The Wehrmacht in Russia

The German book "Soldiers» («Soldaten») - a documentary study of the Wehrmacht. A unique feature of the book is that it is based on the revelations of the German soldiers, which they shared with each other in camps for prisoners of war, not knowing that their allies listen and record conversations on tape. In short, the book became complete details, everything about the Nazis escaped to write letters from the front, and to mention in his memoirs.

According to the magazine Spiegel, «Soldiers" finally buried the myth of immaculate Wehrmacht ("We have to obey orders. They burned SS - we fought.") Hence the subtitle: "On how to fight, kill and die» («Protokollen vom Kaempfen, Toeten und Sterben »). It turned out that the senseless killings, torture, rape, bullying were not the prerogative of the Einsatzgruppen, but were commonplace for the German army. Prisoners of war Wehrmacht recalled the crimes committed as something self-evident, moreover, many defy the military "exploits", and only repentance and remorse no one in particular and did not suffer.
As often happens, the book has appeared thanks to a sensational discovery: the German historian Sönke Nayttsel (Soenke Neitzel), working in British and American archives on the study dedicated to the Battle of the Atlantic, came in 2001, a transcript of wiretapping in which the captured German submarine officer with unusual frankly told about the realities of war. In the course of further investigation it was found a total of 150 thousand pages of transcripts such that Nayttsel handled with social psychologist Harald Welzer (Harald Welzer).

During the war in British and American captives were about a million soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS. Of these, 13,000 have been placed under special observation in specially equipped places, first in the camp of Trent Park (Trent Park) north of London and Latimer House (Latimer House) in Buckinghamshire, and in the summer of 1942 and in the US at Fort Hunt County, Virginia. The cells were crammed with bugs, moreover, among the prisoners were spies who, if necessary, directed the conversation back on track. Allies, thus trying to ferret out military secrets.

If you listened to the British officers and the supreme command of, the United States drew attention to the rank and file. Half of the prisoners of Fort Hunt were lower ranks, even the non-commissioned officers were not more than a third, and officers - one-sixth of. The British formed the 17,500 files, with almost every one of them has more than 20 sheets. Several thousand dossiers were opened by the Americans. Transcripts contain the candid testimony of representatives of all the armed forces. Most of the prisoners were captured in North Africa and on the Western Front, but many of them have visited and in the east, in the USSR, where the war was substantially different.





Here is a brief translation.
direct speech
GRAPH: Infantry told me that when they accompanied the Russian to the rear, 3-4 days prisoners received no food, began to fall. The convoy was always ready, by adding them yourself on the skull, and those already lying dead. The rest of them attacked, torn apart and eats right on the spot.

NOYFFER: Transportation to the rear of the Russian Vyazma - that's where the terror.
Reimann: We, too, was horrified, I once accompanied the train from Korosten to near Lemberg. They are like animals driven from their cars with sticks succumbing to ensure they remain operational and order driven to drink. At the station, there were the trough, they are like beasts threw at them and lapped the water, then they were given a bit to eat. Then they were again driven into the wagons, 60-70 people in cattle cars! At each stop, we pulled ten corpses, they suffocated from lack of oxygen. I heard it, I was riding in the car camp guard and asked the sergeant, this college boy with glasses, intellectual, "How long have you been these already doing" "Four weeks, but I no longer stand it, I want out of here, I can not stand it any longer ". At the stations of the Russian looked cracks in cars and roared like beasts in Russian "Bread! Good God! "And so forth., And threw his old tunic and boots, then had children and brought them to the pumpkin. Pumpkin thrown inside, and immediately heard a roar and the roar of the animal, they probably each other mutuzit. I was just no, sat in a corner, pulled his coat over his head. The guard asked, "What, you do not have food?" He said to me, "Mr. Colonel, whence to take it. Nothing prepared ».
NOYFFER: No, no, in fact, simply an unthinkable nightmare. Only one convoy of prisoners after the Vyazma and Bryansk, the prisoners were on foot, to Smolensk. I often passed this area by car - the cell was full of Russian shot - a nightmare!

SIRI: It is impossible to speak out loud, but we were too soft. And now we are trapped along with all the atrocities. But if we were a hundred percent cruelty - to people disappeared without a trace, then it would be no one said anything. Half measures - that's the error.
In the East, I once suggested that in the case - there was so that it was necessary to send to the rear of the thousands of prisoners of war, but not enough guards. In France, everything would be okay, so degenerativen Frenchman, say to him was, "Go back and then and there to report on his arrival at the assembly point of war," and that stupid monkey was really there. But in Russia between the leading edge of a dense mass of tanks and troops behind it it was 50-80 kilometers, two or three days' march. No Russian will not come back, let him go, he will go, he will go, and then again to the left and right, and in the woods and live there myself quietly. So I said, "What to do, it is necessary to cut off the feet of the people, or to break a leg, or breaking his right hand, so that they in the next four weeks were not combat-ready, so they can be collected." Such a cry went up when I said that we should just punch people in the leg with a crowbar. I was also very fully realized, but today I think that was right. We have seen that we can not fight a war, because we are not sufficiently stringent, barbarism we lack. Not that Russian.

Gerik: In Russia, last year, a small German detachment was sent to a village with some task. The area occupied by the Germans. The village's detachment attacked and all killed. After that came a punitive team. In the village there were 50 men. 49 were shot, and the latter raced across the county, so everyone knows what will happen to the population if the attack on German soldiers.

Curl: In the Caucasus, in the first mountain-egerskoy if some of our killed, the lieutenant did not even have anything to order. The pistol snatched, women, children, all those who came under his hand ...
Kneipp: We have just under Novgorod guerrillas attacked a convoy with the wounded, were all killed. Half an hour later they were seized, thrown into the sand pit and on all sides of the machine guns and pistols ...
Curley: There should be no shooting, they supposed to kill slowly. Cossacks in the struggle against the guerrillas was that it is necessary, I have seen on the southern front.

MULLER: In one village in Russia were partisans. Clearly, the need to raze the village, without regard to losses. We had such a ... Brozike from Berlin, everyone, whom he had seen in the village, he assigned for the house and there was shooting in the head. But the guy was twenty or nineteen and a half. It was said: shoot every tenth. "And what was one in ten, the point is clear", - told the guys, "the entire village to be cleaned." We filled beer bottles with gasoline, set it on the table, and went out, that way carelessly thrown behind his back hand grenades. All at once it takes up to a ceiling - thatched roofs. Women, children, all done some shooting, partisans among them were few. I'm in such cases did not shoot if I was not sure that it really guerrillas. But there was a lot of guys who get great pleasure.

Kittel: In Latvia, Dunaburg, there were mass executions of Jews. STS or STO. In diabetes there was fifteen and sixty somewhere Latvians considered as we know, the most cruel people in the world. And here I lie in bed on a Sunday morning, and suddenly I heard two lines, followed by another pistol shots. I get up, go out, say, "What's the shooting here?" The orderly said to me: "Colonel, do you have to go there, you'll see." Close I approached did not, I had enough. From Dunaburg drove 300 people, they dug a trench, men and women dug a mass grave and went home. The next day they drove again - men, women and children - were counted, stripped naked. Executioners clothing piled in heaps. Then put on the edge of the moat twenty women, naked, shot, and they fall down.
Velbert: And how is it done?
Kittel: Face to the pit, get up behind the twenty-Latvians while firing their rifles in the back. In the ditch, they made such a step, so that the shot stood below. Those came back, shot in the head, and they fell down into the ditch. Then twenty men, they are also one gulp. One gives a command, and twenty people are flying down. Then began the most terrible, but I left, he said: "I have to intervene." He sat in the car, drove to those of diabetes and say, "I forbid once and for all settle here shooting at the viewer. If you shoot people in the forest or somewhere where no one can see, that's your business. But here it should not last more than a day. Our drinking water from local springs, now it will be with all the putrid smell. " It was at a resort north of Mezhciems Dunaburg.
Velbert: And what did they do with the children?
Kittel (very excited): Children, children of three, that's because they were taken by the hair, raised, shot from a gun and throwing down. I saw it. You could watch, LED put a cordon, but at 300 meters there were people - Latvians, the German soldiers - and stared.
Velbert: And what kind of people from diabetes?
Kittel: Abomination! I think they themselves would be shot.
Velbert: Location from which divisions?
Kittel: Germans, they had a form of diabetes and a black patch with the inscription Sonderdienst.
Velbert: A executioners were all Latvians?
Kittel: Yes, all Latvians.
Velbert: But the commander of the German?
Kittel: Yes, in general, managed the Germans and Latvians on the little things. Latvians have searched all my clothes. But this CD has gone out to meet me, "Yes, sir, would be moved to another location." There were only Jews, they were driven from the neighborhood. Latvians with bandages on his hands - the Jews were taken away, and then clean out all, this was a massive bitterness against the Jews in Dunaburg, popular anger was looking output.
Velbert: Against the Jews?
Schaefer: Yes, because at the same time Russian exiled 60,000 Estonians and others. But it certainly is artificially fomented. Say what impression made these people? You've seen it looks like people before being shot? They cried?
Kittel: It was horrible. I saw how they were taken, but did not realize at the time that they were being taken for execution.
Schafer: And people have guessed what awaits them?
Kittel: They knew exactly were apathy. I do not have weak nerves, but when you see this, you simply turns, I always said, "So you cease to be a man, to the conduct of the war is irrelevant." I was adjutant chief chemist IG Farben, and since he could not find another occupation, he, too, once sent to look ... He then weeks on what was not fit. He sat in the corner and howled. He said: "If we imagine that this happens everywhere!". He was a famous chemist and musician with a sensitive nervous system.
Velbert: That's why we have apostatized from Finland and Romania, which is why all the hate us - not because of a single case, but because of the mass.
Kittel: If all the Jews in the world to kill, then there will be nobody to blame.
Velbert (in extreme agitation, shouting) But it's clear, it's a disgrace, it's not only the Jews are to blame, we can blame ourselves, we have to blame the people who did it.
Kittel: Then we have to say, the state apparatus has been arranged properly.
Velbert (shouting): It is clear that it is wrong, no doubt. Really easy.
BRAN: We're just tools ...
Velbert: But to us it is then hanged, as if we were guilty.
BRAN: Today, if you are a German general, people think, "He knew about it and have" and if we say: "To us it has nothing to do", then people will not believe us. All the hatred and all the antipathy just because of these murders, and then I have to say - if at all believe in the supreme justice, if that's how I have five children, deserve, that one or two would be killed in the same manner as revenge. If so, to shed blood, but do not deserve to win, but only what happened.
Velbert: I do not know on whose orders it was done, when Himmler, he - the main culprit. You - the first general from whom I heard this. I have always believed in their writings, a pack of lies.
Kittel: About many things I hold back, they are too terrible.

YOSTING: A good friend of mine, whom I absolutely trust - the Austrian, now, as far as I know, too, in Vienna, he was in the fourth squadron in Odessa. He comes back, and the first lieutenant or captain said to him, "Do you see we've got right now is an interesting idea, shoot so many Jews." He replied: "No, let him." But he had to go on business, and he still had witnessed and told me: barn fully packed with women and children. Doused with gasoline and burned alive. He saw with his own eyes. He says: "As they shouted, you can not imagine. Is it right to do so? "I said," No, wrong. "You can do with the people that you want, but do not burn them alive, not gassed, and God knows what. For that, after all? They can be arrested and then, when the war is won, tell them: "This nation must disappear from here. Hop on a ship going where you want, we do not care, but in Germany this day you do nothing. "We ourselves have done enemies, more and more. In the East, we killed them all, so that people have in the Katyn almost did not believe, and said that it is our handiwork.
No, no, if I did not have a pair of evidence, I would not boil, I think we behaved totally wrong! Madness, the attacks on the houses of the Jews, I myself was then in Vienna, Bad Vöslau. We had nothing then, very little, nothing at all, but we beat them all the windows! It should be easy to bring people and say, "Top Christian takes over the Franz Mayer. You pay compensation, decent compensation or not, does not matter. "We own nothing, and then all three sheets break and set fire to the house. It is clear that the Jews do not belong here, it is clear, I fully agree, but the manner in which this was done is totally wrong, hence the hatred. My father in law that the Jews, God knows, could not stand, said to me, "Erwin! Erwin! This will not go unpunished, whatever you say. " They want to remove the Jews, I am for, I'm with them, I was in the forefront - out of Germany! But why kill something everyone? This can be done when the war is over, then we can say: "We have the power, we have power, we won the war, we can do that." But now? Look who governs Britain? Jew! Who Rules America? Jew! And Bolshevism - is the highest level of Jewry.

Rotkirch: Imagine these Jews, because some were saved, they will tell ... It will not work for us for nothing. If these people, the Jews, will be at the helm and will retaliate, it would be horrible. But I will say one more question, whether to allow the others, because for the most part foreigners - British, French, Americans - to the Jews as a clear concern. They formed an alliance with the devil to defeat us. As we once made an alliance with the Bolsheviks. So they behave. And the main question: what direction the world will prevail, and whether people trust us. We must now work to ensure that people trust us and to avoid anything that might annoy them again, they have to first show, "Guys, we want to build together a sensible world».
Taken from here labas.livejournal.com/904941.html

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