Tarnished Warriors: A Reappraisal
Chapter 6. War Crimes committed by the Wehrmacht and the Allies
As alluded to in the previous chapter, more recent research - inspired by intrepid historians devoted to search for objectivity - has gone on to prove that the decision made to condemn all members of the Waffen-SS en masse was a something of a regrettable faux pas on the part of the Allies. Many governments - including successive German governments that had deliberately denied Waffen-SS veterans the same rights as their Wehrmacht colleagues - have been made to squirm as revelations of hitherto unknown crimes have come to light.
The Record of the Wehrmacht
It has long been suggested that the Waffen-SS had been the only party guilty of committing War Crimes on the German side during the Second World War, and that the Wehrmacht were the "good guys"; this is largely a myth, and the successful result of post-war attempts by many former Wehrmacht servicemen to shift blame for their crimes onto the Waffen-SS, especially on the Eastern Front:
"In a flood of memoirs, articles, and historical studies, German military circles drew a sharp dividing line between themselves and the Waffen SS; and they ascribed to the activities of the SS much of what had been charged against the Wehrmacht".[1]
A number of senior Army commanders were incredibly successful in their attempts to distance themselves from the Waffen-SS; a number of outrageous claims were made, including that the Waffen-SS - by being Hitler's 'favourites' - had been provided with better vehicles and equipment. This is of course a myth, as the premier Waffen-SS divisions were only given the status of Panzer Divisions in 1943, when before they had simply been armoured divisions; the majority of the Waffen-SS Divisions never even came close to achieving this status, and were for the most part poorly equipped, having to cope with the use of either obsolete or captured weapons. While prominent Waffen-SS Divisions such as the Leibstandarte may have received state of the art equipment, this would have been as a result of the fact that more often than not they had found themselves at leading the offensive, not merely because they were special favourites. Leading Army units that also tended to find themselves pitched into the heat of battle at the head of the attack also were recipients of higher-grade equipment - the crack Grossdeutschland division being a noteworthy example.
However, the matter of the Waffen-SS being better equipped that the regular Heer becomes almost insignificant when one begins to examine the line of demarcation made by a number of postwar commentators on what was perhaps the most contentious issue of all: war crimes. As has been indicated in the previous chapter, the fact is that only a small percentage of Waffen-SS personnel were found to have actually had any complicity in any kind of criminal activity or atrocities. As according to the post-war German authorities the Wehrmacht had not been openly responsible for any War Crimes in the West (whereas the Waffen-SS were), their argument which maintained that the Waffen-SS were the only party guilty of war crimes was easily swallowed by the Western Allies. The reality was different on the Eastern Front, however. Omer Bartov argues that:
"...the Wehrmacht's orders regarding Soviet soldiers and politically or "racially" dangerous elements not only sanctioned a campaign of organized murder, but also opened the way for a massive wave of indiscriminate shooting..."[2]
The Wehrmacht, as well as being guilty of implementing the infamous Commissar Order, were also guilty of collaborating with the Einsatzgruppen, a charge regularly made at the Waffen-SS; there are many recorded instances where Wehrmacht personnel handed over "undesirables" to the security forces. General Franz Halder, Army Chief of Staff in 1941, had said:
"...these people [the Einsatzgruppen] are worth their weight in gold to us. They guarantee the security of our rear communications and so save us upon calling upon troops for this purpose".[3]
This was to change, however, for the Army started to find their own solutions for such "problems" as the war went on. An example of such an incident is cited by Bartov:
"...the report of the Wehrmacht commandant of Belorussia... claimed to have shot 10,431 prisoners out of 10,940 taken in "battles with partisans" in October 1941 alone, all at the price of two German dead. Yet this was but one of many so-called "anti-partisan campaigns" which turned out to be outright massacres of unarmed civilians".[4]
Another little-mentioned fact concerns the rather vexed issue of the concentration camps. In previous chapters it has been mentioned that while there had been no direct connection between the fighting arm of the SS and the men who had staffed the camps, transfers between the two sections had taken place, with those involved in these transfers being men who had either been sent to work in the camps as punishment or those who had been classed unfit for active service. As far as the court historians are concerned, this is as far as it goes: little or no mention is made of the fact that Wehrmacht personnel were just as likely to be transferred to concentration camp duty as their Waffen-SS counterparts.
There could be many reasons for not revealing the true extent of Wehrmacht war crimes; it can be argued that as the Allies wished to form a new Germany, they also needed to form what would be the basis of a new army. The condemnation of the Wehrmacht as a criminal organisation would thus have been counter-productive. So, while the Waffen-SS were condemned as being part of the National Socialist structure, its military deeds widely ignored, many in the Wehrmacht who were involved in unsavoury deeds themselves had their records swept under the carpet.
War Crimes Committed by the Allies during World War II
There is also the controversial and inconvenient issue of War Crimes committed by the Allies. Usually, when one mentions Allied War Crimes, it is either hushed up or craftily turned into a discussion of solely Soviet War crimes:
"...the inconvenient fact [is ignored] that Allied troops- and not just the Russians- were guilty of similar atrocities, including the shooting of prisoners and reprisals on the civilian population of Germany. But, to the victors the spoils, and such occurrences are usually 'forgotten' or glossed over".[5]
It is true that the Soviets carried out some of the most brutal atrocities, especially against civilians in Poland and Germany, including rape, pillage, and mass deportation. Karl-Friedrich Grau[6] has provided a stomach-churning list of atrocities committed by troops of the Red Army in occupied Silesia. Many of the crimes described defy belief. Men folk and prisoners of war were either mercilessly killed or sent to Poland or Russia, women and children were raped and assaulted. The following is typical example of the kind of atrocities committed in Eastern Germany:
"...Felonies were committed during the time the village [Kupp] was taken by the occupying troops; the District Forester named ..., his wife and son, were bestially murdered. A whole family and their numerous relatives were slaughtered because the son had killed a Russian soldier who raped his sister. the old peoples' home with its 40 inhabitants was burned down, the people in it died. More than 100 murdered people were buried in a mass grave..."[7]
Such lists are endless, for Soviet crimes committed in post-war Europe, not only in Germany but elsewhere, were manifold. They are too many to mention, and even a superficial examination of the post-war Communist system would require at least a chapter in its own right. But it is not the task of this paper to cover these issues; thanks to those commentators who have been dedicated enough to reveal the extent of these crimes, there are a number of sources now available elsewhere.
But among the Allied powers it was not only the Soviets who had been guilty of war crimes; the Western Allies were also implicated - albeit on a far lesser scale - in activities the stories of which have only recently started to come to public attention. Although these revelations have been slow to make it into the public domain, many things had become well known to many who had been at the centre of the many trial proceedings that had been taking place with the Germans in the dock. It was little more than guilt on the part of individual Allied officers over such events led many to believe that the condemning of Germans for war crimes was a miscarriage of justice. It is a fact that the Canadians had commuted the death sentenced imposed on 12th SS Panzer Division "Hitlerjugend" commander Kurt "Panzer" Meyer due to the fact that Canadian troops had themselves murdered prisoners of war; there were also allegations made against a British armoured car regiment, the Inns of Court, concerning the massacre of members of "Hitlerjugend".[8]
However, the most publicised (which is saying something) case surrounding a major Allied War Crime was that concerning the Biscari massacre, which involved one of America's most famed and dashing commanders, General George S. Patton. In the aforementioned Malmédy case, Leibstandarte Divisional Commander "Sepp" Dietrich had been put on trial for issuing what had been interpreted as a "take no prisoners" order; it was soon revealed that a similar order had been issued by Patton, which had, directly or indirectly, led to the massacre of German and Italian troops at Biscari in 1943. According to a junior officer, Patton was to have said:
"When we land against the enemy, don't forget to hit him and hit him hard. When we meet the enemy we will kill him. We will show him no mercy. He has killed thousands of your comrades and he must die. If you company officers in leading your men against the enemy find him shooting at you and when you get within two hundred yards of him he wishes to surrender- oh no! That bastard will die! You will kill him. Stick him between the third and fourth ribs. You will tell your men that. They must have the killer instinct. Tell them to stick him. Stick him in the liver. We will get the name of killers and killers are immortal. When word reaches him that he is being faced by a killer battalion he will fight less. We must build up that name as killers".[9]
After hearing of the massacre from a subordinate, Patton was said to have been highly irritated; not by the fact that prisoners had been shot in cold blood, but that they were shot in ranks,
"'an even greater error,' Patton noted- presumably because corpses in neat rows could hardly be made to look like battlefield casualties".[10]
Unlike "Sepp" Dietrich, however, Patton was not sentenced, nor was the man who had directly handed down the order, Colonel E. Cookson; the man who was directly responsible for the shooting, a certain Sergeant Horace T. West, was court-martialed for the murder of thirty-seven prisoners of war, and eventually allowed back into the ranks.[11] According to Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, if the Biscari massacre had been dealt with in the same way as that of Malmédy, Patton would have been sentenced to life imprisonment, and Cookson would almost certainly have been sentenced to death.[12]
Notes
