Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau

June 26, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 3 and 4. Chapter three is titled "Related German Agencies" and describes the numerous other official agencies with whom the War Crimes Bureau collaborated, and how cooperation was carried out.

Chapter four, "Methods of Obtaining Evidence" tells us how cases were built and gives some vivid examples of mutilations and other outrages committed against German soldiers on the East, West and South Fronts. The bulk of the testimony (approx. 85%) came from ten's of thousands of sworn witnesses giving depositions to military judges or local courts. 1hr11m

July 6, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 7 and 8, having to do with how Bureau investigations were used by the German government and by the Wehrmacht.

Chapt. 7 talks about White Books and White Papers which were put out by the German Foreign Office. One unexpected and disappointing development was that when photographs of the atrocities committed on Germans in Poland were published in the White Books, there was such an outcry over the "horror pictures" that Germany stopped adding those images. Naturally, since the Germans didn't commit mutilations on their enemies, the other side didn't have such pictures to print.

Chapt. 8 is about the use of Bureau investigations for "Diplomatic Protection" for prisoners of war, the wounded, medical personnel, etc. A number of examples of protests are given, on both the West and East Fronts (South too). Something I did not know: "thousands of German POW's had already been liquidated by Soviet forces in the first weeks of fighting." 47m28s

Image: A German White book from the First World War, 1914. I could not find a single image of a WWII White Book. Are they outlawed? Enlarge

July 27, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 11 and 12. Chapter 11 is titled “Investigations of German War Crimes” which discusses Adolf Hitler's “Order Number 1” (which was not a war crime but allows de Zayas to bring up the concentration camps and alleged “extermination of Jews”); alleged war crimes in North Africa; the status of medical personnel; alleged crimes during the Allied invasion of Europe and at Malmedy.

Chapter 12, titled “Wehrmacht Conceptions of Postwar International Law,” covers ideas that were being developed for a more German-friendly Convention of international laws of war. The current laws, they thought, represented British interests. 1h12m

Below: Unidentified prisoners of war (POW's) whom are supposed to be protected by the Geneva Convention.

August 10, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 14 and 15.

Chapter 14 is titled "The Western Theater of War" which covers:

• Crimes by English soldiers against civilians, mainly in Belgium;
• Crimes against German soldiers in France;
• The French Resistance.

Chapter 15 is titled "Crete":

• Violations of International Law  by British Armed Forces and Cretan civilians;
• Mutilation of German corpses was widespread, which brought on reprisals against civilians;
• Eyewitness reports by Wehrmacht survivors of British killings of wounded Germans. 1hr10min
  

Above: Remains of the crew of a Heinkel 111 that landed in Doullens, near Vimy, France in June 1940, amd were lynched by French civilians (and badly beaten too, it appears), but try to find something about it on the Internet. You won't. These photographs are from the Bundesarchiv, published in De Zayas' book. Fortunately, a court-martial was held on June 6, with three perpetrators being sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out on June 29. (Read something about it in chapter 9.) Enlarge

Sept. 14, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 17 -“Feodosia”, 18 -“Grischino” and 19 -“Soviet Crimes against Non-Germans.” These chapters give further evidence of the Soviet policy of killing all Germans the Red Army was able to get it's hands on, plus adding sub-human mutilations such as cutting off body parts or killing with shovels and pickaxes. You will be horrified at some of the things you hear in this reading.

• In Feodosia, 160 severely wounded German soldiers convalescing in hospitals were thrown out the windows and left to freeze to death by Red Army troops;
• In Grischino (close to current Donetsk, Ukraine), nearly 600 Germans and their allies were murdered, mostly by shooting, plus the women first raped, when the Red Army temporarily reoccupied the town;
• Spanish, Italian and Crimean soldiers received worse treatment from the Soviets than did the Germans, and thousands of interned Ukrainian and Baltic civilians were shot before the Soviets abandoned the locations. 58min
  

Image below: A few of the 160 hospitalized German soldiers who were thrown out of 2nd floor windows of hospitals in Feodosia by Red Army soldiers and then down a several meter high wall, where they were left to freeze. Some were carried to the Sea and left in the surf to freeze. The material at the upper left of the picture is iced-over snow. Enlarge (This is the only picture to be easily found from all the accounts in these three chapters. History pages and Google and Yahoo images wipe it all clean; they only want atrocities BY Germans, not against Germans or their allies.)

September 28, 2015

Carolyn reads chapter 21, "Katyn" and chapter 22, "Vinnitsa."

The mass graves discovered in the Katyn Forest in 1943 are the most widely publicized of the political murders and war crimes committed by the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1945, but are just one of innumerable examples from the bloodthirsty regime of Josef Stalin. In the town of Vinnitsa, 10,000 bodies were exhumed from three major burial sites, but more remained in the ground. 1h7m.  Some highlights:

• At Nuremberg, the Soviet prosecutors tried to indict the Germans for the killing of thousands of Polish officerrs at Katyn, but had to abandon the effort due to the obvious falsity of their case:

• Details of the U.S. Congressional investigation, which also found the Soviets responsible;
• Other research, investigations and books exculpated the Germans for the killing of 22,000 Polish military and police officers;
• In Vinnitsa, the murders of political prisoners held in the NKVD prisons began in 1937-38; rumours of what some had seen taking place were mentioned only in whispers;
• In 1943, Germans dug up mass graves in three separate locations in Vinnitsa, but had to end the digging when the Soviets reoccupied the area in 1944;
• International medical committees were formed for both Katyn and Vinnitsa, and found unanimously that the vast murdering took place when the Germans were NOT there, but the Soviets were in control.

Above: One of the mass graves found at Katyn, Even today the establishment tries not to credit the Wehrmacht for discovering and publicizing this horrendous crime against the Poles. Enlarge

Right: close up of tied hands of Polish officer. Enlarge

Below: International expert investigators studying exhumed victims laid out at one site of the Vinnitsa massacre. Enlarge

By Carolyn Yeager

IN LIGHT OF MY PREVIOUS POST: Advice-giving White men who think Germans should get off their knees and stand up to the world again should actually be asking the rest of the world to lay off the “Nazis” instead. And do they? It's they, too, who won't stop contributing to the unfair defilement of Germany's past.

An illustration of this cropped up when a Russian high school student, part of a joint German-Russian school project on the fates of military prisoners on both sides in WWII, spoke in the German Bundestag last Sunday on the National Day of Mourning. There were three German students from Kassel and three Russian from Novy Urengoy (in Siberia). Above right: Sixteen-year-old Nikolai Desyatnichenko gives his short speech in the Bundestag on Sunday, Nov. 19.