It should not be assumed that under this decree all NN prisoners, as they were called, were brought to trial after reaching Germany. In the majority of cases no trial was ever held. When brought before the civil or OKW courts under the NN procedure they were usually denied the right of being confronted by the witnesses upon whose evidence they had been charged, and were not allowed to call witnesses in their defence. Often no charge was ever preferred and the accused only learned a few minutes before the trial opened of the nature of the charge for which he was to be tried. The proceedings were held in camera. Such trials were farcical and were intended to be nothing else.
In 1944 the NN proceedings were, on Hitler’s orders, transferred from the courts to the Gestapo, and it is not disputed that under this procedure many thousands of the civilian population in the occupied territories were arrested, deported to Germany, tried, sentenced to death, and executed, or imprisoned under inhumane conditions in prisons and concentration camps from which they seldom returned.
One of the war crimes which will be longest remembered was the destruction of the village of Lidice, in Czechoslovakia, and the massacre of a large number of its inhabitants as a reprisal for the shooting by partisans of the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich.
The Germans arrived in the village late on the night of 9th June 1942 and all the inhabitants were at once ordered to leave their houses, taking with them money and other valuables, and to assemble in the square. All obeyed, but a woman and her child who tried to escape on the way were shot down. The women and children were taken by the Gestapo to the school, where they spent the night.
When day dawned on 10th June, all the men of the village were collected in the barns and stable yard of one farm and from there were led into the garden and shot in batches of ten. The shooting wrent on until 172 male adults had been killed. The executioners were then photographed with the corpses at their feet, like the members of a pheasant shoot with their bag.
A number of the women were taken to Prague and shot there. The remaining 195 were sent to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp where 42 died of ill-treatment, seven were gassed, and three were never seen again. Four women with newly born children were also taken off to a concentration camp after their babies had been murdered.
All the children were separated from their mothers a few days after the destruction of the village. Ninety of them were sent to a concentration camp at Gneisenau and have never been seen again. The younger children were taken to a German hospital in Prague and after being examined by ‘racial experts’ and measured to see whether they were up to Nazi Master-Race-Aryan standards and fit for adoption into German families, those who passed this pseudo-scientific test were sent to Germany to be brought up as Germans under German names. All trace of them has been lost. Those who failed were sent to Poland for Sonderbehandlung.1
The village priest, named Sternbeck, who was seventy-three years of age was offered his freedom if he would renounce his congregation. When he refused he was tortured and his church was desecrated before his eyes. He was shot with the rest of his male parishioners having declared that he had lived with his flock for thirty-five years and proposed to die with them.
By the evening of the 10th June not a living inhabitant remained in the village. The men were thrown into a common grave; the houses first plundered, and then burned. When only the empty shells remained standing, they were demolished so that not one stone should remain on another. The rubble was cleared away, the ground ploughed up and surrounded by a barbed wire fence to remain forever a barren waste as a warning to the Czechs.
The Germans published an official announcement of this outrage in the paper Der Neue Tag1 on i ith June 1942.
In the course of the search for the murderers of SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich, incontestable proof was found that the population of Lidice near Kladno gave support and assistance to the perpetrators of the crime. The relevant evidence was, in spite of interrogations, collected without the co-operation of the inhabitants. The attitude to the crime revealed hereby is still further emphasized by other activities hostile to the Reich, by stores of seditious matter, dumps of weapons and munitions, an illegal radio transmitter, and also rationed goods in great quantity, and by the fact that inhabitants of the village are in active service with the enemy abroad. Since the inhabitants of this village have, in the most uncompromising manner, opposed the published laws through their activity and support in the murder of Heydrich, the male adults have been shot, the women sent to a concentration camp and the children placed in suitable educational institutions. The buildings have been razed to the ground and the name of the place has been erased from the records.
What began in France in 1940 as a mere trickle of blood became during the last three years of occupation a raging torrent. And as oppression was intensified, resistance to it grew. Wrhen collaboration proved a failure, terrorism took its place.
By 1943 no pretence was even made by the Germans that offenders against their regulations should be first tried and then punished. In January 1943 von Falkenhausen, who was responsible for part of Northern France as well as Belgium, issued an order that anyone found in possession of explosives, ammunition, or firearms of any description without valid authorization would be ‘liable in future to be shot immediately without trial’.
It might, therefore, be thought that the Germans regarded the ‘Maquis’ as francs-tireurs; but it is manifest that the French Forces of the Interior, to give them their proper name, were considered to be irregular troops and therefore a legitimate component of the French Armed Forces.
This would appear from the following extract from a memorandum to the Wiesbaden Commission entitled, ‘Terrorist Action Against Patriots’.
On the enemy side we have organizations which absolutely refuse to accept the sovereignty of the French Government of Vichy and which from the point of view of numbers as well as of armament and command should almost be designated as troops … these revolutionary units regard themselves as being a part of the forces fighting against Germany. General Eisenhower has described the terrorists who are fighting in France as troops under his command. It is against such troops that repressive measures are directed.
But they were not granted the protection or treatment after capture which is the right, under International Law, of every member of the belligerents’ armed forces who is made a prisoner of war.
Orders were issued by Keitel from OKW that they were to be shot on the spot if caught in the act of sabotage—there can be no complaint about that—but if captured they were then to be transferred to the nearest local office of the SIPO or SD. Any women who sympathized but took no actual part in hostilities were ‘to be assigned to work’. This masterly euphemism meant that they were to be deported to Germany like cattle, sent to a slave labour camp, and worked until they died or became unfit for further exploitation. What happened to them then is told in another chapter.1
All civilians in the occupied territories who were considered a danger to security, instead of being interned in their own country in accordance with the usually accepted practice, were to be ‘turned over to the SD’. That too, sounds innocent enough to anyone ignorant of what the SD was and stood for, or of what happened when the ‘turning over’ had been accomplished. But it meant the lash, the thumb screw, the head-screw, the extraction of finger-nails, and toe-nails, the concentration camp, the gas chamber.
In pursuance of Keitel’s order, the SIPO and SD were given authority to execute without trial. These orders were of general application throughout the occupied territories in Western Europe.
Let free people consider what this meant. It was summary police jurisdiction: anyone living in any of those countries under German occupation without rhyme or reason could be summarily sentenced to death and executed by a comparatively junior official of the local Sicherheitspolizei. No charge, no evidence, and no defence. It was done daily, it was done everywhere, and it was murder.
In Holland, af
ter an attempt to kill Rauter, Gauleiter Seyss-Inquart proclaimed ‘for the Occupied Netherlands Territory in its entirety, summary police justice which shall enter into force immediately’. It is known that by this procedure more than four thousand Dutch citizens were put to death.
In Belgium, at the time of its liberation in September 1944, the crimes committed by German troops against civilians and members of the official Resistance Forces which were fighting against the German Army reached their peak.
At Graide a Resistance Forces camp was attacked. The Germans were entitled to do this and to make prisoner those who were not killed in fair fight during the operation. After the German troops left, however, fifteen corpses were found terribly mutilated. The Germans had used bullets with sawn-off tips.1 Two of the prisoners had been beaten with cudgels before being finished off with a pistol shot in the back of the head.
On 6th September 1944 several hundred members of the Belgian Secret Army were quartered in the Chateau de Forêt. The Germans had received reports that this detachment was about to move and the Chateau was surrounded. Some of the partisans were killed trying to break through the cordon of German troops but others were taken prisoner. The German troops than advanced on the Chateau using these prisoners as a screen. After two hours the fighting stopped for lack of ammunition, and those Belgians who were still holding out were told that their lives would be spared if they surrendered. This promise was not honoured. Many of the survivors were first tortured and then killed. The corpses were then sprinkled with petrol and the Chateau set on fire.
In December 1944 von Rundstedt turned round and made a last and desperate counter-offensive before retreating over the Belgian-German frontier. In its early stages the German troops reached the Marche-Bastogne road and occupied the village of Bande. These soldiers, who belonged to the Wehrmacht, were well behaved and gave no trouble.
Further down the road, however, was a control post set up by the SD, and on Sunday morning, 24th of December 1944, a detachment of Gestapo arrived in the village and arrested about seventy male inhabitants. They even entered the church during High Mass and took into custody some of the congregation. The officer in command of this detachment said that he was only taking them to the control post to check up their identity cards and that they would all be returned to their homes in time for Christmas.
Simultaneously a number of arrests had been made in the neighbouring village of Grune by another detachment of SD. All those apprehended in both villages were then taken to a burnt-out sawmill on the outskirts of Bande in which the control post was situated. There they were interrogated.
After the questioning was over the older men were released, but the younger were taken to a shed where they were relieved of all their personal belongings except that they were allowed to retain their handkerchiefs. They were then lined up in three ranks and marched with hands behind their heads along the Grand Route until they reached the burnt-out shell of a house belonging to a Monsieur Bertrand.
Here they were halted and turned with their faces towards the road and their backs to the houses. They remained like this for some time, standing in the snow and guarded by seven SS men, armed with tommy-guns. One officer remained in command of the escort; he who had conducted the interrogation.
The massacre soon began. A Feldwebel1 came up to the left-hand man of the rear rank, placed a hand on his shoulder and led him just inside the doorway of Monsieur Bertrand’s house. As soon as each prisoner entered the doorway the SS officer, who was posted at the entrance in such a way that he could not be seen from the road, shot the victim in the back of the neck and with a jerk of his knee sent the body hurtling into the cellar which was open to the air as the ground floor had fallen in when the house was burnt down.
The condemned men numbered thirty-three. When twenty had been killed in this way the next to be shot was a young Belgian named Léon Praile. He was a tall, strong youth with broad shoulders. Praile, noticing that the German sergeant was weeping, turned round and struck him full in the face and knocked him down. In the confusion Praile managed to escape, and after spending a night in the woods hid in a barn on the farm of his uncle who was the Burgomaster.
He was, however, the only one to get away, and the other thirty-two were all murdered. The whole countryside at this time was under snow and the Germans covered up the bodies with planks which they found in one of the ruined houses. No one was allowed to pass that way, and except for Praile, no one even suspected what had happened. The villagers all thought that their friends and neighbours had been taken off to Germany as slave labour.
On ioth January 1945, the Germans evacuated Bande and British troops moved in the next day. The Burgomaster who had learned the truth from his nephew, called on the British commanding officer and asked him to come to the scene of the crime. When the planks and snow which covered the bodies were removed, thirty-one corpses were found. Each had a bullet wound at the base of the skull.
This crime was carried out as a reprisal. In September 1944, when the Germans had previously been in Bande before withdrawing eastward in front of the advancing Allies, three of their number had been killed in the adjacent woods. A German officer, Lieutenant Spaan, who was billeted in Bande at the time of the massacre, told his landlady that orders had come ‘directly from Himmler’ that thirty men should be executed to avenge the three Germans who had been killed in September by members of the Belgian Resistance.
That was doubtless the truth, for the Burgomaster, after the Germans had gone, himself found written in chalk on the door of a shed behind the Café de la Poste: ‘This is to avenge the heroes shot by terrorists in September.’ No attempt had been made to discover who these ‘terrorists’ were, there had been no real investigation. Thirty-three young Belgians of military age had been selected at random and, after a perfunctory interrogation and without trial, put to death.
But to return to France. Although the French Forces of the Interior consisted largely of properly organized units of varying sizes which received orders through their own channels from regular military commanders, there were undoubtedly acts of sabotage and ambushes carried out during the first few weeks after the Allied landing in Normandy by individuals and small parties whom the Germans were entitled to regard as francs-tireurs. If captured, these members of the Maquis could have been brought before German military courts and condemned to death.
But they were not; they were, all too often, first brutally tortured and afterwards murdered without trial.
At Rodez, the very day before it was liberated, the Germans shot thirty members of the Maquis whom they had captured, after torturing them. They were shot by tommy-guns and to finish them off the Germans crushed their skulls in with large stones.
In the forest of Achères many members of the Maquis were killed by the Gestapo. Their bodies were eventually discovered and a report of what was found was made by the Commissaire de Police of Pau. Several of the corpses had broken limbs and deep wounds in the lower part of their legs which appeared to have been caused by the cords, with which they had been tightly bound, biting into their flesh.
Two younger men who had been wounded in a skirmish with German troops in Provence were dragged from a ward in the hospital in Nîmes, where their wounds were being cared for, and shot. Their bodies were mutilated and round their necks was hung a placard: ‘Thus are French terrorists punished’.
Throughout August 1944, when the Germans were in full flight from Northern France, the tally of atrocities mounted. On the afternoon of 30th August part of the Adolf Hitler Division arrived in the little village of Tavaux in the Department of the Aisne; and a patrol went to the house of the local resistance leader, whose name was Maujean.
The door was opened by his wife whom the soldiers immediately shot, wounding her in the thigh and breaking her jaw. They then dragged her into the kitchen where, in front of her five young children, one of whom was but a baby, they broke an arm and a leg, poured petrol over her and set her on fire. The children w
ere then told that if they would not disclose where their father was hiding they would be shot. They refused to say where he was, whereupon the Germans locked the children in the cellar, poured petrol over the floors of the house, and set it on fire. They then left. The fire was put out and the children were saved and it was by the eldest, a boy of nine, that this account of the atrocity was given.
There were numerous other instances of reprisals being taken on near relatives of men who were fighting in the French Resistance Forces. At Oyonnax a youth of eighteen, whose brother was in the Maquis, disappeared one night. Three days later his body was found at Siège terribly mutilated. His nose and tongue had been cut off and there were marks of blows all over his body and cuts on his legs. By his side were the bodies of four other young men who had been so mutilated that they could not be identified. None of the bodies showed any signs of gun-shot wounds and all five young men had clearly died from their ill-treatment.
At Presles in the South of France during the summer of 1944 a detachment of SS men visited a farm where two members of the Maquis were supposed to be hiding. They were not there, so the SS deprived of their prey, arrested the farmer and his wife. The Germans shot the husband, raped his wife, then killed her, and after torturing their little son aged three, crucified him on the farmyard gate.
At Ascq another German unit, by way of reprisal for the destruction of the railway line, massacred seventy-seven men including twenty employees of the French State Railways. They were taken indiscriminately and had no direct connection with the incident which provoked the reprisal. One victim was a retired business man of seventy-four and another was a schoolboy of fifteen. This outrage was officially reported by the Vichy Government to Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, then Commander-in-Chief in Northern France, who replied, ‘The population of Ascq bears the responsibility for the consequences of its treacherous conduct, which I can only severely condemn.’
The Scourge of the Swastika Page 11
