Hitler's Bandit Hunters (61 page)

During the proceedings, Bach-Zelewski was reunited with Ernst Korn. Under interrogation, Korn had provided some evidence to Taylor but had not criticised Bach-Zelewski. Upon leaving Bach-Zelewski, Korn explained that he became chief of staff to the HSSPF in Croatia. He remained in that position until April 1944, when he was relieved of command. He told the story that the HSSPF had few resources when he arrived in Agram; there were no troops or equipment to wage a campaign against the partisans. He confessed to organizing an operation in Croatia; he described it as a security operation to protect the local ethnic German population. He said he was supported in guns and
equipment by the German commander, Colonel General Rendulic. He denied that he was responsible for rounding up hostages and that the Order Police had formed independent execution squads under his command. He swore an oath to the truthfulness of his comments.
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In the courtroom he admitted to handling Operation “Ferdinand,” in October 1943, with police and infantry. “A German Regular Police on its own initiative could not undertake any operation independently, as regards the planning orders and execution,” he stated in his concluding remarks.
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After years of diligent disruption and misinformation, Bach-Zelewski finally had his day in court regarding Bandenbekämpfung. Bach-Zelewski opened his testimony by stating that “after various front assignments, at the turn of the year 1942–1943—that is, at the beginning of January 1943—I became Chief of the Band Combating Units. That was a Central Office with the Reichsführer-SS for the combating of bands. This position of Commander of Anti-Partisan Units never ended and the staff carried on to the end. Primarily it was a central report office which worked in close cooperation with the OKW and the OKH.” He said he was “responsible for all partisan reports from the whole of Europe, which arrived at this office, and I had to work on the great, large, band-position maps which I myself had to draw up and which during the daily situation discussions with the Führer had to be presented to him by Himmler.” He accepted some responsibility for his command. “As the fighting itself went,” he claimed, “I was in charge of operations only in the east, but since I was responsible for the drawing up of a new band fighting regulation of course I found out on the spot in the southeast about the band fighting and I myself took part actively with the Wehrmacht in a partisan operation in Croatia.”
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In perhaps one of the most remarkable put-downs in legal history, the judge’s summation of Bach-Zelewski was “the witness is not a military expert in this connection.” The defense counsel, Dr. Sauter, grasped the moment and argued that “the witness Bach-Zelewski is of course the typical SS representative,” continuing, “we had no idea, during the presentation of our case, that exactly an SS leader would be sent here to talk about the regulations for band warfare and particularly that the SS leader who is regarded as mainly responsible for the millions of murders in Russia,” concluding, “the witness Bach-Zelewski must of course give from his point of view in order to save whatever there remains to be saved from the SS.”
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After years of waiting, Bach-Zelewski’s defining lifetime moment was dashed by a lawyer—another historical irony.

After Bach-Zelewski, the foremost economist of the truth was Franz Halder, the former chief of the General Staff of the Army. As a model of Schlieffen professionalism, Halder has left a considerable mark on the post-war history
of Germany’s security warfare. After the war, he became the chief consultant for the Foreign Military Study (FMS) Program under the U.S. Army’s Historical Branch. Hitler “sacked” Halder in the summer of 1942 at the time of the introduction of the Bandenbekämpfung directive. Halder had issued the Jagdkommando order in one of his final acts as army chief of staff. He ensured that Bach-Zelewski, Himmler, and even Bandenbekämpfung were written out of the “official” history. Under Halder’s guidance terms like Partisanen replaced Banden while Partisanenbekämpfung was artificially reinstated over Bandenbekämpfung, to serve up a sanitized version of German military history. In effect, Halder wanted to pretend that German military traditions remained unaffected under Nazism. Halder also had the ambition to complete a Wehrmacht history like the Reichswehr’s official history of the Imperial Army during the First World War. Fortunately for him, U.S. military tradition dictated that some form of foreign military study should follow this war, as it had all previous American wars. Unchecked and unverified, Halder was able to produce his semi-official history financed and resourced by the Americans.

While the technical reports within the FMS collection have a value, the studies connected with partisan warfare or Bandenbekämpfung were a political whitewash. Bach-Zelewski’s only contribution, a brief report of his command of the 14th SS Corps on the Western Front, suggests his complicity. The report confirmed that his Ch.BKV from Warsaw became the corps staff. Ernst Rode contributed a report on the KSRFSS, confirming its policing role and thereby removing the record of its links with Bandenbekämpfung. Field Marshal Kesselring provided a study of the campaign against the Italian guerrillas arguing, “its origin and its method was contrary to international law and turned the previous comradeship (between Italians and Germans) in arms into brutal murder.”
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The argument formed the basis of his war crimes defense:

Guerrilla bands were a motley crew, made up of soldiers of the Allies, Italians, Balkan nations, also German deserters, male and female elements of the population of diverse occupations and ages, with greatly varying moral conceptions lacking any unity based on mutual ethical standards.

The direction of his attack made no reference of remorse for the killings and only contempt for the court. “A soldier,” he argued, “upon whose life an attempt may be made in the most dastardly manner, sees ‘red’ and reacts differently from a pettifogging prosecutor or judge behind the protective cover of his writing desk.”
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Former field commanders also participated in the FMS Program. In 1947, former Lt. Gen. Arthur Schwarznecker, who had worked closely with Bach-Zelewski from 1943 to the winter of 1944, wrote a study of security within “enemy territories” in the area of Army Group Centre. Schwarznecker, the
commander of Oberfeldkommandantur 392 and Korück 582, was at the forefront of Bandenbekämpfung in the east. His study was critical of SS responsibility for antipartisan warfare beyond the combat zone, arguing that “if their activity had been confined to purely political tasks, to which their training and capacity had prepared them, they would have been able, in cooperation with the available police force, to carry out their missions, without the weakening influence of unreliable elements.”
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Gustav Hoehne observed that “in the Polish area … partisans were present, for which the mal-administration of these territories must be partly blamed. The civil administration had expropriated personal property on a large scale in several areas, causing the Polish population thus rendered homeless to band together in small groups, which caused a great deal of damage.” He concluded that “the rules for hunting game with beaters make the best directive,” for combating partisans. Halder’s opinion of Hoehne’s study stated that it was “a worthwhile contribution to the study of the partisan movement in Russia…. It is also interesting because it is based on the personal experiences of the author. I approve of the essay in general.”
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Even the man most responsible for the Vercors atrocities, Karl Pflaum, was granted the opportunity to write reports of his operations in the south of France in 1944. Pflaum wrote two reports on the 157th Reserve Division, the first from a general perspective and the other on operations in August–September.
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Some years later, Lt. Gen. Paul Schirker published another study in 1951 covering the division’s operations in September 1944.
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The pièce de résistance was a study from former Generalmajor der Polizei Alexander Ratcliffe. “In several valuable contributions,” Halder wrote glowingly, “General Ratcliffe has proved his good ability of observation and clear judgement of the Russian as an enemy.” Ratcliffe recommended sound socialization so that a future army, presumably American, fighting in the east was well prepared in advance:

To European minds Russia is a sinister land … with respect to the peculiarities of nature, climate and the inhabitants. The hopelessness of the vast Russian expanses, the severity of the Asiatic winter and the endlessness of the Eastern forests call for strong hearts. The additional strain of a merciless partisan war will be more easily borne if the fear of the unknown has been overcome.

Halder wrote that the study did not bring anything new but “because of its limitation to principles and clear distinction of the essentials I consider it valuable and believe that I can recommend the purchase of this study to the Historical Division.”
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Scrutinizing Ratcliffe’s career details a little more closely, it seems he was a colonial soldier with Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa and joined the police after the war. He was involved in the organization of police units and served under Daluege until 1937, when he joined the army, retaining
his general’s rank. In 1942, he served with the 207th Security Division and, in 1944, was the Kommandantur of Orscha. Captured by the Russians in 1944, he did not return to Germany until 1949. Ratcliffe was not the only
Kolonialmensch
involved in the FMS Program. In one study of antiguerrilla operations in the Balkans, the U.S. Army accepted and promoted the writings of Karl Gaisser discussed in
chapters 5
and
9
.
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By the mid-1950s, Halder’s fictions and the needs of U.S. Army operational research had found harmony. The U.S. Army’s Center of Military History published government publications on such themes as antiguerrilla operations, Soviet partisans, and German rear-area security.
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A former U.S. Army intelligence officer, James Critchfield, has written about the formation of Germany’s post-war defense and intelligence establishment.
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Critchfield, like many U.S. military operatives, must have known how far Gehlen and other German generals were steeped in criminal behavior. The captured files were loaded with evidence of hunting Jews, mass killings, and the wholesale terror of civilians. While expediency in the light of the Cold War represents a reasonable argument for former times, it is more difficult for objective observers to be anything other than bemused by the decision to let so many war criminals go free.

If the newly founded state of West Germany had internalized the principles established by Nuremberg, then ongoing war crimes justice might have been routine. However, the timing of the last American tribunal, the execution of the last war criminals in U.S. custody, and the Federal Republic’s assertion of its own legal destiny coincided at a critical point in time. Norbert Frei has explained how Adenauer and West Germany circumvented the judgments of Nuremberg and ensured that the legal system avoided its precedents.
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The first officials of the Federal German legal system were uncomfortable with Nuremberg; it smacked of victor’s justice, but then many within the judiciary were the products of the Third Reich. Politicians and jurists alike successfully circumvented the Nuremberg judgments on the spurious grounds of avoiding the Nazi policy of punitive judgments. It is in this context that one has to weigh Wolfgang Kahl’s criticism of Nuremberg.

In 1950, the former U.S. military governor of Germany, Lucius Clay, wrote that “the police were screened thoroughly to exclude Nazis.”
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The reconstruction of the German police led down some bizarre turns. Ulrich Herbert’s study of Dr. Werner Best explains why there was such resistance toward trials. Herbert discovered that the former SS established self-protection cliques and that Best, a lawyer by profession, vigorously defended the commanders of Einsatzgruppen.
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He was not alone. In 1946, Bomhard was released from American custody, as he was not regarded as a real war criminal. He went home with his personal archive of SS-Police documentation. This archive
formed the basis for his post-war career as defense advisor to police officers on “trial” before state ministries of the interior attempting to denazify the Federal police. Bomhard became an acceptable headache for the state authorities.
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In the 1950s, he defended police officers against the loss of pension rights and status. Armed with his collection of records and files, he successfully prevented attempts to denazify the police. He still retained powerful friends. After the war, Winkelmann became the deputy to the chief of police for southern Germany; he retired in 1965 on a full state pension and became president of the retired police officers’ association.
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In the German Democratic Republic, the notorious
Braunbuch
was published in 1965, listing former Nazis and their prominence as elites within the Federal system (refer to
appendix 4
).
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In 1978, Leonard Mahlein attempted to raise opposition to the influence of the SS in Federal Germany by publishing a pamphlet explaining the scale of the movement.
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Matters did not just rest with the law. The SS old boy network proliferated and released a market for literature of denial. Just as after the First World War, there was much industry devoted to the publication of memoirs and SS unit histories. The apologists for the Waffen-SS, led by Paul Hausser, tied themselves in knots shunning the criminal activities of the Bandenkampfverbände while claiming several of its “lost victories” for their own record. In 1953, Guderian, no longer blaming everyone, showed his true colors by openly endorsing the Waffen-SS and writing the foreword to Hausser’s book. He opened his endorsement with the SS motto, which had been granted by Hitler in 1931 to Daluege and Bach-Zelewski for suppressing the Stennes revolt. Guderian praised the stoicism of Waffen-SS veterans in the face of post-war castigations and blame. He credited the Waffen-SS with originating the idea of a united Europe and with staunching the Bolshevization of Europe.
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In 1957, a publication challenged this increase of denial among the SS. It gave the names and addresses of the SS veterans’ associations. Nearly all the SS formations were listed, including the Dirlewanger old boys association in Duisburg.
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Bomhard played his part in this historical process. He advised historians of the Bundesarchiv in the publication of a study of the police in wartime and wrote the foreword for a turgid history of the 18th SS-Police Mountain Regiment. In the foreword, he briefly recalled the heady days of the
Alpenkorps
in Serbia conducting its fighting withdrawal in October 1918 under Ritter von Epp. Calling the regimental history an “opus of memory,” he deigned to refer to both the partisans and the bandits and declared that the regiment was the pride of the German people.