Detailed accounts of Nazi crimes

[Zostrianos]

I've had this idea for a while, to list detailed accounts of Nazi crimes here as a reference for anyone who ever has to confront or debate with fascists, racists, holocaust deniers, etc. (many of whom portray the Nazis as blameless heroes, and deny many - if not most - of their crimes). I think the best way to fight fascism is education, by giving people the facts (as I'm convinced many fascists are ignorant of history, especially the younger ones) - not by insulting fascism, but simply by showing what it is, and what it did.
I'm gathering a few different sources now, but I'll use Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands as a starting reference, as it's the most recent and detailed I've seen.

I'll start with the repression of the Warsaw uprising. Feel free to jump in if you find any other info or better references.

Unlike the Ghetto Uprising, however, this campaign would require reinforcements. Following the German withdrawal from Belarus, experienced anti-partisan units were available. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the chief of German anti-partisan formations and a veteran of the partisan warfare in Belarus, was given overall command in Warsaw. Other veterans of the anti-partisan warfare in Belarus were also summoned. The SS Commando Dirlewanger was dispatched from northeastern Poland, the Kaminskii unit from southwestern Poland. They were reinforced by a police unit sent from Poznań and a few hundred foreign fighters, mostly Azerbaijanis who had defected from the Red Army. ....

Kaminskii and his Russians were given personal permission from Himmler to loot, and they accepted this part of their assignment with gusto. They entered Ochota, a southwesterly neighborhood of Warsaw, on 9 August 1944. Over the course of the next ten days, they concentrated on theft, but also killed several thousand Polish civilians. As one of Kaminskii’s officers recalled, “Mass executions of civilians without investigation were the order of the day.” The soldiers also became known for systematic rape. They burned down the hospital of the Marie Curie Institute, killing everyone inside, but scrupulously raped the nurses ahead of time. As one of Kaminskii’s men characterized the Ochota campaign, “they raped nuns and plundered and stole anything they could get their hands on.” German commanders complained that Kaminskii and his men were concerned only with “robbing, drinking, and raping women.” Bach had Kaminskii apprehended and executed: not for the killing or the sexual violence but for his habit of stealing for himself rather than for the coffers of the Reich.54 (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_030.html#fil epos1444176)
The comportment of the SS Special Commando Dirlewanger was even worse. Its men were now a motley group of criminals, foreigners, and SS-men released from punishment camps. Dirlewanger was indiscipline itself; even Himmler had to order him twice to go to Warsaw. The unit was fresh from its Belarusian campaigns, where it had killed tens of thousands of civilians in the countryside and the towns. Now it would kill more civilians in a large city. The most infamous Waffen-SS unit in Belarus now became the most infamous Waffen-SS unit in Poland. The Dirlewanger unit was the bulk of a combat group under the command of Heinz Reinefarth, the SS and Police Chief for the Warthegau, the largest district of occupied Poland annexed to Germany.

Reinefarth received an extraordinary three-part order from Himmler: all Polish combatants were to be shot; all Polish noncombatants, including women and children, were also to be shot; and the city itself was to be razed to the ground. The police formations and the SS Special Commando Dirlewanger carried out these orders to the letter on 5 and 6 August 1944, shooting some forty thousand civilians in the course of those two days alone. They had a military objective: they were to march through the west-central Wola neighborhood and relieve German headquarters in the Saxon Gardens. They lifted the Home Army’s barricades on Wola Street by marching Poles in front of them and forcing them to do the work, using women and children as human shields in the meantime, and raping some of the women. As they moved west they destroyed each and every building, one by one, using gasoline and hand grenades. Wola Street ran just south of the terrain that had been the ghetto, and indeed through some of its most southerly extremes, so their work of destruction brought an adjoining neighborhood to ruins.
The men of the Dirlewanger Brigade burned down three hospitals with patients inside. At one hospital, wounded Germans who were being treated by Polish doctors and nurses asked that no harm come to the Poles. This was not to be. The men of the Dirlewanger Brigade killed the Polish wounded. They brought the nurses back to camp that evening, as was the custom: each night selected women would be whipped by officers and then gang-raped before being murdered. This evening was unusual even by those standards. To the accompaniment of flute music, the men raised a gallows, and then hanged the doctors and the naked nurses.
As houses burned in Wola, people sought refuge in factories, which then became convenient killing grounds for the German SS and police units. At one factory, two thousand people were shot; at another, five thousand more. Wanda Lurie, one of the few survivors of the mass shootings at the Ursus factory, was expecting a child. “I went in last and kept back, always lagging behind in the hope that they would not kill a pregnant woman. However, I was taken in the last group. I saw a heap of bodies about a meter high.” She lost her children. “The first salvo hit my elder son, the second me and the third my younger children.” She fell wounded, but was able later to dig herself from the pile of bodies. She later gave birth to a healthy baby. The mass killing slowed on 6 August, possibly because bullets were short and were needed elsewhere.
The massacres in Wola had nothing in common with combat. The Germans lost six dead and killed about twenty Home Army soldiers while murdering at least thirty thousand people. The ratio of civilian to military dead was more than a thousand to one, even if military casualties on both sides are counted. On 13 August Bach countermanded Himmler’s killing orders, and the organized shooting of civilians in large numbers came to a halt. Many more Poles would be killed, however, in more or less unplanned ways. When the Germans took the Old Town, they killed seven thousand wounded in field hospitals by gunfire and flamethrowers. Some thirty thousand civilians would be killed in the Old Town before the uprising was over.
In the Wola neighborhood, where the worst of the killing took place, the bodies had to be found and removed. The Germans assembled a group of Polish slave laborers, whom they called the Cremation Commando. Between 8 and 23 August 1944, these people were ordered to pick through the ruins of the Wola neighborhood, extract the rotting bodies, and burn them on pyres. In Wola, the remnants of the ghetto were all around them. The laborers marched along Wola, Elektoralna, and Chłodna Streets, now from east to west, following in reverse the route the German police and the Dirlewanger Brigade had taken. Their first five pyres were just to the east of the ghetto, their next thirteen just to the west. The Polish slave laborers (one of whom was Jewish) burned the bodies while their SS guards played cards and laughed.(Bloodlands chapter 9)

[ВАЛТЕР]

Not many people know about these actions outside of the Balkans. These are a few of many examples of Nazi terror againt the populations of Yugoslavia

http://www.berengarten.com/site/Kragujevac-Massacre.html


Massacre at Kragujevac



http://www.berengarten.com/assets/rbu01/img/04%20Massacre%20%203.jpg

One of the most shocking aspects of the massacre was that more than 200 pupils from local schools were taken out of their classes and shot. There are several stories of extraordinary individual sacrifice and acts of heroism, especially by several of the schoolteachers.
Over 40 victims managed to find scraps of paper on which they scribbled their last messages to their loved ones. These were discovered by townspeople after the event. The message copied here was scrawled by 17 year old Ljubiša Jovanović into his school report book. It says, “Dear mum and dad, hi for the last time. Ljubiša.”

Contemporary German records stated that 2,300 people were shot in reprisals. But after the war, the Yugoslav communists supported a different version of events: it was accepted that 7,000 men and boys had been killed at Kragujevac. Since the collapse of Yugoslavia, painstaking local researchers, led by Staniša Brkić at the 21st October Memorial Museum, have arrived at the more objective and reliable figure of 2,795 - 2,800 victims.

By comparison with other major Nazi atrocities, the Kragujevac massacre has received scant notice in the English-speaking world.
http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad


The 1942 raid in Novi Sad, commonly known as the Novi Sad massacre, was a massacre (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Massacre) of civilians in Hungarian occupied Vojvodina (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Occupation_of_Vojvodina,_1941%E2%80%931944) in January 1942, after the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Invasion_of_Yugoslavia). Over 3,000 civilian hostages, mostly of Serb (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Serbs), Jewish (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Jews) and Roma (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Roma_%28Romani_subgroup%29) ethnicity, were rounded up and killed in reprisal for resistance activities by the Hungarian Axis troops.[1] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-Scotland-0) The massacre is considered one of the most notable war crimes (http://www.enotes.com/topic/War_crime) during the Axis occupation of Serbia (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Axis_occupation_of_Serbia).
In response to local partisan activity, Hungarian forces assembled 240 patrols in southern Bačka (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Ba%C4%8Dka), near Novi Sad (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Novi_Sad), for the purpose of conducting anti-partisan raids. Civilians suspected of aiding local resistance fighters were rounded up and taken to the bank of the Danube (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Danube) to be killed. The victims, some still alive, had their bodies thrown under the ice of the frozen river. The Hungarian forces then shot into the ice to break it up. Most of the victims drowned. The Hungarian forces shot at those who were still afloat.[2] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-1)

Casualties

The total number of civilians killed in the raid was 4,211. The victims came from a number of nearby towns, including Novi Sad (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Novi_Sad), Bečej (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Be%C4%8Dej), Vilovo (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Vilovo,_Serbia), Gardinovci (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Gardinovci), Gospođinci (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Gospo%C4%91inci), Đurđevo (http://www.enotes.com/topic/%C4%90ur%C4%91evo), Žabalj (http://www.enotes.com/topic/%C5%BDabalj), Lok (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Lok,_Vojvodina), Mošorin (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Mo%C5%A1orin), Srbobran (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Srbobran), Temerin (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Temerin), Titel (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Titel), Čurug (http://www.enotes.com/topic/%C4%8Curug), and Šajkaš (http://www.enotes.com/topic/%C5%A0ajka%C5%A1).[3] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-2) The victims included 2,842 Serbs (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Serbs), 1,250 Jews (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Jews), 64 Roma, 31 Rusyns (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Rusyns), 13 Russians (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Russians) and 11 ethnic Hungarians (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Hungarians).[4] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-3) Civilians were rounded up at random and taken from their homes and businesses during their workday and while they were engaged in regular activities, even weddings.



http://wiki-images.enotes.com/thumb/0/03/Racija1942_01.png/250px-Racija1942_01.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Racija1942_01.png) Map of places affected by the raid in January 1942 in southern Bačka, in which Hungarian occupational forces killed 3,809 civilians mostly of Serb, Jewish and Roma ethnicity





Causes and initiators

The raid was sparked after 40 Serbian partisans were detected hiding out at the farm of Gavra Pustajic near the village of Zhabalj by a Hungarian patrol on January 4, 1942. From January 21 to January 23, 1942, by the order of officers lieutenant-general Ferenc Feketehalmy-Czeidner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferenc_Feketehalmy-Czeidner), major-general József Grassy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zsef_Grassy), colonel László Deák (http://www.enotes.com/topic/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_De%C3%A1k) and gendarmarie-captain Márton Zöldy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1rton_Z%C3%B6ldy) numerous Serbian and Jewish civilians were murdered in the Vojvodina (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Vojvodina) northern region of Serbia (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Serbia).

Responsibility

Serbian historian Zvonimir Golubović in his book about the raid claimed that Horthy (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Horthy) himself was aware of the raid and approved its being carried out.[5] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-4) This was denied immediately after World War II (http://www.enotes.com/topic/World_War_II). Horthy was a witness at Nuremberg Trials (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Nuremberg_Trials), and all accusations were dropped against him. This incident was embarrassment for Hungarians even in the eyes of its Axis allies, and Horthy was forced to investigate the crime during the war. Based on this, Horthy was not deemed responsible and despite the strong demand from Yugoslavia (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Yugoslavia), both the Americans and the Soviets favored dropping the charge.[6] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-5)[7] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-6)[8] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-Ilona-7)[9] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-Horthy-8) However, when Horthy ordered investigation, the officers who had ordered the raid fled to Nazi Germany (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Nazi_Germany) and returned only after the German Nazi regime occupied Hungary in 1944 (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Government_of_National_Unity_%28Hungary%29). They were executed after the war.

Aftermath

In 1943, the Hungarian leaders attempted to revive relations with western Allies, thus as part of such aims, Hungary organized a trial of several officers that were among those responsible for the raid.[8] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-Ilona-7)[9] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-Horthy-8) However, the officers were allowed to escape to Germany before their sentencing.[10] (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1942_raid_in_Novi_Sad#cite_note-9) After the war, some of the individuals responsible for the raid were tried again by the new communist government of Hungary (which sentenced them to death or to life in prison) and again in Yugoslavia, where they were sentenced to death again, and executed. László Deák and Miklos Horthy, who allegedly were also among those responsible for the raid, were never convicted.
In 2006 (http://www.enotes.com/topic/2006), Dr. Efraim Zuroff (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Efraim_Zuroff) of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Simon_Wiesenthal_Center) charged Dr. Sandor Kepiro (http://www.enotes.com/topic/Sandor_Kepiro) with participating in the massacre on the evidence of his conviction in the trials of 1944 (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1944) and 1946 (http://www.enotes.com/topic/1946). Kepiro, however, states that as a police officer, his participation was limited merely to arresting civilians, and he did not take part in the executions or any other illegal activity.

[Zostrianos]

Not many people know about these actions outside of the Balkans.

Yeah, since Poland and Russia is where most Nazi crimes took place a lot of what they did outside that region has unfortunately been overlooked.

[Zostrianos]

In July 1941, Himmler traveled personally throughout the western Soviet Union to pass on the new line: Jewish women and children should be killed along with Jewish men. The forces on the ground reacted immediately. Einsatzgruppe C, which had followed Army Group South into Ukraine, had been slower than Einsatzgruppe A (the Baltic States) and Einsatzgruppe B (Vilnius and Belarus) to undertake mass shootings of Jews as such. But then, at Himmler’s instigation, Einsatzgruppe C killed some sixty thousand Jews in August and September. These were organized shootings, not pogroms. Indeed, Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C complained on 21 July that a pogrom by local Ukrainians and German soldiers hindered them from shooting the Jews of Uman. In the next two days, however, Einsatzkommando 5 did shoot about 1,400 Uman Jews (sparing a few Jewish women who were to take gravestones from the Jewish cemetery and use them to build a road). Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C seems not to have killed women and children until a personal inspection by Himmler.

The killing of women and children was a psychological barrier, one that Himmler made sure to break. Even as the Einsatzgruppen were generally killing only Jewish men, Himmler sent units of his Waffen-SS, the combat troops of the SS, to kill entire communities, including the women and children. On 17 July 1941, Hitler instructed Himmler to “pacify” the occupied territories. Two days later Himmler dispatched the SS Cavalry Brigade to the marshy Polesie region between Ukraine and Belarus, with the direct order to shoot Jewish men and to drive the Jewish women into the swamps. Himmler couched his instructions in the language of partisan warfare. But by 1 August the commander of the Cavalry Brigade was clarifying that: “not one male Jew is to be left alive, not one remnant family in the villages.” Quickly the Waffen-SS understood Himmler’s intentions, and helped to spread his message. By 13 August, 13,788 Jewish men, women, and children had been murdered. Himmler also sent the 1st Infantry SS Brigade to aid the Einsatzgruppen and police forces in Ukraine. Over the course of 1941, Waffen-SS formations killed more than fifty thousand Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line....

By late August 1941, nine weeks into the war, the Wehrmacht had serious concerns about food supplies and the security of the rear. Murdering Jews would free up food and, according to Nazi logic, prevent partisan uprisings. After the mass shooting at Kamianets-Podilskyi, the Wehrmacht systematically cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen and the police forces in the destruction of Jewish communities. When a town or a city was taken, the police (if present) would round up some of the Jewish men and shoot them. The army would register the surviving population, noting the Jews. Then the Wehrmacht and the police would negotiate over how many of the remaining Jews could be killed, and how many should be left alive as a labor force in a ghetto. After this selection, the police would proceed to a second mass shooting, with the army often providing trucks, ammunition, and guards. If the police were not present, the army would register Jews and organize forced labor itself. The police would arrange the killings later. As central directives became clearer and these protocols of cooperation were established, death tolls among Jews in occupied Soviet Ukraine roughly doubled from July to August 1941, and then again from August to September.


The massacre at Babi Yar


A Wehrmacht propaganda crew printed broadsheet notices that ordered the Jews of Kiev to appear, on pain of death, at a street corner in a westerly neighborhood of the city. In what would become the standard lie of such mass shooting actions, the Jews were told that they were being resettled. They should thus bring along their documents, money, and valuables. On 29 September 1941 most of the remaining Jewish community of Kiev did indeed appear at the appointed location. Some Jews told themselves that since Yom Kippur, the highest Jewish holiday, was the following day, they could not possibly be hurt. Many arrived before dawn, in the hopes of getting good seats on the resettlement train—which did not exist. People packed for a long journey, old women wearing strings of onions around their necks for food. Having been assembled, the more than thirty thousand people walked, as instructed, along Melnyk Street in the direction of the Jewish cemetery. Observers from nearby apartments recalled an “endless row” that was “overflowing the entire street and the sidewalks.”31 (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_027.html#fil epos1388751)The Germans had erected a roadblock near the gates of the Jewish cemetery, where documents were verified and non-Jews told to return home. From this point forward the Jews were escorted by Germans with automatic weapons and dogs. At the checkpoint, if no earlier, many of the Jews must have wondered what their true fate would be. Dina Pronicheva, a woman of thirty, walked ahead of her family to a point where she could hear gunshots. Immediately all was clear to her; but she chose not to tell her parents so as not to worry them. Instead she walked along with her mother and father until she reached the tables where the Germans demanded valuables and clothes. A German had already taken her mother’s wedding ring when Pronicheva realized that her mother, no less than she, understood what was happening. Yet only when her mother whispered sharply to her—“you don’t look like a Jew”—did she try to escape. Such plain communication is rare in such situations, when the human mind labors to deny what is actually happening, and the human spirit strives toward imitation, subordination, and thus extinction. Pronicheva, who had a Russian husband and thus a Russian surname, told a German at a nearby table that she was not Jewish. He told her to wait at one side until the work of the day was complete.[/URL]
Thus Dina Pronicheva saw what became of her parents, her sister, and the Jews of Kiev. Having surrendered their valuables and documents, people were forced to strip naked. Then they were driven by threats or by shots fired overhead, in groups of about ten, to the edge of a ravine known as Babi Yar. Many of them were beaten: Pronicheva remembered that people “were already bloody as they went to be shot.” They had to lie down on their stomachs on the corpses already beneath them, and wait for the shots to come from above and behind. Then would come the next group. Jews came and died for thirty-six hours. People were perhaps alike in dying and in death, but each of them was different until that final moment, each had different preoccupations and presentiments until all was clear and then all was black. Some people died thinking about others rather than themselves, such as the mother of the beautiful fifteen-year-old girl Sara, who begged to be killed at the same time as her daughter. Here there was, even at the end, a thought and a care: that if she saw her daughter shot she would not see her raped. One naked mother spent what she must have known were her last few seconds of life breastfeeding her baby. When the baby was thrown alive into the ravine, she jumped in after it, and in that way found her death. Only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing, or to their number, which was 33,761. Since the bodies were later exhumed and burned on pyres, and the bones that did not burn crushed and mixed with sand, the count is what remains. (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_027.html#fil epos1388911)[URL="http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_027.html#fil epos1388400"] (q.v. Bloodlands chapter 6)

[Zostrianos]

Never in modern warfare had so many prisoners been taken so quickly. In one engagement, the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Center took 348,000 prisoners near Smolensk; in another, Army Group South took 665,000 near Kiev. In those two September victories alone, more than a million men (and some women) were taken prisoner. By the end of 1941, the Germans had taken about three million Soviet soldiers prisoner. This was no surprise to the Germans. The three German Army Groups were expected to move even faster than they did, and thus even more prisoners could have been expected. Simulations had predicted what would happen. Yet the Germans did not prepare for prisoners of war, at least not in the conventional sense. In the customary law of war, prisoners of war are given food, shelter, and medical attention, if only to ensure that the enemy does the same....

Once they had surrendered, Soviet prisoners were shocked by the savagery of their German captors. Captured Red Army soldiers were marched in long columns, beaten horribly along the way, from the field of battle to the camps. The soldiers captured at Kiev, for example, marched over four hundred kilometers in the open air. As one of them remembered, if an exhausted prisoner sat down by the side of the road, a German escort “would approach on his horse and lash with his whip. The person would continue to sit, with his head down. Then the escort would take a carbine from the saddle or a pistol from the holster.” Prisoners who were wounded, sick, or tired were shot on the spot, their bodies left for Soviet citizens to find and clean and bury.
When the Wehrmacht transported Soviet prisoners by train, it used open freight cars, with no protection from the weather. When the trains reached their destinations, hundreds or sometimes even thousands of frozen corpses would tumble from the opened doors. Death rates during transport were as high as seventy percent. Perhaps two hundred thousand prisoners died in these death marches and these death transports. All of the prisoners who arrived in the eighty or so prisoner-of-war camps established in the occupied Soviet Union were tired and hungry, and many were wounded or ill.
Ordinarily, a prisoner-of-war camp is a simple facility, built by soldiers for other soldiers, but meant to preserve life. Such camps arise in difficult conditions and in unfamiliar places; but they are constructed by people who know that their own comrades are being held as prisoners by the opposing army. German prisoner-of-war camps in the Soviet Union, however, were something far out of the ordinary. They were designed to end life. In principle, they were divided into three types: the Dulag (transit camp), the Stalag (base camp for enlisted men and noncommissioned officers), and the smaller Oflags (for officers). In practice, all three types of camps were often nothing more than an open field surrounded by barbed wire. Prisoners were not registered by name, though they were counted. This was an astonishing break with law and custom. Even at the German concentration camps names were taken. There was only one other type of German facility where names were not taken, and it had not yet been invented. No advance provision was made for food, shelter, or medical care. There were no clinics and very often no toilets. Usually there was no shelter from the elements. The official calorie quotients for the prisoners were far below survival levels, and were often not met. In practice, only the stronger prisoners, and those who had been selected as guards, could be sure of getting any food at all.

Soviet prisoners were at first confused by this treatment by the Wehrmacht. One of them guessed that “the Germans are teaching us to behave like comrades.” Unable to imagine that hunger was a policy, he guessed that the Germans wanted the Soviet prisoners to show solidarity with one another by sharing whatever food they had among themselves. Perhaps this soldier simply could not believe that, like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany was a state that starved by policy. Ironically, the entire essence of German policy toward the prisoners was that they were not actually equal human beings, and thus certainly not fellow soldiers, and under no circumstances comrades. The guidelines of May 1941 had instructed German soldiers to remember the supposedly “inhuman brutality” of Russians in battle. German camp guards were informed in September that they would be punished if they used their weapons too little.


In autumn 1941, the prisoners of war in all of the Dulags and Stalags went hungry. Though even Göring recognized that the Hunger Plan as such was impossible, the priorities of German occupation ensured that Soviet prisoners would starve. Imitating and radicalizing the policies of the Soviet Gulag, German authorities gave less food to those who could not work than to those who could, thereby hastening the deaths of the weaker. On 21 October 1941, those who could not work saw their official rations cut by twenty-seven percent. This was for many prisoners a purely theoretical reduction, since in many prisoner-of-war camps no one was fed on a regular basis, and in most the weaker had no regular access to food anyway. A remark of the quartermaster general of the army, Eduard Wagner, made explicit the policy of selection: those prisoners who could not work, he said on 13 November, “are to be starved.” Across the camps, prisoners ate whatever they could find: grass, bark, pine needles. They had no meat unless a dog was shot. A few prisoners got horsemeat on a few occasions. Prisoners fought to lick utensils, while their German guards laughed at their behavior. When the cannibalism began, the Germans presented it as the result of the low level of Soviet civilization.

.....

Some of the most infamous prisoner-of-war camps were in occupied Soviet Belarus, where by late November 1941 death rates had reached two percent per day. At Stalag 352 near Minsk, which one survivor remembered as “pure hell,” prisoners were packed together so tightly by barbed wire that they could scarcely move. They had to urinate and defecate where they stood. Some 109,500 people died there. At Dulag 185, Dulag 127, and Stalag 341, in the east Belarusian city Mahileu, witnesses saw mountains of unburied corpses outside the barbed wire. Some thirty to forty thousand prisoners died in these camps. At Dulag 131 at Bobruisk, the camp headquarters caught fire. Thousands of prisoners burned to death, and another 1,700 were gunned down as they tried to escape. All in all at least thirty thousand people died at Bobruisk. At Dulags 220 and 121 in Homel, as many as half of the prisoners had shelter in abandoned stables. The others had no shelter at all. In December 1941 death rates at these camps climbed from two hundred to four hundred to seven hundred a day. At Dulag 342 at Molodechno, conditions were so awful that prisoners submitted written petitions asking to be shot.


The camps in occupied Soviet Ukraine were similar. At Stalag 306 at Kirovohrad, German guards reported that prisoners ate the bodies of comrades who had been shot, sometimes before the victims were dead. Rosalia Volkovskaia, a survivor of the women’s camp at Volodymyr Volynskyi, had a view of what the men faced at the local Stalag 365: “we women could see from above that many of the prisoners ate the corpses.” At Stalag 346 in Kremenchuk, where inmates got at most two hundred grams of bread per day, bodies were thrown into a pit every morning. As in Ukraine in 1933, sometimes the living were buried along with the dead. At least twenty thousand people died in that camp. At Dulag 162 in Stalino (today Donetsk), at least ten thousand prisoners at a time were crushed behind barbed wire in a small camp in the center of the city. People could only stand. Only the dying would lie down, because anyone who did would be trampled. Some twenty-five thousand perished, making room for more.

Dulag 160 at Khorol, southwest of Kiev, was one of the larger camps. Although the site was an abandoned brick factory, prisoners were forbidden to take shelter in its buildings. If they tried to escape there from the rain or snow, they were shot. The commandant of this camp liked to observe the spectacle of prisoners struggling for food. He would ride in on his horse amidst the crowds and crush people to death. In this and other camps near Kiev, perhaps thirty thousand prisoners died.
Soviet prisoners of war were also held at dozens of facilities in occupied Poland, in the General Government (which had been extended to the southeast after the invasion of the Soviet Union). Here astonished members of the Polish resistance filed reports about the massive death of Soviet prisoners in the winter of 1941-1942. Some 45,690 people died in the camps in the General Government in ten days, between 21 and 30 October 1941. At Stalag 307 at Dęblin, some eighty thousand Soviet prisoners died over the course of the war. At Stalag 319 at Chełm some sixty thousand people perished; at Stalag 366 in Siedlce, fifty-five thousand; at Stalag 325 at Zamość, twenty-eight thousand; at Stalag 316 at Siedlce, twenty-three thousand. About half a million Soviet prisoners of war starved to death in the General Government. As of the end of 1941, the largest group of mortal victims of German rule in occupied Poland was neither the native Poles nor the native Jews, but Soviet prisoners of war who had been brought west to occupied Poland and left to freeze and starve. Despite the recent Soviet invasion of Poland, Polish peasants often tried to feed the starving Soviet prisoners they saw. In retaliation, the Germans shot the Polish women carrying the milk jugs, and destroyed whole Polish villages.
....

As during the Soviet starvation campaign of 1933, during the German starvation campaign of 1941 many local people in Ukraine did their best to help the dying. Women would identify men as relatives and thus arrange their release. Young women would marry prisoners who were on labor duty outside the camps. The Germans sometimes allowed this, since it meant that the men would be working in an area under German occupation to produce food for Germans. In the city of Kremenchuk, where the food situation seems not to have been dire, laborers from the camps would leave empty bags in the city when they went to work in the morning, and recover them full of food left by passersby in the evening. In 1941 conditions were favorable for such help, as the harvest was unusually good. Women (the reports are almost always of women) would try to feed the prisoners during the death marches or in the camps. Yet most prisoner-of-war camp commanders, most of the time, prevented civilians from approaching the camps with food. Usually such people were driven away by warning shots. Sometimes they were killed.


The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.

The Germans shot, on a conservative estimate, half a million Soviet prisoners of war. By way of starvation or mistreatment during transit, they killed about 2.6 million more. All in all, perhaps 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war were killed.
(Bloodlands, chapter 5)

[Zostrianos]

German soldiers had been instructed that Poland was not a real country, and that its army was not a real army. Thus the men resisting the invasion could not be real soldiers. German officers instructed their troops that the death of Germans in battle was “murder.” Since resisting the German master race was, in Hitler’s terminology, “insolence,” Polish soldiers had no right to be treated as prisoners of war. In the village of Urycz, Polish prisoners of war were gathered into a barn, where they were told they would spend the night. Then the Germans burned it down. Near the village of Śladów, Germans used prisoners of war as human shields as they engaged the remnants of a cavalry unit. After the Germans had killed the cavalrymen, who were unwilling to shoot at their fellow Poles, they made the prisoners bury the bodies of their comrades. Then they lined up the prisoners against a wall at the bank of the Vistula River and shot them. Those who tried to escape by jumping into the river were shot—as the one survivor remembered, like ducks. Some three hundred people died.[/URL]
On 22 August 1939, Hitler had instructed his commanders to “close your hearts to pity.” The Germans killed prisoners. At Ciepielów, after a pitched battle, three hundred Polish prisoners were taken. Despite all the evidence, the German commander declared that these captured soldiers were partisans, irregular fighters unprotected by the laws of war. The Polish officers and soldiers, wearing full uniform, were astonished. The Germans made them disrobe. Now they looked more like partisans. All of them were gunned down and thrown in a ditch. In the short Polish campaign, there were at least sixty-three such actions. No fewer than three thousand Polish prisoners of war were murdered. The Germans also murdered the Polish wounded. In one case, German tanks turned to attack a barn marked with a red cross. It was a Polish first-aid station. If it had not been marked with a cross, the tank commanders would likely have ignored it. The tanks fired on the barn, setting it aflame. The machine gunners fired at people who tried to escape. Then the tanks ran over the remnants of the barn, and any survivors.
Wehrmacht officers and soldiers blamed Polish civilians for the horrors that now befell them. As one general maintained, “Germans are the masters, and Poles are the slaves.” The army leadership knew that Hitler’s goals for the campaign were anything but conventional. As the chief of staff summarized, it was “the intention of the Leader to destroy and exterminate the Polish people.” Soldiers had been prepared to see the Polish civilian population as devious and subhuman. One of them was so convinced of Polish hostility that he interpreted a Pole’s death grimace as the expression of irrational hatred for Germans. The soldiers quickly took to taking out their frustrations on whomever they happened to see. As a rule, the Germans would kill civilians after taking new territories. They would also kill civilians after losing ground. If they took casualties at all, they would blame whoever was at hand: men in the first instance, but also women, and children.

In the town of Widzów, the Germans summoned the men, who, fearing nothing because they had done nothing, answered the call. One pregnant wife had a sense of foreboding, but she was torn away from her husband. All of the men of the town were lined up against a fence and shot. In Longinówka, forty Polish citizens were locked in a building, which was then set aflame. Soldiers fired on people as they leapt from windows. Some of the reprisal actions were unthinkably casual. In one case a hundred civilians were assembled to be shot because someone had fired a gun. It turned out that the gun had been fired by a German soldier. (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_025.html#fil epos1334392)
Poland never surrendered, but hostilities came to an end on 6 October

1939. Even as the Germans established their civilian occupation authorities that autumn, the Wehrmacht continued to kill Polish citizens in large numbers in quite arbitrary reprisal actions. In December, after two German soldiers were killed by known Polish criminals, the Germans machine-gunned 114 men who had nothing to do with the incident. In January the Germans shot 255 Jews in Warsaw after the Jewish community had failed to turn over someone whom the Germans, judging by his last name, thought to be Jewish. The person in question had nothing to do with the Jewish community.
....

In the town of Solec, Jews were taken as hostages and locked in a cellar. After an escape attempt, soldiers threw grenades into the cellar, killing everyone. In Rawa Mazowiecka, a German soldier asked a Jewish boy for some water. When the boy ran away, the soldier took aim and shot. He hit one of his own comrades instead. The Germans then gathered hundreds of people in the town square and killed them. In Dynów, some two hundred Jews were machine-gunned one night in mid-September. In all, Jews were about seven thousand of the forty-five thousand or so Polish civilians killed by the Germans by the end of 1939, somewhat more than the Jewish share of the Polish population.

(http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_025.html#fil epos1335826)
....

Arthur Greiser, placed in charge of the largest of Germany’s new regions, known as the Reichsgau Wartheland, was particularly receptive to the idea of “strengthening Germandom.” His province extended west to east from the major Polish city Poznań to the major Polish city Łódź. It was home to about four million Poles, 366,000 Jews, and 327,000 Germans. Himmler proposed to deport one million people by February 1940, including all of the Jews and several hundred thousand Poles. Greiser began the project of “strengthening Germandom” by emptying three psychiatric hospitals and having the patients shot. Patients from a fourth psychiatric hospital, at Owińska, met a different fate. They were taken to the local Gestapo headquarters in October and November 1939 and gassed by carbon monoxide released from canisters. This was the first German mass murder by this method. Some 7,700 Polish citizens found in mental institutions were murdered, beginning a policy of “euthanasia” that would soon be followed within the boundaries of prewar Germany as well. Over the course of the next two years, more than seventy thousand German citizens would be gassed as “life unfit for life.” Strengthening Germandom had an internal and an external dimension; aggressive war abroad allowed for the murder of German citizens. So it began and so it would continue.
.....

Whereas the Germans preserved prewar Polish-Jewish elites, choosing from among them a Judenrat to implement German policies in the ghetto, they tended to regard non-Jewish Polish elites as a political threat. In early 1940, Hitler came to the conclusion that the more dangerous Poles in the General Government should simply be executed. He told Frank that Polish “leadership elements” had to be “eliminated.” Frank drew up a list of groups to be destroyed that was very similar to that of Operation Tannenberg: the educated, the clergy, the politically active. By an interesting coincidence, he announced this plan to “liquidate” groups regarded as “spiritual leaders” to his subordinates on 2 March 1940, three days before Beria initiated the terror actions against the Polish prisoners in the Soviet Union. His basic policy was the same as Beria’s: to kill people already under arrest, and to arrest people regarded as dangerous and kill them too. Unlike Beria, Frank would use the opportunity to execute common criminals as well, presumably to clear prison space. By the end of summer 1940, the Germans had killed some three thousand people they regarded as politically dangerous, and about the same number of common criminals.

(http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_025.html#fil epos1342888)
The German operation was less well coordinated than the Soviet one. The AB Aktion (Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion, Extraordinary Pacification Action), as these killings were known, was implemented differently in each of the various districts of the General Government. In the Cracow district prisoners were read a summary verdict, although no sentence was actually recorded. The verdict was treason, which would have justified a death sentence: but then, contradictorily, everyone was recorded as having been shot while trying to escape. In fact, the prisoners were taken from Montelupi prison in Cracow to nearby Krzesawice, where they dug their own death pits. A day later they were shot, thirty to fifty at a time. In the Lublin district people were held at the town castle, then taken to a site south of the city. By the light of the headlamps of trucks, they were machine-gunned in front of pits. On one night, 15 August 1940, 450 people were killed.
In the Warsaw district prisoners were held at the Pawiak prison, then driven to the Palmiry Forest. There the Germans had used forced labor to dig several long ditches, three meters wide by thirty meters long. Prisoners were awakened at dawn and told to collect their things. In the beginning, at least, they thought that they were being transferred to another camp. Only when the trucks turned into the forest did they understand their fate. The bloodiest night was 20-21 June 1940, when 358 people were shot. (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_025.html#fil epos1352684)


In the Radom district, the action was especially systematic and brutal. Prisoners were bound, and read a verdict: they were a “danger to German security.” As in the other cities, Poles did not usually understand that this was supposed to have been a judicial procedure. They were taken away in large groups in the afternoon, according to a schedule: “3:30 binding, 3:45 reading of verdict, 4:00 transport.” The first few groups were driven to a sandy area twelve kilometers north of Częstochowa, where they were blindfolded and shot. The wife of one of the prisoners, Jadwiga Flak, was later able to find her way to the killing site. She found in the sand the unmistakable signs of what had happened: shards of bone and bits of blindfold. Her husband Marian was a student who had just turned twenty-two. Four prisoners who were members of the city council had survived. Himmler’s brother-in-law, who happened to be the man who ran the city for the Germans, believed that he needed them to construct a swimming pool and a brothel for Germans. (Bloodlands, chapter 4) (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_025.html#fil epos1352895)



(http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_025.html#fil epos1342888)
[URL="http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_025.html#fil epos1335325"]

[AntifaArnhem]

On 10 June, Diekmann's battalion sealed off the town of Oradour-sur-Glane, having confused it with nearby Oradour-sur-Vayres and ordered all the townspeople – and anyone who happened to be in or near the town – to assemble in the village square, ostensibly, to have their identity papers examined. In addition to the residents of the village, the SS also apprehended six people who did not live there but had the misfortune to be riding their bikes through the village when the Germans arrived.

All the women and children were locked in the church while the village was looted. Meanwhile, the men were led to six barns and sheds where machine-gun nests were already in place.

According to the account of a survivor, the soldiers began shooting at them, aiming for their legs so that they would die more slowly. Once the victims were no longer able to move, the soldiers covered their bodies with fuel and set the barns on fire. Only six men escaped; one of them was later seen walking down a road heading for the cemetery and was shot dead. In all, 190 men perished.

The soldiers proceeded to the church and placed an incendiary device there. After it was ignited, women and children tried to escape through the doors and windows of the church, but they were met with machine-gun fire. A total of 247 women and 205 children died in the carnage. Only two women and one child survived; one was 47-year-old Marguerite Rouffanche. She slid out by a rear sacristy window, followed by a young woman and child; the Germans' attention was aroused and the three were shot. Marguerite Rouffanche was wounded and her companions were killed. She crawled to some pea bushes behind the church, where she remained hidden overnight until she was rescued the following morning. Another group of about twenty villagers had fled Oradour-sur-Glane as soon as the soldiers had appeared. That night, the village was partially razed.

A few days later, survivors were allowed to bury the dead. No less than 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane had been murdered in a matter of hours. Adolf Diekmann claimed that the episode was a just retaliation for partisan activity in nearby Tulle and the kidnapping of Helmut Kämpfe.

On 12 January 1953, a military tribunal in Bordeaux heard the case against the surviving 65 of the approximately 200 German soldiers who had been involved. Only 21 of them were present. (Many were living in East Germany, which would not allow them to be extradited.) Seven of them were Germans, but 14 were Alsatians, French nationals of German ethnicity who had been regarded by the Nazis as members of the "Reich". All but one of them claimed to have been drafted into the Waffen-SS against his will, the so-called malgré-nous (a term which means "in spite of us").

The trial caused a huge protest in Alsace, forcing the French authorities to split the tribunal into two separate proceedings, according to the nationality of the defendants. On 11 February, 20 defendants were found guilty. Continuing uproar (including calls for autonomy) in Alsace pressed the French parliament to pass an amnesty law for all malgré-nous on 19 February, and the convicted Alsatians were released shortly afterwards. This, in turn, caused bitter protests in the Limousin region.

By 1958, all of the German defendants had been released as well. General Heinz Lammerding of the Das Reich division, who had given the orders for the measures against the Resistance, died in 1971 after a successful entrepreneurial career. At the time of the trial, he lived in Düsseldorf, which was located inside the British occupation zone of West Germany, and the French government never obtained his extradition from the British authorities.

[Zostrianos]

Thank you, I'd been wanting to post some of the atrocities they did in France as well.

[Zostrianos]

The Nazis also conducted mass executions and anti-partisan reprisals in Greece. Some of the most important ones, from Wikipedia:

Holocaust of Kalavryta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Kalavryta)

In November 1943, the German 117th Jäger Division began a mission named Unternehmen Kalavryta (Operation Kalavryta), intending to encircle Greek guerilla fighters in the mountainous area surrounding Kalavryta. During the operations, some German soldiers were killed and 77 of them, who were taken prisoners, were executed by the Greek guerillas. The Command of the German division decided to react with harsh and massive reprisal operations. The order was signed by Karl von Le Suire on 10 December 1943.
The reprisals began from the coastal area of Achaea in Northern Peloponnese; Wehrmacht troops marched to the town of Kalavryta, burning villages and murdering civilians on their way. When they reached the town they locked all women and children in the town's school and ordered all male residents 12 and older to a hill just overlooking the village. There, the German troops machine-gunned down all of them. There were only 12 male survivors who were present on that day. One other boy of Kalavryta survived, but he was at school during the massacre in a near-by town. The 12 survivors told their story of survival to him, saying that after the Germans went down the line with the machine-gun, their fallen bodies were covered with other dead bodies. This way, when the Germans went through again to pick off the survivors, the few lucky ones were not further injured or killed. Allegedly, the women and children managed to free themselves from the school after a Nazi took pity on them and let them escape while the town was set ablaze. The following day the Nazi troops burnt down the Monastery of Agia Lavra, a landmark of the Greek War of Independence.
In total, more than 1200 civilians were killed during the reprisal operations. About 1,000 houses were looted and burned and more than 2,000 sheep and other large domestic animals were seized by the Germans.


The Holocaust of Kedros (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_of_Kedros), also known as the Holocaust of Amari (Greek: Ολοκαύτωμα του Αμαρίου), refers to an operation mounted by Nazi German forces against the civilian residents of nine villages located in the Amari Valley on the Greek island of Crete during its occupation by the Axis in World War II. The operation was carried out on 22 August 1944 by Wehrmacht infantry and was followed in the coming days by the razing of most villages, looting, pillage of livestock and destruction of harvests.[1] The number of fatalities among the local population rose to 164 during the course of the operation, which had been ordered by Generalleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, commander of the garrison of Crete, to cow the population and deter local guerrillas from attacking the occupation forces during their imminent retreat to Chania.....
In the dawn of August 22, several battalions of German infantry (presumably belonging to the 16th regiment of the 22. Luftlande Infanterie-Division) arrived at the Amari valley. They succeeded in surrounding the villages lining the western side of the Amari valley without being noticed by their dwellers. These villages, collectively called the Kedros villages, are namely Gerakari, Gourgouthi, Kardaki, Vryses, Smiles, Drygies, Ano Meros and Chordaki. The nearby village of Krya Vrysi was also surrounded. In all villages, the German raids followed roughly the same pattern.[3] The locals were gathered together, the identities of males were verified and those to be executed were picked and kept separately. Women, on the excuse that they would go on a long journey, were ordered to return to their homes and collect their valuables. This was a trick aiming to facilitate the looting that would follow. Women, children and the elderly were taken away while the men whose lives were spared were forced to march towards Rethymno where they were held in Fortezza for a few weeks. Following their departure, firing squads started the executions in groups. When finished, dead bodies were doused in petrol and set on fire. In some cases (e.g., Gerakari, Vryses and Ano Meros), the executions had been carried out in a village house which was afterwards dynamited.
In the days that followed the shootings, the houses were looted and then burned or dynamited, similarly to Kandanos three years earlier. All the loot was collected at Scholi Asomaton, from where it was transported on lorries to Rethymno. Harvests and livestock were confiscated for use by the German troops. Local resistance bands could do nothing but watch with hands tied. Being vastly outnumbered, any opposition attempt for defending the region would be suicidal. George Psychoundakis in his book mentions that from his hideout cave in Ida he could see smoke rising from the villages for more than a week.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_of_Viannos)
Holocaust of Viannos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_of_Viannos)

The Holocaust of Viannos refers to a mass extermination campaign launched by Nazi forces against the civilian residents of around 20 villages located in the areas of east Viannos and west Ierapetra provinces on the Greek island of Crete during World War II. The killings, with a death toll in excess of 500, were carried out on the 14th, 15 and 16 September 1943 by Wehrmacht forces. They were accompanied by the burning of most villages, and the looting and destruction of harvests. The massive loss of life amounted to one of the deadliest massacres during the Axis occupation of Greece. It was ordered by Generalleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, in retaliation for the support and involvement of the local population in the Cretan resistance. Müller, who earned the nickname "the Butcher of Crete", was executed after the war for his part in the massacre.

Mesovouno massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesovouno_massacre)

The Mesovouno massacre (Greek: Η σφαγή του Μεσόβουνου) refers to two massacres perpetrated by members of the Wehrmacht in the village of Mesovouno in Ptolemaida, Greece, during the Axis occupation of Greece, carried out on 23 October 1941 and 22 April 1944.
On 23 October 1941, the Wehrmacht soldiers gathered all men aged 16-69 years old, killed them with machine guns and set the houses on fire. In 1944 the village was razed by Nazi troops two days before the massacre of the village Pyrgoi in Ptolemaida. A total of 268 civilians were killed.
In the 1941 massacre, Mesovouno was part of a series of mass executions by the Nazis that took place from 17 to 28 of October, the rest being the executions of the inhabitants of the villages Kalokastro and Kerdylia in Serres, of Kleisto, Kidonia and Ambelofyto in Kilkis.

[Zostrianos]

Minsk was a centerpiece of Nazi destructiveness. The German air force had bombed the city into submission on 24 June 1941; the Wehrmacht had to wait for the fires to die down before entering. By the end of July the Germans had shot thousands of educated people and confined the Jews to the northwest of the city. Minsk would have a ghetto, and concentration camps, and prisoner-of-war camps, and killing sites. Finally Minsk was transformed by the Germans into a kind of macabre theater, in which they could act out the ersatz victory of killing Jews.


German policy in occupied Minsk was one of savage and unpredictable terror. The carnivalesque death march of 7 November 1941 was only one of a series of murderous incidents that left Jews horrified and confused about their fate. Special humiliations were reserved for Jews who were known and respected before the war. A noted scientist was forced to crawl across Jubilee Square, the center of the ghetto, with a soccer ball on his back. Then he was shot. Germans took Jews as personal slaves to clean their houses and their clothes. The German (Austrian) medical doctor Irmfried Eberl, in Minsk after a tour of duty gassing the handicapped in Germany, wrote to his wife that he needed no money in this “paradise.” When Himmler visited Minsk, he was treated to a show execution of Jews, which was recorded by movie cameras. He seems to have watched himself and the mass murder on film later.

Jewish women suffered in particular ways. Despite regulations against “racial defilement,” some Germans quickly developed a taste for rape as prelude to murder. At least once Germans carried out a “beauty contest” of Jewish women, taking them to the cemetery, forcing them to strip naked, and then killing them. In the ghetto, German soldiers would force Jewish girls to dance naked at night; in the morning only the girls’ corpses remained. Perla Aginskaia recalled what she saw in a dark apartment in the Minsk ghetto one evening in autumn 1941: “a little room, a table, a bed. Blood was streaming down the girl’s body from deep, blackish wounds in her chest. It was quite clear that the girl had been raped and killed. There were gunshot wounds around her genitals.”....

In the second half of 1942, German anti-partisan operations were all but indistinguishable from the mass murder of Jews. Hitler ordered on 18 August 1942 that partisans in Belarus be “exterminated” by the end of the year. It was already understood that the Jews were to be killed by the same deadline. The euphemism “special treatment,” meaning shooting, appears in reports about both Jews and Belarusian civilians. The logic for the two undertakings was circular but nevertheless somehow compelling: Jews were initially to be killed “as partisans” in 1941, when there were not yet any truly threatening partisan formations; then once there were such partisan formations, in 1942, villagers associated with them were to be destroyed “like Jews.” The equivalence between Jews and partisans was emphasized over and over again, in a downward cycle of rhetoric that could end only when both groups were simply gone.[/URL]

(http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_028.html#fil epos1411705)
By the middle of 1942, the number of Jews was in rapid decline, but the number of partisans was in rapid ascent. This had no effect on Nazi reasoning, except to make the methods for dealing with Belarusian civilians ever more similar to the methods of dealing with Jews. As partisans became difficult to target because they were too powerful, and as Jews became difficult to target because they were too scarce, the Germans subjected the non-Jewish Belarusian population to ever more extraordinary waves of killing. From the perspective of the German police, the Final Solution and the anti-partisan campaigns blurred together.
To take a single example: on 22 and 23 September 1942, Order Police Battalion 310 was dispatched to destroy three villages for ostensible connections to the partisans. At the first village, Borki, the police apprehended the entire population, marched the men, women, and children seven hundred meters, and then handed out shovels so that people could dig their own graves. The policemen shot the Belarusian peasants without a break from 9:00 in the morning until 6:00 in the evening, killing 203 men, 372 women, and 130 children. The Order Police spared 104 people classified as “reliable,” although it is hard to imagine how they could have remained so after this spectacle. The battalion reached the next village, Zabloitse, at 2:00 in the morning, and surrounded it at 5:30. They forced all of the inhabitants into the local school, and then shot 284 men, women, and children. At the third village, Borysovka, the battalion reported killing 169 men, women, and children. Four weeks later, the battalion was assigned to liquidate Jews at a work camp. When they killed 461 Jews on 21 October, they used very similar methods: the only difference was that there was no need to surprise the population, since it was already under guard in the camp.

Lacking personnel in the rear and needing to keep troops at the front, the Germans tried in autumn 1942 to make anti-partisan warfare more efficient. Himmler named Bach, the local Higher SS and Police Leader, chief of anti-partisan warfare in the areas under civilian authority. In practice the responsibility fell upon his deputy, Curt von Gottberg, a drunk whose SS career had been rescued by Himmler. Gottberg suffered no war injuries but had lost part of a leg (and his SS commission) by driving his automobile into a fruit tree. Himmler paid for the prosthetic leg and had Gottberg reinstated. The assignment to Belarus was a chance to prove his manhood, which he seized. After only one month of police training he formed his own Battle Group, which was active from November 1942 through November 1943. In their first five months of campaigning, the men of his Battle Group reported killing 9,432 “partisans,” 12,946 “partisan suspects,” and about 11,000 Jews. In other words, the Battle Group shot an average of two hundred people every day, almost all of them civilians. (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_028.html#fil epos1412073)

The unit responsible for more atrocities than any other was the SS Special Commando Dirlewanger, which had arrived in Belarus in February 1942. In Belarus and indeed in all the theaters of the Second World War, few could compete in cruelty with Oskar Dirlewanger. He was an alcoholic and drug addict, prone to violence. He had fought in the German right-wing militias after the First World War, and spent the early 1920s tormenting communists and writing a doctoral dissertation on planned economics. He joined the Nazi party in 1923, but jeopardized his political future by traffic accidents and sexual liaisons with an underage girl. In March 1940 Himmler placed him in charge of a special Poachers’ Brigade, a unit made up of criminals imprisoned for hunting on the property of others. Some Nazi leaders romanticized these men, seeing them as pure primitive German types, resisting the tyranny of the law. The hunters were first assigned to Lublin, where the unit was strengthened by other criminals, including murderers and the clinically insane. In Belarus, Dirlewanger and his hunters did engage partisans. Yet more often they killed civilians whose villages were in the wrong place. Dirlewanger’s preferred method was to herd the local population inside a barn, set the barn on fire, and then shoot with machine guns anyone who tried to escape. The SS Special Commando Dirlewanger killed at least thirty thousand civilians in its Belarusian tour of duty.

(http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_028.html#fil epos1412846)
....

The main German actions of mid-1942 and onward, known as “Large Operations,” were actually designed to kill Belarusian civilians as well as Belarusian Jews. Unable to defeat the partisans as such, the Germans killed the people who might be aiding the struggle. Units were given a daily kill quota, which they generally met by encircling villages and shooting most or all of the inhabitants. They shot people over ditches or, in the case of Dirlewanger and those who followed his example, burned them in barns or blew them up by forcing them to clear mines. In autumn 1942 and early 1943, the Germans liquidated ghettos and whole villages associated with the partisans. In Operation Swamp Fever in September 1942, the Dirlewanger Brigade killed the 8,350 Jews still alive in the ghetto in Baranovichi, and then proceeded to kill 389 “bandits” and 1,274 “bandit suspects.” These attacks were led by Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Chief for Reichskommissariat Ostland, the same man who had organized the mass shootings of Jews at Kamianets-Podilskyi in Ukraine and the liquidation of the Riga ghetto in Latvia. Operation Hornung of February 1943 began with the liquidation of the Slutsk ghetto, which is to say the shooting of some 3,300 Jews. In an area southwest of Slutsk the Germans killed about nine thousand more people.

....

Under this new policy, German policemen and soldiers were to kill Belarusian women and children so that their husbands and fathers and brothers could be used as slave laborers. The anti-partisan operations of spring and summer 1943 were thus slavery campaigns rather than warfare of any recognizable kind. Yet because the slave hunts and associated mass murder were sometimes resisted by the Soviet partisans, the Germans did take losses. In May and June 1943 in Operations Marksman and Gypsy Baron (named after an opera and an operetta), the Germans aimed to secure railways in the Minsk region as well as workers for Germany. They reported killing 3,152 “partisans” and deporting 15,801 laborers. Yet they took 294 dead of their own: an absurdly low ratio of 1:10, if one assumed (wrongly) that reported partisan dead were actual partisans rather than (generally) civilians, but still a significant number.
In May 1943 in Operation Cottbus, the Germans sought to clear all partisans from an area about 140 kilometers north of Minsk. Their forces destroyed village after village by herding populations into barns and then burning the barns to the ground. On the following days, the local swine and dogs, now without masters, would be seen in villages with burned human limbs in their jaws. The official count was 6,087 dead; but the Dirlewanger Brigade alone reported fourteen thousand killed in this operation. The majority of the dead were women and children; about six thousand men were sent to Germany as laborers....

There was a Soviet partisan movement, and the Germans did try to suppress it. Yet German policies, in practice, were little more than mass murder. In one Wehrmacht report, 10,431 partisans were reported shot, but only ninety guns were reported taken. That means that almost all of those killed were in fact civilians. As it inflicted its first fifteen thousand mortal casualties, the Special Commando Dirlewanger lost only ninety-two men—many of them, no doubt, to friendly fire and alcoholic accidents. A ratio such as that was possible only when the victims were unarmed civilians. Under the cover of anti-partisan operations, the Germans murdered Belarusian (or Jewish, or Polish, or Russian) civilians in 5,295 different localities in occupied Soviet Belarus. Several hundred of these villages and towns were burned to the ground. All in all, the Germans killed about 350,000 people in their anti-partisan campaign, at the very least ninety percent of them unarmed. The Germans killed half a million Jews in Belarus, including thirty thousand during the anti-partisan operations. It was unclear just how these thirty thousand people were to be counted: as Jews killed in the Final Solution, or as Belarusian civilians killed in anti-partisan reprisals? The Germans themselves often failed to make the distinction, for very practical reasons. As one German commander confided to his diary, “The bandits and Jews burned in houses and bunkers were not counted.” (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_028.html#fil epos1414550)


Of the nine million people who were on the territory of Soviet Belarus in 1941, some 1.6 million were killed by the Germans in actions away from battlefields, including about 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 Jews, and 320,000 people counted as partisans (the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians). These three general campaigns constituted the three greatest German atrocities in eastern Europe, and together they struck Belarus with the greatest force and malice. Another several hundred thousand inhabitants of Soviet Belarus were killed in action as soldiers of the Red Army. (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_028.html#fil epos1416690)


(http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_028.html#fil epos1414688)


(http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_028.html#fil epos1412601)[URL="http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_028.html#fil epos1402443"]