Three responses on the Wehrmacht exhibit follow.   - ed.

1.
Submitted by:  James Tent
          jtent@UAB.EDU

I wish to add a detail to Professor Bartov's observations on the
Wehrmacht's degree of knowledge, and therefore complicity, in what
transpired on the Eastern Front.
        While conducting interviews with eyewitnesses for my first book on
postwar
Germany, I met Dr. Henry Kellermann, a German-Jewish refugee from Hitler's
Germany and a trained lawyer who eventually made a distinguished career in
the U.S. State Department and was involved in postwar planning. Dr.
Kellermann told me in an aside during one session that he had been involved
in preparing indictments and finding documents for the Nuremberg Trials. In
that capacity he met General Walter Warlimont, formerly Deputy Chief of the
OKW.  When the subject of atrocities arose in their discussions, Warlimont
volunteered the information to Kellermann that his Wehrmacht, meaning the
OKH, was fully apprized as to what was going on in the East and that if in
the up-coming trials any senior military officers attempted to say that
they were ignorant of such atrocities then they were simply lying!
Warlimont was known among his fellow officers for his integrity. Moreover,
he could not be accused of accusing others in order to cut a deal for
himself since, he too, was tried at a later Nuremberg Trial (the 12th and
last in that series) and sentenced by the Americans to life imprisonment in
1948 (he was released in 1957). He died in 1976.
        Unfortunately, Dr. Kellermann died last year and cannot be queried
further. Therefore, I feel the need to relate his experience to readers who
are interested in what the Wehrmacht leadership knew was happening in their
own campaign areas as related by one of their own.

James F. Tent
University of Alabama at Birmingham


2.
Submitted by:  Jorg Bottger
        bottgerholstein@YAHOO.COM

I am sure who Dr. Omer Bartov is and find myself largely in agreement with
the tenor of his posting. Yet at the same time I have misgivings about a
few of his statements.

First of all, I fail to see how Mr. Bartov's earlier case studies of three
army front-line units (12th Infantry, 18th Panzer, and the Grossdeutschland
division) confirm the
findings of Christian Gerlach in his recent tome _Kalkulierte Morde_,
indicating a "massive involvement of the Wehrmacht on all levels" in war
crimes and genocide. Although the indictment against the Wehrmacht has been
out for quite a while, the verdict is not. As one German historian has
nicely put it: "Durchaus offen u. kaum thematisiert ist auch die Frage, in
welchem Ausmass die einfachen Wehrmachtsoldaten, Mannschaften,
Unteroffiziere u. unteren Offiziersraenge an der Ermordung der Juden, der
Erschiessung von Geiseln, Partisanen u. Kommissare u. der Misshandlung von
Kriegsgefangenen beteiligt waren, u. wenn, in welcher Weise, ob aktiv
handelnd, zuschauend, wegschauend oder wie auch immer."[1]  In what way are
particularly the crack 18th Panzer and Grossdeutschland to be considered
representative of the _Ostheer_? Perhaps not all readers of H-German are

aware of the fact that the bulk of the German army employed on the Eastern
Front at any given time consisted of divisions of common foot-soldiers, not
Guderian's fabled _Panzertruppen_. In addition, since Mr. Bartov did not
include one of the numerous Luftwaffe ground forces (Flak units, Luftwaffe
Field Divisions, Parachute troops etc.) and naval land formations in his
analysis, how can one make sweeping generalizations about the conduct of
the entire Wehrmacht in the East based on a sample of three army divisions?

Obviously Mr. Bartov is not much troubled by the fact that more than just a
few photographs have been either misleadingly or wrongly labelled by the
makers of the Wehrmacht exhibition. However, the cumulative effect of the
findings by Bogdan Musial, Dieter Schmidt-Neuhaus, and Krisztian Ungvary
seems to be rather damaging for the reliability and validity of the whole
enterprise. Musial and Schmidt-Neuhaus approached the _Hamburger Institut
fuer Sozialforschung_ (HIS) already in January 1999 with their disturbing
discoveries. The response of the HIS: Schmidt-Neuhaus's analysis was
dismissed as irrelevant and Musial was hauled before court, the latter case
eeriely reminiscent of the Goldhagen/Birn brouhaha.

BTW, can Mr. Bartov explain to me (and other list members for that matter)
in his capacity as a
member of the organizing committee for the Wehrmacht exhibition, why it
will be shown in the U.S. instead of, say, Poland, Byelorussia, or the
Ukraine? Is it because of the undeniably historical fact that large numbers
of Wehrmacht troops set foot on North American soil - as POWs? Rather
peculiar this.


Cheers,
Jorg Bottger
Independent Scholar

Note:
[1] Thomas Kuehne, "Kameradschaft - 'das Beste im Leben des Mannes': Die
deutschen Soldaten des Zweiten Weltkriegs in erfahrungs- und
geschlechtergeschichtlicher Perspektive," Geschichte und Gesellschaft
22(1996): p.505, fn. 6.


3.
Submitted by: Thomas Reimer
        ycrtmr@IX.NETCOM.COM

There is a useful interview with Horst Moeller, the Director of the Munich
Institut fuer  Zeitgeschichte, in today's Focus online at
http://www.focus.de . His comment in the
interview
was "voller Fehler und Suggestionen," and attempted to make "eine
politische Aussage." He
concluded that the showing of such a kind of expo was "verantwortungslos."
Also in today's [23 Oct.] Die Welt at http://www.welt.de, an article by
Susanne Leinemann summarizes the opinion of serious historians that "Die
Kritik an der Wanderaustellung wird immer schaerfer." As Ungvary noted,  of
801 catalog pictures, only 10% of the pictures show clearly Wehrmacht
crimes; 9% show crimes done by other armies, incl. the Red Army and NKWD,
23% are so vague that no one can tell who is killing whom, and 58% have
such vague labeling and provenance that one cannot tell if a war crime has
been occuring.  If indeed crimes had been so widespread, then it should
have been easy to find 801 pictures with not the slightest doubt attached
to them. After over a year of proof, the exposition replaced the Tarnopol
panel (3 of 4 pictures showed NKWD victims) and the Hungarian soldiers
executing people in Stari Becej. This still leaves many other pictures that
are plainly wrong....

Thomas Reimer

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

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