Hitler's Bandit Hunters (62 page)

A life of obscurity after Nuremberg was an unbearable sentence for Bach-Zelewski in the 1950s. He was shunned by the likes of the Waffen-SS veterans’ association, in which men like Berger, Bomhard, and Winkelmann were granted the status of minor celebrities. He claimed to have lied at Nuremberg. He alleged smuggling poison to Göring, but in reality his life had
become the loneliness of a nightwatchman for an industrial concern.

Unable to keep quiet about events, he was tried for the 1934 murder of Anton von Hohburg und Buchwald. He thought his subordinate accomplices, SS driver Paul Zummach and SS-Hauptsturmführer Reinhardt, were dead so he denied the charge. Zummach turned up and so Bach-Zelewski confessed. He then retracted his confession when Zummach committed suicide in his cells.
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Bach-Zelewski received ten years of house arrest. In 1961, he gave evidence for the Eichmann trial in Israel. The case jolted the Federal Republic’s legal authorities into action, leading in the first instance to the 1965 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. The trial received considerable attention both at the time and later, but it confined the question of war crimes to one camp and one group of guards. In 1962, Bach-Zelewski was finally charged with killing three Communists in 1930; he was found guilty, received life imprisonment, and died in prison in 1972. Wolff received a fifteen-year jail sentence for his part in the extermination of the Jews but was released on grounds of ill health. Once released from prison, Wolff continued to meet and travel with former SS colleagues like Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons,” and pontificated as a celebrity in television documentaries like the “World at War” in the 1970s.
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A case against the SS-Cavalry was conducted in Brunswick. In 1963, a legal review into the crimes of the 2nd SS-Cavalry Regiment carried out in Russia in 1941 had taken place. The case was held against Franz Magill and the men of the 2nd SS-Cavalry Regiment. The review made many interesting points, a summary of which can be mentioned here. The court was not convinced that Magill and his cohorts were killers, declaring them tools and assistants of someone else unknown. The manner of their contribution was based on their level of involvement in actions that led to fifty-two hundred Jews to be killed. The accused were known to have acted in the murder of the Jews, but it was unclear how independent their actions were. Under the Roman code of law, the court could not determine a clear answer to their criminality. The court turned to the military legal code (
Militärstraf-gesetzbuch
) in force from the outbreak of war in 1939. Under the prevailing military code, a subordinate knowingly carrying out an illegal order was guilty of criminal behavior. The accused had confessed that their orders had little to do with war. This had disturbed the troops, and the troops had also confessed to shooting Jews on the grounds only that they were Jews. This was recognized as racial policy and therefore illegal; thus, the men should have refused to carry out the order. The review stated that there were no exceptions and that the adjutant of the regiment, Walter Bornschauer, had no defense for “only” signing the orders. The review recommended proceedings against the cavalrymen.
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In March 1964, Gustav Lombard, the former commander of the 1st SS-Cavalry Regiment, found his way into the courts through a parallel review process. Martin Cüppers tracked down Lombard’s case and found that the courts became entangled in whether the orders and the reports had been
faked by Hermann Fegelein against Lombard’s wishes. After nine years of proceedings, fifty files, and 230 witnesses, the case against Lombard ended. The state lawyers could not establish a strong enough case; there was just not enough proof of Lombard’s personal desire to kill.
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Heinz Reinefarth was declared immune from prosecution because the British and Americans were not prepared to extradite him to Poland. The Poles requested his extradition in 1947 along with four other generals, including Heinz Guderian and Ernst Rode. The Americans placed a protective veil over these men, declaring them material witnesses to their trials. “These five generals are outstanding German military personalities and have been utilized during the past two years by the Historical and Intelligence agencies in Europe to prepare detailed studies on German operations during the past war,” the U.S. Army declared in 1948. “In this capacity they have made positive valuable contribution to our intelligence effort on the USSR and satellites.”
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Many of the papers from the uprising have disappeared but just enough have survived to gain a picture of Kampfgruppe Reinefarth. By chance in 1958, Reinefarth became embroiled in a legal battle with Professor Thieme from Freiburg. On September 19, 1946, Reinefarth lied under oath to U.S. Army interrogators about his role in Warsaw, even denying that Dirlewanger was under his command.
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Thieme challenged Reinefarth’s evidence from Nuremberg. An article in
Der Spiegel
had mentioned Reinefarth and the Warsaw uprising. A reader had sent a letter, which had been published, and Reinefarth had sought legal redress. The evidence began to form that Reinefarth had ordered attacks on the Polish population. The records collected for the proceedings indicated that Reinefarth’s denazification process had probably been incorrect; a polite way of suggesting that it was undermined by lies.

The
Spiegel
article posed three questions: had Reinefarth any connection with Dirlewanger; had he been involved in any war crimes; and could a case be made? Regarding the command relationships, the situation should have been clear-cut: Dirlewanger was under the command of Reinefarth.
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French MacLean suggested the two hated each other so much that they nearly came to a duel.
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Dirlewanger’s personnel file includes his recommendation for the Knight’s Cross from Reinefarth and endorsed by Bach-Zelewski. The recommendation included actions from April 24 and July 7, placing Reinefarth on the spot.
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Reinefarth praised Dirlewanger’s Warsaw performance as “daredevilry and pluck” (
Draufgängertum und Schneid
). This was confirmed by Bach-Zelewski, who mentioned that Dirlewanger had been wounded eleven times, confirming Reinefarth’s opinion that he was only 50 percent fit. The record of incidents in Warsaw included the first day’s fighting on August 5, in particular the storm of Litzmannstadtstrasse following Stuka and tank attacks; the capture of Adolf Hitler Platz and the relief of the army’s Feldkommandantur on August 8; and the continuous fighting of September 3–5, 1944. All the while Reinefarth praised Dirlewanger’s courage, leadership
capability, and example to the troops. The 1958 article confirmed Reinefarth had been Dirlewanger’s commander; but it then delved into more serious matters. Reinefarth pleaded innocence of any involvement in burnings and shootings. He claimed he had left Warsaw on September 3, 1944. Yet in his Knight’s Cross award recommendation, it had been noted that he had personally directed the Stuka attacks, by the Luftwaffe on September 4–7, 1944. As to shootings, the article recommended that the judges reassess the records and examine an order signed by Reinefarth for the shooting of 196 civilians and the burning of another 155. The article thought that Reinefarth’s offer on September 12, 1944, to Himmler of two captured sacks of tea required evaluation. The article blamed the leading German political parties, the CDU and SPD, for condoning Reinefarth. Calling Reinefarth the executioner of Warsaw (
Henker von Warschau
), it was suggested that with a thousand deaths to his name, he might have to reconsider his legal position. In the end the scandal led to nothing, and Reinefarth died in 1979, in retirement.

In 1974, two years after the death of Bach-Zelewski in the Landsberg prison, Judge Rudolf Ilgen recalled a long forgotten incident from a Sunday evening in the spring of 1933. Ilgen was sent to investigate the murder of a minor SPD functionary. Several men, believed to be SS, had called at the man’s house and ordered him to attend an interrogation. The SS interrogated the victim near his house about the whereabouts of the “Iron Book” (
eiserne Buch
), allegedly containing a list of opponents to Nazism. Shots were overheard and the man was killed. The killers attempted to dump the body in a lake but were disturbed. The victim’s body was recovered, and three SS men were arrested. The commanding officer of Frankfurt on the Oder SS-Standarte was SS-Oberführer Bach-Zelewski, and he arrived on the scene armed with a pistol. He requested details from Ilgen, who, although not obliged to, informed him of what had happened. Bach-Zelewski’s immediate response was to dismiss as allegations any SS involvement, but he appeared to accept Ilgen’s handling of the case and duly left the building. A short while later, Bach-Zelewski returned and advised Ilgen that he had investigated the scene and found evidence of the mark of three arrows, the symbol of the Iron Front, which he said proved they had carried out the killing. But there was no further proof of this, and by evening, the evidence confirmed that at least one of the SS men was guilty.

Bach-Zelewski left again only to return shouting that he would not allow the arrest of one of his men. This time, he refused to leave and began threatening Ilgen. All the while, an SS truck cruised around the justice building with the occupants ominously screaming, “Sieg Heil.” Bach-Zelewski changed tack, requesting the accused men be placed under his custody and offering his word of honor that they would not escape. The senior court officials agreed, probably in fear of their own lives; they stated they did so under duress. Meanwhile, the main culprit was spirited away by Ilgen into full police custody. Realizing he had been duped, Bach-Zelewski lost all control
and his face began to make nervous twitches (
zuckte
) from behind his spectacles. He abruptly composed himself and said, “I cannot go back, I fought the Poles to save Germany. In Upper Silesia, an old woman threw hot water out of the window at me. I ordered my comrades to ‘beat her to death.’” Ilgen could only reply that that was war and this was murder and such behavior had to stop. Bach-Zelewski countered by suggesting that in two years this incident would be forgotten.
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This book opened with Heinrich Heine’s warning against the police, Thule, and the historical school and ends with William Shakespeare’s observation, “The evil that men do lives after them.”
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In 1972, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a lonely and decrepit old man, died in a German prison hospital. Eighty-one years earlier, his uncle was killed in a colonial skirmish that rendered shame on the German army and disgraced his family. In 1911, his father, an East Elbian Prussian Junker, died penniless in Dortmund. Four years later, his “stepfather” chaperoned him into war as a child soldier in the German army. Between 1915 and 1945, the boy was nurtured into a serial murderer and mass executioner. This dysfunctional family bred a man who was encouraged by Hitler to disfigure German history. Bach-Zelewski exploited his past to build a career. He exploited a flair for violence to produce favorable outcomes for his political leaders. In war, he was responsible for mass extermination across continental Europe. In his wake, West Germany suffered serious bouts of political violence. The challenge of the student revolution of 1968 inspired the Baader–Meinhof gang to acts of terrorism and crime. In 1972, during the Munich Olympic Games, a Palestinian terrorist hit squad killed Jewish athletes from the Israeli team. Detachments of German police and soldiers once again conducted procedures for Bandenbekämpfung to suppress the violence. These conditions seemed a fitting memorial to the godfather of Nazi Bandenbekämpfung, as well as a historical test of German democracy. Eventually, order was restored, Germany found confidence in democracy, and another old Nazi disappeared from memory.

Current thinking on the SS has rightly focused on its brutal methods during the occupation of Europe in the Second World War. Whether this was caused by Partisanenbekämpfung or Bandenbekämpfung is immaterial to the victims. Words, however, do matter, and the differences between the two concepts were significant. The key to understanding their differences lies in understanding security warfare. Nineteenth-century Western nationalism
encouraged the convergence of industrial society with the drive of imperialism and advances in warfare. One outcome saw the rise of the professional soldier; the other saw the formulation of security warfare. The great powers exploited security warfare for different ends: America to build the nation, Britain to expand the empire, and France to recapture Napoleonic grandeur. The German variety had origins drawn from the Thirty Years’ War, but the Franco–Prussian War refined it. Germany institutionalized security to reinforce unification and install a guardianship of national interests. The German army later used the African colonies to hone its security warfare methods; it learned to practice brutality as a routine and extermination as a punishment. In 1914, this system was instrumental in sustaining Germany in total war against five other great powers and their empires. Thus, security warfare was a proven and reliable system in the mindset of professional German soldiers. It was, therefore, logical that Adolf Hitler trusted German security warfare in 1939.

Taken from another viewpoint, in the years just before the First World War, Germany looked set to craft the twentieth century. German science and industry had overtaken Britain and France. The education system supported Germany’s drive to compete with the British Empire in international management ventures. German philosophy, music, and other cultural exploits were the envy of Europe. The economy had achieved an unusual mix of heavy industry, agriculture, and a fine sprinkling of modern financial and capital markets. Only America represented the greater power, but Germany had become the engine of Europe. Some scholars have argued that Germany took a wrong turn, while others have argued that Germany followed a “special road” that led to calamity. In 1989, after five regimes and two world wars, the much reduced borders of Germany were reunified. This seemed to confirm the “wrong turn” or the “wrong path”; however, which would have been the correct way? In one hundred years, from 1814, Germany followed a road from Napoleonic occupation through the defeat and occupation of France and a renewed invasion of France, along the way threatening the world with its military prowess. Defeat proved its weaknesses, revolution exposed its political frailties, and democratic politics served to shield Hitler until he came to power.