Hitler's Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe
Page 5
In 1904, thirteen years after the Zelewski debacle, Schlieffen had another opportunity to fully rehearse his concept of war under hostile fire conditions. In German Southwest Africa (Namibia), the Herero tribes were challenging the German’s right to rule them. With a population estimated at eighty thousand, they represented more than a few unruly clans waging a bush war (Buschkrieg). Schlieffen prepared a full-scale operational plan and recommended Lothar von Trotha to command the expedition. Trotha’s chief of staff was Oberstleu-tnant Charles de Beaulieu from the Army General Staff. Among the line officers were Franz Ritter von Epp and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. The German plan called for a series of oblique maneuvers by the troops, coordinated through the Etappen, to pressure the Herero into congregating in one place. The coup de main, an encirclement of the Herero, would lead to their annihilation through superior tactics and systematic killing. The Herero gathered at the Waterberg in August 1904, and Trotha sensed this was his opportunity to strike. After the battle, Trotha wrote, “My initial plan for the operation, which I always adhered to, was to encircle the masses of Herero at Waterberg, and to annihilate these masses with a simultaneous blow.” He expected to “establish various stations to hunt down and disarm the splinter groups who escaped, later to lay hands on the captains by putting prize money on their heads and finally to sentence them to death.”58 A Festschrift published by approval of the German War Ministry (Kriegsministerium) confirmed the plan for battlefield decapitation and extermination.59
Although technically outnumbered, the German order of battle included artillery and heavy machine guns, field telecommunications, and exploitation of the railway network. The central command (Etappenkommandantur Swakopmund) controlled the main supply depots, as well as the flow of reserves and replacements, and managed all communications (transport and telecommunications). From the central hub, each Ortskommandantur was placed in a strategic position and guarded by a ring of guard posts. Linking these outposts was the militarized railway system with station commanders (Bahnhofskommandantur) and the railway troops (Eisenbahntruppen), erecting an internal security web across Namibia. The military railroad increased the army’s response to Herero incursions. Landwehr troops posted to the Etappen and railway installations erected defensive positions, armed strongpoints (Stützpunkte), with machine-gun posts and trench lines.60
Contradictory accounts of the battle that followed exist. Helmut Bley argued that the Herero broke out of the encirclement.61 Horst Drechsler believed Trotha deliberately deployed troops in such a way as to leave an opening. A gap filled by a small force under Major von der Heyde was to hold its position, while the stronger pressing force under Oberst Deimling was to force the Herero, during the melee, to break out, but only into the wastelands of the Omaheke Desert (referred to as the Sandveld).62 Tilman Dedering suggested that poor coordination and planning allowed the Herero to break out and escape. Dedering also explained that subsequent justifications by Trotha and his staff only confused the outcome further.63 Epp happened to serve at the Waterberg in his second colonial campaign, and Epp’s version is the tacit acceptance of failure. After Trotha issued the orders on August 4, Epp noticed that there were large gaps between the encircling forces. One group, under Deimling, was slow to arrive at its designated position and was last in line. The fighting opened at 6:30 a.m., when Epp’s troops entered the fighting zone. Another unit from Epp’s group came on the receiving end of a surprise and concerted Herero counter-attack. At 8:00 a.m., the Herero attacked the left flank, and only with machine guns could the Germans hold them off. Another counter-attack at 9:30 a.m. forced Epp to deploy his artillery. A strong attack at 12:30 p.m. forced Epp to keep firing while on the move. After an hour, the fighting gave way to a pursuit that lasted until 3:15 p.m., when the Germans, without explanation, marched back to their encampments. Epp recorded that, after the battle, until August 16, his unit spent time in the “noble” soldierly task of cattle rustling.64
The escape of the Herero and their continuing acts of insurgency led the Germans to introduce Bandenbekämpfung operations. Kurd Schwabe described several such operations, and one example is especially revealing. During the occupation of Namibia in 1905, Etappen troops attempted to destroy Andreas, a Herero guerrilla leader (Bandenführer), and his followers. On May 12, a detachment from an Etappen company located and attacked the guerrillas by a river. After five hours of hard fighting on difficult ground, the Herero leader escaped with the loss of twenty men. The Germans had no idea of the actual size of his force. The German casualties included one officer, two troopers, and three members of the Schutztruppen. The Germans divided into two troops; one followed Andreas, while the other returned to the nearest Etappen base to report the incident. Raising a general alarm, two more detachments set off in pursuit of Andreas. One detachment came from an Etappen company; the other included ninety volunteers armed with an artillery piece and led by an Oberleutnant of the reserve.65 On May 26, Andreas fled toward the British border and was intercepted. The next day, as the Germans tried to prevent him crossing into British territory, Andreas changed direction and joined up with the Herero leader Hendrik Witbooi and remained inside Namibia.
On June 7, Andreas turned up again to rustle cattle from a German farmer and attracted the attention of three patrols, each led by an officer. They decided on immediate action and attacked Andreas, who once again disappeared. The following day, Andreas was located again and one hundred riflemen attacked his position. On the morning of June 9, the Germans attacked, and during a three-hour clash of arms, they killed Andreas’s son and fourteen other Herero, capturing 250 cattle and various booty. German casualties included one officer killed and another wounded. Andreas fled initially along the river, and then moved into the mountains, losing the trailing Germans. German reserve companies moved into the area and conducted a cleansing (Säuberung) operation, rounding up non-combatants and placing them in labor camps.66 Andreas, like the proverbial bad penny, reappeared in September 1905, this time joined by a band of “Hottentots” (Hottentottenbanden). The Germans located his position within a mountain range. They conducted a six-hour climb to inflict a five-hour skirmish on the guerrillas. The Germans recorded more than eighty Hottentots dead from a band estimated at three hundred; a further twenty Herero were confirmed killed. The German casualties were two troopers killed and ten wounded, and again they rounded up cattle.67 Andreas escaped, outrunning the Germans to reach the British border, but was arrested by the local police. Schwabe reported that 107 Herero were captured, of whom forty-five were men with twenty-eight rifles between them.68 Referring to the latter part of the conflict, the 1913 infantry handbook recorded that in July 1905, Hendrik Witbooi had faced a concentric attack (konzentrischen Vormarsch) and had only escaped in “small groups of bandits” (kleine Banden).69
The sting was in the tail. Trotha failed with Cannae, which cost the German government the deployment of sixteen thousand soldiers on long-term overseas service. In 1907, the Germans formed a police zone in Namibia as the means toward the permanent protection of the colonists.70 The zone operated 113 police stations with approximately seven men per post. A police troop of 60 senior NCOs, 320 NCOs, 60 constables, and 330 native police functioned as a rapid reaction force to quell serious outbreaks of trouble. The numbers indicate a deterrent policing screen to discourage the native population from resistance.71 Even with the German military railway serving as an iron noose around the country, preventing further uprisings, the patrols did not cause large-scale killing. In fact, the Germans had proved largely inept in both leadership and general operational capability. Schlieffen’s ideas had not defeated Herero ingenuity. The real cause of the killing lay in the occupation measures. Jürgen Zimmerer’s research of the German administration highlighted the mass deaths caused by slave labor and a deliberate policy of starvation. Zimmerer has identified the army’s experimentation with social controls and their devastating consequences on colonized communities.72
The transition of the war
from a military campaign into a full-scale security operation coincided with the deterioration in the treatment of the Herero. They went from classification as valiant foes to objects for extermination. On the grounds that they had committed brutalities, Trotha had ordered the Herero to leave Namibia.73 The extermination of the Herero was only partly attributable to full-blown military or Bandenbekämpfung operations. The German military occupation lasted from 1904 until 1912. The ethnic cleansing of the Herero people led to a population reduction from eighty thousand in 1904 to twenty thousand by 1912.74 The scale of killing was new, but the extreme behavior was not, as the China expedition bears out. The political reverberations and criticism of the army’s performance again seeped into German society. At a time of great power rivalry and following the kaiser’s criticism of British behavior during the Boer War, Trotha’s failure became the army’s national embarrassment. Schlieffen ensured that Trotha never served in the field again, and he died in retirement in 1920.75 Throughout 1905, Schlieffen had to defend himself against accusations that he had harmed the good name of the army.76 Perhaps this political criticism, more than his fall from a horse, eventually led to his retirement in 1906. Epp’s fundamental criticism of the army reflected Schlieffen’s drive for professionalism: “If we want to make serious military progress, we must do this through the education of the people…. The soldier class must become a fundamental element and pillar of the nation.”77
The First World War
Two recent and original pieces of research into the German armed forces during the First World War have refocused our attention on the army’s performance and repositioned perceptions of its underlying motivations. John Horne and Alan Kramer conducted an exhaustive study of the 1914 atrocities committed by the army in Belgium and France.78 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius examined the “Ober Ost” (Oberbefehlshaber Ost) and found a military government that aspired to utopian idealism.79 Together, their work provides a framework for a brief but structured analysis of German military security in the First World War. An analysis of the troops, the Etappen, and the occupation highlights the continuous swing away from offensive military operations and toward the expansion of the rear area as the basis of the German war effort. Within this enlargement of security, Bandenbekämpfung played a small but significant part in the war. In the stages, Germany’s war depended on the success of the rigid application of Schlieffen’s (modified) plan. The massive Cannae of the Western allied forces was meticulously planned, with offensive operations running to a forty-two-day schedule. The army initially sliced through Belgium, supported by the home depots and the mobile Etappen that relentlessly pushed troops and replacements to the front. By August, however, the scale of operations and the unexpected resistance from the Allies kept stalling the German progress, and the logistics system backed up as railheads were unable to distribute supplies fast enough. The Russian invasion of eastern Germany caused apprehension. Eventually, a Cannae victory was scored at Tannenberg, but it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The long road of failures since 1891 was, in the light of Germany’s military record, consistent. The general staff descended into a strategic depression and was unable to cast off the inertia until 1918.
There is every reason to assume that Schlieffen analyzed Trotha’s failure, and there is also every reason to believe he was unable to accept that Cannae hamstrung the army with an impossible tactical task. After Schlieffen retired, the general staff looked to Clausewitz for solutions to make the plan work, including reducing friction in operations and increasing the impact of the surprise essential in gaining superiority over a larger opponent.80 Between August and October 1914, the army deliberately killed sixty-five hundred French and Belgian civilians. Horne and Kramer wrote that these acts were isolated to the deliberate killing of civilians, plundering, and causing widespread destruction.81 Horne and Kramer proposed reasons for the killing, including the presence of colonial officers, the franc-tireur paranoia that gripped the popular press, and the speed in which orders were issued to punish civilians for a host of crimes. Had the army ordered a “shoot first and ask questions afterward” policy? Were the soldiers “trigger-happy” troopers? Did they believe in the franc-tireur myth? And how many of the million who invaded Belgium pulled the trigger on defenseless civilians?
The potential of a franc-tireur threat held implications for Schlieffen’s plan and a two-front war. The rapid drain on reserves could not afford the luxury of an 1870–71 style security campaign. The Landwehr of 1914–18 played a central part in offensive operations. Landwehr regiments organized as divisions and brigades and participated in major battles. One frontline infantry regiment, six Landwehr regiments, and four Landsturm regiments successfully carried out the Battle of Nowogeorgiewsk (1915) northwest of Warsaw.82 An indication of the change can be found in the record of the 6th Landwehr Infantry Regiment, which served all four years on the Eastern Front. Initially deployed on August 28, 1914, this regiment was formed from three battalions with a single machine-gun company. More than 1,550 officers and men were killed while serving with the regiment, and collectively they tell an interesting story. From the large numbers of casualties suffered in 1914, the majority came from the former German towns of Glogau and Fraustadt in Upper Silesia, reflecting the three battalion depots. By the end of the war, the casualties were men drawn from across Germany. 83 During the war, regiments were swallowed up not by the Etappe, but to fill gaps in the front. Not for the first or the last time, German security troops were posted to frontline duties in times of emergency. By 1917, in the east, these units were integrated into an occupation organization. The 9th Etappen Inspectorate of the 8th Army, for example, contained the 45th Reserve Field Artillery Regiment, 8th Cavalry Division, 1st Cavalry Division, 19th Landwehr Division, and the 7th Mobile Railway Command for railhead duties.84
The Etappen grew into an enormous establishment in an effort to support the army, exploit the occupation, and impose social control. In the west, the Etappen evolved a static structure with an offensive capability to exploit breakthroughs. The Mobile Etappen were also used to erect a defensive line prior to a retreat.85 On the Western Front, the frontline trenches and the Etappen caused the overlapping of layers of military establishment, which in turn led to a melting pot of front and rear echelons.86 The range of humanity that was capable of passing through the Etappen charged with overseeing a particular area was colossal. There was the clockwork movement of fighting units back and forth to the front, the arrival of replacements, the care system for casualties, the movement of prisoners of war, the collection of forced labor, and the ubiquitous army of entertainers, including publicans, actors, musicians, and prostitutes. The relations between the controllers and the interlopers led to difficulties and, in Richard Holmes’s opinion, caused the vehement cultural distinction between “front and rear” and the adoption of the invective “rear-area swine” (Etappenschweine).87 This situation was common to soldiers of all armies, but in the German army, the Etappen represented more than the extension of authority and jurisdiction: it was the regulator of a military society. Ernst Jünger left an impression of one Etappen commander: “One Captain of Horse dubbed himself the King of Quéant, and made his appearance every night at our round table, where he was greeted by upraised right hands and a thunderous ‘Long Live the King!’”88
The introduction of integrated operational intelligence, counterintelligence, policing with secured perimeters and guard networks, and border controls began to take shape in German security policy. When Maj. Gen. Fritz Gempp, of German military intelligence, recorded the outbreak of irregular fighting (Freischärlerkampf) in Antwerp, on September 29, 1914, there was no such system of security in place.89 Gradually a system developed that included an industry of occupation bureaucracy, with everything from identity cards, transit papers, rationing systems, population censuses, the recording of inhabitants of individual buildings, and the regulation of schools and businesses. In the west, there were celebrated espionage cases. From t
he post-war writing of Gottfried Benn, the famous German poet, we have an account of Edith Cavell’s execution in 1915. Benn served in the German occupation of Brussels as the army’s senior medical officer. He had the duty of attending the execution and later wrote an account of what happened. Benn’s skills articulated a snapshot of the German occupation; collection-detention camps for deported French and Belgian females, prior to being assigned for hard labor (Cavell was briefly imprisoned in one such camp), were located in the Aachen area.90 The railway line between Brussels and Aachen, operated by the Etappen military railroad, a journey today of less than two hours, was constructed and paid for with loans from the Bank of Brussels in the 1840s. By September 1916, this railway was working flat-out and the camps were bursting to cope with Ludendorff’s order to extradite twelve thousand Belgians into forced labor; by October his weekly demand was twenty thousand.91 German methods were driven toward absolute security and massive economic exploitation. These drives required the disposal of large numbers of civilians through collaboration.92 From the few documents that have survived, it is possible to piece together a snapshot of occupation, as French and the Belgian civilians were held hostage to their very existence.93
The German occupation of Northern France led to the organization of six districts with headquarters in Valenciennes, Laon, Cambrai, Vouziers, Charleville, and Vervin. Helen McPhail found that the army controlling the sector determined the regulation of occupation. The system depended on the active collaboration of town and village mayors to regulate the civilian population. 94 On the Eastern Front, there were shifting priorities with the experience of victory and annexation of formerly Russian territory. Liulevicius thought that in the Ober Ost the Germans displayed a form of rule that encompassed both bureaucracy and technology, reaching a peak of professional occupation.95 He argued that the occupation authorities espoused a military utopia that came to underpin Nazi ideology and war making. This is a credible assumption, but as always in German history, there remain those loose strands that indicate the potential for other influences and direction. In the central area of the Eastern Front, the German army entered Warsaw on August 4, 1915, and Field Marshal Falkenhayn immediately established a general government under General von Beseler.96 Records from the Warsaw general government survive and indicate that it was a complex organization with an in-depth security network of guard posts and strongpoints strung across the city.97 German civilians attached to the Etappen in the east included university professors, architects, accountants, doctors, hunters, foresters, and significant numbers of public servants. The depth of planning, infrastructure rebuilding, introducing an education system, and distributing publications, however, was not evidence of “enlightened” occupation. Evidently, innocent care facilities arranged for the benefit the troops were also amenable for terrorizing civilians.