Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe

Alex J. Kay, David Stahel

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253036834
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Holocaust

Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe argues for a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes Nazi violence and who was affected by this violence. The works gathered consider sexual violence, food depravation, and forced labor as aspects of Nazi aggression. Contributors focus in particular on the Holocaust, the persecution of the Sinti and Roma, the eradication of "useless eaters" (psychiatric patients and Soviet prisoners of war), and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. The collection concludes with a consideration of memorialization and a comparison of Soviet and Nazi mass crimes. While it has been over 70 years since the fall of the Nazi regime, the full extent of the ways violence was used against prisoners of war and civilians is only now coming to be fully understood. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe provides new insight into the scale of the violence suffered and brings fresh urgency to the need for a deeper understanding of this horrific moment in history.

PART I. HOLOCAUST

1Hitler’s Generals in the East and the Holocaust

Johannes Hürter

FROM 1933 ONWARD, the radical antisemitism of Adolf Hitler and his supporters was the state doctrine of the German Reich and led to the persecution and murder of those European Jews who fell within the German sphere of control. This doctrine penetrated all state institutions, including the Wehrmacht and its leadership. After the war, those responsible, outside of the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel (SS), claimed to have had nothing to do with these crimes. The initial depression and uncertainty in view of the impending tribunal was quickly overcome. Even during the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals in 1945–1946, the German functional elites regrouped in order to defend themselves against all valid accusations. Although they were deeply compromised, the elites succeeded, together with a broad front of political and journalistic supporters in an unprecedented act of historical and political manipulation, in establishing the power to interpret their Nazi past and in anchoring the myth of the “clean” ministerial bureaucracy and the “unsullied” Wehrmacht in the historical consciousness of the German Federal Republic.

The former generals of the Wehrmacht were particularly successful in shaping this myth.¹ In court and in countless memoirs and other publications, they claimed a strict separation of the good military aspects and the bad political aspects. They were helped in this by the fact that not only West German society but also the Western Allies had considerable interest in liberating the Wehrmacht from the stigma of their crimes. The generals were representing all German soldiers, if not the entire nation, which was rehabilitated in order to allow its integration into the Western defensive alliance. West German rearmament required the know-how of experienced professionals from Hitler’s armed forces. Remembrance of the Wehrmacht was distorted to focus solely on military achievements. Responsibility for defeats and crimes was transferred to Hitler, the SS, and a very few black, or should one say brown, sheep among the generals, such as those who had been hanged in Nuremberg, namely the Wehrmacht generals Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl. In this exculpatory narrative, the highly professional military elite, which had remained “decent” to the last, and “our brave soldiers” were uncoupled from the policies of the Nazi regime and the crimes committed “in Germany’s name.” This was particularly so for the greatest crime of all, the Holocaust. A general like Erich von Manstein, who was highly regarded until his death in 1973 and for a long time thereafter, succeeded in making the grateful German public and his numerous Anglo-Saxon admirers believe that in 1941–1942 he had known nothing about the murder of around thirty thousand Jews under his jurisdiction on the Crimean Peninsula, let alone shared any kind of responsibility for this mass murder.²

The position of the generals within the Nazi system of rule had, in reality, nothing in common with the retrospective construction of an unblemished foreign body.³ The military elite was the most important and most influential of the traditional elites who supported the National Socialist regime. These men were initiated at an early stage into Hitler’s radical plans and played a central role in the project of a “Greater German Reich,” which could only be realized by means of war. The generals willingly allowed themselves to be harnessed by a regime that aimed with extreme militancy for a racially homogeneous “national community,” hegemony in Europe, and “living space” in the east. They did this not only from opportunism, egotism, and a thirst for glory or other base motives but also because Hitler’s policies were compatible with the thinking in power-political, militaristic, and racist categories that were prevalent in this elite. Even without being Nazis, the overwhelming majority of the generals placed their professional expertise to the last at the service of the Nazi dictatorship—the resistance of a few officers against Hitler was ultimately a completely isolated phenomenon among their comrades. The 3,191 generals and admirals of the Wehrmacht⁴ thus contributed decisively to the successes and the resilience of Nazi tyranny. The catalog of involvement in the criminal policies is long and eclipses any crimes known to have been committed by the other traditional elites. The generals—namely the Wehrmacht leadership (High Command of the Wehrmacht, or OKW), the army leadership (High Command of the Army, or OKH), and the most senior troop command at the front—contributed significantly to the planning, preparation, and implementation of illegal wars of aggression, racial-ideological campaigns of annihilation, and brutal occupation regimes. Even in their professional core area, namely the operational conduct of the war, they were responsible for numerous mistakes with catastrophic results.

The Holocaust did not take place without the Wehrmacht, either. This is clear from the facts alone.⁵ A central site of the Holocaust was the German-occupied Soviet Union. It was here that the systematic murder of all Jews began. Approximately 2.5 million Jews fell into the territory controlled by the Wehrmacht, even if a large part were there only for a short length of time. During the first wave of killings until March 1942, around six hundred thousand Jews were murdered in the occupied Soviet territories, of which at least 450,000 were in territory under military administration. The second wave of killings from April 1942 to October 1943, which claimed the lives of around 1.5 million people, targeted above all the ghettos in territory under civilian administration. By contrast, about fifty thousand Jews who were murdered in 1942 during the German offensive against Stalingrad and in the North Caucasus died in areas under military jurisdiction, as did the fifty thousand Jewish Red Army soldiers selected and murdered by the Security Police in the Wehrmacht’s prisoner-of-war camps. To be added to this number are another 350,000 Jews who were murdered under Romanian occupation. Even if most of the more than 2.4 million victims claimed by the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union alone (within the borders of June 1941) were accounted for by the German SS and police apparatus, more than half a million of them died with the military’s administration, acquiescence, and frequently also support—sometimes including actual participation in the killing. Outside of the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht was also directly or indirectly involved in the Holocaust. In Serbia, Wehrmacht units murdered almost all Jewish men—close to six thousand—who were held as hostages during the course of perverse antipartisan campaigns. In other parts of German-occupied Europe, especially in the territories under military administration in France, Belgium, and Greece, Wehrmacht agencies supported the disenfranchisement and deportation of the Jewish populations.

***

The persecution and murder of the Jews in the territories under military administration would have been very difficult to implement against the will of the Wehrmacht and in particular the generals. The stance of the generals in the east regarding the “Jewish question” was, therefore, very important. How antisemitic were they?⁶ Until World War I, the antisemitism in the Prussian-German officer corps did not differ significantly from that of the other conservative elites in Germany and many other European states. Reservations toward the Jews corresponded to the mood of the time and were fed by various forms of resentment: religious and cultural resentment directed at the Jewish religion and orthodox eastern Jewry, dissimilatory resentment directed against the emancipation and assimilation of the German Jews, and biological resentment directed against the Jewish race. At this point, it was still anti-Judaism and dissimilatory antisemitism that predominated rather than the newer racist hatred of Jews. The directive of the Prussian War Ministry from October 1916 to the effect that all Jewish soldiers be recorded statistically in order to examine whether Jews shirked army service disproportionately more often was a discriminatory measure and at the same time an alarming indication of antisemitic tendencies within the military.⁷ Toward the end of World War I, these tendencies became more intense, fueled by the exhortations to hold out made by the Pan-German League, whose propaganda was directed ever more frequently against the Jewish influence among enemies at home and abroad.

Various forms of antisemitism merged and radicalized noticeably once again during the period of upheaval in 1918–1919. The military defeat, the revolution, and the change of system to a republic were blamed in particular on the Jews, who were cast back into their traditional role of scapegoat. The fighting against Spartacists in the Reich and Bolsheviks in the Baltic, whether experienced firsthand or not, also counted among the negative experiences of the military elite. “Jewish Bolshevism” became a code phrase for the collapse of monarchy and power, internal order, and military strength. Open antisemitism spread from the Pan-German League and the racial nationalists to the conservatives. The fact that the liberal Weimar Republic enabled many assimilated Jews to reach prominent positions in politics, society, the economy, and culture appeared to confirm the prejudice of a Jewish republic. Furthermore, serious conflicts were sparked off regarding the immigration of Polish “eastern Jews,” who more clearly corresponded to the cliché of the “racially foreign” (rassefremd) Jew than the German Jews did. Just how popular antisemitism was among sections of the population before Hitler’s assumption of power was first demonstrated not by the successes of his party from the end of the 1920s but by the anti-Jewish proclamations of conservative parties and associations such as the Young German Order, the Reich Agricultural League, and the German Nationalist People’s Party; many officers sympathized with the latter. For all their differences in terms of their manifestations, the nationalist conservatives, the Pan-German League, the racial nationalists, and the National Socialists were linked by a fundamental antisemitic consensus. It was clear to only a very few that Hitler’s ideology and politics would ultimately lead to the attempt to completely exterminate the Jews in the regions under German control. The partial identity of antisemitic thinking made it easier, however, to perhaps internally reject the further steps in the direction of the Holocaust and nonetheless to accept these steps again and again in practice.

Symptomatic for the anti-Jewish stereotypes within the nationalist conservative elite of the officer corps is the record kept by Gotthard Heinrici, who would later be among the “ordinary” generals and commanders on the eastern front. This officer complained as early as October 1918 that Germany was being governed by a “clique of Jews and Socialists.”⁸ During the Weimar years, he was close to the German Nationalists and hoped, following the change of government on January 30, 1933, “that we have finished with the Marxian Jewish pigsty.”⁹ He regarded the antisemitic stance and policies of Hitler’s new government as fundamentally necessary, but in his view the pogrom-like excesses of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the boycott of April 1, 1933 went too far: “It was necessary to force the Jews out of their influential positions. Yet the means were inappropriate.”¹⁰ Heinrici initially registered without criticism the countless discriminatory measures directed against Germans of the Jewish faith during the months and years that followed. It was not until the large pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, (Reichskristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass) that he was shocked, though not very deeply. Shortly thereafter, he learned from a speech by Alfred Rosenberg in Detmold of the consequences and objectives that loomed as a result of the Nation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Understanding Nazi Mass Violence
• Part I. Holocaust
• Part II. Sinti and Roma
• Part III. “Useless Eaters”
• Part IV. Wehrmacht
• Part V. Memorialization
• Part VI. History as Comparison
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover