War crimes of the Wehrmacht

War crimes of the Wehrmacht are those crimes made by German armed forces during World War II. While the principal participants of the Holocaust were the Nazi German political armies — the Waffen-SS and particularly the Einsatzgruppen), the traditional armed forces represented by the Wehrmacht committed war crimes of its own, particularly on the Eastern front in the war against the Soviet Union. The Nuremberg Trials of the major war criminals at the end of World War II found that the Wehrmacht was not an inherently criminal organization, but that it had committed crimes in the course of the war.

War crimes

The war crimes of Wehrmacht include:

Atrocities during invasion of Poland

September Campaign in Poland: Wehrmacht units killed over 16,000 Polish civilians during the 1939 September campaign through executions, terror bombing of open cities or murder. After the end of hostilities, during the Wehrmacht's administration of Poland, which went on until October 25 1939, 531 towns and villages were burned, the Wehrmacht carried out 714 mass executions and a number of other crimes. Altogether, it is estimated that 50,000 Polish civilians had perished including 7000 Jews^[1].

Destruction of Warsaw

Destruction of Warsaw: Up to 250,000 civilians were killed. Human shields were used by German forces during the fighting. During the Wola Massacre 50,000 civilians were murdered to intimidate the Poles into surrender.

Commissar Order

Commissar Order (Kommissarbefehl): The order cast the war against Russia as one of ideological and racial differences, and provided for the immediate liquidation of political commissars of the Red Army. The order stated that German soldiers guilty of violating international laws would be "excused". The order was formulated on Hitler's behalf by the Wehrmacht command and distributed to field commanders.

Barbarossa Decree

Barbarossa Decree (Barbarossa-Erlass): The decree, issued by Keitel a few weeks before Operation Barbarossa, exempted punishable offences committed by enemy civilians (in Russia) from the jurisdiction of military justice. Suspects were to be brought before an officer who would decide if they were to be shot. Prosecution of offenses against civilians by members of the Wehrmacht was decreed to be "not required" unless necessary for maintenance of discipline.

POW Camps

Wehrmacht POW camps: While the Wehrmacht's prisoner of war camps in the West generally satisfied the humanitarian conditions prescribed by international law, prisoners from Poland and the USSR were incarcerated under significantly worse conditions. These prisoners suffered from malnutrition and diseases like typhus that resulted from the Wehrmacht's failure to provide sufficient food, shelter, proper sanitation and medical care for the prisoners. Between the launching of Operation Barbarossa in summer 1941 and the following spring, more than two million Soviet prisoners of war died while in German hands. The German failure to attain their anticipated victory in the east led to significant shortages of labor for German war production and, beginning in 1942, prisoners of war in the eastern POW camps — primarily Soviets — were seen as a source of slave labor to keep Germany's wartime economy running. Although conditions in the German labor camps were hard, they were a relative improvement to the POW camps where hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers succumbed to disease in nine months' time.

Massacres of prisoners-of-war

Massacres of prisoners-of-war: Killing of POWs by Wehrmacht soldiers started during the September 1939 campaign in Poland, with numerous examples exist where Polish soldiers were killed after capture, for instance Śladów where 252 POWs were shot or drowned, and Ciepielów where some 300 POWs were killed, or Zambrów where a further 200 POWs were killed. Some 50 British officers who had escaped from Stalag Luft III were shot after recapture, and 15 uniformed U. S. Army officers and men were shot without trial in Italy. Hitler's Commando Order, issued in 1942, provided "justification" for the shooting of enemy commandoes whether uniformed or not. The massacres include that of at least 1500 black French POWs of West African origin and was preceded by propaganda depicting the Africans as savages. The massacres of black French troops are described in an upcoming book.

Night and Fog Decree

Night and Fog Decree (Nacht und Nebel Erlass): This decree, issued by Hitler in 1941 and disseminated along with a directive from Keitel, was operative within the conquered territories in the west (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands). The decree allowed those "endangering German security" to be seized and to make them disappear without a trace. Keitel's directive stated that "efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate."

Actions against partisans

Actions against partisans: In Italy, Italian soldiers not supporting the German cause were massacred by Wehrmacht forces on the Greek island of Cephalonia. Italian villages ware razed and their inhabitants murdered during anti-partisan operations. In Russia, captured partisans and Jews were used to sweep fields of land mines. In a number of occupied countries, the Wehrmacht's response to partisan attacks was to take and shoot hostages, up to 100 hostages for every German killed. In issuing orders for hostage-taking, Keitel stated that "it is important that these should include well-known personalities or members of their families." A Wehrmacht commander in France stated that "the better known the hostages to be shot, the greater will be the deterrent effect on the perpetrators." Author William Shirer stated that, in all, over 30,000 hostages are believed to have been executed in the West alone, and the Wehrmacht's hostage policy was pursued in Greece, Serbia, Scandinavia, and Poland as well.

Postwar views

Upon the end of the war in 1945, several Wehrmacht generals made a statement that defended the actions against partisans, executions of hostages, and the use of slave laborers as necessary to war effort. The generals contended that the Holocaust was committed by the SS and its partner organizations, and that the Wehrmacht command had been unaware of these actions in the death camps. This statement said that the armed forces had fought honorably and left the impression that the Wehrmacht hadn't committed war crimes and was "unblemished".

However a number of high Wehrmacht officers stood trial for war crimes. OKW commander-in-chief Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and chief of operations staff Alfred Jodl were indicted and tried for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg in 1946. Both were convicted of all charges, sentenced to death and executed by hanging. While the tribunal declared that the Gestapo, SD and SS were inherently criminal organizations, the court did not reach the same conclusion with respect to the Wehrmacht General Staff and High Command. This was seen by many in the German public as exonerating the Wehrmacht's role in war crimes.

The prosecution of war crimes lost steam during the Fifties as the Cold War deepened; both Germanies needed to establish armed forces, and could not do so without trained soldiers and officers that had served in the Wehrmacht. Cold War priorities and taboos about revisiting the most unpleasant aspects of World War II meant that the Wehrmacht's role in war crimes were not seriously re-examined until the early 1980s. The view of of the "unblemished" Wehrmacht was shaken by an exhibition produced by the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hamburg Institute for Social Research) titled Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 ("Crimes of the German Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation 1941-1944"). The popular and controversial traveling exhibition seen by an estimated 1.2 million visitors over the last decade asserted, with the support of written documents and photographs, that the Wehrmacht was "involved in planning and implementing a war of annihilation against Jews, prisoners of war, and the civilian population." After criticisms about incorrect attribution and captioning of some of the images in the exhibition, the head of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research suspended the display, pending review of its content by a committee of German historians. The committee's report in 2000 stated that accusations of forged materials were not justified, but that some of the exhibit's documentation had inaccuracies and that the arguments presented were too sweeping. Yet, the committee reaffirmed the reliability of the exhibition:

The fundamental statements made in the exhibition about the Wehrmacht and the war of annihilation in 'the east' are correct. It is indisputable that, in the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht not only 'entangled' itself in genocide perpetrated against the Jewish population, in crimes perpetrated against Soviet POWs, and in the fight against the civilian population, but in fact participated in these crimes, playing at times a supporting, at times a leading role. These were not isolated cases of 'abuse' or 'excesses'; they were activities based on decisions reached by top level military leaders or troop leaders on or behind the front lines.^[2]

The committee recommended that the exhibition be reopened in revised form, presenting the material and, as far as possible, leaving the formation of conclusions to the exhibition's viewers. The revamped exhibition opened in 2001 and closed in 2004.

It should be noted that some members of the Allied armed forces were also accused of war crimes (such as the Dachau Massacre) during World War II. However, these acts were not following official policy endorsed by Allied commanders, and were relatively isolated in nature compared to massive war crimes of German army, that were often endorsed by its officers and leadership.

References

^ Crimes of the German Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation 1941-1944: An outline of the exhibition – in English
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