Henceforth they were to be deported to Germany by way of prisoner collecting points. Prisoners were to be executed no longer -- not because it was thought illegal or inhuman to execute prisoners, but simply because their labor was now necessary for the Nazi war machine.
In order to clear up any doubts concerning this unusually humane Hitler order, the OKW issued a clarifying order, dated August 18, 1943. Paragraph 3 of the succeeding order empowered any commander having the rank of at least a Divisional Commander, "in cases of particularly malicious procedure on the part of the bandits or their accomplices", to issue precautionary directives not to take any prisoners, or to shoot prisoners and the population captured in the combat areas. In his order of 15 Sept. 1943, passing on this clarifying order, Rendulic said -- and for this he deserves the dubious honor of having "improved" on a Fuehrer order:
1) All operations against collective bands or against individual bandits are to be executed with ruthless severity. The unit employed in band combat is not to be satisfied merely to chase away the bands, but it must attempt again and again to exterminate bands or at least parts of them.....
2) The severity of the fights against the cunning enemy often makes it impossible to bring in prisoners without endangering one's own men. The precautionary directives under No. 3 of the OKW's order below, not to take prisoners, will frequently become necessary against the bands in the Serbo-Croatian area. Should the individual bandits nevertheless be captured alive by our own troops, they are to be treated in accordance with the attached order of the OKW/WFST secret, dated 18.8.43.
What a thinly veiled invitation to the wholesale murder of defenseless prisoners of war, of men who satisfied all the criteria prerequisite to full belligerent status. Small wonder, then, that brutalized by such orders, the common German soldier lost all sense of chivalry, all regard for decency. As inexorably as night follows day, the issuance of these criminal orders was followed by the reports of their enforcements:
Captured 31 partisans -- 27 of them were shot;
2 partisans, captured during an attack on Bijela, refused to tell the name of the Brigade or Division to which they were attached. After their interrogation, they were shot;
18 captured partisans shot;
4 partisans captured -- shot;
Communist courier hanged alter interrogation;
100 bandits hanged for railway sabotage and for a surprise attack on police;
20 partisans hanged for an attempt to blow up a railroad.
You will read these and scores of similar reports until numbed by the monotony of their tragic sameness, your emotions may well be incapable of registering further horror and pite.
Although a critical manpower situation in the Reich was responsible for modification of existing orders respecting the treatment of captured partisans, there was no similar practical excuse for a change in the basic orders governing reprisal measures. The consistency of the German retaliation rules runs like a steady red thread throughout this case. These rules, like the physical presence of Foertsch, lend consistent if appalling unity to the periods of List, Kuntze, Loehr and ven Weichs.
The already mentioned Rendulic order of 15 Sept. 1943 is as revealing on the subject of reprisal measures as it was on the treatment of captured partisans. It is not an exceptional order. It is, unfortunately, thoroughly representative of every single man in the defendants' dock.
The order states:
Attacks on German members of the Wehrmacht and damages to warimportant installations are to be answered in every case by the shooting or hanging of hostages and the destruction of surrounding villages, which latter is to take place, if possible, after the arrest of the male population which is capable of bearing arms. Only then will the population, in order to avoid reprisal measures, inform the German authorities if bands collect.
Unless in individual cases different orders are issued, the rule for reprisal measures is:
1 German killed 50 hostages 1 German wounded 25 hostages Kidnapping of a German will be considered equal to killing a German unless the kidnapped person does not return within a definite period.
According to the severity of the attack, 100 hostages may be hanged or shot for each attack against war essential installations.
These reprisal measures are to be executed if the culprit is not caught within 48 hours.
With orders cf this nature outstanding, there could have been only satisfaction, not surprise, as the routing, matter-of-fact reports came in:
20 hostages hanged and 26 shot for railway sabotage;
As a retaliatory measure for an attack on an armored column 27 Chetnik hostages hanged;
Arrest of a woman teacher in Kapela as a hostage, whose husband, a Croatian captain, deserted to the bands;
Relatives of track attendant Petric, who left his post at 1800 hours, will be shot if he fails to return;
The mass of the population of the villages of Paklenica and Vocarica arrested as hostages and the villages burned down in reprisal for a band surprise attack on Novska;
One village burned and 100 bandits shot as a measure cf retaliation for raid on railway southeast of Gracenica;
In retaliation for a raid on a freight train southeast of Vinkovci 21 bandit suspects taken from near the place of the raid and executed there.
Von Weichs knew of this and other of Rendulic's orders. He knew, too, of their precise execution -- he was Rendulic's commander, it was his business to know. Dehner and Leyser knew of them also -- it was they who saw to it that the orders were carried rut. It was their divisions, regiments and battalions who did the shooting.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will be in recess at this time until 1:30 this afternoon at which time this Tribunal will reconvene in Court Room No. 2.
(A Recess was taken until 1330 hours).
AFTERNOON SESSION (The Tribunal reconvened at 1330 hours, 15 July 1947)
THE MARSHAL: The Tribunal is again in session.
THE PRESIDENT: Counsel may proceed.
MR. FENSTERMACHER: If the Tribunal please, prior to the recess, you will remember, we were discussing the final occupational period, the period August 1943 to October 1944. We were particularly concerned with the basic orders issued by Weichs for the whole theater, and with their execution by Rendulic, Dehner and Leyser in Croatia.
Not until late December 1943, four months after the inaugeration of the new Southeast command, did a major reorientation in theater policy take place. Minister Plenipotentiary Neubacher, Ribbentrop's top political advisor for southeaster Europe, had long worried over the boomerang effect of the German occupational terror. After conferences with Weichs and his army commanders, it was agreed that "the reprisal, penal and revenge measures practed up to now must in the future, take into account the new political objectives." In cases of attacks or acts of sabotage, the new principle was "to seize the perpetrator himself and to take reprisal measures only as a second course, if through reprisal measures the prevention of future attacks is to be expected." Up until now the hangings and burning admittedly had occurred first, and the search for the guilty only later. A reversal in technique was a tribute, not to justice, but to military expediency.
This order of the Supreme Command Southeast, dated 22 December 1943, is a remarkable document in many ways. It rescinded all previous orders concerning hostage quotas. But though reprisal quotas were no longer to be fixed, they were not at all prohibited. Rather the extent of the reprisal measures was to be "established in advance in each individual case." The order is unique also because of this twisted and inconsistent language. It reads in part as follows:
The procedure of carrying out reprisal measures, after a surprise attack or an act of sabotage, at random on persons and dwellings in the vicinity, close to the seen of the deed, shakes the confidence in the justice of the occupying power and also drives the loyal part of the population into the woods. This form of execution of reprisal measures is accordingly forbidden. If, however, the investigation on the spot reveals open or concealed collaboration or a conscientiously passive attitude of certain persons concerning the perpetrators, then these persons above all are to be shot as bandit helpers and their dwellings destroyed....
If such people as are guilty can not be found, those persons must be resorted to who, without being connected with the actual deed, nevertheless are to be regarded as co-responsible.
Why should persons not connected with the actual deed "nevertheless be regarded as co-responsible"? When superior orders are so incomprehensible and so in need of lower-level clarification, it is not surprising to find one of Rendulic's Division commanders, writing to his troops in the following simple, straightforward, understandable language:
All is right which leads to success. After three full years of war in the Balkans each commander knows what is best.
Not because of the new policy directive, but rather because of tactical considerations arising out of the regular military nature of the current war in the Southeast, there was a noticeable change in the Croatian picture in the early months of 1944. The change was not so much a decline in the quantum of crime committed by the German troops there as it was a shift in emphasis from one type of crime to another. The number of hostage hangings may have decreased, but in their place were the many raids on partisan concentrations, followed, after all military operations were ended, by the deliberate burning of partisan hospitals and medical supplies and, on occasion, by the merciless execution of their sick and wounded patients. With periodical "purge actions" and "punitive expeditions" throughout 1944, for example, units of the "Prinz Eugen" and "Devil's" Divisions, both subordinate to Rendulic, went on a rampage of blood and cruelty that can only be duplicated in history by the orgies of Genghis Khan. A dozen or more inoffensive Dalmatian villages were burned and plundered. Three villages were destroyed and more than 800 of their inhabitants massacred on a single day The troops machine-gunned crowds which they, themselves, had assembled, they looted the dead and then half burned the bodies on giant funeral pyres, they poured gasoline on live victims and then set them on fire, they raped and they pillaged and they slaughtered.
What else could be expected of men brutalized and incited to crime by the ruthless orders of ruthless commanders?
Then there were the deportations to slave labor in the Reich. Worried by the threat of an Allied invasion across the Adriatic Sea, but more anxious about the continuous thrusts of Tito's National Army of Liberation and by the labor needs at home, scores of islands and thousands of square miles of Dalmatia and Croatia were completely evacuated of all their inhabitants by the Second Panzer Army. Mixed Croate-German ---
THE PRESIDENT: May I interrupt just a minute. We need a short recess in order to fix the sound system.
(Short recess taken)
THE PRESIDENT: I am informed that the English was coming over Channel 3 and the other language over another channel. The English is now coming over 2, so you will kindly watch and see that you are getting it on your right dial. And the German is on 3.
MR. FENSTERMACHER: Mixed Croate-German commissions rounded up all able-bodied men between 17 and 40 and gave them their choice of being drafted into the Croatian Army or joining strongly guarded labor battalions building fortifications, and coastal defenses, both alter natives which meant fighting on the side of those who would keep them in bondage. Altogether, between 150,000 and 200,000 Croates were up-rooted from their homes and villages and transported to district and regional collecting camps from which they were later screened -- the weak to remain in local concentration camps and all the strong to labor in Germany. In one single action alone, Operation "Panther", more than 6,000 persons were deported to the Reich for labor. Old men, women, nursing children, all had to go, wearing only the clothes they had on and taking with them only what they could carry.
And always, as an area was combed, several groups of the SD were asked to accompany the army to "clean up " in its rear. To "clean up " -- a polite expression for political, racial and ideological murder. So widespread were the evacuations, and so wholesale the deportations, that even the supine Croatian Government protested in their quick and arbitrary manner that the Germans were deporting hundreds whose loyalty to the Pavelic Government and the German occupation was above suspicion.
Hangings -- of hostages, "communists", "bandit helpers", "suspects"; executions - of prisoners, civilians, "anti-Germans", "unreliables"; burnings -- of homes, villages and towns; punitive expeditions and "purge actions"; mass evacuations and deportations to slave labor-that was the answer of Rendulic, Dehner and Leyser to the problem of Croatian pacification.
If Croatia under the aegis of Randulic was an operational channel house, then Serbia under Felber and Geitner was an administrative extermination camp. In no other country did the machinery for murder operate with such chain-like precision.
With impartial ruthlessness and severity, Felber and Geitner liquidated both D.M's and Partisans, depending upon the political affiliation of the group to which the Germans believed the perpetrators of the hostile acts belonged. They hanged and shot in incrediable quantities, reflected in their daily and monthly reports to von Weichs:
2 September 1943: "450 communist suspects ordered to be shot in course of operation in area of Leskovac";
29 September 1943: " 10 D.M. hostages and shot to death in Jagodina for the murder of the district supervisor";
4 October 1943: "283 D.M. hostages and 42 communists shot to death in Cacak on 1 October in reprisal for a number of attacks in the area of F.K. 610 during which German and Bulgarian members of the Wehrmacht were killed.";
17 October 1943: "In retaliation for attack on German customs and police patrol, 100 D.M. in the district of F.K. 810 and 150 communist hostages in Belgrade shot to death;"
29 October 1943: "In reprisal for the attack on two German soldiers by D.M. Chetniks near Tejika on 17 October, for a further attack on 21 October near Gr. Milanovac, and for the attack on barges on the Danube near Izlaz on 26 October, 150 D.M. followers were shot;"
29 October 1943: "As revenge for the surprise attack on a cattle purchasing detachment at Sljivar 100 D.M. followers and 200 communists were shot in Belgrade";
29 October 1943: "As revenge for the surprise attack on the collecting detachment of the 8th Auxiliary Police Battalion at Lelasnica 100 D.M. followers were shot";
1 December 1943: "27 communist hostages shot in retaliation for the attack on the train Negotin-Nisch".
Even after the order of December 1943 rescinding all hostage quotas and decreeing a policy change in reprisal measures, Felber and Geitner continued to execute in arithmetical ratio:
22 January 1944: "50 communist hostages shot to death for the murder of a German police captain in Kragujevac";
24 January 1944: "10 communists shot to death in Pozarevac in reprisal for the murder of the mayor";
On 24 March 1944 in a memorandum addressed to F.A. 610, Felber approved the execution of 10 "communists hostages at the Krusevac airport, and as late as 30 May 1944, he ordered the execution of 50 "communists" in retaliation for the death of two German soldiers.
Such was the record of crime which Felber and Geitner compiled in Serbia.
Von Weichs knew the effect these massacres had on the Serbian state of mind, and he knew that they were directly related tot the problem of pacification of the whole Southeast. He knew, too, that in a theater of war without the usual operational zones and rear areas tactical security and administrative security were one and the same thing. Von Weichs was law in Serbia as he was law in all the Southeast. He knew of Felber's and Geitner's blooky work--he knew, he condoned, he consented, and he approved.
For reasons of convenience and clarity in the statement of this case, we have postponed our description of the German occupation of Greece in order to treat it all together. Greece had been stunned almost into quiescence during the first half of the joint GermanItalian occupation. Always a heavy food-importing country, Greece, with her outside sources of supply cut off and her food stocks pu plundered by the Italian and German occupiers, faced national starvation. Hundreds died in the streets of Athens daily, children with the bloated bellies of undernourishment could be seen everywhere, and between August 1943 and October 1944, the drachma declined from one--three hundredth to one trillionth of its pre-war value. With a population of slightly over seven million people, Greece lost an estimated 300,000 of its inhabitants because of the food shortage.
To a people accustomed to horses and carts, German mechanized night was overwhelming. The military end had come with such speed that it took some tine before the Greeks could even entertain the thought of rebelling against half-tracks, panzers and airplanes.
"But", as Lord Dunsany says, "in three thousand years, freedon grows so hard that it is like a piece of rock at the core of a mountain, that cannot be broken or ground away, and cannot disappear ever." In the latter part of 1942, at the time of Stalingrad and the Allied victories in North Africa, the Greek resistance movement began to gather strength. In Crete, an all too familiar note was heard as early as November 1942, when the German commander General Brauer, instructed his commanders to educate the troops "to show no mercy whatsoever to the civilian population."
As had been observed, up to August 1943 the greater part of Greece was occupied by the Italians. But in November and December 1942 and January 1943, Loehr's reports to CKH began to contain an increasing number of references to retaliation measures against sabotage and guerrilla attacks in the German-occupied portions of Greece.
By June and July 1943, the situation in Greece had become increasingly similar to that in Yugoslavia. Loehr's reports to OKH are an accurate barometer of the terroristic pattern:
3 June 1943: "10 communists from a concentration camp shot in Larissa as a retaliation measure."
2 July 1943: "4 villages burned down and 50 communists shot near Litochoron for attack on German sergeant and blasting of railroad tracks."
4 July 1943: "87 suspects shot while trying to escape".
5 July 1943: "50 Greeks shot in Melaxa for sabotage of cable lines."
Just as in Yugoslavia, literally dozens of separate resistance groups at first arose in Greece. But after a period of merger and consolidation, two organizations of major importance were discernibleGeneral Zervas and his approximately 10,000. EDES troops in the Epirus section of western Greece, and the ELAS units, 15,000 strong, in eastern Greece, the Peloponnessus peninsula, Crete and the islands.
To put down the Greek resistance the Germans tried the same old methods. Terror and intimidation, hostages and reprisal measures, hangings and burnings, had failed to pacify Serbia and Coratia. But the Germans, never humane and seldom smart, knew no other course.
Greece during 1943 and 1944 was, like Yugoslavia, divided theoretically into both operational areas and so-called administrative areas, each with its own separate jurisdiction, organization and personnel. For the efficient execution of their respective missions of pacification and security, it was, of course, quite necessary that the regular tactical troops of Felmy and Lanz should cooperate closely with the district and sub-area police troops under Speidel's jurisdiction. This was achieved both by personal contact of the major personalities involved and by the regular interchange of information, daily and weekly situation reports, and the like. Generally speaking, the tacticaL troops confined their activities to regular military engagements against the organized partisan bands. Speidel's police troops, on the other hand, were concerned for the most part with the civilian population--seizing workers for forced labor in the Reich, deporting Jews from Crete, Corfu, Rhodes and the other islands putting down strikes, executing hostages in retaliation for acts of sabotage and the clandestine killings of German police and quisling Greek mayors.
The orders of Flemy, Lanz and Speidel in Greece were similar to these issued by Rendulic, Dehner and Leyser in Croatia and by Felber and Geitner in Serbia. When attacks on troops, installations and supply lines continued, notwithstanding a previous 10:1 "hostage" quota, the Germans, with their customarily inflated notions of their own worth, promptly raised the quota to 50:1. But even the execution of 50 civilians in retribution for attacks by unknown persons did not completely satisfy General Lanz.
On the 25th of October 1943, his 1st Mountain Division ordered that the 50:1 arithmetical key be applied even to German losses suffered in regular military combat with the legitimately organized and uniformed guerrillas. After October 1943 the out--moded 10:1 ratio was to be effective only for the less serious deaths of such racial inferiors as a "pro-German Greek or a Greek working for the Germans."
By mid--1943, the "Andartes", as the Greek partisans were called, were an enemy to be seriously reckoned with. The Germans, however, refused to grant full belligerent status to the Greek resistance forces. Instead they waged war against the Greeks in 1941-42--by pressing the native population into service on the side of the terror that was oppressing them. They intimidated the inhabitants of peaceful villages into giving information concerning the size and location of partisan troops. They executed civilians in reprisal for the bombing of bridges and tunnels, and for sabotage of communication lines. They labeled men "Bandits", "communists", bandit suspects" and "bandat helpers" and killed them without benefit of investigation, trial or even summary court martial. In short, they resorted to every trick and device that a tyrant, blinded by the fury of his own insanity, might resort to. The reports to von Weichs and Foertsch tell the story of the harvest of the German policy in Greece:
29 November 1943: "In reprisal for band attack on the road Tripolis-Sparta, 100 hostages shot at the scene of the attack."
1 December 1943: "In reprisal for the killing of one German soldier in Tripolis, 30 'communists' were shot."
2 December 1943: "For attack on railroad bridge southeast of Tripolis 50 hostages hanged."
3 December 1943: "19 communist reprisal prisoners shot in revenge for the murder and wounding of Greek police."
6 December 1943: "As reprisal for band attack southeast of of Gythion 25 hostages shot."
621 December 1943: "In the area of Volos 25 bandits shot to death in reprisal for an attack on motor vehicles."
25 February 1944: "50 hostages from the hostage camp at Tripolis shot to death on 23 February in reprisal for the murder of an interpreter."
9 March 1944: "In reprisal for strike agitation by communists 50 communists shot to death."
25 March 1944: "45 hostages shot in Corinth, 52 in Tripolis, 44 in Sparta."
1 April 1944: "Special train Athens-Salonika hit mines. One dead, 14 wounded. Tracks blocked only short while. The execution of 70 Greeks at the site of the incident ordered."
Lidice, the small Czech village which the Germans leveled to the ground in 1942, stands today as a symbol of German savagery. In Greece there are a thousand Lidices--their names unknown and their inhabitants forgotten by a world too busy and too cynical to remember. Greece has many small primitive villages with 500 to 1,000 inhabitants who live in mud houses with thatched roofs that have been lived in for centuries. There are, for example, the villages of the Peloponnes peninsula which were leveled to the ground in December 1943 during the notorious "Operation Kalavritha." Touched off by a report that "bandits" in the vicinity had killed 78 German prisoners, troops subordinate to General Felmy embarked upon a reprisal expedition that lasted for eight days before their senseless bestiality had been satiated. Fourteen villages were completely destroyed and their male inhabitants shot. 511 persons from Kalvritha alone were executed. Whether the Partisans had killed captured German soldiers or not, there was no legal excuse, and there can be no moral mitigation, for seeking wholesale and indiscriminate revenge on the innocent.
Then there were the parallel tragedies of Klissura and Distomen. On an April morning in 1944 partisan troops appeared on the outskirts of Klissura and forbade the inhabitants to leave the village. On the afternoon of the same day, about two miles away, one German motorcycle was attacked and two German soldiers killed.
German reprisal methods being well known by now, all the male population of the village fled in fear to hide in the hills.
Only ole men, women and young children remained behind. About 4 p.m. that afternoon the 7th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment and Bulgarian Occupational Militia subordinate to its command, both under Felmy's tactical jurisdiction, threw a cordon around the village, searched the houses unseccessfully for weapons and ammunition, and called all the people together in the public square. Then the killing and burning began. When it stopped, there were 223 victims lying in the square -- fifty of them children under ten years, 128 women and the rest old men -- Klissura was a mass of smouldering rubble.
The "blood bath of Klissura", as the Germans so appropriately entitled their own report on the affair, was too much for Minister Neubacher to stomach. Not because it was inhumane but because it would have serious political repercussions, Neubacher immediately protested to Weishs. He said:
"It is sheer insanity to shoot babies, children, women and old people because heavily armed Reds had been quartered for one night in their houses and had shot two German soldiers in the neighborhood. The political consequences of such deeds may be very serious. It is obviously easier to kill quite harmless women, children and old men than to hunt down an armed band. I demand a thorough investigation of the matter."
The investigation was ordered. The military whitewash of an SS unit by a Wehrmacht Field Marshal came two months later when Weiehs wrote to Neubacher:
"The Greek witnesses cannot be believed. The village was taken by storm, the inhabitants killed by artillery fire. There was no retaliation action."
Just two months after Klissura, in June 1944, troops of the same 7th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment were involved in a similar massacre at Distomon.
From the Germans' own lengthy report of the incident the following facts appear. As a German company approached the village, 18 Greek civilians were seen. Although they did not fire on the Germans, six of the 18 "were shot while trying to escape". The remaining 12 civilians were arrested and taken along with the company, which continued on to Distomon, remained there for several hours undisturbed, and then set out on the road from Distomon to Stiri. About two kilometers from Distomon, 30-35 partisans, well-entrenched in ridges overlooking the read and armed with an 8 cm. trench mortar that covered the entire area, lay in ambush. Before the surprised Company could disperse and reorganize to return the sudden Partisan fire, the enemy had gone.
In defiance of orders restricting the initiation of reprisal measures to commanders of at least division commander level, the company commander returned his troops to Distomon to retaliate the villagers because they had not previously disclosed the presence and position of the "bandits". A report of a German Secret Field Police member, who was in Distomon at the time, relates what happened after the troops returned: "After the troops returned to Distomon, the 12 prisoners who were taken back were shot dead in the market place as a reprisal measure.....
Subsequent to that, all people present in Distomon were shot dead wherever they happened to be. At that time, I was at the market place and was looking after our wounded interpreter. As far as I observed events, 60 to 70 persons -- men, women and children -- were killed in the vicinity of the market place. As far as I could see it, all were shot dead. I did not see inhabitants being killed in any other way, i.e. beaten to death by rifle butt, or by pouring gasoline over them and setting them on fire."
Why were the 12 arrested Greek civilians killed? What had they to do with the subsequent action by the "Andartes"? Why were 270 inhabi tants of Distomon killed?
What was their crime? Why did the Secret Field Police member feel obliged to say that he had not seen any inhabitants "killed in any other way, i.e. beaten to death by rifle butt, or by pouring gasoline over them and setting them on fire"? Was that the usual method of executing retaliation victims?
Again Neubacher was dismayed by the political, not the moral, insanity of such actions. And again he protested -- not to Himmler, although SS troops were once more involved, but to Weichs, the omnipotent master of the Southeast, the Commander of Wehrmacht and SS troops alike. This time the investigation was more lively, for it revealed that the regiment to which the company involved was subordinate had knowingly issued a false official combat report of its action against Distomon. According to the regimental report the 16 Greek civilians opened fire upon the company as it was approaching Distomon and were "shot while trying to escape", while Distomon itself was taken only after a hard battle followed by a mopping-up operation.
From a sheer internal military standpoint, the SS company commander had not only violated orders regarding the initiation of reprisal measures. He had also deliberately issued a false official report. But convinced that the "competent authorities would also subsequently have ordered reprisal measures against Distomon which would have necessitated sending at a later time a strong mission with corresponding high fuel consumption" and believing that the company commander's procedure was "merely a transgression against formality and corresponded to a natural soldierly feeling", the regiment requested permission to handle the matter "by disciplinary proceedings only". General Felmy, the corps commander involved, consented to the regimental request , and Field Marshal Weichs agreed. Neubacher was informed. The case was closed.
The events of Distomon merit this somewhat detailed account because in this single tragedy there is presented in microcosm the evil of the German Army in Greece and in the whole Southeast during four years of ruthless occupation.
It gives good insight, for example, into the mental processes of a young German officer of company grade, completely devoid of any notions of decency and honor, thoroughly corrupted by the regulations, directives and orders handed down by his superiors. It reveals precisely how war in the Southeast was fought, how the peaceful population was drawn into the struggle, what a reprisal action specifically entailed. It indicates how little the top military authorities did to humanize the already existing techniques and methods of anti-partisan warfare, how lax they were in disciplining their own troops, how they shielded the guilty. Finally, it gives the lie to one of the most important single myths that the Wehrmacht seeks desperately to perpetuate -- that the terrible crimes of troops in the field were committed by SS units over whom the Wehrmacht had no power or control, and that Wehrmacht commanders constantly and vigorously protested to higher authorities against the undisciplined excesses of the SS troops. Weichs knew the inhabitants of Klissure had been killed in a reprisal, not a combat, action by the same SS unit which later was involved at Distomon. He not only did not remove the commanders responsible for that atrocity before they could repeat the same criminal performance at Distomon, but he lied to Neubacher in order to shield it from criticism.
During the spring and summer of 1944 both the tactical commons of Felmy and Lanz and the administrative organization of General Speidel worked feverishly and desperately to postpone the bitter end. The order of 14 August 1944 of General Friedrich Wilhelm Mueller, Commanding General on the island of Crete, is representative of the attitude that prevailed:
"Numerous attacks on German vehicles require vigorous counter measures to demonstrate to the Greek people that we are masters on the island. Consideration for innocent people cannot be shown any more."
Although they knew the war was irretrievably lost, the Southeast Command continued to hang and burn and deport, and as always the Germans' own reports tell the story:
6 April 1944: "In reprisal for an attack by bandits during battalion roll call, killing 4 and wounding 11, 150 persons suspected of belonging to bands were shot in Verria."
23 April 1944: "In Tripolis 12 communists shot in reprisal for a murdered Gendarme."
30 April 1944: "60 communists shot in Athens as further reprisal measures for attack on police officer."
30 April 1944: "200 Greeks will be shot to death as a reprisal measure for the killing of Gen. Krech and his escort detachment." 1 May 1944: "In reprisal for attack on the truck convoy of the 41st Fortress Div. in the southeast Peloponnesus area, 335 communists and band suspects shot to death.
10 May 1944: "In the Boestia area, in reprisal for an attack on vehicles on 26 April 1944, an additional 100 hostages are being shot in Athens."
In May and June 1944: "1600 Jews deported from Corfu and 350 Jews from Crete."
From 1 May to 1 June 1944: "1747 laborers sent to the Reich in three transports. Compulsory deportation to the Reich, particularly from the Peloponnesus, will take place soon."
From 16 June to 15 July 1944: "600 men ready for shipment from the Peloponnesus for employment in the Reich. Transport will take place in a few days for 'Reichswerke Hermann Goering' iron ore mines."
13 July 1944: "50 communists hanged in retaliation for attack on two German officers."
31 July 1944: "Line repair detachment attacked by band west of Agrinion, 8 dead, 14 wounded, Reprisal measures -- 71 communists shot."
10 August 1944: "F.K. 817 reports 50 communists shot at scene of incident at Manara in reprisal for band attack on Athens-Thebes road."
5 August 1944: "Railroad sabotage on train CorinthTripolis. Seven cars derailed. No losses of our own. In reprisal 18 hostages who had been taken along were shot."
26 August 1944: "18 communists shot in Athens in reprisal for German soldier shot from ambush."
23 August 1944: "During mopping-up operations near east Messara, Crete, 191 persons suspected of being bandits shotk 1 village destroyed, 1500 civilians being resettled."
5 September 1944: "In retaliation for raid on truck convoy, 186 suspects shot to death."
In August and September 1944: "13 villages destroyed in retaliation for the kidnapping of Lt. Gen. Kreipe."
Finally, in October 1944, the end came. Threatened from the Nest by combined Anglo-American forces and from the East by the Soviet armies, German troops were withdrawn from the southeast to defend a crumbling Reich. British units landed on the mainland; Elas and Edes troops came down out of the hills. After four long and difficult years under the Nazi yoke, Greece was starving and destitute. But proud and courageous as always, Greece was at last free to resume her own national destiny.
The generals of the Southeast Command went home, were reassigned, surrendered. Twice in 25 years mere readiness for war had been insufficient. As had happened once before, the Balkans had proved to be an Achilles heel to German aggression. The generals were never able to understand why - but strong, independent peoples accustomed to hardship, innured to suffering, and born to freedom can "no more be broken by tyranny than a diamond scratched by a sword."
GENERAL TAYLOR: Your Honor, I desire to turn next to the charges concerning devastation and deportation in Northern Norway. These are the charges embodied in the first specification of Count Two of the indictment, and to examine them we must turn our attention from the Balkans to the northernmost part of the European mainland - the province of Finnmark in northern Norway.