The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  The next evening the Fliegendes Standgericht (Flying Court Martial) of Major Erwin Helm arrived in Karlstadt. These courts had been formed to enforce discipline in the face of Germany’s imminent defeat and had the legal powers of a formal court martial. The one headed by Major Helm was particularly notorious and referred to by locals as a ‘lynching unit’. Major Helm was well known for his brutality and sadism; he had been overheard saying to a seventeen-year-old boy, ‘Have you already chosen the twig you want to hang from?’ On another occasion he had said to his officers, ‘Look at this chap’s neck, it’s really tempting!’

  Major Helm and Mühl-Kühner decided to execute Karl Weiglein as an example to others. He was promptly fetched from the police station in Zellingen and the Flying Court Martial convened at midnight. Helm ordered one of his lieutenants, Engelbert Michalsky, to chair the proceedings. Two local farmers, Anton Seubert and Theodor Wittmann, were brought in as ‘assessors’. Walter Fernau, who by now was another of Helm’s lieutenants, was ordered to act as prosecutor: ‘Helm said, “You can take over the prosecution. It’s a very straightforward case. I’ll get the execution squad together.”’ He had written the death sentence before the trial even started. But then there was a hitch. The two local farmers, Seubert and Wittmann, refused to sentence Karl Weiglein to death.8 Helm solved the problem by dismissing them, later threatening them with a court martial themselves. Karl Weiglein was found guilty, and Walter Fernau knew that the death sentence was the only possible outcome: ‘Even if you now think I am a brutal dog,’ he says, ‘I really cannot say to you that at the time I thought that it was too harsh . . . The judicial authority decides that this is the case with a flying court martial, and I cannot then say, “Wouldn’t it be better to give him three or six months in prison?” That would almost have been like saying to the soldiers, “Now all of you here commit some sort of crime, come up before the Flying Court Martial . . . you will spend six months locked up and in that time the war will be over and the others will die and you won’t.” Do you understand it then? Even today some people, lots of people, will confirm that such situations demand harsh measures, even though it’s not to my taste. But I cannot make the laws.’ Crucially, Walter Fernau talks of a link between the horrors he had seen in the east and his own attitude to the work of the Flying Courts Martial. ‘I saw so many deaths of my own comrades in the war that you do get a rather thick skin as a result . . . Shooting people and seeing them fall too, that is terrible. But over time one becomes accustomed to it. If you are in Russia and see the Russians running about and coming towards you and then they come closer and then maybe they have attached their bayonets, well, then you shoot one after the other and are delighted when they drop. Dreadful! Can anyone understand that today, one being happy when another falls?’

  At 1.30 a.m. Karl Weiglein was taken out to the pear tree Helm had selected for the hanging. He was made to wear a sign around his neck which read: ‘Sentenced to death because of sabotage and destruction of fighting strength.’ The pear tree was only 5 metres from Weiglein’s home and he called out to his wife, ‘Oh Dora, Dora, they are hanging me!’ She opened the kitchen window and shouted at Helm and the others, ‘Leave my husband alone! He hasn’t done anything to you!’ Michalsky shouted back, ‘Shut up and close the window!’ Her husband was hanged in front of her by Helm with the assistance of his lance-corporal. Even Walter Fernau, hardened as he was by his experiences in the east, was upset by the circumstances of Karl Weiglein’s execution: ‘One can describe it as shame . . . It’s terrible for a woman like that to witness her own husband, to whom she has been married for maybe forty years or more, being hanged in front of their door.’ The body was left hanging at the tree for three days until Easter Sunday, guarded by two soldiers.

  After the war, and on reflection, Walter Fernau expressed his sorrow at what had happened: ‘I spoke about it in my last statement, that I was so terribly sorry, but in such an event where people are simply executed it really is too banal afterwards to say, “I am sorry” or “I regret it.” You can do that if you knock the mirror off a car; you can say, “I am sorry” then “What does it cost?” But not when a person is dead. And then I ask, what can be done at all? And that is the big question, which is still open today, what can I do?’

  Many of the perpetrators of this killing escaped conviction. Of those who were punished, Major Helm was given a life sentence by an East German court in 1953, but since the East German secret service, the Stasi, wanted him to work for them in West Germany, he was released after three years. Walter Fernau was sentenced to six years in prison for his part in the court martial, and served more than five.

  Such horrific tales of oppression in Germany are not uncommon in the final days of the war. In Penzberg, in the foothills of the German Alps, local inhabitants defended their coal mines against destruction from Hitler’s scorched earth policy. The US Army was only a day away, but a Nazi execution squad was dispatched from Munich and coldly shot the leaders of the opposition. They then drew up a list of those considered ‘politically unreliable’ and had them hanged.

  In the face of such terror the majority conformed. Johannes Zahn, for example, says, ‘I personally reproach Hitler greatly, after it was clear that the war could not be won, for not immediately saying, “OK, I give up, I will make peace, I will withdraw, I admit that I’m weaker.” He should have done this, but unfortunately he did not have the greatness of character.’ Men like Zahn were not the sort to resist, purely for pragmatic reasons: ‘When there is a clique like Stalin’s or Hitler’s, when they are in power, they have all the means at their disposal and are determined to use these means of power ruthlessly. Everyone says, “There’s no point. I won’t risk anything,” because anybody who risks anything will be killed. We saw that with the July affair. Even the people who were trained to kill and to exercise violence weren’t able to do it, so how could a harmless civilian sitting in his chocolate shop selling sweets, how can he fight against something like that?’ Zahn operated a simple policy of self-preservation: ‘Fight them? I wouldn’t have risked it. I put my tea-cosy over the telephone so as to survive these times. That’s what the majority decided, that was their plan: shut up and see that nothing happens to you.’ When, during an interview with one German who ‘went along’ with the regime, I questioned such sentiments and asked why there had been so much compliance, he angrily replied, with an element of justification, ‘It’s easy for you, isn’t it? You’ve never been tested.’

  In the last months of the war Karl Boehm-Tettelbach left Berlin and was ordered north to Neustadt-Flensberg. On the way he and his fellow officers stopped to meet Himmler. This was to be Boehm-Tettelbach’s last meeting with the SS chief and, despite the Reich crumbling around him, Himmler could scarcely have been more charming: ‘Himmler saw that I was really hungry and frozen and he wanted me to have tea and warm up a little bit, and then noticed that I was in my summer underwear, in just my short shirt, and he didn’t like that and he said: “Now look here, you are going to Flensberg. In Flensberg there is an SS supply store and there you get a shirt and underwear for colder days.” I went there when I arrived and with Himmler’s signature out of his notebook they gave me three shirts and three SS underwear shirts . . . There is still one shirt which my American daughter wears when it’s really very, very cold. That’s from Himmler.’

  Boehm-Tettelbach’s anecdote demonstrates how even in the last moments of the war, with the knowledge that he would be known to history as one of the creators of the Holocaust, Himmler was still able to project the image of a senior officer who had polite concern for the welfare of his fellow Germans.

  The leading Nazis thus held on to real power until the very end. Yet Hitler’s own physical condition deteriorated severely over the last two years of the war: his left arm shook as a result of the July 1944 attack, and he felt dizzy and sick for hours at a time. His personal physician, Dr Morrell, filled him full of quack remedies; Albert Speer, the Nazi Armaments Minister, had
the impression that Hitler was burning out. Despite all this, Hitler was still obeyed by his loyal entourage. In Hugh Trevor-Roper’s words, ‘Hitler still remained, in the universal chaos he had caused, the sole master whose orders were implicitly obeyed.’9

  On 16 April 1945 Stalin ordered the final assault on Berlin. He was careful to organize the attack so that no single general could snatch all the credit. Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Konev, the commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, were jointly charged with the task of conquering the capital of the Reich. ‘Stalin encouraged an intrigue – scheming,’ says Makhmud Gareev. ‘When they were drawing the demarcation line between the two fronts in Berlin, Stalin crossed this demarcation line out and said, “Whoever comes to Berlin first, well, let him take Berlin.” This created friction . . . You can only guess Stalin was doing it so that no one gets stuck up and thinks that he was the particular general who took Berlin . . . At the same time he had already begun to think what would happen after the war if Zhukov’s authority grew too big.’

  While Stalin was acting in a way that demonstrated his true character, so was Hitler. As his forces crumbled around him under the battering of attacks from both East and West, Hitler decided that the German people had demonstrated that they were unfit for his leadership. His vengeance would not be confined to Jews and other ‘sub-humans’ but would extend to all of Germany. In a Führer Order of 19 March he ordered the destruction inside Germany of anything ‘that the enemy could use for the continuation of the struggle’. This command, which has come to be known as the Nero Order (Nero-Befehl), called for the same scorched earth tactics to be used on German soil as had been practised in the retreat from Moscow – and for them to be used at a time when defeat was inevitable. Albert Speer, the Nazi Armaments Minister, managed to minimize the effect of the order by insisting that its implementation be coordinated through his ministry, but the wording of the Nero Order itself is unequivocal. Hitler summed up his feelings at a military situation conference on 18 April when he said, ‘If the German people lose the war, then they will have proved themselves unworthy of me.’10

  As Hitler sat in the bunker of the Reichschancellery and raged at the failure of the Germans to rise to the genius of their Führer, both Zhukov and Konev felt the consequences of Stalin’s imposition of a ‘race to Berlin’. Stalin now issued a map with a demarcation line through the city which left Konev 100 metres west of the Reichstag, the parliament building, which was the trophy that both Marshals sought. The armies of Zhukov and Konev, already engaged in fierce fighting street by street with the Germans, became entangled with each other at the imprecise boundaries between their sectors. Chuikov’s 8th Guards from Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front ran into Luchinskii’s infantry from Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front.

  Anatoly Mereshko served with Chuikov in the battle for Berlin as part of Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, and witnessed first-hand the desperate rivalry that flourished after Stalin had set his generals at each other’s throats: ‘Once Chuikov sent me to a particular suburb [of Berlin] to find out whose tanks were there. I got into my car with machine gunners, rode up there and talked to the people in the tanks. One said, “I am from the Belorussian Front,” another “I am from the Ukrainian front.” “Who came here first?” I asked. “I don’t know,” they replied. I asked the civilians, “Whose tanks got here first?” They just said, “Russian tanks.” It was difficult enough for a military man to tell the difference between the tanks. So when I came back I reported that Zhukov’s tanks got there first and Konev’s tanks came later. So the celebration fireworks in Moscow were in his name . . . At that time it was a custom to arrange fireworks in Moscow with the announcement saying that “in honour of such-and-such army capturing this suburb of Berlin there had to be fireworks”.’ Only on 28 April did Stalin finally authorize a Stavka directive that confirmed Zhukov could take the centre of Berlin himself.

  On 30 April 1945, just before 3.30 p.m., as Soviet soldiers approached the Reichstag, Hitler killed himself. Only with his death did his power over the Nazi Party come to an end. Ultimately, Hitler’s own hatred had turned on the Germans he ruled and, like a fire, had ended by consuming itself. Born of crisis and hatred they had died in crisis and hatred.

  As Hitler shot himself in his bunker on 30 April, the Red Army celebrated – including units stationed in the east German town of Demmin. The victory in Berlin had not satisfied the Soviet soldiers’ desire for revenge, and they wanted every German to pay for the sins of the Nazis. One of the innocent Germans who suffered their vengeance was Waltraud Reski, then an eleven-year-old Demmin schoolgirl. As Berlin fell, she and her family heard this terrible news: ‘Demmin was to burn for three days . . . And the women were fair game for three days too – free to be abused.’ Waltraud’s own mother was raped many times by Soviet soldiers. ‘All the women were disguised, but you can always see whether a woman has a good figure, and somehow they found my mother again and again and treated her terribly. And she never really recovered . . . It’s impossible to imagine what it is like to be raped 10 or 20 times a day, so that one’s hardly human any more . . . Both my sister, who is four years younger than me, and I, tried to shield our mother and screamed . . . This feeling of helplessness and cruelty – even today I am unable to find words for it.’

  Such was the desperation of the citizens of Demmin that hundreds ran down to the rivers that surround the town. ‘I kept seeing women holding children by the hand. And they were running down towards the water . . . and many had tied themselves together and I was wondering: why are they doing that? . . . I could hear it – there is a sort of splashing sound when a person jumps into the water – and so I kept asking: “Why are they jumping into the water?” And my grandmother said: “They are so unhappy, they want to take their own lives.” . . . And the sight of those who had gone into the water the previous night, those terrible sights, those bodies, reddish-blue and swollen. I didn’t often look because I didn’t want it to be true.’ Her own mother, distraught at having just been raped once more, grabbed Waltraud and her sister and ran towards the river. ‘And my grandmother kept saying, “Please don’t do this! What are you doing? What am I supposed to tell your husband when he comes back from the war and you’ve gone?” And somehow she then became calmer.’

  Several thousand townspeople committed suicide in Demmin during the Red Army’s rampage. The exact number of Germans raped or killed in acts of revenge in the final months of the war, and in its immediate aftermath, will never be known. It is a figure certainly – at least – in the hundreds of thousands. Although some Soviet soldiers were later court-martialled for a small proportion of these offences, there is evidence that those in authority were capable of turning a blind eye to their actions. When Stalin was told how some Red Army soldiers were treating German refugees, he is reported to have said: ‘We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have some initiative.’11

  The vengeance exacted by the Red Army on the people of Demmin, perpetrated in the last hours of the war, is an appalling – if not unexpected – end for a war that had begun nearly four years before with the unleashing of such terrible hatred by the Nazis on the Soviet Union. Now this hatred was rebounding on Germany. ‘This must never happen again,’ says Waltraud Reski. ‘Not just the fighting against each other, but also this idea of the enemy not being human.’

  It was the Nazis who had brought this destruction upon Germany. In their twelve-year reign they had demonstrated just what human beings can do if they take the brute beasts of the animal kingdom as their role models and are inspired by words like, ‘Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally’.12 For all time the story of the Nazis will act as a terrible warning.

  Shortly after Hitler’s death, at the formal German surrender, Karl Boehm-Tettelbach observed the signing of the document that meant that Germany had lost her second world war in less than thirty years. These were the thoughts that went through his mind: ‘I had to raise the question, “Was it worth it, to start a war with all these l
osses on all sides; the Russian side, the German side, the American and English and French?” . . . I said to myself, “You’ve got the wrong profession. From now on, think of something else. And don’t think of being a soldier again.”’

  After the war Karl Boehm-Tettelbach ran the Nuremberg office of the American airline Pan Am.

  A Freikorps detachment marches into Munich in 1919. Even though the Nazi Party was not yet in existence, many wear swastikas on their arms – a traditional right-wing emblem that pre-dated the Nazis.

  A clear illustration of the split in German politics in the early 1930s with swastika banners flying from the same block of flats as the Communists’ hammer and sickle. The only policy both Communists and Nazis had in common was their commitment to end democracy in Germany.

  A formal portrait of Hitler by Heinrich Hoffmann from the mid-1920s. Many supporters remarked on the power of Hitler’s stare, a trick he attempts to pull on the camera here.

  Hitler and President Hindenburg shortly after Hitler became Chancellor. A rare picture of Hitler smiling, but then, unlike Hindenburg, he had a lot to smile about.