Hitler's Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe

by Philip W. Blood

  The pièce de résistance was a study from former Generalmajor der Polizei Alexander Ratcliffe. “In several valuable contributions,” Halder wrote glowingly, “General Ratcliffe has proved his good ability of observation and clear judgement of the Russian as an enemy.” Ratcliffe recommended sound socialization so that a future army, presumably American, fighting in the east was well prepared in advance:

  To European minds Russia is a sinister land … with respect to the peculiarities of nature, climate and the inhabitants. The hopelessness of the vast Russian expanses, the severity of the Asiatic winter and the endlessness of the Eastern forests call for strong hearts. The additional strain of a merciless partisan war will be more easily borne if the fear of the unknown has been overcome.

  Halder wrote that the study did not bring anything new but “because of its limitation to principles and clear distinction of the essentials I consider it valuable and believe that I can recommend the purchase of this study to the Historical Division.”83 Scrutinizing Ratcliffe’s career details a little more closely, it seems he was a colonial soldier with Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa and joined the police after the war. He was involved in the organization of police units and served under Daluege until 1937, when he joined the army, retaining his general’s rank. In 1942, he served with the 207th Security Division and, in 1944, was the Kommandantur of Orscha. Captured by the Russians in 1944, he did not return to Germany until 1949. Ratcliffe was not the only Kolonialmensch involved in the FMS Program. In one study of antiguerrilla operations in the Balkans, the U.S. Army accepted and promoted the writings of Karl Gaisser discussed in chapters 5 and 9.84

  By the mid-1950s, Halder’s fictions and the needs of U.S. Army operational research had found harmony. The U.S. Army’s Center of Military History published government publications on such themes as antiguerrilla operations, Soviet partisans, and German rear-area security.85 A former U.S. Army intelligence officer, James Critchfield, has written about the formation of Germany’s post-war defense and intelligence establishment.86 Critchfield, like many U.S. military operatives, must have known how far Gehlen and other German generals were steeped in criminal behavior. The captured files were loaded with evidence of hunting Jews, mass killings, and the wholesale terror of civilians. While expediency in the light of the Cold War represents a reasonable argument for former times, it is more difficult for objective observers to be anything other than bemused by the decision to let so many war criminals go free.

  Alles Vorbei

  If the newly founded state of West Germany had internalized the principles established by Nuremberg, then ongoing war crimes justice might have been routine. However, the timing of the last American tribunal, the execution of the last war criminals in U.S. custody, and the Federal Republic’s assertion of its own legal destiny coincided at a critical point in time. Norbert Frei has explained how Adenauer and West Germany circumvented the judgments of Nuremberg and ensured that the legal system avoided its precedents.87 The first officials of the Federal German legal system were uncomfortable with Nuremberg; it smacked of victor’s justice, but then many within the judiciary were the products of the Third Reich. Politicians and jurists alike successfully circumvented the Nuremberg judgments on the spurious grounds of avoiding the Nazi policy of punitive judgments. It is in this context that one has to weigh Wolfgang Kahl’s criticism of Nuremberg.

  In 1950, the former U.S. military governor of Germany, Lucius Clay, wrote that “the police were screened thoroughly to exclude Nazis.”88 The reconstruction of the German police led down some bizarre turns. Ulrich Herbert’s study of Dr. Werner Best explains why there was such resistance toward trials. Herbert discovered that the former SS established self-protection cliques and that Best, a lawyer by profession, vigorously defended the commanders of Einsatzgruppen.89 He was not alone. In 1946, Bomhard was released from American custody, as he was not regarded as a real war criminal. He went home with his personal archive of SS-Police documentation. This archive formed the basis for his post-war career as defense advisor to police officers on “trial” before state ministries of the interior attempting to denazify the Federal police. Bomhard became an acceptable headache for the state authorities.90 In the 1950s, he defended police officers against the loss of pension rights and status. Armed with his collection of records and files, he successfully prevented attempts to denazify the police. He still retained powerful friends. After the war, Winkelmann became the deputy to the chief of police for southern Germany; he retired in 1965 on a full state pension and became president of the retired police officers’ association.91 In the German Democratic Republic, the notorious Braunbuch was published in 1965, listing former Nazis and their prominence as elites within the Federal system (refer to appendix 4).92 In 1978, Leonard Mahlein attempted to raise opposition to the influence of the SS in Federal Germany by publishing a pamphlet explaining the scale of the movement.93

  Matters did not just rest with the law. The SS old boy network proliferated and released a market for literature of denial. Just as after the First World War, there was much industry devoted to the publication of memoirs and SS unit histories. The apologists for the Waffen-SS, led by Paul Hausser, tied themselves in knots shunning the criminal activities of the Bandenkampfverbände while claiming several of its “lost victories” for their own record. In 1953, Guderian, no longer blaming everyone, showed his true colors by openly endorsing the Waffen-SS and writing the foreword to Hausser’s book. He opened his endorsement with the SS motto, which had been granted by Hitler in 1931 to Daluege and Bach-Zelewski for suppressing the Stennes revolt. Guderian praised the stoicism of Waffen-SS veterans in the face of post-war castigations and blame. He credited the Waffen-SS with originating the idea of a united Europe and with staunching the Bolshevization of Europe.94 In 1957, a publication challenged this increase of denial among the SS. It gave the names and addresses of the SS veterans’ associations. Nearly all the SS formations were listed, including the Dirlewanger old boys association in Duisburg.95 Bomhard played his part in this historical process. He advised historians of the Bundesarchiv in the publication of a study of the police in wartime and wrote the foreword for a turgid history of the 18th SS-Police Mountain Regiment. In the foreword, he briefly recalled the heady days of the Alpenkorps in Serbia conducting its fighting withdrawal in October 1918 under Ritter von Epp. Calling the regimental history an “opus of memory,” he deigned to refer to both the partisans and the bandits and declared that the regiment was the pride of the German people.

  A life of obscurity after Nuremberg was an unbearable sentence for Bach-Zelewski in the 1950s. He was shunned by the likes of the Waffen-SS veterans’ association, in which men like Berger, Bomhard, and Winkelmann were granted the status of minor celebrities. He claimed to have lied at Nuremberg. He alleged smuggling poison to Göring, but in reality his life had become the loneliness of a nightwatchman for an industrial concern.

  Unable to keep quiet about events, he was tried for the 1934 murder of Anton von Hohburg und Buchwald. He thought his subordinate accomplices, SS driver Paul Zummach and SS-Hauptsturmführer Reinhardt, were dead so he denied the charge. Zummach turned up and so Bach-Zelewski confessed. He then retracted his confession when Zummach committed suicide in his cells.96 Bach-Zelewski received ten years of house arrest. In 1961, he gave evidence for the Eichmann trial in Israel. The case jolted the Federal Republic’s legal authorities into action, leading in the first instance to the 1965 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. The trial received considerable attention both at the time and later, but it confined the question of war crimes to one camp and one group of guards. In 1962, Bach-Zelewski was finally charged with killing three Communists in 1930; he was found guilty, received life imprisonment, and died in prison in 1972. Wolff received a fifteen-year jail sentence for his part in the extermination of the Jews but was released on grounds of ill health. Once released from prison, Wolff continued to meet and travel with former SS colleagues like Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons,
” and pontificated as a celebrity in television documentaries like the “World at War” in the 1970s.97

  A case against the SS-Cavalry was conducted in Brunswick. In 1963, a legal review into the crimes of the 2nd SS-Cavalry Regiment carried out in Russia in 1941 had taken place. The case was held against Franz Magill and the men of the 2nd SS-Cavalry Regiment. The review made many interesting points, a summary of which can be mentioned here. The court was not convinced that Magill and his cohorts were killers, declaring them tools and assistants of someone else unknown. The manner of their contribution was based on their level of involvement in actions that led to fifty-two hundred Jews to be killed. The accused were known to have acted in the murder of the Jews, but it was unclear how independent their actions were. Under the Roman code of law, the court could not determine a clear answer to their criminality. The court turned to the military legal code (Militärstraf-gesetzbuch) in force from the outbreak of war in 1939. Under the prevailing military code, a subordinate knowingly carrying out an illegal order was guilty of criminal behavior. The accused had confessed that their orders had little to do with war. This had disturbed the troops, and the troops had also confessed to shooting Jews on the grounds only that they were Jews. This was recognized as racial policy and therefore illegal; thus, the men should have refused to carry out the order. The review stated that there were no exceptions and that the adjutant of the regiment, Walter Bornschauer, had no defense for “only” signing the orders. The review recommended proceedings against the cavalrymen.98

  In March 1964, Gustav Lombard, the former commander of the 1st SS-Cavalry Regiment, found his way into the courts through a parallel review process. Martin Cüppers tracked down Lombard’s case and found that the courts became entangled in whether the orders and the reports had been faked by Hermann Fegelein against Lombard’s wishes. After nine years of proceedings, fifty files, and 230 witnesses, the case against Lombard ended. The state lawyers could not establish a strong enough case; there was just not enough proof of Lombard’s personal desire to kill.99

  Heinz Reinefarth was declared immune from prosecution because the British and Americans were not prepared to extradite him to Poland. The Poles requested his extradition in 1947 along with four other generals, including Heinz Guderian and Ernst Rode. The Americans placed a protective veil over these men, declaring them material witnesses to their trials. “These five generals are outstanding German military personalities and have been utilized during the past two years by the Historical and Intelligence agencies in Europe to prepare detailed studies on German operations during the past war,” the U.S. Army declared in 1948. “In this capacity they have made positive valuable contribution to our intelligence effort on the USSR and satellites.”100 Many of the papers from the uprising have disappeared but just enough have survived to gain a picture of Kampfgruppe Reinefarth. By chance in 1958, Reinefarth became embroiled in a legal battle with Professor Thieme from Freiburg. On September 19, 1946, Reinefarth lied under oath to U.S. Army interrogators about his role in Warsaw, even denying that Dirlewanger was under his command. 101 Thieme challenged Reinefarth’s evidence from Nuremberg. An article in Der Spiegel had mentioned Reinefarth and the Warsaw uprising. A reader had sent a letter, which had been published, and Reinefarth had sought legal redress. The evidence began to form that Reinefarth had ordered attacks on the Polish population. The records collected for the proceedings indicated that Reinefarth’s denazification process had probably been incorrect; a polite way of suggesting that it was undermined by lies.

  The Spiegel article posed three questions: had Reinefarth any connection with Dirlewanger; had he been involved in any war crimes; and could a case be made? Regarding the command relationships, the situation should have been clear-cut: Dirlewanger was under the command of Reinefarth.102 French MacLean suggested the two hated each other so much that they nearly came to a duel.103 Dirlewanger’s personnel file includes his recommendation for the Knight’s Cross from Reinefarth and endorsed by Bach-Zelewski. The recommendation included actions from April 24 and July 7, placing Reinefarth on the spot.104 Reinefarth praised Dirlewanger’s Warsaw performance as “daredevilry and pluck” (Draufgängertum und Schneid). This was confirmed by Bach-Zelewski, who mentioned that Dirlewanger had been wounded eleven times, confirming Reinefarth’s opinion that he was only 50 percent fit. The record of incidents in Warsaw included the first day’s fighting on August 5, in particular the storm of Litzmannstadtstrasse following Stuka and tank attacks; the capture of Adolf Hitler Platz and the relief of the army’s Feldkommandantur on August 8; and the continuous fighting of September 3–5, 1944. All the while Reinefarth praised Dirlewanger’s courage, leadership capability, and example to the troops. The 1958 article confirmed Reinefarth had been Dirlewanger’s commander; but it then delved into more serious matters. Reinefarth pleaded innocence of any involvement in burnings and shootings. He claimed he had left Warsaw on September 3, 1944. Yet in his Knight’s Cross award recommendation, it had been noted that he had personally directed the Stuka attacks, by the Luftwaffe on September 4–7, 1944. As to shootings, the article recommended that the judges reassess the records and examine an order signed by Reinefarth for the shooting of 196 civilians and the burning of another 155. The article thought that Reinefarth’s offer on September 12, 1944, to Himmler of two captured sacks of tea required evaluation. The article blamed the leading German political parties, the CDU and SPD, for condoning Reinefarth. Calling Reinefarth the executioner of Warsaw (Henker von Warschau), it was suggested that with a thousand deaths to his name, he might have to reconsider his legal position. In the end the scandal led to nothing, and Reinefarth died in 1979, in retirement.

  In 1974, two years after the death of Bach-Zelewski in the Landsberg prison, Judge Rudolf Ilgen recalled a long forgotten incident from a Sunday evening in the spring of 1933. Ilgen was sent to investigate the murder of a minor SPD functionary. Several men, believed to be SS, had called at the man’s house and ordered him to attend an interrogation. The SS interrogated the victim near his house about the whereabouts of the “Iron Book” (eiserne Buch), allegedly containing a list of opponents to Nazism. Shots were overheard and the man was killed. The killers attempted to dump the body in a lake but were disturbed. The victim’s body was recovered, and three SS men were arrested. The commanding officer of Frankfurt on the Oder SS-Standarte was SS-Oberführer Bach-Zelewski, and he arrived on the scene armed with a pistol. He requested details from Ilgen, who, although not obliged to, informed him of what had happened. Bach-Zelewski’s immediate response was to dismiss as allegations any SS involvement, but he appeared to accept Ilgen’s handling of the case and duly left the building. A short while later, Bach-Zelewski returned and advised Ilgen that he had investigated the scene and found evidence of the mark of three arrows, the symbol of the Iron Front, which he said proved they had carried out the killing. But there was no further proof of this, and by evening, the evidence confirmed that at least one of the SS men was guilty.

  Bach-Zelewski left again only to return shouting that he would not allow the arrest of one of his men. This time, he refused to leave and began threatening Ilgen. All the while, an SS truck cruised around the justice building with the occupants ominously screaming, “Sieg Heil.” Bach-Zelewski changed tack, requesting the accused men be placed under his custody and offering his word of honor that they would not escape. The senior court officials agreed, probably in fear of their own lives; they stated they did so under duress. Meanwhile, the main culprit was spirited away by Ilgen into full police custody. Realizing he had been duped, Bach-Zelewski lost all control and his face began to make nervous twitches (zuckte) from behind his spectacles. He abruptly composed himself and said, “I cannot go back, I fought the Poles to save Germany. In Upper Silesia, an old woman threw hot water out of the window at me. I ordered my comrades to ‘beat her to death.’” Ilgen could only reply that that was war and this was murder and such behavior had to stop. Bach-Zelewski countered by suggesting tha
t in two years this incident would be forgotten.105 This book opened with Heinrich Heine’s warning against the police, Thule, and the historical school and ends with William Shakespeare’s observation, “The evil that men do lives after them.”106