Submitted by: Alexander B. Rossino
ARossino@USHMM.Org

     In reply to Mr. Jorg Bottger's comments on the Wehrmachtausstellung
     (posted 24 March 1998), I would like to contribute the following for
     the benefit of H-German subscribers.


     Mr. Bottger is indeed correct that there is at least some evidence of
     criminal behavior by the Wehrmacht in the Polish campaign, fought from
     1 to 27 September 1939.  It was during this first aggressive military
     action that the German army put into practice what could be called the
     anti-partisan policies that later formed the basis for the "War of
     Extermination" it waged against the USSR.  Many of these policies were
     also implemented in other parts of occupied Eastern Europe, such as
     Yugoslavia, often with devastating consequences for the local
     population, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

     At the core of the Wehrmacht's reaction to the threat of armed
     civilian resistance was its resort to collective reprisal measures,
     so-called Vergeltungsmassnahmen, that were intended to punish local
     populations for attacks on German soldiers committed by small groups
     of perpetrators.  These measures often included the collection and
     execution of hostages, as well as the summary destruction of villages.
     Hostages were arrested during the campaign in Poland at official rates
     of 3:1, 5:1, and 10:1, (compare with the rate of 100:1 authorized by
     General Keitel of OKW in Serbia, September 1941) but these were not
     always shot.  It was at the discretion of the local commander to
     authorize shootings.  In this context it is important to remember that
     hostage-taking was sometimes meant as a deterrent to future attacks.
     Hostages were not always immediately executed, therefore, because
     immediate execution did not provide the insurance against further
     attacks that the army hoped it would.

     On the other hand, hostages were often shot as punishment for the
     local populace and in some instances the numbers killed ran into the
     hundreds.  The most glaring example is in Bromberg (Bydgoszcz) where
     some Wehrmacht units contributed to the execution of over 1,000
     civilians from 9 to 13 September.  Such shootings also occurred in
     Czestochowa on 3-4 September, however, and elsewhere.  The persons
     chosen for execution usually had histories as political activists, but
     the military typically liked to use members of the intelligentsia due
     to their visibility to the local populace.  An example of this would
     be the execution of 50 Gymnasium students by the army in Bromberg.
     Incidentally, German officers were also not above having priests
     executed.

     In this connection, the Wehrmacht unwittingly aided the Einsatzgruppen,
     which carried out their task of liquidating the Polish intelligentsia
     under the cover of war and necessary reprisal actions.  As the case of
     Bromberg shows, the army would not simply stand aside and let the SS
     carry out executions alone, but sometimes participated under the
     assumption that it was punishing the Poles for their resistance.
     Heydrich was able to state on 27 September in this regard that
     probably only 3% of those dangerous elements targeted by his
     Einsatzgruppen remained to be dealt with in Poland.  Additionally,
     other areas of Einsatzgruppe-Wehrmacht cooperation included the
     transfer and interrogation of prisoners, including prisoners of war
     and large-scale arrests (both SS and military formations had standing
     orders to summarily arrest men aged 17-45 during the invasion).

     As for the destruction of villages, the army realized early on in the
     campaign that it was extremely difficult to identify individuals who
     fired on German troops.  General Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army
     Group North, ordered on 4 September, therefore, that if the individual
     could not be caught the house from which the shots were fired should
     be razed.  In the event that the house could not be identified, the
     entire village was to be burned.  Here was a clearly criminal order
     that was part of the army's standing operating procedure when fighting
     partisans in the USSR.

     As for the extent to which these actions were informed by a racist
     mentality, or other aspects of Nazi ideology, the evidence suggests
     that while it was definitely an influence, it was perhaps not as much
     as later in the Balkans and USSR.  The continuity seems to lie in the
     willingness of German officers to resort to the use of high-levels of
     brutality against people considered inferior, but unlike the campaign
     against the USSR, no criminal orders like the Commissar Order, or
     Barbarossa Decree were perpetrated beforehand.  Violence was thus an
     impulse at this early stage in the war and not yet formalized into
     widely-disseminated orders as was the case later.

     In addition, there is the military's curious and contradictory
     behavior regarding the Einsatzgruppen.  For while there was a great
     deal of cooperation between the SD and the Wehrmacht, there were also
     some conflicts.  The causes for these are too detailed to go into at
     this point, but that they happened has led some scholars to argue that
     the Wehrmacht's campaign against Poland was not ideologically
     oriented.  Of these scholars, Juergen Foerster has been the most
     strident in repeatedly arguing that the Polish campaign cannot be
     legitimately seen as a rehearsal for what came later.  He argues this
     again in an essay due to be published this year by the Oxford Press
     through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as part of a compilation on
     the period.

     As for the barbarization of warfare, I believe Mr. Bottger has gotten
     Omer Bartov confused with Foerster.  Bartov argued in "Hitler's Army"
     that events during the Polish campaign and the behavior of German
     soldiers indeed showed that there were already tendencies within the
     Wehrmacht towards brutality and criminal behavior.  I have attempted
     to give substance to this in a new article published in Holocaust and
     Genocide Studies (Winter 1997) entitled "Destructive Impulses: German
     Soldiers and the Conquest of Poland."

     Getting back to the Wehrmachtausstellung, I spoke with Dr. Walter
     Manoschek and Hannes Heer, two of the designers of the exhibition, last
     summer and asked them why the Polish campaign was left out.  Heer told
     me that he could not find anyone who was working on it at that time.
     He assured me, however, that adding a segment on the Polish campaign
     was in the works.  This was in part motivated by pressure from the
     Poles and sensitivity on his part in recognizing that if the exhibition
     was to travel through Poland, as is intended, it absolutely has to
     address the issue.

     I hope that this clarifies matters for Mr. Bottger and other list
     readers regarding the Wehrmacht's behavior in Poland.  The subject has
     unfortunately been neglected here in the West, a reality I hope to
     rectify in the coming years.


     Alexander B. Rossino
     (ARossino@USHMM.Org)

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