in concentration camps of the Jews, Gypsies and other groups classified as inferior by the philosopher friends of Hitler. It was easy to show that the Army often was used as a uniformed press-gang to shanghai foreign workers for the German war machine.
The only complication has arisen in showing where these men were and what positions they held at a given point in time. In order to do this, we have had to go up and down chains of command like so many squirrels. We have had to go into the question of temporary absences from duty caused by sick leaves, holiday leaves, emergency leaves and every other sort of furlough recognized by the German Army.
The accuracy of self-serving personal diaries and prejudicial affidavits of orderly officers with amazingly unerring memories is somewhat more than questionable. But this defense causes us little difficulty. The crimes perpetrated were on so enormous a scale and so continuous in time that there is more than enough to go round for each defendant. Even making allowance for a few days' or weeks' absence from headquarters means at best but a slight deduction from a still staggering totality. The major characteristic which this proceeding has in common with all of the other war crimes trials heard here in Nurnberg is that the Prosecution's case is based principally upon captured records of unchallenged authenticity which these very defendants, and their closest subordinates and collaborators themselves prepared, unwittingly and dispassionately enough, in the ordinary course of their business of running a war. Ordinarily, in a criminal case, documentary evidence plays a minor role. Most of the proof consists of the oral testimony of the persons who were present or near by when the crime was committed. But for the Prosecution to prove by oral testimony all of the murders and arsons and unlawful arrests and deportations committed by the agencies which these defendants directed was quite impossible for a number of reasons.
In the first place, a person charged with a crime is ordinarily tried within a fairly short time after the act is committed. In a friendly country where the majority of inhabitants are on the side of the law and the wrongdoer is an outcast, the latter will, in the usual case, be readily apprehended. But it took several years before any one German general could be called to account for atrocities committed by his troops in the occupied territories of Europe. The bulk of the criminal acts which have been the subject of this litigation were committed between 1941 and 1944. The lapse of time and the press of events which occurred subsequent to their commission in themselves made it impracticable to attempt to prove the commission of these acts by oral testimony.
Further, in the normal criminal case only one crime, or at the most two or three, are charged against the defendant; and even if more than one criminal act is involved, all of the acts will at least have taken place within a reasonably small area. The courts of one locality are generally spared the task of trying persons who are charged with having committed crimes outside its usually restricted borders, Here, on the other hand, we are dealing with a series of deeds which are only limited geographically by the perimeter of the German Army's territorial conquests. It is not even entirely accurate to use the term 'series', because some of these crimes occurred simultaneously in different parts of Europe. List and Foertsch, for example, were killing hostages in Serbia at the very same time when Kuntze, Lanz and Leyser were executing commissars in Russia.
Finally, in the conventional murder case the Prosecution is usually able to find someone who was in the vicinity of the place where the crime was committed and who lived to tell the tale. Frequently, the murders which form the subject matter of this litigation were committed in such a way that this is not possible. When twenty hostages were marched out of a camp, stood up against a wall and shot by German troops, it was unlikely that anyone except the German troops actually witnessed the scene and lived to describe it.
The proof of the commission of a criminal act by documentary evidence has certain advantages. It eliminates uncertainty and avoids the hazards of human frailties which living witnesses are heir to, such as poor memories, mistaken identifications and good or bad demeanor on the witness stand. It enables the Prosecution to be more detached and reduces the number of controversial factual issues.
But unfortunately, though documents have some advantages, they are not entirely satisfactory. The dry and dull figures of hanged hostages, shot partisans and helpers do not and cannot reflect the destroyed homes, shattered hopes, the disillusionment and misery and pathos that lie behind them. The human mind - perhaps fortunately for our own ultimate well-being - is capable of absorbing only so much tragedy. If one single murder is brought into sharp focus we can take it in, comprehend and be moved emotionally. But when crime is piled upon crime, as has been done in this case, we are in danger of losing our sense of proportion, of allowing the meaning to blur and our moral judgment to become numbed and ineffectual. It is only by considering a cumulative effect that one can shake off the anesthetizing influence of these documents upon one's reason and one's sensibility.
Recorded evidence is handicapped in another respect - documents cannot talk back. They cannot get on the witness stand to annihilate some flimsy explanation, to correct some obvious misinterpretation, or to contradict some outright lie. To the extent that the Prosecution's case is based on documentary evidence, the defendant always has the last say. We can prove that a defendant ordered a given excess to be committed and we can prove that it was committed as a result of his order, but we cannot prove that the defendant did not read the order which he signed or that he did not mean what he said.
But the Prosecution's case does not rest entirely on documents.
Despite the difficulty of seeking out and transporting witnesses from the countries where these crimes took place, the Prosecution managed to Case 7: Closing Statement produce some - a Yugoslav, five Greeks and two Norwegians.
They were unsophisticated folk of the laboring classes who simply described what they had seen done by German troops under the command of these defendants. It is unlikely that their memories were inaccurate. When a man sees practically all of his follow villagers, including a good many members of his own family, murdered before his eyes, it is probable that the incident will make a sharp and indelible impression on his mind.
Though the German firing squads missed scarcely a man in Kragujevac during the three days that no Serb will ever forgot, somehow they failed to kill Zivojin Iovanovitch. He lived to relate that 2300 of his fellow townsmen were rounded up, marched off and sent to their deaths in the last of the three 100:1 reprisal executions that make October 1941 a blemish on German arms that can never be erased.
By sheer good fortune, Stephanos Pappas was able to give an eye witness account of the burning of his village of Konneno and of the indiscriminate slaughter of his friends and neighbors. And in what must certainly be the most miraculous and breathtaking of all escapes, Takis Sipliopoulos told in quiet and subdued detail the story of his own execution. Had one of Felmy's executions not chanced to omit the crucial coup de grace, one might never have known of the massacre at kalavritha.
The Prosecution also used four German witnesses. These men were grilled on cross-examination with particular severity, but with negligible profit. It may be that one reason those witnesses stood up so well was that they knew what they were talking about in the first place.
General Felber certainly knew whereof he spoke when he discussed the nature and purpose of reprisal measures; Bach-Zelewski had more than enough experience to support his conclusions on the subordination relationship of higher police and SS leaders to Army military commanders and General Ferdinand Jodl demonstrated some courage in violating caste loyalty to denounce his one-time commander-in-chief for militarily unnecessary devastation in Norway.
Significantly enough, in spite of the self-proclaimed opposition to National Socialism of every last defendant in the dock, it remained for the Prosecution to turn up, in Willy Finger, the only genuine anti-Nazi who appeared in court during this entire case.
Oftentimes German soldiers, not anticipating subsequent capture and search by the enemy, roguishly photographed their own gruesome work. A number of these photographs were introduced by the Prosecution. Can he who had once seen them ever forget the stark horror of their reality: bent figures poised on the edge of a shallow ditch with the raised rifles a moment before the command to fire; the brutal beheading with an axe -- in four separate scenes -- of a captured partisan; the scattered bodies at Sabac and the German soldier calmly documenting the carnage; the grinning Army troops and the burning thatched village in the background; the bodies grotesquely hanging from street poles along the main street in Belgrade; and the revealing humor of the postcard photographer of three men hanging from a tree and the perverted caption, "Trees in bloom in Serbia, Spring 1941."
But notwithstanding the films on Greece and Norway and the photographs and witnesses from Yugoslavia and Greece, the Prosecution has necessarily been forced to rely upon the verichrome records, orders and communications of the German Army itself in order to prove precisely what the German Army did. These records were kept with no thought of damning or of exculpating either their authors or their recipients. They are the most trustworthy evidence of the events to which they relate that can be imagined.
Such is the general character of the Prosecution's proof. What has the Defense adduced to meet it? Principally, their evidence has consisted of disquisitions by the defendants themselves. We will take up the general burden of their song when we discuss their common defenses.
They have also brought in a number of witnesses. Most of these defense witnesses have been former subordinates of the defendants, whose selfinterest have been former subordinates of the defendants, whose selfinterest and bias isso palpable that it merits no extended discussion.
General Hoelter and General Vogel are but two examples who come readily to mind. Hoelter, Chief of Staff of the 20th Mountain Army during the evacuation of Finnmark, might well have found himself in the deck alongside his Commander-in-Chief charged with complicity in perpetrating the very same crime. And Vogel's credibility -- aside from the fact that he was a corps commander under Rendulic during the same operation -- is clearly indicated by the fact that all of his testimony about the piety and modesty of the defendant Rendulic was squarely contraverted by the entries which the witness had made in his own personal diary during the war.
There was also Dietloff von Winning, the ubiquitous supply officer not only of the 12th Army but of its successors Army Groups E and F, who appeared on behalf of all three of his former superiors, List, Kuntze and Foertsch. Though he had never commanded troops and never smelled powder, von Winning was an authority on everything from objects of art in the White Castle in Belgrade to the number of calories required to keep a Greek hospital patient from dying of malnutrition. Though he knew all about the death of the German members of the 521st Signal Regiment, he could not recollect any action on the part of the German troops in reprisal because retaliation measures were outside his sphere of activity. And in his own orbit of work he could not possibly recall furnishing concentration camps with rations or other supplies.
Dr. Gerd Feine was called to testify concerning the capitulation agreement signed by Germany and Yugoslavia towards the end of April 1941. Dr. Feine got off to a shaky start by confessing, of all things, to having been extremely well treated during his recent trip to Yugoslavia in connection with an investigation of the work of the German Legation in Belgrade prior to the war.
Dr. Feine stated that Cincar Markovic, the former, and deposed, Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia, signed the capitulation agreement on behalf of the Yugoslav Government. Oddly enough, King Peter, as well as Prime Minister Simovic, who was not only a general in the Yugoslav air force but also Commander-in-Chief of the Yugoslav Army, had already left their country for England and could not accept Field Marshal von Weichs' cordial invitation to enter into contractual relations. Dr. Feine talked about a mysterious power of attorney which Simovic had allegedly given to a General Kalafotovic, who in turn was gracious enough to pass it on -- apparently without so much as a by your leave from Simovic -- to power-conscious Markovic. This whole transaction -- is clothed in deepest obscurity. But what really makes the whole suspicious structure collapse is the fact that Dr. Feine, though present throughout the entire capitulation proceedings, never actually saw the magic document which Markovic offered as his authority to transact the business of surrender in Simovic's place and stead.
Friedrich von Sidow allowed the prescribed form of oath to be administered to him without any spoken word of protest though, judging from his testimony, with a good many unuttered reservations. Like the rest of the defense witnesses, he too did no German evil, saw no German evil and heard no German evil. He know only about vicious attacks by partisans in Serbia in 1941; that he did not know by which partisans and never bothered to ask did not appear to strike him as at all unusual for one who, like he, was a major in the German Army. Only 300 Serbs, not almost. 1800 as the captured documents show, were killed at Kraljeve, if you believe his testimony, and that only because 300 Germans had been killed in previous attacks. And even the 1:1 retaliation taken was not for attacks simply at Kraljevo but, to be sure, for attacks which had occurred all over Serbia. Though Sidow claims he was in Serbia throughout October 1941, he never heard the slightest rumor about three large German mass executions at Valjevo, Kraljevo and Kragujevac.
He knew nothing at all about the execution of hostages, about concentration camps or about villages burned in reprisal. Indeed Mr. von Sidow's sense of honor was outraged at the more suggestion that such had occurred. His parting answer can scarcely have passed unnoticed: no, he said, he was not joking, he really had been in Yugoslavia in 1941.
Two other "star" witnesses were the self-styled Balkan experts, both longtime members of the Nazi Party and co-followers with Rosenberg and Streicher of the muse of history. One of them, Dr. Rudolf Ibbeken, had never taught or been taught a single course in Balkan history, he did not speak Serbo-Croat and he had been in Yugoslavia the extended period of six to nine months. He demonstrated his comprehensive grasp of the intricacies of his special field by being unable to answer questions about Balkan personalities which a sixth-grade student in good standing could have covered without great difficulty. Considerably embarrassed by Dr. Ibbeken's ignorance, the Defense produced a slightly more informed Balkan expert in the person of Professor Georg Stadtmueller -- a man so filled with regard for the triumph of international law that even if his country were invaded by an aggressor, and his relatives and friends killed through reprisal actions, even then his deep seated concern for the majesty of law would have restrained him from taking any hostile actions against the enemy occupier. The convincing effect professor Stadtmueller made with this personal confession was dissipated somewhat by the unobjectivity of his conclusion that the Balkan nations had made no recognizable contribution to European culture. Yet one ought not to deal too severely with professor Stadtmueller's testimony. On more sober reflection he did concede, however grudgingly, that yes, the Greek-discovered concept of democracy was something of a contribution to Western civilization after all.
We have talked of the "testimony" of the defendants and of the defense witnesses. The word "testimony" is too charitable: it would really be more accurate to describe what went into the record on direct examination as the depositions of the defendants and their witnesses, because they all took with them to the witness stand reams of paper on which were written all the questions that they were to be asked and all the answers with which they were to respond. So far as these people are concerned, the court can give no more weight to their demeanor on the witness stand during direct examination than it could if they had never come into the courtroom.
In addition, the defense has introduced several bushels of affidavits. A word about those would not be out of place. It was obviously impossible for the Prosecution to call all of these affiants to the witness.
stand for cross-examination without prolonging the trial for another six months. We, therefore, attempted to choose a representative cross-section. Out of more than a thousand affiants we selected fourteen and requested that they appear in Court. Twelve of them did. The result was very edifying.
On the basis of their testimony and documents submitted during their examination, it appeared that one group of affiants might either have been assigned their own particular seats in the defendants' doctor else have been immediately arrested for the lesser charge of perjury. Colonel von Harling, the Ic or Intelligence Officer of Army Group F, followed the established line in swearing that no Allied commandos were ever executed in the Southeast. This declaration was made just before the Colonel was shown his own handwritten signature on orders which sent three named individuals, and an untold number of other commando prisoners, to the SD for "special treatment" that Harling himself in an unexpected burst of candor admitted it meant liquidation. General Winter was another such witness. Winter, though he succeeded Foertsch as Chief of Staff of Army Group E and later of Army Group F, did not know anything about reprisal ratios. He learned things after the war, of course, but to be perfectly honest, he had to tell this Court that from his recollection of his time in the Balkans he could not remember any such ratios. The Tribunal will remember his sputtering and bewildered explanations when he was shown the document containing notes on a speech that he himself delivered at a conference of chiefs of staff on 9 December 1943 in which a 50:1 hostage ratio for German dead and a 10:1 hostage ratio for German wounded was ordered. Later in that same conference Winter was quoted as having said "unfortunately it is not feasible to behead everybody".
It developed that another class of affiants had absolutely no knowledge whatever on which to base the statements made in their affidavits. General Dehner's chauffeur, was dusting off his desk one day and happened to notice a piece of paper.
He did not know who had written the paper, or what was on the paper, or where the paper had come from, but it was his impression that it had something to do with hostages. On the basis of this he made a statement in his affidavit that General Dehner frequently interceded with agencies which were not subordinate to him when the measures which these agencies took were too severe. Another witness, Hans von Selohow, made an affidavit which contained three paragraphs explaining that the Railroad Security Service was not subordinate to the LXIXth Reserve Corps. On the stand it developed that he did not even know what divisions were in the LXIXth Corps. So far as the Security Service was concerned, he did not know what their duties were, who their commanding officer was, to what extent the activities were coordinated with those of German troops in the area, or whether the Corps or the Railroad Security Service had the greater number of troops.
But there is still a further category of affidavits which differ from those which the Court struck only in that the affiants have not been formally indicted. When one of the defendants here was formerly a Corps commander at the time the Prosecution alleged certain outrages were committed by German troops of that particular Corps, it is a standard practice to produce the affidavits of several of the Corps commander's subordinates who have an obvious self-interest in having this Court find that these outrages were never committed. Still another class of affidavits is comprised of those which eulogize the character and deep religious instincts of the defendants. If any of the defendants ever helped a blind man across the street or petted a dog, the incident is probably described at length in some affidavit as an example of his sympathetic and benign attitude towards the Universe and as proof positive that he could never possibly have done anything unkind. It is true that a casual examination of many of these affidavits will reveal that the affiant has not seen the defendant for 10 or 15 years, but the assertions that the latter is by nature utterly incapable of doing anything that is not recommended by the Sermon on the Mount are apparently thought none the weaker for that.
In one case the affiant even dwelt at length on the fact that one of the defendants had a very moderate appetite because of some stomach ailment. The object of this was apparently to show that the defendant was not immortal.
The question of the credibility of a witness is usually arguable and even a lawyer making a wholesale onslaught on the character of the opposition's proof in the heat of advocacy ordinarily admits to himself that there might possibly exist some ground for disagreement on the matter. But when one witness after another gets on the stand and reads off a series of self-serving declarations from a prefabricated script only to burst like a paper bag on cross-examination and when this process continues almost without exception for seven months, we have no inner misgivings when we make the statement that ninetenths of what has gone into this record as so-called defense testimony, including the affidavits, is completely unworthy of credence.
So much for the general character and credibility of the evidence produced by the Defense. We turn now to the specific assertions and denials made by way of defense. Since most of the defendants have sought sanctuary in certain common arguments, repetition can be avoided if these are taken up generically before going into the specific use which each individual defendant tried to make of them. If a certain standard defense is invalid on general principles, it evidently is worthless in a particular application.
First, the defendants maintain that the documents do not mean what they say. Several ingenious schemes have been contrived to support this thesis. Among these is the "telegraphic style" argument. According to this, the documents must be viewed with caution and alarm because they contain numerous daily reports which were sent either by teletype or radio and therefore do not possess the same profusion of adjectives, modifying clauses and so forth in which we have luxuriated here for the past several months.
We can appreciate the adherence in which these defendants hold a telegraphic style. After having listened to them testify, it is obvious how painful it must be for them to read or hear anything that does not bristle with semi-colons, prepositional phrases, and complex-compound clauses inserted parenthetically into the middle of the sentence just to let the speaker get his breath before he makes his last 400-word sprint to the period. But the defendants profess that the brevity and curtness of these reports leads to ambiguous interpretation. Therefore, they have all testified that these reports are in large measure completely incomprehensible to them. The answer to this is that there were no complaints made about their clarity and meaning at the time they were sent and that they were clear enough to enable the defendants and their subordinates to operate the German Army.
But the telegraphic style argument, handy as it is, will not answer every purpose. When a daily report states that "50 men were standrechtlich erschossen" by German troops, there is not much doubt that fifty men were shot and that they were not shot in combat. When another report says "200 people transferred to Zazaviza concentration camp" by a certain army unit, we have no trouble comprehending what happened. Again, when a report reads "400 conscripted workers shipped off to Germany" by a certain Wehrmacht unit the meaning seems to be fairly clear. The defendants dispose of this by the simple device of bringing forth a new set of definitions. They assure us that we are confused if we interpret these messages as meaning what they say. The standrechtliches erschossen does not mean summarily shot, but shot after court martial. "Concentration camp" does not mean concentration camp, it means collecting camp."Conscripted workers" really means voluntary workers. We have not been furnished with a copy of the dictionary which the defendants use but it would be interesting to know, for example, assuming the term "concentration camp" really did mean something else, what term should be used if the word "concentration camp" were meant.
If the text of any given report is perfectly unambiguous and if even the lexicographical talent which has been displayed here cannot redefine it into incoherence, the defendants still have several shafts for their bow. Generally, the first one to be shot is the non-subordination argument. In the area of command of each corps and army were stationed certain troops or groups of armed men all of whom were assigned some part in carrying out the German occupation but who were not technically part of the Army. Among these organizations were the Security Police, the Einsatz Commandos and other elements of the SD, the indigenous troops belonging to the armies of the puppet states which the Germans had set up, as well as certain non-uniformed guerrilla groups who were technically not part of any army but who operated in close cooperation with the German forces. In one report after another the butcheries and plunders committed by these auxiliary organizations are described. It can be seen from many of these reports that these atrocities were committed while the group in question was in the course of carrying out a certain operation under the tactical command of or in conjunction with the Army.
In others, it is not specifically shown that at the time these crimes were committed, the organizations involved were acting with the Army in achieving a specific aim but it does appear that they were committing their atrocities within the area of a given Army Division and that they were sending constant reports to that Division on the nature and location of their activities. In both cases, however, the defendants disavow any responsibility for acts committed by those units.
But they go further than this in their disclaimer of responsibility. A third class of reports exists. In these, a given Army division merely reports to its corps headquarters that 50 hostages have been hanged in a given locality within the divisional area. Nothing more is said.
In every case where the daily report does not fix with certainty the company or battalion or regiment which pulled the trigger or tied the hangman's knot, the defendants have argued that these things were probably done by the SS or the SD or the Police or the Ustacha or the Kosta Pecanac Chetnicks or the Ezones or by some other unit which was either not subordinate to the Army or else was subordinate only for "tactical" purposes.
There are several answers to this argument. First, it is the Prosecution's contention that when the 173rd Infantry Reserve Division reports that 50 hostages were hanged and 50 shot on the same day within the divisional area and makes no mention of any of these other organizations in that connection, it is to be fairly informed that some unit of the 173rd Infantry Reserve Division did the hanging and the shooting. The defendants all deny that this was so. They say that the division reported everything that happened within its area, whether it was done by the division or not, and that unless the report puts the finger squarely on the second platoon of Company C of the 3rd Battalion of the First Regiment of that particular Army Division no responsibility can be fixed.
We submit that this is an affront to common sense. Time and again these defendants have testified to the way that indiscriminate mistreatment of the population and ill-advised executions, arrests and deportations by the police and the SD merely added to the Army's difficulties in keeping the population pacified and subdued. On the other hand they have testified one after the other that reprisal measures properly directed and carried out with sufficient force had a most salubrious and soothing effect on the natives.
Now, assuming what they have said to be true, does it make sense that an Army division, in reporting the execution of a reprisal measure within its area to corps headquarters, would simply report that 100 people had been hanged if it thought that corps headquarters would have any doubt as to who had done the hanging?
If this had been the case, the reports would have been less than meaningless. Corps headquarters would have had no way of knowing, when it received intelligence or the occurrence of one of these massacres, whether to expect calm and tranquility in that particular area for a while or whether to anticipate new outbreaks of rebellion, acts of sabotage and attacks on German troops and installations. Moreover, when a particular action was committed by any of these extraneous agencies, the Division's report precisely said just that. We contend that the only sensible interpretation to be placed on one of these reports made by an Army division in which the carrying out of a reprisal measure is described, is that the reprisal measure in question was carried out by that division, unless some other group is specifically named, and that in fact corps headquarters when it received such a report placed that identical interpretation on it.
But let us, as devil's advocate, assume for the moment that the chaotic system which the defendants claim was actually followed in making these reports and that corps headquarters or army headquarters, when it received the news that a few hundred hostages had been liquidated in the area of a certain division, had no way of knowing who had ordered and carried it out or what its consequences were likely to be. Are these defendants to be exonerated from responsibility for these outrages which were committed by their satellite organizations? When the relationship between these organizations and the Army is examined it will be seen that it was the Army authorities and no one else who were in a position to forbid, avoid and prevent those slaughters from being committed.
First, let us take the relationship between the Army and the Croatian Domobrans. Shortly after the Germans ijvaded Yugoslavia the so-called independent state of Croatia came into being. As one of the defense witnesses said, "Germany created the state of Croatia." It was and remained a puppet state of the expansive Third Reich. Any doubt as to this would be quickly quieted by the tone of unctuous servility in which the communications addressed by the Croatian government to the Army occupation authorities were couched.
The convenience of establishing such a state from the German standpoint is so obvious that it scarcely need be mentioned. By this simple device the German Army transformed itself from a conquering army stationed in occupied territory to an "allied" force invited to remain in the common struggle. As such, it could step out from under its obligations to the civilian population, As such, it could sponsor the formation of a Croatian army to be used for its own purposes while at the same time masking its own reeking activities behind the facade of Croatian marionettes.
The nature of this parasitic regime, made up of jackals and scavengers who would stop at nothing, not even the murder of thousands of their innocent countrymen, for the few bones which fell from the German stable is so evident that one wonders how anyone can stand in this courtroom, as at least six persons have already done and as three persons will certainly do during the next several days, and hold forth to this Tribunal about the COURT NO.
V, CASE NO. VII.
"independent Croatian Government."
But we are not so much interested in the general nature of the Croatian Government as we are in the relation which the Croatian troops bore to the German commanders. To begin with, the Croatian army was organized and trained by the Germans. Their officers and men, as the documents here show, were screened by the Germans so that all "unreliable elements" could be purged. Once they were trained, they were then equipped and armed by the Germans, and then sent to their permanent stations by the Germans. Now, since all of the "independent state of Croatia" was included in the area of one of the three German Army corps stationed there, and since each of those corps were divided into divisional areas, no matter where the Croat troops were stationed they were bound to be in the area of some German division. Within the divisional area, the Germans indicated where the Croat troops were to be stationed and what their tasks were to be, whether it was the guarding of a bridge by a Domobransunit or the patrolling of a railroad line by a detachment of Ustashi.
Then, from time to time, the Croat units would be notified that the German troops intended to carry out a certain tactical operation. Usually these operations consisted of "mopping up" or "combing out" certain areas in an effort to reduce the activities of the partisans -either by destroying their hospitals and bases of supply or by arresting all the able-bodied men in the locality. The Croat troops in such an operation were assigned a certain definite role to play in conjunction with the German troops. When the operation was finished, the German divisional commander would then instruct the Croat troops to take up their old stations and resume their railroad security activities or whatever else they had been doing.
This is what Rendulic, Dehner and Leyser mean when they say that the Croat troops were not "subordinate" or that they were only "tactically" subordinate to them. It is precisely what Lanz, Felmy and Speidel mean when they correspondingly deny responsibility for the excesses of Greek "volunteer" units. In both cases the evidence is Irrefutable that these sets of gangsters were, from start to finish, no more than the uniformed tools and hirelings of the German army. Dehner and Leyser repeatedly protest that they could not order a member of the Domobrans to be tried by a German court martial. In that they may be technically correct -but neither, for that matter, could they order a German soldier to be tried before a court-martial. Only a divisional commander could do that. But who is so naive as to believe that a divisional commander dictates to his superior at Corps headquarters? The record here shows that the power of the German corps commanders in Croatia was such that they could even remove the Croatian civil officials when it pleased them. It is utterly fantastic for them to say that they could take no measures to curb excesses committed by these Croatian janizaries.
We have singled out the relationship between the Domobrans, which was the regular army of the Croatian "independent state", merely as an illustration. What we have said about them applies with equal force to the Ustascha, the Croatian counterpart of the Waffen-SS. It applied with perhaps even more compelling force to the groups of Serbian non-uniformed irregulars -- the Kosta Pecanac, Danzic and even certain branches of the Mihailovic Chetniks -- who were armed and used by the German Army whenever it suited their convenience. It applies, in short, to all of the countries in Southeastern Europe in which the Germans set up puppet regimes and used indigenous troops to murder their compatriots.