The Scourge of the Swastika

by Lord Russell of Liverpool

  Special instruction was also arranged for those selected to supervise the machinery of death in extermination camps. In one camp, during the internment there of a Russian named Manusevitch who gave this information, special tenday courses on corpse-burning were held. The pupils were generally officers and senior NCOs. The chief instructor was a Colonel Schallok, who had great experience of such matters. On the site where bodies were being burned he explained the process and how to set up a bone crushing machine.

  Russian children were even used as live targets for the musketry training of the Hitler Jugend. A Frenchwoman named Ida Vasso, who was manageress of a hostel for aged Frenchmen in Lvov during the German occupation, said that she had seen this happen and her statement was fully investigated and confirmed. The report of the Commission on the result of their inquiries stated that in Lvov the Germans ‘spared neither men, women, nor children. The adults were simply killed on the spot and the children given to the Hitler Youth for target practice’.

  On 30th June 1941 the Germans entered Lvov and began their massacre the next day. After hundreds had been put to death they arranged an exhibition of the murdered citizens in an arcade. The mutilated bodies, mostly of women, were laid out along the walls of the houses. The piece de resistance of this macabre show was the corpse of a woman whose baby was pinned to her breast with a German bayonet.

  It was not only by the Hitler Youth that children were used as practice targets. In one small village in the Krasnya Polyana District a party of drunken German soldiers placed a young boy of twelve on the porch of one of the houses and opened fire on him with an automatic rifle. He fell riddled with bullets.

  In another village German troops tied the wrists of the twenty-five year old pregnant wife of a Russian soldier and raped her. They then cut her throat and bayonetted both her breasts.

  At Rostov, a fifteen year old boy was playing in his back yard with his tame pigeons. Some German soldiers who were passing entered and stole the birds. When the boy protested the thieves took him along to the next street corner, shot him, and trampled on his face until it was unrecognizable.

  Near Smolensk, when the German troops first arrived, they shot about 200 schoolboys and girls who were in the fields helping with the harvest, after a number of the girls had been taken away to satisfy the appetites of the officers. The brutal assaults made by the troops upon women during the first few months of the invasion were redolent of the days when Attila, the Scourge of God, ravaged Gaul with his hordes of Huns.

  In the Ukrainian village of Borodayevka not one woman escaped violation. At Berezovka all females between the ages of sixteen and thirty were carried off like the Sabine women of old, and in Smolensk the German commander opened a brothel for officers in one of the hotels into which large numbers of respectable women were driven and forced into prostitution. In the city of Lvov, thirty-two women in a clothing factory were first raped and then murdered by the attacking troops. Other girls were dragged into the Municipal Gardens and brutally raped: an old priest who tried to intervene had his cassock torn off, his beard singed, and was then bayonetted to death. Near Borissov, in Bielorussia, seventy-five women tried to flee on the approach of the Germans; they were caught and many of them raped. A girl of sixteen was taken into the woods by a party of soldiers and also raped. Her breasts were cut off in the presence of some other Russian women and she was nailed to a tree and left to die.

  Such was the outcome of licensing these men in advance to commit crimes without fear of punishment. The results were those which their masters intended and for which they had planned.

  But the violation of women is not the whole of the story. In many towns and villages through which the Germans passed in their first lightning break-through, wholesale massacres took place. In one village all the old men and youths were shot and the houses burnt to the ground; in another all the old people of both sexes and the children were driven like cattle into a collective farm barn, locked in, and burnt alive; in yet another, sixty-eight people were crowded into a small hut and the doors and windows sealed up until everyone inside was dead by asphyxiation; and in a fourth, 100 peaceful civilians were locked up in the church with a number of wounded soldiers of the Red Army and the building then blown up.

  But these were comparatively minor atrocities compared with the larger massacres, which the Germans called ‘Grossaktionen’,1 such as those carried out at Kiev and Rostov.

  At Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, within a few days of its capture, they tortured and murdered 52,000 men, women and children, large numbers of whom were Jews. Many of these were assembled in the Jewish cemetery, stripped naked, and beaten before they were shot.

  In Rostov, during a stay of ten days, the German troops annihilated many thousands of the inhabitants, forty-eight were killed by machine-gun fire outside the State Railway offices; about sixty were shot while walking along the streets and 200 murdered in the Armenian cemetery. When they were driven out of the city by the Russian troops after such a brief occupation, they threatened to wreak bloody vengeance on the population ‘when they returned’.

  Civilians were also used by the Germans as a screen to cover the advance and retirement of their troops. In August 1941, during an attempt to force a crossing of the River Ipput, the inhabitants of the town of Dobrush were used as a shield against Russian fire, being driven in front of the attacking German units. This practice was continued as long as German troops remained on Soviet soil. Large numbers of civilians were also used to clear mine-fields, although their employment on dangerous work is forbidden under International Law.

  It might be supposed that great difficulty was experienced in finding sufficient executioners. The supply was always equal to the demand and it will have been observed that the demand was not small. None seems to have regarded this sinister duty with distaste; not a few relished it and some boasted of their exploits with pride. One of these, named Le Court, a senior corporal in the German Army proper and not a member of the SS was, despite his French name, a native of Stargard where he had been born and lived all his life. He owned a cinema and was mobilized with the 4th German Airborne Division and when serving in Russia was twenty-seven years old.

  Whilst employed as a laboratory assistant in the photographic section of the headquarters of Air Field Service he used to spend his spare time, to use his own words, ‘shooting Red Army prisoners of war and peaceful citizens and burning down houses together with their occupants’.

  In November 1942 he participated in the shooting of ninety-two Soviet citizens and a month later, of fifty-five more. ‘On both occasions,’ he said, ‘I did the actual shooting.’ He also took part in reprisals on a number of villages and in that way personally set fire to many houses. He had, so he said, shot over 1,000 persons and ‘in recognition of good work and service in the German Army received promotion before it was due.’

  Doubtless he deserved the reward of his Führer whose advice he had so faithfully followed, for had not Hitler said, ‘This gigantic territory (Russia) must be quieted as soon as possible: the best way to attain this objective is to shoot everyone, even those who only cast an ugly look.’

  There were, however, some Germans who were horrified by what they saw. One German officer, a Major Roesler, who had previously commanded a battalion of the 528th Regiment, sent a report to the officer commanding the Ninth Military District regarding an outrage which he witnessed near Zhitomir, when his unit was resting in the area in July 1941.

  Major Roesler had just moved into his new quarters with his staff when he heard volleys of rifle fire, not far away, followed by pistol shots. He decided to find out what was going on and started off in the direction of the firing with his adjutant, First-Lieutenant von Bassevitz.

  As they approached a railway embankment they were informed that a mass execution was in progress. What they saw when they reached the escarpment is best described in Major Roesler’s own words.

  When we finally scrambled over the embankment a picture
of horror was revealed to us. A pit, about seven to eight metres long and perhaps four metres wide had been dug in the ground. The upturned earth was piled on one side of the pit and was completely soaked with blood. The pit itself was filled with numerous corpses of both sexes and all ages. There were so many corpses that it was impossible to tell how deep the trench was. Behind the pile of earth stood a detachment of Feldpolizei under the command of an officer. Many soldiers from units billeted in the area stood there, dressed only in shorts, watching the performance.

  I approached the grave as near as possible in order to see for myself, and what I saw I shall never be able to forget. In the pit lay an old man with a long white beard, clutching a walking stick in his left hand. As he appeared to be still alive I ordered one of the policemen to finish him off and he smilingly replied, T have already shot him seven times in the stomach; he can die on his own now.’

  The bodies lay in the trench, not in rows, but as they had fallen from the edge when they had been shot…. I have never seen anything like this before, neither in the First World War, nor in this. I witnessed many disagreeable things in the Freiwilligen Korps1 in 1919 but nothing so horrible as what I saw at Zhitomir…. I wish to add that according to the testimony of German soldiers who have often watched these executions, several hundred persons are being shot like this every day.

  The officer Commanding the Ninth Military District sent this report to OKW together with the following typical covering letter.

  Subject:—Atrocities perpetrated on the civilian population of the East.

  With regard to the numerous mass executions in Russia which are widespread I was at first convinced that they had been unduly exaggerated. I forward herewith a report from Major Roesler which fully confirms such rumours…. If such things are done openly they will become known in the Fatherland and give rise to criticism.

  Signed: Schirwindt.

  In such a welter of barbarity it is not easy to single out one criminal or one incident for special mention but crazy sadism surely reached its peak in the extermination camp of Yanov during the period when Hauptsturmführer Gebauer, Obersturmführer Wilhaus, and Hauptsturmführer Wartzok were, in that order, Commandants.1

  Gebauer, with his own hands, used to strangle women and children. He froze men to death in barrels; their hands and feet were first tied, they were then lowered into the tubs and left there until they froze to death.

  Murder was so monotonous that the staff were officially encouraged to devise new methods, and one of them, named Wepke, made a bet that he could cut a boy in half with one stroke of his axe. The bet was taken. Wepke got hold of a ten-year-old boy in the camp, made him kneel down with his head hidden in the palms of his hands, and after taking a practice swing, with one single stroke he cut the boy in two.

  Wartzok used to hang the internees up by their feet and leave them hanging until they died. The chief of his interrogation branch, named Heine, stuck bars of iron into the bellies of the inmates and pulled out women’s finger-nails with a pair of pliers.

  Wilhaus, from the balcony of his office, frequently shot prisoners walking across the parade ground partly for the sport of it and partly to amuse his wife and daughters. Occasionally he would hand the rifle to his wife so that she could have a shot. To entertain his nine-year-old daughter he sometimes used very young children for ‘clay pigeon’ practice, having them thrown up in the air so that he could take pot shots at them. His daughter would applaud and say, ‘Papa, do it again.’ Papa did.

  It was this same Commandant who on Hitler’s fiftyfourth birthday, in substitution for a salute of guns, selected fifty-four internees and shot them himself.

  In Yanov the tortures and the murders were carried out with musical accompaniment. An orchestra was formed of inmates and a special tune called the ‘Tango of Death’ was composed. When this camp was disbanded every member of the orchestra was put to death.

  Such is the story of Nazi atrocities in the occupied territories, but it touches merely the fringe. The final score was twelve million murders. Speaking of these crimes in his closing speech to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Sir Hartley Shawcross said:

  In all our countries, when perhaps in the heat of passion or for other motives which impair restraint some individual is killed, the murder becomes a sensation, our compassion is aroused, nor do we rest until the criminal is punished and the rule of law vindicated. Shall we do less when not one, but on the lowest computation twelve million men, women, and children are done to death? Not in battle, not in passion, but in the cold, calculated, deliberate attempt to destroy nations and races, to disintegrate the traditions, the institutions, and the very existence of free and ancient States. Twelve million murders! Two-thirds of the Jews in Europe exterminated, more than six million of them on the killer’s own figures. Murder conducted like some mass production industry….

  It may well be that it is because all this slaughter took place at a time when the world was preoccupied with battle, murder, and sudden death that its enormity has never been generally recognized and has so soon been forgotten.

  1 There is a distinction, though of no interest to the victim, between hostages and reprisal prisoners. The former are taken into custody in order to guarantee with their lives the future good conduct of the community to which they belong; the latter are arrested after some incident has taken place, and are put to death by way of retaliation or reprisal. In either event innocent victims forfeit their lives for offences committed by others.

  1 Pucheu was tried by a French Military Tribunal in Algiers in 1944. He was sentenced to death and subsequently executed.

  1 See page 91.

  2 It is hardly surprising therefore that by Article 3 of the ‘Geneva Convention of 1949’ the taking of hostages ‘at any time and in any place whatsoever’ has now been expressly forbidden.

  1 Nacht und Nebel.

  2 The counter-intelligence.

  1 Special treatment, i.e., extermination in the gas chambers of Treblinka.

  1 The New Day.

  1 See Chapters V and VI.

  1 Every literate German soldier knew that this practice was forbidden. In his ‘Soldbuch’, (Pay Book) were set out the ‘Ten Commandments for the German Soldier Regarding Warfare’. The fifth commandment stated: ‘Dum-Dum bullets are prohibited, also no other bullets may be transformed into Dum-Dum.’ See Appendix.

  1 Sergeant in the Wehrmacht.

  1 This was before the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glâne. After the Allied landing in Normandy the number of atrocities greatly increased.

  1 Milice. A voluntary police force recruited by the Vichy Government for collaboration with SD and Gestapo.

  1 This deposition is taken from the Dossier d’ Oradour sur Glâne and was subsequently published in an official pamphlet, Crimes ennemis en France.

  1 Crimes ennemis en France.

  1 They were, in fact, fuses.

  1 Totwürdig.

  2 He was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to death by shooting, but the sentence was commuted by the confirming officer to one of life imprisonment and he was released in 1953, ‘as an act of clemency’. He is now President of the Stahlhelm.

  1 The Field Police, cf. Divisional Provost Company.

  1 See Oppenheim’s International Law, Vol. II, Section 253., 6th edn., 1940. Ed. Lauterpacht.

  1 Wladyslaw Pietras’ deposition was made before the Central Commission for the Investigation of German War Crimes in Poland, and is published in the Commission’s official report German Crimes in Poland, Vol. i, (Warsaw, 1946).

  1 The rest of this witness’s description is too horrible to print.

  2 ‘Kriegsräson geht vor Kriegsmanier,’ which may be translated as ‘Necessity in war overrules the manner of warfare’. See Oppenheim’s International Law, Vol. II, pp. 184, 6th Edn.

  3 The ‘Drive towards the East’.

  1 Geheime Feld polizei—The Field Security Police.

  1 Major operations.


  1 This was founded in 1919 by a number of desperados from the German Army who refused to be bound by the Versailles Treaty and regarded Philipp Scheidemann who signed it as a traitor. Their activities were confined to Eastern Germany, principally Silesia and the Baltic Provinces, which they called ‘Das Baltikum’. The members of this organization committed many acts of sabotage and murder against the lives and property of those whom they considered collaborators with the Allied Commission and the Government of Friedrich Ebert.

  1 This account of some of the atrocities committed in Yanov camp is taken from the testimony of an eyewitness named Manusevitch who was employed in the camp. Manusevitch worked in a special squad of prisoners employed for burning the corpses of those murdered in the camp. See the proceedings of the 59th day of the Nuremberg trial of major war criminals, Thursday, 14th February 1946.

  CHAPTER V

  SLAVE LABOUR

  BETWEEN 1941 and 1945 more than five million foreign workers were deported like slaves to Germany whence a large proportion of them, though the number is not known, never returned. What happened to them is described in this chapter.

  It is easier to appreciate the concept of Germany’s slave labour policy if it is remembered that it was inherent in National Socialist doctrine which made the State preeminent and had no regard for the personal rights of individuals. According to a German writer on National Socialism, ‘the relationship of labour is not a simple judicial relationship between the worker and his employer. It is a living phenomenon in which the worker becomes a cog in the Nationalist Socialist machine for collective production.’

  Compulsory labour was instituted in Germany itself as early as 1935, and from 1939 the general mobilization of workers began under a decree of Goring as part of his Four-Year Plan. Under this decree foreigners resident in Germany were also liable for such service, so the principle of the compulsory recruitment of foreign workers was in existence in Hitler’s Germany before the war.