Massacres & Holocaust

Atrocities committed by the Leibstandarte

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:20:49 +0200

The Leibstandarte is sadly closely associated with certain obscure war crimes who never have been fully proven or properly investigated. The first recorded crime was in Poland, where an artillery man from the LAH is reputed to have shot about 50 Jews in a synagogue. He pleaded that he was much upset by the harm that the Jews had done to Germany, and after intervention by Himmler, he went free without charge, although Wehrmacht officials insisted he was sentenced.
An event where more information is available, is Wormhoudt. When the Leibstandarte closed in on the BEF's lines round Dunkirk, the staff car in which Sepp Dietrich, LAH commander, was riding, came under British fire. Dietrich himself had to take cover in a ditch for 5 hours until he could be relieved. Rumor passed around in LAH lines that Dietrich had been killed, so the Leibstandarte threw themselves enraged at the 320 British defenders of Wormhoudt. They were men from the Royal Artillery, Chesire and 2nd Royal Warwickshire regiments. The survivors of the assault, only 80 men, were herded into a barn, whereupon grenades were hurled (grenades in a barn? why not in the open?) in their midst , and the SS men shot down those who tried to get away. An (unidentified?) officer came to halt the slaughter, but by that time only 15 men had survived. The executions seem to have been done by II. Batallion, a company whose own commander had been wounded. Mohnke (later LSSAH commander) was identified as the officer who supposedly gave the order.
The 'Malmédy massacre' is dubious matter to say the least. To begin with, the actual 'killings' took place at the Baugnez crossroads, and the survivors rushed to Malmédy. SS-Kampfgruppe Peiper took some 450 US POW's, who were all treated correctly and were send to Germany, in full accordance with existing regulations. Peiper had also given his word to Major McCown that he would respect the rules of land warfare. When his men pulled out of La Gleize, they left behind 150 US prisoners, some wounded, who were being treated by Waffen-SS medics who had volunteered to stay behind. If those alleged 'take no prisoners' orders were given, why were these men not executed as well, and why were they being looked after by Waffen-SS personnel? What happened at those Baugnez crossroads precisely we will never know, for the Americans seemed to have covered up everything nicely. What we do know is that, at the Dachau trials, held in 1946, LSSAH 'internees' (they had been stripped from their POW status) were savagely mistreated, quite obviously in order to gain forced confessions from them.
A dark page in American history are the "Rheinwiesenlager", large prison camps containing some 557.000 German POW's. USA officials already admitted that there were 3.053 deaths within three months after it was set up, German investigations came up with 4.537. Needless to say who is right. This camp got away with a mere blink from Eisenhower, just like Patton ('a good German is a dead German'), he hated Germans. The men were left to starve in the mud, there was no shelter of any kind, thousands of soldiers perished. (source: ("Wissenschaftliche Kommission für deutsche Kriegsgefangenengeschichte", München 1962-1973, 15 books and 2 supplements)
Why is this never brought up, but the Waffen-SS 'massacres' time and time again? It must be remembered that, of the 910.000 men who served in the Waffen-SS, 313.749 did never return home. Every Army contained individuals who perpetrated war crimes. Does the massacre of 560 Waffen-SS soldiers from Wiking and Nord at SS-Übungsplatz Dachau by American soldiers have to be mentioned every time the US Army is brought up? The answer is quite obviously no, as those men were not representative for the whole American Army. That same argument goes for the Waffen-SS. Those who are intoxicated by the Zeitgeist and acting with malice will certainly try to associate the entire Waffen-SS with every war crime committed, even and especially the vague incidents at Baugnez. But by those same standards, the whole US Army was guilty of My Lai, and should also be condemned as a criminal organization. This of course, is nonsense, as much as it was nonsense to call the Waffen-SS a 'criminal organisation'.
Partisans:
Although the LAH was never assigned to anti-partisan operations; partisans are the last thing an army engaged in combat wants to deal with. The Geneva convention clearly states that all combatants (soldiers) must have clear indications (helmets, insignia, armbands) of their military nature, carry weapons in the open and have a clearly defined leader, who is responsible. Partisans had none of that, so they were not protected by the rules of land warfare. If caught, they could be shot without questioning. This hard measure -still in accordance with international law- was needed as the German Army lost an amazingly high rate of casualties to partisans, and had insufficient personnel to guard all areas permanently. Das Reich suffered the loss of 100 mortalities and kidnaps, and the same number of wounded from the period march to D-Day because of unlawful combatans (source: James Lucas, 'Das Reich'). Those 'innocent civilians' disobeyed the rules on many occasions. The German War Governement provided safety for all civilians as long as they did not assume hostile actions against German personnel/installations. In doing so, they made themselves a combatant not protected by the Geneva convention.

The Massacres at Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:11:02 +0200

On June 8, 1944, the 2nd SS Panzer Division "Das Reich" moved from the town of Montauban, just north of Toulouse in southern France toward the Normandy invasion front, around 450 miles to the north. During this relocation, the unit committed two of the worst atrocities of the war in France: the massacres of civilians in the towns of Oradour-sur-Glane and Tulle. The following will briefly summarize those events

Since October, 1943, seven Panzergrenadier units (including Das Reich) had been redesignated as Panzer divisions. These had roughly twice the strength of a comparable Wehrmacht Panzer division, with around 20,000 men and 200 tanks/armored vehicles. The Das Reich, by 1944, was largely comprised of conscripts, many or most of whom were not of the same standard as the original volunteer corps (now consisting of 2,500 survivors of Battle Group Lammerding, recently extricated from the Eastern Front). The division was to refit in the safety of southern France, while awaiting reassignment.
During the refitting period, Das Reich formed one of the three armored, one motorized and thirteen infantry divisions of Army Group G under General Von Blaskowitz. Unfortunately for the Germans, Hitler had placed this and the bulk of his armor a long distance from the expected invasion fronts.The division was commanded by General Heinz Bernard Lammerding, an early SS member and Waffen SS engineer captain at the outbreak of the war. At the end of 1943, Lammerding took command of the Das Reich. By all reports, he was an uninspired leader: his preoccupation with suppressing resistance activity, rather than urging direct transfer of his division to the invasion front likely contributed to the further dispersal of force required to contain the Allied beachead.

The French resistance had problems of it's own: it was plagued by internal conflict, as well as by lack of consensus by Allied commanders regarding the role these units would play. These problems would persist through the invasion of Europe. In general, the Communist elements (the FTP) favored the most direct and aggressive forms of confrontation, including direct assaults on military units and towns, while many of the FFI (the "Free French") favored the more "traditional" irregular unit approaches of harassing supply units and sabotage.
regardless, the units were usually poorly armed, poorly coordinated and poorly lead. Their support from the Allies was often problematic and conflicting orders were frequent, due to lack of a unified command structure and divergent goals of the resistants. Most authorities consider their role in the outcome of the Normandy campaign to have been minimal, for these reasons. Only the inordinate delay in transfer of front-line units such as Das Reich could be viewed as major contributions and these diversions were largely the result of errors in judgement of the German command.

The training and refitting program for Das Reich was running behind schedule, in part due to diversions created as the result of operations conducted against the French resistance. For example, on May 11, 1944, members of the division engaged in reprisals against the towns of Montperzat-de-Quercy, St. Cere, Bagnac, Cardaillac, Lauze, caylus, Cadrieu, Frontenac, Figeac and Terrou, (amongst others), in which extensive looting, burning and killing of civilians occurred.
By June 5, 1944, Lammerding issued a memorandum to 58th Corps on the subject of anti-terrorist measures, in which he formally outlined the repressive measures to be effected against civilians in areas in which resistance units were operating. On June 9, Das Reich divisional headquarters issued an Order of the Day, "The Position with Regard to Guerilla Bands and Tactics for Combatting Them", which more extensively and explicitly outlined the scope of reprisals the division was to take (at the minimum) for infractions against the established order.

These and other actions by the OKW Command and Lammerding set the background for subsequent mass reprisals against civilians in France and were consistent with Waffen SS activities by this and other units on the Eastern Front in preceding years. The anti-resistance role of Das Reich was confirmed during the early days of the invasion in an order from OB West, which transferred 2nd SS Pz and the 189th Infantry Division to the control of the 66th Reserve Corps, for deployement in the Tulle-Limoges area.
On June 7, word reached Das Reich command, that FTP forces had attacked the German garrison unit in the town of Tulle. The Der Fuhrer regiment arrived on the outskirts of town on June 9. The reconaissance battalion (under the command of Major Heinrich Wulf) entered the city without significant loss, relieving the beleagured defenders of the 95th Security Regiment

A total of 139 Germans were killed, some of which (the SS alleged) were German prisoners. A reprisal order was issued, the source of which is disputed. Direct responsibility for the subsequent reprisals however, became that of the senior staff officer, Major Albert Stuckler: Lammerding claimed he arrived on the 9 June, after the reprisals had already occurred, an allegation disputed by Colonel Stuckler and Major Wulf. In any event, a large number of male civilians were rounded up and 97 were randomly selected and hung from lamposts and balconies, under the supervision of Major Kowatsch. 321 additional captives were trucked off, presumably to Germany for forced labor. Incidentally, neither Stuckler or Wulf expressed any remorse for these actions, when interviewed in 1980 by Max Hastings, a British journalist.

A worse reprisal occurred in Oradour-sur-Glane. This operation was the direct responsibility of Major Otto Dickmann, commanding the 1st battalion of the Der Fuhrer regiment. The incident that instigated this was the disappearance of Dickmann's counterpart from the 3rd battalion, Major Helmut Kampfe. Kampfe was a close friend of Dickmann, who assumed he was captured and killed by resistance units. Dickmann and Kampfe's successor (Hauptsturmfuhrer Kahn) selected Oradour as a likely site for reprisal. The exact reasons for this are not known.
On June 10, 1944, the SS occupied the town. The entire population of the town was rounded up. Men were separated from women and children. The women and children were herded into a church. The men were locked in 5 garages and barns, where they were shot. The buildings were then torched. The church with 400 women and children locked inside was also razed to the ground. The SS reported 548 "enemy" killed, with one SS dead and one "wounded". Post-war investigators estimated 393 residents of the town, 167 people from the surrounding countryside, 33 people from Limoges and 55 from other areas were killed during this rampage.

There were no official German sanctions for these or other SS atrocities. Rather, they were viewed only as an "excess of zeal", with no repricussions for any of the participants. The chivalric values of the SS were reserved only for the "deserving". The actions of the SS set new standards for brutality in warfare, whatever the military accomplishments of these units might otherwise have been.
Text by Dan Reinbold

Massacre at Lidice

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:01:32 +0200

In World War II, one of the more memorable atrocities happened in Lidice, as the entire village and all of its inhabitants were either wiped out or transplanted. Martinu chose to express his sorrow in a memorial to the village as his contribution to the American League of Composers. The story behind the massacre begins with the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. He was the chief of the Security Police, the deputy chief of the Gestapo, and was appointed Acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in 1941. On May 29, 1942, two Czechs, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabeik bombed Heydrich's car while he was driving to the Castle in Prague. He died soon after because of his extensive wounds on June 4.

This incited great rage among the German people, and they quickly took revenge. At least 1300 Czechs were killed shortly after the death of Heydrich. A little village of Lidice was the site of one of the most savage attacks of the Germans. On June 9, just five days after Heydrich's death, ten truckloads of the Security Police came and quickly surrounded the village. No one was allowed to leave the village; a 12 year old boy and a peasant woman were shot as they tried to escape. All the men and boys over 16 years old, 172 in all, were rounded up and locked in a barn. They were then shot the next day in groups of ten, which lasted from dawn until 4 in the afternoon. 19 men who were working in the mines during the shooting were also rounded up and sent to Prague where they were killed.

The women as a whole fared better than the men, but still faced cruel situations. Seven of the women were taken to Prague where they were shot. The rest, numbering 195, were sent to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp in Germany. There 49 of the women died; 7 by gassing, and the rest from cruel treatment. The children, 90 in all, were taken to a concentration camp at Gneisenau. The children were then selected according to the "racial experts" and distributed to German people with new German names to be raised as their own. The village itself was completely destroyed. The village was burned, the remains dynamited, and then bulldozed so that no structure was left standing. Even today, the village of Lidice has not been rebuilt.