The Scourge of the Swastika Read online

  From the first moment of their invasion of Polish territory, the German armies committed a succession of atrocities on the civilian population. Within four days of the outbreak of war two hundred Polish citizens were shot or burnt to death at Sosnowiec by German troops of Army Group South. The Germans entered the village without any resistance, no Polish troops being there. Unarmed inhabitants were fired at indiscriminately, some were dragged out of their houses and shot outside in the village square. The synagogue was burned to the ground and twelve Jews shot after having first been forced to dig their own graves.

  The following day at Kajetanowice about eighty Poles were shot to death by other units of the same German formation. The Germans fired into the houses, set fire to them, and then fired on their occupants as they ran for safety.

  Two days later at Pinczow 300 more Poles were either shot or burned to death. On this occasion the troops set fire to the houses, throwing grenades into them: 500 houses were demolished in this way. There was no reason for such barbarity. The Polish troops had already retreated before the Germans arrived and there was no local resistance of any kind.

  On 10th September, 112 Poles in another village, including a number of children, were shot to death or killed by hand grenades. The German troops had entered the village on the Saturday without meeting any resistance and on the Sunday morning some Polish soldiers were seen in the fields advancing towards the village. Before they reached it they were shot down.

  The Germans then collected a number of civilians and led them to a barn where they were made to kneel down with their hands above their heads and were shot. The bodies were put into a barn which was set on fire. One hundred and twelve skulls were later found in the ashes.

  During the same period, 160 Polish citizens, men, women and children, were shot or burned to death at Kilejoweic. When the Germans arrived they herded together a number of civilians into a meadow and fired into them, killing about thirty. Later they drove another batch into a house, locked it, set it on fire, and shot at those who tried to escape through the windows. For two or three days whilst the German troops remained in the village these incidents continued and when at last they left, 160 dead Poles were counted and the whole village had been burned to the ground save for one farm.

  These terrible crimes were committed daily by the German troops as they advanced victoriously through Poland. A full account of them would be nothing less than a tedious catalogue of rapine, arson and murder.

  Within a few short weeks the battle was over: the Polish Army had capitulated, and the ‘General Government’ was set up under Hans Frank. The aim was that Poland should become a mere colonial possession of the Third Reich; and the policy of terror, starvation, slave labour, eviction, and extermination began.

  Between September 1939 and the beginning of 1945 there were 2,332 executions in Poland with a total of 34,098 victims. 8,000 of these were killed in the last four months of 1939 when the German police, supported by local Germans, began to eliminate the Polish population. Out of the total number of executions, 57% were of men, 20% men and women, 12% men, women and children, and the remainder unknown. Some of these executions were of persons who had been sentenced to death by a German military court in accordance with International Law, but 84% were put to death without trial, verdict, or sentence.

  Many of these executions took place in the course of terror raids on towns and districts in Poland which the Occupying Power called ‘pacification’. The method of ‘pacifying’ the district was to shoot a number of its inhabitants.

  The raids were usually made by the SS or Gestapo and the following is an account of an execution in Sroda on 17th September 1939.

  Gestapo agents surrounded a block of houses where they started a manhunt. Passers-by in adjacent streets were also seized. As a result of this raid eighteen men were arrested and assembled in the prison courtyard. Later, a group of twenty-one men was taken from the prison and all the condemned were marched through the town to the place of execution. They were ordered to keep their hands clasped behind their necks. During their march through the town, their Gestapo escort beat and tortured them.

  Arrived at the place of execution, they were forced to dig a ditch with their bare hands. This was to be their grave. When the grave was ready the SS men made them stand in line along the edge of the ditch and shout ‘Heil Hitler’. They were then mowed down by machine-gun fire. All were not, of course, killed outright and the firing-party finished off those still alive with spades and then threw the bodies into the ditch and trampled them down until the surface was level.

  The victims of one mass execution in the Bilgoriz district were disinterred in 1944 and this report on the condition of the corpses was made by the medico-legal experts who conducted the exhumation: ‘Before the murder the condemned men had been tied with thick wire. Several knots were made on their forearms and wrists…. They were beaten and tortured in a most cruel and bestial way. This is proved in several cases by a crushed face or a broken lower jaw and upper jaw: in one case by a large split in the skull.’

  Another ‘pacification’ in the Radonnsko district was supposedly carried out as a reprisal on the local population for having aided the partisans. An eyewitness saw the Germans drag adults and children from three farm houses, shut them up in a barn and then open heavy machine-gun fire upon it. The barn caught fire and the occupants were burnt alive. The German troops then went to another farm and the story of what happened there has been told by a youth named Wladyslaw Pietras who was the sole survivor.1

  My parents implored them to spare our lives but they took no notice and began firing on us. At the first shots we all fell on the floor but the Germans continued. One bullet hit me in my left side. When the Germans left the cottage I decided to run for it. My parents and my brothers and sisters lay motionless on the floor. Only my little niece Teresa, three months’ old, was still crying in her cot. I managed to reach the woods and waited hidden in the undergrowth and from there I saw our house in flames. During this raid I lost my father and mother, my grandmother, two brothers and three sisters. My little niece Teresa was burnt alive. Our village consisted of only four farmsteads. All were demolished by fire and all the inhabitants except myself either murdered or burnt.

  Atrocities of this kind were commonplace in 1939 when the Nazis’ plan to ‘eliminate’ the population of Poland was being put into execution.

  Hitler had said that in the forefront of his programme was ‘the destruction of Poland’. ‘The aim,’ he said in a speech on 22nd August 1939, ‘is the elimination of living forces, not the arrival at a certain line … the destruction of Poland shall be the primary objective.’

  And so the awful holocaust went on for five long years. To give a detailed account of its progress would be tedious and nauseating, but the following description by an eyewitness of a typical mass execution which took place in November of 1941 will suffice as a specimen of them all.

  At 4 a.m. the Gestapo entered my cell and told me they had come to fetch me. I was handcuffed and taken to a motor-car with two other prisoners. We were all placed in the back of the car and our feet chained together. After motoring some distance we turned up a bridle path in the middle of a forest. We were then unfettered, pulled out of the car, and taken to a clearing where mass graves had been dug. Large numbers of Jews were sitting all around, women and children and babies-in-arms. The Gestapo ordered the Jews to undress, beginning with those near the larger of the two graves, and then to jump into it. Those who hesitated were beaten and pushed in. On the bottom of the grave was a layer of quicklime. Some of the women who were carrying their babies jumped in with them; others first threw their babies in. We three prisoners were ordered to collect the Jews’ shoes and clothing. The Gestapo took all valuables, watches, rings, and other jewellery and put them in heaps. The order was then given that no more were to get undressed. The grave was packed almost to the limit. Meanwhile, I and my two companions went on collecting the scattered clothing, valuable
s, blankets, and other belongings, and this took until about noon when a lorry drove up with four large tanks on it. The Germans then fitted up a small motor pump and pumped the contents of the tanks, which appeared to be water, into the grave….1

  The following morning the grave was filled in.

  The enormity of the German war crimes in Poland cannot be appreciated unless the objective of German Government in that country be understood.

  Hans Frank’s original directive when he took over the administration of that unhappy country, was, so he has said, to turn Poland’s ‘economic, cultural, and political structure into a heap of rubble’. He had little doubt that his instructions meant what they said, for he wrote in his diary: ‘If I were to come to the Führer and say “My Führer, I have to report that I have annihilated another 150,000 Poles”, he would reply, “Magnificent, if it was necessary”.’

  In Nazi eyes, military necessity excused any breach of the laws of war.2

  The crimes committed by the Germans against the laws and usages of war and against humanity in Poland had no justification. They were the natural outcome of Nazi ideology and Nazi planning and put their authors beyond the pale of European civilization.

  When Hitler marched into Russia in June 1941 the wellknown slogan of German imperialism had come once again into its own—the ‘Drang nach Osten’.3 ‘If new territory is desired’, Hitler had once written in Mein Kampf ‘it can be secured at the expense of Russia. The new empire must move along the paths trodden by the Teutonic Knights, this time to acquire soil for the German plough by means of the German sword.’ Wheat, coal, and oil from the Ukraine and the Caucasus, nickel from the Kola Peninsula, all these vital sinews of war were there for the taking and Germany needed them badly.

  That Nazi aggression did not start in the East only came about, as Hitler told his generals at a conference in November 1939, ‘by force of events’. But the prize was still there to be won and the moment for so doing had only been postponed.

  The war against the Russians was fought with more savagery and barbarity than anywhere else, and it has been contended by German counsel at a number of war crime trials that the Hague Conventions did not apply to the war between the U.S.S.R. and Germany. The argument put forward and supported by two obscure Russian writers on International Law, is that the idea that there was any natural law having international force had for many years been under an official ban in the U.S.S.R. merely on the grounds that such law represented ‘the thinly veiled instrument of capitalist expansion’. Nevertheless, all modern Russian jurists have stressed both the reality and the enforceability of International Law.

  Furthermore, no State has ever recognized the fact that Russia was entitled to repudiate any of the obligations of the Tzarist Government and particularly not such a one as Hague Convention IV which required a specific form of notice for the purpose of withdrawing from it. Nor has such notice ever been given to the Netherlands Government which kept the register of adherents, and as late as 1939 that government circularized to all concerned, including the German Reich, a list of adherents which included the U.S.S.R. and which was never challenged.

  When this question was raised before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, they disposed of it in these words:

  It is argued that the Hague Convention does not apply in this case because of the general participation clause in Article II of the Hague Convention of 1907. In the opinion of the Tribunal it is not necessary to decide this question. The rules of land warfare expressed in the Convention undoubtedly represented an advance over existing International Law at the time of their adoption, but the Convention expressly stated that it was an attempt to revise the general laws and customs of war which it thus recognized to be then existing. But by 1939 these rules laid down in the Convention were recognized by all civilized nations and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war.

  The Barbarossa Jurisdiction Order of 13th May 1941, issued to the German commanders a month before the offensive against Russia began, left them in no doubt of the methods by which the invaded territory was to be subjugated. It provided that alleged offences by enemy civilians were to be relentlessly liquidated, suspected offenders were to be brought before an officer on whose decision depended whether or not they were to be shot, and collective reprisals were to be taken against localities where partisan attacks had been made.

  This order was liberally interpreted and there was one occasion on which, in pursuance of it, a Russian girl of sixteen was shot for singing an anti-German song.

  From the moment the German troops entered Russia until the last Nazi had been driven out, from the Russo-German border to Smolensk, from Smolensk to Stalingrad, from Stalingrad to the Crimea, and from thence to Kharkov, wherever the German soldier or the SS men set foot, crimes of unimaginable brutality were committed against old men, women, and children in their thousands. The paraphernalia of murder was extensive, the technique varied but it was patently organized and directed at a high level.

  As one of the Russian prosecutors at the Nuremberg trial told the Court, when the sites where the Germans buried their victims were opened up and the bodies exhumed and examined by experts in forensic medicine, it was evident that the methods of killing were identical although the burial grounds were often thousands of kilometres apart and the executions had been carried out by different people. The wounds were invariably inflicted in the same parts of the body.

  Nor was this all. The precautions taken to camouflage the mass graves as anti-tank ditches or trenches were also identical, and when the victims arrived at the place of execution they were invariably ordered to undress and lie face downwards in pits already prepared. As soon as the first layer of human bodies had been shot it was covered with quicklime and the second batch of victims was made to undress and lie down on top of it. Whether it was in the swamps of Bielorussia or in the foothills of the Caucasus the drill was the same.

  This wholesale slaughter was not the result of the excesses of undisciplined German units or formations, still less of individual officers and soldiers, but was the considered policy of Hitler’s Cabinet deliberately planned before the outbreak of hostilities and faithfully carried out in obedience to orders.

  To implement this policy and execute these plans, it was not only necessary that the Nazis should encourage the lowest instincts of their troops and incite them to murder innocent civilians and treat them with every kind of brutality and violence; it was also necessary to train special units to do the work and to make it known that such crimes would go unpunished.

  The task ahead was so abhorrent and revolting that only those without feeling, without pity and without conscience could perform it. Much had been done in Germany before the war to free its people from what Hitler called ‘the humiliating restrictions imposed by the Chimera of conscience and morality’; but not enough, and formations of perverted creatures, the Einsatz kommandos, accompanied the Wehrmacht throughout Russia to do the latter’s filthy work.

  According to an order issued by Hitler, a German soldier could not be brought to trial by court martial for any act committed against Soviet citizens. He could be punished by his commanding officer if necessary.

  Local commanders were often given extensive powers to undertake collective punitive measures against the civilian population. They could burn down villages and towns, seize without normal requisitioning procedure supplies and livestock, and arrest any inhabitant and have him deported to Germany for slave labour.

  It has already been stated that whatever form of reprisal may be sanctioned by International Law it should only be made after all other methods have been tried to obtain satisfaction and after consultation at a very high level; no reprisals should ever be undertaken on the responsibility of a subordinate commander. From the beginning of the Russian campaign, however, local commanders were given very wide powers.

  The principle that war crimes against Soviet citizens would involve the perpetrator in no disc
iplinary action was kept constantly in mind by the German High Command. Hitler having been informed that certain members of the Wehrmacht, for atrocities committed during operations against partisans, had been called to account for their behaviour, instructed Keitel to issue a further directive on this subject.

  This directive stated that if the repression of partisans in the East was not pursued with the most brutal means it would not be long before the menace reached uncontrollable proportions. ‘The troops have, therefore, the right and the duty to use in this struggle any and unlimited means, even against women and children, if only conducive to success…. No German participating in combat action against guerrillas or their associates is to be held responsible for acts of violence either from a disciplinary or judicial point of view.’ This directive gave the German soldier in Russia carte blanche to rape and to murder, and he took full advantage of it.

  All these orders were passed on to the troops, and subordinate commanders issued their own instructions. On 12th June von Manstein issued a directive for the behaviour of the troops in Russia as an appendix to one of his operation orders. It urged them to take ruthless measures against ‘Bolshevik instigators, francs-tireurs, saboteurs, and Jews’.

  Courses of instruction in ruthlessness were held in the German Army. A corporal who served in the special battalion ‘Altenberg’ which took an active part in the atrocities committed by the German troops in the city and region of Kharkov stated that whilst on such a course he attended lectures given by senior officers in the GFP1 who said that the Russian people were subhuman, that the majority should be destroyed, and that those who were spared would be employed by the Germans as slaves. ‘Such instruction,’ the corporal continued, ‘was in accordance with the policy of the German Government towards the peoples of the occupied territories; and, it must be confessed, was put into practice by every member of the Armed Forces, myself included.’