A confrontation broke out in the cells between Guderian, Ernst Rode, and Bach-Zelewski. The interrogators asked Rode for his version of the events. According to Rode, the order was distributed through OKH to 9th Army and through Himmler on behalf of the SS-Police. The actual route was from Guderian to General Vormann to Bach-Zelewski. Rode stated that a conference had taken place between Hitler and Guderian, which preceded the destruction order. Guderian offered Bach-Zelewski siege artillery both to defeat the Polish resistance and to destroy the city. Bach-Zelewski had asked Guderian if the order could be rescinded but was told it was a direct Hitler order. Thus Bach-Zelewski had tried to persuade General Bor, commander of the Polish resistance, to prevent this from happening by surrendering under the Geneva Convention. Rode contended that this operation had also fallen under the authority of the army because Bach-Zelewski’s commendation for the Knight’s Cross came from General Vormann. Guderian would meet Bach-Zelewski only with Major-General Wenck as a witness while Bach-Zelewski in turn took Rode. The interrogators asked why Bandenbekämpfung had been practiced in the operational sector, and Rode explained that the fighting had broken out behind the German lines and only later became part of the “operational area” (Operationsgebiet).65 This appeared to be regarded as convincing testimony from an objective and professional senior police officer.
On August 9, 1946, Ernst Rode was interrogated regarding the operational circumstances for the Warsaw uprising. Rode gave an explanation that wrapped the SS command system under the Wehrmacht and the army. He told his interrogators that Guderian and Bach-Zelewski took witnesses to their meetings, which is why he was able to testify authoritatively. The combating of the partisans was supposed to be Himmler’s responsibility. Rode placed Guderian in overall command, with Himmler commanding Dirlewanger and Bach-Zelewski under the dual commands of the SS and the army. Rode said Bach-Zelewski had tried to prevent the destruction of Warsaw but implied that Guderian refused to intervene to prevent it. He said the army was always in command and this was proved in the issue of the highest medals. Rode said Bach-Zelewski reported directly to Hitler for resources and decisions. The atrocities committed by Dirlewanger’s and Kaminski’s troops were not sanctioned by Bach-Zelewski. Later, Bach-Zelewski summarily executed Kaminski and had Dirlewanger and his troops removed.66
On August 14, 1946, Bach-Zelewski stated that the Polish uprising initially attacked the local German garrison. Then Himmler intervened and sent Reinefarth to quell the uprising although the German 9th Army under Vormann was in control of Warsaw. Bach-Zelewski insisted that his only conferences with Guderian were when Rode was present. Guderian had offered him heavy artillery to destroy the city. Bach-Zelewski contended that he had tried to change Guderian’s mind in regard to the reduction of Warsaw, but the latter reacted very coolly and said it was a Hitler order. Bach-Zelewski insisted that Guderian fully appreciated Hitler’s destruction order in detail. He continued by stating that the destruction order was already in progress on his arrival in the city. Guderian, Bach-Zelewski alleged, had informed Vormann and Stahl of the destruction order and therefore the army was responsible. On September 22, Bach-Zelewski maintained that he knew everything in great detail but was responsible for nothing. During this interrogation, he explained how a large-caliber railway mortar and one hundred flamethrowers were used to suppress the uprising. Then, two days later, he alleged that Himmler was very taken with Guderian and they formed a strong working relationship; not unlike Bach-Zelewski and Himmler, it might be noted. On October 5, 1946, Bach-Zelewski was again questioned over the army’s responsibility for the destruction of Warsaw. Bach-Zelewski alleged that Vormann had not been forceful enough to clarify the chains of command or to control the flow of orders. He continued that this weakness made him directly responsible for the deaths. For this reason, the first fourteen days of German counteractions were the responsibility of Vormann and Stahl. Bach-Zelewski then added that the Warsaw Shield had been granted to the men by Hitler but he did not believe they were worthy of it.67
When Nikolaus von Vormann gave evidence on September 21, 1946, he began by stating his command period for the 9th Army: June 25 to September 30, 1944. This confirmed that he was the senior army commander. He then stated that political control originated with the General Government. Vormann stated that the army came under SS control and that the roles were only reversed in terms of military operations. He stated that Kaminski was a disaster for the operations and wanted him removed. Guderian, he alleged, promised good troops but sent a rabble. Vormann added that Bach-Zelewski had received elements of an armored division under his central command. Troops inside the city were under Stahel’s command while troops outside were under Bach-Zelewski, over whom he had no control.68 On October 2, 1946, Vormann alleged that he complained of the atrocities to Army Group Centre and that it was he who had Kaminski removed from Warsaw. He stated that Bach-Zelewski was directly subordinate to Himmler, which was why the men received the Bandenkampfabzeichen, distributed by Bach-Zelewski, instead of the Iron Cross. He was asked the direct question, “In your position as Operational Commander in Chief were you authorized to give orders to [Bach-Zelewski]?” Vormann replied that if Reinefarth and Bach-Zelewski had not complied with his requests, he could overrule them, although he confirmed they were not under his command.
Heinz Reinefarth was questioned on September 19 and 20, 1946. He had arrived in Warsaw on August 5 or 6, 1944, reporting to Vormann on his arrival. He was given command of one army battalion and one police battalion. Reinefarth confirmed that Bach-Zelewski told him of Hitler’s order to destroy the city. Stahel had set up a combat headquarters in Warsaw that was already functioning. He then met Kaminski who was in the uniform of an SS-Brigadeführer; his men were in German army uniforms. According to Reinefarth, Vormann told him that he had given Kaminski the authority to loot Warsaw, which Reinefarth opposed. But Vormann said this was an inducement to fight, as he was well aware of Kaminski’s behavior. Reinefarth firmly stated that Kaminski came under Vormann’s command. Bach-Zelewski had informed Reinefarth of the women and civilians shot and burned. Kaminski was under the command of Rohr, who wanted rid of him because of the behavior of his troops, including rape and murder. Rohr had lost control of Kaminski and his men, who were regularly found inebriated and refused orders. For this reason, Bach-Zelewski decided to remove Kaminski through subterfuge, having him arrested and then executed. Reinefarth finally stated that Bach-Zelewski all along wanted to settle with the Poles through political rather than armed means. But Bach-Zelewski was under Vormann’s command and this constrained his movements.
The end of the Warsaw interrogations and the International Military Tribunal did not end the Warsaw debacle. A most unusual situation arose when Bach-Zelewski was sent, under American immunity but with Polish army guards, to give evidence in a trial of war criminals in Warsaw. Having been responsible for the destruction of Warsaw and the deaths of many Poles, this was indeed ironic. He traveled on February 14, 1947, and remained in Warsaw for four weeks. He provided a report on his return. On arrival in Warsaw, he was taken to the large collection prison of Mokotow, whose inmates included both Poles and Germans. The defendants included Dr. Fischer, Warsaw governor; Otto Meisinger, commander of the Warsaw security police; and Philip Bouhler, who had been involved in the euthanasia program. He gave little evidence in regard to the destruction of Warsaw. A command chart was written down by Bach-Zelewski (refer to Diagram V) and offered into the proceedings. It was intended to portray a confusion of authorities in order to disguise his authority. It appeared to work. True to their word, the Poles returned Bach-Zelewski to the Americans. Thus the destroyer of Warsaw had been protected from a Polish request for extradition. One can only admire the good grace of the Polish people to have suffered such an inequitable situation; it was just another of the many injustices never healed at Nuremberg. Following his evidence, the U.S. ambassador Murphy was passed the testimony on March 3, 1947. A clue to the treatment of the Poles can be
found in this testimony:
Since there was no supply department attached to my staff and I had no supply organizations at my disposal, I had to hand over control to the civil administration but the question of efficiency was not affected…. Finally I state that hundreds of thousands of civilians and tens of thousands of soldiers of Polish nationality owe their lives due to my sense of responsibility alone. For this, my humane victory over crime, Himmler gave me the reward in the form of a communication by a notary, that my brother Victor had died insane in the Boldeschwing Institution, near Bielefeld.69
The subject of Warsaw was again aired, albeit briefly, in the “Hostages” trial, case seven in the military tribunals at Nuremberg. This was prosecuted by the U.S. Army against German officers involved in antipartisan warfare principally in Yugoslavia. It was a strange case because the Yugoslavs had their own war crimes process, while the Americans imprisoned all the leading commanders of the Wehrmacht but had not elected to extradite them. The trial did not attempt to distinguish between antipartisan warfare, Bandenbekämpfung, or crimes committed by the Nazis in the name of security. It was another attempt by Taylor to bury the German army in further shame. Bach-Zelewski again appeared as Taylor’s expert witness. To parry his testimony, the defendants attempted to raise the questions of Warsaw in the court proceedings. By this time, Bach-Zelewski was well versed in manipulating the courtroom into believing his version of events. Immediately after being questioned about Warsaw, he said, “I crushed the insurrection in two months fighting and my troops had ten thousand casualties…. I bear responsibility for my corps in Warsaw then and today and when I was in command of troops I bear all responsibility.”70 Bach-Zelewski was asked if he was in Hitler’s confidence at this time; he replied in the affirmative but stated he was not in Himmler’s. He was asked if he had tried to “exert pressure against the supreme leadership,” to which he replied, “certainly not, sir.” The losses for Warsaw had also changed. In January 1946, Bach-Zelewski claimed he had saved “hundreds of thousands of civilians and tens of thousands of soldiers of Polish nationality.”71 In October 1945, he estimated total losses in six weeks of combat, “20,000 German and Poles 10,000 military and 40,000 civilians.”72 This contrasts with the figures from his dairy listed in appendix 5.
During the proceedings, Bach-Zelewski was reunited with Ernst Korn. Under interrogation, Korn had provided some evidence to Taylor but had not criticised Bach-Zelewski. Upon leaving Bach-Zelewski, Korn explained that he became chief of staff to the HSSPF in Croatia. He remained in that position until April 1944, when he was relieved of command. He told the story that the HSSPF had few resources when he arrived in Agram; there were no troops or equipment to wage a campaign against the partisans. He confessed to organizing an operation in Croatia; he described it as a security operation to protect the local ethnic German population. He said he was supported in guns and equipment by the German commander, Colonel General Rendulic. He denied that he was responsible for rounding up hostages and that the Order Police had formed independent execution squads under his command. He swore an oath to the truthfulness of his comments.73 In the courtroom he admitted to handling Operation “Ferdinand,” in October 1943, with police and infantry. “A German Regular Police on its own initiative could not undertake any operation independently, as regards the planning orders and execution,” he stated in his concluding remarks.74
After years of diligent disruption and misinformation, Bach-Zelewski finally had his day in court regarding Bandenbekämpfung. Bach-Zelewski opened his testimony by stating that “after various front assignments, at the turn of the year 1942–1943—that is, at the beginning of January 1943—I became Chief of the Band Combating Units. That was a Central Office with the Reichsführer-SS for the combating of bands. This position of Commander of Anti-Partisan Units never ended and the staff carried on to the end. Primarily it was a central report office which worked in close cooperation with the OKW and the OKH.” He said he was “responsible for all partisan reports from the whole of Europe, which arrived at this office, and I had to work on the great, large, band-position maps which I myself had to draw up and which during the daily situation discussions with the Führer had to be presented to him by Himmler.” He accepted some responsibility for his command. “As the fighting itself went,” he claimed, “I was in charge of operations only in the east, but since I was responsible for the drawing up of a new band fighting regulation of course I found out on the spot in the southeast about the band fighting and I myself took part actively with the Wehrmacht in a partisan operation in Croatia.”75
In perhaps one of the most remarkable put-downs in legal history, the judge’s summation of Bach-Zelewski was “the witness is not a military expert in this connection.” The defense counsel, Dr. Sauter, grasped the moment and argued that “the witness Bach-Zelewski is of course the typical SS representative,” continuing, “we had no idea, during the presentation of our case, that exactly an SS leader would be sent here to talk about the regulations for band warfare and particularly that the SS leader who is regarded as mainly responsible for the millions of murders in Russia,” concluding, “the witness Bach-Zelewski must of course give from his point of view in order to save whatever there remains to be saved from the SS.”76 After years of waiting, Bach-Zelewski’s defining lifetime moment was dashed by a lawyer—another historical irony.
Foreign Military Whitewash
After Bach-Zelewski, the foremost economist of the truth was Franz Halder, the former chief of the General Staff of the Army. As a model of Schlieffen professionalism, Halder has left a considerable mark on the post-war history of Germany’s security warfare. After the war, he became the chief consultant for the Foreign Military Study (FMS) Program under the U.S. Army’s Historical Branch. Hitler “sacked” Halder in the summer of 1942 at the time of the introduction of the Bandenbekämpfung directive. Halder had issued the Jagdkommando order in one of his final acts as army chief of staff. He ensured that Bach-Zelewski, Himmler, and even Bandenbekämpfung were written out of the “official” history. Under Halder’s guidance terms like Partisanen replaced Banden while Partisanenbekämpfung was artificially reinstated over Bandenbekämpfung, to serve up a sanitized version of German military history. In effect, Halder wanted to pretend that German military traditions remained unaffected under Nazism. Halder also had the ambition to complete a Wehrmacht history like the Reichswehr’s official history of the Imperial Army during the First World War. Fortunately for him, U.S. military tradition dictated that some form of foreign military study should follow this war, as it had all previous American wars. Unchecked and unverified, Halder was able to produce his semi-official history financed and resourced by the Americans.
While the technical reports within the FMS collection have a value, the studies connected with partisan warfare or Bandenbekämpfung were a political whitewash. Bach-Zelewski’s only contribution, a brief report of his command of the 14th SS Corps on the Western Front, suggests his complicity. The report confirmed that his Ch.BKV from Warsaw became the corps staff. Ernst Rode contributed a report on the KSRFSS, confirming its policing role and thereby removing the record of its links with Bandenbekämpfung. Field Marshal Kesselring provided a study of the campaign against the Italian guerrillas arguing, “its origin and its method was contrary to international law and turned the previous comradeship (between Italians and Germans) in arms into brutal murder.”77 The argument formed the basis of his war crimes defense:
Guerrilla bands were a motley crew, made up of soldiers of the Allies, Italians, Balkan nations, also German deserters, male and female elements of the population of diverse occupations and ages, with greatly varying moral conceptions lacking any unity based on mutual ethical standards.
The direction of his attack made no reference of remorse for the killings and only contempt for the court. “A soldier,” he argued, “upon whose life an attempt may be made in the most dastardly manner, sees ‘red’ and reacts differently from a pettifogging prose
cutor or judge behind the protective cover of his writing desk.”78
Former field commanders also participated in the FMS Program. In 1947, former Lt. Gen. Arthur Schwarznecker, who had worked closely with Bach-Zelewski from 1943 to the winter of 1944, wrote a study of security within “enemy territories” in the area of Army Group Centre. Schwarznecker, the commander of Oberfeldkommandantur 392 and Korück 582, was at the forefront of Bandenbekämpfung in the east. His study was critical of SS responsibility for antipartisan warfare beyond the combat zone, arguing that “if their activity had been confined to purely political tasks, to which their training and capacity had prepared them, they would have been able, in cooperation with the available police force, to carry out their missions, without the weakening influence of unreliable elements.”79 Gustav Hoehne observed that “in the Polish area … partisans were present, for which the mal-administration of these territories must be partly blamed. The civil administration had expropriated personal property on a large scale in several areas, causing the Polish population thus rendered homeless to band together in small groups, which caused a great deal of damage.” He concluded that “the rules for hunting game with beaters make the best directive,” for combating partisans. Halder’s opinion of Hoehne’s study stated that it was “a worthwhile contribution to the study of the partisan movement in Russia…. It is also interesting because it is based on the personal experiences of the author. I approve of the essay in general.”80 Even the man most responsible for the Vercors atrocities, Karl Pflaum, was granted the opportunity to write reports of his operations in the south of France in 1944. Pflaum wrote two reports on the 157th Reserve Division, the first from a general perspective and the other on operations in August–September.81 Some years later, Lt. Gen. Paul Schirker published another study in 1951 covering the division’s operations in September 1944.82
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