29Quoted in Mulligan, p.143
CHAPTER SEVEN
1Overy, p.160
2Quoted in Cooper, The German Army, 1933–1945, p.443
3Keegan, John (ed.), The Times Atlas of the Second World War (Times Books, 1989), p.104
4Warlimont, Gen. Walter, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 1939–45 (Presido Press, 1964; first published Bernard & Graege Verlag, 1962), pp.303–6
5Statistics quoted in Beevor, Antony, Stalingrad (Viking Press, 1998), p.415
CHAPTER EIGHT
1Klee, Ernst, Dressen, Willi, and Riess, Volker, Those Were The Days (Hamish Hamilton, 1991; first published by S.Fischer Verlag GmbH 1988), p.293
2Burrin, Philipp, Hitler and the Jews (Edward Arnold, 1994), p.38
3Noakes and Pridham, Vol.3, p.1200
4Ibid., p.1075
5Noakes and Pridham, Vol.3, p.1091
6Klee, Dressen and Riess, p.27
7Ibid., p.28
8Ibid., p.31
9Ibid., p.90
10Ibid., p.90
11Ibid., p.96
12Ibid., p.51
13Quoted in Aly, Goetz, ‘Jewish Resettlement’, in Herbert (ed.), Extermination Policies, p. 71.
14Quoted in Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939 – March 1942 (William Heinemann 2004), p. 318.
15From Burmeister’s testimony of 24 January 1961, Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg, 303 AR-Z 69/59, p.3.
16Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944 (Phoenix Press 2000)
17Quoted in Longerich, Peter, The Unwritten Order (Tempus 2001), p.78
18Weinberg, Gerhard, ‘The Allies and the Holocaust’, in Neufeld, Michael J., and Berenbaum, Michael (eds.), Allies and the Holocaust in the Bombing of Auschwitz (St Martin’s Press, New York 2000), p.20
19Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Vol.3, p.1126.
20Quoted in Longerich, Unwritten, p. 92.
CHAPTER NINE
1Kershaw, Ian, The Hitler Myth (Oxford University Press, 1989), p.218
2Kershaw, Ian, The Persecution of the Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich (Yearbook of Leo Baeck Institute 1981, Vol.26), p.284
3Kershaw, Ian, The Nazi Dictatorship, p.177
4Quoted in Adair, Paul, Hitler’s Greatest Defeat (Arms and Armour Press, 1994), p.66
5General der Infanterie Hans Jordan, quoted in Ziemke, Earl, Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East (US Army Historical Series, Office of the Chief of Military History, Washington DC, 1987), p.316
6Adair, p.117
7This file was originally selected for us by Professor Gellately and then the research was completed by BBC Assistant Producer Detlef Siebert
8Walter Fernau still disputes the assessors’ version of what they said happened inside the courtroom. It was, after all, the assessors’ evidence that helped convict him for participating in the court martial at his own trial after the war
9Trevor-Roper, Hugh, The Last Days of Hitler (Macmillan, 1947)
10Hauner, Milan, Hilter – A Chronology of His Life and Time (Macmillan Press, 1983)
11Quoted in Overy, p. 261
12Noakes and Pridham, Vol.3, p.743
NOTES ON EYEWITNESSES
KIRA PAVLOVNA ALLILUYEVA-POLITKOVSKAYA
Born in 1922, she was Stalin’s niece, the daughter of Pavel Alliluyev, who was the brother of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. After the suspected poisoning of her father in the Kremlin before the war, she and her mother were later arrested and she spent five and a half years in forced exile.
DR FRITZ ARLT
Joined the Hitler Youth in 1929 at the age of seventeen, and became a Nazi Storm Trooper in 1932. He gained a PhD in 1936. Between 1939 and 1940 he was head of the Department for Population Affairs and Welfare at the Internal Affairs Office of the Government General. In 1940 he became head of the Reich office for the Consolidation of German Nationhood in charge of the administration of the resettlement policy. In 1943 he transferred to the Waffen-SS.
RUDI BAMBER
Born into a Jewish family in Nuremberg in 1920, he was educated in a mixed school until 1936. In 1933 his parents became the caretakers of the B’nai Brith Lodge premises in Nuremberg; from 1935 they ran a Jewish café and guest house in the city. His father, who had won the Iron Cross during World War I, was murdered by Storm Troopers on Kristallnacht. In July 1939 Rudi Bamber managed to escape from Germany.
ZBIGNIEW BAZARNIK
Aged fourteen at the start of the war, he worked as a handyman and assistant electrician at Hans Frank’s estate at Krzeszowice outside Krakow from May 1941.
BERNHARD BECHLER
Born in 1911, between autumn 1940 and spring 1942 he was ADC to General Eugen Müller (General for ‘special duties’) who was in charge of the drafting and interpretation of the infamous Commissar Order. From March 1942 he was a captain in the 3rd Infantry Division within the 6th Army. He was captured at Stalingrad on 28 January 1943.
CARLHEINZ BEHNKE
Born in 1922, he joined the Hitler Youth in 1933 and volunteered for the Waffen SS in 1940. He fought from the beginning of the Barbarossa campaign, first as a private in Artillery Regiment 5 of the SS-Panzer Division Wiking and subsequently as a junior officer in an SS Police Grenadier Division.
GÜNTHER VON BELOW
Born in 1905, he entered the Reichswehr in 1925. He was Quartermaster of 4 Corps in the French campaign and subsequently a senior officer within the 6th Army at Stalingrad. From 1943 to 1955 he was a Soviet POW.
GERDA BERNHARDT
The sister of Manfred Bernhardt, a mentally disabled boy murdered at Aplerbeck psychiatric hospital in Dortmund during the Nazi’s Children’s ‘Euthanasia’ Programme. Only in 1989 did the whole truth about the killings at Aplerbeck become known.
MAYA IANOVNA BERZINA
Born in 1910. Her father was a close collaborator of Lenin’s and one of his first ambassadors. In 1938 her father was shot dead in the purges because he was a ‘suspect’ Lithuanian. She experienced the panic in Moscow in October 1941, and with her husband and young child fled by boat from Moscow’s southern port.
CHARLES BLEEKER-KOHLSAAT
Born in 1928 into a wealthy ethnic German family in Posen, in a part of Poland that had been German before World War I. He later became a member of the Hitler Youth and witnessed the resettlement of the incoming ethnic Germans.
KARL BOEHM-TETTELBACH
Born in 1910, he joined the Luftwaffe before the Nazis came to power and trained secretly as a pilot in Russia. He was adjutant to Field-Marshal von Blomberg during the Fritsch/Blomberg crisis of 1938. During the war he served at the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia, the Wolf’s Lair; he was present in the compound at the time of the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler.
ALEKSEY BRIS
Born in 1922 in the Ukraine. He worked as an interpreter for the Germans in Gorokhov during their occupation of the Ukraine. In 1942, after witnessing the mistreatment of his fellow countrymen at the hands of the Germans, he joined the UPA – the Ukrainian Nationalist Partisans.
PROFESSOR MIECZYSLAW BROZEK
As a young assistant professor in classical philology at the Jagellonian University in Krakow, he was arrested in November 1939 along with other academics as part of the Nazi plan to deprive Poland of intelligent people. He was imprisoned in various concentration camps, including Dachau. He and the surviving professors were released as the result of international pressure at the end of 1940.
FYODOR VASILIEVICH BUBENCHIKOV
Born in 1916, he first saw action in the war as a commander of a penal battalion at the Battle of Kursk. He subsequently participated in Operation Bagration and was wounded at Danzig in early 1945.
ADOLF BUCHNER
Born in 1923 in Munich, he later trained in agriculture at Marktoberdorf. He was arrested in 1942 after being denounced for listening to foreign broadcasts. In February 1944 he was called into the SS-P
ionierbataillon Dresden for ‘probation at the front’. He participated in ‘cleansing’ villages near Leningrad.
ALBERT LVOVICH BURKOVSKI
Born in 1928 in Stalingrad, when the fighting started he was left alone in the city after his grandmother had been killed. He was adopted by the Soviet 13th Radimeev Division and personally killed Germans at close range on the Mamaev Kurgan.
PAUL EGGERT
Coming as he did from a broken home, Paul Eggert was forcibly sterilized by the Nazis when he was eleven. He later spent three months in the children’s ward of Aplerbeck psychiatric hospital where he witnessed the ‘disappearance’ of many of the children.
IRMA EIGI
An ethnic German from Estonia, she (at the age of seventeen) and her family arrived in the Warthegau in late 1939 as part of the first group of Baltic Germans to be resettled in ‘Germany’ under the terms of the secret protocol to the Nazi–Soviet Pact.
JOSEF FELDER
Born in 1900, he was a Social Democrat MP by the time Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. After the Nazis came to power he was arrested and sent to Dachau. Released after eighteen months in the camp, he had to remove himself from politics for the duration of the Nazi rule of Germany.
WALTER FERNAU
Born in 1920 in Melsungen. As a member of the 14 Panzerjäger-Kompanie of his regiment, he took part in Operation Barbarossa and was wounded during the retreat from Moscow. He became a lieutenant in 1944, and in the spring of 1945 he joined Major Helm’s unit which was charged with assembling scattered soldiers and later with ‘Flying Courts Martial’. He became Helm’s adjutant and was appointed NSFO (National Socialist Guidance Officer). In many of the Flying Courts Martial he acted as prosecutor.
HEINZ FIEDLER
Born in 1922, he was drafted into the Reiter-Regiment 10 in Torgau and trained as a radio operator. In the summer of 1944 he fought against the Red Army during their Bagration offensive and escaped from the fortified place of Bobruisk.
ESTERA FRENKIEL
Born into a Jewish family in Łódź she, along with other Lodz Jews, was forced by the Nazis to move into the designated ‘ghetto’ area of the city in the spring of 1940. She managed to get a job as a secretary working in the ghetto administration and was thus able to meet Hans Biebow, the Nazi who was the ghetto manager. When the ghetto was closed she and her mother were transported to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
VENIAMIN POLIKARPOVICH FYODOROV
Born in 1924, he served as a private with the 77th Guards Infantry Regiment of the Red Army during Operation Bagration.
MARK LAZAREVICH GALLAY
Born in 1914, from 1936 he worked as a Soviet test pilot at the Central Aerodynamic Institute. During the late 1930s he witnessed the effect of the purges on Soviet military aviation.
MAKHMUD AKHMEDOVICH GAREEV
Born in 1923 of Tatar nationality, he served more than fifty years in the Red Army, finishing his service as Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces. In 1942 he was a captain, commanding the 3rd Battalion of the 120 Infantry Brigade, and by 1944 he was a major, the Operations Officer in the Headquarters of 45 Infantry Corps.
INNA VLADIMIROVNA GAVRILCHENKO
Born in 1926, she lived through the German occupation of Kharkov, witnessing her own father’s death from starvation in May 1942.
IVAN IVANOVICH GOLOKOLENKO
Born in 1921, he volunteered to fight in the war in June 1941. In the autumn of 1942, as a lieutenant in the 19th Tank Brigade of the 26th Tank Corps, he participated in the Soviet Operation Uranus.
JUOZAS GRAMAUSKAS
Born in 1920, he lived in the village of Butrimonys in Lithuania. In September 1941 he witnessed the massacre of women and children by units of the Lithuanian Army acting on German orders.
PETER VON DER GROEBEN
Born in 1903, he was a senior German military officer during the war. In 1943–4 he was Chief of Operations of Army Group Centre, and he finished the conflict as Major General of the 3rd Cavalry Division.
ANATOLY MARKOVICH GUREVICH
Born in 1916, he was Head of Soviet Military Counter-intelligence in France and Belgium during World War II. During 1940 he learnt of the German intention to invade the Soviet Union and passed on the information to Moscow. At the end of 1942 he was arrested by the Gestapo. After the war he was accused by the NKVD and imprisoned for twelve years. He was ‘rehabilitated’ in 1991.
BRUNO HÄHNEL
Born in 1911, he joined the youth wing of the Storm Troopers in 1927 before working as a regional leader of the Hitler Youth in Westphalia until 1945.
HANS VON HERWARTH
Born in 1904, he joined the German diplomatic corps in 1929. From 1931 to 1939 he worked in the German embassy in Moscow and witnessed the signing of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. From 1939 to 1945 he served in the Wehrmacht.
GERHARD HINDENLANG
Born in 1916, he began the Barbarossa campaign as a lieutenant with the 71st Infantry Division. By January 1943 he was a battalion commander at Stalingrad. From 1943 to 1950 he was a prisoner of war. He is a recipient of the German Cross in Gold, one of the highest awards in the German Army.
WOLFGANG HORN
Born in 1920, he was a junior NCO with the 10th Panzer Division, commanding a six-man gun crew. He took part in Army Group Centre’s advance to Moscow and his unit reached to within 30 kilometres of the Russian capital.
FRANZ JAGEMANN
Born in 1917 into a German family (but with a Polish father). He served as a ‘supply translator’ from July to October 1940 in the Warthegau.
ANNA JEZIORKOWSKA
Born in 1929 into a Polish family in Posen, she and her family were brutally evicted from their flat in November 1939 and transported in animal freight wagons to the General Government.
TAMARA BATYRBEKOVNA KALMYKOVA
Born in 1925, she participated in the defence of Stalingrad as a communications officer with the Soviet 64th Army and was wounded in November 1942.
WALTER KAMMERLING
Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1923; as a fifteen-year-old he witnessed the Anschluss and the mistreatment of Jews on the streets of Vienna. He managed to leave Austria in October 1938.
VLADIMIR KRISTAPOVICH KANTOVSKI
Born in 1923, he was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in 1941 for distributing leaflets protesting at the arrest of one of his schoolteachers. In 1942 he volunteered for a penal battalion and served in the 54th Penal Company. He was severely wounded during his first attack. In 1944 he was arrested again and sentenced to six more years in the camps.
JOHANN-ADOLF GRAF VON KIELMANSEGG
Born in 1906, he joined the German Army in 1926. In 1939 he became a member of the General Staff.
EMIL KLEIN
Born in 1905, he participated in the march through Munich during the Beer Hall Putsch and was later decorated with the Nazi ‘blood order’. He joined the Storm Troopers in the early 1920s and became a Nazi propaganda speaker after 1925.
ERNA KRANZ
Born into a middle class Bavarian family, as a teenager she participated in the Night of the Amazons Pageant in Munich in 1938.
MARIA THERESIA KRAUS
Born in 1920, she is a former neighbour of Ilse Sonja Totzke who died in a Nazi concentration camp after being the victim of denunciations. One of the denunciations attacking Miss Totzke (in the Würzburg archives) is signed by Resi Kraus.
VALENTINA DMITRIEVNA KRUTOVA
Born in 1931, she was eleven years old when the Germans advanced on Stalingrad. Trapped within the German lines she, her younger sister and elder brother were lucky to survive after the death of their grandmother.
EVDOKIYA FYODOROVNA KUVAKOVA
Born in 1939, she was just four years old when the NKVD deported her and her family to Siberia as part of the punishment relocation of the Kalmyks.
JACQUES LEROY
Born in 1924 in the French-speaking part of Belgium, he joined the Waffen SS after the fall of France
. He rejoined his unit after losing an arm and an eye and was decorated with the Knight’s Cross on 20 April 1945 for his bravery in the defence of Nazi Germany.
EUGENE LEVINÉ
Born in 1916, he is the son of the Jewish Räterepublik politician Eugene Leviné who was executed in 1919. He later joined the German Communist Party and escaped from Germany in 1933.
BERND LINN
As a boy, growing up in Bavaria in the 1920s, he witnessed the arrival of the so-called ‘eastern Jews’. He later joined the Waffen SS and fought on the Eastern Front during the war.
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 37