A second Luftwaffe radio operator, captured after an air-raid over Britain on August 5, 1942, reported that he had heard about the execution of 15.000 Jews on the aerodrome at Poropoditz. First, they all had to dig a hole – a sort of ditch – then they shot them all, except a hundred, whom they left alive. Then these hundred had to put them all into the hole and cover them up, leaving a small opening. Then they shot the hundred and put them in too and closed it. I wouldn’t believe it but someone showed me the hole, where they were, all trodden down. (25)
SS-Sturmbahnführer Jacob Hanreich, a professional soldier since 1933, served in the 1.SS-Panzer-Division (LSSAH) as it fought its way through Ukraine during the 1941 offensive. The division spent the winter of 1941–1942 just west of Rostov-on-Don. Under interrogation, Hanreich reported that a fellow officer had told him that thousands of Jews had been murdered south of Mariupol and in Taganrog by the SD Einsatzkommando. They were brought out of the towns by being told that they were to be transferred, but were brought in front of some AT ditches. There they had to undress, descend into the ditch, and were then shot. The AT ditches were afterward covered with earth. (26) A striking note in many of these reports is the German officers’ understanding of how the Security Police and the Einsatzgruppen organized the mass executions of Jews on Soviet territory. Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe officers and men alike appeared to be aware of the procedure for the executions. For example, Army Lt Thöne (27), who was captured in Italy on Christmas Day 1943, revealed to the British officer who interviewed him that he was aware of the details: There was a special SS Kommando at Simferopol which issued the order to all the Jews there that they were to hand over their belongings to the head of their community.
They were then told: You are to be transferred, you are to take with you what you have in the way of clothes, etc! Then they all collected together at a certain place, lorries drove up and they were told to leave their things where they were and to climb into the lorry. From there they were dumped into the nearest AT ditch. Their belongings were then usually distributed to the civilian population; they had already taken their money and valuables. (28) Thöne succinctly describes the standard method employed by the Einsatzgruppen across occupied Soviet territory to kill the Jews. The standard operating procedure, as later research has confirmed, was to use Jewish community elders to register the local Jewish population; the German authorities would then assemble the Jewish population, with their belongings, for resettlement. The Jews would then be marched under escort or transferred by truck to the execution site, usually not far from the village or town. German police set up a security cordon around the execution site, then ordered the Jews to undress and hand over their valuables to the police. The Germans then shot the Jews and distributed their clothing and other belongings to the local civilian populace. Valuables handed over to the perpetrators were forwarded to the Security Police headquarters in Berlin.
Among the secretly recorded conversations, one of the most revealings took place between Generalleutnant Georg Neuffer and Generalmajor Gerhard Bassenge of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, both of whom had surrendered in Tunisia on May 9, 1943. In British captivity in mid-December 1943, they were heard discussing a recent BBC news program broadcast in German, Bassenge: They dished up the mass executions of Jews in Poland. They estimate here that altogether five million Jews—Polish, Bulgarian, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian have been massacred. Neuffer: Really? Not counting the German ones? Bassenge: Including the German Jews, during the whole time. They furnished evidence that an enormous number from camp so-and-so between such-and-such a date, fifteen thousand here, eighteen thousand there, twelve thousand there, six thousand and so on, I must say that if 10% of it is correct, then one ought to … Neuffer: I should have thought about three million. Bassenge: You know, it really is a disgrace. (29)
What is puzzling here is how Neuffer acquired his detailed knowledge of executions of Jews, including deported foreign nationals, at extermination camps in Poland. He performed his Luftwaffe service as commander of flak units in Germany, the Soviet Union, and North Africa. Thus a single conversation reveals that some details of the Final Solution were known not just to the German Security Police, but also to many members of the German armed forces.
At a time when it was allied with the United States and the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazi aggression, Britain made no use of this information on war crimes taking place on Soviet soil. British authorities were aware of Soviet publications based on material extracted from their German POWs that dealt with German atrocities against the civilian population in Eastern Europe. However, they decided that there would be no British publication of material obtained through bugging, as this would compromise a productive method of intelligence-gathering.
THE BALTIC STATES
Although Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were de facto republics of the USSR, they are discussed separately; here, the SS Einsatzgruppen’s anti-Jewish activities resulted in the near-complete slaughter of the local Jewish populations as well as of those Jews deported to the region from Greater Germany.
An April 25, 1945, bugged conversation in which Generalmajor Walter Bruns describes a massacre in Riga has been widely quoted. (30) During the autumn of 1941, Bruns was stationed in Riga with a bridge-building unit of Army Group North. On November 30, 1941, Bruns visited an execution site outside the city in the Rumbula Forest. The first victims of the day were 1035 Berlin Jews, who had been brought directly from their train upon its arrival at Riga and shot before 0900. More than 20.000 Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto followed and marched out over the course of that day to be shot. In the recorded conversation, Bruns described what he saw: When I arrived those pits were so full that the living had to lie down
on top of the dead; then they were shot and, in order to save room, they had to lie down neatly in layers. Before this, however, they were stripped of everything at one of the stations at the edge of the forest were the three pits they used that Sunday and here they stood in a queue one and a half KM long which approached step by step, a queuing up for death. Bruns observes with surprise that although these Latvian Jews saw what was going on only as they came near, the waiting victims surely had heard the shots long before they were able to see anything. As German Jews continued to arrive in Riga over the course of that winter, they were housed in the ghetto which was now emptied of Latvian Jews.
In another bugged conversation Oberst Erfurth, an army administrative officer, remarked: I always disliked seeing the Jewish women from Germany who had to clean the streets in Riga. They still kept on speaking German. It was revolting! That should be forbidden, and they should not be allowed to speak anything but Yiddish. (31)
Captured German officers made reference to massacres elsewhere in the Baltics as well. In 1941, Major Arp was stationed in the Field Commandant’s Office (Feldkommandantur) in Kowno (Kaunas), Lithuania. In a bugged conversation following his capture in 1944, he complains: At Kowno these SS swine shot 1000 people in Fort 5 every night. Our ears rang with it and we couldn’t sleep!. (32) Similarly, Generalleutnant Heinrich Kittel of Army Group North (in 1941) was captured in France on November 22, 1944. Just four weeks later he was heard discussing a mass execution of Jews in Dunaburg (Dvinsk, Daugavpils), Latvia on November 7–9, 1941, carried out by fifteen SD men and sixty Latvians. Local Jews were made to dig out a large trench: Men and women dug a communal grave and then marched home. The next day along they came again men, women, and children, and they were counted off and stripped naked; the executioners first laid all the clothes in one pile. The twenty women had to take up their position—naked—on the edge of the trench, they were shot and fell down into it. According to the bugging report, Kittel became very excited when he mentioned that the executioners seized three-year-old children by their hair, held them up, shot them with a pistol, and then threw them into the mass grave. However, Kittel’s main complaint had to do with the location of the execution site near springs: We draw our drinking water from deep springs, we’re getting nothing but corpse water there. (33)
NOTES
25. Report SRA 2961 dated August 12, 1942, TNAK, WO 208/4127. The mention of a nearby airfield could indicate that Berdichev was the actual site of execution. Senior SS and Police Commander for South Russia (HSSPF Rußland-Süd) Friedrich Jeckeln organized a mass execution of 18.000 Jewish men, women, and children there, near the airfield, on September 15– 16, 1941. Ereignismeldung (Einsatzgruppen report) no. 88, September 19, 1941 (Nuremberg doc. NO-3149); and Vasilii Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, eds., Das Schwarzbuch: Der Genozid an den sowjetischen Juden (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994), 59 –71.
26. Report PWIS (H)/LDC/299 dated August 29, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/3647; a copy is located NARA RG 165, entry 179, box 722. The execution of 1500 Jewish men, women, and children Taganrog was carried out by Sonderkommando 10a (a unit of Einsatzgruppe D) on October 27, 1941, at a ravine on the edge of the town. See “Note sent on April 27, 1942, by V M Molotov” (Soviet Foreign Minister) disclosing the details and published in Soviet Government Statements on Nazi Atrocities (London: Hutchinson & Co. for the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices, undated), 43–44; and Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe (London: Elek, 1974), 226. RSHA Berlin reported simply that Taganrog was now “judenfrei.” Ereignismeldung No. 136, November 21, 1941 (Nuremberg doc. NO-2822).
27. In many cases the documents omit the subject’s first name.
28. Report SRM 468 dated February 7, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/4137. In this bugged conversation Thöne mentions the systematic method of executing Jews. On March 5, 1944, in a discussion with a “British Naval Officer,” he described the system from the round-up of local Jews to their execution. Report “Special S.R. 132” dated March 12, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/4197.
29. Report SRGG 676 dated December 19, 1943, TNAK, WO 208/4167.
30. Report of bugged conversation of Brigadier General Walter Bruns, SRGG 1158 # dated May 2, 1945, TNAK, WO 208/4169. A copy of this document was declassified recently and is located at NARA, RG 226, entry 108A (Washington Registry SI Branch Field Files), box 145. NARA also holds a copy of Bruns’s first interrogation by American authorities on April 24, 1945. Bruns reported on the Riga execution even at this stage. Report entitled “Secret. Note on German Atrocities,” RG 332, entry STO MIS-Y, box 93, folder 22 –39, interrogation by 6824 DIC (MIS)/CI-24 dated April 29, 1945. See also Breitman, et al., U.S. Intelligence, 96 –100; Richard J. Evans, Telling Lies about Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial (London: Verso, 2002), 219– 21. Bruns also appeared as a defense witness in the “High Command Case” (Case 12, United States v. Wilhelm von Leeb) in Nuremberg. In Riga, HSSPF Jeckeln organized the liquidation of the ghetto and the execution of its Jewish population. See his interrogation by Soviet officers dated December 14, 1945, in the Archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG-006.025*01
31. Report SRM 1061 dated November 28, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/4139.
32. Report SRM 877 dated September 12, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/4139. Einsatzkommando 3 (Einsatzgruppe A) regularly carried out executions of Jews at Kovno (Kauen) Forts VII and IX between July and November 1941. See “The Jaeger Report,” in NS-Prozesse: Nach 25 Jahren Strafverfolgung. Möglichkeiten, Grenzen, Ergebnisse, ed. Adalbert Rückerl (Karlsruhe: C.F. Mu¨ ller, 1971), appendix.
33. Report GRGG1086 # dated December 30, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/4169. A copy of this report is available at NARA, RG 226, entry 109, box 429, folder XX6141. The execution that Kittel described probably is the one that took place on November 7–9, 1941. This action, which was organized by the office of the Commander of the Security Police in Riga and carried out with the participation of Arajs Kommando of Latvian collaborators, claimed the lives of some 3000 Jewish men, women, and children from Dvinsk (Daugavspils). See Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941– 1944: The Missing Center (Riga and Washington, DC: Historical Institute of Latvia in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996), 279.
A man from the German Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst) who later became a U-boat stoker (Maschinengefreiter) and was captured on November 1, 1943, witnessed a mass execution in Vilna (Wilno, Vilnius), Lithuania. Stoker Minnieur told a fellow prisoner that the Gestapo organized the Vilna execution with Latvian auxiliary policemen acting as the shooters and that he had witnessed the shootings. The Jewish victims were stripped to their underwear before being shot. Among the victims, Minnieur saw a German Jewess from Landsberg a.d. Warthe who had been educated at Göttingen University and whom he had known as a cleaning woman in the Labor Service barracks. The young lady was, he noted, a marvelous girl. (34)
A number of U-boats and surface vessel crews in British custody, some captured as early as January 1942, had been based at the Libau (Liepaja) naval base in Latvia. Just weeks before his capture, one senior naval mechanic had seen a navy firing squad shooting what may have been six communist officials. (35) A U-boat stoker captured on March 10, 1944, mentioned in a secretly recorded conversation that he had participated in the execution of 180 Jews in the sand dunes near the base. (36) A stoker from a surface vessel, who was captured on December 22, 1944, told of his previous service with a Waffen-SS training unit in Libau that he boasted that his unit machined-gunned 3000 Jews on December 3, 1942. There were some fine women among the Jewesses of all ages. (37)
POLAND
In their secretly recorded conversations, German POWs in British custody referred to anti-Jewish activities in Poland that took place as early as Sept 1939. The earliest of the incidents mentioned took place in Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), where many members of the Polish Intelligentsia and Polish Jews were shot in the first days of the German occupation. According to German POWs, the 1.SS-PD (LSSAH) shot fifty Jews west of Warsaw at Burzeum on Sept 25, 1939; (38) the division executed another fifty Polish Jews at Modlin the following month. (39)
The transcripts of bugged conversations and interrogations contain many references to the Warsaw Ghetto, covering all stages from its establishment through the uprising in April-May 1943. Several SS-men from an SS-Totenkopf training unit that helped put down the uprising were captured in Normandy. Under interrogation, they detailed their actions in Warsaw. (40) Similarly, a voluble Luftwaffe sergeant captured in Tunisia on Aug 13, 1943, was later recorded telling another prisoner that he had heard that seventeen thousand Jewish people were butchered near Litzmannstadt, men, women, and children, without any scruple. All the victims had to strip naked before being killed. Their furs and jewelry (seventy pounds of gold by weight were collected) went to the senior butchers and the lesser ones took the rest. (41)
During 1944, captured POWs made frequent mention of the death camps that the SS had established on occupied Polish territory. For example, in a secretly recorded conversation, a captured fighter pilot mentioned shootings at Lublin (Majdanek), the use of mechanical diggers to prepare mass graves, and the burning of victims’ corpses. (42) Some reports even refer to gassings at Auschwitz. The saddest story is told by an army soldier who was on guard duty at Auschwitz when transport from Greece was being unloaded. The soldier saw an SS-man kick a pregnant Greek Jewish woman in the stomach, causing the woman to abort immediately. (43) No literature has been found to show why an army unit should be on guard duty in the ramp area at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but the short description seems plausible. Two parallel cases can be found in US Army interrogation records: Luftwaffe sergeant Josef Thul had been part of a relief guard sent from Konzentrationslager (KL—concentration camp) Buchenwald to KL Auschwitz with eighty other guards in Jun 1944 to escort eight thousand Jews back to Buchenwald as forced laborers. In his few days at Auschwitz, Thul witnessed the arrival of two Hungarian transports, their immediate dispatch to the gas chambers, and the subsequent cremation of their bodies. Likewise, Fritz Buchholz, a former German political prisoner held at Auschwitz from Sept 1941 to Jan 1945, was inducted into a Wehrmacht flak unit with the rank of corporal (Obergefreiter). He was captured in central Germany on Mar 31, 1945. During interrogation, Buchholz provided details of the gas chambers, their destruction by SS-men using explosives in Dec 1944, and the destruction of the last crematorium on Jan 18, 1945, (sic—Jan 26, 1945) just before the final evacuation of the camp. Buchholz also reported that in the estimates of the guards, who worked at the crematories and whose statements agreed closely, an estimated 4 and a half million Jews and 17.000 gypsies were exterminated in the camp from the time of its inception up to Dec 1944.
During the time of the Hungarian pogroms, transports from Hungary pyres had to be built to take care of the overflow of inmates. The figure Buchholz gives is surprisingly close to the inflated figure of four million” killed at Auschwitz quoted in a conversation between SS-Major Wilhelm Hoettl and Adolf Eichmann. (44) Another witness to the killings at Auschwitz is a former prisoner, Jan Leitner, who was held in the camp from Dec 1941 to Dec 1943, then sent to KL Buchenwald, and finally employed as a forced laborer in an SS railway construction unit. When the unit was stationed near Koln, this Czech national escaped to the American front lines. In Mar 1945, he provided information on the daily execution of Poles at Auschwitz, the operation of the gas chambers, and the arrivals of transports from Greece (in May 1943) and France (in June and July 1943). (45)
According to an interrogation report from Oct 1944, a German POW described the rounding up of 3000 Jews from Skole (near Drohobycz) in Aug 1942 and their deportation by train. Almost certainly, their destination was the Bełzec death camp. (46) In a report from Jul 1945, another POW detailed the 1942 deportations of Jews from Hrubieszo´ to the large Jewish camp near Włodawa-Sobibor death camp. (47) Deportations to these Aktion Reinhard camps would result in the death of every Jew on the trains.
GERMANY
POWs were not averse to discussing what was happening inside Germany itself. Early details of concentration camps (Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen) came from former prisoners as well as from former guards. (48) Information on the German Jews’ deportation to the East came in 1944, in a bugged conversation. An army medical orderly captured in Normandy on Aug 1, 1944, referred to the Dec 1941 deportation of the Hannover Jews to Riga even giving a total number. In a Sept 27, 1944 interrogation, it came out that this man, Fuhr, was a former Criminal Police officer (Kriminal Kommissar) who had been on detached duty with the Gestapo in Hannover in 1941. The author of the report wrote that Fuhr gives the impression of a callous opportunist who realizes that he is now in danger. Such information as he has given is considered reliable. Fuhr’s description of the part played by the Gestapo chief at Hannover, SS-Major Stuber, in preparing the deportation program, assembling and counting the Jews with the assistance of men from the Gestapo, the Criminal Police, and the regular police force confirms recently published research. (49)
A conversation recorded in Austria on Nov 3, 1945, involved SS-Lieutenant Eugen Horak, an interpreter with RSHA VI C at the end of the war: I was once present in Vienna when they were loading up people for one of those mass evacuations. Hundreds were crammed into wagons, which normally took a couple of cows. And they were thoroughly beaten up as well. I went up to a young SS man and asked if all the beating up was really necessary. He laughed and said they were only scum anyway. Horak went on to say that he saw some incredible things at Auschwitz an indication that he had accompanied this transport from Vienna to the extermination camp. (50)
OTHER PARTS OF OCCUPIED EUROPE
Several CSDIC reports mention measures taken against Jews in France, Belgium, and Italy. For example, Luftwaffe Sergeant Tintes, captured in Tunisia on May 10, 1943, had detailed knowledge of the deportation of Jews from France the previous autumn: Those who could actually prove that they had been French citizens for more than ten or twelve years were allowed to remain, but all the others who had immigrated since then, refugees and foreign Jews, were taken away. The French police broke in on them suddenly, pulled them from their beds, packed them into lorries, and off the goods trains went—off towards Russia. In fact, in those early deportations from France it was the foreign and stateless who were the easiest and thus the first victims—as Adolf Eichmann himself pointed out to the German Foreign Office in a Mar 1942 letter. (51) Another report from that region derives from the interrogations of three Jews captured by British forces in France on Sept 6, 1944. Strangely, these three—one Jew from Berlin and two Polish Jews who had been forced laborers at the Arbeitslager Brauneck near Boulogne, were treated by the British as POWs. (52)
In Sept 1944, shortly after his capture, General Alfred Gutknecht described the deportations of Jews from Antwerp, Belgium: At Antwerp I experienced the way that all the Jews were taken away in that winter (1942-1943). They had to report every day that they were still there and then they were sent away. That was done in vehicles like furniture vans. Only a few survivors remained. (53)
In Italy, the CSDIC recorded former senior SS officers Dr. Constantin Canaris of the Gestapo and Dr. Otto Begus of the SD expressing sympathy for SS Colonel Herbert Kappler, the German security police commander in Rome, who was at the time under investigation for his role in the massacre of Italian civilians at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome. In response to the shooting of thirty-three German policemen in the city on Mar 23, 1944, Hitler ordered a reprisal. The following day, Kappler ordered the execution of 330 Italians. Kappler’s subordinates took 258 Italian political prisoners and seventy-seven Jews arrested in recent raids to the caves and executed them there. In reference to the investigation, Canaris noted with approval that Kappler was unshaken and faced the situation with courage. (54)
POSTWAR USE OF DATA
In an undated postwar report entitled Atrocities as Seen through German Eyes, (55) a British intelligence officer summarized the information that had been gleaned through bugged conversations between German POWs. On the question of the German officers’ awareness of atrocities, the report’s author found that knowledge of the wholesale slaughter of Russians and Jews was fairly widespread. Less well known, the report continued, were the details of what went on in concentration camps. Nevertheless, the author wrote, the fact of the existence of the camps and … the fact that the treatment there was brutal were undoubtedly common knowledge.
The report makes some interesting observations about the prisoners’ sense of responsibility—their own or Germans’ more generally—for the atrocities. Significantly, the report notes that a large number of the POWs expressed the view that the Germans’ mistake was not in committing the atrocities but in committing them openly or before final victory was assured. Moreover, even those prisoners who disapproved of the atrocities appeared to take it as axiomatic that they themselves could not be expected to interfere or protest to the extent of seriously endangering their own positions. The report notes the general lack of appreciation of personal responsibility among the POWs. Indeed, in the bugged conversations German army personnel of every rank displayed only a passive attitude to the crimes they had heard about or witnessed—as though such executions were to be expected for a vanquished enemy. Few of the prisoners expressed any remorse. Many of the German generals appeared to feel no responsibility to the civilian populations within their areas of command, and without demur allowed the Security Police to murder the local Jewish populations. Though some, it seems, were appalled by these crimes, they did nothing to prevent them. They seemed to feel that the orders issued to them allowing such criminal acts relieved them of personal responsibility to interfere in mass executions. In many bugged conversations, the prisoners seem to feel that the men who carried out the executions—the shooters themselves—were to be congratulated for not having broken down mentally. Several reports mentioned that the bugged German officers laughed as they described executions.
NOTES
34. Report SRN 2528 dated December 19, 1943, TNAK, WO 208/4148. The scene described by Minnieur took place probably just a few months before his capture. In the spring and summer of 1943, the 1st Latvian Police Battalion, based in Vilna, closed down five labor camps in the area and shot 1300 – 1400 Jewish men and women in separate actions; see Aru¯ nas Bubnys, “Die litauischen Hilfspolizeibataillone und der Holocaust,” in Holocaust in Litauen: Krieg, Judenmorde und Kollaboration im Jahre 1941, ed. Vincas Bartusevicˇ ius, Joachim Tauber, and Wolfram Wette (Cologne: Bo¨ hlau, 2003), 124 – 25
35. Report SRN 852 dated March 11, 1942, TNAK, WO 208/4143
36. Report SRN 3319 dated April 8, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/4150; a copy of this report is available at NARA, RG 226, entry 178, box 4
37. Report SRN 4530 dated January 12, 1945, TNAK, WO 208/4156. In this recorded conversation, Obergefreiter Helmut Moschner, a naval mechanic, provides information that is generally accurate. On December 17—not December 3rd—1941, a five-day action carried out by a Waffen-SS training unit ended with a total of 2,746 Jews killed. The SS- und Polizei-Standortfu¨ hrer Libau reported the massacre in “War Diary No. 1, September 20, 1941 – November 30, 1943.” Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, R 70 Sowjetunion/12. See also Krausnick and Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, 173 – 79, 571, 574
38. Interrogation report of SS-Major Hanreich, PWIS(H)/LDC/299 dated August 29, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/3647; a copy of the document can be found at NARA, RG 165, entry 179, box 722
39. Interrogation report of SS-Lt. Alfred Lengenfeld, PWIS(H)/LDC/358 dated September 21, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/4295; a copy of the document can be found at NARA, RG 165, entry 179, box 722. Lengenfeld was serving with the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler at the time of the execution. According to the report, Lengenfeld claimed that he refused to carry out the order to shoot and was court-martialed as a result. He maintained that he was then dismissed from the SS and sentenced to two years imprisonment in KL Buchenwald. In February 1943 he was called up by a Luftwaffe Parachute Division and reinstated as a lieutenant. Information Acquired from German Prisoners of War 2140. Interrogation report of SS-Sturmmann Franz van Lent, PWIS(H)/LDC/235 dated August 1944, TNAK, WO 208/3647; also at NARA, RG 165, entry 179, box 722. Van Lent was assigned to the security cordon during the German assault on the ghetto and witnessed several mass shootings. See also interrogation report of SS-Grenadier Willi Hansen, PWIS(H)/LDC/643 dated July 16, 1945, WO 208/4295. Hansen was an aide to SS-Lieutenant Nowak (1.SS-Ersatz Bataillon “Totenkopf ”) and was stationed in Warsaw during the Ghetto Uprising
40. Report CSDIC (AFHQ) No. 55 (G) dated August 24, 1943, TNAK, WO 208/5508. A copy of this report is available at NARA, RG 226, entry 210, box 157F, OSS “Secret” report B-484 dated November 9, 1943.
41. Transcript of recorded conversation of fighter-bomber pilot Lt. Col. Mu¨ ller-Rienzburg, SRA 4820 dated January 13, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/4132. Mu¨ ller-Rienzburg was captured in Italy on December 1, 1943.
42. Signalman Obergefreiter Till in conversation with a “British Army Officer,” “Extract from S.R. Draft No. WG 3422” dated September 25, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/4200. Till places the episode with the pregnant Jewish woman in July 1943; the only Greek transport to Auschwitz that arrived at KL Auschwitz near that time came on June 8, 1943, and contained 880 Jewish men and women. Of these, 572 were selected for the gas chambers. Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939 – 1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989), 516
43. Affidavit of Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, Deputy Group Leader of the foreign section of the Security Police Amt IV of the RSHA, Nuremberg Document 2738-PS, Exhibit USA-296
44. The US interrogations are found in NARA, RG 498, ETO MIS-Y Section, box 64 (Leitner, interrogation of March 17, 1945; and Thul, interrogation of March 29, 1945), and box 65 (Buchholz, interrogation of April 2, 1945). Between June 5 and July 1, 1944, KL Auschwitz dispatched 7,000 Jews to KL Buchenwald in four ways of transport. Czech, Kalendarium, 793, 801, 809 – 10. After the war, SS-Major Wilhelm Hoettl of RSHA VI spoke many times about his conversation with Adolf Eichmann concerning the number of Jewish victims of the Final Solution. See for example Interrogation Report No. 21 dated July 18, 1945, NARA, RG 498, box 69
45. Interrogation report of Corporal Anton Stejskal, PWIS(H)/LDC/421 dated October 19, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/4295; a copy is located in NARA, RG 165, entry 179, box 722. Stejskal, a Sudeten-German, was captured in Antwerp in September 1944. In August 1942 Stejskal was a junior customs official in Skole when men from the SD Drohobycz and SD Lemberg arrived to organize the deportation of the Skole Jews. One afternoon 3,000 Jews were packed into railway freight cars and sent to Rawa Ruska, the gateway to the Bełzec death camp. The deportation from Skole was part of a larger deportation action carried out by the SD with Police Battalion 133 in Skole, Stryj, and Khodorov areas on September 3 – 5, 1942. Altogether 5,000 Jewish men, women, and children were taken to their deaths at Bełzec. See Arad, Belzec, 250 and 386; Curilla, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei, 775
46. Deputy Judge Advocate General, HQ XXX Corps District (Germany), to War Crimes Section, JAG Branch, HQ 21 Army Group, July 26, 1945, passing on a statement by “Karge” dated July 3, 1945, TNAK, WO 309/463. Karge, a former customs official, was stationed in Hrubieszo´ w in early 1943 when the Jews remaining in the local ghetto were shot by the Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22 German security police. Later Karge was stationed in the customs post at Kowel-Stryj. While there, he saw the Sobibor death camp. The camp was staffed by Viennese “SD” men and ethnic Germans from Poland and Latvia. At this stage, the “Sonderdienst” (special workforce) in Sobibor was burning bodies on pyres. It appears that the British authorities took no action on the information gathered from Karge’s statement
47. Special Interrogation Report (SIR) 716, SIR 726, SIR 727, and SIR 741 all dating from August 1944, TNAK, WO 208/3596; copies are available at NARA, RG 498, ETO MIS-Y Section, boxes 3 and 4. Former guard SS-Sturmmann Schreck left KL Sachsenhausen on July 14, 1944, taking with him a Polish prisoner for whom he provided false papers and a spare SS uniform. The Pole had been a prisoner at Sachsenhausen since April 1940. Schreck and the Pole surrendered to British forces in Normandy on July 19, 1944.
48. PW Paper 24 dated September 27, 1944, written by Fuhr, TNAK, WO 208/4171; a copy can be found at NARA, RG 498, ETO MIS-Y Section, box 12. On December 15, 1941, a deportation train containing 1,001 Jewish men, women, and children was sent from Hannover to Riga. It arrived on December 18, 1941. Despite the many hardships they faced, sixty-eight Jews from this transport survived the war. See Alfred Gottwaldt and Diana Schulle, Judendeportationen aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941 – 1945: Eine kommentierte Chronologie (Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag, 2005), 130
49. Report of bugged conversation 1 SC/CSDIC/X dated November 21, 1945, TNAK, WO 309/1423. The only known transport of Jews from Vienna directly to Auschwitz departed Vienna on July 17, 1942, and consisted of 995 Jewish men, women, and children. The date and time of arrival of this train at Auschwitz have not yet been established. In all likelihood, these Viennese Jews were gassed soon after their arrival. See Gottwaldt and Schulle, Judendeportationen, 395 – 96; Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Ma¨ nner (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1993), 179, 196; and Czech, Kalendarium, 250
50. Report of the bugged conversation of Luftwaffe Signals Sergeant Tintes, captured in Tunisia on May 10, 1943, SRA 4174 dated May 27, 1943, TNAK, WO 208/4130. During the seven-week period from July 17 through August 31, 1942, twenty-one transports took some 10,000 stateless, non-French Jews from France to Auschwitz. See Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz: Die Zusammenarbeit der deutschen und franzosichen Behorden bei der “Endlosung der Judenfrage” in Frankreich (Nordlingen: Delphi Politik, 1989 [1983]), 408 – 46. Eichmann’s letter of March 9, 1942 is located in TNAK, GFM 33/401, Serial 702
51. Interrogation report PWIS(H)/LF/722 dated September 27, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/3638
52. Interrogation report GRGG 187 # dated September 10, 1944, TNAK, WO 208/5017
53. Trial papers of Albert Kesselring before a British Military Court in Venice, Italy, 1947, including a copy of the Italian trial indictment of Herbert Kappler, TNAK WO 235 – 366
54. Updated intelligence report entitled “Atrocities as seen through German eyes,” TNAK, WO 208/4172; a copy is located in WO 311/54
