Document 137
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 286
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 19–21 Apr. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]
WILDERMUTH (re killing of inmates of lunatic asylums): I once spoke with the director of the whole business at ANGERS(?). His name was EBERT or EBES(?).[349] In the course of a somewhat heated argument I said to him: ‘You’re a lawyer too, there’s a certain unpleasant paragraph in the penal code called “murder”. You will have to come to terms with it. It must be perfectly clear to you that you will one day have to answer for it.’ That gave the man a bit of a shock.
BROICH: No more people over 70 years of age even being accepted in hospital any more.
WAHLE: Not even if an operation is necessary?
BROICH: Operations could be done, but the patients had to return home afterwards. My father-in-law – it was forbidden and was quite impossible; that was in POTSDAM and even the operation was only carried out at all because the doctor was a friend. He said: ‘No, I may not take you in, it would get us into the greatest difficulties.’ That was in the spring of 1942.
ELFELDT (re killed-off mental cases): 70–80,000 people have been put away, haven’t they?
WILDERMUTH: Yes, and I arrive at that figure from my brother’s figures and from that EBERT or EBES(?). I said: ‘Have they killed 100,000 people there?’ To which he merely replied: ‘No, not 100,000.’
BROICH: Was there more?
WAHLE: No, less.[350]
Document 138
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 288
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 24–6 Apr. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]
HEILMANN: We were in the front lines and said: ‘It isn’t our business what they do in the rear.’ Gradually it leaked out how they were treating the many PW.
FISCHER: At least three or four million of them died of starvation during the winter of 1941/42.[351]
HEILMANN: I took several Russian PW along with me; they were shoemakers and tailors. I had them at the airfield at MAGDEBURG. When we went on operations, we couldn’t take them along. On that occasion the CO of the airfield told me: ‘We can arrange matters. There is such a number of them here; occasionally they go and bathe and just collapse and die.’ There were so many of them – they were given very little food. That was the great crime. They’re human beings – good God, Russians are human beings too. Then they keep on talking about Asiatics—
FISCHER: What was our behaviour like?
HEILMANN: Even if they are Asiatics. But every human being has the right to live.
FISCHER: We have behaved like savages, not like civilised people.
HEILMANN: We have deserved the name of Huns for all time. Since BUCHENWALD – good Lord, those photographs are ghastly. It really makes you feel ashamed.
FISCHER: Then we talked about KATYN, about those 11,000 officers – how many have we put to death![352]
Document 139
CSDIC (UK), SR REPORT SRGG 1203(C) [TNA, WO 208/4170]
Generalleutnant SIRY (Commander, 347 Infantry Division) – Captured 10 Apr. 44 in Friedrichsroda.
Generalstabsintendant PAUER[353] (formerly of the OKH) – Captured 7 Apr. 44 in Kleinrinderfeld.
Information received: 6 May 45
SIRY: One mustn’t admit it openly, but we were far too soft. All these horrors have landed us in the soup now. But if we’d carried them through to the hilt, made the people disappear completely – no one would say a thing. These half measures are always wrong.
In the East I suggested once to the ‘Korps’ – thousands of PW were coming back, without anyone guarding them, because there were no people there to do it. It went quite well in FRANCE, because the Frenchman is so degenerate that if you said to him: ‘You will report to the PW collecting point in the rear’ the stupid idiot really did go along there. But in RUSSIA there was a space of 50–80 km, that is to say a 2 to 3 days’ march, between the armoured spear-heads and the following close formations. No Russians went to the rear; they lagged behind and then took to the woods left and right, where they could live all right. So I said: ‘That’s no good, we must simply cut off one of their legs, or break a leg, or the right forearm, so that they won’t be able to fight in the next four weeks and so that we can round them up.’ There was an outcry when I said one must simply smash their legs with a club. At the time, of course, I didn’t really condone it either, but now I think it’s quite right. We’ve seen that we cannot conduct a war because we’re not hard enough, not barbaric enough. The Russians are that all right.
Document 140
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 300
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 16–17 May 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]
HABERMEHL: […] FELBERT (PW) told me he had been ‘Kommandant’ of BESANÇON; people who were found in possession of arms had to be condemned to death. They were condemned to death by the Military Court, the sentence was confirmed in PARIS, went back, and then he was the man responsible for carrying out the sentence, and he said that in this way, while he was in charge, forty people were shot. He said he couldn’t do anything about it, but he is sure that action will be taken against him.[354]
Document 141
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 301
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 18–19 May 45 [TNA, WO 208/4178]
DITTMAR (re concentration camps): What did we know about them?
SCHLIEBEN: Everybody knew that dreadful things happened in them – not exactly what, but just that dreadful things happened – every one of us know that as far back as ’35.
DITTMAR: To Germans?
BROICH: Primarily to Germans.
ELFELDT: We knew (what happened) in POLAND to the hundreds and thousands of Jews who, as time went by, disappeared, were sent away from GERMANY and who after ’39 were said to be accommodated in ghettos and settlements in POLAND – we were told that.
SCHLIEBEN: They all disappeared.
ELFELDT: Who ever got to know that millions of these people – as the Russians now assert – perished or were burnt in AUSCHWITZ and whatever these small places are called?
BROICH: Certainly none of us.
ELFELDT: We heard about AUSCHWITZ when we were in POLAND.[355]
BROICH: I visited DACHAU personally in ’37. The commandant of the camp said to us: ‘If I had to spend a year here, I should throw myself on the electric wire. I couldn’t stand it for longer than a year – nobody could.’
HOLSTE: Some people stood it for twelve years.
BROICH: We were quite convinced that we were only shown what we were supposed to see. I went there with the hereditary Prince of WALDECK,[356] that swine; he had two camps under his control. We spent six hours there and afterwards were absolutely overcome by what we had seen, although we did not see any of the tortures we have heard about lately.
349
Dr Irmfried Eberl (8.9.1910–16.2.1948) is probably indicated here. At the beginning of 1940 he took over as head of the Brandenburg-Havel Euthanasia Institute and in the autumn of 1940 the institute at Bernburg/Saale. A total of at least 18,000 persons were murdered at both places under his directorship. Eberl was commandant at Treblinka death camp in 1942. He was conscripted into the Wehrmacht on 31.1.1944. After the war he practised as a doctor at Blaubeuren, where he was arrested in January 1948 and committed suicide the following month. He was not a lawyer, he had studied medicine at Innsbruck. Schulze, ‘Euthenasie in Bernburg’, pp. 155–7; Gehler, ‘Heilen durch Töten’, pp. 361–82.
350
By September 1941 the planned euthanasia programme had claimed 70,273 victims. Although organised euthanasia was halted after massive protests, another 20,000 persons were killed in ‘wildcat’ actions. Klee, ‘Euthanasie im NS-Staat’.
351
Up to February 1942, about two million Russian PoWs had died in German captivity, 500,000 of them in the period from November 1941. Streit, ‘Keine Kamaraden’, p. 128.
352
Between 3.4.1940 and 13.5.1940 the NKVD murdered 14,587 Polish officers and police in Soviet captivity, of which 4,404 were killed at Katyn near Smolensk, 3,896 at Kharkov and 6,287 at Kalinin. Misial, ‘Das Schlachtfeld zweier totalitärer Systeme’, p. 24f.
353
In 1944 Generalstabsintendant Friedrich Pauer was Departmental Head V2 at OKH Army Admin.
354
A source documenting Felbert’s activities as Feldkommandant Besançon in detail is not known. The Feldkommandantur 560 War Diary (BA/MA RH36-206) is not very enlightening, but mentions in passing that its war court condemned 18 terrorists to death on 18.9.1943, of which 17 were shot ‘without incident’ on 26.9.1943. 40 death warrants signed by Felbert therefore seems a realistic figure. In his memoirs written in captivity at the end of 1945 he says, ‘…As Feldkommandant I tried to relieve the civilian population of the burden that is always so heavy under foreign occupation. I saved many people from the death penalty, preserved many from long prison sentences and prevented many acts of violence by subordinate officers. But one could not be everywhere and one did not get to hear everything, and so certain things happened which should not have happened.’ ‘Memoirs’, p. 57. This statement was supported by French eyewitnesses in the court proceedings and also by official documents. Felbert, Wehrmacht Commander, North-Eastern France, pointed out on 4.2.1944 that the Feldkommandant was not king in his kingdom and one had to get used to the fact that the SD was not subordinate to him, and it was of great importance to cooperate with this service office.
355
Himmler ordered the setting-up of the concentration camp at Auschwitz on 27.4.1940. At this time Otto Elfeldt was Staff Officer, Artillery, Army Group A in the West. There is nothing to indicate his having visited Poland, and his knowledge of events there is therefore noteworthy.
356
Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck-Pyrmont (13.5.1896–30.11.1967), 6.10.1938 to the capitulation HSSPF Fulda-Werra. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Buchenwald trials, 14.8.1947, released 1.12.1950.