The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  DR GÜNTER LOHSE

  He joined the German Foreign Office and the Nazi Party in the 1930s. He witnessed the consequences of Hitler’s chaotic method of government.

  RIVA LOSANSKAYA

  Born in 1918, she is one of only sixteen Jewish survivors from the massacres at the village of Butrimonys in Lithuania.

  MARIA MAUTH

  Born in 1924, she served in the Reich Labour Service during the war.

  WALTER MAUTH

  Born in 1923, he served as a lance corporal in a heavy machine gun company of the 30th Infantry Division. During 1943 and 1944 he participated in the German ‘scorched earth’ retreat.

  HUBERT MENZEL

  Born in 1908, he joined the German Army in 1927. From April to October 1941 he participated in the planning and then the direction of Operation Barbarossa as a major in the Operations Department of OKH (Army High Command). In November 1942 he was appointed Chief of Operations (Ia) of the 16th Panzer Division in Stalingrad. From 1943 to 1955 he was a POW in Russia.

  ANATOLY GRIGORIEVICH MERESHKO

  Born in 1922, he was a committed member of the Communist Party and as a young officer fought against the Germans’ Operation Blue and subsequently in the defence of Stalingrad. From then until the end of the war he was an officer ‘for special tasks’ in Chuikov’s Headquarters. After the war he rose to become Deputy Military Commander of the Warsaw Pact.

  ALEKSANDR ANDREEVICH MIKHAILOVSKI

  Born in 1921. During an anti-partisan sweep that encompassed their village of Maksimovka in Belorussia, he and his deaf and dumb brother were made to walk down a road that the Germans suspected was mined.

  STEPAN ANASTASEVICH MIKOYAN

  Born in 1921, he was the eldest son of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan. He grew up in the Kremlin compound, playing with Stalin’s own children, and went to flying school with Stalin’s son Vasilij. He served as a pilot during the war.

  ANNA MIREK

  Twenty-seven years old at the start of the war, she worked as a cook at Hans Frank’s estate at Krzeszowice outside Krakow.

  SUREN GAREGINOVICH MIRZOYAN

  Born in 1923, from May 1942 he served as a private in a reconnaissance patrol with the 33rd Guards Rifle Division in the Soviet 62nd Army. He fought in the Caucasus, the Kalach area and at Stalingrad, and ended the war in the Ukraine.

  GERHARD MÜNCH

  Born in 1915, in 1941 he was adjutant of the 194th Infantry Regiment with the 71st Infantry Division. In 1942 his was the first German battalion to reach the Volga in Stalingrad. He was flown out of the Stalingrad encirclement on 22 January 1943. After the war he became a general in the West German Army.

  NADEZHDA VASILIEVNA NEFYODOVA

  Born in 1927, she was fourteen years old when the Germans over-ran her village of Usyazha, 50 kilometres east of Minsk in Belorussia. She and her family were trapped between the Germans (who killed her brother) and the Soviet partisans (who killed her sister).

  VLADIMIR TIMOFEEVICH OGRYZKO

  Born in 1917, by 1939 he was a junior officer with the NKVD Moscow Division. During the Moscow panic of October 1941, he commanded a secret police unit that helped restore order. In the winter of 1941 he also served alongside the backmarker divisions on the Moscow front as part of the 1st NKVD Division.

  ROMUALD PILACZYNSKI

  Born in 1927 into a middle-class Polish family in Bydgoszcz, in what became part of Albert Forster’s domain after the Nazi redrawing of Polish boundaries. His family were reclassified as ‘third category’ Germans.

  OTTO PIRKHAM

  Austrian diplomat who witnessed the meeting of Hitler and the Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg on 12 February 1938 at the Berghof.

  NIKOLAY VASILIEVICH PONOMARIEV

  Born in 1916, he was a communications officer in the General Staff Headquarters before the war, becoming Stalin’s own personal telegraphist from July 1941 until the end of the war.

  ZINAIDA GRIGORIEVNA PYTKINA

  Born in 1921, she took part in the Stalingrad battle as a nurse with the 88th Tank Brigade. In 1943 she was selected to join SMERSH (‘Death to Spies’) as a lieutenant and counter-intelligence officer working alongside the Headquarters of the 54th Tank Brigade within the 3rd Tank Army.

  RÜDIGER VON REICHERT

  Born in 1917, he joined the Wehrmacht in 1936 and by 1941 was a battery commander in the 268th Infantry Division, 4th Army, Army Group Centre. By the end of the war he was a major on the General Staff. After the war he went on to become a general in the West German Army.

  WALTRAUD RESKI

  Born in 1934, she was eleven years old when the Red Army set fire to her home town of Demmin in East Germany in 1945. Her mother was repeatedly raped by Soviet soldiers.

  ANATOLY IVANOVICH REVA

  Born in 1935, he was six years old when the Germans occupied the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov. With his father dead and his mother in hospital he roamed the streets before being placed in an orphanage, where he nearly died of starvation.

  DR HERBERT RICHTER

  Born in 1899, he fought as a German soldier during World War I. In 1924 he joined the German Diplomatic Corps, and later served in Rome, Bombay and Colombo.

  DR JUTTA RÜDIGER

  From 1937 to 1945 she was Reich Leader of the League of German Girls (the BDM). As a child she witnessed the French occupation of the Ruhr.

  WALTER SCHAEFER-KEHNERT

  Born in 1918, he was an artillery officer with the 11th Panzer Division fighting in Kiev, Uman, Vyazma and Moscow. His unit was sent to France in May 1944.

  ALBERT SCHNEIDER

  Born in 1923, he was a mechanic with the 201st Assault Gun Battalion, fighting through Minsk, Borisov, Smolensk and Orsha to within 30 kilometres of Moscow. In 1942 he was transferred to the 101st Artillery Battalion and deployed near Stalingrad.

  MANFRED FREIHERR VON SCHRÖDER

  Born in 1914, he joined the Nazi Party in November 1933. In 1938 he entered the German Foreign Office. From 1937 to 1938 he was a member of the SS Cavalry Unit and, from May 1942 to August 1943, served in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.

  SUSI SEITZ

  Born in 1923, she was not quite fifteen when she stood cheering in the crowd that welcomed Hitler into the Austrian town of Linz in March 1938. She went on to become a leading member of the Austrian Hitler Youth.

  GEORGY VALERIEVICH SEMENYAK

  Born in 1921, he was a scout with the 204th Division within the 11th Mechanized Corps. He began the war in Belorussia and was taken prisoner by the Germans on 6 July 1941 near Minsk. He was one of the few Soviet prisoners captured so early in the war to survive German captivity. After the war, and throughout his working life, he suffered discrimination within the Soviet state because he had been taken prisoner.

  MELETI SEMENYUK

  Born in 1912, he lived in a small hamlet near Gorokhov in the Ukraine. During the war he joined the UPA (the Ukrainian Nationalist Partisans) fighting both the Germans and the Soviet partisans.

  VIERA SILKINAITE

  A native of Kaunas in Lithuania, at the age of sixteen she witnessed the murder of Lithuanian Jews in the ‘garage’ killing in Kaunas in the early days of the German occupation.

  FRIDOLIN VON SPAUN

  Born in 1900, he volunteered to fight in the right-wing Bavarian Freikorps Oberland after World War I and saw action with the Freikorps in Poland. After Hitler came to power he worked to promote Nazi propaganda in Germany.

  REINHARD SPITZY

  Born in Austria, he joined the SS and the staff of Joachim von Ribbentrop in the 1930s. During the war he served in German intelligence.

  OACHIM STEMPEL

  Born in 1920, in 1941 he was a lieutenant with the 108th Panzer Grenadier Regiment within the 14th Panzer Division. He was caught within the Stalingrad encirclement, where his own father (a general and a divisional commander) committed suicide. From 1943 to 1949 he was a POW in the Soviet Union.

  VIKTOR ADOLFOVICH STRAZDOVSKI

  Born in 1923,
he volunteered for the Red Army in 1941. As a private in the 52nd Infantry Regiment, 18th Division, 32nd Army, he fought at the Battle of Vyazma and subsequently at Stalingrad and Kursk.

  FYODOR DAVIDOVICH SVERDLOV

  Born in 1921, he commanded an infantry company with the 19th Infantry Brigade, 49th Army. In the winter of 1941 he and his men fought in the area of Kubinki during the defence of Moscow.

  ARNON TAMIR

  Born in 1917 in Stuttgart, he went on to be active in the Jewish Youth Movement. In 1938 he was one of a large number of Jews deported to Poland by the Nazis, but subsequently managed to escape to Palestine.

  WILHELM TER-NEDDEN

  Born in 1904, he joined the Nazi Party in 1937. From the summer of 1941 he was Deputy Head of Economic Staff East. He also worked in Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. During the German occupation of the Ukraine, he witnessed the acrimonious relationship between Rosenberg and Koch.

  HERMANN TESCHEMACHER

  Active in right-wing politics in the 1920s, he later joined the Nazi Party. During the war he fought on the Eastern Front.

  WOLFGANG TEUBERT

  Joined the Nazi Storm Troopers in the east of Germany during the late 1920s. During the war he served in the German Army on the Eastern Front.

  MIKHAIL IVANOVICH TIMOSHENKO

  Born in 1909, he took part in the Finnish war with the 44th Ukrainian Division. In June 1941 he and his NKVD comrades fruitlessly tried to resist the initial German assault on the Soviet border. Later in 1941 he was the political commissar of a partisan unit behind the German lines.

  WALTER TRAPHÖNER

  Born in 1908, he served as a private (subsequently lance corporal) with an SS cavalry regiment operating in the rear of Army Group Centre. He was wounded in December 1942 and sent back to Germany.

  IVAN STEPANOVICH TRESKOVSKI

  Born in 1928, he lived in Usyazha, 50 kilometres east of Minsk in Belorussia. Like his fellow villager, Nadezhda Vasilievna Nefyodova, he experienced the brutality of both the Germans and the Soviet partisans.

  PROFESSOR STANISLAW URBANCZYK

  An academic at the Jagellonian University, Krakow, he was imprisoned by the Nazis at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was released after fourteen months, at Christmas 1940.

  BORIS VLADIMIROVICH VITMAN

  Born in 1920, he served as an intelligence officer at the Headquarters of 6th Army on the south-western front. He fought in the ill-fated Kharkov advance of May 1942 and was taken prisoner by the Germans during the Barvenkovo encirclement.

  HELMUT WALZ

  Born in 1922, he was a private with the 305th Infantry Division and fought hand-to-hand with Red Army soldiers in Stalingrad in October 1942. He was severely wounded on 17 October and spent the rest of the war in hospital.

  SAMUEL WILLENBERG

  Born in 1923 into a Jewish family in Poland, in 1942 he was sent to the Nazi death camp at Treblinka. In 1943 he managed to escape and, after a series of adventures, eventually joined the Polish underground and fought against the Nazis.

  GABRIELE WINCKLER

  She was a secretary in Germany during the 1930s.

  PROFESSOR JOHANNES ZAHN

  Born in 1907, he gained a PhD in Law in 1929. From 1933 to 1934 he worked at the Central Association of German Banks and in 1935 became Managing Director of the German Institute of Banking. From 1939 to 1945 he served in the Wehrmacht; during this period he was also German administrator of English and American banks in Belgium.

  PETRAS ZELIONKA

  Born in 1917 into a poor Lithuanian peasant family, in 1941 he joined the 3rd/13th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion. As a ghetto guard he witnessed killings in the 7th Fort in Kaunas and later murdered victims himself in numerous other actions. In 1948 the Soviets sentenced him to twenty-five years in Siberia.

  EUGEN ZIELKE

  An ethnic German from Łódź in Poland whose father ran a food shop. In 1940, when he was in his early 20s, he benefited from trade with the Jews who were imprisoned in the Łódź ghetto.

  INDEX

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  Alliluyev, Kira 153–4

  Aly, Götz 135

  Amann, Max 34

  Anfilov, Professor Viktor 166, 179

  anti-Semitism

  in Austria 100–1

  and the extermination camps 325

  in Germany 17–20, 291–3

  Hitler’s views 21–2, 66, 69, 72, 291–2, 293, 294, 310, 337

  Kristallnacht 70–2, 292–3

  Nazi 24, 31–2, 44, 65–72, 291–6

  see also Jews

  Aplerbeck hospital 74–7

  Arlt, Dr Fritz 130, 134–6

  Auschwitz 19, 287, 291, 315, 324–5

  Austria, Anschluss (unification) with 90, 91, 96–102, 104

  Bamber, Rudi 66, 70–1, 292, 293

  Bazarnik, Zbigniew 134

  Bechler, Bernhard 159–61, 167, 276, 277, 278, 280

  Behnke, Carlheinz 229–30

  Belorussia

  Operation Bagration 339–44

  partisan war 221–4

  Below, Gunther von 254, 283

  Bełżec 315, 317, 322, 324

  Benda, Luise von 147

  Beria, Lavrenti 151, 176–80, 191, 192

  Berlin Wall 7

  Bernhardt, Gerda 74, 75

  Bernhardt, Manfred 74–5, 76, 77

  Berzina, Maya 190

  Bessel, Dr Richard 38, 40

  Biebow, Hans 138–40

  Bitzel, Uwe 76–7

  Blaskowitz, Colonel-General Johannes 116–17

  Bleeker-Kohlsaat, Charles 119–20

  Blomberg, General von 50–1, 55, 90, 92–6

  Bock, Field Marshal von 158

  Boehm-Tettelbach, Karl 51, 55–6, 68, 69, 92, 93, 94, 95, 108–9, 329,354–5

  and the formal German surrender 359

  and the plot to kill Hitler (1944) 331–2, 333–4

  Bormann, Martin 73, 207–9

  Bouhler, Philipp 72, 73, 74, 77, 295

  Brandt, Dr Karl 73–4

  Brauchitsch, Walter von 147, 160, 199, 202

  Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of 175–6, 179

  Bris, Aleksey 203–4, 209–10, 211, 219, 224–5

  Britain

  and Hitler’s foreign policy objectives 79–80, 83–6

  and the Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union 143–4, 145–6, 156, 163,171,198

  and the Munich Agreement 103

  and the outbreak of war 106, 107,108, 109

  Browning, Professor Christopher 17,132,139

  Brozek, Mieczyslaw 115–16

  Brückner, Wilhelm 73

  Brüning, Heinrich 37, 39, 81

  Buchner, Adolf 215–16

  Bukharin, N.I. 149

  Burkovski, Albert 250, 253–4, 262

  Butrimonys, killing of Jews in 298–303, 308–9

  Canaris, Admiral Wilhelm 107–8

  Chamberlain, Neville 103

  Chelmno gas vans 314–15, 317, 324

  Children’s ‘Euthanasia’ Programme 73–7

  Chuikov, Vasily 254–6, 257, 262, 263, 356

  Communists in Germany 16, 32, 37, 39, 42, 43

  interrogation and imprisonment 47–9

  and the Nazi rise to power 37, 39, 42, 43

  concentration camps 46, 47, 48–9, 115, 135–6

  Czechoslovakia, German invasion of 91, 102–6, 108

  Dachau 46, 47, 48, 49, 89

  Dalton, Hugh 171

  Darwinism, and Hitler 34–6, 73, 104, 108

  Demmin, Red Army rampage in 357–9

  democracy 10

  in Germany 16, 26, 33, 37

  and the Nazi Party 38–9

  Dietrich, Otto 52, 188–9

  Drexler, Anton 21, 23

  Eden, Anthony 84

  Edward VIII, King 92, 93


  Eggert, Paul 75–6

  Eichmann, Adolf 101, 294, 321, 337

  Eigi, Irma 120–2

  Einsatzgruppen 114, 161, 173–4

  killing of Jews in Lithuania 296–309

  Eisner, Kurt 16

  Engel, Major 116–17

  ethnic Germans

  and the Nazi administration of Poland 118–36, 137–8

  in the Sudetenland 102–3

  extermination camps 48–9, 324–5

  Auschwitz 19, 287, 291, 315, 324–5

  German people and knowledge of 336–8

  Treblinka 287–91, 324