German Chivalry In the Soviet Union During WWII

[Prodigal Son]

Morphic's noble, civil, German soldiers....

Barbarossa was not just a war of conquest for Hitler, it was, as he called it, "a war of extermination." Prior to the invasion, he stated to his generals, "The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be fought in a gentlemanly fashion, this struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, merciless, and unrelenting harshness."2

In order to achieve the "unprecedented, merciless, and unrelenting harshness" against the enemies of the Reich, an execution apparatus was created. Special mobile execution units were dispatched into Russia. These execution units, called einsatzgruppen, were attached to the rear of the German army - the Wehrmacht. The task of the einsatzgruppen was to execute Jews, gypsies, and political undesirables. According to an order from Heydrich:

The following are to be executed:

Officials of the Commintern (together with professional Communist politicians in general); Top- and medium-level officials and radical lower-level officials of the Party. Central committee and district and sub-district committees; Peoples commissars; Jews in Party and State employment, and other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, inciters, etc.) insofar as they are, of special importance for the further economic reconstruction of the Occupied Territories ..

'The principal targets of execution by the Einsatzkommandos will be: political functionaries, ...Jews mistakenly released from POW camps, ...Jewish sadists and avengers, ...Jews in general...'"

As the Wehrmacht conquered territories in Russia, the einsatzgruppen moved in to perform their murderous duties.

The einsatzgruppen were created in 1939 by SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Six units were created and used during Hitler's invasion of Poland, and their duties were to murder political prisoners and to round up the Polish Jews and place them into ghettos. The einsatzgruppen were supervised by the Reich Central Security Office - RSHA, which was run by Himmler's lieutenant Reinhard Heydrich.

For the Barbarossa invasion, Heydrich organized the einsatzgruppen into four units: A, B, C, and D. Each einsatzgruppe unit consisted of roughly 1,000 men. Himmler and Heydrich chose the commanders for the einsatzgruppe units. Each unit was divided into smaller units called einsatzkommandos and sonderkommandos. The recruits came from the SS, the Gestapo, Reich Security Services [SD], the Criminal Police, the Security Police, and the military branch of the SS [Wafen-SS]. Rather than concentrate the Jews into ghettos, the einsatzgruppen were now given orders for mass murder. Before the recruits were sent out to carry out their duties, they were given three weeks of instruction including lectures on the importance of killing the enemies of the Nazi Empire.

After the war, Otto Ohlendorf, commander of einsatzgruppe D, gave testimony as to how the killings were carried out:

"The einsatz unit would enter a village or town and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of "resettlement." They were requested to hand over their valuables and shortly before the execution to surrender their outer clothing. They were transported to the place of executions, usually an antitank ditch, in trucks-always only as many as could be executed immediately. In this way it was attempted to keep the span of time from the moment in which the victims knew what was about to happen to them until the time of their actual execution as short as possible. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, by firing squads in a military manner and the corpses thrown into the ditch."3

The open-air killings of the einsatzgruppen were not always satisfactory for the Germans. The executioners were called neck-shooting specialists because they always aimed at the back of the neck of the victim in order to insure a quick death. Sometimes the executioners missed their mark and the victims that did not immediately die. The Nazis feared that the people in the neighboring towns could hear the screaming and moaning of the victims that were wounded but still alive, writhing in the ditches. Some of the executioners aimed at the Star of David patch which was sewn onto the shirts of the Jews. The patch was sewn over the breast and was located over the heart. By aiming at the patch, the executioners shot the victims through the heart. When they were shooting children, the executioners could not get a clear shot because the children were shielded by their mothers. The killers tried to get the mothers to let go of their children so that they could be shot quickly. The executions were full of such scenes of horror.

These executions took place all over the occupied territories in the east. Ironically, Himmler and Heydrich had to deal with the strain that the killings were causing not to the victims, but to the killers. The shootings of innocent men, women, and children were having an effect on the executioners. Many of them went mad and had to be taken to mental institutions, others turned to drinking, and others committed suicide. Even Himmler himself could not stand to watch the killings. He nearly collapsed when he visited an execution site in Minsk. During his visit, an SS Police Commander complained about the strain on his men, "They are finished for the rest of their lives! What kind of followers are we creating by these killings? Either neurotics or brutes!" 4 Despite being shaken by witnessing the killings, Himmler was not inspired to put a stop to it, rather, he felt that this duty must be done. The "enemies" of Germany must be eliminated so that future generations of Germans must not have to live with them. What was needed was a more efficient method of killing that would be easier on the murderers.

http://www.thirdreichpages.org/killingsquads.htm

Of course he'll find soem evidence that this was all just a "hoax". Morphic doesn't seem to realize that being German doesn't make one immunite to the complete desensitization a soldier experiences in war.

[Cd.]

I truely believe that would Hitler would have pursued the war in the east in a more humane fashion, he would have had more success. The Russian General Andrei Vlasov who collaborated with the Nazis, though was never a believer in Nazism himeself, was quoted as saying that given a few Russin divisions under his command, the Stalinist system would have collapsed under its own weight. There was so much hatred for Stalin in Russia that the Germans would have succeeded. Only Hitler's insistance in making war against the people of Russia worked against him.

[MorphicOutFielder]

Hitler msade serious erorrs with jews as well. Any jew who had proven loyalty to Germany should have been accepted. Also, jews should have been given opportunities to demonstrate loyalty.

You guys sure make a lot of assumptions about me.

Do not forget that Germany knew what Russia had done in the Ukraine and that had to be frightening. I suspect that Hitler was frightened. Frightened people make grave mistakes. Hitler certainly made a lot of mistakes.