human mutilations such as cutting off body parts or killing with shovels and pickaxes. You will be horrified at some of the things you hear in this reading.

• In Feodosia, 160 severely wounded German soldiers convalescing in hospitals were thrown out the windows and left to freeze to death by Red Army troops;
• In Grischino (close to current Donetsk, Ukraine), nearly 600 Germans and their allies were murdered, mostly by shooting, plus the women first raped, when the Red Army temporarily reoccupied the town;
• Spanish, Italian and Crimean soldiers received worse treatment from the Soviets than did the Germans, and thousands of interned Ukrainian and Baltic civilians were shot before the Soviets abandoned the locations. 58min
   

Image below: A few of the 160 hospitalized German soldiers who were thrown out of 2nd floor windows of hospitals in Feodosia by Red Army soldiers and then down a several meter high wall, where they were left to freeze. Some were carried to the Sea and left in the surf to freeze. The material at the upper left of the picture is iced-over snow. Enlarge (This is the only picture to be easily found from all the accounts in these three chapters. History pages and Google and Yahoo images wipe it all clean; they only want atrocities BY Germans, not against Germans or their allies.)

September 21, 2015

Carolyn reads Chapter 20, “Lvov.” The situation found in the prisons of Lvov/Lviv, Ukraine when the Wehrmacht first entered the city on June 30, 1941 was shocking, to say the least. The prisons were filled with thousands of brutally murdered Ukrainians and some Poles - the work of the NKVD, Stalins secret police. In this program:

• Eyewitness accounts of finding 4,000 decomposing corpses in the prisons of Lvov, and thousands more in Zolochov, Rivne, Dubno and Lutsk;
• How German air crews were among those murdered in the hospitals and prisons;
• Why the local populations killed up to 7,000 Jewish residents in reprisal after the Soviets left;
• How Soviet propaganda tried to blame the killings on the Germans at the Nuremberg Tribunals, and through disinformation campaigns even up until today;
• Otto Ohlendorf testimony (and here);
   
• Two German newsreels are on this page: 2nd and 4th on the top row. 58min

Image below: Weary Ukrainians greet the German Wehrmacht in Western Ukraine in the summer of 1941. Note the women at left in traditional costume carrying flowers. Enlarge Two more photos here (relatives discover victims of NKVD in Lvov on June 30, 1941) and here (murdered ethnic Germans are being identified by their relatives at a Ternopil GPU prison on July 10, 1941)

September 28, 2015

Carolyn reads chapter 21, "Katyn" and chapter 22, "Vinnitsa."

The mass graves discovered in the Katyn Forest in 1943 are the most widely publicized of the political murders and war crimes committed by the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1945, but are just one of innumerable examples from the bloodthirsty regime of Josef Stalin. In the town of Vinnitsa, 10,000 bodies were exhumed from three major burial sites, but more remained in the ground. 1h7m.  Some highlights:

• At Nuremberg, the Soviet prosecutors tried to indict the Germans for the killing of thousands of Polish officerrs at Katyn, but had to abandon the effort due to the obvious falsity of their case:
• Details of the U.S. Congressional investigation, which also found the Soviets responsible;
• Other research, investigations and books exculpated the Germans for the killing of 22,000 Polish military and police officers;
• In Vinnitsa, the murders of political prisoners held in the NKVD prisons began in 1937-38; rumours of what some had seen taking place were mentioned only in whispers;
• In 1943, Germans dug up mass graves in three separate locations in Vinnitsa, but had to end the digging when the Soviets reoccupied the area in 1944;
• International medical committees were formed for both Katyn and Vinnitsa, and found unanimously that the vast murdering took place when the Germans were NOT there, but the Soviets were in control.

Nov. 2, 2015

Carolyn reads Chapter 23 "Shipwrecked Survivors" and Chapter 24 "Hospital Ships."

Though it is more difficult to investigate the deaths of shipwrecked sailors and air crews downed in the ocean than it is deaths on land, the War Crimes Bureau found clear evidence of crimes by the British during the attack on the Erich Giese destroyer at Narvik, Norway; the Osia Paraskevi caique in the Aegean Sea; and on paratroopers traveling by caique to western Crete. The shooting of downed German airmen in the Channel during the 1942 Battle of Dieppe, France, and in the Mediterranean in 1944 were also crimes by some British RAF pilots.

The investigation of the November 1944 attack which sank the German hospital ship Tubingen in the Adriatic Sea is discussed in detail, but  far less attention was given to the frequent British attacks and bombings of the smaller German hospital carriers. The Soviet Union unilaterally refused to recognize any German hospital ships.

This ends the reading of this very important book – the only one of its kind, as far as I know, that gives exposure to the German Military's professional investigations into the war crimes committed by the Allies against German soldiers. 1h14m
 

By Carolyn Yeager

IN LIGHT OF MY PREVIOUS POST: Advice-giving White men who think Germans should get off their knees and stand up to the world again should actually be asking the rest of the world to lay off the “Nazis” instead. And do they? It's they, too, who won't stop contributing to the unfair defilement of Germany's past.

An illustration of this cropped up when a Russian high school student, part of a joint German-Russian school project on the fates of military prisoners on both sides in WWII, spoke in the German Bundestag last Sunday on the National Day of Mourning. There were three German students from Kassel and three Russian from Novy Urengoy (in Siberia). Above right: Sixteen-year-old Nikolai Desyatnichenko gives his short speech in the Bundestag on Sunday, Nov. 19.

I HAVE MANY ARCHIVED PODCASTS STORED here under "Radio Archives" on the sidebar.

Sometimes I hear from a listener who is having problems when using the players. What commonly happens is the player will play for a few minutes and then shut off, or sometimes restart at the beginning again, never getting past a certain length of time. I often have this problem myself.