Hitler's Bandit Hunters (55 page)

The Prinz Eugen Division commander later wrote of the lessons learned from “Rösselsprung.” Otto Kumm identified problems of transportation discipline and poor maneuvering through the mountains. The division had found it difficult to prepare at night and had lost communications with its strike battalion. Communications routines were poor from the beginning of the operation with signals routed through the V SS-Mountain Corps to reach XV Army Corps.

Kumm concluded that his combat leaders required a wider perspective of the fighting and should not focus only on their parts in the operation. The
Germans had not pushed scouts forward and had failed to reconnoiter the withdrawal of the partisans. Kumm also noticed that combat commanders failed to concentrate their forces for counter-attacks or to make rapid decisions when they realized partisan intentions. He was particularly critical of the high levels of ammunition expended by German troops. Infantry firing was too early and at too great a distance to have any effect. He indicated a lack of training by suggesting that the troops needed more practice before such methods became a routine. He noted that the heavy weapons barrages rarely achieved concentration on a major target. The overexpenditure and poor supply of ammunition led to extended periods without heavy weapons support. The greatest problem was the division’s near total lack of spatial awareness in relation to neighboring formations. Critical in the encirclement maneuver, there were several cases of SS troops firing on German forces. An attack by one battalion was stalled by fire from a Jagdkommando, both from Prinz Eugen Division. The command and coordination of the division was also sidetracked from the mission by minor matters such as railway and road security. The problem of communications became acute with the lack of useable radios and the absence of signals capability at nighttime. Kumm’s list also included problems in personal equipment supplies, lack of Luftwaffe support, poor medical facilities for the wounded, lack of central supply, poor weapons and rations, and lack of draft-animal equipment. Praise was limited to the worth of the combat engineers, capability of the animal handlers, and importance of the mountain field guns.
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Given the scale of the problems, one can only wonder what the division had been doing during the years when it was under Phleps’s direct command. Actually, Phleps’s bureaucratic opportunism had disguised his incompetence in turning the Prinz Eugen Division into a professional fighting force.

In Italy the SS-Police and Wehrmacht had divided their activities appropriately. The SS had a free hand over security operations, mobilizing labor and deporting Jews and Gypsies. The Wehrmacht led a spirited defense against the Allies. Then, in the space of two days, everything changed. On March 23, 1944, a bomb triggered in Rome’s Via Rasella and killed twenty-eight German policemen, wounded four (who subsequently died of their wounds), and later one more who had died was added to the count, making a total of thirty-three killed for German reprisal calculations. Hitler demanded reprisals within 24 hours, but they did not take place until August 24, when 335 men were executed in what has become known as the Ardeatine Caves atrocity. On the morning of March 24, 1944, after a brief firefight, German soldiers captured an American OSS team. The team’s mission was to blow up a tunnel along the Genoa–La Spezia railway line on Italy’s northwest coast. The team was captured by soldiers of the 135th Fortress Brigade (
Festungsbrigade
). The brigade came under Gen. Anton Dostler’s LXXV Army Corps, which in turn came
under the command of Army Group von Zangen, which covered northern Italy. The OSS team wore U.S. Army uniforms and included fifteen men of Italian extraction. Dostler, following a brief discussion with his chief of staff, ordered the fifteen men executed on March 25 under the terms of the “commando order.” The execution order was passed to a senior lieutenant from the fortress battalion to make the preparations and included charging an NCO to dig the men’s graves. In the early hours of March 26, a twenty-five-man firing squad with two officers arrived from the fortress battalion. At 7:30 a.m., each “commando” received a pistol shot to the back of the neck. They were buried in their uniforms in a communal grave.
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On June 29, 1944, the men of Civitella Della Chiana, a small town in Italy, were executed by German troops. The incident was sparked by the killing, possibly murder, of two German soldiers and the wounding of a third. Historian Erich Hosbawm commented on this atrocity and argued that historians should adopt caution when examining of such incidents. He found that many villagers thought local boys were responsible for the deed and not the resistance movement, and their foolish act had brought reprisals to the village.
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Michael Geyer also examined the killings; within a broad study of Hitler’s war of extermination, Geyer concluded that the German army conducted cold, calculated executions interspersed with cases of wild slaughter. Based on the limited documentary evidence of some military maps highlighted to show “bandit” activity, Geyer’s conclusion attributed the outburst of reprisals and massacres to the collective effects of war-weariness showing incipient disintegration of the German army as they built an “emotional horizon” of massacres between killers and killed as the war ended. The facts do not confirm Geyer’s conclusion, but correspond to Hosbawm’s warning.

A report written by British Intelligence after the war listed nineteen reprisal atrocities between March 24 and November 27, 1944. They included a “conservative” estimate of seventy-five hundred men, women, and children executed. Included in the numbers were the Ardeatine Caves atrocity in Rome, during which 335 men were shot, and Civitella, where 212 men, women, and children were executed. The Ardeatine Caves massacre was begun by an attack on troops of the Police Regiment Bozen.
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In Civitella, the victims’ ages ranged from one to eighty-four, and all the executed women were found naked. There was the usual evidence of burning of buildings, as the British report confirmed: “approximately 100 houses were destroyed by fire; some of the victims were burned alive in their homes.” The fighting formations potentially responsible included the Luftwaffe’s Herman Göring Panzer Division and 1st Parachute Division, the 114th Light Division, and the 16th SS-Panzer Grenadier Division Reichsführer-SS. Each formation had conducted reprisals and atrocities. Only two weeks earlier in Pisa, troops of the Hermann Göring Division collected eighty hostages and “indiscriminately seized and hanged
them on nearby trees.”
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The Hermann Göring Division had regularly conducted atrocities since its deployment in North Africa. Geyer elected to judge the Reichsführer-SS, “an autonomous formation if ever there was one,” as the chief culprit. This indicated a fixation over its honorary title rather than its actual operational status.
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Indeed, the troops of the Reichsführer-SS had conducted the “Marzabotto Massacre” as reprisal for the feverish activity of the “Garibaldi Partisan Brigade.” Between August and September 1944, the Reichsführer-SS’s reconnaissance detachment was responsible for killing upward of two thousand civilians.
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Circumstantial evidence does not make the Reichsführer-SS responsible for the Civitella Della Chiana massacre.

Elsewhere, in northeast Italy, Globocnik had adopted a strategy to regulate and maintain north-south communications. This enabled the conduct of east-west Bandenbekämpfung actions preventing a linkup by Italian and Yugoslav partisans. A Bandenstab was established to carry out operational planning led by SS-Sturmbannführer Ernst Lerch. Globocnik’s forces were a mix of SS-Police and Italian collaborators. The police units included the 2nd Italian Militia Regiment, a detachment of German gendarmerie, and some Carabinieri; in all, a Kampfgruppe of 1,630 men. Attached to Globocnik’s forces was the SS-Karstjäger Battalion (
SS-Karstwehrbattallion
). The Karst is a distinct geological feature of Istria, in northern Italy or the northwest corner of Yugoslavia. The idea of raising this battalion came from SS-Standartenführer Professor Brandt, a noted geographer and caving specialist. Brandt wished to place the men from this region, noted for their Fascist support, into a security battalion, and so they became known as the
Karstjäger
. The initial mustering raised 964 men; the officer cadre came from SS geological detachments. The battalion began Bandenbekämpfung actions in the Trieste area on December 1, 1943, under the command of Odilo Globocnik. It quickly established a reputation for shooting partisan suspects. The battalion was later turned into the 24th Waffen-Gebirgs Division der SS Karstjäger merging with the SS-Italian Brigade of nine thousand Italian collaborators.
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Under Globocnik, two operations of note were initiated at this time, “Osterglocke” (April 1944) and “Braunschweig” (May 1944). Heinrich Blaser, a senior police lieutenant, transferred to Globocnik’s command staff on January 19, 1944. He testified after the war that “Braunschweig” lasted seven days in mid-May and had the objective of encircling an Italian partisan band and liquidating their leaders.
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The British decodes proved accurate about the purpose of these operations; they were part of an intensive exercise to round up labor of military age on the grounds of preventing revolts. Those arrested from Communist areas were deported to Mauthausen and Buchenwald concentration camps.
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Skorzeny assisted Globocnik in both operations, and this partly explains why he was not involved in “Rösselsprung.” The post-war interrogation of Friedrich Dupont, a former SS-Obersturmführer of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, testified to Skorzeny’s work with Globocnik. Dupont
joined the Skorzeny-Jagdverbände, and he explained their job as conducting intelligence gathering and carrying out counterintelligence.
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Why had it suddenly “blown up” in Italy? There is no clear-cut answer. The breadth of security operations conducted across the whole southern flank was extensive. After the war, Kesselring was questioned over the reasons for this period of extreme brutality. He excused the behavior of German troops on the grounds of the ill feeling generated by Italy’s treachery. He argued that the partisans were really criminal bandits, the worst elements of Italian society, and blamed the Allies for encouraging them.
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Geyer attributed the cruelties to vague notions of war-weariness but was hindered by being unable to decipher symbols on a Bandenbekämpfung map. Blaming the atrocities on Hitler’s tinkering, Himmler’s Bandenkampfgebiet decision, the rivalry between military strategy and security policy, and German resentment over Italian treachery seems shallow and inadequate. Finding an adequate explanation for the abrupt end to the atrocities after September 1944 is also virtually impossible.

The events in the Balkans and Italy spilled over into southern France. Bandenbekämpfung methods were widespread in France, imposed alongside labor and extermination policies. German army prisoners of war confirmed the scale of security activities in southern France. A consolidated report from former NCOs from 978th Grenadier Regiment mentioned that an “anti-terrorist training course” (
Terroristenbekämpfungslehrgang
), almost certainly a Bandenkampfschule, was organized near Avignon in May 1944. The course lasted for fourteen days and took two participants from each unit of the regiment. The attendees “made one excursion against the partisans, but without success.” The 978th Grenadier Regiment also experienced severe partisan attacks near Dijon while en route to Normandy.
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The SS deployed detachments to combat growing resistance activities. The 18th SS-Panzer Grenadier Training Battalion transferred to southern France. This battalion had been involved in Bandenbekämpfung operations in the Ukraine since December 1942. In January 1944, it undertook security assignments in White Russia and then in April was redeployed to Prague. On June 23, 1944, it began a period of service in southern France where it remained until September.
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Georg Gerhager, an SS-Rottenführer serving with the 2nd SS-Flak Detachment, remembered his participation in actions against the resistance during an interview with British intelligence officers. A Kampfgruppe of infantry and flak artillery was formed by the 2nd SS-Panzer Division Das Reich to combat resistance in the area of Montauban. SS-Brigadeführer Heinz Lammerding, Bach-Zelewski’s former chief of staff, was the commander of Das Reich, regarded as an elite armored division. Gerhager confirmed that the infantry surrounded a forest where the resistance was concentrated and was
then shelled by the artillery.
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SS-Grenadier Marcel Meith, an Alsatian serving in the 11th Company of 4th SS-Panzer Grenadier Regiment 4, Der Führer, part of Das Reich, revealed that he had participated in extensive security duty since mid-April 1944. He was involved in rounding up Frenchmen suspected of working with the resistance and transporting them to a camp near Montauban. Their activities ranged as far as 120 kilometers from Montauban. Meith recalled being an interpreter in the interrogation of a Frenchman, who had tried to escape, was shot three times in the chest, but remarkably remained alive. The SS examined the man’s papers and beat him when he refused to talk. Eventually the wounded man died.
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The most infamous of incidents was the destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, which involved killing 642 men, women, and children.
¹⁰³
Elements of the Der Führer Regiment destroyed the town and the inhabitants on a Saturday afternoon. They conducted a textbook Cannae encirclement, rounded up the defenseless civilians, and paraded them in the square. The SS forced apart the men from their families and led them away to barns and large buildings. They machine-gunned them and then set alight the buildings using straw strewn over the bodies to accelerate the burning. The women and children were herded into the town church. The combination of benzene and a carton of explosives transformed the stone building into a crematorium—a raging inferno that burnt so hot the church bell melted into the stone floor. Those attempting escape through the windows were shot; few escaped.